A CENTURY OF SCOTTISH HISTORY SIMON, LORD LOVAT. (Original by Hogarth.') A CENTUEY OF SCOTTISH HISTORY FROM THE DAYS BEFORE THE '45 TO THOSE WITHIN LIVING MEMORY BY Sm HENRY ^AIK K.C.B., M.A. (OxoN.), LL.D. (Glasgow and St Andrews), Member of Parliament for Glasgow and Aberdeen Universities WITH PORTRAITS WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS EDINBURGH AND LONDON MCMXI All Rights reserved .C7 443038 on ■5 70 PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION. As a new Edition of this work is now called for, advantage has been taken of the opportunity to correct a few errors and misprints, and occasionally to modify a criticism or opinion in the light which recent events have thrown upon historic tendencies. A few very unimportant excisions which have been made, probably to the benefit of the book, have rendered it possible to bring it within the compass of a single volume. The portraits which appear in this Edition are a new feature. H. C. February 1911. PKEPACE TO FIRST EDITION. It is the object of these volumes to follow the course of Scottish history from the time when Scotland was divided from its southern neighbour by well-defined lines of demar- cation, alike in religion, in politics, in tradition, and in social habit — when, indeed, the points of contact were but few and unimportant — down to the period when the Scottish nation, while preserving some valuable and durable national characteristics, became, as regards all its main interests and in the main current of its history, absorbed in one stream with that southern neighbour, with whom it has now formed a partnership so close as to share a common life, and, in the eyes of Europe, to be almost identical. The history of Scotland down to the Jacobite rising of 1745 has been treated very fully in previous works. But in those works the first half of the eighteenth century has been dealt with chiefly as the concluding chapter of her national history — not as it afiected the period which was to follow. It has therefore been found necessary in these volumes to recapitulate shortly the leading events of that half century, as opening the new chapter in Scottish history which began with the Revolution and the Act of Union — episodes, indeed, complementary to one another. From that point Scotland began to shape a new phase in her national life. As the plan of the present work is to give a chronological narrative of the leading historical events down to the middle of the nineteenth century, it has been necessary to include in it an account of the rising of 1745. But as that dramatic viii PREFACE. and romantic episode has formed the subject of many detailed narratives, and as the personal history of many of the chief actors has been fully told, the present account of it has been confined to the main events, which alone may be held to come within the history of the nation as a whole. From 1745 onwards the history of Scotland has hitherto been treated for the most part only as subsidiary to the history of the Empire, and as forming a subordinate chapter in the history of England. Besides this we have, as illus- trating Scottish life, a large and most interesting series of memoirs, of accounts of social traits, of pictures of manners, and of contemporary reminiscences. The history of the great ecclesiastical struggle, which culminated in 1843, has been treated as an episode apart, and not as a phase of national history, with its origin in the past and with its permanent influence on national character. The object of these volumes is to give a chronological narrative of all the principal incidents — political, ecclesiastical, and legislative, as well as literary, social, and commercial — which form the history of Scotland throughout a very momentous century, in the course of which the character of her permanent contribution to the common life of the Empire was chiefly shaped. H. C. January 1901. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. THE REVOLUTION SETTLEMENT AND THE UNION. PAGE Phases of Scottish history . . 1 The Union of the Crowns and its effect 1 Decay of the military spirit . . 2 Contrasts between Englishmen and Scotsmen 3 Scotland under Cromwell . . 4 The Restoration in Scotland . . 5 The later Stuart period ... 5 The Revolution .... 6 The fall of Episcopacy ... 8 The growth of Jacobitism . . 9 Parties in Scotland under William III 10 Submission of the Highlands . . 10 The Massacre of Glencoe . . 12 The Darien Scheme ... 15 The rigour of religious intolerance . 17 PAOK Revival of Jacobite hopes . . 18 Scheme of a Union . . . .18 The Act of Security ... 19 Plans of Godolphin and Queens- berry 19 English and Scottish aspects of the Union 21 Danger of Queensberry's position . 23 The Duke of Hamilton and the Opposition 25 The Commissioners for the Union named ..... 26 The Treaty of Union signed . . 27 Debates in the Scottish Parliament 27 The Act passed .... 29 Queensberry's journey to England 29 Dislike of the Union ... 30 The Union a blow to the Jacobites 31 CHAPTER II. THE EARLIER SCHEMES OP THE JACOBITES. Armed resistance to take the place of discussion .... 34 Hopes of French intervention . 34 The mission of Hooke ... 35 His insolence to the Scottish leaders 36 A French expedition ... 37 An alarm soon dispelled . . 38 The Jacobites intervene in English politics 39 Lockhart of Carnwath ... 40 The United Parliament ... 41 The Jacobites and Harley . . 43 The Patronage Act ... 44 Its far-reaching effects ... 44 The Moderate party in the Church 45 Growing irritation in Scotland . 46 Proposed repeal of the Union . 48 Defiance of English Ministers . 49 Bolingbroke and the Jacobites . 50 Jacobite hopes dispelled . . 60 CHAPTER III. FROM THE ACCESSION OP GEORGE I. TO 1745. Effect of the death of Queen Anne 52 Plans of rebellion .... 53 The Earl of Mar .... 53 A hunting-match at Braemar . 55 Prospects of the Jacobite cause 56 Mar's failure as a strategist . . 56 Weakness of the rebellion . . 57 The battle of Sheriffmuir . . 58 Reprisals 58 Changes in Scottish feeling . . 61 X CONTENTS. The rebellion of 1719 ... 64 Its failure ..... 65 Forfeitures and their ineffectual enforcement .... 66 Growing discontent helps the Jacobites ..... 67 Payment of Scottish members . 68 The beer tax 69 Resistance in Edinburgh . . 70 Riots in Glasgow .... 70 Change in Scottish Administration 72 Prejudice against the Revenue laws 72 Smuggling on the increase Smugglers condemned to death Sympathy of the populace The execution of Wilson Porteous fires on the crowd . His trial and reprieve The Porteous mob . Anger of the queen Factious debates in Parliament Plans for punishing Scotland Their failure .... Increasing discontent CHAPTER IV. THE STATE OF SCOTLAND IN 1745. Small resources of the country 83 The Independent Companies . . 91 The Lowlands .... 86 Lord Lovat .... . 91 Development of national character 86 His earlier career . . 92 The Highlands . . . . 87 His sojourn in France . . 93 How they impressed strangers 88 Resists the rebellion in 1715 . . 94 Mingled poverty and pride 88 Suspected of Jacobite leanings . 95 The clan 89 Cameron of Locbiel . 95 Power of the chief .... 90 Forbes of Culloden . 96 CHAPTER V. CONTEMPORARY POLITICS IN ENGLAND. Sir Robert Walpole Secret of his power Difficulty of his task Character of George II. Queen Caroline Opposition to Walpole Decay of his power Neglect of Scottish needs Walpole's fall The Broad Bottom Ministry Their weakness 99 The Patriot party . 108 100 The Jacobite opportunity 109 101 Foreign expedition . 110 102 Victory of Dettingen 110 102 The Pelham Ministry 111 103 French favour to the Jacobites . 112 104 Prince Charles Edward . . 112 105 Disappointment of French hopes . 114 106 Carteret and his colleagues 115 106 Pelham's power confirmed 116 107 CHAPTER VI. FROM THE OUTBREAK OF THE REBELLION TO THE BATTLE OF PRESTONPANS. Police of the Highlands . General Wade and his roads . Jacobite emissaries active Murray of Broughton The Prince sets sail Slenderness of Jacobite resources The Prince's first adherents . Slackness of the Government . Proclamation against the Prince The Standard raised Character of the Prince . His force increases . Sir J ohn Cope's resistance Early Jacobite success . Alarm in Edinburgh Scanty means of defence 117 118 119 120 121 121 122 123 124 125 125 127 128 129 130 131 Approach of the Prince . The Edinburgh Volunteers . The Highlanders outside Edinburgh The Provost convokes a meeting A summons from the Prince . Entrance to the city forced . The entry of the Prince . Proclamation of King James . Cope's return from the North . The Highland army leaves Edin burgh The field of Prestonpans . The Highland attack The rout of Cope's army The triumph of the Jacobites Its drawbacks .... CONTENTS. xi CHAPTER VII. FEOM PRESTONPANS TO FALKIRK. The Prince at Edinburgh . .148 Doubts as to his course . . . 148 His government of Edinburgh . 149 Resistance of the castle . . .151 Factions in the Prince's camp . 152 Chances of help from France . . 153 Hesitation amongst the Highland chiefs ...... 153 Weak points in the Jacobite cause . 154 Alternatives open to the Prince . 155 Advance into England . . .157 Seizure of Carlisle . . . .158 Dissension in the camp . . . 158 Advance from Carlisle . . .159 The Prince reaches Preston . . 160 Advance to Manchester and Derby 161 Forces arrayed against the Prince . 161 The retreat from Derby . . . 162 Return to Scotland .... 165 Revival of hopes .... 166 The siege of Stirling . . . 166 General Hawley . . . .167 The battle of Falkirk . . .169 Hawley's discomfiture . . . 170 CHAPTER VIII. FROM FALKIRK TO CULLODEN. A new stage in the campaign . . 171 English estimate of the Rebellion . 172 Jealousy against the Scotch . . 172 English desire for vengeance . . 173 Factions in English politics . . 174 English fears revived . . . 175 Cumberland assumes command . 177 Dissensions in the Highland host . 177 Retreat to Inverness proposed . 178 Detached Jacobite successes . .179 The Rout of Moy . . . .181 Cumberland's deliberate advance . 182 Delusive hopes from France . . 183 Lord George Murray's success . 184 Concentration at Inverness . . 185 The two armies . . . .186 The Highlanders at bay . . .187 Plan of a night attack on Nairn . 188 Its failure 189 The battle of Culloden . . .190 Defeat of the Highland army . . 190 CHAPTER IX. REPRISALS, AND SAFEGUARDS AGAINST REBELLION. Scattering of the Highland force . 193 Excesses of martial rule . . . 194 Political measures of security . 195 The Church of Scotland . . .195 The Episcopalian Church . . 195 Its past history . . . .196 The Church of a minority . . 198 Proscribed by law . . . .198 The Usagers 200 Breaches in the Church repaired . 201 Increased severity of proscription . 202 Harrying of the Episcopalians . 203 The trials of the Jacobites . . 204 Trial of Kilmarnock, Cromarty, and Balmerino .... 205 Execution of Kilmarnock and Balmerino 207 The more obscure victims . . 210 Lord Lovat 211 His journey to London . . . 212 His trial 214 Murray of Broughton turns in- former 215 Lovat's condemnation . . . 216 His last hours and execution . . 217 The old order passing . . . 219 Cumberland's ruthlessness . . 220 Disarmament of the Highlands . 221 Proscription of the Highland dress 221 Confiscation of estates . . . 222 The Act of Indemnity . . .223 Break-up of the clan system . . 224 Hereditary jurisdictions abolished . 225 The death of Duncan Forbes . . 227 xii CONTENTS. CHAPTER X. PARTIES IN SCOTLAND AFTER THE REBELLION. Scotland after the death of Jaco- bitism 228 English estimate of the Scotsman . 229 Scottish jealousy increasing . . 229 Hatred of the Union . . .229 Jacobitism resented by the Eng- lish Tories 231 Jacobitism as a separatist force . 232 Isolation of Scotland . . . 232 Poverty of the country . . . 233 Modest beginnings .... 234 Scottish types . . . .236 Religious differences . . . 236 Growth of latitudinarianism , . 237 Variety of character . . . 238 Scottish ladies of the old school . 239 Freedom from conventionality . 240 Scottish administration . . . 242 The landed aristocracy . . . 243 The Law Courts . . . .245 The Church 246 Doctrinal disputes .... 246 The Marrow controversy . . 249 Disputes as to Church govern- ment 250 Beginning of Dissent . . . 250 Parties in the Church . . . 251 Power of the Established Church . 252 Claim for increased endowment . 254 Defeated by the landed interest . 255 Maintenance of Church discipline . 256 Some leaders of the Church . . 258 Professor Leechman . . . 268 Dr Alexander Webster . . . 258 Principal Tullidelph . . .259 The Patronage Question . . . 259 Aims of the younger clergy . . 260 The Moderate party . . . 261 CHAPTER XI. ECCLESIASTICAL AND SECULAR INNOVATIONS. The older school of Moderates . 263 Change in Church debates . . 264 Dr William Robertson . . .265 His literary position . . . 266 His influence on Edinburgh society 267 The literary galaxy of Edinburgh . 268 David Hume 269 Dr Alexander Carlyle . . .271 Dr Alexander Webster . . . 272 Dr Robert Wallace . . .274 The brothers Wishart . . .274 Variety of Scottish types . . 275 General loyalty to the Government 276 The assembly of the Church . . 276 Occupations of the territorial aris- tocracy 276 Mixture of simplicity and extrava- gance 277 The lawyers 279 The commercial class . . . 281 Political opinions .... 282 Conciliation of the Highlands . 282 Indifference to English parties . 283 Social clubs 283 The Board of Manufactures . . 285 Commissioners of Annexed Estates 285 Softening of religious opinion . 286 Literary effort .... 286 The lighter aspects of life . . 287 Home's 'Douglas' .... 287 Opposition of the Highflyers . . 288 The Moderate clergy and the theatre 288 Proceedings against Dr Alexander Carlyle 289 Relaxations of the social code . 290 i Dispute about the militia . . 292 CHAPTER XIL SCOTTISH NATIONALITY AND ENGLISH JEALOUSY. The new aspects of Jacobitism . 293 Modified grumbling at the Union . 294 Fusion of the nations . . . 296 Old Edinburgh . . . .296 Municipal administration . . 297 Glasgow 298 The Lowlands . . . .299 Increasing interest in the Highlands 300 General administration . . . 300 The Earl of Islay . . . .301 Attachment to the dynasty . . 302 Accession of George III. . . 303 Enthusiasm of loyalty . . . 304 Desire for peace .... 305 Attack on the Earl of Bute . . 306 The Scottish nation involved in the attack 307 Scottish indifference to abuse . . 308 The management of Scottish busi- ness ...... 310 Liberality of feeling in Scotland . 313 Renewal of the militia dispute . 313 The Church and Dissent . . 315 Domination of the Moderates . 316 CONTENTS. xiii CHAPTER XIII. SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CHANGES. The new task before the country . 319 Edinburgh improvements . . 319 The Forth and Clyde Canal . . 320 Development of roads . . . 321 Scottish banking .... 321 Competition amongst the banks . 323 Abuse of the system . . . 324 The Ayr Bank and its failure . 325 Change in the bankruptcy law . 326 Conditions of labour . . . 327 Combinations of labourers . . 327 Poor relief 328 Assessment proposed in Edinburgh 329 The law of Entail . . . .330 Its modification .... 331 Contrasts between different parts of Scotland 331 The Highlands . . . .332 Efforts at improvement in the Highlands 333 Methods of agriculture . . . 334 Growth of Wealth . . . .336 Agricultural projectors . . . 337 Literary activity .... 338 The romantic spirit . . . 341 The Douglas Case . . . 342 Popular excitement roused by it . 342 Pennant's account .... 343 Johnson's journey .... 344 CHAPTER XIV. FROM 1770 TO 1780. Importance of this decade . . 346 Closer bond between England and Scotland 347 This tendency checked . . . 348 English prejudices .... 348 Effect of these in binding Scotland together 349 Absence of party feeling at this time 350 Foundations of Scottish Toryism . 352 Pressure of hard times . . . 353 The Meal Mobs . . . .353 Self-government and police . . 354 Emigration 355 Scottish trade depressed . . 356 Henry Dundas becomes Lord Advocate 357 Parliamentary reform mooted . 357 Dundas's sympathies . . . 358 The basis of his power . . . 358 His friends 359 Lockhart of Covington . . . 359 Macqueen of Braxfield . . . 360 Further extension of Edinburgh . 361 Emancipation of the Colliers . . 362 Local struggles .... 362 Sliding-scale of prices for impor- tation 363 Development of party spirit . . 363 The Volunteers .... 363 Question of Catholic disabilities . 364 Opposition to their repeal . . 364 Anti-Catholic riots . . . 366 The project abandoned . . . 368 FROM 1780 Continuance of anti-Catholic feel- ing 369 Injury to the Government . . 369 Lord North and the Opposition . 370 Weight of the Ministerial party in Scotland 370 Scottish sense of nationality . .371 Concentration of life in the Capital 371 Indifference to English politics . 373 Close of the American War . .374 The Government blamed in Scot- land as in England . . .374 Sir John Sinclair .... 375 The Rockingham Ministry . . 376 The Shelburne Ministry . . .376 Coalition between Fox and North . 376 The Peace of 1783 . . . .376 Continuance of the power of Dundas 377 Henry Erskine's short tenure of office 379 :r XV. TO 1784. The Ministry of Pitt . . .379 Alliance between Pitt and Dundas . 379 The Dissolution of 1784 . . .380 Secret of Dundas's influence . . 380 His family 381 His character 383 His love of Scotland . . .384 His unquestioned supremacy . . 385 Extent of Scottish sympathy with the Whigs 386 Shaken by the coalition between Fox and North .... 387 Acceptance of Pitt's predominance 387 Influence of the Moderates . . 387 Their aims in the Church . . 388 Healing old feuds .... 389 Toleration to the Episcopal Church 392 The Militia dispute again . . 393 Changes in Scottish life . . . 394 Gathering storms .... 396 xiv CONTENTS. CHAPTER XVI. THE TORY AND WHIG Advancing prosperity . . . 397 Religious opinions .... 398 Literary outburst .... 399 Projects of reform .... 400 Burgh administration . . . 400 Its abuses 401 A weapon in the hands of party . 402 Checked by fear of revolution . 403 The Court of Session attacked . 403 Opposition to Church patronage . 404 The charges against Warren Hastings 404 Scottish view of them . . . 406 Illness of George III. . . . 406 Scottish loyalty to the king . . 407 The French Revolution . . .407 The Tory and Whig parties in Scot- land 408 Extent of the revolutionary move- ment in Scotland . . . 409 The Friends of the People . . 410 Reaction and alarm . . .410 Agitation for reform . . . 411 Proclamation against seditious meetings 413 PARTIES IN SCOTLAND. Prosecutions 413 Action of the Court of Session . 414 Scottish judicial bench . . . 414 Sedition trials .... 416 Thomas Muir .... 416 Braxtield as judge .... 418 Trial of Thomas Fyshe Palmer . 420 Of William Skirving . . .420 Of Margaret and Gerald . . 421 Protests in Parliament . . . 421 The Habeas Corpus Act sus- pended 422 Trial of Watt and Downie . . 422 Poverty and discontent . . 423 The Younger Whigs . . .423 Policy of repression . . . 424 Henry Erskine .... 425 Deposed from the Deanship of Faculty 425 War between the Tories and the Whigs 426 Riots and repression . . . 427 Financial pressure .... 428 CHAPTER XVII. THE SCOTTISH SCH Its general features . . . 429 Its academic influence . . . 429 Its field of operation . . . 430 The Scottish University system , 431 Its changes ..... 431 The Professors .... 432 Francis Hutcheson . . . 433 His life in Ireland . . . .433 His system 434 His work in Glasgow . . . 436 His theory of a Moral Sense . . 437 His personal character and in- fluence 438 Professor John Stevenson . . 439 David Hume 440 His treatise on * Human Nature ' . 441 Reception of his work . . . 442 Henry Home 444 L OF PHILOSOPHY. His discursiveness .... 446 Adam Smith 447 His political economy . . . 448 Flaws in his system . . . 449 Thomas Reid 451 His works and teaching . . . 452 Contrast with his contemporaries . 453 His central principle . . . 455 Adam Ferguson .... 456 Appointment as professor . . 458 His ethical teaching . . . 459 His personality .... 460 Beattie's Essay on Truth . . 462 Dugald Stewart . . . .463 His wide influence .... 465 His connection with the Whigs . 466 End of the Scottish School . . 467 Its limitations and its strength . 468 CHAPTER XVIII. HENRY ERSKINE AND THE YOUNGER WHIGS. The deposition of Erskine from the Deanship ..... 469 New political combinations . . 470 Shifting of population . . . 470 Strength of the older traditions . 470 Edinburgh as their centre . . 471 Life at the capital .... 471 Its aspect to strangers . . . 472 Shelley and Hogg in Edinburgh . 472 Struggle between the Old and the New ... . . 474 Erskine's family .... 475 His personal character . . . 475 Qualifications as a party leader . 476 Position at the Bar . . . 478 Strange clients .... 479 Increasing bitterness of party . 480 The younger Whigs . . . 480 Francis Jeffrey .... 481 The Tories 483 Chances of reform .... 484 An opportunity missed . . . 485 CONTENTS. XV The ' Edinburgh Review ' Its political partisanship ' Blackwood's Magazine ' Pitt's resignation . His return to power Death . . . . 486 488 489 490 490 490 Impeachment of Lord Melville . 491 His acquittal 491 The Ministry of All the Talents . 492 Henry Erskine in Parliament . 492 Tories in power again . . . 493 Reforms in Court of Session . . 494 CHAPTER XIX. THE OLDER TORYISM AND ITS FAILURE. The battle of Waterloo . . .495 Its different effects . . . 495 Strength of Tory feeling . . 496 Increasing discontent . . . 497 Social changes .... 498 Poverty and disaffection . . 499 Lord Liverpool's Premiership . 501 Its different phases . . . 501 Threatenings in Scotland . . 502 Trials of Maclaren and Baird . 503 The prosecution and the defence . 505 Trial of Neil Douglas . . .506 OfM'Kinlay 507 Collapse of the prosecution . . 507 Damage to the Government . . 508 Secret societies .... 509 The Radical war .... 510 Meetings to denounce the Govern- ment 512 Truculence of the press . . 513 Its evil consequences . . . 514 Attacks on the Lord Advocate . 515 CHAPTER XX. LARGER AIMS IN POLIT The Castlereagh influence dis- appears 517 New spirit in the Government . 518 Peel and Canning .... 518 Progress of reform . . . .519 Changes in the Court of Session . 519 Canning Prime Minister . . 520 The narrower phase of the party fight 521 Wider movements in the nation . 522 Religious revival .... 523 Andrew Thomson .... 523 Thomas Chalmers .... 524 His early ambitions . . . 525 His passing attachment to the Moderates 526 His innate Conservatism . . 527 1 AND IN THE CHURCH. Changes over to the Evangelicals . 527 Qualities of his eloquence . . 528 His work in connection with Poor Relief 529 Phases of Poor Relief in Scotland . 530 His ideal Church . . . .531 Poor Relief in St John's parish, Glasgow 533 Success of his efforts . . , 534 Peculiarity of his position . . 535 His loyalty 536 His respect for Church establish- ments 536 Opposition to pluralities . . 537 Revival of the Evangelical party . 539 The Catholic Relief Bill . . 540 1830 TO More enlightened statesmanship . 541 Remains of the older Toryism . 541 Scott's opinions .... 542 His defence of Scottish banking . 542 His appeal to national instincts . 543 His suspicion of the Whigs . . 545 Dislike of compromise with reform 546 Influence of the new spirit in the Church 546 Decay of the Moderates ... . 547 Chalmers as Evangelical leader . 547 Strength of the religious revival . 549 Change in the Whig party . . 551 Their alliance with the Evangelical party 552 Chalmers drifting from the Con- servatives 552 R XXL 1834. Courted by the Whigs . . .553 The Non-Intrusion controversy . 554 Patronage as exercised in the past 555 Relations between ecclesiastical and civil politics . . . 556 Fall of the Tory Ministry . . 557 Jeffrey as Lord Advocate . . 557 The Reform Bills . . . .557 Parliamentary reform accomplished 559 The new Scottish Administration . 560 Burgh reform .... 561 Renewal of the Patronage struggle 562 The Veto Act .... 563 Opposition to the Annuity Tax . 564 Defence by Chalmers . . . 565 His confidence in political help undermined .... 566 xvi CONTENTS. CHAPTER XXII. THE DISRUPTION. The past of the Scottish Church . 568 The objects of the Patronage Act of 1711 569 Its results 569 Growing discontent against it . 570 The place of Chalmers in the struggle 571 His dislike of the Whigs . . 572 His London lectures on Church Establishments .... 572 His relations to the Low Church Anglicans 573 Legality of the Veto Act tested . 575 The Church and the civil courts at issue 576 Temporising of the Government . 577 New cases of friction . . . 577 The Presbytery of Strathbogie . 578 Bold statement of the Church's claim 579 The Court of Session defied . . 580 Negotiations with the Government 581 Their failure 582 The issues become more clear • 583 The Constitutional party in the Church 584 Disr\iption contemplated . . 586 Measures in advance . . . 586 The Claim of Right . . .688 The plan of campaign . . . 589 Convocation at Edinburgh . . 589 Firmness of the Tory Government 590 The last united Assembly of the Church 590 The exodus 591 The prospect for the Church . . 592 MartjTs on both sides . . . 594 Renunciation of Voluntaryism by the new Church .... 595 The attitude of Chalmers . . 595 Later attempts at conciliation . 596 The Free Church accepts the Edu- cation Grants .... 598 CHAPTER XXIII. CONCLUSION. Significance of the ecclesiastical struggle 599 Stubbornness of the new political opinions ..... 599 Mistakes of the Whigs . . . 600 Their weakness in general politics 601 Strength of their hold on the middle class 602 Close alliance with the Free Church 602 The poor law 603 Chalmers's hopes disappointed . 603 Further social changes . . . 604 The law of Entail further modified 604 Growth of the commercial class . 6C5 Development of wealth . . . 606 Railways 606 Coal and iron industries . . 607 Woollen manufactures . . . 607 Disappearance of older types . 608 The epoch of the middle class . 610 Scottish national education . . 611 The parish school .... 611 The Act of 1803 . . . .612 Imperial grants .... 613 Destitution of the Highlands . 614 The Act of 1861 . . . .615 The Act of 1802 . . . .615 Cost of the educational system . 616 Recapitulation .... 616 Index 618 ILLUSTRATIONS. PAGE SIMON, LORD LOVAT ..... Frontispiece {Original by Hogarth.) PRINCE CHARLES EDWARD STUART . . . . .121 DUNCAN FORBES OP CULLODEN ..... 227 DR ALEXANDER CARLYLE, MINISTER OP INVERESK . . . 289 HENRY DUNDAS, IST VISCOUNT MELVILLE .... 357 HENRY ERSKINE ....... 425 {Painted by Raeburn.) DAVID HUME ........ 440 ADAM SMITH, AUTHOR OP 'THE WEALTH OF NATIONS' . . 448 FRANCIS JEFFREY . . . . . . .481 THOMAS CHALMERS, D.D. . . . . . . 524 \ A CENTURY OF SCOTTISH HISTOET. / CHAPTER I. THE REVOLUTION SETTLEMENT AND THE UNION. It is the object of this work to give a detailed account of the history of Scotland during the century which begins with the year 1745. During all that period there is a national history; and although, as the present century has advanced, the history of Scotland has been more and more merged in that of England and of the Empire, she has yet preserved many of her distinctive national peculiarities, which may be traced as the products of her own history. Never perhaps, on so small a scene, has there been so much of dramatic incident and of strongly marked contrasts in char- acter and in conditions as in the history of Scotland during this period. But before entering on the detailed history from 1745, it is necessary to sum up very shortly the results of certain phases of Scottish history which preceded those with which we are specially to deal. The union of the crowns of England and Scotland in 1603 had closed one long and tragic epoch of Scottish his- tory. For centuries Scotland had been little but an armed camp, in which a long struggle for national independence had been varied only by the fiercest internecine quarrels between contending factions. Every Scotsman had been born and inured to arms, and the whole social organisation of the country rested upon a military basis. The Crown had maintained its power only by balancing one faction of a turbulent aristocracy against another ; and the aristocracy, whom the very necessity of existence forced to be tyran- nical and rapacious, vied with one another in insolence to A 2 THE REVOLUTION SETTLEMENT AND THE UNION. the Crown, and in oppression of the people. Each member of it maintained himself in an armed garrison, and moved about attended by a formidable military array. Behind this turbulent and disordered camp, which closed its ranks from time to time to resist the encroachments of England, and to maintain its own independence, there lay a wide and unexplored mountain territory, inhabited by a race of different origin, speaking an unknown tongue, and alien alike in social customs, in religion, and in sympathy. These hordes were known chiefly by their ever-recurring plundering forays, and by an occasional pitched battle, from which they returned to their mountains defeated but not subdued. They were known to live under a system which combined the feudal and the patriarchal character — banded together in great clans, which embraced large numbers and covered a vast territory, but were knit together by the closest ties, and by unques- tioning submission to their chiefs. But the system of govern- ment ended with the chief. Beyond him they knew no authority : and the danger with which their existence con- stantly threatened that part of Scotland which owned a certain allegiance to her kings could only be averted by the makeshift policy of playing off one clan chieftain against another. Such a system could neither encourage industry nor pro- mote the growth of population or of wealth. The resources of the country were few, and such as they were had not been developed. Agriculture could scarcely flourish when its products were liable to frequent plunder and destruction, and when those who pursued it were subject to the constant demands of military service and exposed to the dangers of military occupation. But the Union of the Crowns brought many of the dis- tinctive features of this state of things abruptly to a close. The wars of independence were now ended. The Scottish nobles no longer had to deal with a king dependent upon their will, and compelled to maintain the semblance of authority by a degrading submission to their factions. They found a new arena open to their ambition in attendance at the English Court. They found also that advancement in that Court was not to be attained by the means which had served them in their own domains. They could no longer be attended by an array of vassals, and the maintenance of such an array had no longer the excuse which it formerly found in the defence of national independence. The effect of this was speedily found in the decay of the military spirit. The power of the feudal barons rapidly NATIONAL DIVERGENCIES. 3 diminished, and their influence was maintained only by dex- terous combinations, by attaching themselves to some cause which commanded the enthusiasm of the people, and by changing and balancing, with little regard either to prin- ciple or consistency, their own attitude towards every sec- tion of the multitudinous factions into which Scotland was divided. Their territorial influence, their high - sounding titles, the hereditary respect which was ungrudgingly paid to them, and, not least, the intense and eager vigilance which their situation demanded, all combined to maintain a certain sway ; but that sway rested no longer upon the ultimate basis of military command. The only part of the country which remained practically unaflected by the change was the vast region of the Highlands, whose borders pressed up to their own doors, but whose more remote fastnesses remained impenetrable to outer influence, and guarded by the bulwark of the mountains. But while the epoch during which Scotland had maintained her independence by the sword had now closed, and while the sword was growing rusty in the scabbard by disuse, it must not be assumed that the two nations were brought more close in sympathy. In everything that constitutes national life the Scotsman stood in sharp contrast to the Englishman. His language was then, and continued for long to be, marked by such strong dialectical peculiarities that it was to the Englishman, to all intents and purposes, a foreign tongue. His notions as to religion and church government entered very deeply into his mind and char- acter ; and they were notions which the Englishman neither understood nor cared to understand. This was not, indeed, due to anything abnormal in their development. It is a commonplace of English witticism to profess a derisive hor- ror of the complications of Scottish ecclesiastical disputes. The truth is, that no other range of human interests appears to follow laws so regular and uniform in their development as those which operate in regard to religion ; and the opera- tion of these laws was never more distinctly traceable than in the course of Scottish religious struggles. It was only the history of the country which gave to them a shape so alien to anything which English history reveals to us. The contrast between the Scotsman and the Englishman extended to every sphere of life, and to every phase of character. The result of this, in the history of the seven- teenth century, was a strange one. Two nations, which for a thousand years had been bitter foes, were now com- pelled to share a common history. For England at least, 4 THE REVOLUTION SETTLEMENT AND THE UNION. if not for Scotland, the opening scenes of that common history were of unprecedented importance. The generation which followed the Union of the Crowns saw a new scheme of government attempted by Strafford, to be followed by the outbreak of determined parliamentary opposition, of a kind hitherto unknown in English history. That opposition won a brief triumph in the Civil War, only to be crushed under a military despotism. When that military despotism fell to pieces, it was followed by a powerful but unthinking burst of national feeling, under the influence of which the monarchy was restored in a form which contained within itself the seeds of decay. Another generation passed before these seeds of decay yielded their fruit, and the century closed with the final triumph of parliamentary government in the Revolution. In this common history Scotland had her share ; but throughout it all her motives were different, and she worked out her o^Yn development in her own way. The salient events therein were not the products of Scottish history, and that history was no more affected by them than the character of the liquid it contains is affected by the shape of the bottle. She felt the pressure of the royal prerogative under Charles I. and his Sinister: but the pressure told in a different direction; the resistance to it was prompted not by the Parliament, but by the Church ; its topics were not financial, but ecclesiastical. Left to herself, Scotland would not have sought a remedy in the abolition of the royal power, and zeal for parliamentary independence was, in her view, a meaningless anachronism. She was com- pelled to submit to the conqueror, and felt the iron heel of the military despotism under Cromwell : though on the whole that despotism brought to her a prosperity to which she had hitherto been a stranger. She shared commercial privileges which she was destined afterwards to lose, and not to recover for more than one generation ; and it may fairly be doubted whether the Restoration would have come at the time and in the way that it did had Scotland only been concerned in it. There it certainly was accompanied by no such indubitable outburst of popular feeling as in England, and its effect was to produce a state of things fiercely resented by a large part of the population. It may be doubted whether in Scotland the dominant feeling was not that of a personal loyalty to the race and name of the Stuarts which gradually identified itself with national independence. It did not mean to Scotland, as it did to England, the restoration of ancient landmarks, the return of THE RESTORATION IN SCOTLAND. 5 a free parliament, the rebuilding of the national Church, the renewal of old bonds of hereditary affection between a terri- torial aristocracy and their dependants. Although the name was borrowed by the party in Scotland which attempted for another century to maintain the Stuart family, the character of the English Cavalier was something of which no counter- part was to be found in Scotland. Apart from all political questions, the Restoration appealed to feelings that lay very deep in the heart of the yeoman on every village green in England. He knew little, and he cared less, for discussions about the Petition of Right, about the Grand Remonstrance, about the control of the militia ; but he knew that the King was come to enjoy his own again, and that he would help his faithful friends to recover what was theirs. The reign of the Saints was over : the May-pole would be again set up in the village green; the squire would again be seen in his old haunts, and go in and out amongst his people ; the familiar sound of the liturgy that had soothed their fathers and grandfathers would be heard once more, and the old round of custom that had taken root in the very soil would spring up luxuriantly, and obliterate the ugly marks that the Roundheads had scarred upon the face of the land. But we would search in vain for any similar feeling in Scotland. There, no doubt, as in England, the Restoration was acceptable to the majority, and was warmly welcomed by a few. But it was ushered in by no such outburst of popular feeling as in England. Even to those who received it most gladly it could not appear, as it did in England, a ^ ray of light from heaven, sent in answer to the enthusiastic prayers of chivalrous devotion, and piercing with its bright- ness the clouds and thick darkness of oppression. Scotland was doubtless glad to get rid of what she felt to be a foreign yoke, although the yoke had been in no way very galling in its pres- sure. She was satisfied with the restoration of a line which had its origin in Scotland, and which Scotland had for a time assisted against its foes — not so much from any devoted loyalty to the Crown, as from jealousy of those in England who had crushed its power. Loyalty was a plant which had not as yet taken any very deep root in the Scottish soil, nor had it yielded very abundant fruit: and the tangible results of the Restoration were not such as to favour its growth. The re-establishment of Episcopacy was doubtless welcome to many in Scotland, and was enthusiastically desired by a few. But in no part of the country was it entwined with the associations of the people or rooted in their affections. Its restoration in 1660 was largely the work of the most 6 THE REVOLUTION SETTLEMENT AND THE UNION. shameless tergiversation and the basest intrigue. It found its defence not in its association with the central fibres of national life, but in the sword of the dragoon. The finer strain of Scottish Episcopacy, as of Scottish loyalty, was only developed at a later day. So it was with the Revolution. When the course of English politics brought the fitting season for the Revolution, it was inspired by ideas together alien from any that were to be found in Scotland. Amongst the leading actors in that momentous national crisis were the prelates of the national Church, who were resolved to defy, in defence of her liberties and privileges, the Crown to which their prin- ciples bound them to show a strict obedience. But that Church could count upon no support amongst those' who might be well affected on other grounds to the Revolution in Scot- land, and indeed the chief object which the Revolutionary party in Scotland might hope to attain was the overthrow of an Establishment which was linked most closely to that of England both in Church government and in liturgy. But the opponents of that Church had just as little to hope from the accession of William III. They had no love for tolera- tion, which in their eyes assumed the guise of trafficking with the accursed thing. Even the more moderate forms of Presbyterianism were suspected in their minds, and they feared above all things a lukewarm Erastianism, which might by degrees tamper with the pure faith of which they and their fathers had been the martyrs, and the subtleties of which they had refined to suit their own special ideas under the guidance of leaders who seemed to them to speak by direct inspiration of Heaven, and from which they had eliminated all taint of heresy in the harsh crucible of persecution, torture, and wanderings amidst the hills, pursued by Claver- house's dragoons. Amongst the leading men in Scotland there was not one who had not trafficked deeply with difier- ent parties in the State, or of whom it could with any certainty be predicted what action he might take in a crisis such as this. Even amongst those who afterwards showed the most enthusiastic devotion to the exiled house, or who displayed the greatest valour in its cause, there was scarcely one who had not indicated some readiness to acquiesce in the new settlement, and who had not hoped to find in supporting the accession of the son-in-law of James some means of reconciling their loyalty and their interests. The fighting power of Scotland lay in the disciplined forces of Claverhouse, which had so long maintained (in spite of all THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH. 7 the indomitable fierceness of the sects which they had to keep in awe) the authority of the Stuart kings, and in the High- land clans. Accident, their own innate love of independence, the complete want of sympathy between themselves and the Lowlands, and the fierceness of their internal struggles, which led them to see in the chiefs of Argyle — the leading oppon- ents of the later Stuart tyranny — their own most inveterate enemies, combined to bring these clans into one camp with Claverhouse ; and Claverhouse maintained, by his consummate military skill, the resistance to the Revolution Settlement until he fell, in the hour of victory, at Killiecrankie. Meanwhile, in his absence, the Convention had carried through the Revolution at Edinburgh. The earlier stages had been fiercely contested, and his closest adherents had, by the express orders of James II., attended these earlier sittings in the hope that the deliberations might turn in their favour. But that hope was soon dispelled. The withdrawal of Claverhouse had left them without defence ; and the Con- vention was overawed, not only by the throng of Cameronian enthusiasts who crowded from their western conventicles into the cellars of Edinburgh, but also, before long, by a body of troops fresh from the discipline of foreign wars under the command of Mackay. With an opposition so silenced, there was little doubt as to the verdict of the Convention. The Revolution was carried out in terms even more stern than those adopted by the English Convention, and James II. was pronounced, in terms as to which there was no mistake, to have forfeited the Crown, which was then ofiered to William and Mary. So far, in outward form, there was little difference between the solution for the crisis which had been found for England and for Scotland. But there remained in Scotland questions which she must settle on lines entirely her own. In Scotland, as in England, the Episcopal Church was that which embraced the landed aristocracy and many of the educated classes ; and in the north of Scotland at least it commanded, by tradition and inheritance, the affection of the great mass of the people. Was that Church, which stood in the forefront of an honour- able resistance to encroaching prerogative in England, to be deprived not only of privileges, but even of toleration, by the same settlement which placed William III. on the throne of Scotland ? The history of the last generation was a sufficient answer to any claim for a retention of the privileges of the Episcopal Church : and it is hardly possible that they could have been retained without a civil war, in which the authority of 8 THE REVOLUTION SETTLEMENT AND THE UNION. William would have been exerted to crush his own most important adherents. But the question of toleration of differ- ent creeds was a much more difficult one. To refuse it was repugnant to all the principles to which William III. was most heartily attached. To deny it in Scotland when it was granted in England was to draw a line of demarcation between the two countries which he was called upon to rule, so logic- ally indefensible as to make his own position almost absurd. To grant it to the Episcopal Church was a means of conciliat- ing the landed gentry, whose influence was so considerable as to be dreaded. It would not have been distasteful to the wiser and more enlightened representatives of Presbyterianism, who were not without hopes of a union of the two Churches under the auspices of the State, and who dreaded, much more than they dreaded the Episcopalians, those sectaries who exaggerated the tenets of Presbyterianism, and who were ready to fling at their heads the charge of a time-serving Erastianism. But it was not to be. The tenets and the worship of the Episcopalians were associated in the minds of the Scottish people with those of the Roman Catholics, and were accord- ingly proscribed. Those who had suffered persecution became themselves its prompters. Episcopalians were almost forced to cling to those principles of Jacobitism to which they were already well inclined : loyalty to the exiled family became one with loyalty to their Church; and the union was cemented by their long suflerings for these associated causes. But even in the establishment of Presbyterianism, and in the proscription of Episcopacy, measures might have been observed that would have secured considerable allegiance from the landed aristocracy. The rights of Church patronage were vested in that aristocracy, and their preservation might have tended to produce a closer sympathy between the natural leaders of the nation and the national Church. Within the Church itself a large and not the least enlightened part of her adherents looked upon a system of patronage as likely to secure for the Church a succession of pastors of more temperate wisdom and of a wider charity than that which would arise under a system of popular election. But here also it was found impossible to steer a middle course. The triumph of the dominant Presbyterian sect must be complete. The landed proprietor was to be taught that in his own parish and at his own gate there was another who had a tenure as secure as his own, who owed nothing to his patronage ; who would not be backward in scanning with painful minuteness the particulars of his private life, and subjecting them, if GROWTH OF JACOBITISM. 9 need be, to the chastisements of ecclesiastical jurisdiction; and who would not be likely to overlook any lapses on his part which savoured of affection to the exiled family. All these steps, it may be fairly argued, were necessary in the circumstances. Scotland was forced to reconstruct her Constitution at a juncture the epoch of which was fixed, not by her own, but by England's exigencies. In that reconstruc- tion she had to deal, suddenly and decisively, with questions of her own which were not ripe for settlement. No healing hand was present to pour balm upon the wounds which the rough process of reconstruction had left. In the fever-heat of the struggle men sought to disable their enemies and to provide for their own safety ; and in the story of their own tergiversation, in the consciousness of their own selfishness, they read the dangers to which the new settlement was exposed — dangers which were to be averted, not by a slow and painful process of developing new institutions by sound and conciliatory methods, but by a rapid application of the principle that the spoils must fall to the victors. That their adherence to the victorious cause was a thing of yesterday did not render the application of the principle less urgent, or in their eyes less meritorious. One thing at least may be said: the effect of this policy was to plant a root of Jacobitism very deep in the soil. It would not be too much to say that whereas the Cavalier party in England rose with the Civil War, and died, as an effective or dominant element in the nation, with the Revolution, on the other hand the Jacobite party in Scotland began to attract to itself a certain portion of national sym- pathy, and to find its opportunity in every occasion of national discontent, only with the Revolution; and that it ceased to exist as a real and effective power only when the Highland clans were scattered on the moor of Culloden. But the very sustenance of that party depended upon its being fed with sufficient occasions of national discontent. These were administered with no stinting hand. Whatever blessings the "glorious Revolution" had in store for the nation, there was certainly at first little sign in the horizon of the silver lining behind the clouds. The reign of William III. was in Scotland a time of almost unmitigated gloom. For some of the blackness of the sky it would be unjust to blame the Government. The nation was sunk in poverty, and there was little sign of dawning commercial prosperity to relieve the gloom. For a population of about a million, a circulating medium which has been calculated at £600,000 was sufficient for all its commercial transactions, and this 10 THE REVOLUTION SETTLEMENT AND THE UNION. was eked out by no paper currency. The total revenue did not exceed £100,000, o£ which customs and excise con- tributed about £65,000. Barren as it was over vast tracts, the cultivation of the soil was little advanced, even where the conditions were most favourable, and for manufactures there was, in the absence of capital, but little opportunity. A succession of bad seasons reduced vast numbers of the population to the utmost straits of poverty, and even the meagre subsistence to which long habit had inured them utterly failed. The misfortunes of the country were indeed too heavy to find relief in any short space from the efforts of Government, even had all its energies been directed to the task. But the Government was supine and listless, and such energies as it possessed were employed in less worthy tasks. A succession of men of great ability and restless ambition, but mutually suspicious and clothed in a very scanty garment of political rectitude or consistency, held the administrative offices, and either served or pretended to serve their English masters by governing Scotland in the manner least likely to give either trouble or offence to the central authority, by whom they were nominated and upon whom their dependence lay. It is hard to distinguish in the seething mass of faction all the ramifications of parties, or to trace the various gradations of adherence to the prin- ciples which they professed. But three main parties evolved themselves from the confusion. The first was the so-called Court party, which strove to maintain itself in power by a dexterous manipulation of affairs in obedience to the behests of their English masters. The second was the Jacobite party, whose sympathies were hardly concealed, and who cloaked only their active participation in the schemes of the exiled king. Between these two lay a third party, which was known by the cant name of the Squadrone Volante, which professed a pure patriotism and a sole devotion to the interests of the nation, but which covered by such professions an ambition and a greed of office which in no degree fell short of that of their rivals. One of the first acts of the Government lives in history as a monumental instance of unparalleled baseness and treachery. Attempts were at first made to secure the allegiance of the Highlands by a systematic bribery of the chiefs. This had some success; but the agents were suspected both by the bribers and the bribed, and in 1691 it was deemed expedient to name a day — the 1st of January 1692 — before which submission should be made, on pain of the most dire penalties. For all these Highland clans, loyalty or submission to any SIR JOHN DALRYMPLE. 11 established form of government in the Lowlands was an almost meaningless form of words. Their loyalty was given entirely to their chiefs, and their steadfastness was shown only in adhering to the hereditary feuds between clan and clan. To many of the Court party, it was a matter of dis- appointment which they did not care to conceal, that the money which was to be spent in securing their allegiance was not employed in their extirpation, and they openly ex- pressed their regret that any terms should be suggested which did not leave these aliens to be dealt with as avowed and irreconcilable enemies. The ablest and most trusted of William's adherents was Dalrymple, the Master of Stair, then Lord Advocate, the son of Viscount Stair, who was President of the Court of Session. The family had rapidly risen from obscurity to the highest political influence; but while it commanded distinguished respect for unquestionable ability, it was distrusted and detested as no other family within the Scottish Border. It had known how to trim its sails to every breeze of political exigency ; and in the years immediately preceding the Revolu- tion, the father and the son had secured themselves against forfeiture of their property by taking opposite sides. None was associated more closely with the deeds which had brought about the forfeiture of the Stuart family than the Master of Stair. Even those who were their political allies distrusted them, and their rapidly acquired ascendancy was ascribed, in accordance with the current belief of the day, to their having buttressed the family fortunes by more than mortal alliances. The wife of the viscount was a woman whose powerful character and successful schemes of ambition lent themselves to the common report that she was involved in unhallowed compacts, and was not free from the taint of witchcraft; and the repeated tragedies which surrounded the house of Dalrymple, one of which the genius of Scott has made to live for us in a picture which repeats the fateful issues of Greek tragedy, seemed to support the view that the wrath of Heaven was seeking vengeance for the deeds of darkness that had secured for the family the rapid realising of its worldly ambition. The viscount was now an old man, and the fortunes of the house rested chiefly on the Master, Sir John Dalrymple, who had foresight sufficient to reveal to him the certain result of the political contests of the day, and who was determined to show that previous compliance with the exiled dynasty did not moderate the zeal with which he was prepared to serve' the new power. Amongst the Highland clans there was one, that of the 12 THE REVOLUTION SETTLEMENT AND THE UNION. Macdonalds of Glencoe, which threatened little danger to the Government either from its numbers or its alliances, but which was well known for the bitterness of its feud with the Campbells — a feud which carried with it as a necessary consequence adherence to the exiled family. The name of its chief — Maclan — stood high; and the clan, although it prac- tised to the full that habit of raiding which its hereditary instincts held to be no dishonour, was a fit representative of much that redeemed the Celtic character by a romantic loyalty and by a high-souled, albeit a fantastic, code of chivalry. Upon the destruction of this clan the Master of Stair now directed all the forces of his legal subtlety and of his relentless hate. He chafed at the possible loophole that was left to them, of acquiescence in the edict of sub- mission before the appointed day, 1st January 1692. He waited with impatience the expiry of the period, fearful lest a timely submission should snatch them from the vengeance due to troublers of his statecraft. He gloated over the in- creasing probability that they might allow the time to slip by, and pictured to himself with a grim perspicuity their certain fate. One feature — and one only — demands a certain respect, even in the loathing that his mood creates. It is that the very keenness of his intellect prevents him from glozing the matter over, or covering it beneath a cloak of smooth verbiage. There is at least no paltering in the unmeasured barbarity of his hatred. The 1st of January drew near, and Dalrymple already saw the hapless clan delivered into his hand. Their fate was to be such as to strike terror far beyond the mountains that hemmed in the lonely valley where they dwelt — a region which nature has made desolate, but which to later genera- tions has now the weird aspect cast by a shadow as of death. Before the time, Maclan made up his mind to accept the oath. He explained the position to his clan, and counselled them, by their loyalty to himself, to do nothing which might throw a doubt upon the fidelity of the oath which he was about to take. Towards the end of December he came to Fort William to tender his oath ; but the fort was commanded by a military officer who had no power to accept it. The officer, however, gave him a letter to the Sheriff of Argyle, and Maclan hastened to offer his submission to that judge at Inveraray, not delaying on his journey even to visit his own house, which lay scarcely a mile distant from the road. But the snows of winter fell jbefore he could cross the moun- tains to Loch Fyne, and January had begun before he reached the sheriff, who agreed under protest to administer the oath, THE MASSACRE OF GLENCOE. 13 and at once sent information to Edinburgh of the circum- stances that had caused the delay. The facts were either ignored or suppressed — and the guilt varies very little whether inquiry in such a case was stifled, or whether — as appears more likely — the indubitable evidence of the oath having been taken was actually destroyed after its full effect was understood. Efforts, more or less ingenious, have been made to distribute amongst the various agents the responsibility for what followed, and to lessen their share of the guilt. In such a case these efforts lead to very small results. We can only release each actor in the tragedy from full responsibility to the very limited extent of supposing that at certain stages of the case he did not have all the facts before him, but only resolved, in order that his action should not be stayed, to close his eyes to what he might easily have known. It is one of those crimes in which history declines to see any mitigation, and for which she must condemn all the actors — from William and his agent, Stair, down to the meaner tools of their cruelty — to one equal sentence of execration. Before January was past orders were issued to the military authorities as to which no doubt was possible. One hundred and twenty men of Argyle's regiment, under a Captain Campbell of Glenlyon, who was connected by a tie of relation- ship with the doomed clan, were sent to Glencoe. There they were received, on their own assurances, as friends, and treated with all the hospitality that the Macdonalds could afford. For fifteen days the soldiers dwelt amongst them, under conditions that in all ages, and even amongst the most depraved savages, have been taken as a pledge of friendliness and security. Meanwhile the passes from the glen were secured; full instructions, which admitted of no gleam of mercy in the execution of the murderous design, were issued. The instructions — from the responsibility of which it has vainly been sought to exculpate William on the ground that he had not read or considered the order — were not only superscribed, but, by an almost unprecedented excess of caution, had been subscribed by the king. Stair himself supplemented them by severe threats against any insuflBcient execution of the orders, and by detailed warnings to his agents against any possible lapse into mercy. Down to the most minute arrangements the scheme was accurately planned beforehand, and the very house at which the work was to begin was prescribed. It was at four o'clock on the morning of the 13th of February that the deed of murder began. The day before 14 THE REVOLUTION SETTLEMENT AND THE UNION. had been spent in friendly intercourse. Some of the officers had agreed to dine the next day with Maclan. Others had been playing cards in the evening with his sons. Ominous preparations were noted, and murmurings were heard amongst the soldiers, who shrank from, the accursed task; but sus- picions were lulled to rest by appeals to kinship, and to the bond of hospitality, of which the breach might well seem im- possible. Before dawn, some of the band presented themselves at the house of the chief, and as he ordered refreshments for his guests he was shot upon his own threshold, while his aged wife was so brutally ill-treated that she died the next day. Presently the glen rang with the shouts of the murderers and the shrieks of their victims. Neither age nor sex was spared. Men of eighty years of age were struck down, and a child of five, who clung to Glenlyon's knees, was stabbed by one of the officers. The houses were set on fire, and the inhabitants were either butchered at their doors or fled to the mountains. It had been part of the plan that every outlet from the glen was to be stopped by troops which were to arrive at the time when the carnage began. But during the night a storm of snow set in and the troops were unable to approach. The survivors escaped to the hills to die amidst the snow-wreaths, or to wander through the mountain-passes to distant shelter. Thirty-eight were struck down beside their houses, and about one hundred and fifty, with women and children, fled from the glen. The design of Stair had been accomplished, but — by no fault of his — his vengeance had been baulked of its full aim. The story spread slowly but surely. It was published in the Paris Gazette of the 7th of April, and soon repeated in London with greater detail. It was seized upon by the Jacobites as an admirable weapon in their fight with the Government, and it raised, not in one faction only, but throughout the nation, a storm of indignation. An adminis- tration which worked by such methods could not but be discredited even amongst its own supporters. In 1695 a commission was appointed to inquire into the report, and all the documents were laid before it. That commission was sufficiently compliant to acquit William of full privity to the deed ; but Stair's part in it was condemned as having exceeded his commission, and the subordinate actors were demanded for prosecution. If the guilt of William were doubtful before, his action upon this report leaves no room for doubt. Stair pres- ently obtained a remission from the king, and his agents were not prosecuted, but received promotion. To plead for a sus- pense of judgment before such evidence is not argument but THE DARIEN SCHEME. 15 chicanery : it is to palter with plain facts, and to reduce the tribunal of history to contempt. The conscience of humanity will for ever brand the massacre of Glencoe as a heinous and unpardonable crime. Such action played into the hands of the Jacobites. But it did not stand alone. In 1695 the rising commercial enterprise of Scotland sought to obtain an outlet which should give her some advantage equivalent to that which England obtained from her colonial trade. This scheme was followed out with the daring speculation which is as characteristic of the nation as its dogged perseverance, although less generally recognised. The prime mover in the matter was William Paterson, who had led at one time a roving and adventurous life, and who had latterly been the leading spirit in the foundation of the Bank of England. From all the advantages which the sagacity of this banking scheme and its complete success would have naturally secured for him he had been excluded by the jealousy of his English coadjutors. In the course of his wandering life he had visited the Isthmus of Darien — once again, in our own day, to be the scene of an audacious scheme at last approach- ing accomplishment — and had conceived the idea that success- ful colonisation might make of it the central emporium of trade between the East and the West. He had obtained for his scheme the powerful support of Fletcher of Saltoun, one of the ablest and most eloquent Scotsmen of the day, who was himself an unflinching republican, but in whose eyes all party distinction waned into insignificance compared with the sup- reme duty of maintaining against any external domination the independence of the Scottish nation. Between them these two men attracted the devoted allegiance of their fellow- countrymen; and their scheme, which, however bold in con- ception, was reckless and absurd, united in its enthusiastic support every phase of Scottish feeling. Courtier, nationalist, and Jacobite, all rushed with one impulse into the scheme, which was not only to realise for themselves the wealth of Eldorado, but was to recover for their country by the native enterprise of her sons a new glory which was to replace that sun of national independence of which the last rays were setting amidst clouds and thick darkness. Within a few weeks, so enthusiastic was the nation in the cause where patriotism was linked with the hope of gain, that £300,000 was subscribed in a country whose whole circulating medium little, if at all, exceeded £600,000; and all who possessed savings, or could realise any property, were eager to have a share in the new venture. The fabric of their dream was indeed a baseless one, and 16 THE REVOLUTION SETTLEMENT AND THE UNION. the difficulties were such as a country unaccustomed to distant enterprise and wholly ignorant of complications with foreign nations entirely failed to realise. But for the credit of the nation, as well as of the projectors, it must be said that no accusation of designed delusion, much less of the nefarious malpractices of selfish cupidity, was ever brought against this, the first speculative effort of a nation seeking, by no ignoble effort, to escape from the bondage of poverty.^ The blame of its failure cannot be laid upon England. The malarious soil, the tropical climate, the absence of the vast capital necessary to secure native labour, and the jealousies certain to be aroused amongst foreign powers, whose colonial influence seemed to be threatened, — all these would have as- sured failure, even had the influence of the English Government not led to the withdrawal of the English subscriptions which had already been paid, forced the merchants of Holland and of Hamburg to turn away from an enterprise in which they had at first cordially joined, and encouraged, by the example of the orders given to their own colonial governors, the hostility of the Spaniards. But English misgovernment and neglect were responsible for even more than her jealousy and ill-will. The company had been created by an Act of Parliament and a charter from the Crown; and the grant of such legislative privileges (which encouraged the poorer nation to waste life and treasure upon a reckless scheme of which the last hopes were to be destroyed by a base compliance with English prejudices) was a high crime and a breach of the first duty of a government. In his subsequent vacillation William had again recourse to the most craven subterfuge of a ruler, that of laying the blame on his subordinates — he had been ill- served in Scotland. But this was no excuse for the crime. On the ill-fated and hopeless expedition Scotland had thrown away a great part of her scanty resources, and two thousand seven hundred of her best lives. Of all who sailed, only a handful survived the horrors of pestilential malaria, the pressure of fatigue and famine, and the bullets of the Spaniards. Baseless as the dream of vast colonial wealth had been, Scotland not unnaturally laid the blame for the 'disaster on the apathy and shifting policy which had sacrificed ^ Dr Somerville of Jedburgh, in his ' History of the Reign of Queen Anne,' quotes from the MSS. of Sir J. Clerk of Penicuik the words as used of the Darien Scheme, "I always thought it not so much a foolish as a roguish project." But the ground of the opinion is not given, and Sir J. Clerk, who was only a youth when it occurred, had no personal knowledge of the affair, and would probably have given reasons for his opinion had it not been merely the expression of his own judgment — which he evidently represents as different from that which ordinarily prevailed. RELIGIOUS INTOLERANCE. 17 her hopes to English selfishness, and left her sons as a defenceless prey to the Spanish troops. These did not exhaust the evils which Scotland suffered under the rule of William. The overturn of the Episcopalian Church in Scotland had been followed by the domination of the strictest sect amongst the Presbyterian clergy — men whose religious notions were steeped in fanaticism, whose ideas of ecclesiastical government were bound up with a tyrannical invasion of the privacy of domestic life, and who were determined to exercise to the full the rights of domi- ciliary inspection. Smarting from a recent experience of martyrdom, they set their faces against anything that savoured of religious toleration. They revived once more, in all their savage barbarity, the prosecutions for witch- craft, which had fallen into abeyance under the later Stuarts, and from which the consciences of the more intelligent part of the nation shrank in horror. But the alliance of these fanatics had to be cultivated by the Government, and any attempt to curb their tyranny was interpreted as veiled Jacobitism. Meanwhile the Government, for their own pur- poses, pursued those whose disafiection they suspected with vexatious persecution, even although many of the agents of that persecution had been distinguished for their own tergiversation. No one could travel through Scotland with- out special permission. The suspects were hunted from place to place, and evidence against them was procured by a full use of that power of torture which the law of treason in Scotland still permitted. Many of those against whom no satisfactory evidence could be found lay in prison for years without the power of pleading the rights of habeas corpus in their favour. To be suspected of a lurking sym- pathy for that family which had but lately held undisputed power, which was still identified with Scottish independence, and against whose ultimate reassertion of their rights no permanent statutory prohibition, such as the English Act of Settlement, had yet passed the Scottish legislature, was treated as a crime no less heinous than would have been an interference with a long -established government, safely rooted in the hereditary confidence of the nation. It is no wonder, then, that disaffection was widely spread, and that even those who saw most clearly the faults of the exiled family thought the national independence of Scotland had the first claim upon their loyalty, and were careless how they swelled the discontent which was the chief prop of the Jacobite cause. The position of affairs was indeed critical ; and in the early years of Queen Anne's reign it might well B 18 THE REVOLUTION SETTLEMENT AND THE UNION. seem doubtful whether the Revolution Settlement in Scotland might not be swept away, or maintained only at the expense of a war between England and herself. The accession of Queen Anne presented a favourable oppor- tunity for the Jacobites, or, as they called themselves, the Cavaliers. She belonged to the family which possessed the claim of hereditary right, and her advent to the throne was received with an outburst of loyalty that acclaimed her as the " rightful sovereign." This had the advantage of offering a middle course. On the one hand, it argued no opposition to the Revolution Settlement by virtue of* which alone Anne sat upon the throne, which by strict hereditary right be- longed to her brother. But, on the other hand, her reign might be considered a stopgap, which suspended indeed, but did not extinguish, the hopes of the exiled family. Her known predilections in favour of Episcopacy might flatter the hopes of the Jacobites, and family affection might be hoped so far to prevail with her as to lead her to pass on the Crown to one of her own race, if in the course of her reign he should secure the allegiance of the nation. This double aspect of her tenure of the royal power preserved the hopes of the Cavaliers, while it rendered needless any open acts of rebellion. To add to their confidence, they had in their favour the strong sense of national independence, which made even a republican like Fletcher of Saltoun feel a certain sympathy with the Jacobites, as sharing in a common de- testation of English tyranny, and in a determination to resist compliance with the English Act of Settlement, which fixed the Crown upon the Hanoverian family. The events which followed, although it is hard to trace their course amongst the subtle windings of party machinations, yet prove almost more than anything else the consummate adroitness of the leading English minister Godolphin. Absorbed, as he well might he, in a European war which strained all the resources of England, and beset by the jealousy of English factions, he yet managed, with singular skill, so to play off" one party against another in Scotland as to secure, what at one time seemed absolutely hopeless, that Union of the Parliaments without which England could never have been a great European power. His chief agent through the arduous struggle of these years was the Duke of Queensberry, a man who owed much to the favour of the Stuarts, and who had comparatively little support in his own country. He was a man full of resource, ready m debate, courteous in manner, who knew how to attach to himself, by favours adroitly placed, the THE ACT OF SECURITY. 19 confidence of a few, even although his subtlety was sus- pected and his sincerity doubted by many whom he sought to gain by allurements and by promises. The Jacobites were led by two men, the Dukes of Hamilton and Athole, both of great ability and great inlfluence, but regarding each other with jealousy and suspicion. The Country party, or, as they were soon after called, the Squadrone Volante, were nominally led by the Marquis of Tweeddale, a man of inferior capacity, who was not gifted with the faculties which enabled him to steer a successful course in such a seething current of faction, and who com- manded such confidence as he attained chiefly from the fact that he was looked upon as a simple and well-meaning man. The party of which he was the nominal director was hetero- geneous in its composition, and was rendered unstable not only by the variety of its elements, but by the selfish aims which animated many of its members. The Cavalier or Jacobite party were not powerful enough, strong as their influence appeared, to undo the Act which re-established Presbyterianism in Scotland. But they secured a certain amount of practical toleration at least for Episco- pacy, and this might be taken as a good harbinger of future hopes. They gained the support of the nation, and the alliance of the Country party, by a strenuous assertion of Scottish independence, and by pressing forward what was known as the Act of Security, which declared that on the death of the Queen the succession should be settled by the Scottish Parliament, but that the same person should be incapable of holding both crowns unless Scotland were ad- mitted to full rights of trade and navigation, providing for national independence by ordaining that all men capable of bearing arms should be trained in monthly drills. The Act passed the Scottish Parliament, but it was fraught with too much danger to obtain the assent of the English Ministry. Queen Anne refused to give it royal sanction by the ceremony of the touching of the Act by the Royal Com- missioner, who was the Duke of Queensberry. The crisis was evidently desperate ; and, as a first expedient, it was resolved by the Government agents to fix upon some of the opponents of the Ministry the stigma of a charge of treason, by bring- ing against them an accusation of trafficking with the power of France for the restoration of the exiled family. A tool for this was obtained in Simon Eraser, afterwards Lord Lovat, of whose strange career we shall see much more, and who carried on some negotiations between Louis XIV. and the Jacobites in Scotland, in which he acted the double part which he played 20 THE REVOLUTION SETTLEMENT AND THE UNION. in so many incidents of his life. The agent, however, was too discredited, and the game of the Jacobites was too evidently a waiting one, to make the scheme answer the ends for which it was intended. The Duke of Hamilton, whom it was sought to involve in the suspicion of treason, was able to repel it w4th ease, and the machination recoiled upon Queensberry,^ Foiled at one point, Godolphin and his agent had to resort to another plan. Their main object was to drive a wedge between the Coun- try party and the Jacobites. Able and versatile as he was, the Duke of Hamilton was too timid and vacillating for the part he had to play. He suffered himself to be led into a support of what appeared to be the rising power of the Coun- try party under Tweeddale ; and when Tweeddale was nomi- nated Commissioner, and appeared to have displaced the Duke of Queensberry from power, the Jacobite party conceived that their own hopes were promoted by the change. The Act of Security was again pressed forward, and this time it obtained the assent of the Crown. But in permitting this, Godolphin only allowed the crisis to come to a head. The jealousy of the English Parliament was fully aroused. Fresh impetus was given to the scheme of a union, and it was seen that without such a union, not only the Protestant succession, but the very existence of England as a power in Europe, was threatened. Before long Godolphin was justified in what was a bold but hazardous policy. The Squadrone Volante was soon discred- ited. Its selfishness was detected, and the hollowness of the alliance between it and the Cavaliers was exposed. Its short- lived tenure of power soon came to an end ; the enmity be- tween its leaders and those of the Cavaliers, who had very diflferent schemes in view, became more marked than ever. Tweeddale was succeeded, as Commissioner, first by the Duke of Argyle, then a young man of unrivalled territorial influence, and fresh from his military laurels in Marlborough's wars, who was the close adherent of Queensberry; and afterwards by Queensberry himself. The opposition to the English Ministry in the Scottish Estates, which had gone perilously near to absolute resort to violence, dwindled away and was discon- certed ; and the path seemed clearer for the realisation of his aims by Queensberry. But the task was one which demanded all the skill in state- craft, all the boldness in emergency, that Queensberry could summon to his aid. If his allies in the English Ministry were sincere in their desire to accomplish the Union, and so to get ^ Lovat also attempted to bring a similar charge against Athole, with whom and whose family he had a lifelong feud of the bitterest kind. DISSIMILAR SOCIAL HABITS. 21 rid of a danger which threatened their country, the^^^ were at the same time far from sanguine in their hopes. It seemed too much to expect that an aim which had been so long sought in circumstances which appeared more opportune should now be achieved, when the two nations were exasper- ated against one another, and when a great gulf of jealousy and hatred had to be bridged over. The Scottish nation was to the last degree proud and intractable, steeped in the traditions of centuries of inde- pendence. The inhabitants of a large portion of it were sep- arated by race and language, as well as by fundamentally dissimilar social habits, from the English; and even the Lowlanders of Scotland, if they were remotely akin to the English race, were marked off from that race by the indelible brand of centuries of inveterate hostility, and by a difference both in constitutional and civil law. Scotland was in no sense a commercial country; and the very absence of the wealth that commerce might have brought had increased the influence of a territorial class whose power, built up on the ruins of the power of the Crown, and fortified by the possession of hereditary jurisdiction, kept alive a feudal aristocracy, the very memory of which had passed away from England. Their poverty made them cling all the more tenaciously to that weapon which they possessed in the allegiance of vassals who had not yet lost either the habit of fighting or the taste for its indulgence. The religious differ- ences divided Scotland into sects which clung to their distinc- tive tenets with an enthusiastic devotion; but they seemed to forget their differences in the common antipathy to their southern neighbours. The Established Presbyterian Church feared that her very existence might be imperilled by union with a nation whose national Church was Episcopalian. The dissenting sects, who stood aloof from an Erastian Establish- ment, even although its religious creed was Presbyterian, dreaded still more any trafficking with Prelacy, which they scarcely distinguished from rank Papacy. The Episcopalians, who might have looked with sympathy to the English Church, yet detested a union with England, because it would rivet more firmly the chains which the Revolution Settlement had fastened upon them. The aristocracy dreaded the downfall of their ancient pride of authority ; the commonalty dreaded lest the nascent hopes of their scanty commercial enterprise might be nipped as was the Darien Scheme. The Jacobites saw in the Union something that would dissipate for ever the divinely sanctioned rights of the family which commanded their allegiance; and the Country party, many of whom 22 THE REVOLUTION SETTLEMENT AND THE UNION. were willing to push their opposition to those hereditary rights to the verge of republicanism, yet joined in hatred of the Union, which would end that national independence which they had hoped to build on the downfall of the usurpa- tions of the Crown. On the other hand, the more powerful and wealthy nation regarded Scotsmen with a mixture of contempt and of in- difference. With vast issues hanging on the successes of her armies abroad, England had little time to spare for thoughts of a country which, it seemed, could never be of much assist- ance, but which was only too likely to prove a thorn in her side. In her eyes Scotsmen were vaguely classed together as a half-civilised race, restless, grasping, turbulent, and domin- ated by a nobility whose pride was proportioned to vast authority, but whose rent-rolls were insignificant compared with the incomes of hundreds of London burgesses or of countless squires in every English county. Whatever injury Scottish pride and jealousy and Scottish intrigue with her enemies might bring upon England, what had a nation, whose merchant ships were on every sea, whose wealth was growing by leaps and bounds, and whose victories were making the greatest European Powers tremble, to gain from the alliance of a race whose country was a barren waste, one -fifth of whose scanty population were beggars, and whose largest city did not contain a population of thirty thousand souls ? The spirit with which Scotland approached the question was that of fortifying her own independence by doing every- thing to embarrass her neighbour's schemes. England was equally determined to make the poorer nation suffer from the weight of a heavy hand. In 1704 an Act of the English Parliament declared that, if no union took place, every native of Scotland would be treated as an alien after the 25th of December 1705. The exportation of horses, wines, and a great proportion of the appurtenances of civilised life, from Eng- land into Scotland, was prohibited, as well as that of cattle and coals (the one Scottish product which was — as yet but scantily — giving hopes of wealth) from Scotland into England. The loss to Scotland by the embargo on the cattle trade alone was reckoned at £100,000 — equal to the whole of her public revenue. Scotland had no great commercial houses which might claim a place in the hierarchy of trade and concert measures of retaliation. Her trade was largely in the hands of pedlars, whose numbers were supposed to be more than two thousand, the aggregate of whose wares was considerable, and whose agency was almost the only means by which the middle class in Scotland could share in the luxuries of England. But THE DUKE OF QUEENSBERRY. 23 not only did England close her own doors to Scotland, she sought to check Scottish traffic with other nations. All Scot- tish ships trading with any power at enmity with England were to be treated as fair prizes of war, and cruisers were put into commission for this special task. When the Scottish militia began its training pursuant to the Act of Security, England retorted by fortifying the northern towns, and throwing into them garrisons which were to terrorise the Scottish Border. Plausible apologies might be found both for the insolence of English contempt and indifference, and for the reckless intensity of Scottish pride and independence. But the impact of these forces might easily have produced a spark that would have kindled the flames of civil war. The resources at the command of the Duke of Queensberry were few. The game he was to play was one of the utmost hazard, and on its issue he risked not his fortunes only, but perhaps his life. From those whose prejudices he was to encounter in the struggle he had no mercy to hope in case of failure ; and his position was often like that of the commander of a beleaguered garrison, compelled to submit all his schemes to the decision of an assembly of which half at least was composed of bitterly hostile foes. He no doubt had the com- mand of such military forces as there were in Scotland, but these were scarcely three thousand in number, scattered over various parts of the country, and not always well affected to the measures of the Government. Two or three of the greater noblemen or of the Highland chiefs could easily have brought into the field an army that would have been more than suffi- cient to wipe out the scanty forces of the Crown ; and though they had no money to pay their levies, the defect might have been met by the simple and hereditary device of plunder. In the south-west of Scotland the Cameronians still retained the fighting power which their experience under the harrying of Claverhouse's dragoons had given them ; and much as they hated the memory of Stuart rule, they hated still more the policy which would sacrifice the independence of their country to an unhallowed alliance which should bind them to a nation owning allegiance to a prelatical Church. They were ready to rise in armed resistance and join hands with the Highland clans : and it was only the adroit contrivance of Queensberry, aided as it was by the divisions and vacillations of his oppon- ents, which prevented their junction in an armed march upon the capital. The division of parties being such as has been described — the Presbyterians, anxious to push still further the liberties secured by the Revolution Settlement ; the Squadrone Volante, 24 THE REVOLUTION SETTLEMENT AND THE UNION. resting chiefly on a vague assertion of Scottish independence ; and the Cavaliers, keen for a Jacobite restoration, in alliance with prelacy — Queensberry had a hard part to play, and could only hope to succeed by sowing dissension amongst his opponents. The Scottish Estates had really ceased to repre- sent the nation, as the Government had never ventured to appeal to a new election since the Revolution. But to have done so now would have been little short of madness. An election in 1706 would have produced a Parliament almost unanimous against the Union. He could not bribe, because the total value of all the offices under the Crown was only £20,000, and even if the scale of bribery might be propor- tioned to the national poverty, yet the crowd of hungry expectants was so great as to make this sum a scanty one for securing parliamentary support. But even in the existing Parliament, which had become inured to faction and intrigue, and the temper of which Queensberry knew by long experience, he could not reckon on a majority. He had on his side the vast influence of Argyle ; but Argyle was an ally whose temper craved wary management, and whose pride did not permit him to play with convenience the second part in any game. He had the sup- port of the unequalled eloquence, the consummate statesman- ship, and the profound legal knowledge of Stair ; but Stair's name was execrated throughout the country as the repre- sentative of a family over which there seemed to hang a sort of unhallowed shadow, which had been deepened by his own association with the massacre of Glencoe. Besides these, Queensberry had on his side the Earl of Mar. But Mar could bring to him no help in debate, and could command only a very limited stock of confidence. His family was indeed ancient and considerable, but he was himself of poor estate, insignificant in person, and with no share of that eloquence which was so powerfully displayed by many on both sides. Worse than all, he had already managed to inspire some of that distrust which haunted him through life, and for which his own acts gave only too ample reason. Another of Queensberry's adherents was the Chancellor, Earl of Seafield, the heir to the Earl of Findlater. Like many others, his family boasted high descent, but was sunk in poverty, and he had been born only to the prospects of a younger son. He had been bred a lawyer, and to skill in his own profession he joined the arts that helped him to turn every phase of political change to his own advantage. He had moved through each step of professional advance- ment, was a profound lawyer a skilled debater, and a past THE DUKE OF HAMILTON. 25 master in the art of political intrigue. Such qualities made of him a facile and useful tool ; but " his mind," as a con- temporary says, " was a blank sheet of paper, which the Court might fill up with what they pleased." His adherence might help in political exigency, but it could not attract one jot of popular respect. Against Queensberry were banded almost the whole aris- tocracy of Scotland. Four-fifths of the nobility and gentry, even in the western shires, it is asserted, and more than half of the Commons over the whole country, were in sympathy with the Jacobites. At their head were the Dukes of Hamilton and Athole, who had at their beck and call between them the power of the south-west and of the Perthshire Highlands, and who were eminently fitted by eloquence and character to lead a powerful and aggressive party. With them were joined such men as Fletcher of Saltoun, whose love of national independence amounted almost to fanaticism, and who could not be suspected either of political intrigue or of being carried away by the glamour of a romantic loyalty. In a parliament eminent for the high gifts and eloquence of its members, the opponents of the Government could boast no mean share of energy and ability ; their weakness lay in the deep -lying jealousies and dissensions that might be glozed over, but threatened every moment to burst into flame. In their dissensions lay Queensberry 's one hope of success or even of safety in his scheme for a parliamentary union. It was in the summer of 1705 that the first act of the drama opened. The English Parliament had already agreed to the Commission for considering the Union, and had left the nomination of commissioners to the queen. When the dis- cussion began in the Scottish Estates, the Duke of Hamilton moved a proviso which would have limited the commissioners to a federal, instead of an incorporating, union — to a scheme, that is, which would have allowed all the old difficulties to continue in a new form. The proposal of the Duke of Hamilton was fiercely debated, and in the end it was lost, in the absence of some of the Cavaliers, by a majority of two. So narrow were the risks in the game that no one could be certain of the issue, and it came upon the Cavaliers as a mortifying surprise. Boldness and successful manage- ment had won for Queensberry the first round in the fight. But the hopes of the Cavaliers were not yet dissipated. The next motion was one which declared that no treaty for union should be entered upon until the Act of 1704 — which declared that natives of Scotland would, in the absence of an Act of Union, become aliens at a certain date — should be 26 THE REVOLUTION SETTLEMENT AND THE UNION. repealed. The Government were aware that this Act was intended rather as a threat than a reality, and that its repeal — which was presently obtained — could cause no great diffi- culty ; and it was perhaps with no great pain that they found their opponents this time successful in the vote. Then came what was, in the eyes of the Cavaliers, the great betrayal. The Duke of Hamilton was so far their trusted leader. He had been in constant communication with his party ; but on the very day of the debate he had avoided a formal meeting, and had hastily answered the emissary who sought to arrange a plan for the nomination of commissioners, " that there was time enough to consider that affair ; it was not for that day." When the vote on the rescinding of the English Act had passed the hour was late; business for the night seemed finished, and some of the Cavaliers, satisfied with their day's work, had gone home. Suddenly the Duke of Hamilton moved that the nomination of commissioners for the Union should be left to the queen. What were his motives — whether a desire to secure a seat on the Commission for himself, or to conciliate the favour of a sovereign whom he thought not altogether ill-disposed to his own party — it is idle to guess. His own party felt that they were betrayed, and were at no pains to conceal their indignation at the surrender of the very stronghold of their position. But they were taken at a disadvantage, and even the protests of the Duke of Athole could not retrieve the position. The motion was carried by a majority of eight, and Queensberry might well congratulate himself on a victory more than half won. Not only was the Union well launched, but a wedge had been driven into the ranks of the Jacobites and those who were half inclined to support them, and their broken ranks were never completely closed. Parliament was prorogued in September 1705, and in March 1706 the commissioners (thirty-one for each country) were appointed by the queen. Whatever flattering hopes the Duke of Hamilton entertained that his dexterity would be success- ful were doomed to disappointment. Only one commissioner — Lockhart of Carnwath — was not an adherent of the party of the Court. It was on the 16th of April 1706 that the commissioners began their sittings at the Cockpit, Westminster. To save appearances, and not to seem entirely to neglect a scheme which represented the wellnigh undivided adherence of Scot- land, the question of a federal union was put forward ; but it was put forward only to be withdrawn with what looked like an apology for the proposal. The scheme of a united SUCCESS OF QUEENSBERRY. 27 kingdom, with one Crown and one Parliament, and a settle- ment of the succession in the terms of the English Act, was unanimously passed, — Lockhart's dissent being unrecorded, as those for whom he acted deemed that it was the best policy for their representative to listen in silence to proposals against which he could not have protested without surrend- ering any further part in the business. But, indeed, after the first resolution, the rest was comparatively trifling detail. Scotland's share in the representation was restricted to a thirteenth in place of the sixth part, to which her population would have entitled her. Her share in English taxation was declared, and to recoup her for the future burden of her quota of the English National Debt, a present payment of £391,000^ was agreed upon. On many of the details a show of discussion was made, but the spirit was gone out of the fight, and those who represented Scotland felt that they were there for little purpose but to register the decrees of their English colleagues. The treaty was signed on the 22nd of July 1706. The last act of the drama began when the Scottish Estates met to consider the Treaty of Union in October 1706. For the one side it was a struggle to secure a victory which had long seemed hopeless, but which was now within their grasp ; for the other it was a last despairing resistance to what many honestly believed a fatal blow to their country, and to what others knew to be a deadly menace to their own secret designs. At first the opponents of the Court strove to maintain that the consideration of the treaty was beyond the scope of their commission, and that to alter the Constitution without an appeal to their constituents was a betrayal of their trust. This was defeated by a large majority, showing how success had contributed to Queensberry's parliamentary strength, and the divisions never again show that even balance between the parties which had prevailed in the previous session. The op- position was indeed chiefly that of the rabble out of doors. A military guard had to be planted round the Parliament House, and the Commissioner went to and fro escorted by a troop of Horse Guards, and with his carriage surrounded by soldiers, who could not protect him from the curses — even from the assaults — of the populace, whose sympathies, what- ever they were worth, were all on the opposition side. The ^ It is odd that one of those employed in the actuarial calculations upon which this payment was based was William Paterson, the projector of the Bank of England and of the Darien Scheme. He was one of the few ardent supporters of the Union whose opinions were overborne by the hope of ministerial favour, and yet it was his own Darien Scheme and its treatment by England which did much to influence Scottish animosity. 28 THE REVOLUTION SETTLEMENT AND THE UNION. climate even told in Queensberry's favour. A continuance of stormy weather prevented the Edinburgh contingent from being swollen by accessions from the provinces. But the exasperation of the whole country was none the less pro- nounced because it did not choose to brave the fury of the elements or the bullets of the Guards. It mattered but little to the Duke of Queensberry that the curses and threatenings of the Edinburgh rabble obliged him to walk between hedges of soldiers to his coach, and that his coachman, to escape a shower of stones, was forced to gallop " at top speed " with his escort of Horse Guards from the Parliament House to his own mansion near Holyrood. The grim front of the many-storeyed buildings that line the High Street had looked upon many a riot, and a Scottish noble who mixed in the politics of these days could not indulge in the luxury of nerves. The Government majorities were growing, and they were a better safeguard of his power, his property, and even his life, than the swords of his escort. The soldiers made a brave show in the streets of Edinburgh ; but Queensberry knew well that they would form but a thin defence were the Duke of Athole to rouse the Highlands, or the Duke of Hamilton to lead from the west a force of Jacobite lairds and Cameronian enthusiasts. His game must be played in Parlian?ent, and each new turn of the cards there made him more secure of English support. When the Articles of Union were taken into consideration, a long debate took place upon the first, which united the two kingdoms into one. The time for vacillation was now past; nothing was now left but the resistance of despair; and the Duke of Hamilton, whose previous change of front had so baffled his party, now surpassed his previous efforts in a powerful and eloquent speech, which moved his audience to tears, as he appealed to the glorious past of his country, and protested against surrendering in a brief half hour all that the struggles of centuries had achieved. This and the articles which immediately followed, provid- ing for the succession in the Hanoverian line, and for the union of the Parliaments, were pressed rapidly on, and even the tactics of dilatory debate were disconcerted by a repeated use of the closure. The remaining articles were of com- paratively little importance, relating to the incidence of taxa- tion and the payment of the Equivalent Grant in respect of Scotland's future share in the National Debt, the largest part of which was to be used to recoup the African company for its losses in the ill-fated expedition to Darien. The objectors had much to urge, but remonstrance was now useless, and there THE ANGER OF SCOTLAND. 29 was little spirit to fight a losing battle within the Parliament. Protests and petitions were promoted in ever}^ burgh through- out the land, and various associations were formed with more or less overt purpose of armed resistance. But divided counsels frustrated their action, and their indignant outcry fell upon heedless ears. The whole Treaty was embodied in an Act to come into force on the 1st of May 1707 ; and the ill- chosen jest with which the Earl of Seafield as Chancellor returned the Act to the clerk when he had signed it — " Now there's ane end of ane old song " — remained as a con- temptuous epitaph on the grave of Scottish independence.^ The Ministry won a conspicuous victory all along the line; and, by a strange stretch of power, the representative peers and the forty-five members who were to sit in the united House of Commons were selected not by free election, but by the nomination of the Estates, which could do little but register the choice of the Ministers. On the 2nd of April 1707 the Duke of Queensberry set out for England, attended by a splendid retinue as far as Dunbar. When he crossed the Border, each town through which he passed vied with the others in the pomp and solemnity with which he was received, and the lavish hos- pitality with which he and his suite were entertained. His advance southwards was like a royal progress; the nobility and gentry gathered on his route; and when he reached Barnet, the Ministers of the Crown, and a long train of members of both Houses, met him with a triumphal wel- come. A thousand horsemen and a long train of coaches accompanied him to his house in London, and the same night he waited on the Queen to receive her thanks for his services. In the outburst of a popular thanksgiving, the curses of the Edinburgh mob, the prophetic dirges in which the ruin of Scotland was proclaimed, and the nights when he ran the gauntlet down the High Street of Edin- burgh, protected by his guards from being torn to pieces by the rabble, might well fade from his memory. ^ A story of tragic horror is told of one member of Queensberry 's household at the period, which shows the dark cloud that overhung his public triumph. His eldest son, Lord Drumlanrig, was a hopeless and dangerous lunatic, and was kept guarded, according to the cruel custom of the time, in a cellar in the mansion. One day when feeling ran most strongly, and riotous bands were gathered in the streets, the household servants had gone out to view the proceedings. Mean- while the lunatic escaped from his cell, and wandering through the house came upon a boy who was turning the spit in the kitchen. With the rage of an infuri- ated wild beast he killed the boy, and spitting the body, roasted it before the fire. The madman, concealed from every prying eye, and consequently made the sub- ject of wild reports, survived his father, but his succession was set aside in favour of his younger brother. 30 THE REVOLUTION SETTLEMENT AND THE UNION. But the wrath of the Scottish nation continued for more than a generation to burn as hotly as ever. The benefits of the Union were of slow growth and gradual development ; its evils were quick to show themselves, and were within the observation of all. The emblems of independence sud- denly vanished ; the Parliament House no longer echoed to strains of indignant eloquence ; the streets of the capital were no longer crowded with the members of the Scottish Estates and their retainers, and it seemed as if the profit which their presence brought was transferred for ever from the pockets of the Edinburgh to those of the London trades- men. The allurements of fashion and the attractions of social vanity drew the aristocracy to London; and the poorer nation found that to this material injury there was added the insult of a callous and contemptuous indifference on the part of those who, as they conceived, had robbed them of their independence with the help of traitors in their own camp. Suspicions of bribery further exasperated the general rage. Certain sums of money were undoubtedly distributed amongst those who lent their aid to the Govern- ment scheme ; but the total amount was small, and it may be doubted whether the popular belief was altogether well grounded, and whether payments for arrears of salary and necessary expenses were, at least in many cases, fairly to be reckoned as bribes.^ Such suspicions, however, find a ^ The matter was made the subject of a report to Parliament by Commissioners on the Pubhc Accounts in 1711 ; and although the circumstances are suspicious, and there was admittedly some secrecy in the transaction, yet the proof of actual bribery in the ordinary sense of the term does not appear conclusive. The fact is plain that a payment of £20,000 from the English to the Scottish Treasury was contemplated for the payment of arrears of salaries and allowances accrued since the accession of the queen. This was avowedly proposed in order to smooth the way for the Union, and the fact affords no ground for a charge of moral turpitude. An ideal standard of political rectitude might require a man to give as ardent a support to a government which did not pay him what it owed as to one which met all its obligations. But human nature will not often show such cordiality to a defaulting creditor; and at least we must admit that the man who bargains that he shall be paid his wages before he lends his support in a doubtful cause is entitled to have his case distinguished from that of one who sells his vote for a bribe. To avoid the suspicions which any payment from the English to the Scottish Treasury must certainly arouse at such a juncture, it was arranged that the payment should be made to the Commissioners of the Treasury personally, and that they should give a personal discharge for it. Such an arrangement was undoubtedly open to objection on the strict principles which now regulate public accounts ; but it may safely be said that irregularities much more serious were matter of everyday occurrence down to a far later date and in exigencies far less grave. To urge, as Lockhart of Carnwath seems to do, that the payment of arrears is as blamable as the creation of posts, and that this may be merely a veiled bribe, is contrary to common-sense. The acceptance of a post, under however heavy a pledge of support, differs from the acceptance of a bribe because it is open and avowed and must be arraigned and judged before the bar of public opinion. That SLOW RESULTS OF THE UNION. 31 ready credence when a political change eminently likely to arouse popular indignation is accomplished. The Union was brought about contrary to all expectation; it could never have been attained by the ordinary machinery of govern- ment; and no man of ordinary foresight could have hoped that it would have been accomplished without sowing seeds of hatred which would only slowly die away. There is another aspect of the whole struggle which it is more easy for us than it was for contemporaries to estimate at its full importance. The history of Scotland for the first half of the eighteenth century is a history of obstinate rebellion, often indeed slumbering, but never dead, and now and then bursting out in open war. During all that period the fundamental question of dynastic allegiance overwhelmed all other interests, and gave its own colour to all other divisions and disputes. There were many important side- issues involved; but they were all for the time forced to appear as aspects of the one dominant struggle, and to rise and fall with the fortunes of the side which espoused them. As years went on it became evident that all the strongest forces of the nation — its growing commercial prosperity, its best intelligence, its essential prudence and moderation — were gradually cast into the scale of the party which supported the Hanoverian Settlement. The glamour of a romantic loyalty cannot blind us to this fact; and the gradual waning of Jacobite hopes brought with it the down- fall of many causes with which the Jacobite party had identified itself. The first of these side-issues which suffered from this fatal alliance was that of opposition to the Union. The first battle of Jacobitism was fought over the Union; and the issue of the fight was the first irreparable blow to their cause. It was complicated, indeed, by other issues, but so was every subsequent attempt of the failing party after a post has been accepted and its duties discharged arrears of salary should be paid can only be called a bribe by a strain of language that is absurd. But it is further argued that the payment of arrears was only made to selected persons. The appearance of the Duke of Athole's name in the list for one of the largest payments (£1000) amply disposes of this. His sup- port could not have been hoped for in the Government's wildest dream. The most serious part of the charge is that, to some of those who received the money, all arrears are stated to have been already paid, while in the case of others no proper discharge was given to the Treasury, and they afterwards received a further payment from the Equivalent Grant in the name of arrears. But estimates of arrears are apt to prove somewhat elastic, according as they are measured by the debtor or the creditor ; and on the whole the evidence is scarcely sufficient to prove a charge of flagrant venality. We must not forget that the Report was made at a time when party feeling ran high. If bribery there was, it seems to have been restricted to a settlement — possibly capricious and sometimes over generous — of claims which had a real existence. 32 THE REVOLUTION SETTLEMENT AND THE UNION. down to 1745. The failure of the resistance to the Union marked a distinct downward progress in the fortunes of the Jacobites ; and it was an accident only, and not an essential, that the battle was fought not in the field but in the Parlia- ment House. Armed resistance was, indeed, contemplated, and came very near to being realised ; and had the issue of arms been appealed to, it would have been on a larger scale than in any of the subsequent attempts. But the abandonment of any plan of armed resistance in 1707 proved rather the comparative strength of the Jacobite party than their weakness. Down to 1707 they might well hope that by weight of numbers and by fervour of national dislike to the Union they would yet reverse the Revolution, and retrieve the fortunes of the exiled house : after the Union that hope was gone, and nothing remained to them but armed rebellion. Had the narrow majority of two which affirmed the incorporating against the federal union been reversed, the anti-union party would have become as clearly identified with the Jacobites in appearance as they were in fact; and within the borders of Scotland their numbers would have been too overwhelming to force them to have recourse to arms. The preponderating strength of their fighting power would have enabled them to leave that power in abeyance. For a time they would have held secure authority north of the Tweed. The ultimate issue would doubtless have been conquest by England; but such a strain on English resources as conquest would have implied might have changed the position of England in Europe, and had portentous results on European history far beyond the shores of Britain. It is this which links 1707 to 1745 so closely in the chain of cause and effect; and before entering upon the detailed history which begins with the latter year, it is necessary to pass briefly in review the salient events of the intervening period, which w^ere all phases of the one central struggle which engaged the chief attention of Scotland, and which coloured all her divisions about lesser things. Jacobitism in England survived as a romantic but scarcely avowed partisanship, whose adherents were scattered, and whose plans never sought realisation. The passing flicker of ani- mation which it now and then attained was stimulated by Scottish example, and sank into ashes when that stimulus was removed. Other and far larger questions engaged the attention of parties, and Jacobitism was rather the ghost of a dead memory than the creature of a living impulse. But in Scotland for more than one generation Jacobitism GRADUAL DECAY OF JACOBITISM. 33 remained a real and living creed, lying close to the hearts of a large section of the nation, more or less openly- avowed, and dividing the people, in spite of all the habits of social intercourse, into two camps, one of which regarded the other as owning allegiance to an authority which they themselves detested and disavowed. The one camp never wholly could rid themselves of the fear, the other never ceased to cherish the hope, that rebellion might some day be successful. We should misread the history of these forty years were we to look upon these successive events as spas- modic revivals of Jacobite ardour. That ardour was never absent from its supporters, never ceased to be a source of uneasiness to its opponents; but the story of these years is that of its gradual decay and its final extinction. With such a cause of dissension, so unsleeping, and at the same time so fundamental, eating at the very vitals of her cor- porate life, the wonder is, not that Scotland did not prosper more, but that she prospered as she did. c 34 CHAPTER 11. THE EARLIER SCHEMES OF THE JACOBITES. It is curious to observe how soon the new phase of the struggle was to be entered upon. The parliamentary arena was now closed. Such hopes as the Jacobites could cherish for the future lay in armed resistance. On the eve of the debates that were to issue in the Union, suspicions had been aroused of plans concocted with France for armed intervention. Undoubtedly there had been grounds for such suspicions; but they had been indignantly repudiated, and there are reasons a good deal stronger than any such formal repudia- tion for believing them to have no very solid foundation. At the most any such scheme had been tentative only ; and so long as the Jacobites had been able to muster, even in the Estates which had long ceased accurately to represent the feeling of the electorate or of the country, a party which was outnumbered by their opponents only by two voices, such schemes would have been not only a mistake but a folly. That period was now past; and it had hardly dis- appeared before more definite plans were arranged for putting their principles to the arbitrament of war. Their hopes were high; their resources in mere numbers of fighting men were vastly superior to those of their opponents within the borders of Scotland; and they were secure of the sym- pathy of the great majority of the nation. But the test of arms could not be applied without risks which had not yet been faced. Defeat in Parliament might mean loss of power and influence; defeat in battle brought with it the axe and the gibbet. However high the hopes with which they entered on the new phase of the struggle, those who took part in it knew well that they burned their boats behind them, and that defeat would leave them at the mercy of a foe who, for his own safety, would be compelled to treat them, not as an out- voted faction, but as criminals A CALL TO ARMS. 35 and traitors. This danger was not sufficient to deter men who felt themselves strong in the sympathy of the nation; but it was ominous of the future when we find that in the first attempt to bring about an appeal to war the cause was treated only as the tool of those who had their own designs to serve. Even before the Act of Union was placed upon the statute- book, the new scheme had been set on foot. Towards the end of February 1707, one Hooke, an emissary of Louis XIV., had landed in the north-east of Scotland on a mission of inquiry. He found the Duke of Athole and his adherents ready to rise in arms for the exiled family and confident of success — so confident, indeed, that they were ready to place their arms at the disposal of their rightful sovereign without demanding any further promise of assistance from the French king than an army of some 6000 or 7000 men. The number was small when compared with the vast extent of European armaments, but, as subsequent events showed, it was quite enough to have turned the scale in any of the later struggles. But when Hooke moved farther south he met with others whose loyalty was possibly not less sincere, but whose caution prompted conditions as to assistance which were more stringent. Ten thousand men was the least force from France which promised, in their opinion, success to the enterprise. They must have a supply of artillery and, above all things, of the commodity most scarce in Scotland — money — before it would be prudent to rise in arms. But if their king were to land with such an army and with such sinews of war, they could promise to join him with 25,000 foot and 5000 horse at their back. The extent of their demands was measured, not by their weakness, but by their confidence in the strength of their own cause; and indeed the appeal to arms was never afterwards made with the same prospect of success. For one cause or another, almost every section of the nation was embittered against the existing Government. The Presbyterian Church had assented to the Union as the price of security for itself; but its preachers now found themselves compelled by the apparently unanimous opinion of their congregations to denounce the Union in every utterance from their pulpits. Even the enthusiastic Cameronians, who detested Prelacy, and looked upon the papistical tenets of the Stuarts as an accursed thing, were fain to hope that the exiled family might repent of its heresies, and were ready to make common cause with the Episcopalians in resistance to a Union that was fraught with degradation to their country. The landed 36 THE EARLIER SCHEMES OF THE JACOBITES. aristocracy could count upon the support of their followers ; and in almost every burgh the Act of Union had been burned at the common cross amidst the execrations of the crowd. The whole forces of the Crown in Scotland scarcely numbered 2500 men, and of these it was expected that at least 2000 would desert to the standard of the exiled king. The gar- risons throughout the country were practically deserted, and the castle of Edinburgh was held by a handful of men without the munitions of war. Within that castle there lay the treasure paid by England in terms of the Union, and such a treasure would supply just what was wanting to secure the success of the enterprise. Nothing could be easier than to march upon the northern towns of England, and, by holding Newcastle, to deprive London of her coal supply. One element of weakness there was, and that was disunion amongst themselves. The agent of the French king knew nothing of the state of the country, and he would, indeed, have been possessed of unusual political acumen had he acquired that knowledge. He committed the fatal mistake of dealing separately with the different leading members of the party, and this was the very means best calculated to confirm their mutual jealousy and distrust. But indeed the conditions of the country were little studied save as they affected the plans of the French king. To conceive that the Grand Monarch would interfere in the affairs of Scotland from an abstract regard for hereditary principles, or for sympathy with a loyal but defeated party, was nothing but mid-summer madness. The extension of French influence could be the only aim either of the king or of his Ministers. Nothing proves more conclusively that Jacobitism had stepped down to a lower position, and was- no longer a powerful and avowed parliamentary opposition,, than the circumstance that, with all the support which they found in national indignation, its adherents were ready to abate their pride, and submit to terms which made them tools and dupes in the hands of Louis. This is visible throughout the whole of Hooke's negotiation. This obscure soldier who, born in England, had accepted service in the army of her deadliest foes, yet assumed towards the proudest members of the Scottish aristocracy the tone of a pleni- potentiary who did not seek to disguise the fact that he considered their cause only as it affected his master's designs. Their reasonable demands he met with a haught}^ condescen- sion. " I begged of them," he says, " to remember that they had to do with a prince of the utmost penetration, who will never suffer himself to be imposed upon ; that it would INSOLENCE OF THE FRENCH EMISSARY. 37 not look well in them to be teaching him what was his interest" — and so on. They were expected to imperil their fortunes and their lives on a mere hypothesis that it might suit the French king's purpose to make some attempt upon Scotland, mainly designed, not to realise their aims, but to divert some of England's military force from the Continent, and to shake the stability of English credit. His tone towards the Duke of Hamilton, whose honour was never impugned, but whose constitutional hesitation made him shrink from the danger to himself and his followers of entering upon an enterprise of an entirely new character, was that of overweening insolence. "I was not," he reports himself as having said, "come into Scotland to ask the Duke of Hamilton's advice about the king's affairs: his Majesty did not want it. The duke did not deal fairly; he used tricks unbecoming to a person of his rank; he pretended to want to treat, but did not take any measures for it. I was tired of all his shuffling and evasions; and if he could not do anything, I should perhaps find means to save Scotland" ("save it," that is, in the sense of making it another pawn in the French game) "without him." Nor was the tone of this obscure adventurer, so far as we can gather, resented. The national feeling was ready to catch at any hope of assistance, however doubtful its promise and however degrad- ing its conditions. They strove to support their cause by a flattery that was almost servile. "They have directed me to represent that the French are as much loved in Scotland as they are hated in England. . . . That they still preserve several French idioms and terms of expression ; that France is therefore always dear to them." It is odd to find little traits of social and linguistic form gravely put forward as make- weights in the balance of European intrigue ! Louis, however, appeared to think that Scottish loyalty might be used to good purpose for furthering his own schemes. It was arranged that the exiled king should start from Dunkirk with an army of some 5000 men in a fleet com- manded by the Comte de Forbin. The illness of the titular king delayed the expedition until an English fleet appeared before Dunkirk, and when that fleet was driven off by stress of weather the French expedition started on the 6th of March 1707. A storm once more drove them for shelter to the Newport-pits, from which they sailed again on the 8th. The voyage was unusually long, and instead of sailing straight to the Firth of Forth the fleet made a detour as far as thirty miles north of Aberdeen, and it was only on the evening of the 12th that they cast anchor before Crail, 38 THE EARLIER SCHEMES OF THE JACOBITES. on the northern coast of the Firth of Forth. The Chevalier was anxious to land at once, but he was prevented by the French commander. In a few hours the English fleet, under Sir George Byng, which had started in pursuit, entered the Firth. The French fleet cut their cables, and by a skilful manoeuvre managed to elude the far stronger English fleet, and to escape with the loss of a single vessel. The French ships rendezvoused in the North Sea. The entreaties of the Chevalier to be put on shore at any point on the Scottish coast were disregarded, and within three weeks of the day from which, with every semblance of sincerity, which it was thought convenient to assume, the French king had despatched the expedition for the invasion of Scotland, the fleet returned to Dunkirk — not a man of the expedition having set foot on Scottish soil. Meanwhile the alarm amongst the supporters of the Government in Scotland had been extreme. Every Jacobite was in a state of elation, and moved about the streets of Edinburgh with a haughtiness that he took no pains to conceal. Messengers were sent all over the country, and the Jacobite adherents threw off" all disguise, and hastened with their followers towards the capital. The sands of the detested Union seemed to be fast running out, and a Jacobite restoration, to be received with far greater fervour of national enthusiasm than that of 1660, seemed about to be realised. The Hanoverian adherents were a wretched minority, and the Earl of Leven, who commanded a handful of soldiers on whose fidelity he could not rely, was in a state of nervous fear. He drew up his troops on the sands of Leith when ships of war appeared in the Firth, but it must have been with heavy misgivings as to his power of oflering any effective resistance to the landing of the French contingent. It soon, however, appeared that the ships which had been sighted were not those which brought the exiled king to the arms of his subjects eager to show their loyalty, but Byng's fleet, before which the enemy had already fled. Never were hopes so confident more cruelly shattered. On the eve of what appeared an easy and certain victory the Jacobites found themselves cowed by the presence of an English fleet. Their elation was suddenly changed to discomfiture, and instead of victorious leaders of a national movement, they found themselves a baffled and discredited faction, steeped in treason, and with little to expect except forfeiture, imprison- ment, or death. Whether the French king had intended more than a feint which was to disturb the English Govern- ment, or whether he had only given orders which forced AN ABORTIVE EXPEDITION. 39 upon his commanders an excess of caution, it is useless to conjecture ; but it is at least certain that the allurements of his proffered aid had misled the Jacobite hopes when they were highest, and converted what had been a proud and confident party, commanding all but unanimous national support, into a defeated faction, to be associated hereafter, in the mind of the English nation, with treason and intrigue, for which the gibbet and the axe were the proper remedies. It is not the least tragic element in the history of that ill- fated party, that in its first attempt, as in its later efibrts, it was the sport and plaything of the irony of fortune. The full force of the blow did not fall at once. A few gentlemen were arrested in Stirlingshire who had actually gathered together in arms, and against whom it would appear to have been easy to prove an overt act of treason. They were brought to trial ; but hard swearing, sympathetic juries, and a court which contained not a few judges who were more or less implicated in designs of the sort, resulted in their acquittal — an acquittal which the Government probably did not regret. The alarm had been real and well founded, but its collapse was so sudden and so complete as to be almost comical, and it was not impolitic to allow the incident to pass without increasing discontent by punishing men who had on their side the sympathy of the great majority of the nation. Many other men of influence were arrested on suspicion and were taken as prisoners to London, but they were soon after released. The release was partly due to the influence which for the moment that unstable politician, the Duke of Hamilton, had with the Whig party, now dominant in English politics, and this was the beginning of the intimate connection of the Scottish Jacobites with one or other of the English political parties. Their history during the next six years consists mainly of their attempt to advance their own schemes by subtle combinations now with one and now with the other party, and of their tortuous windings amidst the troubled waters of English politics. The arena of their own parliament was now closed to them. The high hopes which they had founded upon the assistance of the French king had left them stranded as dupes of his selfish schemes. For a time they endeavoured to retrieve their hopes and recover their influence by making themselves essential to one or other party in England. At the outset they had some reason for confidence. The elections in Scotland had gone strongly in favour of the Jacobites, and although the number of Scottish members — based on the proportion of revenue instead of that of 40 THE EARLIER SCHEMES OF THE JACOBITES. population — was unduly small, they were compactly knit together. The representative peers also belonged largely to that party, and although their influence was compara- tively small, they acted for the most part, except in some points which aflected the privileges of their order, in close concert with the House of Commons managers. Parties being fairly balanced, a compact body of forty-five members could seriously influence a division in the House of Commons, and although English selfishness and prejudice often united both parties in flouting the aspirations of the Scots, yet their alliance was worth cultivating. The discontent in Scotland was becoming even more pronounced, and in it the Scottish members had a powerful sustenance and support. The chief manager of the party in the House was George Lockhart of Carnwath, whose 'Memoirs' form a most im- portant source of information as to the whole course of the transaction. He is an undisguised partisan. He makes no secret of his bias, and of his detestation of all who were adverse to the claims of the exiled family. By that touch- stone he forms his judgment on all who took part in politics, and according to it, and it alone, he applies praise or blame. But allowing for this bias, which is never misleading, because it is never concealed, we may accept his account of the trans- actions of the day with implicit confidence. He can recognise and discriminate as to the ability of his opponents, and even as to the extent to which their character merits respect, apart from the black smudge of Hanoverian sympathy. He avows that from first to last his single object in all his intrigues was to promote the interests of the exiles, and that all other political questions weighed with him only as they could be used to advance or to injure these interests. His own position and his own character — nay, even the very candour with which he tells his story — are sufiicient to acquit him of any mean or sordid notion. Of a descent which made him rank with the proudest of the aristocracy, he was at the same time one of the wealthiest of Scotsmen, and his influence in Lanarkshire, and throughout the south-west of Scotland, was second only to that of the Duke of Hamilton. He spared no time or trouble, and shrank from no danger and no loss, which could help the cause he had adopted. He sought no reward either in title or in money, and stood scrupulously aloof from the network of selfish intrigue which surrounded the exiled court. He was physically and morally fearless, and spoke his opinion with equal (freedom to friend and foe. He was not only a ready and forcible speaker, trained in the stimulating atmosphere of the Scottish Estates, LOCKHART OF CARNWATH. 41 where eloquence was a common gift, but he possessed, what is an even more valuable parliamentary faculty, the power of rapid perception and quick decision in a parliamentary crisis. He joined to all these qualifications the absence of any ambition for personal glorification, and a rare faculty for playing upon the hopes and fears of other men. He was, in short, by birth, by position, and by character, a man eminently fitted to play a decisive part in political affairs. By friendship and relationship he was connected with the leading men of both parties. His grandfather had been ambassador to France. His father had met with a tragic death at the hand of a disappointed litigant, when President of the Court of Session. He was nephew to the Duke of Wharton, who, though deemed by Swift " the most universal villain I have ever known," was head of one of the proudest families in England, and a man of mark amongst the Whigs. He was the friend and intimate from childhood of the Duke of Argyle. His wife was a daughter of the Earl of Eglinton. To all these advantages he added a fearless, and, so far as we can see, a disinterested spirit. Only the baneful circum- stances of his time depressed him. He was one of those strong characters whose very forcibleness narrows their range. Devoted to a cause which became more and more identified with all the dark devices that weave themselves about political intrigue, all his powers of character and intellect were driven into an underground channel, and all his moral principle became involved and twisted by con- spiracy. There is in truth nothing more tragic in the history of Jacobitism than the degree to which the canker of intrigue penetrated the very life of men such as Lockhart, when they were involved in its meshes. The united Parliament met in November 1708. The Scottish members soon found themselves called upon to resist encroachments on Scottish commercial privileges — or what they conceived to be encroachments; and even such small matters as the refusal of the usual drawbacks of duty on the export of fish cured in Scotland, on the ground that the salt with which it had been cured before the Union had not paid the English duty, gave rise to bitter discussion. The Scottish members of the House of Commons were deprived of the aid of the representative peers, because they opposed certain privileges which gave these peers an undue influence in elections — an influence which was dreaded, because the peers were more disposed to truckle to the English Ministry than their countrymen in the Commons. This division made the English Ministers less chary of showing their contempt 42 THE EARLIER SCHEMES OF THE JACOBITES. for Scottish opinion; and no great difficulty was found in passing an Act which assimilated the Scottish law of treason to that of England, and prevented such sympathetic treatment of prisoners as had been seen in the late trials. Treason was no longer to be tried at the Scottish Court of Justiciary, but by a commission of Oyer and Terminer, to be specially named, from which all could be excluded whose leniency there might be reason to fear. The power of extracting evidence by torture, which had been used to the full by the supporters of the Revolution Settlement, was abolished; but this was a poor consolation to the Scottish members, who saw in the new Act a serious menace to the independence of their own courts. Parliament was prorogued in the spring of 1709. So far the Jacobites had not cast their lot very decidedly with one party or the other. To forecast the political horizon in that year would have been difficult for any one ; most especially was it impossible for those who had no know- ledge of the main elements in the complicated tangle of party warfare in that day. But during that year Harley's influence grew in proportion as that of Godolphin and the Duchess of Marlborough waned at Court. The Queen was anxious to rid herself of a galling tyranny, and sought a release by throwing herself on the support of Harley and the Tories. The ill-judged prosecution of Sacheverell for the sermon in which he attacked Godolphin, and advocated the theory of Divine Right in such terms as seemed to condemn the Revolution Settlement, precipitated Godolphin's fall. An outburst of popular indignation hard to explain, and stimulated chiefly by unthinking prejudice, ranged it- self on the side of Church and Crown, of which the Tories professed themselves the defenders. The battle was fought over the really insignificant body of this obscure and un- worthy divine, whom ill-timed prosecution converted into a national hero. The Scottish members seemed now to have found their opportunity. The Government of Godolphin were not only responsible for the hated Union, but had flouted the Scottish members and made light of their discontent. They were baulked in the blow which they had aimed at the Tories through Sacheverell, and their failure was the signal for their fall. The Scottish commoners threw themselves heart and soul into the contest, and by their influence the Duke of Hamilton was persuaded to vote against SacheverelFs conviction. The Earl of Mar, who had been one of the chief agents of the Union, but was now become one of its HARLEY AND THE JACOBITES. 43 bitterest opponents, took the same course; and although the Duke of Argyle did not actually vote against the Ministry, he helped to shelter Sacheverell from their wrath. Harley and his chief associate, St John, triumphed. The famous Ministry of "the Last Four Years of the Queen" was established; and it was under no small debt of grati- tude to the compact band of Scottish members that had aided the victory. At first it seemed as if this novel method of advancing the aims of Scottish Jacobitism, by skilful combination with an English party, was to prove successful. The union be- tween Harley and the Scotsmen seemed cordial. But per- severance in the pursuit of a bold line of politics was not in keeping with the character of Harley. His political wisdom never rose higher than adroit management, well- assumed hesitation, and a perplexity of aim which managed to bafile detection by its very obscurity. He had no fixed and definite policy ; and in pursuing a tortuous course amidst the confused sea of contending factions, he neither could, nor would, maintain faith with his Scottish allies. His only device for securing influence was to conceal his objects ■ — a concealment all the more easy because he knew them not himself. The only power of the Scottish members lay in the intense and rigid simplicity of their purpose. Be- tween such elements, permanent coalition was impossible. The experience of the Scottish members under Godolphin was repeated on each new occasion. A proposed tax upon the export of linen — Scotland's staple trade — was met by their most angry protest; but their efforts led to no result but a slight modification of the tax. Harley defended the proposal with a bluntness of phrase that was almost brutal. "Have we not bought the Scots," he said, "and have we not a right to tax them ? " Such an appeal to the un- thinking prejudices of his supporters of the October Club does not deserve to be dignified by the name of arrogance — it was only the vulgar bullying of a purblind intriguer, who caught at any pretext that served for a moment. It met with a dignified rebuke from Lockhart, who knew how to turn it to admirable account. "He was glad to hear a truth, which he had never doubted, now publicly owned — that Scotland had been sold. But he admired that it should be held that the Equivalent Grant should be named as the price. That Equivalent was paid because Scotland took upon herself a share of England's debts. It would, therefore, be interesting to know what price had been paid for Scottish independence, and into whose hands that price 44 THE EARLIER SCHEMES OF THE JACOBITES. had passed." A Bill promoted by Scotsmen, for the en- couragement and regulation of the Scottish linen trade, was successful in the House of Commons, but only after bitter opposition from many English members and lukewarm sup- port from the Ministry; and in the House of Lords it was thrown out. The same fate attended every attempt. A Bill for en- couraging the importation of Scottish timber also failed; and when Lockhart and his friends conceived that the time was ripe for a Bill for the Toleration of Episcopacy in Scotland, it was thwarted and delayed, because Harley dreaded any complete rupture with the Presbyterians. The Duke of Queensberry, whose skill and statesmanship had steered the bark of the Union through troubled waters, was now dead. Harley had no such statesman on his side to manage Scottish affairs. The Duke of Argyle and Lord Mar were now the leaders of the Scottish party ; but though they seemed to be acting with Harley, their support was not secure. The Duke of Hamilton was not unfriendly; but he was in the first place a Jacobite, and only in the second place a Tory of Harley's school. Lockhart, who was the heart and soul of the Jacobite party, was daily becoming more suspicious of Harley's evasions and subter- fuges. For a time Harley managed to avoid a rupture. The projected mission of the Duke of Hamilton to France seemed to portend some purpose of negotiating for a Jacobite restoration ; and the subsidies granted to certain of the High- land chiefs, which enabled them to maintain the military discipline of their clans, seemed to point the same way. The tragic death of the Duke of Hamilton, in his duel with Lord Mohun, on the eve of setting out on his mission — a death in which foul play had certainly a part, and in which political enmity, perhaps, was not without its influence — defeated these hopes; but the Bills for tolerating Episcopacy, and still more that for restoring Patronage in the Presbyterian Church, were accepted as earnests of a more cordial attitude on the part of the Tory Ministers towards their Jacobite allies. The latter of these Acts requires more than a casual mention, as it had far-reaching results. In its inception it was certainly planned to increase the influence of the landed gentry, who were well disposed to the Jacobite interest, and might be counted on to favour that interest in the nomination of incumbents. Since the Reformation all the fiercest struggles in the Scottish Church turned — as they were to turn down to a far later day — upon the question THE ACT RESTORING PATRONAGE. 45 of the selection of her ministers, as was only natural where religion penetrated so deeply into the heart of the people. But as the question presented itself to the Scottish people, it was not one of popular against territorial influence ; it was in truth one involving the maintenance of what was believed to be purity of doctrine. The gifts which com- mended a preacher to a congregation were not those which would naturally be supposed to attract the favour of the less educated. They were rather those of stem and un- bending rigidity of doctrine, of fierce disciplinary zeal, and of powerful appeals to the passion of enthusiasm. In the eyes of a people who had suflered the direst agony of per- secution, who absorbed the metaphysical aspect of religion to a degree which has never been equalled in the history of the world, and who felt that the very existence of their creed depended upon the maintenance of its doctrinal purity, such gifts in their pastor gave a sense of security and strength which far transcended the value of any other attractions. Had the choice of their ministers remained with the congregations, the ecclesiastical Establishment would probably have retained its iron discipline, and its stern rig- idity of doctrine would have endured, and would have kept Scotland fundamentally divided from English feeling and English thought. To the English Ministry the Patronage Act seemed a fairly promising bulwark against democratic influence; and we find Swift claiming high merit in its enactment for the Ministry to the support of which he had devoted his genius. But in truth the measure was one the efl'ect of which the English Ministers could not even re- motely estimate. It was really the work of the Jacobite party, which hoped by its means to capture the Church. It remained upon the statute-book for one hundred and sixty years, and was almost the solitary monument of the influence of that party on the history of Scotland. But it wrought in a way absolutely opposed to their design. It was to that Act that the growth of the Moderate party in the Church of Scotland was due. The influence of that party we shall trace in future years. It was of another temper from that of the rigid Covenanters, who sought to maintain an archaic rigidity of discipline unsuited to the age. It fostered in the Church a new type of clergymen, who attached small importance to niceties of doctrine, and boldly asserted a more liberal code of ethics. They claimed for themselves, and extended to others, a freedom from re- straint that largely transformed the temper of the people. They passed beyond a conception of religion founded upon 46 THE EARLIER SCHEMES OF THE JACOBITES. Hebraic models, and found interest and occupation in litera- ture and in the general intercourse of the world. They broke down barriers that had previously kept the nation sternly aloof from modern thought, and in so doing they helped to cement the Union between England and Scotland. They refused to consider the distinction of Church govern- ment between Episcopacy and Presbyterianism as of more than minor interest, and were content to rest the frame- work of their ecclesiastical system upon grounds of ex- pediency. It was only natural that they should often lay themselves open to charges of indifFerentism and laxity; and the older instincts of the people again and again broke out in resistance to Patronage, and new currents of dissent took their rise from these epochs of resistance. But none the less, the work which the Moderate party performed for the country was a great one; and little as they anticipated the result, it was the Jacobite party which by this Patron- age Act enabled the Moderate party to come into existence. The Moderate party in the Church never became tainted with Jacobitism. It accepted the Revolution Settlement, and not only acquiesced in the Union, but broke down many of the barriers of thouo^ht and sentiment which at first made that Union odious. Under its influence Scotland assumed a place of her own in the front rank of philosophy and literature. And the bulwark which that party raised in its earlier years against the stern rigidity of an uncom- promising and unyielding isolation of religious doctrine it afterwards maintained against the encroachments of dema- gogic allurements. It was a strange coincidence that the Act which made that party possible was repealed by the Conservative party a generation ago, in one of those strange moods of compliance which sacrifice principle to popularity, and in a vain attempt to conciliate irreconcilable opponents.^ So much for one Act which the Jacobite influence helped to place upon the statute-book, and which had far-reaching re- sults of which the Jacobites could little dream. But their attempts to attain their own ends by the adroit management of English parties had really little success. Harley used their aid when it might be useful to him against the Whigs ; but where purely Scottish interests were concerned he made little scruple of leaving them in the lurch. A proposal was soon after made that the malt tax should be extended to Scotland. Such a proposal was quite enough to unite all Scottish opinion against it, with little consideration of the real merits of the question. It was unprecedented : it was oppressive : it was a 1 By Act abolishing Church Patronage in 1874. MINOR SCOTTISH GRIEVANCES. 47 means of striking at the whole agricultural interests of the poorer country. Barley in Scotland was so poor that it could not support such a tax. Nay, more, rents were often paid in kind, and the heritors, who were often good Jacobites, would be the chief sufferers. The arguments from the Scottish point of view were specious enough to sway national opinion, and to make the impost the occasion of riots all over the country ; and the appeal to their own interests was quite sufficient to persuade the Scottish lairds to make themselves the champions of the national indignation. It was forgotten that the impost was distinctly provided for in the Act of Union, although it was stipulated that it should be deferred until the close of the Continental war. It would have been useless to point out, what was nevertheless the fact, that the argument from the inferiority of the crop had no application unless the tax was to be differentiated according to the fertility of each county, nay, of each farm, in England. Logic and political argument went for little in such a dispute; the broad issue alone was attended to, and the l&ght was waged, on the one side with the obstinate tenacity of despair, on the other with much of the insolence of confidence and overwhelming num- bers. Even on the merits alone the case for Scotland was not strong ; but it was strong enough to bind together all the Scottish members of both Houses as one man. The divisions upon it were not complicated by any delusive alliances with the English Tories. Almost every English vote, whether Whig or Tory, was cast on one side : on the other the Scotsmen united with a cordiality they had never known before. Even had their cause been a worse one, it is impossible to refuse admiration to the sturdy defence of the handful of Scottish members against the overwhelm- ing strength of a contemptuous majority. The taunts thrown on their own country never were more galling; but never were they thrown back with more passionate indignation. For long their fury had been restrained by the hopes that success might be achieved by strategy, and that party might be balanced against party. But their patience was now exhausted, and the boldest spirits saw that the support of Harley and his friends could never be secure unless it were riveted by fear. The English members were told to their faces that their insolence might be safe in numbers, but that they would not dare to answer singly for the cowardly taunts which their majority inspired. The fight was unsuccessful, as it was bound to be ; but it served at least to define the future attitude of the Scottish members. Harley had played them false : he must be taught 48 THE EARLIER SCHEMES OF THE JACOBITES. that if their friendship was not worth buying, their deter- mined hostility might be dangerous. One point was gained : all sections of the Scottish party were knit together, and the benefit of this union might be reaped by those whose aims were most definite and most consistent, and who were the best masters of parliamentary strategy. If the Tories had proved fickle, what hopes might be cherished from the Whigs ? Had the Scottish contingent conceived themselves to be bound to the interests of the United Kingdom ; had they felt any allegiance to party ties in the English Parlia- ment, or any interest in party aims, — the indifference with which they changed their party allegiance might be deemed callous in its cynicism. But they had indeed no such thought. The majority had come to Westminster with no aim but to prove the Union a device injurious to both nations, and destructive to their own. Time and experience had im- bued the whole body of members with the indignation which the majority had at first felt; and there were few now who were not ready to venture upon any extremities to sweep that Union away. What they had failed to achieve by dexterous strategy the Jacobite leaders, and above all Lock- hart, hoped now to achieve by a last effort of despair. They determined to measure swords with their opponents by a proposal to repeal the Union. Lockhart would fain have started this proposal in the House of Commons ; but it was eventually decided that the experiment might best be tried in the House of Lords. The negotiations were carried on with no attempt at conceal- ment. Harley (now Earl of Oxford) was thoroughly alarmed.^ Such a scheme might, it was foreseen, receive the support of the Whigs. He sent for Lockhart, and expostulated with him in an interview that shows both men in their true colours. Oxford told Lockhart that their designs were known to him, and was answered by an assurance that sueh knowledge was precisely what they desired. But the blame, said Oxford, rests chiefly with you. What blame there was, Lockhart did not know, but at least all Scottish members shared it. " You will bring an old house about your ears," answered Oxford, " and ^ Clerk of Penicuick ('Memoirs,' Scot. Hist. Society, p. 88) states that the opposition of the Tory Minister to this scheme was due to the fact that the repealing Bill proposed that the Elector of Hanover should succeed to the throne of Scotland, just as by the Act of Union, and this seemed adverse to the hopes of the Pretender in England. The theory seems far-fetched, and cannot be seriously maintained. The repeal of the Union under any condi- tions would have been helpful to the Jacobites. Oxford's hesitation arose from his conviction that it was so favourable to them that it would have been fatal to his own power. ATTEMPTED REPEAL OF THE UNION. 49 the queen will highly resent your conduct." " We cannot well be worse than we are," said Lockhart ; " we must now make the best of a bad bargain: if the queen thought ill of our designs, it must be from misinformation, that was doubtless our misfortune, but it did not alter our duty." Oxford assured him that the Ministry would show their resentment against all that furthered the plan, and he wished that for their own sakes they would let it fall. "Discouragement," answered Lockhart, "was no new thing to them, but he should find them resolute, and all the more resolute for his threats. If it were needful they had courage to suffer for their country." Oxford's blustering, the last resource of a weak man who saw his subterfuge exposed, failed to produce any effect. The personal influence of the queen was brought to bear, but it was as little to the purpose. The Scottish Jacobites were strong just because they knew that they shared at least some of the secret sympathies of the queen, and that amongst Oxford's colleagues there were men like Bolingbroke, who viewed with no misgiving the chances of a restoration. The debate in the House of Lords showed a strange revulsion of feeling against the Union. Its repeal was moved by the Earl of Findlater, who as Lord Seafield had been Chancellor of Scotland when the Union passed, and who had made the last scene of Scottish independence the subject of an ill-timed jest. It was supported by the Duke of Argyle, who had been Queensberry 's chief confidant, and who had long been esteemed the leading advocate of the Union amongst the Scottish nobil- ity. Lord Mar had found it his interest to press the Union in 1707 ; he now found that self-interest, which was the rul- ing guide of all his action, directed him the other way. From the motive of party spirit, and in the hope of embarrassing the Ministry, the Whigs were ready to vote for the undoing of what it had only a few years before been their glory to have achieved. The motion for leave to introduce the Bill was thrown out by a narrow majority ; but enough had been done to show the resentment in which six years' experience of the Union had united the Scottish people, and how powerful a weapon this resentment was in the hands of the Jacobite party. The hopes of that party as to what might be achieved by parliamentary strategy were not yet at an end. Parlia- ment was dissolved in the summer of 1713, and that which met in the spring of 1714 contained a Tory majority, not indeed so large as that in the last Parliament, but more united, and containing a larger proportion of men who were prepared to accept a Jacobite restoration on the death D 50 THE EARLIER SCHEMES OF THE JACOBITES. of the queen. Oxford continued his methods of subterfuge and vacillation, and seemed to be deterred from throwing himself upon the support of the Whigs as a means of over- coming the opposition of his colleague St John (now Lord Bolingbroke), only because the Whigs seemed in no way- disposed to accept the proffer of his alliance. Meanwhile Bolingbroke showed his hand more and more plainly, and gave increased encouragement to the aims of the Jacobites. Experience had made Scotsmen shy of trusting the faith of an English Minister, and they bluntly assured him that their support could be purchased only by speedy and decisive action, and that they considered their plans to be more injured by delay and vacillation than by professed opposi- tion. Bolingbroke tried every device of temporising subter- fuge. " Let them give him time ; the power of Oxford would soon be at an end. He was heart and soul with them : mean- while let them not drive matters too far." But to the guilt of dissimulation Bolingbroke added lack of boldness to strike for that at which his dissimulation aimed. He did not shrink from treason, but hung back when the treason called for action. To the Scottish Jacobites there seemed little doubt but that a restoration was possible in the last year of Queen Anne's reign, if only Bolingbroke had been pre- pared to declare himself. It was the object of the hopes of at least a large proportion of the Tories, and was dreaded as almost inevitable by as large a number of the Whigs. The prepossessions of Lockhart and his friends compel us to receive their evidence as to the state of feeling at West- minster with some doubt; but they were clearly right in believing that nothing was more fatal to their hopes than such a course of vacillation as Oxford had pursued, and from which Bolingbroke varied only so far as enabled him to outbid Oxford for their support. The old game of vague and delusive offers on one side, of suspicion, anger, and exasperation on the other, went on a little longer; and it closed only when the queen's death, in August 1714, put an end for ever to the shuffling evasion by which Boling- broke had attempted to capture the support, and yet delude the hopes, of his Scottish allies. When the curtain fell upon the last stirring scene of the Scottish Parliament, one act of the Jacobite drama had been closed. Baffled in the parliamentary arena of their own country, their hopes were next based on the delusive promises of the French king. They had been prepared to put their cause to the arbitrament of war, carried on with foreign aid. That scheme miscarried ; and at the very moment when STAGES IN DISILLUSION. 51 their hopes seemed highest, it left them not only the dupes and playthings of the selfish ambitions of Louis, but branded as participators in what must henceforward be deemed a cause identified with treason. No government that values its own security can give any other name to a scheme which, what- ever its moral justification, invokes the aid of a foreign power to undo the deliberate work of the domestic legis- lature. Success, and success alone, can give legal justification to such action; and, failing such success, its adherents must expect no other treatment than that which awaits treason and conspiracy. But the Jacobites escaped easily and lightly from the fiasco of 1708. They renewed the combat at Westminster, and for a time it seemed as if the growing resentment, which was the first fruit of the Union, might, by skilful manipulation and by dexterous parliamentary strategy, be turned to good account. They formed what seemed to be a close alliance with the Tory party, and one section of that party was not indisposed to accept their designs in favour of the exiled family. They left their mark upon the statute-book, and came near to the undoing of that Union which was the standing barrier to their hopes. But they found, in time, that they were working in an alien field, and dealing with parties whose sympathies were not with them. The larger wave of English politics submerged and overwhelmed them, and bafiled all their finely drawn schemes. Whatever their resource, their ability, and the undaunted courage with which they pressed their aim, they found themselves duped and befooled by Oxford and by Bolingbroke, even as they had been by the delusive show of assistance with which Louis XIV. had for the moment dazzled them. Ill -fortune tracked their footsteps, and the next phase of the struggle was to be enacted on other ground and in another shape. 52 CHAPTER III. FROM THE ACCESSION OF GEORGE I. TO 1745. The death of the queen ended with dramatic suddenness the parliamentary hopes of the Jacobites and the doubtful plans of their allies amongst the Tory Ministers. The strong breeze of favouring fortune which brought the Hanoverian family safely to the throne — of which but a few months before it had at most but a problematical hope — scattered the gossamer web of Jacobite intrigue into thin air. The fire and enthusiasm of Bishop Atterbury prompted his offer to proclaim the Stuart succession at Westminster if he had the attendance of a bodyguard; but such an incident would have had no other character than that of a theatrical episode. The issue was now to be left to the arbitrament of sterner weapons. The prospects of the Jacobite party were not altogether dark, however their schemes were baffled for the moment* A large majority of the gentry, and probably the preponder- ating number of the common people, so far as they had any very distinct political opinions, were attached to the ancient house. The strength of the Tory party was not indeed proportionate to its numbers. It was a party composed of heterogeneous elements : and the gulf was very wide between the Tory who was ready to accept Hanoverian rule if his Church were safe, and the Tory who was ready to place hereditary right even higher than the claims of his Church. But it might safely be reckoned that the whole of that party would sooner or later veer towards the Jaco- bites if any success were to attend their efforts. The resources which, with good fortune, they might hope to command, were abundant, and the forces at the command of the Crown were few. Large parts of the country were openly disaffected, and every section of it was honeycombed THE EARL OF MAR. 53 with intrigue. England was an ill -united country, dis- trustful and contemptuous of its Government, but sturdily- attached to its habits and its institutions, and not certain that these might not be better preserved under the older line than under ^the rule of a foreign dynasty. In Scotland, hatred of the Union, the jealousy of alien interference, the various causes that had contributed to keep alive the zeal of national independence — all tended the same way. Scot- tish pride united with Scottish poverty in stimulating hatred of English administration, which was identified with the Hanoverian line. In the background, the dark and unex- plored region of the Highlands concealed an undying tenacity of local custom and local tradition which found its best safeguard in resistance to the plans of the English Government, and which wrapped itself in a loyalty to the Stuarts which was strong chiefly because it covered a viru- lent racial antipathy to their neighbours in the South. All the outward symptoms told for the Jacobite cause: it was only a question what the issue would be in the long struggle between the slow growth of the plant of self-interest in the soil of national prosperity, and the more enthusiastic loyalty, stimulated by accidental causes, but less solid in its roots, and less healthy in its growth. When an appeal to arms follows immediately upon the failure of a parliamentary campaign, it starts under the worst auspices both for success and for a display of high-minded valour. The adoption of new plans divides the counsels of a party and shatters its unity, and the first appeal to arms is apt to be guided only by that section of the party which com- prises its most reckless spirits and its most cunning intriguers. This was signally illustrated in the Rebellion of 1715. Its first inception was under evil omens. The central spirit in that rebellion was the Earl of Mar, one of the most striking and one of the least attractive of the personalities of the day. The halo of romance and unselfish loyalty which has gathered about the Jacobite story, and has made of it a legend of hero- ism, certainly derives none of its brightness from the Earl of Mar. He was now a man of forty-four years of age, and already his career had been a strange one. Born to the suc- cession of an ancient title and vast territorial influence, his birth was nevertheless attended by baneful shadows. His father had shown no great consistency of political principle, and after abandoning his hereditary loyalty he had opposed the Stuart cause at the Revolution, only to repent once more — so bitterly that, according to common belief, his remorse had led him to take his own life. His son, John Erskine, 54 FROM THE ACCESSION OF GEORGE I. TO 1745. Earl of Mar, was brought up by a mother from whom he in- herited a misshapen body and a perverse nature — shared to the full by his brother, of whom we shall hear more, who took to the study of the law, rose to the Bench under the title of Lord Grange, and scandalised a not over-punctilious society by his combination of fanatical religion with coarse and law- less profligacy. Like many of his class. Lord Mar found his high rank and territorial influence crippled by grinding straits of poverty. To a deformed person he joined a certain dex- terity and abundant resources of intrigue, and his position was such as almost forced him to use that intrigue as the means of advancing his personal interest. Already in 1706 he had been Secretary of State in Scotland, and he found it expedient to be one of the strongest advocates of the Union. When that Union was accomplished he became Secretary of State in the English Government, and was soon as great an adept in the field of English party politics as he had proved himself in the Parliament House at Edinburgh. He doubled the char- acter of a great Highland chief with that of an English courtier, and moved as easily amongst the polished circles of Queen Anne's Court as when he ruled with absolute sway the vast clans that recognised his patriarchal rule on the banks of the Dee. When he found it expedient, under the Govern- ment of Lord Oxford, he joined the ranks of those who at- tempted to bring about the repeal of the Union, and he was deeply engaged in the schemes so rife during the last years of Queen Anne for a Stuart restoration. When the Hanoverian accession was accomplished with such surprising smoothness he attempted to trim his sails to the prevailing breeze, and to make his peace with George I. But his overtures were ignominiously repulsed, and with an amazingly rapid versatility he resolved to make himself the leader in an armed attempt to replace the Stuart family on the throne. He put himself in communication with the exiled court, and persuaded himself, as he persuaded others, that every circumstance was auspicious of success. With the passionate eagerness of de- spair he glozed over every difficulty, and resolved to be the first to catch at what seemed a certain success, only because every other resource had failed him. On the 2nd of August 1715 Mar set sail, in disguise, at Gravesend, on board a collier, and landed at Elie, in the Firth of Forth, on the Fifeshire coast. He was accompanied only by two friends and two servants, but his plans were already known to some of the leading Jacobites throughout Scotland. After spending some days in Fife, where the lairds were for the most part Jacobite in their sympathies, he went to his PROSPECTS OF THE JACOBITE CAUSE. 55 estates in Aberdeenshire on the 20th, having issued invitations to a great hunting-match to be held on the 27th. Such gatherings were well known to be but thinly veiled pretexts for the mustering of armed force. It was customary to gather at them all the leading territorial aristocracy and the heads of the clans ; and these assembled, attended by their followers in arms, one of the stated obligations of these followers being to attend their feudal superior in " hunting " as well as in "hosting," in sport as well as in war. The gathering at Braemar was one of which the meaning could not be mistaken by the Government. The nobles who met there came from all parts of the country ; and however they might differ in the degree to which they were prepared to hazard their lives and fortunes in armed rebellion, they were at least bound together by such sympathy as would have made them welcome the restoration of the exiled family by some means or other. The standard of the army which was to do battle for the rights of the exiled family was raised at Brae- mar on the 6th of September, and about the same time the exiled Prince was proclaimed as James VIII. of Scotland and James III. of England at Aberdeen, Inverness, Dundee, Mon- trose, and various other places throughout the district north of the Forth. The rapid growth of the rebellion proved that, however much Mar's action had been prompted by personal disappoint- ment and repulse, it had served to stir the sparks of an already smouldering fire. Scotland was, indeed, honeycombed by Jacobitism; and the moment seemed well timed to catch that Jacobitism when its hopes were highest and its enthusiasm most ready to be kindled. The smaller lairds or squires had much to gain and little to lose; and their discontent at the existing state of affairs had been stimulated by the comparison which closer contact had provoked between their own poverty and the prosperity of their southern neighbours. The High- land chiefs might be expected to join the standard of revolt almost as one man, and their patriarchal authority was still sufficient to make it probable that they could command the unbroken support of their clansmen. The Jacobite cause had abundance of support in England, and it was natural that the impoverished Scottish lairds should forget that the inclination to hazard all in armed rebellion diminishes in intensity in pro- portion as the prosperity which may be risked by the attempt is greater. The opposition which the Union had provoked had been loudly proclaimed, and the causes of discontent which had supervened had led to numerous popular outbreaks, which seemed to await only an opportunity to reassert their 56 FROM THE ACCESSION OF GEORGE I. TO 1745. strength. The prosperity which the Union had brought to the towns and the trading community was of slow and silent growth, and was very likely to be overlooked by the territorial aristocracy, amongst whom the cause of Jacobitism found its most numerous adherents. It had been so long the habit to look to France as the inveterate foe of the English Government, and to expect from her encouragement and assist- ance for rebellion in Great Britain, that it was difficult to realise the difference which was brought about by the Peace of Utrecht and the death of Louis XIV. in 1715, which placed at the head of the French Government the Duke of Orleans, whose policy it was to keep on friendly terms with the English Ministry. When Mar pointed with a confidence which possibly he felt, and which he certainly affected, to the prospect of lavish assistance from abroad, there was only too much readiness to accept his accounts as accurate and well founded. The fact was, that the abundance of support which the Jacobite cause commanded in Scotland in 1715 was largely the cause of its foredoomed failure. On the one hand, it seemed to render cautious deliberation and prudent manage- ment unnecessary ; and, on the other hand, it prevented the cause from having the stimulus of exalted heroism. The plans of Mar had been suggested by his own disappointed ambition; and they were pushed on with such unthinking haste, that no proper measures of concerted action were taken. A large body of the most respectable Jacobite adherents w^ere alienated or paralysed b}^ not being allowed to share the confidence of the leaders, and by being forced into a position which made them prematurely the objects of suspicion to the English Government. Men like Lock- hart found their long and carefully concocted plans frus- trated b}^ the sudden outbreak of armed rebellion, which took them unawares. With all Mar's astuteness, he pos- sessed neither the military skill that would have enabled him to lead an armed force, nor the promptitude and decision that would have fitted him to decide what were the objects to which that force should be directed. The exigencies of his position — exigencies, in great part, of his own making — forced him to act prematurely, and he was compelled to cover his lack of preparation by grossly exaggerating the support upon which he could rely from abroad. He spoke vaguely, and in boastful terms, of the certainty of assistance from France, of the speedy appearance of the Prince, and of the simultaneous descent upon England of an expedition under the Duke of Ormond. The extent of his own dele- ITS QUICK COLLAPSE. 57 gated authority was doubtful ; and, in truth, the only advan- tage which his successful and sudden appeal to the loyalty of the Highland clans gave to him, was that it found the English Government unprepared — and of that advantage he was personally unfitted to make use. It is not necessary here to enter into the details of the re- bellion, or to recount its successive incidents. It is sufficient to sum up shortly its general course, and the causes of its disastrous ending. Mar advanced to Perth with an army of some 10,000 men, and occupied the town without opposition. The northern part of the island was almost entirely held by the Jacobites; but even in that advance he left some parts under the sway of those who, like the Earl of Sutherland, adhered to the Hanoverian cause. Meanwhile the small body of troops which the English Government could command were massed together at Stirling, and the Duke of Argyle was named Commander of the Forces in Scotland. With him it rested to prevent the advance of the insurgents south of the Forth, and this he could accomplish only by a wait- ing game, in which he was admirably assisted by Mar's hesitation. Instead of forcing his way southwards, Mar lingered at Perth, where disaffection and division of counsels became every day more rife. Territorially, Perth was a convenient gathering-place ; but now, as on a later occasion, it was found to be a very hotbed for fostering all the ani- mosities, and for exasperating all the deep-rooted feuds, which were inseparable from a Highland host — united only by similarity of language and of custom, but divided by the fierce antagonism of the various clans. Mar detached a body of his troops, under the Brigadier Mackintosh of Borlum, a doughty Highlander who had the advantage of a training in the art of war, to effect a junction with the rebels in the south country, who had been joined by a body of cavalry from the northern English shires. Mackintosh captured a ship which had been sent into the Forth with a supply of arms. He threatened Edinburgh, which was saved only by a forced march of the Duke of Argyle. Shortly before, an heroic but futile attempt had been made to seize the castle of Edinburgh; but it was frustrated by a reckless carelessness in the design, which almost invited detection. When Mackintosh joined the southern insurgents, endless disputes as to the line of march and the objects of the campaign arose ; and it was only after the force had all but appealed to arms in order to settle their disputes that the march into England was decided upon, and that they advanced to Preston, and there stood a siege which left 58 FROM THE ACCESSION OF GEORGE I. TO 1745. them, before the middle of November, prisoners in the hands of the forces of the Government. Just at the same date Argyle found himself at last in a position to advance upon Perth, as Mar's strange procrastination had prevented him from pressing southwards upon Argyle's inferior force. On the 13th of November, Argyle, with some 3000 men, en- gaged the army of Mar on the field of Sheriffmuir, between Stirling and Perth. The issue of the battle was so far un- decided that the right wing of each army defeated the troops opposed to it. But the engagement, in fact, answered the purpose of Argyle as well as a victory. It rendered any advance of the insurgents southwards impossible, and practically ended the rebellion. Soon after, the exiled Prince Lu.ded in Scotland and proceeded to Perth, to be crowned at Scone. For a moment the hopes of the Jacobites were rekindled, but the appearance was delusive. The Prince arrived too late, and neither his person nor his conduct was such as to inspire hope in a defeated and discredited gather- ing, which felt itself tricked and betrayed. Amidst many murmurings, and with much misgiving, it was decided to fall back upon Aberdeen, and to attempt at a later date to renew the rebellion in a more favourable position. But upon the march thither, the Prince and some of his im- mediate followers, with Mar himself, secretly embarked for France at Montrose. The army broke up at Aberdeen, and melted away amidst the fastnesses of the mountains, from which they had been drawn by false hopes, by a mistaken confidence in the strength of their own cause, and under the guidance of those who had neither the quali- ties of military leaders nor the prudence and the deliberate preparation that might have made them successful designers of a definite plan of operations. The first act in the drama of Jacobite rebellion had been played by sorry actors. Those who had been captured at Preston were brought to London, and received with every mark of contumely and scorn. They were thrown into the various prisons in the metropolis; but it was soon felt that it would be unwise for the Government to provoke despair and resentment by any severity. The jeers of the London populace were in- deed their chief punishment. Two alone, the Earl of Der- wentwater and Viscount Kenmure, — the noblest and most honest of a poor lot, — were executed. The great majority of the prisoners were suffered to escape from their con- finement by a laxity which was too general not to have been the result of some connivance. In many cases the penalty of forfeiture was imposed. The lower offenders CAUSES OF FAILURE. 59 were pardoned; and the Highland clans were suffered to disperse to their own mountains and valleys without being harassed by military pursuit. The Duke of Argyle, who had been the means of ending the rebellion, exerted all his influence to mitigate the severity of punishment ; and although his action therein cost him for a time his favour at Court, he was too considerable to be thwarted, and the English Government acquiesced in a policy which prudence dictated and which Argyle's services gave him the opportunity of urging with efiect. Within five months of the raising of the standard at Braemar the rebellion had completely ended, and it might well seem as if the hopes of the Jacobites were finally quenched. Once more, and this time in its first serious attempt at armed resistance to the established rule, the cause had failed. Every year that new rule was strengthening its hold ; and yet, thirty years later, it was to be assailed with all the heroism of a forlorn hope. Never would the defeated cause be so strong again as it was in 1715. At that time its chances were great. It had, indeed, failed before when it seemed to have all but united the feeling of the Scottish nation to resist the Union. It had failed once more when a vain and delusive show of assistance had been promised from France ; and again it had been defeated in its attempt to recover itself on the arena of the English Parliament by mixing itself in the struggles of party. When it rashly assumed the offensive in 1715 there was much that seemed to tell in its favour. The Jacobites were certainly the pre- ponderant majority of the Scottish nation, and they might safely count on the sympathy of a large part of England. When the moment seemed convenient, it was certain that the foreign jealousy of England's power would prompt assistance to any rebellion likely to weaken that power. The military forces at the command of the Government were meagre, and seemed almost to tempt an armed resist- ance. The Jacobites were weak only amongst the trading community in some of the towns, and these towns had not yet reached that importance as compared with the country districts which a few years of the Union was to bring to them. But in truth the spirit of personal loyalty which was to give to Jacobitism the largest part of its force was not yet fully roused. That spirit was not stirred by the personal qualities of the actual representative of the Stuart family. It was to be kindled only to its full extent in the last and final effort of despair, and it was to unite with it the 60 FROM THE ACCESSION OF GEORGE I. TO 1745. universal attachment of the Highlands to the traditions of their patriarchal system, which they came to recognise as threatened in its very existence by the growth of a new state of society. In the north of Scotland there was, in 1715, much division of aims, and much that looked like disaffection to the Jacobite cause. Mar's difficulty in advanc- ing southwards was greatly increased by the fact that he had behind him large and important sections of the Highland clans who had not entered into his schemes, and who united with the Government because such union seemed at the moment just as likely to consolidate their own customs as a hearty support of the rebellion would have done. The Earl of Sutherland maintained an active resistance to Jacobitism. Lord Reay, at the head of the powerful clan Mackay, main- tained the same attitude. By a curious coincidence, the Erasers were drawn from their allegiance to the Jacobite cause at the call of the strange leader whose personality we shall presently have to observe more in detail, Lord Lovat : and he, who represented in its most lawless form the worst features of the Highland rule, in its savage contempt of law, was joined in a strange conbination with his neighbour, Duncan Forbes of Culloden, who represented the newer spirit of law and order in the defence of the Hanoverian cause about Inverness. In the rebellion of 1715 there were many instances of conspicuous heroism, and of unselfish devotion ; but they were exemplified quite as much by its southern supporters as by its Highland adherents. The hopes of the cause were indeed ruined at its outset by the personal ambition and the recklessness of Mar, the most fatal adherent whom the House of Stuart ever had. Under the stimulus of personal rebuff, he had hurried on the rebellion before the schemes were matured, before the different sections of the party were trained to act in concert, and before any attempt could be made to verify the absurdly exaggerated hopes of foreign assistance that were held out. The Chevalier did not come at the outset to give a glamour of heroism to the undertaking, and by his personal authority to prevent the spread of fatal dissension and of mutual jealousy. He joined his adherents only when the game was already up, when dejection had taken the place of hope, and when his presence was not a source of strength but an embarrassment. When he appeared his dejected mood and lack of heroic vigour increased the depression of an army already out-manoeuvred in military tactics, and with its resources drained. The Highlands were in 1715 only a strange and unknown CHANGES IN SCOTTISH FEELING. 61 territory, inhabited by a race alien alike in language, in sympathy, and in origin from the South, and with no common tie sufficient to enable them even to understand the history and the struggles of their southern neighbours. From the trade and the ordinary employments of the rest of Scotland they were absolutely cut off. Occasionally, indeed, they supplied their own poverty by raids on their more civilised neighbours : bands of them were occasionally to be seen in the cattle-markets of the south, where their uncouth tongue and dress, and their habit of carrying all the weapons of war, made them strange and unwelcome intruders. But after these occasional appearances they vanished into their own mountain fastnesses, having no temptation to prolong their stay amongst those whose life was strange to them, and confident on the other hand that the arm of the law could never follow them into their retreats. With southern life they did not seek to mingle, and they had not as yet begun to fear that their own customs were in danger of being swept away. They had not yet learned the last heroism that is bred of despair. They could indeed, even before that day, be roused to great efforts, under leaders of military genius such as Montrose and Dundee; but amongst their own clan patriarchs they had no such inspiration. A few years more was to work a strange transformation both in the Highlands and in the Lowlands. The Highland chiefs- came to have more and more intercourse with foreign nations. More and more frequently they served in foreign armies. They acquired experience in the arts of statecraft and in the tactics of war. Without losing their authority and in- fluence amongst their clans, they acquired a veneer of foreign polish, and a pretence to some scholarship and culture. They became fitted for intrigue and combination, and learned a sort of diplomacy in foreign courts. Men so trained could make far more use of the vast and unquestioned authority which they wielded over their clansmen, to whom obedience wa» still a religious duty, fortified by every motive which super- stition could bring to its aid. At the same time the Lowlands, largely owing to the Union, were advancing in wealth, and were more and more disposed to maintain and spread the influence of the law as the best safeguard of that wealth. The existence on their very borders of what were considered to be little else than hordes of savage robbers, under alien customs and an alien rule, was felt to be a standing menace to the prosperity, and even the security, of the country. Men looked upon the Highlands and the 62 FROM THE ACCESSION OF GEORGE I. TO 1745. clan system partly with fear, partly with curiosity, but still more strongly with impatience, as something which must be crushed before Scotland could enjoy the fruits of her growing prosperity in peace. The coming struggle was inevitable, and in that struggle Jacobitism found its last opportunity. It then combined in one heroic effort the most generous and devoted loyalty, and the despairing effort of a long tradition of custom and of government, deeply rooted in the affections of those who had inherited it, but doomed to decay and disappear. It enlisted in its cause the impetuous valour of a race of born warriors, and the practised skill of those who wielded over them an un- questioned authority, and who to that authority now united the craft and versatility which thirty years of plot and in- trigue, and of experience in foreign courts and foreign camps, had given them ; and, thanks to the errors of the English Government, it could count upon a discontent which various causes had ripened also in the Lowlands of Scotland, and which made Jacobite sympathies even there to be considered as something not only to be secretly cherished, but more or less openly professed. It must not then be forgotten that Jacobitism, which for one generation more was to retain its force and vitality, was a plant which had struck its roots very deeply in the soil, and had spread its branches in many directions. It has been too much the custom to speak of it as an absurd and infatuated creed, maintained, at the worst, by unscrup- ulous adventurers, and, at the best, by those who nursed a romantic but forlorn hope. To a certain extent this aspect of it is true. But it is not all the truth. Its most en- lightened supporters set before themselves a certain definite ideal of government. Many of them had schemes of ecclesi- .astical government which seemed to them more consonant with their tastes and predilections than the Presbyterianism which was the most characteristic Scottish creed. They were animated by a very keen, albeit a mistaken, sense of patriotism. They represented a strong tradition and a romantic impulse, which does not count for nothing in human affairs. They saw clearly the limitations of the dominant Whiggism of the day. No doubt the tenets of Jacobitism were often fantastic and absurd, and no one saw their errors more thoroughly than Scott. But it was just because he saw that it represented much that was strongest and most characteristic in the nation that he has entwined it with the national romance. It is an absurd mistake to consider Jacobitism in this its last generation of vitality as nothing NEW ATTEMPTS. 63 but a fantastic and stage-struck fancy, buoyed up by the harebrained schemes of adventurers. The heroism which its adherents displayed was frequently the result of deliberate judgment, based upon a keen perception of the errors and limitations characteristic of the dominant political ideas of the day. No doubt, as Lord Stair, the ambassador to France, who for years continued to combat it on French soil, avers, the Jacobites were often more ready to drink the health of the exiled king than to fight for him. But we must not forget that it possessed something of greater strength and reality which brought it at times near to success, and made it at least a serious menace to the English Government. Let us take as a proof of this even the very small and hopeless attempt that was made less than four years after the collapse of the Rebellion of 1715. That collapse had left the affairs of the Jacobites at the lowest ebb of fortune. The court of the exiled king was a hotbed of jealousy and intrigue, largely due to the distrust which many of the party felt of Mar, who was now the king's chief counsellor. Boling- broke, who, on his exile, was willing to place his genius and talents at the service of the Jacobites, was soon estranged, and swore that he would sooner cut off his right hand than use sword or pen again in the cause. There seem to have been fair hopes that even the Duke of Argyle, in just offence at the ingratitude which forgot his services at Sheriffmuir, because of his advocacy of lenient measures to the Jacobites, might be induced to transfer his great influence to the cause which he had so lately defeated ; but if such hopes had any foundation they were effectually destroyed by the machinations of Mar, who saw that such an alliance must diminish his own weight and influence in the party. The schemes which were now taken in hand were entrusted to others, and were carried out apart from the little Jacobite court. The first ray of hope proceeded from Charles XII. of Sweden. He was bitterly offended with George L, who, as Elector of Hanover, held Bremen and Verden, which had been wrested from Charles's hands. To avenge himself for this wrong, Charles was ready to do all he could to encourage rebellion in England, and his Minister, Baron Gortz, entered keenly into the plan. According to the design, Charles himself was to land in Scotland with an army of 12,000 men, supported by Spanish money. The design came to nothing, and what seemed a formidable menace to the English crown once more crumbled to pieces. But meanwhile the enmity between England and Spain, which was the result of England's alliance with the Emperor Charles VI., Spain's most 64 FROM THE ACCESSION OF GEORGE I. TO 1745. formidable enemy, became more pronounced. Cardinal Alberoni, who from obscure beginnings had contrived to make himself chief Minister of Spain, and had breathed new life into what appeared a corpse, was determined to avenge the defeat of a Spanish by an English fleet by fo- menting the rebellion, even although small hopes could now be entertained of any help from Sweden. Even these hopes, small as they were, disappeared with Charles's death in December 1718, and the chances of the scheme rested only on the help of Alberoni. The Duke of Ormond, who re- presented, if not the highest ability, at least the highest honour and probity amongst the adherents of the Stuarts, was summoned to Spain, and at the same time the Earl Marischal and his brother, James Keith, were sent for to lead another expedition for the same purpose. Alberoni was at the moment hard pressed to meet other foes and to resist other attacks; but he nevertheless agreed to equip a formidable force, which was to land on the coast of England, at the same time that the Earl Marischal made a descent upon Scotland. All depended upon the secrecy and suddenness of the attack ; but delays intervened, and before Ormond's expedition started in March 1719, certain knowledge of the intended invasion had reached the English Government, and measures had been taken to anticipate and check any attempt at a rebellion. On the 8th of March the Earl Marischal sailed from San Sebastian with two frigates, a supply of money and ammunition, and a body of 300 Spanish soldiers. Ormond's expedition, w^ith five ships of war, and twenty-two transports, carrying 5000 troops and an abundant supply of arms, started the day before from Cadiz. But on the 28th of March that fleet encountered a storm which destroyed it, and once more shattered the hopes of the Jacobites. The smaller expedition, under the Earl Marischal, landed in the island of Lewis early in April, and was there joined by the Marquis of Tullibardine and the Earl of Seaforth. They were not aided by the expected diversion in England. They waited in vain for news of the arrival of Ormond's fleet. The attempt was indeed a hopeless one. The failure of the Rebellion of 1715 had left the Jacobites a dejected and powerless faction, whose chief adherents were in exile, and unable in their own poverty to give it the pecuniary aid that was above all things necessary. The only hope of success lay in a bold and quick advance; but it was with difficulty that the Earl Marischal persuaded his colleagues to cross to the main- land, and he altogether failed to bring them over to his THE BATTLE OF GLENSHIEL. 65 proposal for a rapid march to Inverness. Divided counsels led to so much delay that it was not till the 13th of May that the expedition landed on the shores of Loch Alsh, and occupied the castle of Eilean Donan. There they were attacked by a squadron of the English fleet, whose guns soon shattered the castle, which was sufficient to repel a Highland raid, but altogether indefensible under the fire of artillery. The ships that had brought them to Scotland had already sailed for Spain, and had they stayed would have fallen as an easy capture to the English men-of-war. Nothing was left to the little band but to advance inland in the vain hope that they might find new allies on their march. A few ad- herents gathered from Perthshire and Stirlingshire, but the forces of the Government soon marched to meet them under General Wightman ; and on the 9th of June they were com- pelled to give battle in Glenshiel, the mountain-hemmed defile that runs from the head of Loch Duich. The issue of the fight was soon decided. The invading troops were scattered the same evening. The remnants of the Spanish detach- ment surrendered and were sent as prisoners to Edinburgh, whence they were shipped to Spain in October. The High- land clans who had once again attempted, under the allure- ment of foreign assistance, to revive what might well have seemed a hopeless struggle, dispersed to their homes. Their leaders went once more into exile, and before the year was over Alberoni had fallen, and all hopes from that quarter were at an end. The attempt was, indeed, foredoomed to failure. Divided counsels, mutual suspicions, and the helpless poverty which forfeiture had brought to the Jacobite adherents were a poor accompaniment of any renewed rebellion, even had the prospects of foreign aid been more assured. But yet so much vitality did the cause possess that this forlorn hope enlisted in its service two of the ablest Scotsmen of their day. Neither the young Earl Marischal nor his brother were men to be led astray by merely chimerical projects. In a later day they both proved of what stuff they were made — the earl as ambassador from Prussia to France, and his brother as the greatest of Frederick's field - marshals. That such men should risk all in the attempt is enough to prove that Jacobitism, with all the elements of weakness which surrounded it, depended on something more than the whimsical fancies of harebrained adventurers. It had still tenacity enough to nurse its aims for five-and-twenty years, until its most heroic effort ended in final disaster. During these intervening years the cause of the Jacobites E 66 FROM THE ACCESSION OF GEORGE I. TO 1745. was to receive powerful assistance from the discontent caused, sometimes by untoward circumstances, and by schemes which fortune rendered abortive, but more frequently by errors on the part of the English Government. Topics of irritation arose which the callous indifference and narrow prejudice of that Government allowed to grow into rankling sores, stimulating the Scottish desire for national independence. The Jacobite agents knew well how to take advantage of such chances. In 1716 the Commissioners appointed by Act of Parliament to inquire into the forfeited estates of those who had taken part in the rebellion met at Edinburgh. Four of these Commissioners were English members of Parliament, and amongst these the name of Sir Richard Steele gives a certain piquancy to the list. They soon found that their task was not an easy one. Whatever dangers might be feared from the Jacobites, it suited ill with Scottish feelings that an alien Commission should conduct an inquiry which was to lead to the impoverishment and ruin of many of the most notable families in Scotland. The delays and intricacies of Scottish law, the lack of sympathy in the proceedings felt by many members of the Scottish judicial body, which they took no pains to conceal, and the unwillingness of Scotsmen to become the purchasers of their countrymen's forfeitures, led to delay and complication. There was a touch of char- acteristic humour in the intricate excuses found, under the patronage of the court, for the law's delays. In the first place, certain fines were due from those who had taken arms in the rebellion ; and these fines had first to be assessed and levied on the estates before their value could be realised. Besides this, the Court of Session admitted a formidable list of charges on the estates due to real or fictitious creditors, and the agents nominated to receive the rents in name of these debts were found to be frequently men of Jacobite leanings, and to be closely connected with the banished families, if they did not actually represent them. When even this device proved insufficient altogether to thwart the much - interrupted proceedings of the Commissioners, another and even more peculiar fiction was resorted to. It was maintained, and the theory often found support from the courts, with whose wire -drawn methods of argument it was entirely in accord, that the nominal proprietors were not the real possessors, but that the estates had been alien- ated by some previous conveyance, or rightfully belonged to some other member of the family, and could not therefore be attached for the rebellious acts of those who had held INEFFECTIVE FORFEITURES. 67 them by a wrongful title, or by the sufferance of those who were the rightful owners. Many of the decisions of the Court of Session were reversed by the House of Lords — a circumstance which did not in itself contribute to soothe the rujSled national feeling ; but the reversal did not prevent delays, more vexatious to the English than the Scottish mind, that clogged the proceedings of the Commissioners. For nine years they continued, at intervals, to pursue their labours, but the sale was slow, and the chief purchaser was the York Buildings Company,^ which thus became a substantial Highland landlord. When they closed accounts in 1725, the sales had realised £411,082. Of this, £303,995 was absorbed by debts; £26,120 was paid in crown grants. Of the remaining £84,043, the salaries and expenses of the Commissioners amounted to £82,936. The balance of £1107 was all that came to the public purse.^ Meanwhile on many of the estates, and notably on those of the Earl of Seaforth, the rents had continued to be paid, and the domain adminis- tered in defiance of the law, and in armed resistance to its emissaries, by faithful adherents of the exiled family. It was only in 1725 that Marshal Wade had at his disposal a sufficient number of troops to march to Brahan Castle, and there receive, with due ceremonial, the submission of the clan. In apparent obedience to the law, a surrender of arms was made ; but in reality the weapons handed over were, according to Wade's own description, worthless, except as old iron. Those which were effective were carefully concealed ; and the very fact shows how deeply rooted was the conviction that they would again be required. The Seaforth estates, which extended from sea to sea, and even to the Hebrides, were seized in the name of the Commis- sioners; but in 1732 the earl was permitted to repurchase them — we may conjecture not on very severe terms, seeing that a rival purchaser might have had some difficulty in making his titular ownership effective. The same year which saw the conclusion of the labours of the Commission on Forfeited Estates was marked by a disturbance in the Lowlands. It serves to show how easily the smallest spark could burst into a flame, how the task of the Jacobites was helped by the party dissensions amongst the adherents of the Government, and how, without any deliberate intention to act unjustly, want of sympathy and want of intimate knowledge on the part of the Govern- ^ Its full title was the Company of Undertakers for raising the Thames Water in York. Buildings. Chambers's Domestic Annals of Scotland, vol. iii. p. 444, 68 FROM THE ACCESSION OF GEORGE I. TO 1745. ment might sap the allegiance of the country. The affair is a somewhat intricate one, and has not been followed with the care or accuracy necessary for its explanation. Careful examination reveals to us no act on the part of the Government calling for any heat of indignation, and just as little does it show any deep-rooted spirit of law- lessness amongst the people. But it proves how efficacious was the handle given to those who sought to excite rebellion by a Government which failed entirely to appreciate the difficulties of the situation, and which busied itself about trifles while it neglected any large scheme of conciliation and any generous concession to national susceptibilities. In the absence of such a scheme common prudence might have suggested an effective garrisoning of the country ; but lethargic indifference prevented the Government from guard- ing against the danger for which its own errors were largely responsible. The present difficulty grew out of a fiscal dispute. The revenue of Scotland was miserably small, and scarcely sufficed for the maintenance of her civil and military administration, much less for any contribution to imperial requirements. One generation at least, if not more, must pass iDefore this could be materially altered, and before increasing prosperity might make her a profitable member of the united empire. The difference between Scotland taxed on a footing of strict equality, and Scotland treated with a generous measure of fiscal leniency, was, however, for England a trifle scarcely worth her consideration. But this was precisely what was not clear to the financial creed of Walpole. He found the burden of Scottish administration a troublesome one, and it was swollen by a small but anomalous payment of £10 a-week towards the expenses of the Scottish members. He regarded the matter rather in the spirit of the Norfolk squire than of the Premier of a United Kingdom, and he found that even those English members who were most disposed to carp at his policy were ready to join him in placing upon Scotland the measure of taxation which seemed her proper due. Since the accession of George I. the Jacobite element amongst the Scottish members had virtually dis- appeared, and the Scottish members generally had fallen into line as the obedient henchmen of his Government. It was only too natural for Walpole to overlook the real dangers of the situation, and to strain the obedience of the Scottish contingent so far as to alienate from them the great bulk of the Scottish nation. He appealed to their poverty by threatening them with the loss of that income, which was FISCAL AGGRAVATIONS. 69 to most of them a matter of necessity; and in the rough language reported by Lockhart, he told them plainly that they knew "what money was raised and how applied in Scotland, and that they must lay their account with tying up their stockings with their own garters." It was easy for Lockhart and those who thought with him to translate such language into its seeming equivalent — " that for sup- porting a parcel of corrupt locusts the country must be oppressed." Walpole's plan, however, was not without that amount of formal justification which just serves to make such plans more unpalatable. He remembered the opposition which a few years before had been raised against the extension of the malt-tax to Scotland, although it had been distinctly provided for by the terms of the Union, and he knew that the opposition had been strong enough to force the sus- pension of the tax. He resolved, therefore, not to renew this scheme, but to impose instead a tax of 6d. on every barrel of beer, depriving Scotland at the same time of the bounty paid in England on the exportation of grain. This seemed, on paper, to be no unfair alternative, but was far more open to attack on principle. It instituted a different system of taxation, which on no construction could be held to be consistent with the terms of the Union. The Jacobites saw their opportunity, and they did not fail to use it. The breach of faith was represented as flagrant and dangerous in tendency, and as a proof that the Union was to be made an instrument of tyranny for the benefit of England. The heritors of Mid-Lothian met and sent a letter of in- structions to their member, who happened to be Dundas of Arniston, the Lord Advocate in Walpole's Ministry, directing him to do all in his power to prevent so scandalous an injustice. Dundas, as well as the Duke of Roxburghe, who since 1716 had been Secretary for Scotland, belonged to the Squadrone Volante,^ or the party which claimed to represent Scottish patriotic feeling, and was in full sym- pathy with the prayer of the memorial. Even the obedient henchmen of Walpole found the task of supporting the measure too dangerous, and the Minister could no longer count upon their help. Much to the disappointment of the Jacobites, as Lockhart confesses, Walpole changed his plan. He abandoned the proposed excise on beer, and in its place adopted the course of reimposing the malt-tax, which had so far been suspended. Lockhart admits that this, though in its financial effect as severe, was not inconsistent with 1 See p. 10. 70 FROM THE ACCESSION OF GEORGE I. TO 1745. the terms of the Union. It deprived Scotsmen ot their main topic of attack, but they were still able to appeal to popular feeling, which overlooked legal subtleties, and saw only one more symptom of English selfishness in the proposal. The discontent showed itself chiefly in Edinburgh and Glasgow. In Edinburgh the brewers adopted the some- what childish course of refusing to brew — a course which would deprive the Scotsman of his beer, but would at the same time cost the English Treasury the loss of excise. It is hard to see how they could expect to continue the fight with such a suicidal weapon ; but, however that might be, the Government of the day took strenuous measures to meet the difficulty. Dundas was deprived of the office of Lord Advocate, and Duncan Forbes of Culloden, a man whose professional status and high character made him a trusty and invaluable ally, was chosen to fill the post. By his influence the Court of Session was brought to pronounce the action of the brewers illegal. The laws against com- bination, which were to be so often invoked, and so un- sparingly exercised against the labourers, were now used, much to their astonishment, against the masters. They were threatened with fine and thrown into prison on grounds which it might be hard to justify. But the sur- render of one was followed by the collapse of all, and after a vain show of resistance they resumed their manufacture, and what at one time looked like a threatening crisis seemed likely to pass over peacefully. In Glasgow the event was different. So far the Jacobite cause had there found little support. But discontent was in- creasing, and had been fanned by the unjust pressure which, as was alleged, had been applied to the growing tobacco trade, which seemed likely to compete with that of Bristol. J acobite emissaries had been actively at work, and there were very distinct forebodings of a riotous outbreak. These forebodings were too threatening to be neglected, and it was clear that their member, Daniel Campbell of Shawfield, who had been an active supporter of Walpole's scheme, was in danger of being made the victim of the popular rage. Two companies of soldiers were drafted into the city on the 23rd of June. On their arrival they found the guard-house locked against them ; and, whether from disaffection or timidity, the provost besought the officer not to attempt to force it, but to disperse his soldiers to their quarters throughout the city. With amazing facility the officer consented to this course, and thus gave direct encouragement to the rioters, who proceeded to RIOTS IN GLASGOW. 71 attack Shawfield's house. The officer sent to offer to the provost the help of his men to stay the destruction, but his offer was refused, and the house was sacked and wrecked. Next day, on assembling his men, the commander of the force found them attacked by a riotous crowd, upon which he fired. This increased the fury of the mob, which broke into the town-house and seized what arms they found there; and then, acting as it would seem under some sort of guidance of which it is not difficult to guess the origin, proceeded to attack the soldiers. At the entreaty of the magistrates their worthy officer withdrew his men to Dumbarton, pursued by the mob, and did not consider himself safe until he had found refuge in the castle there. Such was the lesson which the feebleness of the Government gave to riot and disaffection. The situation was at last alarming enough to move even an indifferent Government to more active measures. Marshal Wade was recalled from the Highlands with sufficient troops, and, accompanied by the Lord Advocate, Duncan Forbes, he entered the city, and virtually placed it under martial law. But the unanimity of silence was complete. On a peremptory demand, the magistrates gave in a list of seven persons, four of whom were women, who were suspected of being parties to the riot, but scarcely one of them could be found. A riot so checked leaves permanent traces and gives an under- current of strength to disaffection. But nothing remained except to commit the magistrates, as the Lord Advocate proceeded to do, on the strangest warrant. He had himself sworn in as Justice of the Peace for Lanarkshire, and by virtue of that very trifling office he committed the magis- trates of the capital city of the county on a vague charge, and marched them in custody to Edinburgh, where they were lodged in the Tolbooth. Such action might indeed be im- peratively necessary, and Forbes was not a man who would strain the zeal of his new official function without grave reason. But its constitutional validity was open to more than doubt. It was impugned as absolutely illegal by his predecessor, Dundas, who was now in active opposition, and the prosecution was allowed to lapse. The resistance to the new tax failed, and the Lord Advocate could congratulate himself and his patrons on the vindication of the authority of the Government and the Parliament. But none the less it left its traces. When we consider the amount involved, we may well feel astonished that a Minister so shrewd as Walpole strained financial pedantry for such a matter. The estimated produce of the tax was only £20,000 a-year, and any surplus was to be applied to the benevolent 72 FROM THE ACCESSION OF GEORGE I. TO 1745. purpose of increasing the revenue of the Scottish Board of Manufacturers. The truth is that Walpole's prime motive in the affair was to assert his own authority and check the growth of a rival faction. With this purpose in view, he recked but little of the deeper danger from Jacobitism which lurked behind the professed subject of dispute. The dismissal of Dundas was soon followed by that of the Duke of Rox- burghe. The office of Secretary of State for Scotland was suspended, and the administration was joined with that of England in the hands, of all men, of that burlesque of a Minister, the Duke of Newcastle. He confessed to Forbes his utter ignorance of the country and its conditions, and it did not need his confession to convince us of his absolute un- fitness for the task, and of the insult involved in intrusting the government of a country tenacious of its independence, and only grudgingly tolerating the Union, to this fantastic trifler, who could breathe freely in no atmosphere but that of the ante-chamber and the back-stairs. The administra- tion of Scotland, so far as the English Government was concerned, was virtually conducted by Walpole's trusty per- manent officials, Delafaye and Scrope. Argyle no doubt saw his opponents ousted, and with his brother, Islay, and his protege, Forbes, he now had the main guidance of Scottish affairs. But these affairs were to be managed as a sub- ordinate and, indeed, insignificant branch of Walpole's admin- istration, and in obedience to the principles he might dictate. Such a position did not fail in time to alienate and embitter the proud temper of Argyle, and it brought to Forbes's long and faithful labour, and to his courageous defence of what seemed at one time a beleaguered fort, no reward but that oi verbal gratitude and practical neglect. The next prominent incident that passes on the stage of Scottish history before the outbreak of the Rebellion of 1745 is one not altogether unlike that which has just been re- counted. It arose out of the popular prejudice against the revenue laws. The outrage about which it is concerned was due to the feeble, if not actually disaffected, administration of municipal government, which received no guidance or help from the central authorities. It marks the extent to which organised conspiracy could lift its head boldly against con- stituted rule, and could calculate its blows shrewdly, and strike with effect and with impunity. Finally, it illustrates the utterly confused and unsatisfactory notions that prevailed about a subject which at best is involved and delicate — the relations between civil authority and military responsibility, when the military force has, upon emergency, to be called HABITUAL SMUGGLING. 73 upon to act. But parallel as it is in these features to the occurrence just related, it made an altogether different im- pression on the time, and on the page of history ; and, through the genius of our great romancer, it has left an indelible picture on the minds of every subsequent generation. The incident is that which is shortly known as the Porteous Mob, and is of singular interest for the light which it throws on the manners of the time no less than on its political history. The revenue laws necessarily increased in severity as com- merce advanced and as the machine of government made larger claims on the resources of taxation. The execution of these laws provoked discontent and not infrequently led to riots, even in England. An Act was passed in 1736 against the frauds on the revenue which arose from the widespread smuggling, against which there was no efficient system of police. But the infringement of such laws is never at first regarded with reprobation by the moral sense of the com- munity. It was well understood that a certain amount of connivance might be expected even from the revenue officers themselves; and, at the worst, the forfeiture of goods and the fines exacted were looked upon as a risk incidental to trade, which might provoke deep resentment, but to which there attached no stigma of moral guilt. It became absolutely necessary to extend the severe penal system of the country to those breaches of the law; but this inevitably provoked a sense of tyrannical oppression, and excited sympathy for those who suffered from what was thought to be a contriv- ance of the governing class for their own advantage. If this was the case in England, much more so was it in Scotland, where the whole system of government encountered a strong current of discontent and distrust, and where an active faction was ever ready to fan into flame any smouldering ashes of irritation. Such laws had been little known, and their execu- tion had been entirely neglected until the last generation ; and many years had yet to pass before their infringement was regarded by a vast proportion of the population with anything but the mildest condemnation. In March 1736 two men from amongst a number who had carried on a system of smuggling on the coast of Fife were condemned to death. Their special offence had been the robbery, in the preceding January, of money which lay in the house of the collector at Pittenweem ; and as this did not represent anything like the value of the contraband goods which had been repeatedly seized in their possession, the unpopularity of the smuggling laws from which they had suffered seemed to transform their robbery and housebreak- 74 FROM THE ACCESSION OF GEORGE I. TO 1745. ing into something much more venial. The sympathies of the people were largely in their favour, and the punishment which they were to suffer seemed unduly harsh. The execu- tion was fixed for the 14th of April. On the Sunday before the day of execution the prisoners, according to the strange and revolting custom which then prevailed, were brought to the Tolbooth Church to public worship, unfettered but under a military guard. The ordin- ary congregation attended at the same service, and we have an account of the scene from a young student at Edinburgh University who was present as a spectator.^ " The bells," he tells us, " were ringing, the doors were open, and the people were coming into church" — the bulk of them sympathisers with the criminals. The soldiers had seated their charges in one of the ordinary pews and taken their places beside them. The total absence of that stern discipline with which justice has learned to surround her operations, and which is so carefully arranged that it seems to move with the inev- itableness of some ponderous piece of machinery, is typical of the slipshod habits of an age in which familiarity with its makeshift ways not unnaturally bred something of con- tempt for authority. In this scene, where the churchgoing citizens seemed to mingle indiscriminately with the officers of the law and their charges, there was a sudden stir. Both prisoners suddenly attempted to leap from the pew. The stronger and heavier, Wilson, was held back, and threw him- self upon the soldiers, two of whom he held in his hands, while he fastened his teeth upon the collar of a third. His companion meanwhile escaped through the open door, and being favoured by the sympathy of the bystanders, none of whom cared to stop him, he disappeared amidst the laby- rinth of narrow entries that ran from the High Street, where pursuit was hopeless. Wilson remained for execution, and the feeling for his hard fate, which had been considerable before, was now increased tenfold. Not the rabble only, but many of the respectable citizens, were known to be in his favour, and warnings were not wanting that the temper of the people was irritated to the last degree. The magistrates recognised that there was danger, and in order to guard against the rescue which they had reason to think might be expected, they sought and obtained the aid of a reserve of soldiers from the castle, who were stationed in the neighbouring streets. But the primary charge of maintaining order was committed to the town- guard, a body of police instituted at the Revolution, when ^ Dr Alexander Carlyle of Inveresk. \ EXECUTION OF WILSON. 75 the ordinary citizens were relieved of the duty of " watching and warding," which until then had rested with them. The officer in command of this guard was a certain Captain John Porteous, who, after a wild youth, had served in the wars abroad, and had obtained the command of the city force after the Rebellion of 1715. He was the boon companion of many young men of the better class in Edinburgh, and although disliked by the people as a severe disciplinarian, and dis- trusted by the more respectable as a man of profligate life, he had attained some credit with the magistrates as an active officer, and, as an adept in the national game of golf, he had shared the sports of those of a better class. The scene of the execution was the square of the Grass- market,^ which lay at the southern foot of the castle rock. There was gathered the ordinary crowd that assembled for such a public spectacle — not composed, as in the later days of public executions, of the refuse of the population, but made up largely of the ordinary citizens, who saw no horror in such a scene. It is strange to read that young Carlyle, who has left us his own impression of the scene, was conducted there along with his fellow-pupils by the tutor in whose house he boarded as a student at the university, and who had hired some windows from which his charges might view the spectacle, which was apparently considered as a suitable item in the education of the young. The execution, according to custom, took place after the dinner hour — at that time about one o'clock ; and in prepara- tion for his duties Porteous had dined freely, and came upon the ground excited by drink, and by the insult which, as he conceived, had been done to his own office by the summoning of the military reserve. He was resolved to show that his own men were quite sufficient to maintain order with no adventitious aid. The execution proceeded with due order, and after the criminal had suffered, the executioner and the soldiers were assailed with stones and outcries, but with no more serious violence than usually attended such a scene. But Porteous was ready to seize any occasion of offence, and in order to check any rising disorder, he ordered his men to fire, and, it was asserted, threatened them upon their show- ing some hesitation, and even seized a gun and fired himself. Some of the soldiers, fearing to injure the crowd, fired high, and consequently hit some of the spectators in the windows ; and when the crowd dispersed, it was found that some six or eight were killed, while a larger number lay wounded on the ^ So called from being the market-place for the freshly cut grass which was brought into Edinburgh for fodder. Hay was as yet rarely used in Scotland. 76 FROM THE ACCESSION OF GEORGE I. TO 1745. ground. One of those killed was a youth of a lower class, who had been displaced by the party in charge of Carlyle's tutor, and who had found a vantage-point in a window a few feet lower down. The irritation of the people was too threatening to be appeased, except by the blood of the agent of this outrage. Porteous was brought to trial, and the forms of Scottish law were not such as to favour the prisoner upon a trial for murder. It was afterwards asserted, but apparently on insufficient grounds, that the judges had been so far influ- enced by popular clamour as to strain the law to his dis- favour; but the trial led to his conviction, and the popular vengeance seemed likely to be satisfied by his death. Some of those in authority, however, thought that the penalty for what might be deemed at most as an error of judgment was unduly severe, and was likely to have a bad effect on those responsible for the maintenance of order, and to be an en- couragement to violence on the part of the mob. The king was absent on one of his frequent visits to Hanover, and the queen was acting as Regent. Her personal intervention was obtained, and Porteous was reprieved. The news of the reprieve provoked the keenest irritation amongst almost every class in the community; and the Scottish people were in no temper to be baulked of their vengeance by the intervention of English Ministers. The threatenings were loud and deep, and the queen-regent was especially assailed by every term of contempt and reproach. Strangely enough, the precautions which such a state of popular feeling made necessary were entirely neglected. The Government concerned themselves little in the affair, and were content to leave the matter in the hands of the civic authorities. The Lord Advocate (Forbes) was at his estate near Inverness, the Solicitor-General (Erskine) in Dumfries- shire, and neither knew anything of Porteous's reprieve. From Newcastle, who was primarily responsible for the government of Scotland, but who regarded with his usual petty jealousy the influence of Argyle and his brother Islay, through whom alone that government could have been effec- tively maintained, no assistance could be obtained. Even Islay, who, as Lord Justice-General, was the chief criminal authority in Scotland, was absent; and the Lord Justice - Clerk (Lord Milton), who was his principal agent, was resid- ing securely at his estate some miles distant from Edinburgh. No executive officer of any weight or importance was present at the seat of danger. On the night of the 7th of September — that preceding the THE PORTEOUS MOB. 77 day originally fixed for Porteous's execution — a small knot of men entered Edinburgh about nine o'clock by the West Port, which they closed and occupied, so as to prevent the entry of any of the military forces quartered in the suburbs. Everything in their movements pointed not only to a care- fully prepared plan, but to the existence amongst the people of a capacity for bold and quick conspiracy which was in inverse ratio to the bungling feebleness of the Government. The leaders secured the main gates of the city, and, advanc- ing to the beat of drum, they were joined by a crowd of some 4000 men, which seems to have gathered as if by magic. They proceeded with a deadly certainty of aim that told of the presence of military discipline, and there was throughout a careful and measured deliberation in all their acts which stands in striking contrast with the feeble and panic-struck conduct of those whose authority they flouted and defied. No unnecessary violence was permitted. They first marched to the guard-house, and stripping the town-guard of their arms, they dismissed them unhurt. With almost military pre- cision they advanced to the Tolbooth Prison, and demanded the surrender of Porteous. Meanwhile the magistrates had gathered together, but were helpless against the mob. They attempted to check the leaders, and to dissuade them from the attempt, but their interference was set aside, quietly and without any unnecessary violence, but none the less effec- tively. No one could be got to carry a written message to General Moyle, who was in command of the castle ; and although Mr Lindsay, the member of Parliament for the city, made his way over the city wall, the military officer naturally hesitated to interfere without written orders and the presence of a magistrate, in a case where recent events had proved that unguarded action might be so perilous, and that zeal would not be allowed to atone for any breach of a highly technical law. In the absence of any such support the magistrates could offer no resistance, and when the sur- render of the prisoner was refused the assailants proceeded to force the door of the Tolbooth. It was strong enough to withstand their attacks, and thereupon tar barrels were soon forthcoming, and the door was burned down. The other prisoners were set free, and Porteous, who had, according to the lax prison discipline of the day, been allowed to celebrate his reprieve by giving a feast to his boon companions, was found concealed in the chimney of his cell. Heedless of his entreaties, but at the same time with none of the speedy wreaking of vengeance which would have marked an un- guided mob, they ordered him to prepare, and conducted him 78 FROM THE ACCESSION OF GEORGE I. TO 1745. with all the boldness of method and deliberation to the place of execution, which had been the scene of his own crime. No more studied defiance of authority could have been perpe- trated than this uninterrupted march through more than a mile of streets to the ordained place of execution. On their way they procured a rope, and the poor wretch was hanged upon a dyer's pole. When the deed was done the crowd dispersed quietly and with as much order as it had assembled. No excesses followed their triumph ; not the smallest act of robbery or wanton violence marred the dignity of what, however misguided, was an almost judicial act of popular vengeance. Even when it was necessary to break open a shop in order to procure a rope for the execution, it was said that a guinea was left on the counter to recoup the shopman for his loss. The whole proceeding was too impos- ing to be called a riot. History hardly can point to another instance where the mysterious arm of popular authority, clothing itself with something of judicial dignity, struck a blow more deliberate, more decisive, and fraught with a deeper lesson for its nominal governors. The army of revolt vanished as quickly and as quietly as it had mustered. But it left the city in a panic, and the magistrates at their wits' end. Now that it was too late for anything but an inquiry which the almost unanimous feeling of the city was determined to render futile, the law officers were summoned, and arrests were made. The pre- cognition of witnesses was pushed on with a vain activity ; but amongst the hundreds who were examined not one scrap of reliable evidence was forthcoming, and it was soon clear that the conspirators had provided as skilfully for the quick dispersion as for the assembling of their short-lived force. A few were denounced and committed to prison; but only one man was brought to trial — a harmless, half - witted creature, who when further stupefied with drink had been made to march with the procession holding a halberd in his hand, and who had been recognised by the livery that he wore as footman to the Countess of Wemyss. He was acquitted by the jury, and of the others denounced as par- ticipators all were either beyond the reach of the authorities or were harmless loiterers whom excitement had brought into the crowd, and whose drunken boasts had been taken too seriously. Even had witnesses desired to come forward they could only have done so at serious risk. The same veiled force which had planned the conspiracy was felt to be likely to take vengeance on any betrayal. Meanwhile the news had been received at Court with a AN OPPORTUNITY FOR FACTION. 79 storm of indignation that knew no bounds, and that com- prehended in its anger the authorities as well as the people of Scotland. The queen felt the flouting of her authority as regent to be a personal insult. She rated all concerned, and declared that General Moyle "deserved to be shot by order of a court-martial as much as any of the rioters deserved to be hanged." Walpole, who, careless as he was of Scottish affairs, was provoked at a mishap that involved further complications for his Government, declared that Moyle deserved to be broke for a coward, bagged for a fool, or hanged for a knave. Of all those concerned, however, the military commander had most cause to be cautious in his action, and had most strictly obeyed command ; and it remained to turn the stream of Court wrath upon the luckless magistrates. About their fate there raged for some months a conflict in which every one of the many parlia- mentary factions that prevailed sought to gain some triumph over their enemies. The first parliamentary step was taken by Lord Carteret when Parliament met in February 1737. In the debate upon the Address, he denounced the Scottish riots, attacking not only the violence that had been done to Porteous by the mob, but the injustice that had been perpetrated in his trial and condemnation. Carteret's chief object seems to have been to embroil the Government with Scotland, and to lower the authority of Argyle and of his brother Lord Islay, the Lord Justice-General, whose influence in Scotland under the nominal administration of Newcastle was supreme. New- castle pursued his usual course of fussy and intriguing vacil- lation, and sought only to contrive new plans for undermining the compact between Walpole and Lord Islay — of whose influ- ence he Was jealous even while he was their ostensible ally. Walpole and Islay knew how to make of him their tool, and had temper and contrivance sufficient to avoid a rup- ture ; but Argyle was neither disposed to brook such inter- ference, nor was his temperament such as to permit him to set bounds to his display of contempt for Newcastle's petty spite, and passion for intrigue. Hardwicke, now Lord Chan- cellor, viewed with a lawyer's e^^es the danger of a defiance of authority, and was not displeased to form a coalition that would counterbalance the preponderating influence of Wal- pole and the Argyle party. 'The bishops were inflamed against the insults which the Presbyterian zeal of Argyle had led him to pour upon their order, and were only too ready to join in any combination that might diminish his influence and alienate him from the Court. Walpole soon 80 FROM THE ACCESSION OF GEORGE I. TO 1745. found that the after -results of the riot, in the twists and complications of faction, were to the full as dangerous and troublesome as the original defiance of authority ; and he would fain have allowed the whole affair to pass as quickly as possible out of memory. But it played into the hands of the Tories, who welcomed the opportunity of posing as the maintainers of liberty against the reprisals upon an independent nation which panic suggested. Walpole thus stood between two fires. On the one hand he was urged by Hardwicke and Newcastle to vindicate authority by severe measures ; on the other he had to safe- guard Islay's influence in Scotland, which would be ruined if the national susceptibilities were unduly provoked. He was compelled to acquiesce in the introduction of a bill in the House of Lords, which was drawn by Hardwicke, and clearly showed his animus. Under it the provost and bailies of Edinburgh were to be disabled from holding any office and to be imprisoned ; the town-guard was to be abolished, and the Netherbow Port was to be pulled down. No pro- posal could have stung the pride of the Edinburgh citizens to the quick more than the last. Another generation was to see the disappearance of the old city gates — swept away for the convenience of the inhabitants, and regretted only by the antiquarian and the lover of the picturesque. But to suggest that one of the gates should be destroyed to satisfy the offended dignity of the English Court, and because it had barred the way to the military sent to cow an Edinburgh crowd, was much the same thing as if the Ministry at Downing Street had proposed to pull down Temple Bar as a penalty for the Gordon riots. Islay was ready to compound the matter by giving up the town- guard of Edinburgh, if the Netherbow were spared ; but even with this modification Argyle sturdily opposed the bill, and refused to come to terms with the Government that proposed it. Carteret, satisfied with having flung this bone of contention amidst the nominal adherents of Wal- pole, withdrew from all active participation in the dispute, and pleased himself with satirising the subterfuges of the various disputants. A petty storm raged for a time over the question of summoning the Lord Justice- Clerk (Milton) and others of the judges to be interrogated by the House. Whether they were to be summoned as delinquents or as witnesses — to explain their own shortcomings or to guide the House as to the law of Scotland — was matter of keen debate. Each disputant propounded a fresh theory, while all were conscious that the real object was to aim a blow ANGER OF THE QUEEN. 81 at Lord Islay, of whom the Lord Justice -Clerk was the trusted agent and confidant. The patience of Queen Caroline was not unnaturally exhausted. The topic was one hate- ful to her, because the flouting of authority had happened just when that authority was represented by herself. In her first anger she had forgotten the latitudinarian philosophy with which she solaced her leisure, and the self-control which, in her conjugal affairs, she carried perhaps beyond the point which the duty of Christian forgiveness warranted. She talked of making Scotland a hunting-ground, with that delicate regard for Scottish feelings which it was the habit of the Court in which she lived to show. The only answer vouchsafed by Argyle to the gibe was that in such a case he would crave her Majesty's indulgence to go and prepare his hounds for the chase. But her irritation was not soothed by the maladroit devices in which the Ministry entangled themselves in their vain endeavours to avenge the insults of the Edinburgh mob. She rated the Duke of Newcastle in the contemptuous terms that his pettiness invited and deserved. "What the devil," she asked him, "signifies all this bustle about the Scotch judges ? Will worrying the Scotch judges be any satisfaction to the king for the insult offered to the Government in the murder of Porteous ? . . . I understand all this very well : you hate Lord Islay, and you want to take this occasion to do disagreeable things to him, and make it impossible for him to carry on the king's business in Scotland; but Lord Islay has been too good a servant to the king for the king to let any such schemes take effect. . . . The business of princes is to make the whole go on, and not to suffer little silly, im- pertinent, personal piques between their servants to hinder the business of the Government being done. . . . You under- stand me very well, and I hope we shall have no more of this childish, fiddle-faddle, silly work." Amongst her other accomplishments Queen Caroline could speak plainly when she chose. According to his usual habit, Newcastle only fidgeted and shuffled and prevaricated. "The Lord Chan- cellor had told him so and so : he was really guided by him." His excuses were brushed aside; but he had got a warning which, like a whipped schoolboy, he was bound to remember. He was one of those who could be tutored only by contempt. The bill laboured through the House of Lords, but in the Commons it fared still worse. The Tories were loud in their denunciations of its pains and penalties. The Scottish mem- bers of all parties condemned it with one voice. Even the F 82 FROM THE ACCESSION OF GEORGE I. TO 1745. Lord Advocate (Forbes) and the Solicitor-General (Erskine) did not hesitate to condemn a bill introduced by their own Government.^ The bill finally passed, but in a mutilated and comparatively harmless shape. The clauses as to the destruc- tion of the Netherbow Port, the imprisonment of the magis- trates, and the disbanding of the town-guard were struck out ; and instead it was provided only that the provost should be incapable of holding any office, and that £2000 should be paid by the town to Porteous's widow. The two Houses of Parliament, as that flippant gossip Lord Hervey says, had been employed five months in declaring that a man should never again be a magistrate who had never desired to be one, and in raising £2000 in Edinburgh to make a cook-maid bless the hour in which her husband was hanged ! Such a conclusion was hardly fitted to increase the respect either for the Government or for a united Parliament amongst the people of Scotland. The first had proved itself incapable of maintaining the law, the second had utterly failed to vindi- cate with dignity the authority of that law against insult. As if bent on producing the maximum of irritation with the minimum of efiective result, the Government imposed upon the ministers of the Church the odious duty, under penalty of deprivation, of reading in the course of each service a proclamation for the discovery of the murderers of Porteous. It was to serve as a touch -stone between the fanatics, as they were called, who dreaded the Erastian tendencies of an Established Church, and the more peaceable adherents of a submissive Establishment. But it failed in its purpose. It caused grievous heartburnings and searchings of conscience ; but it showed only that there was a strong leaven of the old ecclesiastical independence, in spite of the modifying influ- ences of Church patronage. The old Squadrone party again set themselves in antagonism to those whom they stigmatised as the Argathelians — from the fact that the Argyle party represented Walpole's authority in Scotland. The reading of the proclamation was resisted by too many to make the in- fliction of the penalty possible, and the Act remained in- efiectual, except as an additional source of irritation. It was the last echo of the angry outburst which the Porteous Mob had roused, and of the petty rancours and jealousies by which it had been followed. ^ This sounds strange to us, and is, of course, altogether alien to our modern notions of the solidarity of a Government, but it was then matter of no un- common occurrence. 83 CHAPTER IV. THE STATE OF SCOTLAND IN 1745. With the Porteous Mob and its sequel we reach the last important episode in the history of Scotland previous to the outbreak of the final Jacobite rebellion. With the failure of that rebellion there begins a new chapter in Scottish history, which it will be our business hereafter to follow in detail. We must first investigate the causes of that rebellion, and trace its course until it ended in irreparable and hopeless defeat — leaving, none the less, an undying- memory of romantic heroism. Before we do so, it may be well to form for ourselves some picture of the state of Scotland as it was during the generation which preceded the year with which our detailed narrative is to begin. About the time of the Union the population of Scotland may be roughly estimated at about one million souls. That of England at the same period was about five millions and a half; so that in this respect Scotland not only bore a better proportion to her southern neighbour than in any other particular, but a considerably larger proportion than her population at the present day bears to that of England and Wales. But the distribution of that population was far different from that of the present day. The leading towns, which now embrace nearly a half of the population, were then insignificant aggregates — sometimes little more than would nowadays be accounted overgrown villages. Edinburgh, clustered entirely in the long and narrow High Street that ran along the ridge of rising ground ascending from Holyrood to the castle, and in a few dingy lanes and alleys that lay beneath its slopes, was hardly changed from what it had been for two centuries. Its lofty tenements, where the aristocracy and the leading professional men where huddled together in obscure and noisome wynds, 84 THE STATE OF SCOTLAND IN 1745. were still the same that had seen the struggles of the days of Queen Mary and had sheltered the courtiers of the later Stuart reigns. The whole population was scarcely twenty thousand, and it was hard to say how any increas- ing population could be accommodated, pent in as the city was within the narrow range of the old town wall. The surrounding district was only to be brought within the circuit of the town after long struggles, in which those who saw a danger in such extension were to fight each step by which it was brought about by every device of obstruction and delay. Glasgow was only a petty town- ship of some thirteen thousand souls, gathered in unpre- tentious streets that straggled into green fields from the feet of her ancient cathedral and university. The little, scarcely navigable, stream that a century later was to begin to carry forth her fleets of merchantmen, and to bring to her argosies from every part of the globe, then gave no presage of her future place amongst the great ports of the realm. Aberdeen, Dundee, and St Andrews had each a population of some four thousand; and the last found in her university a source of importance that made her more than the rival of what were ere long to be great commercial centres, when she had sunk to the level of a comparatively insignificant university town. Perth was slightly larger. As a sort of garrison against the Highlands, she had some claim to consideration, which was enhanced by her ancient importance as a seat of royalty; but even with this she had only a scanty part of that population and wealth which now belong to her merely as a thriving county town. Far in the recesses of the Highlands Inverness claimed the dig- nity of a northern capital, but that dignity was enhanced by no outward signs; and the town consisted only of a few houses little better than hovels — so wretched, indeed, that at the period of the Rebellion of 1745 there was only one house which contained a room without a bed — the house that served as lodging, within a space of a few months, both to the younger Chevalier and to his success- ful rival and antagonist, the Duke of Cumberland. It had been nursed into a little brief importance under the occupa- tion of Cromwell's soldiers. When these left, and when their fort was dismantled and destroyed, it had sunk again into its former obscurity and decay. So trifling was the contribution of these towns to the total population ; while on the other hand the country districts must for the most part have been little less popu- lous than in our own day — if we except the comparatively^ RESOURCES OF THE COUNTRY. 85 scattered population of the mining districts, which were then only waste tracts of moorland, but now constitute a densely populated area. Turning from population to the resources by which that population lived, the contrast is even more striking. The total currency of Scotland, as we have already seen, was not probably above £600,000. The annual revenue did not exceed £100,000. The valued rental did not certainly reach to more than half a million. When the Bank of Scotland was established in 1695, its total paid-up capital was £10,000, and for several years it did not exceed £30,000; and yet so ample did this appear for all requirements that when the rival establishment of the Royal Bank was started in 1727, with a capital of more than £100,000, it was held by many to be an unwarrantable competition, and one bank or the other, it was conceived, must inevitably break. Such foreign trade as there was suffered a check from the jealous restrictions imposed by the English Parliament. The manu- factures of Scotland were trifling, and the chief of them, which was the linen manufacture, was only being nursed with difficulty into respectable proportions. The tobacco trade was still in its infancy, crippled by the jealousy of Bristol, the far more important centre of the American trade. The vast mining industries were undeveloped, and the soil still held its treasures unknown and concealed. Nor was agriculture in a more forward condition. Wheat was scarcely grown. Ip. vast tracts of the Highlands there was hardly any arable land. The staple use to which the land was put there was in the rearing of cattle, and that, for reasons to be presently explained, was a hazardous specu- lation; while neither the tenure of the soil nor the habit of the people favoured any other method of employing the resources of the soil. It would be easy to multiply instances, and to dwell upon the almost magic contrast between the humble conditions of Scottish life in the generation before our narrative begins, and the marvellous development which a century and a half was to bring. But it is needless to burden these pages with a miscellaneous mass of statistical details. It is more important, for the right understanding of what is to follow, that we should grasp the main conditions of the life which was to group so much of crowded dramatic interest upon so limited a scene. We have to trace the growth of the plant, the flowering of the blossom, and the rich yield of fruit. Let us see, then, first of all the soil upon which that crop was reared, how it had struck its roots, and what 86 THE STATE OF SCOTLAND IN 1745. scars it bore from the storm and tempest through which it had passed. It was in the Lowlands that the distinctive characteristics of Scotland were chiefly nourished into a rugged maturity. It would be an essential error to attribute these in any great measure to racial peculiarities. To do so is to localise unduly the limits of Saxon and of Celtic influence, and to take too little account of the vast influence of national experience in the building up of national character. Cen- turies of fierce struggle for national independence had stiflened the muscles and braced the nerves of national life. The memories of religious struggle had burned them- selves deeply upon the national conscience; and religious persecution had given birth to a habit of keen intellectual activity, which, by dint of much brooding, had developed the metaphysical side of religious questions, and had given rise to a portentous amount of dialectical subtlety in the hair-splitting distinctions between different sects. The hard conditions of life had stimulated industry and thrift, and given to the people the indomitable perseverance which inevitably tells in the dire struggle for the survival of the fittest. Even in the Lowlands there were vast tracts of mountain and glen, peopled only by memories of ancient legend and by the stirring episodes of Border warfare, and serving to keep alive a background of romance, which formed a peculiar setting for the dialectical subtlety, and the keen practical activity, of a nation that was instinct with the vital sense of national independence and of national kinship. Within the bowels of the soil there lay treasures yet undiscovered, which were destined to be the source of wealth undreamed of in the past of Scotland, but re- quiring for its development just that sturdy energy, that brooding ambition, that undying spirit of enterprise, which were characteristic of the people. The Lowlands of Scot- land presented an extraordinary mixture of intellectual subtlety and keen practical common -sense, of indomitable perseverance and obstinate adherence to old ways, of rest- less independence and innate respect for authority, of stolid reserve and susceptibility to the stirrings of romance and poetry. Such a mixture promised the most certain harvest of national enterprise. Their poverty was at once a hardening experience and an unfailing impulse; and more even than any system of education, their readiness in pursuing the dialectical gymnastic of religious contro- versy braced their minds to a high intellectual activity, while their nurture on the great thoughts and lofty THE HIGHLANDS. 87 diction of Hebrew poetry preserved their imagination from decay. A totally different picture is presented when we turn to the Highlands. At the time of which we are speaking this was not so much a territorial distinction as one of language and of custom. Almost down to the Union the Gaelic language was spread over many parts of Scotland from which it soon receded. Even in Fife it had been the current language down to a comparatively late date. But in time it retired, for the most part, behind the barrier of mountains which served as a wall of defence for a separate language as it did for peculiar customs and a distinct mode of life. Even behind that barrier, the places where English was spoken were distinguished from the Highlands, although both their situation and the character of their surroundings led to their being classed under that name by their southern neighbours. Beginning within sight of the Lowland towns, that region stretched for 200 miles, in certain aspects as much a land of mystery and of fable as the Indies to the citizen of England or to the Lowland Scot. So long as Lowland Scotland was inured to arms by constant wars with England, the Lowlander retained enough strength of his own to preserve him from any fear of his northern neighbours. But after the Union of the Crowns, long peace had turned the Lowlander away from habits of fighting. These had remained only with the northern clans, and rendered them a constant menace to the more peaceful population of the South. They grew to be a people apart. The natural rampart of mountains which fenced them in, and the mists that lay about their peaks, seemed to impose an impenetrable bar to intercourse ; and if an adventurous southerner occasionally crossed these mountains, it was only after long and anxious preparation, and after he had made his will and arranged his affairs, as starting on a journey where the chances of return were at least problematical. Such was one aspect of the Highlands to the ordinary citizen of Edinburgh and of Glasgow ; but we must not sup- pose that the region behind the mountains and the mists was untouched by outer influences. We have already seen that it had become almost habitual for the younger members of the families of the chiefs to take service abroad, where they ac- quired not only the experience of campaigning and the astute- ness bred of cosmopolitan intercourse, but also a veneer at least of social polish. Some of the chiefs were themselves great nobles, who could adopt at will the manners and habits, no less than the dress, of the Edinburgh, and even of the 88 THE STATE OF SCOTLAND IN 1745. London, drawing-room, when they chose to assume their places in such circles. There were English garrisons at Fort George, Fort Augustus, and Fort William, which maintained from sea to sea a line of English influence, and which repre- sented an intercourse which had never been altogether broken from the days of Cromwell. English travellers were not infrequent, and English engineers were at work all along the roads which General Wade had been employed in construct- ing through the Highlands, since the failure of the last rebel- lion. In fact, divided though it was, the region was not so much unknown, nor the Highland habits so much unfamiliar, to the Lowlander, as the one was depressing to his eye and the other an object of his curiosity and his wonder, in its vivid contrast to all the conditions of life with which history and association had surrounded him.^ The impression which the mountain scenery made upon the southern traveller of that day is always the same, and is strangely different from that to which later generations have become used. The English military officer, Burt, who has left us a valuable account of the Highlands as then seen by southern eyes, breaks off his description of the mountains "as a disagree- able subject"; and he viewed them with another eye than ours. The very aspects of that scenery which rouse a modern spectator to enthusiastic admiration were those that seemed to him uncouth and repulsive. "They appear still one above another, fainter and fainter, according to the aerial perspective, and the whole of a dismal gloomy brown, drawing upon a dirty purple; and most of all disagreeable when the heath is in bloom." The life which he found amidst these gloomy and repulsive surroundings was not of a kind to attract the Lowland traveller. On its first aspect, it was little removed from that of the savage. The habita- tions were formed of peat and moss, supported by a few un- hewn branches. It was rare to find any bed but one of fern or heather, and neither chimneys nor windows were ordinary appurtenances of their abodes. Cleanliness, either in person or in dwelling, was utterly unknown, and disease in its most deadly and uncouth forms was rife. The poverty was every- where such as to bring the inhabitants to the very verge of famine — if, indeed, that is not famine itself which gave neither to man nor beast the pittance necessary to support life with a semblance of health or vigour. Tillage of the soil, in any but the most primitive forms, was unknown, and 1 Bailie Nicol Jarvie was not the only Lowlander who was not unwilling to claim kinship with a Highland family, and was ready to aver with him, "My father had a great regard for the family of Garschattachin." THEIR PRIDE AND POVERTY. 89 the cattle subsisted on such scanty forage as might be found on the mountain-side in summer, and in winter shared the habitations and grew lean upon the diet of starvation which was the lot of their owners. There was no opportunity or encouragement to industry; and bodies so insufficiently fed were only too likely to sink into lethargy and half -inanimate sloth. Even amongst those who were more well-to-do, fresh meat was hardly used, and could only be procured — and then only as a rare and almost unknown luxury — for some three or four months of the year. Even where there was an outward appearance of greater plenty, it was not of a kind that denoted wealth, or even comfort. The chief maintained around his dwelling a numer- ous horde of dependent clansmen, who owed to him implicit obedience, but who looked to him for sustenance. The most meagre fare alternated with bouts of ostentatious and waste- ful hospitality, the laws of which demanded a brutal excess. The large " tail " or following of the chief did not imply that he possessed wealth, or could count on any but a moderate rental, paid chiefly in kind. Burt tells us of his astonish- ment when a Highland proprietor of a domain which meas- ured about sixty by about forty miles, and contained 2,000,000 acres, offered him the whole at 3d. an acre as purchase price. His astonishment lessened when, upon a more careful calcula- tion, he found that the rental of £900 represented a sum about £2000 less than the interest of the sum for which the estate was offered, on the scale of eighty acres to the pound ! Poverty such as this, which even amongst those whose influence was largest scarcely permitted the decencies of life, was rendered absurd by its combination with unmeasured pride of birth, and a disdain of manual labour which that pride enjoined. The meanest clansman was the kinsman of his chief, and although his life and liberties were at the mercy of that chief, he yet could claim from his superior the greeting and the familiar shake of the hand which marked them as members of a common family. The conventional distinctions were indeed strange. A man could be a drover, or keep the pettiest alehouse, without derogation to his birth or losing the title of a gentleman. But manual labour was an indelible stain, and the mechanic was as much despised as the merchant, however wealthy or however skilled. The first duty of the clansman was absolute and implicit obedience to his chief. It was his prime duty, in the words of Ewan Cameron, not to want even oatmeal if he were called upon to fight the battle of that chief. To swear by the head of the chief was the most binding oath that a 90 THE STATE OF SCOTLAND IN 1745. Highlander knew ; and all he possessed he held only by the grace of that chief, and as a man of his clan. Their pride of birth was but a part and parcel of the absolute loyalty to the chief which the clan system bred, and which was only greater than that which was due to every member of the clan. Such a bond was not conducive to respect for the law, but it made an admirable foundation for military enterprise. The chief was too intent upon the strength of his retinue and upon having a ready command of fighting men to do anything to encourage industry, or foster habits of money-getting, much less of thrift. Such habits would inevitably have weakened his authority, and have promoted an intercourse with the Lowlands before which that authority must have broken down. It was far more for his interest that the clan should draw its sustenance from the plunder of the Lowland cattle and such revenues as it enjoyed from the black-mail levied upon the Lowland proprietors as an insurance on their pro- perty — a sort of rudimentary form of the modern notion of "ransom." The victims of such plunder and of such exac- tions, levied with a certain regularity and form that made them wear the aspect of tribute money, were men of an alien race, whom deeply rooted tradition made the Highlanders consider as their hereditary foes, and as the original robbers of their land. To carry on such depredations on a large scale was no derogation to claims either of honour and honesty or even of gentle blood. To steal a cow or two was the act of a thief ; to " lift " a herd was the exploit of a " gentleman drover." With all his poverty, therefore, the chief had in his hands a most effective weapon of war. The most implicit obedience was yielded to him by his followers, and he sought every means of maintaining his own dignity by a large and im- posing train of immediate attendants. The chief was the colonel of the regiment which was formed of the clan; his sons were the lieutenant-colonel and the majors, and each chieftain, or delegate of the chief, was captain of his own company. The depredations carried on under the authority of the chief, involving, as they often did, the outlawry of his clan, secured him against any chance of his followers seeking to make peace with their southern neighbours. The scanty resources of their country inured these followers to the hardest fare and to the hardest quarters, and turned them out splendid campaigners, ready to make forced marches on a diet of biscuit or oatmeal, and refusing even the shelter of a tent for their encampment. Indolent as they were by choice and custom — almost by necessity — those who had THE INDEPENDENT COMPANIES. 91 experience in the engineering of the roads knew that it was not from lack of activity, strength, or even industry when once their zeal was roused. More than all this, the signal for war might be passed from clan to clan, when once the imperious missive of the Fiery Cross was sped across the mountains. To refuse to obey its call, and that without question of the object of its summons, was to lose every claim to honour, and to become an outcast from the clan, and an object of the contempt and vengeance of every fellow- clansman.i As if to encourage and foster this widespread power of the chief, the short-sighted policy of the Government fell upon a strange device for maintaining the semblance of its own authority, A surrender of arms had been demanded after the Rebellion of 1715. It was carried out in a way so per- functory as to be little but a farce. All the old and useless weapons which could be found were handed over with much appearance of submission, but abundant arms were stored at various places throughout the Highlands. And in order, as it were, to teach their eifective use, and to give opportunity for drill, the Government restored, in 1725, what were known as the Six Independent Companies, consisting in all of 480 men. The Highland regiments were the levies of the Sidier Dhu (the black soldier — whence the later name of the Black Watch) as opposed to the Sidier Roy (the red soldier), who formed the garrisons at the scattered forts. These Highland regiments did not form part of the regular army. They were separate levies which were really a menace to the English power. The composition of each company could be quickly changed, so that, far beyond their nominal strength, there was a large reserve force, ready drilled and disciplined, and available whenever their services might be required for any enterprise on which their chiefs might be engaged. And the principal representative of the Government in this strange work of drilling and disciplining a powerful contingent of rebels was that trustworthy agent, Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat ! The country being so divided, it may not be amiss to select some personalities that were specially typical of its varying phases. Of these there can scarcely be one of more amazing versatility than Lord Lovat, who has just been named. He 1 Roughly the possible fighting force of Scotland was reckoned at about 220,000. According to Scott's calculation in 'Rob Roy' (chapter xxvi.) the total popula- tion of the Highlands was about 230,000 souls, of whom some 57,500 were fit to bear arms. As an honest livelihood was not possible for at least a half, there were, according to Bailie Nicol Jarvie, at least 28,000 men whose desire must be to fight whenever they got the chance. 92 THE STATE OF SCOTLAND IN 1745. was born in 1667, and closed his life of long and involved treachery on the scaffold in 1747, so that his manhood and his mature age saw the downfall of the Stuart dynasty and the last struggle for its restoration. Few men have contrived to compress even in so long a life a career of such unblushing villainy and such complex duplicity, unabashed by any sense of shame. Shrinking from no cruelty, true to no cause, hesi- tating at no act of double-dyed treachery, and yet ready to assume a cloak of specious sanctity when it suited his designs, he lived only to illustrate his own theory that "true moral reflections are no more but a play of our intellectuals, by which the author caresses his own genius by false ideas that can never be put in practice." The younger son of a younger son, his youth offered no prospect of succession to the wide domains and vast authority wielded by the head of the Frasers. But one after another of those who stood between him and the succession died, until there remained only the widow and daughter of the eleventh lord between the succession of Simon and his father, Thomas. Simon had already completed his education at King's Col- lege, Aberdeen, and had so far profited by it that he never in after life was at a loss for a Latin quotation wherewith to grace his most hypocritical utterances, and to embellish the most dramatic incidents of his life. He was twenty-nine years of age when his kinsman, the eleventh lord, died in 1696. Simon had induced the late chief to leave a will in favour of his father, but this will was disputed on behalf of the widow and her daughter, and as the widow was a member of the powerful family of Athole, it required some boldness for a young and penniless claimant to push his claims against such opposition. Failing to secure the person of the young heiress, he summoned to his aid his clansmen, who seem to have favoured his claims, as they were likely to favour one who promised to assert their independence so efficiently, and with their help he attacked and took prisoner Lord Saltoun, who had the support of her Athole kinsmen as a claimant for the hand of the heiress. Not content with this open defiance of the law, he proceeded further, and by a strange change of tactics he seized the dowager, and with every circumstance of violence and outrage forced her to a marriage which at a later day he treated as a thing of nought. Compelled to fly from the law, and condemned in his absence as a rebel and an outlaw, he maintained for a time an armed resistance to the emissaries of the Government, and was adroit enough to procure his acceptance by the clan as its rightful chief. By the help of Argyle, with whom he maintained a SIMON, LOKD LOVAT. 93 close alliance, afterwards cemented by marriage, he managed to procure a pardon, but the fact that his enemy, the Duke of Athole, recovered the favour of the Court, forced him to seek exile in France at the beginning of Queen Anne's reign. There he exchanged his career of open lawlessness for one of tortuous intrigue. He found means of access not only to the Court of St Germains, but also to the presence of the French king; and he managed to procure consideration for his proposal that the Jacobite schemes should be forwarded by a rising in the Highlands, aided by French troops and French subsidies. The Court of St Germains was honey- combed with cliques and jealousies, and even had the most far-sighted policy guided its counsels, it would have been wise to deal cautiously with one of Lovat's past. But in spite of jealousies and suspicions he won some trust, and was despatched to Scotland for further negotiations with the Highland chiefs. As the issue of these negotiations, he betrayed the whole to the Duke of Queensberry, then acting as the Lord Commissioner in Scotland, and yet he did not scruple to cross to France, and again to renew his secret trafficking with the Ministers of James. Lovat, however, cunning as he was, had involved himself in a mesh of treachery which baffled even his powers of evasion, and he was detected in his duplicity and committed to some sort of custody. What form that custody took remains un- certain. He seems to have been released from imprisonment at least, although probably kept under espionage at Saumur, where he resided; and he appears to have recovered his interest sufficiently to be trusted, while he managed to employ, as an instrument to that end, the enthusiasm with which he professed to have adopted the Roman Catholic creed. His skill in ingratiating himself with those whose favour he wished to gain was unrivalled, and like many of his kind his wit and versatility won for him the good graces, of the other sex, in spite of the strange uncouthness of his grotesque face and figure. According to a story, neither strictly authenticated nor absolutely disproved, he even carried his religious devotion so far as to become a noted preacher, and thus command the surest influence over the hearts of his female friends. Meanwhile he was lost to his clan, and even his existence was doubted. It was only in 1713 that these sturdy adher- ents, feeling that stirring times were in store, sent an emissary to search for their chief, and to beg him again to place him- self at their head. It was necessary in the first place to obtain the consent of the Chevalier to his quitting France; 94 THE STATE OF SCOTLAND IN 1745. and this was achieved only on the understanding that he went to summon the clan Fraser to be in readiness to receive their rightful king. He had left an abundance of enemies, however, in England, and his journey to the North was attended by every risk, and was interspersed with frequent imprisonment, which only adroitness and the help of powerful friends at length enabled him to escape. When he reached his own domain he found the rebellion stirred by Mar in full operation. The town of Inverness was held for the rebels by Sir John Mackenzie; and here Lovat found his opportunity. He summoned the Erasers to arms, and joining his men to those whom Duncan Forbes of Culloden was able to gather, he successfully attacked the town, compelled the Jacobites to fly, and by so doing, un- doubtedly did much to confirm the victory which had been somewhat doubtfully won about the same time on SherifF- muir. No one knew better than Lovat how to improve such a service to his own advantage. In 1716 he obtained a com- prehensive pardon for the long list of crimes which was recorded against him by the courts; and it was not long before, by the aid of such eflective patronage as could mould even the decrees of a court of law, he was confirmed in the possession of his title and estates, and gained not only the confidence and gratitude, but even it would seem the intimate friendship, of George I. He could play his part with equal dexterity in every scene, and the same facile adaptability as had made him the religious confidant of ladies of the French nobility, and procured for him the smiles and gifts of the Grand Monarch, now stood him in good stead as well amidst the wits and courtiers of St James's as amongst the savage clansmen of his native heaths. No man of his time played the game of absolute duplicity with such consummate success on so many fields. When the Independent Companies were re-formed he naturally had a command, and to this was added soon after the sherifldom of Inverness, which, joined to his hereditary power as chief of one of the most numerous clans, made him virtual ruler of one of the largest tracts of the Highlands. For a while his astuteness was employed only in riveting his power over the clan, in extending his estates by every device that the adroitness of lawyers could suggest, and in maintaining his connections farther afield. His chief depend- ence was upon the powerful alliance of Argyle and his brother Islay, which he drew closer by marriage with their kins- woman, his third wife, in 1732; and with their assistance he continued to retain his favour at Court. But when the CAMERON OF LOCHIEL. 95 Scottish patriot party was formed, Lovat found it his interest to throw in his lot with them and Argyle rather than with Islay, who adhered to Walpole. His movements became suspected, and he was detected on evidence, which was too strong to be set aside, of trafficking once more with the exiled family. He was deprived of his sheriffdom and of his command of the Independent Company. He made no secret of his rage at being thus superseded; but in spite of his reiterated denials and the unctuous professions of innocence with which he attempted to deceive even his most intimate friends, he doubled once more in his career of tortuous treachery, and even while he professed that he was done with the things of the world and only anxious to end his life in peace, he was engaged in the game of intrigue, which in his old age had not lost its zest for him, and to which there was now added the sweet allurement of revenge. He fitly represents one type of the Highland chief — happily a rare one. Utterly without conscience and faith himself, he could yet rely with confidence on the absolute fidelity of his clansmen, which no duplicity on his part could alienate or shake. With the lawless violence and the personal courage and audacity proper to a Highland chief, he combined all the knavish tricks and smooth-faced chicanery that would have furnished the stock-in-trade of a professional card -sharper and cheat. While able to shine in Court and drawing-room, the companion of wits and fine ladies, he could yet fill, as to the manner born, the place of the Highland chieftain, dis- pensing an ostentatious and barbaric hospitality a^midst sur- roundings from which the graces and even the decencies of life were banished. He could find a way at once to the hearts of his clansmen, to the confidences of the devout Roman Catholic, and to the intercourse of the most orthodox Presbyterian divines. He could confer a kindness with grace- ful courtesy, and soothe the sorrowing with a letter of tender sympathy; and with equal facility he could blunt suspicion by boisterous cynicism, and gain confidence by the unblushing candour of his avowals. We shall presently see how he played the last scene in his dramatic career of villainy, which gives him so high a place in the gallery which history opens to us of consummate rogues. Of far different calibre was another head of a powerful clan — Donald Cameron of Lochiel, or, as he was generally called, the Gentle Lochiel. Neither he nor his ancestors had ever swerved in their allegiance, nor had the faintest suspicion of self-seeking ever attached itself to their devoted loyalty. Lochiel's grandfather was Ewan Cameron — Ewan 96 THE STATE OF SCOTLAND IN 1745. Dhu, or Black Ewan, as he was called — who had stood by the Stuart house in evil fortune as steadfastly as in good. The old man had fought in the wars of Montrose and of Dundee. After the Restoration he appeared for a brief period at the Court of St James, a stately representative of a type of ruler who was strangely out of place amidst the debauchees who crowded the levees of Charles II. ; and he received from the king the honour of knighthood, an inharmonious append- age to his ancestral dignity. He had seen his son, John Cameron, outlawed and a fugitive after Mar's rebellion in 1715 ; and, dying in 1719, at the patriarchial age of ninety, he had left the headship of his clan to the Lochiel whose part in the new rebellion was to be so conspicuous. In wise and far-seeing statesmanship, in moderation in the hour of triumph, and in calm and cool courage under adversity, the new chief worthily represented the family which was held in highest honour throughout every part of the Highlands. More than once throughout the campaign his influence checked the out- break of disorder and robbery which would have stained the memory of the Highland army. More than once he achieved success at critical moments in the expedition ; and, what was still more important, he often prevented the outburst of those jealousies amongst the clans which boded fatally for the issue of their adventure. None could yield the place of honour in battle more gracefully than the head of the Clan Cameron, and when he was ready to give way none found it seemly to insist upon questions of precedence. The page of history unfortunately presents to us some glaring instances of selfish and unabashed treachery amongst the conspicuous Highland leaders ; and the pressure of adversity, which forced men into subterfuges and disguises, has perhaps given ground for further suspicions, which ingenious inquiry may ferret out, and a lively imagination may aggravate. But the cause which could boast of a Lochiel does not lose the lustre it derives from such a name, even though it must admit to a Lovat, and may be smudged with suspicion by legends of Pickle the Spy. It would be difficult to conceive a contrast more vivid than that which is presented by a comparison of either of the two figures just sketched with that of another prominent Scotsman whose name figures largely in the first half of the eighteenth century. Duncan Forbes of Culloden, who passed through the various stages of legal dignities, was member of Parliament, and eventually Lord President of the Court of Session, fills a conspicuous place amongst those who shaped the destinies of the country at a most critical period. The FORBES OF CULLODEN. 97 story of his life carries with it nothing of the Epic pictur- esqueness which sheds a halo round the name of Lochiel — the unquestioned chief of a powerful clan, following a long line of ancestors in a final act of high-souled and romantic loyalty to a losing cause. Just as little does it present to us the dra- matic surprises and fantastic subterfuges which give its inter- est to Lovat's strange career. Forbes represented one of those Highland families whose settlement beyond the Highland line dated only from the previous century. Coming of a good stock, and inheriting a fair estate, he yet could claim no vast territorial sway, and his influence rested upon no clan chief- tainship and upon no ancient descent. In religious sympathies he was a strict Presbyterian. His family associations, his early education, and his training as a lawyer in Edinburgh and at Leyden, gave to him a character widely different from that of his neighbours in Inverness-shire. These represented an ancient order, the sands of which were quickly running out, and of which the next generation was to see the decay. He was the product of new elements in the life and history of Scotland ; and yet no one embodied more completely all that was most characteristic of her genius, in its indomitable courage, its tenacity of purpose, and even in its rugged and somewhat uncouth homeliness. Like all of his day, Forbes indulged in the profuse boon - companionship which shocks modern taste, and of which change of habits renders us perhaps over-rigid censors. At Culloden, it must be admitted, the claret flowed rather too freely ; and even the obsequies of that dignified matron, his mother, served as an excuse, according to a common story, for a debauch which so overcame the company of mourners that they lost the coffin. But such foibles were too engrained in the habits of the time to permit us to use them as items in our estimate of individual character. Forbes represented the best in his countrymen still more truly. His love of Scotland was intense, his sympathies with all her aspirations unbounded ; and yet he managed to combine these with the acceptance of the new principles that were here- after to guide her administration. In his common-sense, in his balanced judgment, in his keen interest in the development of education and of manufactures, he was an admirable specimen of the best type of Whig statesman of the day — a type which the selfishness of little cliques so rarely permitted to be realised on the southern side of the Tweed. His political projects were sometimes quaint enough, as for instance when, in 1742, he traces the financial difficulties of Scotland to the loss of excise owing to the pernicious but growing custom of drinking 98 THE STATE OF SCOTLAND IN 1745. tea instead of beer. This degeneracy arouses an indignation on the part of the good President which knows no bounds. This " villainous practice " must at all hazards be stopped, and the use of the " abominable drug " must be checked. To do so, he would not stop at mere fiscal remedies, nor at the im- position of a heavy tax. He boldly advocates legislation which should peremptorily forbid the drinking of tea to all but the higher ranks of society; and they are only to be allowed to do so, not on condition of paying a heavy duty, but on compounding by a yearly poll-tax for permission to indulge in the pernicious habit. Forbes had sense enough at least to see that his proposal might seem to many an "uncouth" one; and it is not by a caprice like this that we must estimate his political capacity. His administrative experience gave to him a weight in practical affairs which mere legal acumen never could have achieved, especially when that acumen was encumbered with the clumsy weight of pedantic lumber that hung heavily upon Scottish jurisprud- ence. A steadfast adherent of the Hanoverian dynasty, he never sank to be the submissive tool of the English Govern- ment, and his sympathy for his countrymen made him boldly withstand any undue severity of reprisals, keenly as he strove to countermine the beginnings of rebellion. The friend of English statesmen, the intimate of English literary men, the patron of James Thomson, he touched on a new side of modern life. But in his close intercourse with the chief representatives of the older and decaying system, in the rugged simplicity of his life, in his devotion to the national instincts of his own people, even in his quaint and pedantic excursions into the domain of theological discussion, he was distinguished as sharply from his friends and intimates south of the Tweed as he was from the wild and half-civilised neighbours that surrounded him in his Highland home. His sterling qualities, and the indubitable value of his services, made him a trusted though an independent colleague, and raised him to high and responsible office. But they left him a poor man, rich only in the honoured name which he left upon the page of history. It was a name none the less honoured because it was entwined with no romantic legend, but served only as a monument of unswerving obedience to duty in a tangled and often a corrupt age. Scottish history has few figures over which she can linger with more loving pride than that of Duncan Forbes. 99 CHAPTER V. CONTEMPOKARY POLITICS IN ENGLAND. In attempting to understand the immediate causes of the renewal of the Jacobite attempts in 1745, and to estimate the danger which it threatened at this juncture, it is necessary to recall some of the features of contemporary English politics. The retrospect is neither an easy nor a pleasant one. No generation could present to us a more confused mass of in- trigue and corruption, of base and sordid aims, of short- sighted devices. Nor can we trace one thread of consistent policy, not to say of principle, to guide us to any discern- ment of its main tendencies. A society, lost to all dignity, and absorbed in petty scandals, seemed to transfer to the domain of politics all the festering corruption that tainted its ordinary life. One name dominates it, that of Sir Robert Walpole. For twenty years he had maintained an undis- puted power, with one short interval which only served to make his position more sure and unassailable. About his name there has gathered a crowd of controversy, in which the opposite sides have given free rein to unmeasured invective, or have indulged in encomiums that take no account of his faults. Men have adopted one side or the other chiefly according to their temperament or intellectual sympathies, and in obedience to traditional party names that have very little connection with political principles. The meaner aspects of the time protrude themselves with sufficient clearness. Politics was undoubtedly a game in which personal selfishness played the giant's part, and in which the interests of the nation at large were lost sight of in a petty struggle for place and emolument, the spoil alternately of different factions, both belonging to one small section of the nation. But behind this sordid struggle greater issues were shaping themselves. The nation was 100 CONTEMPORARY POLITICS IN ENGLAND. preparing for the greater part which she was to play in Europe. Political principles were being developed which were eventually to work great changes, although now they were often advanced with more ostentation than sincerity, and were used as convenient weapons by those who had the worse fortune in the struggle for place and power which they would fain have shared. A baffled Opposition may often be insincere in their advocacy of patriotism and of political purity; but it does not follow that their advo- cacy does not in the long-run help these causes. New influences were at work — in religion, in literature, in social aims — and were destined to break through the crust of insincerity and affectation that seemed to absorb the life of the little clique occupying for the moment the field of politics and playing upon the surface of society. For twenty years Walpole had imposed his own strong personality on the smaller circle that pulled the wires of politics and seemed to have the destinies of the nation in its hands. Both in its faults and in its virtues he was typical of the national character, and it is this which has kept his personality alive even for those who could give little connected account of his acts as a Minister. By birth, by education, by sympathy, he represented the landed aristocracy, which, in spite of the successive steps which have stripped it of much of its power and its privilege, still retains its hold upon the hearts of Englishmen. He was a bold and courageous leader, a faithful servant, a generous friend. He had no interest in great social ques- tions, and neither respected, nor was capable of understand- ing, any popular aspirations. But he was resolute to maintain the power of the Crown and its Settlement as determined by the Revolution; and, without troubling him- self with principles, he sincerely believed in these aims as making for the prosperity of the nation. More than any previous Minister, he looked upon the House of Commons as (what which he largely contributed to make it) the repre- sentative of what was good and bad in that part of the nation which had any interest in politics, and he learned to play upon its moods and humours, and to understand its caprices, with that easy dexterity which is the essential equipment of a modern parliamentary leader. While aspir- ing to no purity of self-abnegation, he descended to no personal meanness, and pursued no merely selfish aims. Such political ambition as inspired him was sound and wholesome, and he was not so absorbed in political schemes as to forget, in his retirement at Houghton, the healthy instincts of sport, SIR ROBERT WALPOLE. 101 and that interest in art which enabled him to form an almost unique collection of its finest specimens, and to transmit to his son an inheritance of cultured taste. But, on the other hand, as in his private life he shared to the full the coarseness and libertinism of the age, so in his public life he not only refused his sympathy to political principle, but dealt out to it nothing but contempt. His experience of the hollowness of hypocritical professions taught him to disbelieve in the very possibility of political honesty. For him each man had his price; and in the estimation of that price he attained to the skill of an adept, Siud based his power upon a cunningly built fabric of cor- ruption. With all his financial ability, he followed no financial principle with consistency. He neither sought to build up any national institution, nor treated those that ex- isted with the respect either of sympathy or of determined opposition. The Church claimed none of his reverence, and, on the other hand, a certain political sympathy with the Dissenters did not lead him to question her claims : for him she was simply an instrument of government. Adroit as was his management of Parliament, he felt no pride in its history or its traditions. He saw that a vigorous executive was necessary, and yet, if he troubled himself to look ahead at all, he must have seen that the Government was grossly failing in its duty to the mass of the nation. We have a curious instance of this dereliction of duty in a saying of his which Lord Hervey reports in his ' Memoirs ' : "If you ever come to govern this country, and if you hope to do it in peace, never leave it without an army, and never let that army, at lowest, be reduced to less than 18,000 men." This conviction, uttered in the privacy of intercourse to one whom he then believed to be a sincere friend, did not prevent him from imperilling the national safety in obedience to that out- cry against a standing army on the part of the patriots which was of all others the most fatuous. His greatest praise, indeed, was that he was more honest than most politicians, in an age when most were scoundrels; stronger and more able than most, when most were mastered by cowardice, frivolity, and affectation. His task was not an easy one. He had, first of all, to maintain himself, by dexterous management, in the good graces of a royal family whose faults and divisions went far to undo the work of Walpole in buttressing their tenure of power. History presents few spectacles more degrading than the sordid tragi -comedy which was enacted in the daily life of St James's. We are compelled to accord to 102 CONTEMPORARY POLITICS IN ENGLAND. George II. the merit of personal courage, and of a certain odd perspicacity, which give him an insight into the char- acters of men; but beyond these, there is hardly a trait in his character which can redeem him from contempt. He was utterly without letters or refinement — a coarse and vulgar bully; yet his petty conceit and vacillation made him the easy tool of any one who cared to study his foibles. For his wife he had an affection which was wholly composed of selfishness, which prompted him to write to her in terms of rapturous affection that became contemptible in their mawkishness, and yet did not prevent him from indulging in habitual infidelity, and even from pouring into her ears his rakish confidences in a style which would have been deemed a libel on humanity had it been imitated in the most licentious drama of the day. The people of England were the objects only of his hatred, expressed in the incoherent vituperation of his childish spleen; and the hatred and contempt were cordially returned. He was ignorant of our history and of our Constitution, and re- garded his English dominions as only an inconvenient appendage to his Hanoverian Electorate. Selfish and tyran- nical as husband and as father, he was equally ungrateful as a master. But he earned the faithful service of his- Minister, the toleration of his people, and the regard and submission of his wife, only because his death might usher in evils even more serious than his own childish and grovelling selfishness. By his side there was another figure of infinitely greater interest, but requiring from Walpole as wary and cautious management. Caroline of Anspach, the queen of George II., was a personality of strange contradictions, which, if it does not attract our affection, yet cannot but interest as a tragic study of human nature. Proud, able, and ambitious, and yet stooping to the meanest arts ; a dissembler of her feelings, untrue to her word, and yet constant enough to those who claimed her gratitude ; loving and yet vindictive ; haughty and yet submissive to the king ; with little tincture of piety or reverence, and yet dying with the heroism of a martyr and the gentleness of a saint ; full of passion and capable of tenderness, but yet nursing with relentless per- severance that hatred for her eldest son which craved his death as its only possible satisfaction, — such a character was one which demanded dexterous treatment from a Minister who had to preserve his influence with husband and with wife, and yet to conceal from both the contempt and re- pulsion which their mutual relation must inspire, and to DIFFICULTY OF HIS TASK. 103 conciliate on their behalf a people whom the picture of their domestic life did so much to alienate. In the larger sphere of parliamentary management Wal- pole's task was not less dilBficult. In the earlier years of his power, Walpole had to face the relentless hostility of the Tory party who saw in his Ministry the downfall of all their hopes and ambitions, and who numbered in their ranks all that was most brilliant in the genius of the nation. That party had at their command the most tremendous weapons of satire and invective which our literature could boast and which eloquence could devise. The faults of those whom he displaced were cunningly concealed, and consummate controversial skill was able to turn against him all the topics that appealed to popular prejudice. A party that sees itself hopelessly excluded from power can easily claim a monopoly of political virtue, and can securely pour forth the vials of its wrath upon the errors of the Government even when these errors are more free from the taint of corruption that clung to Walpole's parliamentary leader- ship. The dangers of Jacobitism could be readily glozed over, even at the moment that the secret hopes of the Jaco- bites were encouraged and their support secured. The fears of a Jacobite invasion might be treated as imaginary, even while it was known that the unpopularity of the Hanoverian family and the insecurity of the actual settlement were so great that hardly any statesman was free from the sus- picion of trafficking with the exiled house. Meanwhile all the social turpitude, all the political corruption, all that was distasteful to the people, and all that wounded their pride, might be turned against the Minister and reiterated with all the sting which literary genius could impart, and all the impressiveness which eloquence could command. But it might seem that in 1740 this formidable alliance of vituperation had spent its force. The careers of the most relentless of Walpole's enemies were either ended or on the wane. The hand which had pictured him in the Flimnap of Lilliput had now lost its cunning, and Swift was sinking into the grave amidst the clouds and darkness of mental lethargy. Bolingbroke's work was nearly done, and his character and influence were spent. Wyndham was dead, and Pope had already sped his most venomed arrows of satire, and even in his latest attack had seemed to moderate his anger in recalling his own intercourse with Walpole — " in his happier hour Of social pleasure, ill-exchanged for power." 104 CONTEMPORARY POLITICS IN ENGLAND. Walpole might well suppose that his tenure of power would outlast the rancour of his enemies, and that he would live to see the bubble of patriotism burst. But in truth the satire had been too well -pointed, and had found too many weak joints in his armour to permit it to have no effect. The appeals to patriotism might be insincere, the motives of the attack might be selfish and personal, but they had appealed to a widespread and not altogether unsound instinct in the nation. The suspicion that England was being sacrificed to Hanover was a real one, and it deepened the dislike of the nation to a family that had no personal qualities to counteract the feeling. " If we wish to secure ourselves against any danger from the Pretender," said Chesterfield, "let us procure for him the Electorate of Hanover: from that quarter at least we shall never seek a king." And beyond all accidental cir- cumstances of discontent there lay the deeper feeling that the whole system of political conduct which Walpole repre- sented was doomed. Prudent men might dread the removal of his wise management, and might see greater ill in store for us. But stronger than such prudence was the stirring of new forces of deeper earnestness of conviction, and a foretaste of the greater part which England was destined to play amongst the nations. The patriotism of William Pitt and the Toryism of Samuel Johnson were not feelings that owed their existence to factious rancour or to ignoble self-seeking. In 1740, however, it might have seemed as if Walpole would retain his power as long as he lived. His enemies were an ill-assorted crowd, without any consistency of prin- ciple, and certain to quarrel over their share of the spoils of victory should it fall to their lot. Again and again during the session of 1740 they tried conclusions with him, but always came off" the worse in the struggle. When the new election came, however, the extent of his unpopularity was seen. The result was due to a concurrence of forces. One who has been Minister for twenty years must necessarily make many enemies, and Walpole's gradual absorption of power, and his intolerance of any rival in the camp, had alienated almost all men of ability from his side. Carteret, brilliant and ambitious, but flighty, eccentric, and unstable ; Chesterfield, the wittiest, if not the most eloquent, of the peers; Argyle, for nearly forty years a foremost power in the State, whose fiery temper and impetuous pride did not lessen the respect due to his high character and great ser- vices in counsel and in camp ; even Hervey, Walpole's old confidant, whose captious cynicism did not prevent his being DECAY OF WALPOLE's POWER. 105 a useful ally, — all these had joined with Pulteney, the leader of the Tories, William Pitt, the foremost of the younger Patriots, and Shippen, the representative of the Jacobites, in denouncing, night after night, "the sole Minister," "the execrable Minister," " the author of all our misfortunes," " the engrosser of power," " the corrupter of Parliament," " the Min- ister who left us to be the prey of our enemies, and yet forged for our liberties the chain of a standing army." The real weakness of Walpole's position was that he had no distinct domestic or foreign policy to oppose to the attacks of his enemies. His administration had been one of subter- fuges and devices — dexterous, indeed, but by their very nature incapable of commanding allegiance or drawing together the ranks of a party. Skilful as he was in finance, and adroitly as he had managed to avoid offence either to the landed or the moneyed classes, yet he could point to no distinct financial policy, and had started scheme after scheme only to abandon them in the face of popular tumult. It was to no purpose that he pleaded in foreign affairs that he " did not raise the war in Germany, or advise the war with Spain, or kill the late Emperor or King of Prussia; that he was not First Minister to the King of Poland, and did not kindle the war between Muscovy and Sweden." Such an argument is childish in its futility. No sane man would blame an English Minister for the exist- ence of foreign complications; but no one who thinks of his country's welfare would deem him worthy of his place if he fail to find a consistent plan for meeting these com- plications as they arise. To one line of conduct Walpole had hitherto been consistent — he had resisted war. It was when he surrendered this last remnant of consistency, and yielded to clamour by going to war with Spain, that he precipitated his fall. Just before that war broke out there occurred an incident which graphically illustrates the blindness with which the afiairs of Scotland were treated, and the apathy which had been bred in English Ministers to the dangers which they threatened. One of the wisest of the Scottish adherents of the Ministry — Duncan Forbes of Culloden — conceived a plan for employing the fighting power of the Highlands to assist and not to endanger England's interests. He laid his scheme — which was one for the embodiment of some of the High- land clans as regiments in the British army, with English colonels, but officered by the leading men in the clans — before Lord Milton, the confidant of Lord Islay. Both by Milton and by Islay it was received with the utmost favour. Islay brought it before Walpole, and by him also it was 106 CONTEMPORARY POLITICS IN ENGLAND. deemed a measure of the highest wisdom. War was threaten- ing, and it was far better to engage these born warriors on England's side rather than leave them to the dangerous incitements of her enemies. But Walpole's colleagues re- fused their assent. They would not give to the Patriots the chance of saying that they armed Jacobite rebels as defenders of the country. Walpole was forced to submit, and the scheme was abandoned, only to be renewed after the danger had proved itself a real one, and when the genius of Chatham realised how the most dangerous enemies of the Crown might be made the strongest bulwark in its defence. The end came soon after the beginning of the new Parlia- ment. The election of a Chairman of Committees and the various election petitions served as trials of strength, and Walpole held his own only by a few votes. At length a motion for a Secret Committee to inquire into the conduct of affairs was lost only by three votes in a full House. This was followed by actual defeat on an election petition. Wal- pole yielded to the urgency of his friends, and resigned office on 31st January 1741-2, being created Earl of Orford on his retirement. Never did the fall of a Minister more completely disappoint the hopes of those who had united only for his discomfiture, and who enjoyed a brief triumph in his defeat. The cant- word amongst them was the cry for a Ministry "on a Broad Bottom " — a phrase which, under a specious pretence of uniting all parties, might in reality seem to offer satisfaction to many miscellaneous ambitions. But no such ideal was put into practice. To all intents and purposes the Ministry remained a Ministry of Whigs. The king was at no pains to show his irritation at the success of what he deemed an unscrup- ulous Opposition. When Walpole came to announce his resignation George II. fell on his neck in tears, lamented his loss as a personal misfortune, and besought his frequent presence at Court. Wilmington — the same useless figure- head who had for a brief space taken Walpole's place at the beginning of the reign, when it had seemed that his influence was broken — was again recalled to be First Lord of the Treasury. Carteret became Secretary of State, and his son-in-law, the Marquis of Tweeddale, was named to the restored office of Secretary for Scotland. But Lord Hard- wicke remained Lord Chancellor; the Duke of Newcastle, and his brother, Henry Pelham, retained their places in the Government ; while Pulteney, who, having in the rash expan- siveness of opposition fervour foresworn office, thought it due to his own consistency to refuse nomination, was created FEEBLENESS OF THE NEW MINISTRY. 107 Earl of Bath, and found his influence destroyed by the defeat of his old opponent. Argyle accepted office for the moment, and was nominated as commander in Flanders ; but when he found that the Ministry was not to be sufficiently " broad- bottomed" to admit some of the Jacobites whom, strange to say, he counted amongst his adherents, he threw up office in disgust, and continued to oppose all the measures of the Court. William Murray, indeed, who was supposed to have Jacobite leanings, chiefly from the fact that his brother, the titular Earl of Dunbar, was the Pretender's First Minister, was soon after brought into office as Solicitor-General. But his stately eloquence and profound intellect were not framed to be the tools of party intrigue, and his character kept him aloof from all factious combinations. The Ministers found themselves openly insulted and derided by the king, who still, on all emergencies, sought the advice of his former Minister. From his retirement at Houghton, Wal- pole, or, as he now was, Lord Orford, continued largely to guide the aflairs of the nation, and to act, in his opponents' own words, as " the Minister behind the curtain." To gratify their spleen, and to fan the smouldering flame of popular indignation, Walpole's opponents sought to pursue the inquiry into his past conduct which would, as they hoped, prove him guilty of flagrant malversation of public money. But in truth the prosecution was half-hearted, and showed itself more by its vindictiveness than by its energy. For a short time there were mighty breathings of wrath. Walpole and his brother were to be committed to the Tower, and windows, so it was said, had been hired on the route by which they were to be conveyed thither, by those who wished to triumph over the ruin of the all-powerful Minister. Official witnesses were bullied and browbeaten ; and matters went so far between Pitt and Mr Scrope, the old Secretary to the Treasury, during the examination of the latter, that the octogenarian official would fain have challenged to a duel the future Earl of Chatham. But Walpole could afford to smile at all these fierce threatenings which quickly spent their force. The Ministry found themselves compelled to adopt the old measures. The pay was again voted for the Hano- verian troops. A new campaign of the Allies in Flanders was planned. What called itself the Government of the country was reduced to its old round of petty intrigue and selfish struggle for place, without any thread of definite policy either for domestic or for foreign aflairs ; only for one able Minister there was substituted a knot of incompetent bunglers, from whom the ablest even of their own nominal followers held aloof. Such was their lack of financial ability 108 CONTEMPORARY POLITICS IN ENGLAND. that they were at their wits' end for money, and the City men began to call for the restoration of Walpole on his own terms, with the bribe of exchanging his new earldom for a dukedom. It is no part of our business now to enter into the ignoble details of these baffled intrigues. But there is another aspect of the change of Ministry and the defeat of Walpole which has a very immediate bearing on our present theme. Little as his opponents could master it, and poorly as their own bark could ride upon its current, the tide that had overturned Walpole's rule was still a strong and steady one. It was certain to rise until the nation learned its own dignity, rose to take its proper place in the world, and made it impossible for any government to rest on a basis of systematic corruption. Walpole might smile at the baffled efforts of his enemies. His own influence lasted to his death, and his own courage and resourcefulness have won for him an honourable place in history. But, none the less, the day of professed cynicism in politics was doomed. Patriotism was no longer to be a by- word and an object of contempt, but the standard and the weapon by which national glory and national prosperity were to be won. The man who was to raise that standard to its highest was amongst Walpole's bitterest assailants, but he was no sharer in the immediate division of the spoils. We may, indeed, search in vain for anything in Pitt's action at this time — save his refusal to accept office — to show that he saw the hollowness and selfishness that marked the momen- tary triumph of Walpole's opponents. But with him the denunciations that had preceded Walpole's fall had a sounder foundation than greed for office ; and his later career realised the deeper national instincts that had given weight and mean- ing to the indignation roused by Walpole's methods. Rightly or wrongly the Tory party, which recalled the days before the Hanoverian succession, when divisions of party had at least some intelligible basis, looked back upon its own traditions as something better than those of personal intrigue and parliamentary corruption. For it the diatribes of Bolingbroke and Wyndham and Pulteney, and the satire of Swift and Pope, had a real and stimulating meaning. Its ad- herents inherited the traditions of the Cavaliers, sublimated and idealised by the lapse of time. For them, quite apart from the sordid reality of intrigue, the change of Government seemed to have a deeper meaning, and to renew the traditions of their youth. Horace Walpole tells us, with a sneer, how the old ladies " who had not been dressed these twenty years are come out in all the accoutrements that were in use in Queen Anne's days." "The joy and awkward jollity of THE JACOBITE OPPORTUNITY. 109 them," he says, " is inexpressible." " If ever I come to Court again/' they had said to one another, "I will have a pink and silver, or a blue and silver " ; " and they keep their resolution." Walpole might smile; but the old ladies and their husbands represented no contemptible feeling all the same. All the country squires were not Squire Westerns, and it was not for nothing that men like Shippen the Jaco- bite became proverbial for honesty, and that even Sir Robert Walpole himself was compelled to own that Shippen was the only man whose price be could not name. If this underlying feeling of satisfaction pervaded the Tories, still more did it permeate that fringe of the Tories who were avowed Jacobites. These last might be excluded from office, but none the less the change told powerfully in their favour. Their principles might be disowned by those who enjoyed a hollow triumph in the fall of Walpole; but in that fall the Jacobites found their opportunity. The oppo- sition to Walpole had been, as George II. rightly understood, in great measure an opposition to the house of Hanover ; and just as his fall had kindled their hopes at home, so the war with France, in which the nation was now fully engaged, gave them new chances abroad. The letters from the Court of St Germains "commanded the Jacobites, and exhorted the Patriots, to continue what they had mutually so well begun, and said how pleased the king was with their having removed Mr Tench " (Sir Robert Walpole).^ Could words more accur- ately describe the situation ? The Patriots and the Jacobites were not destined to run on even lines ; but, for the moment, was there not something which linked them to one another in their satisfaction at the discomfiture of a common foe, even although the apparent spoils of the victory fell into other hands ? Unconscious of the larger issues involved, this ill-assorted Government pursued its own blundering way. There were not wanting men of high ability in its ranks ; but either, like Lord Hardwicke, the Chancellor, and Murray, the Solicitor- General, they pursued the even tenor of their own career, and held aloof from the selfish intrigue that was rife amongst their colleagues; or, like Carteret, they treated the whole affair as a jest, and openly sneered and flouted those whose counsels they nominally shared. We are not concerned with the details of the administration. Insulted by the king, despised by the nation, without cohesion, and without a policy, they were compelled to follow the very course in foreign affairs which they had repeatedly assailed. 1 Horace Walpole to Sir Horace Mann, June 30, 1742. 110 CONTEMPORARY POLITICS IN ENGLAND. The conduct of foreign affairs was entirely in the hands of Carteret, who, with an astonishing amount of rant and extravagance, and in spite of habitual excess and dissipation, yet possessed an unrivalled knowledge of European affairs, and whose linguistic skill gave him an enormous advantage in conducting the negotiations with the foreign Powers. The spring of 1743 found the plans arranged for a new campaign, which was to be conducted under the command of the aged Earl of Stair, long ambassador to France. In that expedition the king and his younger son, the Duke of Cumberland, were to take part, while Carteret accompanied them in person to manage the delicate task of diplomatic negotiations. But so strong was the impression of feeble and vacillating counsels, that the prospect of actual fighting was hardly taken seriously. There was talk of a real battle in Italy. " Our ofiicers who are going to Flanders," says Walpole, "don't quite like it; they are afraid it should grow the fashion to fight, and that a pair of colours should no longer be a sinecure." But " our troops are actually marched, and the officers begin to follow them — I hope they know whither ! " Walpole's gossip is, of course, that of an unfriendly critic, but it serves to show the prevailing current of feeling, that would not treat as serious anything in which the miscellaneous group that called itself a Government were engaged. There were not wanting some ominous signs of danger at home. Amongst the troops ordered abroad was a Highland regiment who had no taste for the expedition. When it was urged that their absence would leave the country unprotected against a Jacobite rebellion, the reply was made that their being sent abroad would make 800 fewer rebels at home; and they proved the soundness of the suspicion by deserting in large numbers before embarkation. But in June 1743 all England was startled by the news of a glorious victory, won by the English and Hanoverian forces under Stair against the French under Marshal de Noailles, at Dettingen on the Mayne. The king and his son, the Duke of Cumberland, had not only taken part in the fight, but had shown indubitable valour. Against overwhelming numbers, and in spite of great disadvantages of position, the allies had fought splendidly, and the king, by his own intrepidity, had turned the fight at the most critical period in its fortunes. His son had been wounded, after showing that he possessed the royal virtues of courage and military sagacity. It might well seem that the unpopularity of the Hanoverian alliance would now diminish, and that the Hanoverian dynasty would attract to itself some of the love of Englishmen. Whatever his feelings might be to the new Ministry, Walpole was too MOMENTARY SUCCESS OF THE GOVERNMENT. Ill good an Englishman to grudge the triumph. He drank to the healths of Lord Stair and Carteret, and "since it was well done, did not care by whom it was done." But, in the result, these hopes were to a large degree dis- appointed. George II. failed to secure the momentary pop- ularity which his victorious courage had gained for him. Stair, enraged at what he deemed neglect of himself, and jealous of his Hanoverian allies, threw up his command. Carteret's triumph made him careless of hiding his contempt for his colleagues, and he was determined either to be First Minister or nothing. The glories of the victory, on the other hand, were disparaged by the Jacobites, and Carteret's despatches were burlesqued. The death of Wilmington in July left the post of Prime Minister vacant, and a struggle ensued between Carteret and his opponents, in which, sorely against the king's sympathies, the latter proved successful. The Duke of Newcastle, whose fussy frivolity rendered him ridiculous, and his brother, Henry Pelham, who represented a poorer reflection of Walpole, were yet too strong in their parliamentary influence to permit the personal regard which Carteret had won from the king to prevail. After protracted bargainings, the king was compelled to set aside his favourite, Lord Carteret, upon whom alone he could count for the support of the Hanoverian subsidies. The "puppy," New- castle, he would have at no price; but the post of First Lord was eventually conferred on Henry Pelham. For a time Carteret acquiesced in this arrangement, and the Ministry seemed to have acquired additional strength. But every means was resorted to by the Jacobites to rouse the nation against the Hanoverian policy, and to aggravate the unpopularity of the king and his Ministers. The ques- tion of retaining the Hanoverian troops in English pay was fiercely debated. Pitt thundered against Carteret even more bitterly than he had before against Walpole. He was "the Hanoverian-troop Minister," "a flagitious taskmaster"; "the 16,000 Hanoverians were all the party that he had, and were his placemen." The Pelhams were alarmed, and were anxious to temporise. The king fretted ; and Carteret, secure of the king's sympathy, braved unpopularity in defending the Hano- verian alliance. At Court there was nothing but distracted counsels: "there was no joy but in the Jacobites." One item alone was some consolation to the Ministers — the death of the Duke of Argyle in September 1743. The memory of his great services, and his unrivalled influence in the North, still made him a great power in the country; and it is hard to say what line he might have followed had he lived to see the outbreak of the rebellion. It is certain that of late he 112 CONTEMPORARY POLITICS IN ENGLAND. had shown some sympathy with the Jacobites, under the impulse of his discontent, and the rankling of disappointed ambition; but whether he would actually have joined in armed rebellion may well be doubted. Had he done so, the danger, great as it actually was, would have been immeasur- ably increased. Meanwhile the French, stimulated by their defeat, had turned to the exiled family as a ready instrument for taking vengeance on their foe. The renewal of Jacobite hopes, and the definite reopening of a scheme of restoration, dates almost immediately after the outbreak of the war with Spain in 1739. In 1740 seven leading Scottish Jacobites, who possessed large influence in the Highlands — the Earl of Traquair and his brother John Stuart; Lord Lovat; the titular Duke of Perth, and his uncle Lord John Drummond ; Sir James Campbell of Auchinbreck, and the younger Cameron of Lochiel — had entered into an association which pledged them to rise in arms as soon as adequate help was provided from abroad. Other associations were formed on the same footing throughout Scotland; and now it seemed as if the condition for which they stipulated was about to be fulfilled. However little the danger of these movements might be appreciated by the English Government, who were no way disturbed at the local troubles of Scotland, the French Court judged the case more truly ; and, indeed, it was chiefly through Scottish agents that the negotiations about foreign assistance were carried on. The death of Fleury had placed Cardinal Tencin in power as the chief Minister of France, and he was stirred not only by his per- sonal sympathies but by what appeared to be the interests of the French Crown, to make himself the champion of the Jaco- bite cause. In 1744 that championship took very definite form ; and once more Jacobite hopes were to be stimulated by promises which, however serious they seemed at first to be, were destined in their results to be as barren and de- lusive as those with which they had so often been beguiled. Already in June 1743 Cardinal Tencin had become so convinced that the Jacobite cause was one which it suited the interests of France to promote, that he wrote to James's Court at Rome and asked that Prince Charles Edward, his eldest son, should come to Paris. The exiled King was only too ready to accept any proffered succour, but he hesitated to take a step which would undoubtedly arouse suspicion, and stimulate defensive measures on the part of the English Cabinet, until the French preparations were more advanced. Meanwhile he could only temporise and PRINCE CHARLES EDWARD. 113 profess his gratitude for the encouragement given to his cause. The young Prince was of a character which prompted him to seize such an opportunity with eagerness. We shall have to watch his qualities as they show themselves here- after in the heroic enterprise which gives him his place in history, and which redeems the degradation that clings about his later days, when baffled hopes, and the dull lethargy of despair, had sunk him into selfish and besotted uselessness. But now, in spite of all defects of education, which had left him in many ways ignorant and untutored, he had, by universal testimony, all the heroic courage, the energy, and the power of steady endurance which made him a fit leader of a forlorn hope, and all the magnetic power of attraction which rivetted the affections of his followers. From his father he inherited consummate grace and dignity of manner, which impressed the imagination of those to whom their loyalty was as a religion, which the misfortunes of the exiled house kindled into enthusiasm. The religious devotion which, in his father, passed into superstition and savoured more of the monk than of the king, was in him only a graceful trait of reverent and pious filial duty, and was tempered with the high spirit of a young man who shunned gaiety and fashion rather from a stern self- discipline than from a want of taste. From his mother's family he inherited the heroism which had enabled John Sobieski to maintain a long and adverse struggle against overwhelming odds. The training which his father's mock court had given him might well have excused an ignorance of the world, and an absolute unfitness for facing the stern realities of a desperate military undertaking ; and the atmo- sphere of petty jealousy and intrigue in which his youth had been spent might well have given to the petulance of youth an utter incapacity of conceiving higher motives, or of play- ing a hero's part upon a wider stage. As it was, the dignity of lofty purpose, courageous patience in the face of disappoint- ment, and firm determination to subordinate all other aims to the one supreme object for which he was ready to sacrifice his life, and to which filial piety as well as patriotic duty appeared to summon him, could not shine more clearly than they do through the ill-spelt and boyish letters which he continued to address to the king after he had set out upon the enterprise in which heroic loyalty was once again, and for the last time, to attempt to undo the work of history, and revive hopes that might have seemed for ever withered and decayed. His education had been neglected, his range H 114 CONTEMPORARY POLITICS IN ENGLAND. of experience had been narrow, but he had the rare power, which in spite of all other blemishes gives the stamp of greatness to its possessor — that of discerning, and rising to the height of, a great opportunity. That the aims of the band of which he was the centre should be mistaken and foredoomed to failure ; that history had already written an adverse verdict, in characters only too clear, upon the cause which he represented — nay, even that he was himself to decline into a discredited and degraded age, — all these do not rob him of the glory of seizing the right moment for acting a hero's part in the last struggle of a lost but still romantic cause. Early in January 1744 the Young Chevalier started from Rome, with a commission from his father appointing him regent with full powers. Already France had gathered 15,000 veterans at Dunkirk ready to embark in transports ; and two fleets to convoy them, of eighteen vessels of the line, were collected in the harbours of Rochefort and Brest. On the 9th of January the young Prince set out in dis- guise, attended by only a single servant; set sail from Savona, and, landing near Cannes, travelled speedily to Paris, arriving there on the 20th of the same month. At the French Court there was still so much of hesitation that the Prince was not accorded a personal interview with the king, and retired to Gravelines, where, under an assumed name, he awaited the maturing of events. Meanwhile the combined fleets of Rochefort and Brest, under the command of Admiral Roquefeuille, advanced up the Channel, where an English fleet of much greater strength, under Sir John Norris, an aged though experienced officer,^ awaited their arrival. Roquefeuille anchored at Dungeness, where Norris, instead of blockading Dunkirk, watched the French fleet, and prepared, with a timid deliberation, to attack. Great crowds gathered on the coast to watch an expected engage- ment, which, had it occurred, might only have left another part of the coast clear for the transports to disembark their troops. But Roquefeuille was unable to risk an engage- ment. He sailed off" under cover of the night; and at the same time, fortunately for the English Government, a storm, which blew directly on Dunkirk, not only forced Roque- feuille to retire to French harbours, but utterly destroyed the transports, upon which 7000 troops had already been embarked. Many of these transports were wrecked, and some were lost with all on board. The hopes of the expedi- ^ The frequency with which he had to account for misfortunes by adverse cir- cumstances procured for him the nickname of "foul- weather Jack." CARTERET AND HIS COLLEAGUES. 115 tion were ruined before it had begun, and the attempt was never again renewed. The Marshal de Saxe, who was to have commanded the expedition, was sent to another seat of war; and once more the prospect of French assistance, which had so often beguiled the fancy of the Jacobites, proved but a broken reed. The danger which had threatened England had roused the keenest alarm, and for a time it looked as if preparations had been too long delayed amidst the bickerings of faction. The feeling of many in London was that the Hanoverian dynasty might soon be overturned. All England could furnish only some 7000 troops to oppose the landing of an army, and to collect even these would be a work of time ; and it would be still longer before the ten battalions summoned from Flanders, and 4000 men from Ireland, could arrive. Carteret, the Minister chiefly in the confidence of the king, had aroused the jealousy of his colleagues, and his compliance with the king's Hanoverian inclinations had kindled against him the most bitter opposition. Only the overmastering sense of a common danger had for a time closed the breaches, and produced a semblance of union amongst the prominent leaders. When the danger seemed to have passed in the month of March, the bitterness of opposition to Carteret was again renewed ; and even the declaration of war by France in the same month did not suffice to lessen the anger of those who deemed that Carteret's action would lead to the waste of English lives and resources in a protracted European war for objects not her own. In the autumn of 1744 the struggle between Carteret and his nominal colleagues in the Ministry reached an acute stage.^ He was resolved to be supreme, and rightly conceived that he understood far more than they the complications of foreign politics and the preparations which they required. They, on the other hand, relied on their parliamentary support, but dreaded lest the denunciations of Pitt and the Tories might, by accentuating the odiousness of the Hanoverian subvention, involve the loss of that parliamentary support, and overwhelm them in a common disaster with Granville. The king still clung to his favourite, and strove to maintain him against his foes. But the general feeling was too strong even for the king, and in November 1744 he was obliged to sacrifice Granville to the clamour which his action had aroused. The ^ In October 1744, by the death of his mother, Carteret became Earl Granville. All London was amused when this year, in the midst of the excitement of the political struggle, he married Lady Sophia Fermor, a reigning beauty younger than his own daughters. His first wife had died in June 1743. 116 CONTEMPORARY POLITICS IN ENGLAND. genius, the eloquence, the brilliant scholarship, the all-embrac- ing accomplishment, the daring and the dash of Granville, were compelled to give way to the wily tactics and the stolid pedantry of Pelham, and to the fantastic folly of that "comedian hired to burlesque the character of a Minister,"^ his brother, the Duke of Newcastle. Pelham became First Lord of the Treasury, and held the office till his death in 1754, only to be succeeded by the duke. The Ministry was reconstituted more on the model which had been aimed at three years before, of the Broad-bottom. Not Tories only, but even suspected Jacobites, were given office. Pitt was conciliated, not by office, from which he still stood aloof, but by the defeat of his chief enemy, Granville and by promises that meant the speedy gratification of his am- bition. The opponent of the Hanoverian subsidies, which had stirred his wrath when Granville was chief Minister, and which had led him to stigmatise that statesman as one who "had drunk of the potion which poets have described as causing men to forget their country," he now found in these subsidies one means of gaining for England that great place amongst the nations of which his imagination already pictured himself as the champion. By a process of comprehension, the bitter- ness of opposition was conciliated, and the burst of indignant feeling, which had shaken the Hanoverian settlement, seemed to be appeased when Granville had been made the scapegoat of its wrath. In March 1745 the death of Walpole, who had lived long enough to see his own fall avenged in the bicker- ings amongst his successors, seemed to remove the last land- mark of the struggles which had raged so fiercely a few years- before. The Ministers could boast that in the House of Commons " there was no man of business, or even of weight,, left capable of heading or conducting an opposition." In May 1745 the Duke of Cumberland, with the Austrian and Dutch allies, suffered at Fontenoy a defeat at the hands of Marshal de Saxe which was not without some of the glory of a victory ; and at the call of national danger, and with the hope of national glory, the ranks closed and the bitterness of faction was for the moment soothed to silence. It was in such circumstances that the Young Chevalier and his scanty band of adherents were to renew for the last time, and with no adventitious aid, the struggle which was to leave a mark of such heroic effort on the page of history. ^ Smollett in JIuraphrey Clinker, 117 CHAPTER VI. FROM THE OUTBREAK OF THE REBELLION TO THE BATTLE OF PRESTONPANS. Very scanty and ineffective measures of police had been adopted for the pacification of the Highlands in the genera- tion which had elapsed since the Rebellion of 1715. The population, as we have seen, remained in a state of isolation. No steps were taken to bring about any real intercourse between Lowlands and Highlands. The clan system re- mained untouched. No schemes were set on foot for pro- viding employment for the disordered hosts of the mountains, who were almost forced to live by preying on their southern neighbours. There was no attempt to bring them to coalesce with the more thriving population on whom they bordered, and side by side with whom they lived — so closely that in many petty villages the inhabitants of neighbouring hovels did not understand one another's language, and led different lives. In the town of Nairn we are told that one portion of the town was Gaelic, another Scottish, and the two lived like people apart. Education was utterly neglected in these regions; and the Parish School system, whatever it did for the rest of Scotland, was there powerless against the influ- ence of the chiefs, who disdained an influence that would have undermined their power. Such measures as were taken were merely directed to the repression of robbery and dis- order, and to the provision of means whereby military authority might be exercised. To the amelioration of the Highland people those responsible for the government gave no thought. These measures of repression, however, were exercised with no harshness or cruelty. They were the measures of a military authority, and they did not seek to put in practice any philanthropic scheme. But the authority was in the wise and moderate hands of General Wade. His 118 THE REBELLION TO THE BATTLE OF PRESTONPANS. first anxiety was to put a stop to ever -recurring rapine, and to a certain extent he did this with success. He established a sort of armed police recruited partly from the Highland clans. He had the help of some of the better chiefs, who, if they exacted a payment for the check they imposed upon the robberies of their own or other clans, which came perilously near to blackmail, yet carried out their part of the bargain with a rough justice. For his armed men he established a series of small forts throughout the country which kept the various districts in some sort of discipline. These smaller forts were sub- sidiary to a chain of larger garrisons, where considerable bodies of troops were kept. The garrisons were those of Fort William to the south, Fort Augustus at the lower end of Loch Ness, and Fort George close to Inverness. On Loch Ness itself he placed an armed sloop, which might convey bodies of troops quickly where their services might be required; and by these means, without putting in force any violent measures of repression, he succeeded in over- awing disaffected districts, and made a respectable show of authority for the Government. Above all, he constructed a series of roads through the mountain-passes which were admirably adapted for the movements of large bodies of troops, and for the transport of artillery. In the construc- tion of these roads he occupied the men of his military police, and thus prevented the inconvenient presence of an idle soldiery, and gave an example of industry which was not lost upon the people. The making of these roads required the highest engineering skill then available, and the means by which the roughest obstacles were overcome, and impenetrable fastnesses were traversed by easy highways, served to impress upon the people a high sense of the skill and contrivance of their new masters. There were three main lines of these roads. Starting from Stirling and going north-west by GriefF and Aberfeldy, the first reached Glengarry at Dalnacardoch. Thence it went over the mountains to Dalwhinnie, by the track now followed by the railway. At Dalwhinnie one road went by the valley of the Spey to Kingussie, and thence to Inverness and Fort George. The other went in a more westerly direction, and crossing the steep sides of Corryarrick by a zigzag of nine traverses, descended upon Fort Augustus. A third road went from Loch Lomond by Dalmally and Tyndrum, penetrated the lonely recesses of Glencoe, and so reached Fort William. Thence it skirted Loch Lochy and Loch Oich on the south side, and crossing at Fort Augustus, MANAGEMENT OF THE HIGHLANDS. 119 went on the northern side of Loch Ness to Inverness — following in the main the line of the present Caledonian Canal. These roads opened new accesses to the Highlands, and made easy the quick movement of troops, which had before been possible only to the military genius of a Montrose, a Dundee, or a Mackay, and then only for light- armed bands, who had no knowledge of artillery as an arm of war. Whatever were its limitations, and however little it attempted to raise the level of the Highland population, Wade's work was thoroughly well done. So long as he had a free hand the Highlands at least wore the appear- ance of peace and order. But the short-sighted policy of the Government destroyed much of its benefit. The advice given by Wade and by his most prudent coadjutor, Duncan Forbes, was deliberately set aside. The Highland police which he had embodied was disbanded, and only small garrisons of the regular army — most often the rawest recruits — were left to occupy the forts. This took place in 1740, and no sooner was it carried out than the depre- dations began again. The more lawless of the chiefs — all the more dangerous that their thieving propensity was united with a veneer of policy — renewed their old robberies without fear. Such a veteran freebooter was Macdonell of Barisdale, who covered the calling of a practised robber with the graces of a "polished behaviour, fine address, and fine person," and who interspersed his business of rapine with such addiction to the classics as enabled him to have a Latin quotation ever ready to his hand. He drew a regular income of £500 a -year from blackmail, and yet sincerely believed himself to be a benefactor to the public. But this was not the only evil that the interference with Wade's work produced. Conspirators were not slow to find their opportunity. Emissaries from abroad were ever on the move between the shores of Scotland and of France. Arms were landed, pledges of support were obtained, ominous whisperings were heard, and money was distributed adroitly as the best means of keeping alive Jacobite sym- pathies amidst a needy population, and amongst chiefs who felt their authority slipping away from them. The Govern- ment abandoned the prosecution of the sound work on which their representative was engaged. We shall presently see how little use they were able to make of that which he had already accomplished in opening the Highlands to the movements of a military force. After the failure of his hope of a strong support from PRINCE CHARLES EDWARD STUART. THE PRINCE SETS SAIL. 121 cipitating rash or headlong action. In later days an equally unfounded but much more absurd charge was brought against the Prince himself of an opposite kind. It was said that he showed pusillanimity and hesitation, and was finally only carried on board the ship that brought him to Scotland "bound hand and foot." This is the story which Hume repeated on the authority of idle gossip, but it has been amply proved to have no foundation in fact, and is contrary to every recognised trait in the Prince's character. Mis- fortune — and its sequel, despair — produced dissipation, and broke down a character at first bold and decisive in action and moderate in moments of triumph; but common justice must accord to him the honour due to a man reckless of his own life in a cause he deemed to be a noble and a righteous one. By midsummer 1745 Charles had made all the scanty preparations which were to suffice him for his bold enter- prise. He obtained some small pecuniary aid from France — to the extent of some £4000, — and he was able to secure two ships, a man-of-war of sixty guns called the Elizabeth, and a smaller frigate called the Doutelle. They belonged to two Dutch adventurers, who intended to use them as privateers. On board the Doutelle he himself sailed from Nantes on the 8th of July. The Elizabeth was attacked — probably as an ordinary French man-of-war, and with no suspicion of her destination — by the English ship the Lion. Both ships suffered heavily, and the Elizabeth was com- pelled to return to France. The Lion came back disabled to the English port ; and after the usual fashion of the day — a fashion which only became prominent, but was not for the first time resorted to, in the more famous case of Byng, a few years later — her officers were brought to trial and one of them was shot. Such was the barbarous malignity with which a feeble Government was wont to visit the misfortunes of the agents whose valour did not command success. Meanwhile Charles proceeded with a few com- panions in the Doutelle, narrowly escaping similar attacks by other English ships, and after a hazardous voyage he anchored at Erisca beside the island of South Uist. Never was a forlorn-hope started with more slender chances of success. The proprietor of the island, Macdonald of Clan- ranald, was absent on the mainland, but he was represented by his uncle, Macdonald of Borodale, whom the Prince sum- moned on board. In his case, as in that of all the others whom Charles summoned to confer, there was no shirking of the call, but his verdict was absolute against the attempt, 122 THE REBELLION TO THE BATTLE OF PRESTONPANS. which he deemed to be nothing but rank insanity. He told the Prince that Sir Alexander Macdonald of Sleat and the Macleod — the two most powerful chiefs in that part of the country — were resolved not to join unless success was made possible by the presence of a foreign force ; and his own advice would be given to his nephew Clanranald to take the same course. Borodale left him, and even the Prince's companions began to despair. Only Sir Thomas Sheridan, his tutor, — a blood relation of his own, whose Irish audacity had great influ- ence over his spirit, — pressed that more of his adherents should be consulted before the enterprise was abandoned. Charles resolved to follow this advice, and crossed from Uist to Loch Nannuagh, near Arisaig, on the 25th of July. Macdonald of Moid art, whom he first consulted, gave the same verdict as Borodale. But Moidart's younger brother Ranald listened with impatience to the interview. The quick-witted Prince perceived his chance and appealed to him, " You, at least, will not forsake me ? " "I will follow you to the death were there no other to draw a sword in your cause." Such enthusiasm is contagious. The elder brother yielded, and the bolder counsel prevailed. The Prince landed and was conducted to the house of Borodale close by; and the little band were thus committed by the chance turn of an inter- view to the task of overthrowing the well-established throne of the Hanoverian family. With no troops, with only a scanty supply of money, with no cei*tain hopes of assistance, and with the avowed opposition of some of the warmest Jacobite adherents, Charles and his companions essayed an enterprise that seemed inspired only by the madness of despair. He had seven companions : the Marquis of Tulli- bardine, who had taken part in the rising of 1715, and had been attainted, the title of Duke of Athole passing to his younger brother; Sir Thomas Sheridan; Sir John Mac- donald, a Scottish officer who had served in Spain; Francis Strickland, an English gentleman; Kelly, who had been implicated in Atterbury's plot of 1721 ; ^neas Macdonald, a brother of the chief of Moidart, now a Paris banker ; and Buchanan, who had brought Charles from Rome to Paris. The strongest and most trusted of Jacobite adherents in the Western Highlands was Cameron of Lochiel. On his support of the cause its last hopes depended, and he was summoned by the Prince. He arrived, convinced of the madness of the scheme, and resolved to urge its abandonment ; but his brother, Cameron of Fassifern, knew the character of the Prince as well as that of his own chief. "Write your opinion to the Prince," he had urged, " but do not trust yourself to the fascin- THE GOVERNAJENT ALARMED. 123 ation of his presence. I know you better than you know yourself, and you will be unable to refuse compliance." At the interview Lochiel strongly urged his doubts, but a per- sonal appeal overcame him. " I shall take the field with such as may join my standard," said the Prince ; " Lochiel, whom my father deemed our best, may remain at home and learn our fate." Lochiel yielded, and the die was cast. The task that faced the little band was to gather some semblance of a force. It was well that to his heroism the Prince joined a skill in the management of men, and a perception of character that admirably fitted him to impress the minds of the simple Highlanders by whom he was now surrounded, and to whose hearts the very weakness of his cause made a powerful appeal. The Government were slow to move, and singularly ill- informed as to the progress of the movement. But they had already received, with little disposition to credit it, the report of a landing of the Prince in the Western High- lands. It received attention so far, that some of the most suspected of the Jacobite adherents were watched, and a bungling attempt was made to arrest the titular Duke of Perth at his house of Castle Drummond. That attempt was foiled by the presence of mind with which the Duke received imperturbably the announcement by Campbell of Inverawe, who had just dined with him, that he had orders to arrest him. Making the officer pass before him with the cere- monious politeness due from a host, he suddenly escaped by a secret door, sprang upon a bare-backed pony that he found outside, and fled to the mountains, where he lay concealed, ready to join the Prince. Those who were privy to the enterprise now gathered to the rendezvous in the lonely glen of Lochaber, and the Prince there collected round him a group of chiefs who could command no scanty support amongst their glens. They were already planning the raising of the standard, and the striking of some sudden and effective blow was all but arranged, before the Government took any active steps. Murray of Broughton, who had been closely watched for some weeks, managed to leave his house in Peeblesshire and join the Prince, bringing with him the manifestoes which were to give formal shape to the ad- venture, and which were already printed and ready for issue. On the 2nd of July President Forbes brought to Sir John Cope, the commander of the King's forces, a letter from a corre- spondent in the Highlands, who mentioned, but at the same time discredited, a rumour that the Prince was to land some time during the summer. This was communicated, as at most 124 THE REBELLION TO THE BATTLE OF PRESTONPANS. a remote possibility, to the English Government. During the month the alarm increased, but even on the 2nd of August we find Forbes writing, half alarmed, half sceptical, to Henry Pelham to tell him of the rumours that were spreading. Such rumours were confirmed by Lord Milton, who wrote on 8th August from Rosneath (where he was staying with the Duke of Argyle), and by the Highland correspondent of Forbes, who wrote on the 9th, both positively asserting the fact of the landing. Meanwhile, a day or two more brought confirmation of these rumours. On the 6th of August a proclamation was issued, putting a reward of £30,000 on the Prince's head. The Government had been slow to move, but was now thoroughly alarmed, and despatches flew fast and thick. That proclamation, to the undying honour of the Scottish Highlands, fell on deaf ears. Not the direst straits of poverty ever tempted to a betrayal any one of the many thousands to whom treachery would have brought affluence beyond their dreams. Long before the proclamation was knowni in their mountains, the first blow in the enterprise had been struck, and curiously enough this happened on the very day when it was issued in London by the English Government. The incident was like many that followed, and showed how easily disciplined troops can be struck with panic when con- fronted with the unwonted tactics of a foe ignorant of the arts of war. Two companies of English soldiers, marching from Fort Augustus to reinforce the scanty garrison at Fort William, were taken prisoners in a pass near the river Spean by a handful of Highlanders. Utterly unaccustomed to the wiles of men who knew every foot of the ground, they were thrown into confusion by some dozen clansmen scattered at different points on the hillside. The soldiers hastily retreated ; their Highland foes seemed to start up from every bush, and they were forced to run for some six or seven miles, until met by another small body who barred their retreat. Completely out-manoeuvred, the soldiers, mostly raw recruits, threw down their arms, and were carried prisoners to Lochiel's house of Auchnacarry. It was a beginning of good omen to the Jacobite cause. Even bolder schemes had been on foot — to seize the Duke of Argyle in his castle at Inveraray, and to get hold of some of the smaller forts which garrisoned the Highlands. These schemes were found impossible. But the Prince was served so well that trusty emissaries had eluded the vigilance of the Government troops and spread the summons far and wide through every one of the northern counties. The insurrection was known to thousands, and THE STANDARD RAISED. 125 counted its active participants by hundreds, before the Gov- ernment had any certain information of its existence. It was on the 19th of August that Charles raised his standard at Glenfinnan. On the 18th he had passed from Borodale to Glenaladale, and thence crossed Loch Shiel with some five-and-twenty attendants in three boats. In the lonely glen, surrounded by precipitous mountains, he waited to see if his hopes were to be realised by the gathering of the clans. For two hours he remained in suspense, finding shelter in one of the wretched hovels which were the only signs of human habitation on the spot. At length Cameron of Lochiel ap- peared with more than 700 of his followers upon the ridge of the mountain. It was the pledge of loyal support, and was a signal of encouragement to thousands within the length and breadth of the Highlands. The standard of white, red, and blue silk was unfurled, and it was held by the Marquis of Tullibardine, while the royal proclama- tion and the commission of regency, nominating the Prince as his father's representative, were read.^ The Prince made a short and stirring appeal " to join with him in so glorious an enterprise," to those "with whose assistance and the protection of a just God, who never fails to avenge the cause of the injured, he did not doubt of bringing the affair to a happy issue." The enterprise thus launched for good or ill, it is not amiss- to see what manner of man was the young Prince who was henceforth to be its life and soul, and under w^hose name the expedition was to win a place in history and in romance denied to many far more imposing and perhaps more moment- ous undertakings. Prince Charles Edward,^ or, as he is generally called, the Young Chevalier, to distinguish him from his father, who is designated as the Chevalier St George, was the eldest son of the titular James III. and of the Prin- cess Clementina Sobieski, granddaughter of the king John Sobieski of Poland, who defeated the Turks before Vienna. 1 An injurious tale has sometimes been propagated, that Charles started the enterprise against his father's advice, and meant if it succeeded to mount the throne himself. The story has not a shred of foundation. James certainly wished to remain at Rome, and had now no ambition for a crown other than titular. But Charles uniformly opposed the intention, and was too shrewd, if not too honest, to lend himself to such a bungling scheme. 2 This designation is at once more accurate and more decorous than that which his enemies affected, and which careless habit has endorsed, of The Pretender. The Prince was in no sense a pretender. He advanced claims which the English constitution, as altered by the Revolution, did not admit ; but he made no pre- tence to a birth which was not amply supported, and has nothing in common- with those adventurers of whom history gives many examples, and to whom the name is properly applied. 126 THE REBELLION TO THE BATTLE OF PRESTON PANS. He was born on the 31st of December 1720, and was con- sequently in his twenty -fifth year. He was above middle stature, being about five feet ten inches tall, and his frame was well knit and graceful, his demeanour and aspect digni- fied and imposing. His eyes were hazel, and his hair brown, with a tendency to a golden colour at the tips. His counten- ance had a cast of melancholy which suited the part he had to play, and did not detract from the dignity of his mien. Gifted by nature with an active frame and a robust constitu- tion — which he inherited from his mother's warlike race, — he had trained it, by constant exercise, to skill in all athletic feats. He could endure long and fatiguing marches on scanty fare ; he was an accomplished horseman, an expert shot, and an adept in all games which called for physical excellence. He was quick and lively in disposition, a ready talker, and, in spite of a desultory education, carried on under unhappy influences, he was acute and ready in acquiring knowledge. He was fairly well read, and, above all, had read fully in that most exacting of all documents, the character of men. He had already won distinction as a soldier by giving evidence of marked bravery in the campaign in Italy, where he had served under his kinsman the Duke of Berwick. In the strained and unnatural atmosphere of a titular court, where intrigue was rife, he had preserved a fair balance of mind, and had escaped the contagion of priestly influence to which his more gentle but weaker father had completely succumbed ; and while conscious of a more domineering spirit of his own, he never failed to show to that father filial respect and even tenderness. Under the influence, it is said, of his tutor Sir Thomas Sheridan, he had imbibed some laxity of religious views, and even though he saw that it was well to simulate a devotion which he scarcely felt, he somewhat scandalised the stricter notions of his father. He was at pains to study the character of the Highlanders, and managed, with an astonishing equanimity of temper for one naturally impatient, to steer his way amidst the constant bickerings of the chiefs who surrounded him. He won the devotion of the great body of his followers by adapting himself to their ways, and by learning to converse easily and familiarly after their fashion. He subjected himself to all the hardships of their march, and showed how ready he was to endure fatigue and hard fare with the humblest. In the conduct of the campaign he never forgot the claims of humanity, and refused to punish, even with an amount of severity that would have been prudent, those who were in his power, and who had schemed his assassination. On no occasion CHARACTER OF THE PRINCE. 127 did he attempt to strike terror into the peaceful inhabitants amongst whom his army passed, and the march of the High- land force under his control was stained by no manner of violence or of outrage. In more than one respect he was an ideal leader of a forlorn hope. On the other hand, he had already acquired some of those faults which time and misfortune developed, and which brought him to a dishonoured age. He was suspicious, and somewhat inclined to intrigue. He showed occasionally a certain petulance which prosperity and power might have made dangerous to his country. He had already fallen to some extent into habits of intemperance, which eventually broke his constitution. A superficial complacence only thinly covered a profound selfishness that was engrained in him by habit, and which made him treat all the sacrifices of his devoted followers as no more than their bounden duty, demanding at most his countenance and friendliness, not his gratitude. If he felt for the calamities that fell upon those who risked all in his cause, it was often a feeling for- gotten in the thought of his own misfortunes, and in new schemes for realising his aims. The balance of his temper was marred by headstrong obstinacy, which often baffled the plans of his advisers, and led him, when his imperious will was thwarted, to play the part of a sulky schoolboy. The very determination with which he played a risky game led him more than once to hazard that game by his inveterate dislike of yielding to the more mature wisdom of his experi- enced adherents. As the inspiring spirit of the enterprise he played a splendid part, but misfortune crushed him, and success would have placed a dangerous sovereign on the British throne. After the raising of the standard, Charles remained for a few days at Lochiel's house of Auchnacarry to complete his plans. New adherents joined his force, and presently he found himself able to advance inland with more than 2000 men, and with a confident hope that the number would soon be increased. While he still waited, an emissary reached him from the veteran intriguer Lovat, who was resolved, if the bait were large enough, to try a new plan of treachery, and join the cause at which he had in 1715 struck a deadly blow. Lovat had been promised the dukedom of Fraser and the lord-lieutenancy of Inverness-shire, but his own rascality made him suspicious, and he would not pledge himself entirely until he had the patent in his grasp. Meanwhile, he carried on a correspondence with his friend and neighbour, Forbes, indignantly combating any suspicion of his fidelity to the 128 THE REBELLION TO THE BATTLE OF PRESTONPANS. Hanoverian house, at the very time when he was chuckling over the idea that a turn of the cards might place Forbes at his mercy, and that he might yet "bring him to the Saint Johnstoun's tippet." Forbes was not misled by the hoary knave, and perhaps Charles trusted no further than he was obliged to the unctuous protestations of the versatile hypo- crite who promised to "aid what he could, but his prayers were all he could give at present." These prayers and the forfeit of his own life, which was of quite as problematical value, were all which he ever really gave to the cause which would have been better quit of such support as his. While the Prince's force was quickly increasing, and his relations with the chiefs were becoming every day more close, the authorities at London and Edinburgh were at their wits' end. The king was absent in Hanover. Many of the regular troops were abroad. The total of the forces in Scotland was about 3000 men — three battalions and a half of infantry and two regiments of dragoons — the great majority raw recruits. The civil authorities were deprived of all initiative; their advice was often scouted, and their warnings often dis- regarded. The commander of the forces was Sir John Cope, active and zealous enough, but with no ability equal to such an emergency, — a "little, finical, dressy man," as he is de- scribed by a quiet observer.^ On the very day when the Prince's standard was raised. Cope advanced to Stirling with all the troops he could muster — many of them the men who had been employed but recently in making the roads. At Stirling he was compelled to leave behind his cavalry, who would have been useless in the mountains of the North. Thence he marched to Dalnacardoch with a force of some 1400 men. Charles had now passed to the mountains east of Loch Ness, and hoped that Cope would give him battle on the steep road that led down the slopes of Corryarrick. But to have done so with forces so far inferior — the Prince had now about 2500 men — would have been madness on Cope's part. In order to stay the Highland advance the only wise strategy would have been to bar the way before it in the lower ground. But Cope was not equal to the emergency. With futile caution he summoned his officers to a council of war, and on their advice he resolved not to face, but to elude, the High- land army. He advanced on the road from Dalwhinnie to Garviemore until the point of Catlaig was reached, where the western road branches north to Inverness, and south- east to Dalnacardoch. When his army arrived at that point they were ordered to face about. The rear became the van, 1 Sir John Clerk of Penicuick. THE HIGHLANDERS MARCH SOUTH. 129 and it marched off by the Inverness road. When the Prince's scouts advanced to reconnoitre they looked only upon the solitary stretch of road. Cope's army had disappeared. So eager were the Highlanders for the fray that it was at first proposed to follow Cope and cut him off from the retreat to Inverness. But it was soon seen that a far more important strategical advantage could be gained by simply advancing on the course now left unbarred. After an unsuccessful attempt to seize the barracks of Ruthven, the army con- tinued its unopposed march to Dalwhinnie. Macpherson of Cluny was still playing an uncertain part. He had ac- quiesced in the existing Government, and was in correspon- dence with Cope. But to confirm his suspected but wavering sympathies, he was seized at his house and conveyed — perhaps no unwilling prisoner — with the Highland host. On the 30th the Prince reached Blair in Athole, where the prestige of the Marquis of Tullibardine's name brought many adherents from the Athole country ; and on the 3rd of September Perth was entered without resistance. There he was joined by the Duke of Perth and by Lord George Murray, the younger brother of Lord Tullibardine. Perth was too far committed to the cause to make his adherence matter of doubt or hesi- tation. He was enthusiastic and courageous ; a loyal friend, and beloved for his amiability and ease of manner ; but he was no strategist, and had none of the qualities of a states- man. Long residence abroad had made him almost un- familiar with his mother tongue, and, accustomed as he was to the petty cabals and artificial restraints of the exiled Court, he was little fitted to combat ill counsels that might be suggested to the Prince. Murray had for a time appeared to shake ofi" the Jacobite principles which he had maintained in the risings of 1715 and 1719, and had sought for employ- ment in the English army. He now reverted to his old creed, and brought to its support the ability of an accom- plished strategist. But his temper was harsh and overbear- ing. He patronised rather than followed the Prince. He flouted the Highland chiefs, and was at little pains to dis- guise his contempt either for their manners or their notions of conducting a campaign. He refused to court the little cliques that had followed the fortunes of the exiled house, and acquired from them the hatred which weaker men can cherish for one who thwarts their designs and despises their methods. It was one of the faults of Charles's character that it was incapable of dealing with such a man, and dreaded more than it valued the mastery of his disposition. It was a fault which was nurtured in the Stuart blood. Amongst I 130 THE REBELLION TO THE BATTLE OF PRESTONPANS. all the opposition offered to Lord George, perhaps the most dangerous was that of Murray of Broughton, the Prince's secretary. That slippery adherent had unquestionable abil- ity ; but it was that of the man of business rather than the soldier, and he was jealous of the control which Lord George demanded as the price of his support. By none more than by the Secretary were the Prince's suspicions kept alive. The earlier days of September were spent in making the levies upon the surrounding towns which the scanty resources of the Prince rendered necessary. These were regularly en- forced, but with no show of violence, and no disregard of property. Some rough discipline was practised in order to make the motley host a more effective military instrument, but the practised eye of Murray soon saw that the High- landers must be allowed to make war after their own methods, and that more would be lost than gained by wast- ing time in the niceties of drill. James VIII. was proclaimed as king, and a proclamation was issued in which a redress of Scottish grievances, and above all a repeal of the Act of Union, were promised. An effective use was thus made of the chief cause of irritation which rankled in the minds of all classes of Scotsmen, whether Jacobite or not. A further proclamation was issued, setting a price of £30,000 upon the Elector of Hanover's head. There was a touch of safe but not ineffective dignity in the confidence the Prince expressed that no follower of his would stoop to qualify for such a reward, and a touch of not less effective humour in his own wish — ultimately overruled — to reduce the price to the thousandth part of that which had been offered for his own. It is to the capital that we have now to turn in order to follow the course of events there since the full extent of the danger had been realised. Never was city in worse plight for meeting a sudden call to arms. The sympathies of the citizens were divided : two-thirds of the men were said to be Whigs and two-thirds at least of the women to be Jacobites. But the lower class was little to be trusted, while in the upper class the bias was distinctly towards the Tory side. At the moment the lord provost (Mr Stuart) and the majority of the council belonged to that party ; but the elec- tions were at hand, and by the influence of the trades guilds the Whig candidate (Mr Drummond) and his adherents hoped to gain the day. The students of the university, as well as their professors, were mainly Whig; and even where their political sympathies were not pronounced, the professional class were naturally inclined to resent the approach of an aggressive host, and to feel that their duty lay in allegiance ALARM IN EDINBURGH. 131 to the constituted authorities. At such a juncture men do not waste time on political discussion. The first instinct of a peaceable British population is to resent disturbance and to side with the established Government. When the enemy is at the gates men do not ransack their political memories in the search for lurking sympathies. The Whigs attempted to bring accusations of lukewarmness, if not of positive treach- ery, against the Lord Provost Stuart. No such charge was ever substantiated, and on a review of the whole case we can only pronounce him to have acted with sound common- sense, and with as much vigour as could fairly be expected of a municipal magistrate who found singularly little sup- port either from the higher dignitaries of the State or from the military authorities. Strong though the castle was both by natural advantages Siud by its fortifications, Edinburgh was not, and never had been, a really fortified city. On three sides it was enclosed by the city wall, while the north side was defended by the Nor' Loch, a swampy marsh which lay in the valley beneath the castle. Within these narrow limits the houses were closely pent in lofty tenements. To have re- duced it would have been a task of a few hours only for any modern artillery ; but even against such a force as that of the Highlanders the nature of the defences was such as gave the defenders no advantage. The wall was little more than an ordinary park wall, varying in height from ten to twenty feet. It had neither redoubts nor turrets, and the parapet was too narrow for mounting cannon. Besides this it was at various points covered by houses not only on its inner but on its outer side. The armed force upon which the city could rely was little stronger than its defences. There were some 1200 of the trained bands, but they were little more than a convivial society, rarely called together except for festal occasions, without arms or military discipline, and not always to be relied upon for steadfast loyalty to the Government. Besides these there was a small body of armed police, called the Town Guard, many of whom were themselves Highlanders, and who were available for little more than maintenance of order in the town. The only regular troops were the two regiments of dragoons — them- selves new recruits — whom Cope had left behind at Stirling, and who had now fallen back upon the neighbourhood of Edinburgh. With such resources it is not so much surprising that no -effective resistance was made as that it was for a moment thought possible. Had the regular cavalry been effective 132 THE REBELLION TO THE BATTLE OF PRESTONPANS. troops they might have done much by hanging upon the enemy's flanks, and by harassing his march, to have dis- organised the Highland host. As it was they gave no example to the townsmen but that of cowardice and panic. On the 27th of August, while intelligence as to the move- ments of the enemy w^as still vague, and scarcely anything was known except that Cope had drawn off to Inverness, that the Highland force had changed places with him on the Stirling road — by what was compared to a figure in a country-dance — a meeting of the loyal citizens was held to concert measures of defence, and it was proposed to raise by subscription a regiment of 1000 men. A question as to the legality of this was raised, and it was found necessary to send an express to London to obtain the consent of the Crown. Meanwhile, those of the citizens who were most ardent for the defence enrolled themselves as volunteers, and petitioned for a grant of arms from the castle. Young and old were ardent in their military zeal ; and the Pro- fessor of Mathematics in the university, M'Laurin, under whose able tuition many engineer officers had been trained, applied his scientific knowledge to the repair and improve- ment of the cit}^ wall. Some cannon were fetched from Leith, and the very preparations increased the martial spirit and determined the citizens not to yield their town to the first onset of the Highland horde. New hopes were inspired when an express arrived from Cope to General Guest, the lieutenant-governor of the castle, ordering him to send transports from Leith to meet the army at Aberdeen and convey it to the capital. Nothing, Cope soon found, was to be gained by staying at Inverness, and he was now making a hurried march to the coast at Aberdeen. It was now a race for time between the High- landers and the regular army; and the citizens, hour by hour, scanned with eager eyes every weathercock, to learn whether an eastern wind would bring the transports up the Firth. On the 11th of September the Prince advanced from Perth and crossed the Forth at the Ford of Frew, eight miles from Stirling. As he came nearer, Gardiner's dragoons retreated to Corstorphine, some three miles from the city, while the other regiment (Hamilton's) lay at Leith. The case was evidently desperate. The captain of the volun- teers, Drummond, whether from genuine courage or, as some suspected, from a desire to make his loyalty more pronounced than that of his rival, Provost Stuart, called upon the more ardent spirits in the force to follow him, and with the THE VOLUNTEERS. 133 dragoons to march out and attack the Highlanders. As the event proved, such an attempt could have ended only in disaster. But many of the younger men, some of them students in the university, were ardent for the scheme; and new detachments of volunteeers, who came from Fife under Bruce of Kennet, and from the surrounding country, confirmed them in their zeal. On the morning of Sunday, the 15th of September, news was brought that the Prince's army had reached Kirkliston. Gardiner's dragoons had now been marched to Coltbridge, about two miles to the north-west of the city; and in order to inspire further martial ardour, Hamilton's regiment was directed to march through Edinburgh and to join the other body. The sudden sound of the fire-bell, which was to be the signal for the rendezvous of the volunteers, startled the city during the hour of divine service. The volunteers paraded to the number of 400 in the Lawnmarket, and a momentary enthusiasm was aroused as the dragoons marched past, clashing their swords, and returning the cheers with which they were greeted. It was a brave show, but events soon proved how little there was beneath the show. The volunteers were kindled to enthusiasm, and for a time it looked as if serious resistance were to be made. These volunteers, we are told, "loaded their pieces for the first time," and fortunately a performance which had its hazards led to no immediate catastrophe. Neither the jeers of some spectators in the windows, who doubted whether their new-born ardour was as real as it seemed, nor the tears and lamentations of their female friends, daunted for a time the valour of the youthful troops, and they even were bold enough to threaten to fire into the windows where the derisive onlookers were placed. But as they advanced some qualms assailed the weaker hearts. "Does not this remind you, Mr Hew," said a student more versed in Livy than in active warfare, to his companion — "does not this remind you of the Fabian gens marching out of Rome to meet the Gauls, while the matrons and virgins were wringing their hands, and lamenting the certain danger to which the tribe was to be exposed ? " " Hold your tongue," said the other, "or I shall complain to the officer." "You must recollect the end, Mr Hew, omnes ad unum periere/' Reflections like these were trying to the nerves, and before the West Port was approached the gallant band was sadly thinned. Prudence found herself presently reinforced by the remonstrances of the principal of the university, and several of the clergy, who hurried to the scene, and " patheti- 134 THE REBELLION TO THE BATTLE OF PRESTONPANS. cally besought" them not to expose "the flower of the youth of Edinburgh and the hope of the next generation to the danger of being cut off without any just or adequate object." Such complimentary forebodings naturally had con- siderable weight, especially when it was added that their going out could certainly do little good, and might do much ill. A few, however, were doughty enough to re- pudiate the advice, and for an hour longer they waited before they were marched back to the college yards and dismissed. The lads met in the evening and further dis- cussed the matter with no lack of vehemence, and resolved, as their efforts promised to be useless in the city, to carry an offer of their service to Cope as soon as he should arrive. For that night they were set as sentinels on the city walls, and answered the challenges of the guard with all the punctilio of military discipline. There were two youths amongst them, both of whom have left to us records of their experiences. Dr Alexander Carlyle of Inveresk and John Home, the author of 'Douglas,' were posted close to one another when the lord provost visited the walls at dead of night. Both were sturdy Whigs, but Home's views of things were apt to be coloured by his imagination. He was convinced beyond all argument that the provost was nothing but a Jacobite in disguise. "Did you not see," he said to Carlyle, "how pale the traitor looked when he found us so vigilant?" "No," said the more matter-of- fact Carlyle, "I thought he looked and behaved perfectly well, and it was the light from the lantern that made him appear pale." A respectable municipal magistrate, called from his bed in the middle of the night to visit military outposts, scarcely deserved the imputation of treachery if he looked somewhat pale. Thus passed the night between the 15th and the 16th of September. On the morning of the 16th the Highland host advanced slowly towards the city. A message was brought from one who had passed them on the road — perhaps a sympathiser — that the Duke of Perth had charged him to tell the people of Edinburgh that if they admitted the Prince's army they would be civilly treated, but if not they must lay their account with military execution. The consternation was now general. Only the two regiments of dragoons, which had now joined at Coltbridge, lay between the enemy and the city. The fighting power of these regiments was in any case doubtful ; but on the evening of the fifteenth, Gardiner, who alone could arouse in them any spark of courage, was superseded by General SUMMONS FROM THE PRINCE. 135 Fowkes, whom the bungling of the Government had sent from London for the task. A small reconnoitring party in advance of the Prince's army came in contact with these dragoons and fired their pistols at them. Without returning a shot, the soldiers broke into disorder and galloped in the direst panic to their camp at Leith, their flight taking place in full view of the city, by what were called the Lang Dykes, now covered by the streets of the New Town of Edinburgh. Even at Leith they halted only for a moment and pursued their way to Prestonpans. Night had fallen when they reached that village, and as a blunder- ing horseman stumbled into a deserted coal-pit, the clatter of his arms roused their panic terror afresh, and scattered them in all directions to the eastern coast. The road which they had followed was strewn with their accoutrements and arms, and more than a cartload of these were collected and despatched after them by the care of young Carlyle. Mean- while the volunteers had once more gathered at the sound of the alarm-bell, but even at their urgent request no orders were sent them, and between the panic which the flight of the dragoons had caused and the remonstrances of the few who remained steadfast, a hand-to-hand conflict almost arose between the members of the little band. When the tumult was at its height, an unknown horseman galloped past their line, announcing that the Highlanders were close at hand with a force of 16,000 men. Nothing was left for the volunteers but to march to the castle and deliver up the arms which divided counsels had not suflered them to use. The bolder spirits resolved to meet again at the camp of Sir John Cope. Meanwhile crowds thronged the streets and besought the provost to give up all thoughts of a hopeless defence. He convoked a meeting of the magistrates, to which he sum- moned the leading members of the Government ; but all these had now left the town. The meeting was first held at Gold- smith's Hall, but the crowd increased so fast that it was necessary to adjourn to the New Church Aisle. At such a gathering deliberation fast changed to noisy clamour. When the discussion was at its height a letter was handed in, addressed to the Lord Provost, Magistrates, and Town Council of Edinburgh. When opened it was found to be subscribed " Charles, P.R." At first the lord provost refused to have the letter read; and there were grounds, perhaps, for his hesitation. The legal advisers of the town were summoned to give their advice ; but the only one that could be found declared that the matter was too high for him to 136 THE REBELLION TO THE BATTLE OF PRESTONPANS. give an opinion upon, and having said so rose and went away. There was some ground for the provost's exclamation, " Good God, I am deserted by my arms and my assessors ! " At length impatience to know the contents won the day, and the letter was read. It summoned the city to receive the army of his Majesty, and to take proper measures for secur- ing the peace and quiet of the city, which the Prince was very desirous to protect. " But if," it proceeded, " you suffer any of the usurper's troops to enter the town, or any of the cannon, arms, or ammunition now in it to be carried off, we shall take it as a breach of your duty, and a heinous offence against the king and us, and shall resent it accordingly." It promised the preservation of the rights and liberties of the city and the property of his Majesty's subjects. "But if any opposition be made to us, we cannot answer for the conse- quences, being firmly resolved at any rate to enter the city ; and in that case, if any of the inhabitants are found in arms against us, they must not expect to be treated as prisoners of war." In the face of such a summons resistance appeared doubly perilous. It was resolved to ask for delay, and about eight o'clock at night four members of the council were sent to Prince Charles's camp, about two miles off, at Gray's Mill, to submit to him this request. Scarcely had this deputation left the city before a message was brought that the transports with Cope's army were sighted off Dunbar. The hopes that had vanished were kindled anew. Messengers were then sent, too late, to recall the deputation; and it was resolved once more to arm the volunteers. General Guest was asked to deliver the arms that had been returned to the castle. But he replied that the magistrates might arm those whom they thought loyal ; that if they made a formal request to hand over the volun- teers' arms, and if the general body were well-affected, he might consent to do so ; but that meanwhile he had ordered the dragoons to meet Sir John Cope's army. This was equivalent to a notice that the defence of the city could not be trusted to the citizens, and that the issue was to be left in the hands of the king's regular forces. Further discussion was effectually stopped when it was found that the majority of the volunteers had left the town. By ten o'clock the messengers returned from the Prince. A delay until two o'clock in the morning was granted. Failing a positive answer then he would be obliged to take other measures. A further deputation was sent asking for a delay till nine o'clock in the morning. The deputies were sent to Gray's Mill in a hackney coach ; but they were not THE HIGHLANDERS FORCE THE CITY GATES. 137 admitted to the Prince's presence, and were curtly bidden to take themselves off. Meanwhile the Prince had ordered Cameron of Lochiel with 500 men to force an entrance by the Netherbow Port, and Murray of Broughton was sent with them as guide. As they approached the walls they found cannon planted, but the sentinels had been withdrawn. Advancing silently to the gate, Lochiel placed a body of men on each side under the shelter of the wall, and sent a messenger in disguise to demand entrance. This was refused, with threats to fire if the man did not withdraw, and for a moment the plan seemed to be baffled. But just at this moment, by one ot those ludi- crous coincidences that are interspersed throughout the whole story of the enterprise, the hackney coachman who had just brought back the disappointed delegates from Gray's Mill was returning to his stables outside the Netherbow. The gate was opened to let him pass, and in a moment Lochiel's men rushed in, overpowered the porters, and entered the city without a blow. They proceeded to the guardhouse and dis- armed the soldiers there. The other military posts and gates were seized, and before five o'clock the city had been cap- tured. When day dawned the citizens were alarmed by a defiant shot from the castle, and they rushed into the streets to find that their capital was in the hands of the Prince's adherents. The Highlanders behaved with the utmost order, and no disciplined troops could have abstained more completely from anything like robbery or violence. They remained till noon at their post beside the city cross; and although the citizens, recognising that things were not as bad as they had feared, fraternised with the Highlanders, and brought them food and drink, the Camerons, obedient to the orders of their chief, refused the whisky. A free indul- gence in that beverage might have produced results that would have been less agreeable to the douce burghers of the town. The crowd that dreaded the Highlanders' entry, and were almost ready to die in preventing it, now hung round them in groups, in which curiosity soon took the place of fear, and friendliness that of curiosity. It was at noon on the l7th of September that Prince Charles made his entry into the city. With the main body he marched round by Duddingston to avoid the fire of the castle, and halted in the hollow below Arthur Seat and Salis- bury Crags. Presently calling for his horse he entered Holyrood Palace by the Duke's Walk, accompanied by an escort of men bearing the most notable names in Scotland, and amidst the cheers of a vast crowd, which pressed round 138 THE REBELLION TO THE BATTLE OF PRESTONPANS. and sought to kiss his hand. Not the hardest heart nor the most uncompromising Whiggism could deny the impressive- ness of the scene as the young Prince entered the palace of his fathers, surrounded by a brilliant throng, and undisputed master of the capital. Suddenly it seemed as if what was a harebrained though heroic attempt had, with the help of Government imbecility and of divided counsels, emerged into the proportion of a great national movement. Charles him- self was eminently fitted to appear to advantage in such a scene. He rode well, and his bearing was such as well be- came the scion of a long line of kings. He had adopted the national dress. He wore a short tartan coat, a blue bonnet with the white rose for a cockade, and carried the star and ribbon of St Andrew, and his light - coloured periwig was turned over in front with his own brown hair. His aspect was dignified if somewhat melancholy; and his manners to the crowd were such as to rouse enthusiasm for one so young, and seemingly destined for so high a fate. Instinctively the crowd compared him with the Bruce, and Scottish independence seemed to see in him its hopes revived. A thousand men, it was said, could easily have been enlisted in the streets if only — and it was an important reservation — arms could have been found to equip them. The chiefs were a striking throng, and the lesser chieftains, or gentlemen of the clans, were armed in the full Highland panoply of war. But the main body of their followers were scantily equipped. Most of them had only a single weapon, and many bore only a scythe-blade, fixed straight on the handle, and sometimes nothing but a club or cudgel. Their dress was ragged and weatherworn; even their wild appearance, savage mien, and unkempt locks did not hide their shortness of stature and the thin and meagre bodies which told of a hard-won and scanty suste- nance. They had nothing of military order and discipline ; and although they might impress the peaceful townsmen, and might with their enthusiasm arouse uncomfortable fears as to the possible conduct of such a horde, it did not seem as if they could withstand the steady onset of a disciplined martial force. As the Prince entered the palace a man of ripe years, James Hepburn of Keith, stepped from the crowd, knelt before him, and then advanced in front with a drawn sword. He was one whose claim all recognised and admitted. He was of ancient lineage, and had already perilled all in sup- port of the ancient line. He had been involved in the rising of 17 15, and after many adventures had made a strange escape from a London prison, and found refuge with his family, who PROCLAMATION OF KING JAMES. 139 had followed him to the metropolis, and whose lodging he discovered almost by a miracle by seeing in the window a piece of ancient family plate. With them he had returned to Scotland, and for a generation he had indulged hopes of such a day as the present. He was, however, no fanatic for divine right, and no convinced Jacobite in principle. He took up arms against the Union, and it was for this that he threw himself into the cause that had attracted him as a young man. Even amongst the Whigs he had won for himself a name as "the model of ancient simplicity, manli- ness, and honour"; and the cordiality with which his acces- sion was welcomed by the Jacobites was equalled by the regret which others felt that a soul so stainless was led astray by visionary schemes. He lived to repent the part that he was now to play. On the same day the heralds and pursuivants were com- pelled to proclaim King James at the city cross, amidst the plaudits of a crowd, and the waving of handkerchiefs from the ladies who gathered at the windows looking on the scene. Most noticeable in the cavalcade was the wife of Murray of Broughton, the secretary. She was a noted beauty, and appeared on horseback, decked with white ribbons, and carrying a drawn sword. Altogether it was a brave show : only the ominous silence that was observed in a large part of the crowd served to lessen the general enthusiasm. At night the rank and beauty of the city gathered at a ball in Holyrood House, and the white cockade was worn by every lady who had a relative in the force. If female enthusiasm could win a cause, the success of the enterprise seemed already well assured. It was perhaps of more importance to secure such success that Charles was able to take possession of the arms of the trained band, and to make a requisition on the city for the necessary equipment of his motley host. Meanwhile Cope had got back from his strange escapade in the North, and was landing at Dunbar. The landing was not completed till the 18th of September ; and by that time he was joined by the two regiments of dragoons, who had already shown how little they were to be depended on. They had collected after their flight, and the arms with which they had strewn the road had been sent after them in covered carts. When Cope was able to advance he found himself at the head of about 2000 infantry and 600 dragoons, and some parties of volunteers under Lord Home and others brought up the force to about 3000 men. He had taken up some guns at Aberdeen, but with the usual want of 140 THE REBELLION TO THE BATTLE OP PRESTONPANS. foresight he had no artillerymen to work them, and had to trust to the help of some old men whom he obtained from the transports. Otherwise his troops were well appointed; but it was a meagre display to represent the authority of the British Crown, and to oppose a rebellion which sufficient precautions would have nipped in the bud. To maintain a siege in Edinburgh was obviously impossible for the small and ill-assorted army which Charles commanded. The guns of the castle rendered his position there somewhat insecure ; and in spite of the huzzas of the crowd, he could not doubt that there was a great weight of opinion amongst the citizens adverse to his cause. To have advanced south- wards and eluded Cope, as Cope had eluded him in the North, would have been the height of recklessness for a force whose fighting power was yet uncertain, and who would have been surrounded by a hostile population from which they could not hope to draw supplies. The bold course was at the same time the safest, and Charles resolved to hazard all on a pitched battle with the English general. With the additions which his army had now received, he was able to count something like 2500 men. They were all foot soldiers — no Highlander ever fought on horseback — and of artillery they only had such knowledge as inspired a vague and half superstitious dread. It was long since they had measured themselves in battle with an armed foe, and their leaders could only trust to the warlike spirit of the race, and to their religious devotion to the persons of their chiefs. The reckless ardour and impetuous valour of these there was no room to doubt. Orders were given that the Highlanders should march out of the city on the morning of the 19th. It was impos- sible to leave any portion of the army to guard the city, and a very little energy on the part of the garrison of the castle might have undone much of the success which the Chevalier had won so easily. But energy was not a quality of which those who acted for the king were to make any display. The governor of the castle was an octogenarian, and vigorous as he was for his years, he could trust noth- ing to the help of those outside his walls, and probably judged that his first duty was to secure the safety of his arsenal. The citizens might have recovered a little of the spirit which had evaporated so easily two days before, but the quick wit of a single Highlander sufficed to secure not his own safety only, but the undisputed submission of the city. He had wakened from a drunken slumber to find himself left behind by the army, but he showed no sign THE MARCH FROM EDINBURGH. 141 of fear. He knew, he said, that he was safe, because 500 Highlanders had been left behind in concealment, ready to emerge if there were the slightest attempt to dispute the authority of the Prince. It was deemed prudent not to submit his story to the hazard of a test. The Highland army made a brave show as it left the King's Park that spread round Holyrood House. Hazardous as was their attempt, a presage of good fortune seemed to throw some sunshine upon it. The Prince had kindled their enthusiasm to the highest pitch, and as he placed himself at their head and drew his sword, he shouted, "Friends, I have thrown away the scabbard." On the night of the 19th they encamped at Duddingston, and then advanced in high spirits towards the sea, the march being wisely directed along rising ground towards Inveresk. A handful of horsemen — not fifty in all — were well employed in reconnoitring, and kept their leaders fully informed as to the numbers and disposition of Cope's force, which by this time had reached the neighbourhood of Tranent. There it was found in position on a level ground stretching towards the sea, full in face of the Highlanders, who occupied a rising ground. It was called Carberry Hill, and had sad associations for the house of Stuart, as the scene of the surrender of Mary, Queen of Scots, to her rebellious subjects. A few of the more courageous of the volunteers had before this reached Cope's camp, and offered their services. They were not accepted as part of the fighting force, but sixteen of them were employed as mounted scouts to bring tidings of the enemy's advance along the road from Edinburgh, by which alone Cope judged that they could advance. One of these was Alexander Carlyle, who has left us an account of his adventures ; and two more were men who afterwards attained notable positions. Carlyle knew every foot of the ground and eluded capture, but the two others — Francis Garden, afterwards as a senator of the Court of Session known as Lord Gardenstone, and Cunninghame, afterwards a general in the British army — were unlucky enough to be captured. They had entered an inn at Musselburgh ta recruit from the fatigues of unwonted military duty, and as they were enjoying themselves over oysters and wine they were surprised by one of the Prince's guards. He pre- tended to take them for rebels, and when they announced that they were king's men they were promptly arrested and carried to the camp at Duddingston. They managed to elude their captors soon after, and rejoined Cope next day. Young students, however courageous, make bad scouts, and 142 THE REBELLION TO THE BATTLE OF PRESTONPANS. Cope was so ill-informed as to the ground that he chose the worst position, in a wide field, spreading between Seton and Preston, and backing to the sea. The field was an arable one, and an early harvest had permitted the crop to be cut and carried before the 20th of September. The stubble spread clear before them without cover of any kind, and here they took their position fronting to the west. Scarcely had they done so when the enemy appeared on the high ground near Tranent, about a mile to the south- west. Cope's soldiers greeted them with a defiant shout, which was returned by the Highlanders with no less spirit. As soon as he saw the enemy. Cope changed his front and faced them to the south. The two armies were now front- ing one another and separated by about half a mile, and between them lay a boggy swamp, encumbered with en- closures, dry-stone dykes, and some cover. It was bordered on the side close to the king's army by a deep ditch and hedge. The Highlanders were eager to charge, but to do so without knowing the nature of the ground would have been madness. Lord George Murray sent a military officer of experience, Mr Ker of Gradon, to make a reconnaissance. This he did with consummate coolness, riding over the ground on his white pony full in sight of the enemy. Undisturbed by their fire, he calmly picked his way about the moss, pulled down a gap in a dry-stone wall, and led his horse through ; but he returned to report that the ground was impracticable. The only firm footing was in a waggon- way across the moss; but by advancing along it in close formation the army would have been swept by the artillery and musketry, and could not have reached the other side without heavy loss and almost certain confusion. It was with difficulty, however, that the Highlanders were restrained from a hopeless attempt. Meanwhile Cope, satisfied with having secured a good position, was in no hurry to attack. Colonel Gardiner, the commander of one regiment of dragoons, urged that more decided steps should be taken to press on the fight before the impression of the wild host before them should have daunted such little courage as the king's troops possessed; but the more cautious counsel prevailed. After a few more feints each side laid aside the thought of battle for that night, and lay down to rest in preparation for the combat of the morrow. The place where the Highland army bivouacked for the night was a field of pease, which had been cut but not carried, and lay in bundles on the ground. It was a cold A NIGHT MOVEMENT. 143 frosty night, succeeding to a warm September day ; but the Highlanders were accustomed to exposure, and wrapt in their plaids they could take all the rest that they desired. The Prince lay amongst his followers, with a bundle of pease for his pillow. The night was an anxious one for both sides : the English army feared an onset from some unexpected quarter, while the Highland leaders were un- certain how they were to cross the morass. But their spirits were keen for the fight, while on the other side there were well-grounded fears of the steadiness of the troops — fears which were increased by the pusillanimous caution of the English commander. Colonel Gardiner, in particular, knew that he could place but little reliance on his troopers; and his fears as a military judge were increased by a presenti- ment of coming ill. His own house was close at hand; but he stayed all night upon the field, and gave his last counsel to the servants wdth him, from whom he did not conceal his uneasiness. A casual circumstance gave to the Highlanders a very material advantage. Amongst the gentlemen in the camp was one Mr Anderson of Whitburgh, who knew every inch of the ground. His memory now recalled a path which led from the height on which they were encamped through the morass and round the left flank of the enemy's force. He communicated this to Hepburn of Keith, and by him he was conducted to Lord George Murray, who quickly grasped the advantage it would give him. The Prince was roused, and immediately gave orders for the attempt to be made. In the deepest silence the march began. There had been some dispute as to which clan should lead, that place being claimed as their right by the Macdonalds. They resolved to settle it by lot, which fell to Lochiel and the Cameron clan ; but he persuaded the others to yield the post of honour which had thus fallen to him to the Macdonalds. The stars were still shining on the hill when the army began to move ; but as they descended into the lower ground the mist of an autumn night gathered round them, and enabled them unseen and unnoticed to negotiate the narrow path that was to bring them to the plain. The 3000 men composing the army marched without a sound, being helped in their silent march by the soft leather brogues which the Highlanders wore, and by the almost complete absence of cavalry. Anderson himself guided them down the narrow lane, which had been left entirely unguarded, and the first column advanced due north- ward, so that the line should be extended along the east side of the plain. At parts the ground was swampy and broken, 144 THE REBELLION TO THE BATTLE OF PRESTONPANS. and the advance was slow : the Prince, who marched at the head of the second column, stumbled at one place and fell forward on his knee. As they began to form the mist cleared away and showed the advance to the enemy. A sentinel gave the alarm, and an alarm -gun was fired to rouse Cope's army to the fight. The Highlanders had by this time completely outflanked his left, and Cope quickly formed anew, placing his left close by the sea, and facing the Highlanders towards the east. The morass which had before protected it now lay to the right of his army. The infantry were in the centre, on each flank the dragoons, with the artillery in front. The two opposing armies could scarcely have been more different one from another. On the one side were the serried lines of the English army with their rows of bayonets glittering in the morning sun. The artillery were, so far as outward show went, an imposing arm of modern warfare ; and the dragoons, in goodly array, gave no outward presage of the disastrous failure that was to follow. Opposed to them were the ragged and ill-arranged hordes of the Highlanders, grouped according to their clans and with- out the compact and regular lines of modern warfare, but compensating for lack of discipline by their impetuous valour. The English general had kept his men for hours in moment- ary expectation of an attack which he hesitated to precipitate. They now saw themselves out-manoeuvred, and the hurry of forming a new line was of no good omen for the issue of the fray. Strange and uncouth as they appeared to the English soldiers, the Highlanders were no savage or ignorant foe. In their ranks were many of the first gentlemen of Scotland. What the clans lacked in discipline they compensated by an unswerving loyalty, and by an enthusiasm that amounted to a passion, clouded though it was by superstition. Their religious spirit was deep and fervent. Each man fought, not as a drilled and unjudging machine, but inspired by a cause which, for himself or through his chief, he deemed to be an indubitably just one. They snatched a moment for a word of prayer, drew their bonnets over their brows, and with the usual battle-cry, and to the shrill and piercing sound of the bagpipes, they rushed upon the foe. The Prince had desired to lead the charge, and was prevented only by the unanimous remonstrances of the chiefs. As it was, he headed the second column. As they rushed forwards they discharged their firearms at the artillerymen, then cast them away, and drawing their claymores, engaged in a hand- to-hand fight. The artillery was served only by a few old sailors who had been impressed from the transports. They THE ROUT OF COPE's ARMY. 145 fled at the first onset, leaving their officer, Colonel Whiteford, alone upon the field; and the guns were from that moment useless. On the right, the first squadron of dragoons, under Colonel Whitney, did not even attempt to charge, but made another of those panic-stricken flights which they had prac- tised so often within the last two days. Colonel Gardiner, with the second squadron, made a spirited attempt to recover the day; but only a score of men kept their ground about their commander. The rest scattered in a moment in a dis- graceful rout. Hamilton's regiment, on the left wing, broke in almost frantic disorder before the onset of the Macdonalds, scattering in all directions, and some rushing blindly down the lanes which were left between the clans. They fled in all directions, and were dispersed in their frenzied panic to every point of the compass. Thus deserted by the cavalry, the infantry for a short time maintained a hopeless fight. They had been drawn up with their backs to a high park wall, and could not even save themselves by flight. Many of their officers fell, and Gardiner, who, deserted by his own dragoons, still maintained his ground, attempted in vain to rally them, and was soon struck down by a Highlander armed with a scythe. After a few minutes those who remained threw down their arms and surrendered. The Highlanders were now scattered in all directions in pursuit, and even then, had it been possible to rally the dragoons, the day might perhaps have been retrieved. But Lochiel's pipes soon col- lected the scattered Highlanders, while not even the threats and pistol-shots of their officers could force these routed horsemen to make a new attempt. A few were rallied for a moment, only to break away again in headlong flight to Edinburgh. There a handful of horsemen continued their wild career up the High Street to the gates of the castle, but were roughly told by the commander to take them- selves off", on pain of being swept down by his cannon. They then fled in wild terror to the west country. So sudden and abject had been the rout that young Carlyle, wakened in his father's manse close at hand by the noise of the first cannon, rushed out in a few minutes to view the fight. Scarcely fifteen minutes had passed from that first sound until he met the fugitives scattered over the fields, and the Highlanders in the hot fury of pursuit. He first encountered Lord Elcho and answered quietly his fierce inquiry for the nearest public-house. Presently came the Duke of Perth, who, true to his character, put his questions with more show of courtesy. K 146 THE REBELLION TO THE BATTLE OF PRESTONPANS. Sir John Cope and his principal officers made their way to Berwick -on -Tweed, and of his whole army only some 200 men gathered at the quarters of their vanquished com- mander. All his artillery and standards, his baggage- waggons- and the military chest, fell into the hands of the victors. Such was the battle of Prestonpans, as it is generally called, or of Gladsmuir, as it was called by the Highlanders. The latter name was all the more apposite because of the ominous lines that were quoted from Thomas the Rhymer — "In Gladesmuir shall the Lattle be" — which thus gave to it the dignity of the fulfilment of a. prophecy. A force which certainly did not exceed 3000 scantily armed and undisciplined Highlanders had, in a few minutes, scattered in hopeless flight and confusion a trained and disciplined English army of at least equal numbers. The- effect of the defeat was all the more telling, because in 1715 the Duke of Argyle at Sheriffmuir had with 3000 men checked and broken up, if he did not actually defeat,. a Highland force of more than 10,000. The conduct of the English general was afterwards the subject, not of a court-martial, but of a military inquiry. That acquitted him of any grave military error. It could not prevent him from being the subject of ridicule to his own and succeeding ages. It can only be said that the English Government, by their fatuous apathy and miser- able weakness, were powerful conti-ibutors to the disaster. The triumph of the Highland army was complete, and they nowise abused their victory. After the first fury of the onset there was no indiscriminate slaughter. The wounded were carefully attended to in the neighbouring houses. The inhabitants of the country round had hovered near the battle- field in a sort of idle curiosity, and they were now suffered to move about unmolested. There was no rapine or violence- in the neighbourhood. Such marauding would have lost half the value of the victory, and the influence of the leaders sufficed to prevent it. But the victory was not pure gain to the Prince's cause. The Highland army lost considerably on the battlefield. More than a hundred men were killed or wounded. And even though it brought in new adherents, it showed how little reliance could be placed on the motley host. Many had obtained a share of the booty which was captured with the baggage-waggons, and laden with such articles of dress and such appurtenances. THE HIGHLAND TRIUMPH. 147 of baggage as the English officers carried with them, the mountaineers in considerable numbers hastened to return to their homes. Perhaps they thought that the cause for which they had fought was now triumphant, and fancied that their services were no longer required. In more than one way Charles was to find that victory brought its own difficulties. Placing a still higher value on their services than before, the chiefs disputed his authority, and employed themselves in the endless bickerings of jealousy. What Alexander Carlyle says is probably true enough — that "the victory at Preston, triumphant though it was, put an end to his authority." 148 CHAPTER VII. FROM PEESTONPANS TO FALKIRK. On the night after his victory the Prince lay at Pinkie House,^ near Musselburgh. Next morning he returned in triumph to Edinburgh amidst the plaudits of the crowd, and with all the outward show of welcome from the magis- trates, whatever had been their feelings a few days before. The capital was now completely at his command, with the exception of the castle, which, in the absence of Lord Mark Ker, the governor, was held by two stout veterans. Generals Guest and Preston, both above eighty -six years of age. How- ever unfit such weight of years might be for the heads of a beleaguered garrison, these old soldiers did their duty well. Guest, in particular, was wheeled round the walls every two hours during the blockade ; and he showed no lack of spirit in his dealings with the rebels. The fruits of a victory must be gathered quickly, if they are to be of much value. Had the Prince been able to advance at once, while the country was still under the im- pression of the consternation spread by the rout of Preston- pans, and before the Government could organise a new army, the expedition might have inflicted far greater damage on England than it actually did, whatever similarity there must have been as to the ultimate result. But he depended on a force accustomed to quick plundering forays, to be succeeded by precipitate retreat. Many of his followers had already disappeared, and new accessions of force were to be expected only as the results of the accidents of war. Had there been a great flood of Jacobite feeling, restrained by severe military force, and waiting only for a favourable oppor- ^ Then occupied by Colin Campbell, Esq., Commissioner of Customs. The Prince no doubt quartered himself without the ceremony of invitation ; but such a guest must liave given a shock to one inmate of the house, Archibald Robertson, a pragmatical old bachelor and rigid Presbyterian, the uncle of the historian. THE prince's government IN EDINBURGH. 149 tunity to burst out, such restilts might have been satisfactory- enough. But when the majority of the nation was either apathetic or actively opposed to the enterprise, and when the weakness of the Government was due chiefly to its criminal disregard of the intrigues that had long been on foot, and to the fact that it had been taken by surprise, then every hour's delay played into its hands. To have advanced at once would have been the best strategy had it been possible: as circumstances were, it would have been the height of madness. The Prince made the best of a difficult position. He would have no rejoicings for a victory which had cost his subjects so dear. He exhorted the ministers of Edinburgh to resume the exercise of their religious functions, and although he could not be expected absolutely to sanction public prayers for the reigning family, he gave an assur- ance that no one would be called to account for any im- prudent language. One of the ministers actually did resume his functions and boldly prayed for King George, but the Prince refused to interfere with this honest assertion of a political faith. With a touch of humour the stout-hearted preacher added to his next prayer one for the Prince, and made the petition that as he had come to seek an earthly crown, a heavenly one should be granted to him. It was one thing, however, to hold the city by the presence of his victorious army: it was another thing to restore a feeling of confidence under the new regime. The bankers were invited to resume business; but they hesitated to do so. Those who were adherents of the Government, now that they could not resist, left the city, and spread else- where a feeling of sullen discontent. They were compelled to submit to the billeting of soldiers in their houses, and to pay their quota of the subsidies demanded; but they did it with murmurings not less because they had for the time to be concealed. The Courts of Law were closed, and business was practically at a standstill. The Highlanders were on the whole peaceable enough, and were under sufficient restraint to abstain from robbery and violence; but the citizens none the less bemoaned the suspension of all settled life by the presence of a "savage" host. We find Sir John Clerk, for instance, who had certainly shown no conspicuous zeal in the defence of the Government to which he was bound by most substantial ties, piteously lamenting his own enforced flight, which he was compelled to make along roads that were rendered deep and danger- ous by the tramp of marching troops. He was actually 150 FROM PRESTONPANS TO FALKIRK. compelled to pay £200 as his share of the subsidy; all his best horses were requisitioned, and his spruce domain was invaded by uncouth Highland chiefs, who must have been strangely out of place amidst his trim alleys and in his well-ordered library at Penicuik. But he is compelled to admit that his enforced visitors "committed no disorders about the house except that they eated and drank all they could find, and called for everything as they thought fit." ^ Such whinings hardly show the spirit that strenuously re- sists a rebellion, but they serve to show how deep and wide- spread was the resentment against its temporary success. The forces of the Government were being rapidly aug- mented after the first sudden and unexpected blow. Several British regiments had been brought home from Flanders ; and the Dutch, according to treaty, sent over 6000 mercen- aries. These troops were now being concentrated at New- castle under Marshal Wade. They we're tried veterans, and it could hardly be expected that the fiasco of Prestonpans would be repeated after sufficient warning. For the Prince to have advanced at once would have been to leave behind not only the supplies and reinforcements which the High- lands might yet yield, but also to abandon hope of all assistance from France. That assistance could reach the Prince only by Scottish ports. But if the bold venture of an immediate advance were impossible, the prospects of the enterprise in Scotland still looked promising. Levies were made on all the consider- able towns, Glasgow — which was almost entirely adverse to the cause — being compelled to pay £5000. New adher- ents came in from Aberdeenshire, from Strathmore under Lord Ogilvie, and from Speyside under Lord Lewis Gordon, the brother of the Duke of Gordon. The Duke himself held aloof; but his abstention was compensated by the bold appeal to the sympathy of the clan which Lord Lewis was able to make. Lord Kilmarnock, who, when a boy, had appeared with his father at the head of a regiment of a thousand Ayrshire adherents of the Government against the rebels of 1715, and who enjoyed a pension as a reward of his loyalty, now changed sides, and rashly joined in an enterprise which was to cost him his life. In the main the Prince's army was to continue one composed of the Highland clans, and to partake both of their weakness and their strength. But it was now joined by no inconsider- able body of Lowlanders, and there was added to it more than one fairly equipped squadron of cavalry. What it ^ Memoirs, p. 188. RESISTANCE OF THE CASTLE. 151 gained in numbers and discipline, however, it may well have lost in cohesion and in impulsive force. The chief military question that had to be settled was the continued resistance of Edinburgh Castle, which re- mained to mark the limits of the Prince's apparent triumph. To have reduced it by storm was obviously impossible ; but so long as it remained impregnable, the authority which he exercised rested upon a most precarious tenure. There was nothing for it but to attempt a blockade, and accord- ingly it was proclaimed that no one should convey provisions to the castle under pain of death. This was promptly answered by the threat that unless the blockade were with- drawn the guns of the castle would be opened on the city. The lord provost and magistrates were reduced to sore straits, between an authority that could coerce but could not protect them, and a citadel that could reduce their town to ruins. They could only appeal to London and beg that the cannonade should be suspended until an answer were returned. General Preston seems to have agreed to this; but the terms of the arrangement having, as he understood, been broken, he actually opened fire upon the houses nearest to the castle. The Prince had to face the prospect that de- spair and terror might prompt the citizens to a resistance which courage and loyalty had failed to arouse. At the best, such a disaster, even if it had not overturned his authority, must have made it odious and unpopular; and to prevent it, he was compelled to withdraw the blockade. The strange spectacle was then seen of a victorious army exercising undisputed authority in the city, while the citadel maintained itself intact and drew provisions as it required from those who were in the enemy's power. Such a state of things was obviously only temporary. The Prince held a court. Festivities were frequent at the palace, and banquets and balls helped to give the impression of a fixed authority that could turn its attention to other matters than the prosecution of the war. It was not without prudent policy that every effort was made to let the Prince and his surroundings loom large in the eyes of the aristocracy of both sexes that were gathered at Edinburgh, and who forgot dangers and risks amid the buckram of a court that only thinly covered the stern realities of a camp. A council met every day, and it applied itself with energy enough to the provision of supplies, and to the necessities of military discipline. But it contained elements too diverse to per- mit of its harmonious working. The immediate companions of the Prince were many of them Irishmen, out of sympathy 152 FROM PRESTONPANS TO FALKIRK. with the country which they sought to hold, ignorant of its constitution and its history, and filled with those arti- ficial notions of hereditary right which they had imbibed in the hotbed atmosphere of the exiled Court. Where they were not mere adventurers, reared and nurtured in con- spiracy, they were only adherents of a name and of a romantic and fanciful idea. The motives that stirred the various sections of the Scottish host — motives often inconsist- ent and almost irreconcilable — were all alike unknown and uncared for by them. The passionate attachment to the clan system ; the rugged national feeling that chafed against the Union; the enthusiastic devotion to a ritual and a hierarchy which dominant Presbyterianism had trampled in the dust; the dogged obstinacy that made even some of the descendants of the Lowland Covenanters prefer a king of their own line to one of Hanoverian origin — all these had their representatives in the camp of Charles Edward. They had little in common with one another; but all alike shared the contemptuous disregard of the O'Sullivans and the Sheridans of the Prince's entourage. To investi- gate all the cross-currents of intrigue, of jealousy, of greed, of ambition, it may be of selfish treachery, belongs to the history, not of Scotland, but of the Rebellion. In the history of Scotland that rebellion is an incident of which we can only present the origin, the salient incidents, and the event. The documents and memoirs that throw light upon its labyrinths, and the accounts of it that have been written from every varying aspect, constitute in themselves a goodly library. The romantic interest of the story can never fade, and some new coil of its intricacies may yet from time to time be unravelled. But we should give an untrue and disproportion ed notion of its place in Scottish history if we presented each detail as of essential import- ance in the nation's life. In that life it was an episode that left a memory and a romance, and reflected a trait in the national character that might not otherwise have been revealed. But it left no further legacy; it affected no national institution; it embodied no permanent national aspiration ; it left no definite impression on the national char- acter. It was like one of those scenes that not only charm the eye, but win the heart, amidst the Scottish mountains : scenes that derive their beauty from far-folded mists and changing clouds ; from the ripple of waters lighted by a moment's sunshine ; from creeping shadows and the glitter of a summer shower. We visit them again, and find the gaunt and rugged form of the landscape unchanged, but the magic HESITATION AMONGST THE HIGHLAND CHIEFS. 153 beauty that caught us and lingers vaguely in our memory has vanished beneath the sullen aspect of a leaden sky. Amidst the bickerings and jealousies of the council at Holyrood one point emerged of supreme importance. What help was to be expected from France, and until that help was assured what progress was it safe to make ? It was the policy of the Prince and his inner circle of advisers to represent such help as certain; it was the fixed deter- mination of the Highland chiefs to insist that their risks should to some extent be covered by explicit declarations on that head. France did just enough to raise expectations and to keep the rebellion alive; but she plainly refused to commit herself to any serious effort. From time to time vessels arrived with a handful of reinforcements and with a scanty supply of money. Monsieur de Boyer arrived at Holyrood in the character half of an envoy, half of a messenger, and his presence helped the Prince to inspire his followers with some hopes. His brother, the Duke of York, it was said, would soon land in Britain at the head of a French army. But only enough was done to give some speciousness to these hopes. One of the worst results of this uncertainty was that it gave ample opportunity to those who sought to play a double game. They were able to hold out delusive offers of assistance on which they might base future claims if the rebellion proved successful, but which they might refuse to implement until the condition of foreign aid were more amply satisfied. Macdonald of Sleat and the Macleod of Macleod, the most powerful chiefs amongst the Western Isles, still insisted, with no suspicion of treachery, upon a condition which they had openly avowed to be a necessary precursor of their aid. But others, and above all that aged villain, Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, found in this uncertainty an admirable cloak for his own duplicity. He hesitated and made excuses. He kept up a correspondence with his neigh- bour, Duncan Forbes, and yet intrigued with the Prince's agents as to the terms on which his alliance might be pur- chased. His double-dealing inflicted one of the severest wounds on the enterprise, because it alienated others whose help would have been worth much more. By his means Macdonald and Macleod were driven all the more securely into the hands of Forbes, who alone, amongst all the agents of the Government, earns our admiration for the steady head and sound judgment that made him the mainstay of loyalty to the constituted dynasty in the north of Scotland. By his influence not only Macdonald and Macleod, but Lord Sea- 154 FKOM PRESTONPANS TO FALKIRK. forth, the Earl of Sutherland, and Lord Reay, the chief of the Mackays, were induced, with other leading men of the North, to accept commissions for raising Highland regiments in support of the Government. Nothing could have inflicted greater injury on the Jacobite cause. The Prince found not only a veteran army barring his advance at Newcastle, but he was obliged to leave behind him in the North a hostile force which might be trusted to counteract the efforts of his supporters in the region where they might have hoped to act with most effect. This northern force gathered at Inverness before the end of October, and it forced upon him the choice between courses all of which were equally fraught with danger. Lovat at length declared himself for the Jacobite cause by sending his son with a body of his clansmen to the assistance of the Prince. But he ad- vanced no farther than Perth; and the contingent arrived too late to join in the march to England, and was obviously too weak to act with effect against the powerful confederacy which the energy of Forbes had concentrated at Inverness. Driven to choose a course of action, the Prince had a difficulty before him with which neither he nor his various advisers were competent to deal. Heroic as was the enter- prise, bold as was its design, warm as was the enthusiasm which it had gathered round it, we must always remember that it never got much beyond the stage of an adventurous escapade. The first essential of success required in a rebel- lion is that it should rest upon some solid political founda- tion. This was precisely what was wanting to the present effort, and its supporters were incapable of taking a just measure of the political feeling of the nation. The central nucleus of the enterprise was the small body of conspirators, who had long lost their political sense in the unsound atmos- phere of a pseudo court, deriving all its occasional import- ance from the shifting chances of foreign intrigue. No doubt it had the support of some of the leading Highland chiefs ; but their support was doubtful and almost half-hearted, as they felt that they were being made the tools of conspirators who had failed to perform their part of the contract in secur- ing effective foreign assistance. Romantic and heroic as their loyalty was, it rested partly upon a selfish motive, the desire to preserve powers and jurisdictions which were threatened by all modern constitutional principles, and which might hope for a precarious toleration under a dynasty which they had laid under heavy obligations. No doubt the attempt attracted a few malcontents both in Scotland and in Eng- land. In Scotland the Union was unpopular with many; WEAK POINTS OF JACOBITISM. 155 but the solid interests of Scotland were gradually winning for it acquiescence, if not enthusiasm. The Scottish Epis- copalians hoped by its success to stem the tide of intolerance which threatened to overwhelm them ; but they could not hope to bring the nation over to allegiance to their cause. In England, the grumblers against the Government which had alienated and disgusted a large part of the nation, and which seemed inclined to subordinate English interests to foreign exigencies, were numerous enough; and Jacobite leanings more or less pronounced were no bad adjuncts to the general discontent. Many found it not unpleasant to hint vaguely at changes which might restore the balance which they found rudely disturbed, to recover the influence of the landed gentry, and to stem the flowing tide of Whig- gism and corruption. The Squire Westerns of the day found it amusing to make their wives drink the first toast after dinner to the king over the water, to hint at a good time coming when sound Tories would enjoy their own again, to make a parade of patriotism, and when their potations grew deeper to rail at the Hanoverian rats that were eating up the corn and leaving nothing but the chafl*. But there was a long step between this and taking up arms for the exiled house, or making its cause the basis of a strenuous political design. A bad scenting day might seem to Squire Western to be due to the vile machinations of German intruders; but a good scenting day was not to be wasted for all the Jacobites that ever plotted, and the good squire would never have paid the price of a well -blooded hound in order to set King James upon the throne which his father had lost. But all this was just what it was impossible for Charles and his advisers to appreciate. When rebellion is the result of deeply rooted political conviction it may not always be successful, but it is at least deliberate, pertinacious, and cautious in design. When it is, for the vast majority of its supporters, nothing but the embodiment of a tradition, the expression of a sentiment, the outcome of casual and ill- defined grumbling and discontent, then it descends from the level of a deliberate design, and becomes the instrument of restless and often selfish conspirators. Do what they would, the choice of the leaders of the enterprise was narrowed down to alternative chances in a game of reckless hazard. By remaining in Scotland, Charles would inevitably give rise to the suspicion that he could exert no influence beyond its borders. The resources of the party there were limited. The power which he wielded was precarious, and he must 156 FROM PRESTONPANS TO FALKIRK. expect it soon to be overturned by an army which would presently be on a footing altogether out of proportion to any he could command. He depended entirely upon the Highland chiefs, whose dictation he resented, and between whom and the Lowland Scots discord must inevitably break out. The longer he waited there the more did the Rebellion assume the appearance of a revolt by a poor and thinly- populated country against her larger and wealthier sister; and nothing would render it more odious to Englishmen and more certain to provoke their anger and contempt, suc- ceeding to a sudden fit of pusillanimous alarm. He held the capital, it is true; but he held it only by a successful military exploit, and maintained in it only a camp, not a government. The law courts were closed; business was suspended ; the ordinary life of the city was at a standstill. The people watched, partly with apathy, partly with curi- osity, partly with alarm, an army encamped in their midst, whose presence they could not resent, for whose abstention from actual violence they were grateful, but whose occupa- tion, they were convinced, could not be long — unless a change, of which there were no signs, came over the spirit of English politics. If, on the other hand, he advanced into England, there was only too much danger that he would lose any advantage which he had already gained. Whatever effective support he had obtained had been from Scotland alone. Such troops as he had would be less amenable to discipline and more prone to alarm the farther they advanced from their homes. In- stead of being amongst a population which was divided in feeling and, even when not sympathetic, effectually cowed, they would pass through a nation of strangers, of whose opinions they knew nothing, and whose hostility to a savage horde was certain. It was in Scotland alone that the Prince could receive reinforcements from France, if any such rein- forcements were to be hoped for. He left behind him in the North a powerful Highland confederacy opposed to his claims, and that confederacy would be strengthened by the assistance of the Lowlands as soon as the victorious army which held them in check should be withdrawn. Very moderate energy on the part of the leaders of the English army now gathering at Newcastle would enable them to cut off his retreat ; and he would probably be compelled to hazard all on the chances of a battle in a country where the majority were ready to de- scribe the attempt as a proof of overweening insolence on the part of a troublesome and disaffected province of the kingdom. Both on political and strategical grounds there were dangers THE prince's choice. 157 in either course. The Prince was bent upon a bold advance. To him the expedition was one for the maintenance of sacred hereditary rights against flagrant usurpation, and all political considerations were swallowed up in this single idea. The victory he had already achieved seemed to mark the favour of Heaven to his cause, and he was firmly convinced that attachment to his family would be a sufficient motive to the majority of Englishmen to flock to his standard. He meas- ured the strength of England only by the fatuous efforts that her Government had yet made, and forgot the extent of her resources. His past experience seemed to prove that a sudden and bold attack was sufficient to make the whole edifice of constitutional government, which had endured for nearly two generations, to topple to the ground. Above all, he saw that the necessary resources for his scheme could only be found by drawing on the wealth of England, and that his only hope of foreign assistance lay in proving that he had effective support there. But he found his proposals strongly combated in the council that now sat daily in Holyrood House. The more prudent strategists urged that the only hope of success lay in waiting for Wade's advance. No arguments that he could use could change the minds of these adherents, who felt that their followers were not to be counted on for a foreign expedition. He was reduced to proposing an advance to the Borders ; but to this also they were opposed, knowing how little permanent authority they were to leave behind them when the army was no longer present. On the third day he declared his firm intention to advance, and it says much for the loyalty of his followers that he was able to induce them to follow him against the advice of the wisest heads amongst them. They saw that the die was already cast, and that defiance of his authority could only precipitate the absolute failure of their attempt. All that Lord George Murray could effect by his arguments was, that the advance should be made rather to the west than the east, so as to give England time to rise and France time to give the assistance of which she held out only delusive hopes, before the decisive engagement with Wade's force. He saw that the hills of Cumberland were likely to oppose a barrier to Wade's advance towards the west, and that before his army had crossed them there would be time to strike one or two effective blows. To this the Prince agreed ; and the advance was begun on the 31st of October 1745. The first night the Prince again spent at Pinkie House, and the army, which consisted now of 5500 men, was ordered to 158 FROM PRESTON PANS TO FALKIRK. rendezvous at Dalkeith on the next day. Thence it was to advance in two bodies to the neighbourhood of Carlisle. The body which took the west road was commanded by the Duke of Perth ; that which kept to the east road was led by the Prince himself. When Carlisle was reached it was deter- mined to seize the town and the castle; and such show of resistance as was at first made did not prove very elFective. The mayor proclaimed to the citizens that he was determined to hold out to the last ; and General Durand, who commanded the castle, was equally bold in his declarations. But the siege had hardly begun when the mayor sent a message of capitu- lation ; and as no surrender would be accepted which did not include the castle, that also was handed over, after the de- fenders had suffered the loss of one man killed and one wounded. On the l7th of November the Prince, who had meanwhile reached Brampton, made his triumphant entry into the town. But this apparent success was accompanied by circumstances that showed the weakness of the cause. No sooner had the Highland army retired than the displaced officials resumed their functions in Edinburgh, not with the acquiescence only, but with the warm acclamation, of the people. Other towns followed the example of the capital. Perth was not pre- vented, even by the presence of a strong Highland force, from showing its sympathy with the Hanoverian cause. Dundee was equally decided; while in Glasgow the anti-Jacobite feeling had always been marked. The short-lived triumph seemed already to be passing away like a dream. Nor was this the only sign of evil portent. As the Highland army advanced it dwindled away by the desertion of those who could not, even by their devotion to their chiefs, bring them- selves to wander so far from their native mountains. Of the 5500 who left Dalkeith in the beginning of November more than a thousand had drifted back before the two bodies met again in the neighbourhood of Carlisle. Besides this, ominous signs of dissension had shown them- selves amongst the leading followers of the Prince. The parties most clearly divided from one another were on the one hand the more personal adherents of the cause in the intimate circle of the Prince. They consisted of those who were the habitues of the exiled Court, the seasoned conspira- tors, the unflinching advocates of divine right. They were fighting for a tenet to which they clung with the intensity of religious fanatics; they were also men who had much to gain and nothing to lose except their lives. They were complacent to the Prince, ready to second all that was boldest DISSENSION IN THE CAMP. 159 in his schemes, because in that boldness lay their only chance of success in the desperate game. These men looked to the Duke of Perth as their leader, and lost no opportunity of thwarting Lord George Murray, and aggravating any cause of offence which the Prince was only too ready to conceive against him. On the other hand were those who had perilled their all in the cause ; who believed in it not only as righteous in itself, but as helping to redress Scottish wrongs, and who in its prosecution studied not only the caprices of their Prince, but the opinions and feelings of their countrymen. They resented the dominant influence of Irish adventurers who brought nothing to the common cause save their swords and their restless spirit of intrigue. They resented the Roman Catholic predilections of the Duke of Perth, and felt that these would arouse the opposition which nearly sixty years before had driven the Prince's grandfather from the throne. They took a just estimate of their own value to the cause, and refused to be made the cat's-paw of a crew of adventur- ous conspirators. Above all, they knew the value of the strategical ability of Murray, and chafed to see it set aside for the harebrained schemers who fed their hopes only on delusive promises. Lord George Murray was not of a temper to brook distrust or neglect; and the feud went so far that after the capitulation of Carlisle, which had been arranged by the Duke of Perth, he tendered the resignation of his command to the Prince. That resignation was ac- cepted; and what would have been an irreparable loss to the cause was averted only by a doubtful reconciliation, and by the request which the Prince was induced to make that Lord George Murray should resume his command. The elements of dissension remained as strong as before. To have remained at Carlisle would have been useless, A garrison of some 300 men was left there, and on the 21st of November the army advanced to Penrith. There they expected to meet Wade, who had marched from New- castle to Hexham, and there seemed every prospect that the success or failure of the cause would be put to the hazard of a pitched battle. But Wade was now an old man, and the helpless dilatoriness which seemed to have diffused itself on all the officers of the Crown now held him back. The winter had set in severely after a long dry summer, and the roads over the Cumberland hills were encumbered by deep snow. The marshal feared the fate of Cope too much to hazard anything on a doubtful chance ; and he retired to Newcastle, leaving the road southwards open to the Prince's force. From Penrith the rebel army 160 FROM PRESTONPANS TO FALKIRK. pushed on to Lancaster and then to Preston, where they arrived on the 26th. The memories of 1715 made that town an object of superstitious dread to the Highlanders, who believed that destiny did not permit them to pass the scene of their former defeat. To counteract this superstition Lord George Murray marched them through the town, and en- camped to the south of it beyond the bridge over the Ribble. The spell seemed to be broken and the road to London to lie open to the rebels. The people of Preston received the Prince with cheers; but when it was attempted to raise recruits for the army these cheers did not translate them- selves into any overt assistance. He was forced to content himself with the neutrality or the thoughtless acclamations of a crowd moved perhaps by curiosity as much as cordial sympathy. So far, however, the march southwards had not been without its triumphs, and it had endeared the Prince to the main body of his followers. Never was a leader of a forlorn hope, or of a gallant adventure — however we choose to style it — more fitted by his personal qualities to captivate the hearts of an army such as marched under his standard. They were no disciplined troops, accustomed to regard their leaders only as the guides and directors of a vast military machine. Their obedience to their chiefs was absolute and unswerving; but it was an obedience linked to indomitable pride, looking to a familiar greeting and an easy intercourse between themselves and their chiefs as a right which could not be denied them. With marvellous tact, Charles, in spite of all the habits contracted at foreign Courts, managed to adapt himself to this strange compound of almost slavish obedience with ineradicable pride of race, and could pass a jest or share a scanty meal with the humblest of the un- couth Highlanders who marched at his side. They admired athletic skill and were inured to hardship and fatigue: Charles could rival them in physical endurance, and shared all the labours of the march. Small of stature and ill nurtured as they were, there was nothing that attracted their admiration more than a stately and majestic mien; and none bore himself better than the representative of the ancient line. The Celtic imagination was ever prone to respond to the call of poetry and romance, and both had already begun to weave their web about the expedition and about the person of its leader. His marvellous consti- tution enabled him to vie with the most hardy in feats of endurance ; and he was as cheerful amidst hardships as he was dignified in all the ceremonial functions that fell to WITHIN REACH OF THE CAPITAL. 161 the representative of the rightful sovereign. He often spent the night in camp, and took his slumber lying beside the soldiers in their bivouac. He refused to use the carriage provided for him, and insisted that it should be occupied by the aged Lord Pitsligo, who had brought the remnant of a long life to devote to the service of his king. In a light plaid, with the blue sash and bonnet and the white cockade that were the emblems of his fortunes, he beguiled the weary toil of long marches by his unfailing bonhomie. In a Lancashire village he found that trudging along the hard roads had worn a hole in his shoe, and was fain to have recourse to the blacksmith to nail an iron plate upon the sole. "You are the first blacksmith that ever shod the son of a king," he said ; and the joke fell on ears that cherished it for its blitheness and its pride. The onlookers might cast on them sour looks; the hoped-for help might tarry; the scenes amidst which they passed might be alien and strange ; but with such a cause and such a hero fatigue, and hardship, and thickening danger might be faced with a light heart. From Preston the army passed to Wigan, and thence to Manchester, which they reached on the 29th of November. In Lancashire, if anywhere in England, it might be thought that the Jacobite cause had strong support, and already some leading men from that county had joined the Prince's standard. But it soon appeared that their followers were few, and not more than two hundred were added to the army under the name of the Manchester regiment. Every day it became more plain that the hopes to be placed on the active loyalty of English Jacobites were delusive and vain ; and the farther the army advanced the blacker were the looks that greeted them. Such was the aspect of matters ere they reached Derby — only ninety miles from the capital. Difficulties were now crowding on them. The English Government were fully awake to the crisis, and, dilatory as their action had been, the engine of military force was now prepared. Cope had been vanquished in Scotland. Wade had failed to check the advance in the northern counties. But his army was intact, and was threatening the rear. The Duke of Cumberland had been summoned from abroad some weeks before, and had taken command of a consider- able army posted at Lichfield. The king had placed him- self at the head of his guards, and was encamped with them on Finchley Common. The march on London would certainly be met in force, and meanwhile the Prince's army was threatened from more than one point in his rear. L 162 FROM PRESTONPANS TO FALKIRK. For two days the Prince stayed at Derby to refresh his troops. Victory seemed now within his grasp, and he looked forward confidently to a triumphant entry into London. Even the details occupied his attention, and he was doubtful whether his entry should be on horseback or on foot, in Highland or in Lowland garb.^ But he had to reckon with others who took a better measure of the enterprise and its hopes. On the 5th of December Lord George Murray and all the military commanders appeared before the Prince to deliver a grave remonstrance. They had done all they could do, and had fulfilled their part of the bargain ; but no hint of effective support had as yet come from England, and their hopes of French assistance had proved utterly vain. Three armies were now on foot in England — one just in front of them under the Duke of Cumberland, one to their rear under Wade, and one at London under the king. Against not one of these could they expect a victory, and even a casual success could not be effectually followed up unless they could reckon upon sympathisers who would rally to their aid. On the other hand, by retreating to Scotland they might successfully maintain themselves there, by junction with the army at Perth, and with a small French force which had reached Montrose under Lord John Drummond. By such a course success, if slower, was not impossible ; and at least the danger would be less appal- ling than that which threatened them where they were. The Prince and his immediate advisers were indignant at such advice. He swore that he would adhere to his plan and hazard all in an attack upon the capital. But the advice had been carefully weighed, and was not to be lightly abandoned. Those who thought with Lord George Murray were not to be turned from their deliberate decision. Unwillingly, and with no attempt to hide his chagrin, the Prince was forced to give up his scheme. He announced that he would return to Scotland, but only because they forced him to abandon all his hopes. He would hold no further councils, and he must accompany their retreat not as their leader, but as one to whom freedom of action was denied. ^ It is scarcely necessary to note that the assumption of the Highland garb by the Chevalier, however calculated to conciliate Highland sympathies, was absurd and incongruous. The house of Stuart was in no wise of Highland origin, and had no connection with the clans. No member of that house had ever dreamed of appearing in such guise, and its annals contained many records of fierce con- tests with the Highland chiefs. The adoption of the dress by Charles Edward was only one degree less ridiculous than the theatrical absurdity which led George IV. to appear in similar attire during his visit to Edinburgh in 1822. THE RETKEAT FROM DERBY. 163 It may be that prudence dictated the retreat. With reckless audacity an ill-assorted and half -disciplined host of less than five thousand men had marched into the heart of England, had threatened the capital, had captured towns, and had overcome such troops as had attempted to with- stand them. To a superficial observer it might seem as if the vast population, the overwhelming wealth, the solid political institutions, and the military power of a great empire were to be at the mercy of a small band of reckless adventurers. It was no wonder that, as their real power be- came visible to the leaders themselves, a very little considera- tion showed them what dangers surrounded them. But these dangers had certainly not been impressed upon them by any action of the Government. The whole power of the empire was paralysed by the criminal weakness of the Government; and although it was shaking itself free from the lethargy into which it had fallen, there was no out- ward sign that it could exert itself effectively to crush revolt. Three armies were on foot, but they seemed to hesitate about coming to grips with this petty invading force. The crown had at its command thousands of vet- erans, trained in foreign wars. From the royal family downwards there was a plentiful supply of officers of ripe military experience. The resources of the country were greater than they had ever been, and it had abundant re- serves of power. But for the moment it seemed helpless to protect itself against an attempt which seemed, from almost infinitesimal beginnings, to be able to shake it to its foundations. Even when retreat was decided on, that attempt did not seem to lose its vigour and its power of striking an effective blow, and the successes of the Jacobite cause were not closed by the backward march. But in truth that retreat was worse than a defeat : it was the confession of weakness wrung from the self-conscious im- potence of those who had started, against their more prudent judgment, an enterprise which they could not hope to bring to a successful issue. So long as he was inflated by hopes of victory, so long as he was buoyed up by delusive fancies of foreign aid, so long as he could nurse the idea that Providence would favour the cause of hereditary right, the Prince was a splendid leader of an expedition which was heroic even if it was somewhat theatrical. But when the measure of his support had been rightly taken, when the depth of Jacobite loyalty had been plumbed with accu- racy, when he found that common-sense and prudence were making themselves felt against the tide of a flowing en- 164 FROM PRESTONPANS TO FALKIRK. thusiasm, then he became no more than a plaything of fortune. He had suffered no defeat : all the more striking was the implied confession that he was outmanoeuvred in the hazardous game that he had chosen to play. From the day when he was forced to turn back at Derby Jacobit- ism was no longer an effective force. It was to leave a memory, a tradition, a gradually decaying thread of influ- ence in the affairs of the nation ; but of permanent political results it was to be entirely barren. The Prince was no longer the blithe companion of his soldiers, sharing their fatigues and mingling in their talk. He hung in the rear of his army; made them wait on his movements; rode behind as one who ostentatiously had ceased to be the director of the march. He sulked at his own impotence, and for a time he ceased even to affect any interest in the plans of those who still professed that their retreat was made for strategical reasons, and with no con- viction of coming defeat. The Highlanders had behaved with exemplary discipline in the onward march, and the silent acquiescence of the districts through which they had passed had given them confidence even though active assistance was not forth- coming. But it was different with the retiring host. Dis- cipline was relaxed; robbery became more frequent; they could not be restrained from plundering the homesteads by which they passed; and in place of silent or even friendly spectators, they found sullen and threatening looks, and even active hostility, surrounding their retreating steps. Stragglers were seized and maltreated. Many of the towns recovered their boldness, and threatening bands hung upon the rear of the army which a few days before had been watched with wonder and respect. Deserters were restrained from a precipitate retreat to their mountains only by the feeling that they had to pass through long tracts of hostile country before they found a place of safety. Lord George Murray, whose prudence had advised the retreat, took upon himself what was often the arduous task of protecting it; and by the time that the van of the army reached Penrith on the I7th of December he was about six miles in the rear, and was threatened closely by the pursuing force of the Duke of Cumberland, who had left Lichfield as soon as he heard that the Highland army was returning north. At Clifton, a village some three miles south of Penrith, Lord George had a brush with the royalist cavalry, who sought to disturb the Highland troops and give time for the Duke of Cumberland to advance. In this skirmish he waa RETURN TO SCOTLAND. 165 successful, and beat off the advancing force. But he was insufficiently aided by the main body under the Prince, and all he could do was to retire and ultimately join the Prince's army when it re-entered Carlisle on the 19th of December. So far the retreat had been conducted in good order and with no undue precipitancy. The pursuing army had been kept at bay, and the Highland force suffered no disaster that could damp their spirits or make them anticipate defeat. Tidings of possible French aid reached the Prince, and it seemed as if the retreat from England were temporary only, and that after he had time to recruit his forces and consoli- date his power in Scotland he might return at the head of an even more formidable army. With this view it was deemed necessary to garrison Carlisle, and a small band of some 300 men, consisting mostly of the English adherents and of some French and Irish who were technically in the service of the French king, were left to hold the castle, and thus secure a gateway into England when it suited the Prince to return. To run such a risk upon a chance, which in reality was hopeless, argued a miscalculation of the forces arrayed against him which was characteristic of the leader. After two days the retreat into Scotland was begun, but the Scotland which he entered was not that from which he had marched in triumph. The Government not only re- covered from the effects of its own heedlessness and quick alarm, but its adherents throughout the country had also taken a better measure of the situation, and were prepared to offer resistance to an enterprise which was now plainly seen to be fraught with danger to the national prosperity. In Dumfriesshire and Annandale generally the people were only waiting for some support from the central authority to animate them to an attack upon a force whose retreat they attributed to the failure of the Jacobite cause. In the south- western counties the majority of the population was strongly anti-Jacobite, and Glasgow was sufficiently ardent in the Hanoverian cause to raise a regiment of volunteers under the Earls of Home and Glencairn. In the North a strong body of the Highlanders who had refused to join the rebels was gathered under Lord Loudoun; and the capital was again in the hands of the constituted authorities. It seemed at first as if the Prince were returning to a country where his cause would have as little support as it had found in the march through England, and as if the authority which he had exercised there a few weeks before had passed away like a troubled dream. But in truth this represented only one aspect of the situa- 166 FROM PRESTONPANS TO FALKIRK. tion. The hopes of the cause seemed to revive when the Prince re-entered Scotland. Under Lord John Drummond, the brother of the Duke of Perth, a French force of trained soldiers had landed at Montrose. There was some talk of a larger French expedition under the Prince's brother, the Duke of York, and an even greater expedition for the invasion of England was projected under the command of the Duke of Richelieu. This force was to amount to more than ten thousand men, and they were not only gathered at the sea- port towns of France, but transports were provided for their embarkation. But the expedition hung fire, and when the news reached England, Admiral Vernon was sent with a strong fleet into the Channel, and troops were massed upon the coasts of Kent and Essex. The delay proved fatal to the project, and long before the hopes of the Jacobites were dis- pelled the expedition was definitely abandoned. Meanwhile the Prince had taken vengeance upon the mal- contents of Dumfries and Glasgow by levying money upon these towns. With new spirit the Highland army advanced northwards, and it was determined to lay siege to the castle of Stirling, which was occupied by a large detachment of the Government forces under General Blakeney. Nor did the cause lack support in other parts of Scotland. In Aberdeen- shire Lord Lewis Gordon, the brother of the Duke of Gordon, had levied a considerable force amongst the landed gentry who were favourable to the Jacobite cause. At Inverurie, almost ten miles from Aberdeen, he came into collision with the Highland forces who stood for the Government under Lord Loudoun, and inflicted upon them a crushing defeat. He then joined the French force under Lord John Drummond, and advancing to Perth, where there was a considerable body of the Prince's adherents under Lord Strathallan, he marched thence to join the Prince at Stirling. The Jacobite army then amounted to about 9000 men, the largest number ever collected under the banner of the Prince. With this force he began the siege of Stirling, on the 10th of January 1746. Meanwhile the Duke of Cumberland had not been inactive. Since the skirmish at Clifton with Lord George Murray he had not attempted to interfere with the retreat of the High- land army, but when they were gone, he had little difficulty in reducing the petty garrison left at Carlisle. The whole of that garrison were taken prisoners, and at one blow all the English adherents of the Jacobite cause fell into the hands of the Government and were reserved for trial. How- ever slender had been the support accorded to the Prince's cause in England, it cannot be said that his English allies GENERAL HAWLEY. 167 had much reason to thank him for any regard for their fate. After entering Carlisle on the 31st December, the Duke of Cumberland was recalled to London to take com- mand against the projected invasion from France. In his place General Hawley, a blustering barrack -room bully, took the command of the pursuing army. As a subaltern in 1715, he had seen something of Highland warfare at SherifFmuir, and that experience had given him a poor opinion of their tactics, which he was soon to have good cause to alter. He was at the head of 8000 men, of whom the majority were tried veterans, and so confident was he of success that on arriving at Edinburgh his first act was to erect the gibbets destined for the rebels. This hectoring bully merits little attention from history were it not that he fitly reflects much in the character of his master the Duke of Cumberland. To insult the loyal inhabitants of the country which he polluted by his presence was in accordance with all his habits. On the soldiers whom his roistering carelessness led to disaster he was wont to exer- cise the most tyrannic despotism, and a defeat was followed by wholesale punishment, and even by a death penalty for some. He was as cruel as the hired mercenaries of the Middle Ages, without the skill or knowledge which generally accompanied their savage temper. When abroad he decorated his quarters with the skeleton of a soldier whose execution he procured. His life was one of flagrant defiance of every dictate of morality and religion; and when it ended a few years later, he left a will which consisted of a tirade of blasphemous impiety. The English Government had at first left the defence of the constitution to a set of feeble and incompetent dotards ; with Hawley they began a new school of contemptuous and heartless scoundrels, which culminated at last in the royal butcher whose name remained as a byword and a curse in Scotland, and who would have given even to a worse cause than that of Jacobitism the respect- ability which comes from being opposed by men of the type of Hawley and of Cumberland. Human nature would sink low if it did not mingle with its doubts of the wisdom of the Jacobite rebellion some pity for its victims, and some admiration for its heroic loyalty. It would sink still lower if it did not, even while recognising the public good in the ultimate event, condemn to infamy the names of those whose ferocious and bloodthirsty cruelty will for ever be associated with that event. Hawley 's movements were closely watched by a better master in the art of war than he. Lord George Murray 168 FROM PRESTONPANS TO FALKIRK. lay at Falkirk waiting for the approach of the Royalist army from Edinburgh. On the 13th of January he learned that orders had been received at Linlithgow to prepare provisions and forage for the troops already on the march. Lord George at once advanced to Linlithgow with a con- siderable body of the Highlanders, supported by a sufficient body of cavalry to enable him efficiently to patrol the Edin- burgh road. General Huske, Hawley's second in command, who shared neither the blustering temper nor the military incapacity of his superior officer, was in temporary charge of the force. Murray's scouts harassed the advancing foe, but his numbers were not sufficient to engage them, and towards nightfall he fell back on Falkirk. On the following day he retreated nearer to Stirling, giving time to Hawley to bring up the rest of his army and occupy Falkirk. On the 16th of January the Chevalier, leaving only a small force to continue the blockade of Stirling, advanced with the main body of his army to Bannockburn. Hawley still lingered at Falkirk, hoping, it would seem, that the foes he so much despised would melt away at the terror of his name, and that the whole expedition would disperse without a blow, and leave to him the congenial task of taking vengeance on helpless stragglers. Meanwhile he spent his time at Callander House in the company of the Countess of Kilmarnock, who found no shame in a dal- liance with the agent sent to wreak vengeance on the adherents of the cause which her weak and wavering hus- band had joined, and for which he afterwards suffered death. His camp was unguarded and no patrols were sent out. By a stratagem of much skill the Highlanders took advantage of his carelessness. Lord John Drummond was sent forward with a con- siderable body along the main road leading from Stirling to Falkirk. This march was intended only as a feint, but every care was taken to attract attention to it by the dis- play of the Prince's standard, and by courting the observa- tion of the foe. Meanwhile Lord George Murray advanced by a circuitous route farther south which opened on Falkirk Moor, then an unenclosed common rising to a considerable ridge. Only when the manoeuvre was almost completed was it observed by General Huske, who was without the support of his superior officer. No orders were given, and the army stood perplexed between two advancing forces. Hawley was summoned in haste from his dalliance at Callander House, and advanced with drawn sword at the head of three regiments of dragoons, hoping to reach the THE BATTLE OF FALKIRK. 169 height before the Highlanders. But under the cover of the ridge these had marched forward rapidly, wheeled and formed in column on the protected side, and soon reached the summit in line of battle. The Macdonalds and Camerons formed the first line ; behind them were the Athole Brigade, with Lord Lewis Gordon's and Lord Ogilvie's contingents ; while the third line was formed of the Irish picquets and the cavalry. Hawley's dragoons had by this time occupied the ridge, towards which the Highlanders charged. The dragoons attempted to take them in flank, but were foiled by a morass, and they were thus compelled to make a charge in front. The Highlanders had learned by discipline and ex- perience not to trust solely to the wild onset that had so often carried them to victory. They reserved their fire until the dragoons were close upon them, and then at the distance of about ten yards poured it in with effect so deadly that the line of horsemen was completely broken. A few attempted to penetrate the Highland front, but only to fall by the clay- mores of the second line, or to be despatched by dirks when they had been torn from horseback by the skirts of their coats. The rest galloped along the ridge exposed to the fire from the front of the Highlanders, and few of them rallied from the disastrous rout. Just as the attack began, a violent storm of wind and rain drove straight in the faces of the Royalist troops, and added to their confusion. It was in vain, however, that Lord George Murray called to the High- landers to stand fast and prepare for another volley of musketry. The instinct of their race was too strong, and disregarding all the entreaties of their general they once more resorted to the tactics which had swept the field of Prestonpans. They dropped their muskets and their plaids, drew their claymores, and rushed on with their usual battle- cry. Their left wing broke the right and centre of Hawley's foot, who were advancing behind the dragoons. They were veterans salted at the fights of Dettingen and Fontenoy ; but the onset of the clans was unlike anything they had ever seen, and to its appalling fury was added the gloom of a furious storm in the half light of a winter afternoon. Their powder was wet by the storm ; their discipline was unavail- ing ; and the future hero of Quebec, then a young officer, saw the veterans of European wars scattered in dismay by an untrained mob of Highland caterans. Wolfe had been lingering in inactivity under Wade at Newcastle during the previous weeks, but he had been sent forward with Hawley, and was now a brigade-major in Burrel's regiment. It was 170 FROM PRESTONPANS TO FALKIRK. his first taste of Highland warfare, and perhaps he learned from it some distrust of the formal tactics that served well enough against disciplined troops. His own wing at least held their own and protected the English retreat. They stood their ground, outflanked the Highlanders, and having kept their powder drier in spite of the pitiless storm, they poured upon that wing of the Highland army a steady fire which broke it up in confusion and flight. The battle be- came a chaos, something like that of Sheriffmuir, in which each side could claim some success, but was obliged to admit some disastrous panic. In twenty minutes from the first onset part of each army was flying in total uncertainty about the issue of the fight. The Highlanders had on the whole the best of it ; but their want of discipline prevented them from reaping the full advantage of their success. Haw- ley abandoned his camp and left his cannon in the hands of the enemy. He retreated during the night to Edinburgh, and, after all his boasting, returned more cowed and abject in his defeat than even Cope, over whose incompetence he had not failed to triumph when he first essayed the task of checking the rebellion.^ It was only the steadiness and con- duct of General Huske that prevented the rout from being an irretrievable disaster. ^ In 1758 we come upon the record of Hawley's death at the age of eighty. His last will and testament fitly closes a career which serves as an example of the worst type of military braggart not uncommon in the annals of last century. It is full of the most nauseous blasphemy, and winds up with the words, " The priest, I conclude, will have his fee : let the puppy have it. Pay the carpenter for the carcass box." This refined gentleman was the prime favourite of the Duke of Cumberland ! 171 CHAPTER VIII. FROM FALKIRK TO CULLODEN. The fight at Falkirk marks a new stage in the campaign. At first the success of the Highlanders had been beyond all expectation, and their advance into England had given rise to considerable alarm ; but all was imputed to the feebleness of the measures taken against them, and their forward march through the English counties seemed to show their weakness rather than their strength. The expedition appeared likely to crumble away of itself ; the apathy rather than the active resistance of the English population seemed sufficient to do it to death. The retreat from Derby seemed to confirm this estimate, and it was deemed that the Highland army would soon be reduced to such weakness as to fall before one crush- ing and decisive blow. But the engagement at Falkirk proved that as a fighting force the Highland army had in nowise lost its spirits or its cohesion, and that efforts far greater than those yet made were necessary for its annihilation. It was apparent that it could command by fear, if not by enthus- iasm, considerable support in Scotland, and that it could inflict blows that damaged heavily the prestige of the Eng- lish army. Its numbers were increasing; they were ani- mated by the strongest stimulus of all — a conviction of the weakness of their adversaries. Falkirk was all but a repeti- tion of Prestonpans, but on a larger scale ; and its issue had confirmed the result of the lesser conflicts of Lord George Murray at Clifton and of Lord Lewis Gordon in the North. The ultimate result might be certain, but before that result could be attained it was clear that the military resources of England must be drawn upon to a far larger extent. The rebellion was not, as yet at least, to fall by listlessness, by failing enthusiasm, or by lack of sympathy. Meanwhile, it may be well to pause in the narration in order to estimate the attitude of mind which the rising 172 FROM FALKIRK TO CULLODEN. had so far produced in England, and how that affected the relations between the two countries. At first — apart altogether from any sympathy with the movement — it had been regarded with a sort of pitying contempt. The earlier successes were looked upon as mere casual incidents of which a few weeks at most would obliterate the memory. Within the political arena — a narrow and not a dignified one — the enterprise became a new topic of contention. The party which adhered to Walpole was not sorry to find a new perplexity added to their opponents' troubles. Granville and his followers, secure in the favour of the king, although they had relinquished the spoils of office to the Pelhams, made light of the whole matter, and found a proof of the weakness of the Government in the fact that it could not deal effectively with an affair so petty, and that the tremu- lous nerves of the Duke of Newcastle were thrown into an extremity of craven fear. So far as the people of London were concerned, the danger was sufficiently distant to be received with equanimity. A handful of banditti, it was said, could never conquer a kingdom ; and slight as was the enthusiasm for the reigning family, it seemed as if the nation, as a whole, were determined to stand neutral, and as if the danger which could come from the more or less pronounced Jacobitism of a few country magnates was purely imaginary — a bugbear conjured up by the Whigs as a means of discrediting the Tory Opposition. So marked was Granville's contempt for a danger which involved him in no responsibility, that Newcastle, as we are told, seemed almost elated when new successes of the Highlanders gave the lie to Granville's prognostications. The one danger seemed to be that of foreign aid to the rebels, and against such a risk sufficient security was taken by the naval pro- tection of the coasts, and by the presence in the Channel of a fleet under Admiral Vernon. A few of the greater nobles proposed to raise regiments for the defence of the reigning dynasty, but the sincerity, and even the unselfish- ness, of their efforts were open to doubt. To raise regiments and to pay them, it was said, was a noble service; to raise them upon Government pay was a more doubtful act; to receive the pay and not to raise them — as it is to be feared was sometimes the case — deserved something more than contempt. The people of the North, who were nearest to the danger, were the first to be alarmed. The Yorkshiremen, led by their Archbishop, who donned military attire, breathed out mighty threatenings. The wickedness of the rebellious JEALOUSY AGAINST THE SCOTS. 173 Scots — because, in the prevailing view, the whole Scottish nation was involved in the attempt — was denounced in language of most edifying fervour. The guilt of rebellion was painted in colours that would have satisfied the most rigid adherent of the Eight Divine. The Bishop of Durham urged that the people should take upon themselves the duties of the military authority, and arm themselves to defend the Revolution Settlement. The Bishop of Hereford preached passive obedience in good set terms. " We are quietly and conscientiously to submit ourselves," said he, "as well to a Caligula or a Nero as to a Trajan or an Antonine: that is, as well to the worst as to the best of governors." In short, a good stock of that inherent Toryism which is ingrained in the average Englishman was drawn upon to denounce and repudiate an enterprise which had hoped to enlist on its side the whole Tory party, and which was now regarded by many only as a symptom of the irreconcilable factiousness of the Scottish nation. That the bulk of that nation was as warmly opposed to the rebellion as they were themselves was a truth which never dawned on these good bishops or their audiences. The sturdy resistance of the clergy of the Scottish Establishment was neglected and ignored. From the first a false note was struck which greatly increased the jealousy between the nations. The wisest body of the nation probably judged, not without fair ground, that the chief danger proceeded from the supine- ness of those who underestimated the danger, but that the supineness, even though helped, as it was, by the lack of real loyalty to the house of Hanover, would not last long. The English people had no great love for George II. or his family, but they did not wish to see their peace and prosperity disturbed by a barbarous horde of wild High- landers. Gradually the impression of the strength of the rebellion grew. It was seen to be led by experienced tac- ticians. The Highlanders were found to have benefited by the opportunities of drill in the independent regiments. At first it was remarked that many of the greatest names of Scotland were not associated with the attempt; but the prophecy of Sir Robert Walpole with regard to the Jaco- bites was recalled — "If they come again they will begin by their lowest people; the chiefs will not appear till the end." John Bull viewed the matter with much of that phlegmatic indifference which is at once his weakness and his strength. He trusted that it would be settled some- how, much as he trusts that his civil officers will sooner 174 FROM FALKIRK TO CULLODEN. or later get the better of an unruly mob. If there were a few broken heads on either side in the process it would be no very terrible matter. When the rebellion seemed to be gaining ground, Parliament was summoned; the Habeas Corpus Act was suspended ; reinforcements were fetched from abroad; the Government seemed to be roused to the danger. This was sufficient to calm the nerves of the average Englishman. The advance to Derby was seen to be something of the nature of a retreat, as it showed the rebels to be too weakly supported in England to allow them to make a stand, and every day's march made their position more precarious. They had only to be met by an effective force to make their weakness visible. The fear of the rebellion was not great enough to check the endless bickerings of political intrigue and the personal struggles of the little cliques that for the time occupied the political arena. The Pelham clique had a majority in Parliament, but they had neither any solid support nor respect from the nation. The Tories had much of the talent; but the Jacobite rebellion disconcerted them, and they had no cohesion and no settled plan of action. The Meteor of Parliament " was already recognised in Pitt ; but his action was still erratic and uncertain, and the genius which was ere long to tower over all others was now only busy in conquering for himself a position. At length came the news of the retreat of the Highland army from Derby, and the inference was too quickly drawn that the rebellion was utterly crushed. Stories were told, with all the exaggeration of a panic but just escaped, of the savage excesses of the invaders ; and these stories, which were for the most part inventions, served to stimulate loyalty of the baser sort, and seemed to justify a ruthlessness of revenge which had none of the justification that might have been de- rived from a danger prudently foreseen and courageously met. The Duke of Cumberland and Marshal Wade continued their advance; and the arm-chair politicians of St James's were pleased to hear that the task of vengeance had been delegated to a coarse military bully of the type of General Hawley. Six thousand Hessians were summoned from the Continent to restore the broken power of the English Government; and although some — Pitt amongst the others — objected to such agents in restoring the authority of the crown, their objections were overridden by the necessities of the case. But such an accession of force seemed quite sufficient to make the country secure against any real danger. The retreat from England was accomplished; Carlisle fell DESIRE FOR VENGEANCE. 175 into the hands of the Duke of Cumberland ; and it seemed as if the Highlanders had done their worst. But then the news came of the fight at Falkirk, by which they had their revenge on the ignorant presumption of Hawley, and once more had scattered the English dragoons, and outmanoeuvred experi- enced and disciplined troops almost as successfully as at Pres- tonpans. It appeared as if English arms could not hold their own in Scotland; and the inference was quickly drawn that there was something in Scottish air favourable to rebellion, and that English liberties were chiefly in danger by the ill- feeling of their northern fellow -subjects. Carelessness, timid- ity, incapacity, and corruption easily found a way of excusing themselves by decrying their Scottish fellow-subjects, and by bequeathing a legacy of mutual suspicion to the next generation. Such was the moment chosen by a Court intrigue to over- turn the Pelham Ministry, and to attempt the formation of a government by Lord Bath and Lord Granville, without the help of a parliamentary majority. The project lived only for a day, and it served merely to show the utter irresponsibility which Granville united with his brilliant talent. By some mad whim, the king had fancied that he could relieve himself of the " puppy " Newcastle. The attempt proved only his own impotence. For a time he sulked and would see no one. He would not play the game unless he could choose his own instru- ments; and it was only with the petulance of a spoilt child that he found himself compelled to submit to the power of the majority, until a statesman worthy of the name should grasp the situation and impose himself, by the sheer power of genius, at once on king and Parliament. Granville accepted his defeat and threw up the scheme as a portentous joke ; and once again the nation was forced to trust its affairs at a dangerous crisis to the incompetent hands of Newcastle, whose strange fate it was to bridge over the interval between the fall of Walpole and the rise to undisputed power of one greater than Walpole in the person of William Pitt. The rebellion " fetched breath " at Falkirk, and the dearth of English statesmanship confirmed its recovery of hope. For a time the danger seemed to grow, and it only provoked more bitter outpourings against the Scots. The whole Scottish nation was condemned as a fit nurse of disaffection and revolt. "The existence of rebellion," says Horace Walpole, "seemed too intimately connected with the being of Scotland to expect that it would soon be annihilated." Its annihilation was at least to be the work of some time ; and the delay stimulated that spirit of hatred against the Scottish nation which took the place of the preceding alternations of 176 FROM FALKIRK TO CULLODEN. apathy and panic. Confiscation of estates was to be the smallest punishment meted out to those who had joined the expedition. The rebellion was not only to be crushed, but its renewal was to be rendered impossible by withholding all mercy and exacting the utmost penalty of the law. While the enterprise was in its inception some had seen in it only matter for contempt, others had been driven into an unreason- ing panic, not a few had felt a lurking sympathy for its objects. Now that it had threatened England, and had shown that on Scottish soil it might recover itself so far as to inflict disgraceful defeat upon a disciplined English army, all other feelings were swallowed up in a virulent indignation which involved the whole Scottish nation in one condemnation with the Highland host. With the battle of Falkirk the rebellion reached, as we have already said, a new stage. It was now four months since the sudden march of the Prince had placed him in command of Edinburgh, and had crowned his arms with victory on the field of Prestonpans. With his hopes unduly inflated, he had fancied that Scotland was at his feet, and that the heritage of his fathers only waited for his entrance into England to be securely his. He did not recognise that his supremacy in Scotland was only nominal, and that, however much Toryism in England might have inclinations towards Jacobitism, these were not strong enough to prompt the malcontents to arduous risks, least of all when Jacobitism appeared in the form of a host of savage Highlanders, whose language and ways were unfamiliar and uncouth. The march into England had distinctly weakened and dissipated the support on which he could rely ; and necessary as the retreat from Derby was, the wonder is, not that he did not recover his former prestige in Scotland, but that the expedition remained on foot, and maintained an active resistance to the Royalist army for three months more. The incidents of these three months were dramatic enough. They were a series of struggles which, though often successful, were no longer for supremacy, but only to avert inevitable defeat. The expedi- tion was foredoomed; but, driven to bay, its adherents resolved to sell their lives as dearly as was possible, and to try the eflect of sudden raids upon various points held by their foes. Such attempts might be prolonged and spirited, but they could only have one final result. After the battle of Falkirk more than one course was open to the Prince. He might have advanced on Edinburgh, following the defeated and demoralised army of Hawley ; but such an attempt, successful though it might have been for the THE DUKE OF CUMBERLAND ASSUMES COMMAND. 177 moment in recovering his hold upon the capital, would have been a daring and desperate one. On the other hand, he might stay and carry on the siege of Stirling, and might hope, by securing that fortress, to hold the entry to the Highlands. His own views were in favour of this plan ; and he spent some valuable time in an attempt which was foredoomed to failure, as he had no sufficient means to prosecute a siege against a place of such strength. As time went on the hope- lessness of the scheme became apparent to all but the ill-fated leader of the expedition. Immediately after the battle of Falkirk the Duke of Cumberland had been despatched from London to assume the command of the Royalist army. He started on the 25th of January, and reached Edinburgh by rapid stages, reviving the confidence of the Government by his presence, and by the prestige which that presence gave to the Royalist army, which seemed strong enough to crush a force that had shown itself unable to reap the full advantage of successes which chance threw in its way. Cruel and callous as the Duke was soon to prove himself, he was at least an improvement on the coarse and profligate Hawley, who thought the best way of atoning for the disgrace of a defeat caused by his own overweening confidence was to resort to wholesale punishment of the troops who owed to him their disasters. The Duke found himself at the head of a well-disciplined and seasoned army, keen to avenge the disgrace so far inflicted on the military prestige of England, and confident in its power to crush a rebellion already crumbling by its own weakness. It was resolved at once to advance upon Stirling in order to relieve the siege ; and pains were taken to impress upon the soldiers that firmness and discipline were alone necessary to retrieve the disasters that they had already suffered. The Highland army lingered about Stirling, but its strength was fast ebbing away. Many of the clans dispersed after the battle of Falkirk to carry home the plunder which they had gathered after the dispersion of Hawley 's force. Dissensions were rife amongst them, and the slightest spark seemed sufficient to stir the camp into actual combat. Rights and privileges which were deeply rooted in the customs of the Highlanders were little suited to the discipline of an army, and their neglect by the commanders often led to open revolt. One day an armed straggler from the English camp marched boldly through the Highland force in the full equipment of an English soldier. Lord Kilmarnock essayed to arrest him, and found a Highlander's dirk pointed at his breast. He tore from the intruder's hat the black cockade, which was the M 178 FROM FALKIRK TO CULLODEN. Hanoverian emblem, but the action was resented as an insult to the clan. The intruder was a Cameron, who had deserted the English army and rejoined his clan ; but no hand could change the emblem on his hat but that of his chieftain, Lochiel. For another to attempt it was a crime against the unwritten law that governed the clan. Another day a soldier of Clanranald's, by the accidental discharge of his musket, killed the younger son of Glengarry. In a moment Glen- garry's clansmen were in a ferment. Nothing would content them but the instant execution of the offending member of the other clan ; and even when he was sacrificed to their fury, they felt the loss of their chief's son so deeply that they for the most part withdrew from an expedition which had been stained by an event of such ill omen. Charles soon found that he had to deal with a force where there was little of the unquestioning military discipline that can alone retrieve disaster. Failing hopes, frequent disasters, the bitterness of inter- necine feuds, soon completed the general distrust of ultimate success, and drove the Highland leaders to counsels of caution. The chiefs, no longer called to councils of war by the Prince, assembled by themselves and resolved to express in no equivocal terms their own views of the course that should be followed. They presented to him a unanimous address in which they urged that the only course which prudence directed was that of retreat to Inverness. There they might maintain themselves until the spring, using every opportunity to seize the English garrisons throughout the Highlands, and when they had made themselves masters of the North they might hope to renew offensive operations on a larger scale with the approach of summer. No advice could have been more unpalatable to the Prince. He did not despair of reducing Stirling, and at least he hoped to wait there until challenged to battle by the Duke of Cumberland's advancing army. Not in a single fight had he been defeated, and he refused to believe that defeat was possible — or, indeed, that the troops under Cumberland would fight with any show of vigour against their hereditary sovereign. A sort of desperate fatalism had seized on him — the reckless courage of the gambler who had played a perilous game, and was ready to stake his all on the ultimate event. He was thrown into a frenzy of despair, and showed the weakness that underlay his show of courage. He might lead a forlorn-hope, and keep alive his blitheness amidst danger so long as active exertion stimulated his spirits. The deeper and more abiding fortitude that could be patient under mis- RETREAT OF THE HIGHLAND FORCE. 179 fortune, and could resist the despondency that is born of ebbing hopes — that nature had denied him. But rage as he might, the advice was too strong and too deliberate to be resisted. He chafed at his own impotence. He redoubled his suspicions of Lord George Murray and his Scottish advisers ; he threw himself more unreservedly on the sycophantic advice of his Irish followers; he fretted and fumed like a spoilt child, — but all was in vain. The retreat was resolved upon, and it was carried out with the disorder and haste that betokened a broken and dissentient host. Charles yielded to the imperious counsels of despair : perhaps he saw, only too clearly, that however necessary these might be, they were the sure precursors of failure and defeat. The army retreated first to CriefF, and then separating, moved in two bodies to the North. One followed the Highland road that took them directly to their mountain fastnesses; the other, under Lord George Murray, went by Montrose and Aberdeen and thence to Inverness. Meanwhile the Duke of Cumberland advanced to Perth, where for a time he was content to occupy the gateway to the Highlands. In the early days of February the scene of the rebellion became restricted to the northern counties, and the movements by which the Jacobite leaders strove to maintain their cause were entirely changed in character. Until it drew together for its last fatal struggle — and even then shorn of much of its strength — the Highland army never again was gathered into one whole. It maintained a sort of guerilla warfare, often successful, always spirited and alert, but hopelessly unfitted to achieve the object which for a brief space it had seemed as if it might accomplish. For nearly six months Charles maintained himself in security at the head of a sufficiently imposing force ; but save for a few brief weeks in Edinburgh, he had never even to outward seeming wielded any semblance of administrative authority. After the battle of Prestonpans he had been nothing but the commander of a successful army. With the northern retreat that army ceased to exist as a united force : it rallied only for a moment to earn the dignity of a sublime defeat. But the weeks that passed from February till the fatal day of Culloden were not without successful episodes and achieve- ments that showed both skilful leadership and undaunted courage. On the whole, the honours remained with the Jacobites: only the solid weight of preponderating power at length drove them to the wall. They fought like a beleaguered garrison until the last of their resources failed them. Their first efibrt was to reduce the enemies whom they had 180 FROM FALKIRK TO CULLODEN. left in the North, and who had undermined tlieir influence just where it might have been most strong. Lord Loudoun had maintained the Hanoverian cause in the northern shires, and held the castle of Inverness. His force was small, but during all these months it had found its opponents still weaker, while the Jacobite clans were occupied with higher game. He had with him the followers of the Macdonald of Skye and of the Macleod of Macleod ; but it was doubtful whether the abstention of these chieftains from the Jacobite cause was altogether approved by their clansmen. In all he could count only on some 2000 men, and the prudent advice and the tireless vigilance of the Lord President Forbes alone gave vigour and backbone to Loudoun's scanty force. To defeat that force was the first task of the Jacobite chiefs. Step by step that work was accomplished. The little force of Loudoun was cooped up at Inverness. Whatever the influence that this band of Hanoverian adherents exerted in the North, they were in no position to dispute the Chevalier's advance, or to make a stand against the far more numerous Jacobite clans. The barracks at Ruthven, which had with- stood the attacks of the Prince at the outset of his expedition, were unable now to resist attack. The lurking sympathy of many about Inverness — waiting only for some decisive issue in order to declare their open adherence to the Prince under the guidance of that veteran scoundrel Lord Lovat — was a danger which the Hanoverian adherents could not despise. But the Jacobites were scattered over the country. Only a band of some 300 men remained as the bodyguard of the Prince, and it was with a false sense of security that he took up his residence at the castle of Moy, the stronghold of The Mackintosh. The chief himself, after wavering between the two sides, took up arms under Lord Loudoun ; but his wife had no such vacillation in her adherence to the Jacobite cause,, and had levied a band of her clansmen, at whose head she rode,, in a tartan plaid and with pistols at her side. She was proud to receive the Prince at her castle, and there he abode in fancied security while his followers harried the neighbourhood. Loudoun had already suffered defeat at the hands of Lord Lewis Gordon some weeks before. His position was far from secure, but his only chance lay in striking a bold blow against the Prince. All was arranged for a midnight surprise at the castle of Moy, and with 1500 Highlanders — almost the whole of his scanty force — Loudoun advanced for the capture of the Prince. But the doughty hostess had been apprised of the attempt. Her mother-in-law was a Whig, but she knew well how the clan would have suffered in esteem had the repre- THE ROUT OF MOY. 181 sentative of the ancient line been captured in its stronghold. With admirable inconsistency she sent word of Loudoun's plan to her daughter-in-law; and scanty though her means of resistance were, the Amazon of Moy Castle was equal to the occasion. She called upon the blacksmith of the clan to patrol the ground between Inverness and the castle ; and on the night of 16th February the vanguard of Loudoun's force — the Macleods themselves — were found advancing to the attack. The smith had only some six or seven men at his disposal, but these he dispersed about the woods that lined the road, and as the attacked force approached they discharged their muskets from different places; they raised the battle-cry of the Camerons, and the bagpipes gave their wildest and most terrific skirl as a signal for a terrific onslaught. The Macleods fancied that they had fallen into an ambush of the gathered tribes. They did not wait to see the end of the sudden alarm, but fled to Inverness in such absolute panic that men were trod to death by their flying comrades, and the road was strewn with their castaway accoutrements. The Rout of Moy remained as a bitter memory of a bafiied attempt. Such a frenzy of panic was a sign of weakness too evident to be over- looked. The Prince advanced with such troops as he could gather, and Inverness was seized without resistance on the 18th of February. Fort George fell an easy prey on the 20th, and Lord Loudoun was glad to seek safety in flight beyond the Cromarty Firth. Fort Augustus was captured, after only a meagre show of resistance, by Lord John Drummond, and it seemed as if the North at least was to hold no stronghold against the Jacobite attack. The Duke of Cumberland mean- while had advanced only as far as Perth, and he did not ven- ture to throw out garrisons farther than the Athole district, where they could only check, but could not crush, the Jacobite clans. While he was at Perth there came the news of the landing of 6000 Hessians under Prince Frederick of Hesse- Cassel, and to meet and arrange plans with the Prince the Duke paid a hasty visit to Edinburgh. It was during that visit that a council of war was held, which gives us a fair means of judging of the general estimate of the Jacobite hopes. To most of the English generals it seemed as if the rebellion were already at an end. The force was dispersed ; its authority had disappeared; in the Lowlands the fear of it was nothing but a memory. The English counsellors of the Duke were of opinion that no further battle was possible, and that it remained only to pursue to their mountain fastnesses a few scattered bands of marauders. But one of the council was Fletcher, Lord Milton, the Lord 182 FROM FALKIRK TO CULLODEN. Justice - Clerk. To his judicial functions he added more than the usual charge of political affairs, and he could pronounce more surely as to the prospects of the fight than the hide-bound military pedants who surrounded the Duke. Against the military opinion he pronounced his opinion that the Highlanders were preparing for another rally, and would yet contest the issue in a pitched battle. It was fortunate for the Duke that he gave weight to the advice of the judge rather than to the reckless counsels of his staff. Had he attempted to overtake, one by one, with scattered forces, the various marauding bands into which the Highland army had broken, he would almost certainly have courted disaster and defeat and prolonged for at least one campaign the civil war. He resolved instead that his advance should be slow, but in overwhelming force. We may condemn the inhumanity of the Duke of Cumberland, and refuse to condone the ruthless cruelty with which he crushed the Highlands when victory had put them under his heel, but we cannot deny to him the prudence and the conduct which made him, though a youth of twenty- five, act with the discretion of an experienced commander. With calm deliberation the English force advanced from Perth and occupied Aberdeen. Garrisons were left along the line of march as a protection against Highland incursions. Step by step the chain closed round the district where the Jacobites could still maintain themselves; but they were yet able to make some gallant efforts to prove their fighting power. In the North Lord Loudoun and his little band were pressed farther and farther off from Inverness. Even with the help of the Mackays, who followed the Hanoverian sympathies of their chief, Lord Reay, it was impossible for him to maintain his hold upon Sutherland- shire against the advance of Lord Cromarty, who attacked the Earl of Sutherland at his stronghold of Dunrobin, and forced him to surrender. The activity with which the guerilla warfare was pushed is seen by nothing more strongly than the fact that the Jacobites were able to push their attack home so strenuously in these northern counties, where it soon became evident that the population was, for the most part, hostile to the cause. So vigorously was the campaign carried on that Lord Loudoun and the Lord President were fairly driven from the northern shires, and compelled with the Macdonalds and Macleods to take refuge in Skye. The Duke of Cumberland had now arrived at Aberdeen, and had pushed his advanced posts to the Spey, whence THE prince's last EFFORTS. 183 he proposed to move to the Western Highlands with the approach of spring. For the moment the northern winter was more than usually severe, and only those accustomed to the hardships of the climate could venture to carry on a campaign amid its rigours. The outposts of each force watched one another in the neighbourhood of the Spey; but by a common consent any decisive operations were postponed until the season was more advanced. Meanwhile all that the Prince could do was to employ his troops in various scattered expeditions. When so scattered they could more easily procure supplies, and the dire emptiness of his coiFers was less apparent. The quick marches, the daring attacks, the surprising successes that these scattered bands achieved were dramatic and effective, and served to keep the spirit of rebellion alive, but they were in reality only the beginning of the end. Sooner or later the advance of the Duke would be made : the only alternatives for the Prince would then be to accept defeat and failure or to draw together his scattered followers; and once these marauding parties came together, the fatal question must be asked — how they were to be fed or paid. Delusive hopes came from France. A fleet arrived at Peterhead with soldiers and supplies of money under the Marquis of Fimarion ; but its landing was interrupted and delayed, and at length the French commander deemed prudence the better part of valour and withdrew. A vessel which had once, under the name of the Hazard, been a sloop-of-war in the English fleet, but had been purchased by French owners and renamed the Prince Charles, essayed a landing on the coast of Sutherland, bring- ing a substantial sum — some £12,000 or £13,000 in specie, — ^the commodity which of all others was most urgently re- quired by the Prince. But it was chased by an English frigate, and its crew were compelled to run her ashore and make their way inland, where, with their treasure, they fell an easy prey to the Mackays. Every gleam of success for the ill-fated expedition seemed to shine for a moment only to be succeeded by the dark cloud of disaster which became more lowering day by day. All the more heroic were the last efforts that illuminated these dreary months. While Lord Cromarty was acting against the northern force under Lord Loudoun, and while Lord John Drummond was carrying on a hopeless siege of Fort William, — which almost alone amongst the western strongholds held out against the Prince, — a most vigorous and well -planned effort was made by Lord George Murray to seize the various forts held for the Government throughout Athole. That district was one where the influence 184 FROM FALKIRK TO OULLODEN. of his family was supreme. That influence had often been employed for the Jacobite cause, and as an old adherent of that cause the Marquis of Tullibardine had been outlawed, and the dukedom had passed to the second son. Lord George was a third son — for whom there was no prospect of succes- sion to the family honours whatever the event of the war; but his influence in the Athole country was vast, and even the attraction of his name, much more the success of his arms against his Hanoverian brother, might have gone far to pro- long the rebellion, and might have made it hard for the Duke of Cumberland to maintain his communications and advance into the western fastnesses where the Highlanders could easily retreat. The force which Prince Charles placed at the dis- posal of Lord George was meagre enough — numbering only some 700 men. But they were amongst the staunchest of the Jacobites, and they had the special stimulus of personal enthusiasm and of the strongest clan allegiance in their attempt to clear the district from the hated presence of the Saxon soldier. The forts were many and widely scattered, and to seize them all simultaneously was Lord George's scheme. When each little detachment had done its work they were to meet at dawn beside the Bridge of Bruar, and then to devote themselves, in their united force, to the reduc- tion of Blair Castle. At the Bridge of Bruar, Lord George and a slender company of some five-and-twenty followers awaited the rendezvous before dawn one morning in the middle of March. Suddenly there came news that the English commander at Blair, Sir Andrew Agnew — a careful but pragmatic military martinet — had been alarmed by the news of various attacks, and was advancing with five hundred men. Flight seemed the only course open, but to have fled would have been to deliver to the enemy each of the detachments whose arrival they awaited. A half -built turf -dyke stretched along a field which lay close to the road, and Lord George determined to use this for a stratagem which, strange though it was, finds more than one parallel in the history of the rebellion. Helped by a mist that was slowly rising from the ground, he arranged his scanty force behind this dyke. He had the standards with him, and these he posted at due intervals behind the mock rampart. As soon as Agnew's soldiers advanced, and just as the rays of the sun broke through the mist, the bag- pipes struck up, the banners waved, and at various points along the dyke broadswords were brandished and the battle- cries of the clans were shouted. Never did a more reckless and daring ruse succeed more completely. The prim veteran, RETREAT TO INVERNESS. 185 at the head of his disciplined troops, was absolutely deceived. Prudence forbade his advancing against an embattled host of the clans — for such he believed the little band of two dozen men to be. He was only too glad to withdraw in safety, and relieved to find that the enemy refrained from pursuit and permitted him to bring back the column to the stout walls of the Castle of Blair. Lord George Murray's scattered bands soon joined him, fresh from the surprise of some thirty forti- fied posts, and bringing with them 300 prisoners. Flushed with their success they began the siege of Blair Castle, which they had no hope of reducing but by a prolonged blockade. Its walls were seven feet thick, and artillery of a very different calibre from any that the Jacobite army possessed would have been required before an assault could have been attempted. The blockade was soon abandoned, and Lord George and his forces were recalled for the far more urgent need which was created by the approach of the Duke of Cumberland's army. For some three months a guerilla warfare had been carried on, for the most part with fair success. But the last stake was now to be played in a pitched battle, and for this purpose it was needful for the Prince to call up all his forces. Success in the attempt would place him in possession of the means to pay and to support them. Failure could not involve a fate more terrible than that each of the scattered parties into which his force had been broken up should be pursued and crushed in detail. Lord George Murray returned to Inverness from Athole. The forces defending the Spey were ordered gradually to fall back as the Duke advanced. Lord Cromarty, fresh from his successes in Sutherland and Caithness, was summoned to Inverness. No sooner did his retiral begin than the ill-will with which these counties regarded the cause boldly asserted itself. By a plot, as bold and hazardous as many of their own, the Earl of Cromarty and his immediate followers were seized by a few resolute men, and made prisoners in the Castle of Dunrobin without striking a blow in their own defence. Strangely enough, the sudden collapse of the Jacobite cause in Sutherland took place from altogether independent causes on the very day of the battle of Culloden, in preparation for which the Prince had summoned Lord Cromarty and his band. With the opening of April the last act of the tragedy began. On the 8th of that month the Duke moved forward from Aberdeen. As he advanced to the Spey, where the outposts of his own army were placed, there was some doubt whether the Highland forces would not dispute the passage. No such attempt was made ; and the Duke advanced without opposi- 186 FROM FALKIRK TO CULLODEN. tion to Nairn, which he reached on the 14th — his vanguard pursuing some of the Highlanders who had been occupjring the town some distance on the road to Inverness. The Chevalier himself appeared at the head of his guards and of the Mac- intoshes, and checked the Royalist advance. For the two days that were to elapse before the fight the Duke made his headquarters at Nairn — sixteen miles from Inverness. His lodgings were at first at a house in the town belonging to Rose of Kilravock, and afterwards at the house of Dalblair, near the encampment. There was no reason for haste. The blow that was to be struck would be all the more effective if it were dealt de- liberately and without leaving anything to chance. There was no stronghold to be attacked ; no compact body to be broken up; no threatening force which must be speedily reduced : on the contrary, it was of the first importance that the scattered detachments of the Prince's adherents should be suffered to draw together, so that no mistake might be possible as to the character of their defeat. A hurried attack would be an ineffective one, because its crushing force might not be clearly seen. Nairn was a stage onwards in his march; and it was only because it was the fitting resting-place in the advance of his troops that the Duke chose to stay there for a couple of days. Let us see how each side compared with the other. The Duke had with him a force of at least 8000 of the most seasoned troops of the English army. They were amply provided with supplies, had only recently broken up from secure winter-quarters, and with them on the coast there was a fleet which brought with it all that might be necessary in such an expedition. There was ample store of artillery ; and the Duke himself as leader represented the supreme authority of the State. On the other hand, Prince Charles had nothing upon which to rely except a force already reduced wellnigh to despair; unable to draw together owing to absolute dearth of susten- ance and of the means of procuring it ; beleaguered in a coun- try where many of the population were hostile ; wearied by a winter spent in scattered and hazardous expeditions, attempted as much with the object of procuring a scanty subsistence as for any permanent advantage which they could secure. From marvellously small beginnings he had managed to collect a half-disciplined army of some 3000 men. With that force he had managed to deal some effective blows, and for a few weeks had exercised authority in the capital. Gradually his force grew, and he had found himself able, unopposed, to advance DISSENSIONS IN THE HIGHLAND FORCE. 187 into England, and to cause some tremors even to the English capital. But bold as was his enterprise, it gathered no real strength as it advanced; and when tactical considerations compelled a retreat, he returned to Scotland to be recruited by new supporters, but yet found himself unable even with these supporters to exercise any real authority. On his return to Stirling the number of those who were ready to light for his cause had increased to some 9000 — the highest point to which his force ever rose. But that increase in numbers was not all to his advantage. Dissensions became more rife as the numbers swelled; it was dangerous to bring them together for lack of supplies ; and throughout the winter he had been compelled to employ them in efforts to break the chain of garrisons that was closing in around him. Amongst the ranks of his supporters there were the most bitter jealousies : each section profoundly distrusted the other ; and such cohesion as there was came only from the impact of a common despair. Hopes that had been sedulously nursed, of possible help from France, had proved entirely delusive; such support as was vouchsafed was scanty in its measure, and even what was sent had not reached the Prince's hands. His troops were starving and unpaid; desertions were frequent; and it was difficult even for his buoyant temperament to keep up a semblance of gaiety and confidence amidst surroundings so dismal, and forebodings of coming disaster so plain to every eye. One by one the outlying bodies were recalled — from the North, from Fort William, from Athole, and from Stirling — but only a fragment of the army could be gathered together ; and even that fragment had lost the discipline and organisa- tion which in the short gleam of success it had managed to attain. The Duke of Cumberland lay at Nairn, and the 15th of April was spent in celebrating his birthday, while Prince Charles's force lay expectant on Drummossie Moor, about five miles from Inverness, and close to the President's house of Culloden, where the Chevalier took up his quarters. At noon- day on the 15th the army was drawn up in preparation for an attack from the Duke; and even in this dire extremity a dissension sprang up because the right of the line was not assigned to the Macdonalds, who claimed it as theirs by right, and who fought with sullen discontent because this hereditary privilege was denied them. The delay in the Duke's advance, whether calculated or not, was all to the disadvantage of the Highland force. So desperately bad was their commissariat that the soldiers had nothing to eat during the 15th but a single biscuit to each man, and no effort seems to have been 188 FROM FALKIRK TO CULLODEN. made — perhaps in the strain of expectancy it could not have been made — to bring up from Inverness such suppHes as it must have contained. A starving and dissentient army was no good omen of success. As it became apparent that no attack was to be expected on that day, and as the reconnoitring parties brought word that the Duke's army lay inactive at Nairn, a new plan was suggested — mainly on the initiative of Lord George Murray, than whom no one could form a better judgment as to the fighting power of the troops. He proposed that a night attack upon the Duke's camp at Nairn should be made, simultaneously on opposite sides, by himself and the Duke of Perth. The wine and wassail of the birthday feast might blunt the powers of resistance in the English camp ; and a night attack would render useless both the artillery and the cavalry, in which the Highlanders were hopelessly outmatched by the Royalist army. The proposal was not adopted without misgivings. Some 3000 or 4000 of the best fighting contingents had not yet rejoined the Prince's army, and the length of the march between Drummossie Moor and Nairn (a good twelve miles) seemed to preclude the possibility of a night alarm. It was only by the urgency of Lord George that the proposal was adopted. It was far from a hopeless one. Nairn possessed no semblance of fortifications, and the camp was placed in an unentrenched field a little to the west of the town. The Highland troops were marvellous in their mobility, and a forced march of twelve miles between the close of an April day and dawn seemed not beyond their powers. A surprise of this kind would have been eminently likely to add one more to the panics which had become a familiar feature of the war. Had discipline been more thorough, and had the baneful effect of dissension and mutual suspicion been absent, it might well have been that one more success might have fallen to the decaying cause. To make the ruse more effective the heath was set alight, so as to convey the impression that the fires of the encamp- ment were still burning. About eight o'clock in the evening the march began. Silence was strictly enjoined, and to preserve it the more completely the attack was to be made without musketry fire, but only with the broadsword and Lochaber axe ; the tent-ropes were to be cut, and in the confusion a blow of the dirk might account for many an English soldier before he knew even the nature of the attack. But whatever the preparations, the march soon became disorganised. Lochiel, who led the way, quickly outmarched NIGHT MARCH TO NAIRN AND RETREAT. 189 the rear, and messages were sent in quick succession, beseech- ing the first column to wait for their supports. The Duke of Perth himself, when messages were in vain, rode after Lord George Murray, when they were only four miles from Nairn, and urged the necessity of a halt. It was already two o'clock in the morning, when only a scanty portion of night remained, and already the wearied and famished soldiers had strayed from the ranks, and were slumbering in the woods of Kilravock, by which they were now passing. It was now hopeless to make the attack in darkness, and at least two miles of their march must have been in broad daylight. Already the reveille sounded from the Duke's camp. The bolder spirits still urged an advance : the surprise might not be complete, but there was still time to fall upon the camp before it was fully prepared. Lord George Murray refused such a risk. He gave orders for a retreat ; and thus one more ground of discontent and suspicion was inspired in the Prince's mind with regard to the ablest and not the least faithful of his adherents. So rapidly was the retreat accomplished that Drummossie Moor was reached by five o'clock in the morning, and three hours sufficed to cover a road which had consumed six hours of the night. But the men returned famished and dispirited. They slunk off" in large numbers to seek some food at Inverness, or to snatch a short slumber in the surrounding villages. Even the threats of their officers did not suffice to recall them to the standards; and the nightmare of a wasted march through the dreary hours of darkness left them utterly demoralised for the stern work of the day. Even the officers who gathered for council at Culloden House were fain to throw themselves down for a few minutes' much-needed sleep. But before eight o'clock in the morning they had to brace themselves for a last effort. Word was then brought that the van of the Duke's army was only two miles off", and that the main body was within four miles. With the courage of despair the leaders gave the summons to arms. Once more — and for the last time in a fight that was exclusively their own — the pipes shrieked the famous slogan of each clan. The same weird music was to sound thereafter for many a fierce onslaught on many a stricken field: it was on that day to give the last call to arms in a cause that the Highlanders had made their own, and for which they were giving battle to the best of England's military array. The men were weak from starvation, bewildered from want of sleep, and weary with their midnight march. Of those who had gathered on the 190 FROM FALKIRK TO CULLODEN. moor the day before at least 2000 were absent when the army was drawn up in array. Scarcely had the drums been sounded when word was brought that the duke's army was not two miles distant. He had with him more than 8000 foot, nearly 1000 horse, and ample artillery. On the Chevalier's side the numbers actually present did not exceed 5000 men, if indeed they were so many. Even the comparison of numbers only faintly describes the odds between the well-drilled and well-equipped troops of the Royalist army, and the famished and wasted ranks of their Highland foes. Once more the old spirit of the Celtic race was roused by the scent of battle. The torpor of weariness and despair seemed to fall away from them as they rushed to the conflict. With a determination bred of the underlying conviction that now the last stake in a long and hazardous game was being laid, each line advanced. The English artillery did deadly execu- tion in the Highland ranks, and ploughed lanes through them, while the French guns, which represented all the Prince's artillery, did scarcely any damage. For an hour the clans endured this galling and murderous fire with stern resolution ; but at length their patience was exhausted, and with a wild cry they burst upon the foe in a charge such as had carried the day at Prestonpans. The onslaught was irresistible, and with impetuous valour they broke through the first line, and dashed themselves on the second. But their bravery was of no avail. They had to meet a foe of another mettle from the dastard dragoons that had fled from the field of Prestonpans. The seasoned veterans of many a hard-fought European field knew what they were to meet and were prepared ; and they were led by officers, amongst whom the future conqueror of Quebec was only one, all trained in the best military tactics of the day. Nor was the left wing that had made the impetuous charge supported by the right. There the Macdonalds, nursing their fancied wrong in being deprived of the place of honour, hung back in sullen hesitation. One of their leaders, Mac- donald of Keppoch, in vain attempted to arouse them, and fell as he made a last appeal to their honour and their fealty to the clan. In a few minutes the rout was general. A wall which had protected the right wing of the Highlanders was broken down, and through the breach the infantry, supported by dragoons, poured in upon the flank, and the whole High- land army was thrown into inextricable confusion. The flight quickly became general. A few of the troops retreated with flags flying and with their pipes playing, but the main body CULLODEN. 191 of the army fled in panic either to Inverness or to the more distant hills of Badenoch. The stragglers found no mercy, and for weeks and months the country round was harried by the English soldiers, who spared neither age nor sex in their indiscriminate slaughter. The Prince, according to the most trustworthy account — and the account which tallies most with his indubitable courage — waited until all was lost, and at last was forced from the field by his old tutor, Sir Thomas Sheridan, who actually seized the bridle of his horse and galloped with him towards the Badenoch hills. The Prince soon dismissed the body of horsemen who had accompanied his flight, and pursued his way with a scanty retinue to the house of Gortuleg, where he announced the defeat to the aged trickster Lovat, who was there waiting for the issue of the game in which he had played so desperate a part. From Gortuleg he sought refuge at Glengarry, and then disappeared into the Western Highlands, there to pursue, for five months more, those strange and eventful wanderings which form a wondrous mixture of stirring adventure and romance. During all these months he lived the life of a hunted fugitive, owing his safety only to "hair's-breadth escapes, and to that unsullied loyalty — perhaps unrivalled in all history — which prevented hundreds of starving clansmen from gaining riches by the betrayal of their hereditary prince. The narrative of these wanderings — which have been traced with every fulness of detail — belongs to the biography of Charles, not to the history of Scotland. They can be read in countless pages, and live in the proudest traditions of mountain and glen. On the battlefield of Culloden more than a thousand of the Jacobite army fell. A few of the more ardent spirits gathered once more at Ruthven, and some were not unwilling to renew the hopeless struggle. But even the dauntless courage of the Prince was broken, and he shrank from making further drafts upon the lavish fund of loyalty that the expedition had called forth. His message to the thousand followers who gathered at the rendezvous bade them seek their own safety, and announced his own intended retiral to France. He hoped once more to return and renew his efforts with more abundant foreign support. It was only in September that he was able to escape the vigilance of the soldiers who ceaselessly dogged his steps, and to avail himself of two French frigates which managed to put in at Lochnannuagh — the scene of his landing — and to convey him with Lochiel and a small band of his followers to France. He landed at Morlaix in Brittany on the 29th of September. The hopes of the Jacobites were not 192 FROM FALKIRK TO CULLODEN. yet dead, and their secret plots and conspiracies were not at an end. But as an effective force the cause was at an end. It fell on the field of Culloden never to recover, and for the next few months the scenes of its closing episodes were at the mercy of a ruthless victor, while all Scotsmen were more or less arraigned by the thoughtless arrogance of their southern neighbours as participants in the guilt of rebellion. 193 CHAPTER IX. REPRISALS, AND SAFEGUARDS AGAINST REBELLION. Before midday on the 16th of April the last wave of Highland valour had spent itself against the rock of the disciplined army with which the Duke of Cumberland encountered it, and in the deadly defeat upon the waste moor of Culloden the last hopes of the Jacobites had perished. The cause was, indeed, lost before the conflict took place, and that was but a last and dying effort which was made by the Highland force. They were at the end of their resources, and met the Royalist army when already weakened by long fast, and foot-sore and weary after a useless night march. Already dissension had broken their ranks, and gloomy forebodings told them that the end was at hand. It may well be that the ferocity of despair tempted them to the savage fury of wild animals driven to bay, and led to furious cries and even to detached orders against the giving of quarter ; but no satisfactory evidence can be produced that such was the deliberate plan of the Highland leaders. The afternoon fell upon a disaster as complete, and an outlook as dark, for the adherents of the baffled enterprise, as history has to record. The bravest of the Highland force lay slain upon the withered waste where the conflict had taken place, and hundreds more were slaughtered in their retreat to Inverness, or trapped like wild animals in the huts and shanties where they had taken refuge. Only a wild and scattered flight enabled some of the leaders to escape, and allowed many of the common soldiers to gain their mountain fastnesses, where they were to perish by starvation or to be hunted down by the soldiery, drunk with blood, goaded to fury by the absence of all restraints of discipline, and stimulated by the example of their officers, who vied with one another in reflecting that spirit of ruthlessness with which Cumberland stained the credit of his victory. A story is told of Wolfe, who, ac- companying the Duke of Cumberland over the field, was N 194 REPRISALS, AND SAFEGUARDS AGAINST REBELLION. ordered by him to shoot a helpless man lying on the ground. He refused on the plea that he was an English officer, not a hired assassin. The story is typical of the savage bloodthirsti- ness with which the ruthless victor triumphed over a brave but defeated enemy. The cause of Jacobitism was shattered beyond hope of repair; but this, far from suggesting to the victors the wisdom and policy of mercy, only prompted them to increased virulence of revenge. The soldiers were dispersed over the Highlands to hunt down and butcher, with little dis- crimination, the fugitives from the battle and those who had taken no part in the expedition. Their wretched huts were burned to the ground, and the cattle were driven off, so that those who escaped the sword might perish by starvation or ex- posure. When nothing was left to plunder, the wretched inhabi- tants of the ruined villages were stripped naked and left to die upon the hillside if they could not creep to the nearest town- ship and beg a morsel of bread. If any remnant of property was found it was confiscated at the will of the military and sold by auction without the warrant of any court. Nor was this ruthlessness of savage revenge — far exceeding any out- rage perpetrated by the Highland host either in the security of their triumphal progress or in the despair of their retreat- confined to the remote Highlands. For months the country was given over to the scant mercy of a savage soldiery, and even when absolute tranquillity prevailed, and within a few miles of Edinburgh, where the law-courts were once more in session, the same flagrant disregard of anything but the promptings of revenge was displayed. From January until the late autumn the gallows erected by Hawley in the Grassmarket of Edinburgh stood as an open insult to her citizens. Peaceful tradesmen were exposed to the insolence of the soldiers and the still more intolerable arrogance of their officers. A sulky word, or a retort provoked by violence and insult, or by flagrant injustice, was made the ground of sub- jecting the townsmen to the ruthless discipline of martial law ; and only by slow degrees, and after repeated remonstrance, was a scant and grudging respect paid to the majesty of the law. Whatever danger was threatened by the Jacobite rebellion, Scotland owed no gratitude to those who crushed it. Careless apathy and helpless vacillation had been succeeded by indis- criminate barbarity, and that the ashes of Jacobitism continued to smoulder for at least one generation more in many a Scottish home was due in no small measure to the conduct in which the Royalist officers too faithfully repeated the example of the Duke of Cumberland. No one had a more splendid opportunity than was open to the Duke of showing the MEASUEES OF REPRESSION. 195 magnanimity of a victor by treating with firmness and yet with leniency the last remnants of a cause which, however mistaken, was worthy at least of decent, if not of respectful, obsequies: no one ever more recklessly threw that oppor- tunity away. But we must turn now to the political measures which followed the suppression of the rebellion, and to the steps which were taken as necessary to make the Government secure against its recrudescence. We pass now from the irresponsible excesses of martial law to the more deliberate policy of the Government and its advisers. If there was one quarter where nothing but loyalty to the Hanoverian family prevailed, it was in the Church of Scot- land. Even when the rebellion was in the full flush of success, there had been amongst the ministers of the Church some conspicuous instances of courageous maintenance of con- stitutional principles that might well have shamed those who now triumphed most arrogantly over the fallen cause. The loyalty of the addresses from various Church courts extorted the gratitude even of Cumberland. The Church was indeed too secure and too strong to be easily assailed, and she had but scanty possessions which might have been made the object of extortion. But even the Church was not exempt from insult. The ministers were required to act the part of informers against their own parishioners, and not only to give evidence against those who were suspected but to denounce them to the law, and to keep lists of the disaffected. It is to the honour of the Church that such an order was not only disregarded but openly disobeyed, and that it remained prac- tically a dead letter. None had been more bold in their loyalty than the ministers of Edinburgh, but they did not now hesitate to let the Duke s secretary, Sir Everard Fawkener, know that they would decline to comply with the behest. There was something even of sarcasm in their reply, when they trusted that, in the defect of their own assistance, those employed in the administration " may be directed to prudent, just, and manly measures." A Government of which New- castle was the head certainly stood in need of such a prayer. The Church of Scotland was in a position to make insult dangerous and oppression impossible. But there was another Church which had no such security. That was the Scottish Episcopalian Church, which had now fallen into evil fortune. By a strange fate, it had to suffer for faults which were not altogether of its own contrivance, and was bereft of sympathy in quarters where it might well have counted upon it. 196 REPRISALS, AND SAFEGUARDS AGAINST REBELLION. The Episcopalian form of Church government, as distin- guished from Roman Catholic doctrine, had never laid hold of the national spirit in Scotland, nor had the religious history of the country been favourable to its development. The evils of Roman Catholicism in Scotland had been more striking and more deep-rooted than in England, and it was only natural that the reaction under which that tyranny had been overturned should be more sweeping in its effects. Reform was not dominated, as in England, by the statecraft and policy of the Tudors, but was the work of a popular outburst of feeling which had been unwilling to tolerate anything that savoured of the older state of things. A turbulent and selfish aristoc- racy had found its profit in exaggerating this popular feelings and had indulged in a shameless robbery of the Church which cloaked itself under the disguise of reforming zeal. When Epis- copacy, as distinguished from papal allegiance, had been re- stored in Scotland, it was in a form which seemed to minimise the points of divergence from Roman Catholic doctrine, and it appeared as the. chosen ally of monarchical supremacy. These circumstances marshalled against it the whole force of popular feeling, which reckoned any temporising with such a scheme to be a mere trafficking with the accursed idolatry of the Papists. With the Restoration in 1660 it found itself in a position of nominal supremacy ; but it was a supremacy maintained only by the ruthless persecution of godless dragoons, and wielded only by a little clique of Court adherents. It is now a commonplace of history that many of the tales of that persecution were exaggerated, and that some of those who acted for the Government were men of heroic mould and of conscientious convictions. The spirit of theological rancour was not all on one side; but the Episcopal Church was ab- solutely without any means of appealing to the popular sympathy or of gaining the popular respect. It is indeed surprising that in certain districts it maintained a hold upon the popular feeling which has lasted in these districts down to the present day. But these were isolated instances which did not affect the country as a whole. The Church had been stript of its revenues, and the inheritance of ill-fortune which had dogged its steps and left it a pauper Church lessened its weight and influence, even in the eyes of those who viewed with horror an imposing ritual or an august establishment. It was powerless to strike its roots into the territorial system of the country, after the manner of its sister Church in England; and even the half -contemptuous patronage which the territorial aristocracy extended to it was valueless in it- self, and only served to fan the popular jealousy. Its ancient THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH. 197 shrines had perished during a century of civil strife, and it was without all the outward trappings of decent order and picturesque surroundings which instinctively exercise an in- fluence upon the spirit of a people, and entwine their sym- pathies with those outward symbols that speak to them of long-drawn associations, and make them indisposed to icono- clastic fervour. The iron heel of persecution had stamped its mark on the character of the people, and made them stern in their resistance to a Church government that savoured of aristocratic regime, and to a Church ritual that seemed to €urb the fiery zeal of self-directed religious feeling. When the Revolution came, its constitutional or political effects were only feebly felt compared with the blow which it dealt to the Episcopal Church government, the defeat of which was welcomed because it was held to have been the submissive and time-serving slave of a ruthless tyranny, owing such influence as it had gained largely to the treacherous betrayal of a latitudinarian clergy. The landed gentry, although in many cases they found it convenient to be nominal adherents of the Episcopal Church, had little sympathy with its clergy. Some of these they despised as too obsequious tools in the hands of the Court; others they disliked for a spirit of religious de- votion which seemed to condemn their own laxity. In any case, they had reason to dread the continued prosperity of a Church which might have made inconvenient demands for restitution, and they were not unwilling to see the restoration of a form of Church government which reduced all the clergy to a uniformity of insignificance. When the Union was forced upon the country, not the least vigorous in their denunciation of it were the Scottish Episcopalian clergy. They had en- joyed but scant sympathy from their sister Church in England, and had no reason to welcome a closer bond. But they did not gain any additional influence from their assertion of national independence as against the Union. The spirit of national independence found a far more effective ally in a Presbyterian establishment. The dislike of the Episcopalian Church to the Union was ascribed much more to Jacobite intrigue than to Scottish patriotism. When patronage was restored in 1712, the Scottish adherents of Episcopacy undoubtedly derived some hope from that restoration, but it was a hope that was doomed to disappointment. In the event, patronage only made the compact between the landed aristocracy and the Presbyter- ian Church more easy, and enabled that Church to rise superior to the more fanatical forms of popular religious prejudice. So far as it injured the Church, it was by giving rise to dissent- ing sects, which suspected the Presbyterian establishment of a 198 REPRISALS, AND SAFEGUARDS AGAINST REBELLION. leaning to Erastianism, but which looked upon Episcopacy as the bottomless pit to which that Erastianism might lead. We are told by a good authority ^ who belonged to that section in the Presbyterian Church which had least sympathy with Presbyterian extravagance, that in the earlier part of th& century the larger proportion of the Scottish nation were inclined to Episcopacy. We need not doubt that there were symptoms which indicated that this was the fact ; but never- theless it is certain that the inclination was not very deeply rooted, and that what was strongest and most characteristic in the national temperament turned instinctively to the Presby- terian form. The growing enlightenment and more liberal spirit that soon began to animate that Church really enabled it to do the work which, with a more fanatical Presbyterian establishment, might have devolved upon Episcopacy. Had the Presbyterian Church remained, after the middle of the eighteenth century, what it was a generation earlier, it might have driven all that was enlightened in the nation into the arms of the Episcopalian Church. As it was, that Church became the refuge only of a hopeless minority, and was re- garded as the symbol of attachment to a forlorn political hope. In England the Revolution had marked the triumph of the Anglican Church against Roman Catholicism. It had been due in no small measure to the courage and independence of the English bishops, and although a few of the English clergy had found themselves unable to accept the full consequences of their own resistance to James II., yet the non-juring party in the Church, which was formed out of those scrupulous spirits who refused to submit to tyranny, and yet feared the sin of downright rebellion, had retired into a peaceful and not unhonoured obscurity, and after a generation or two had gradually melted away. In Scotland the danger of Roman Catholicism had only been a remote and unreal bugbear, and the Revolution really marked only the triumph of Presby- terianism over Episcopacy. The vast majority of Scottish Episcopalians were therefore non-jurors by compulsion. The history of the last two generations, personal sympathy, natural gratitude, devotion to a religious ritual that seemed the only alternative to a rude and grotesque fanaticism, — all these at once determined their position. The Scottish Episcopalian could hardly be other than a Jacobite, and what was lacking in the identification of the two causes was supplied by the narrow-minded and illiberal proscription to which the Epis- copalians were subjected. For a time it had seemed as if the prospects of Scottish ^ Dr Alexander Carlyle. FAILURE OF ITS HOPES. 199 Episcopacy were more promising. The Act restoring Patron- age was passed in 1712 by the Government of Harley. That Act nominally affected only the Presbyterian establishment. But as things then stood it looked as if it were to be but one step in the restoration of Episcopacy. It was in pursuance of the same policy that the Government in the same year passed what was deemed to be an Act for the Toleration of Epis- copacy in Scotland. It was " to prevent the disturbing those of the Episcopal Communion in that part of Great Britain called Scotland." They were free to assemble for worship in any town or place except the parish churches. Magistrates were bound to give them protection under severe penalties. The only restriction was that the clergyman should produce his letters of orders, should subscribe the oath of allegiance, and should pray in express terms for the queen and the Electress Sophia. This Act, broadly as it contrasted with the policy pursued since 1690, was yet not wide enough to em- brace the more uncompromising of the rigid Episcopalians. But its spirit and intention were evident, and even amongst the strict Episcopalians there were not wanting those who might be ready to purchase toleration and security by a prayer for the queen which might soon be replaced by a prayer for her brother when restored to his hereditary rights. Even if they could not reap the full benefit of the Act for the moment, they were at least freed from any rigour of persecution. But such hopes as they might have indulged were soon dispelled. Queen Anne died in August 1714, and the rebellion of Mar in the next year brought down upon the Episcopal Church the full rigour of the law, administered by a Govern- ment whose sympathies were against her, and who naturally dreaded what was looked upon as a hotbed of sedition. The oaths were now strictly enforced, and the non-jurors who had found casuistical arguments for accepting them under Anne found no such subterfuge for their conscientious scruples under George I. Even this was not enough, and in 1719 a new Act imposed severe penalties upon all who performed the Episcopal service to a congregation of more than eight without having taken the prescribed oaths and prayed for King George and his family by name. Rigorous as it was, this Act did not entirely proscribe Episcopacy. But it did what was even more fatal, by for- cing into more striking prominence the Jacobitism of that Church, and giving to the whole Scottish Episcopal Church a special tendency both in ecclesiastical doctrine and in cere- monial usage. Proscription gave greater strength to the attachment to the Scottish Office, which seemed to reflect 200 REPRISALS, AND SAFEGUARDS AGAINST REBELLION. a doctrine more pure and less tainted with modern heresies than the English liturgy. In regard to the doctrine of the Eucharist, that Office approached much more closely to the Roman Catholic creed. The mixing of water with the wine, the commemoration of the faithful dead at the altar, the consecration of the elements, and the use of the oblatory prayer, were the points in which the more strict party claimed to represent the primitive and catholic "usages" of the Church, and from which they took their name of the "Usagers." They had their sympathisers in England, but these sympathisers were only an insignificant minority in the English Church, and were debarred by their tenets from all share in her government or in her revenues. Throughout the great mass of the English Church of the eighteenth century such themes aroused no interest and attracted no attention, fiercely as they were to be fought over a century later. But in Scotland they occupied the chief thoughts of the scattered and depressed remnant of the Episcopal clergy. It was a clergy tenacious of principle, pure in morals, ardent in its religious impulse ; but its absorption in these subtleties developed in it an entire incapacity for political struggle, fostered a spirit of ecclesiastical independence which rendered it intractable even to the leaders of the J acobite party, strong as was its sympathy for the cause, and gave rise to a schism within its own borders which diminished even that slight influence which it might have exercised over the nation. To one party in the Church it seemed as if the wisest policy were only to maintain the Episcopal succession without seeking to establish any diocesan government, and without accentuating any of the distinctive " usages " of their own distinctive ritual. They were content to have occasional consecrations of bishops in sufficient numbers to prevent the extinction of the episcopal succession, and these bishops were to constitute a college whose members exercised a very limited individual authority. Others again maintained a more heroic attitude — refused to trim their sails to political exigencies or to succumb to lay dictation, and laboured with some success to restore the primitive rule of the Church by assigning to each bishop a territorial diocese ; while with almost equal rigidity they maintained the distinctive "usages" of the Church that marked her characteristic doctrines. As time went on the application of the Act of 1719 became less rigorous. But the High Church party in the Scottish communion had to complain of a lack of sympathy from the latitudinarian clergy of the Anglican establishment. They aimed above all things SCHISM IN THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH. 201 at independence: but attractive as the independence of a national Zion might be to the Scottish mind under another guise or under happier conditions, it was an unlikely means of gaining Scottish sympathy to force into prominence those features of Episcopacy that approached most closely to the Roman Catholic ofl&ce. Failing in all other support, this party in the Scottish Church sought for an alliance with the Eastern communion, and entered into negotiations with the Patriarchs of the Greek Church. For a few years the emis- saries of the " highest " section of Scottish Episcopalians were haunting the synods of Muscovy and carrying polyglot letters to and from the Metropolitans of the Orthodox Church. But there also their sturdy tenacity of doctrine forbade the necessary concessions, and the strange conferences came to an abortive end. There appear to have been some hopes of success at one time, but they disappeared with the death of Peter the Great in 1725. The further the Usagers pressed their heroic — albeit im- practicable — policy, the more hopeless became their cause. Strangely enough, the same thing which rendered them less tractable allies of the Jacobite leaders, rendered them also more obnoxious to the Hanoverian Government. They were unwilling to make their Church a mere handmaid and convenient tool of political intrigue, but they were equally unwilling to compromise their consciences by any casuistical acceptance of the oath of allegiance and abjuration. The whole Church became more and more deeply imbued with the non-juring spirit, and while this spirit taught them, to place the interests of pure doctrine higher even than political fidelity, so it rendered them all the more liable to the suspicion of Jacobitical sympathy and Jacobitical intrigue. The College of Bishops gradually yielded to the revived diocesan order, and by the year 1742 some sort of concordat had been arranged which promised peace between the Usagers and their more latitudinarian opponents within the bounds of the Church. But hardly had this concordat been accepted when a cruel fate involved Scottish Episcopacy in the disaster which followed Culloden. For twenty years before the rigour of persecution had gradually been relaxed. The breaches within the Church had been repaired, and she might congrat- ulate herself on having healed her schisms just at the moment when Dissent was becoming rife in the household of her pros- perous Presbyterian rival. But the slackness with which the statute of 1719 had been administered had not taught the Scottish Episcopalians caution : it had rather inspired them with recklessness. Queen Anne's Toleration Act of 1712 would 202 REPRISALS, AND SAFEGUARDS AGAINST REBELLION. not now have satisfied them; and instead of it, they found themselves exposed to the vengeance of a Government which found in them the representatives of a creed which was deemed to be only disguised Roman Catholicism as regarded doctrine, and veiled rebellion as regarded politics. The lash fell on them in the Act of 1746. It revived, with additional penalties, and under more rigorous conditions, the provisions of the Act of 1719. Any one exercising the func- tions of a pastor at any Episcopal meeting where more than four persons were gathered, without having taken the statutory oaths,^ was to be liable to imprisonment for six months for a first ofience, and to transportation for life for a second. As under the Act of 1719, every Episcopal clergyman was bound to show his orders ; but only such orders as had been given by some bishop of the Church of England or of Ireland were to be registered, the registration of all other orders being declared void. The other penalties were hard ; but this, which denied to their communion the very right to recognition as a Church, was the most direct insult to that party of the Scottish Episcopalians whose independence chiefly compels our respect, however much we may doubt whether their policy was the wisest for their Church. It aroused their bitterest resentment. They felt, with some reason, that " it brought in a shadow of a foreign Episcopacy, which had not been much heard of before, among us." Even this Act was not enough. Hitherto the laity had been unmolested; but now attendance at any illegal Episcopal meeting-house was to be subject to fine and imprisonment, and to deprivation of all political rights. No device could have been better contrived for the injury of the Church. The clergy were inured to hardship, and could hardly now have much dread of deprivation or of poverty. But the Episcopal laity were of another type. Their adherence to the Church had often been prompted more largely by dislike of an aggressive Presbyterianism than by ardour for a proscribed faith; and their zeal was not usually proof against such penalties. Many abandoned their attendance at Episcopal ^ These oaths were — 1st, The Oath of Allegiance to George 11. 2nd, The Oath of Abjuration, renouncing any allegiance "to the person pretended to be Prince of Wales during the life of the late King James, and since his decease pretending to be, and taking upon himself the style and title of King of England, or of Scotland." 3rd, The Assurance — acknowledging George II. to be king de jure as well as de facto, and pledging the declarant to the maintenance of his title against the Pretender; and 4th, The Oath of Supremacy, pledging the declarant "to abhor, detest, and abjure, as impious and heretical, that damnable doctrine, that princes excommunicated or deprived by the Pope may be deposed or murdered by their subjects." EPISCOPACY PROSCRIBED. 203 worship, and having no inclination to the Presbyterian Establishment, were content to steer the safer course of abstention and indifference. As if even this were not enough, a statute of 1748 provided that no one other than a minister of the Established Church could perform any divine service in any house or family of which he was not the master, without rendering himself liable to the penalties attaching to an unauthorised chaplain, — imprisonment for a first offence, and transportation for a second. It was with good reason that the historian of the Scottish Episcopal Church found no other description of her state than that ''she still breathed, though in a weak and languishing condition." She had to wait until the fury of vengeance, bred of weakness and vacillation, had passed away, and till security and strength could dispense with the help of proscription and persecution. When that time came, the Church was not slow to learn the lesson of allegiance to constituted authority. But after the defeat of Culloden she was exposed to the full fury of the storm. Wherever the troops of Cumberland passed, whatever else was spared, the Episcopal meeting-house was given to the flames — or, if flames would have endangered neighbouring houses, was demolished to the foundations. The clergy were hunted from one hiding-place to another. They gathered a handful of them people under the shelter of the rocks, or in the nooks of a remote glen, and worshipped in secret, waiting for the signal by which their pickets told of the approach of a file of soldiers, whom some informer might guide to the spot. The stories of their adventures linger to this day in many villages, especially on the north- east coast. The religious fervour and its attendant heroism, which had been so conspicuous in the days of the Cameronians, were not confined to one section or to one generation of Scotsmen — still less were they limited to one form of religious belief. They burned as brightly on the rocky coast of Angus and Mearns and in the mountain glens of Inverness-shire as on the wild heaths and moorlands of Galloway and Ayrshire — as warmly in the hearts of the proscribed Episcopalians as in those of the persecuted Covenanters. But the vengeance of the Government did not stop short at religious proscription. The havoc that had been spread by Cumberland's soldiers through the length and breadth of the land had its counterpart in the Statute-book. It was not enough to have decimated the Highland population by the sword and fire and famine. The sting had to be taken 204 REPRISALS, AND SAFEGUARDS AGAINST REBELLION. out of the clan system by finally crushing the power of the chiefs. We have to turn farther south for the earlier punitive proceedings which were taken against the leading agents in the rebellion who had failed to escape from the clutches of the law, or who had not paid the penalty of their offence upon the field of battle. The first trials were those of the officers of the Manchester regiment, almost all of whom were found guilty, and nine of whom eventually suffered death, with all the horrors that then accompanied an execution for high treason. Their fate touched the hearts of a populace which was little disposed to condone an attempt that had spread alarm even to the doors of Parliament. Most of them were men of respectable station and high character, whose sincere conviction of the righteousness of the cause commanded respect, and whose heroism in the hour of death extorted admiration even from those most inclined to condemn the folly and recklessness of their acts. One of these, Mr Townly, the captain of the Manchesters, thoughtlessly left behind in the retreat to hold Carlisle against Cumberland's pursuing army, was a man of good family, some literary accomplish- ment, and easy fortune, whose dissatisfaction, both as a Roman Catholic and as a Jacobite, with the existing Govern- ment had led him to enter the French army as a volunteer, returning home only when the cause which he had at heart seemed to invite the assistance of all loyal Jacobites. None of these prisoners belonged to the class who are prepared for any attempt, however desperate, by a career of crime, or by the promptings of poverty. Some repented of their acts, but all died with a calmness and fortitude that proved them worthy of a cause which needed only to add to its heroism more prudence and political wisdom. The behaviour which they showed at the scaffold could not but leave an impression dangerous to the established Government, and one which might well have suggested the expediency of tempering justice with mercy. The concourse which gathered at their execution was " the greatest in the memory of man " ; and " it was observed," says a contemporary account, " that the mob offered no insults to any of the prisoners this day, though they had behaved very rudely to them in passing to and from their trials." Other prisoners, of more august position, were yet awaiting their trial. Of these one was the Marquis of Tullibardine, the elder brother of the Duke of Athole. His father had been more than suspected of Jacobite leanings in the days of the Union, and he himself had joined the ill-fated expedi- TRIAL OF KILMARNOCK, CROMARTY, AND BALMERINO. 205 tion of 1715. He had then been attainted and deprived of his hereditary rank, which had passed to his younger brother, and, save when he returned for the short and ill-fated expedi- tion of Glenshiel in 1719, he had lived in exile in France until he returned with his Prince for the more heroic effort of 1745. In the Jacobite army he had held the place next to the Prince himself, and his brother, Lord George Murray, had been the mainstay of the expedition ; but failing health compelled him to surrender himself a prisoner only a few days before Culloden. He was dying when brought to London in June, and in the next month his death as a prisoner in the Tower removed him from the certain penalty which awaited his second treason. His last advice to his fellow-countrymen was that they should abandon for ever designs which he saw had now received their final defeat. On the 28th of July the three leading Jacobite lords who had fallen into the hands of the victors were brought to trial. These were the Earl of Kilmarnock, the Earl of Cromarty, and Lord Balmerino. The trial was conducted with the august pomp and dignity of a state ceremonial, in which the principal participants had their duly assigned place. This was not without a certain impressiveness, and gave to the whole procedure the gravity of a constitutional act, in spite of the gruesome tragedy which it covered. For the purpose of the trial. Lord Hardwicke, the Lord Chancellor, was constituted High Steward of Great Britain ; and the peers were summoned to meet in West- minster Hall in their robes of state. The Chancellor pro- ceeded in state, accompanied by the judges, from his house in Ormond Street to Westminster Palace, and amid the beat of drums the procession passed through the Painted Chamber to the House of Peers. There the House was constituted, and when Black Rod announced that the passages were clear, the whole assembly, which fitly typified the august dignity of English legal procedure, passed in procession to that great hall where so many of the most dramatic episodes in our history have found a congenial scene. For the occasion its architectural grandeur was enhanced by rich trappings, and the hall was crowded with a select audience, composed of all that was most distinguished in the land. Meanwhile the prisoners, attired as for a gala, had been brought in coaches from the Tower, with the axe carried by a ceremonial officer, its edge symbolically turned away from its destined victims, in token that they were as yet guiltless in the eye of the law. They received and returned the greetings of the court as if they were but figures in an august pageant, and as if that 206 REPRISALS, AND SAFEGUARDS AGAINST REBELLION. pageant had no tragic side, or rather as if that tragedy was most fitly indicated by the stately courtesy which no personal hazard could compel the peers of the British Parliament to curtail or abandon. It would argue a lack of imagination, and an obtuseness of temperament, to be insensible to a ceremony so pregnant with constitutional significance. Kilmar- nock and Cromarty had already repented of their rashness, and pleaded guilty, throwing themselves on the clemency of the Crown. Nothing proves more strongly the sincerity of their remorse, or the dignity with which they carried it, than that such a plea in no way prevented them from playing their part with honour and with nothing of that abject humiliation of which a repentance following upon failure is apt to be a symptom. Balmerino, on the other hand, did not feign a repentance which he did not feel. He raised an objection as to one item of the indictment, which wrongly alleged that he had been present at the siege of Carlisle ; but when it was given against him, he regretted that he had caused any trouble to the court, and declared that he had no more to say. When the time came for demanding a verdict, the bishops, according to the decent usage that withdraws the fathers of the Church from a vote which decides the issue of life or death, asked leave to retire ; and the question was then put, beginning with the youngest baron. The verdict of guilty on all the prisoners was a unanimous one, and the 30th of July was appointed as the day upon which the prisoners might plead in arrest of judgment. On that day the court met with the same ceremony as before. Kilmarnock and Cromarty acknowledged the justice of their condemnation, admitted the heinousness of the error which they had com- mitted, and offered pleas for mercy which were both manly and unaffected. Balmerino was as undaunted as before. He took exception to the retrospective effect which it was sought to give to the Act passed in March, which ordained that the rebels should be tried wherever the king might appoint, and counsel was assigned him to argue the point. Another adjourn- ment took place till the 1st of August ; but on that day Balmerino declared that his counsel had convinced him of the futility of this plea, and that he desired to withdraw it. Sentence of death was then pronounced in that appalling form which applied to all prisoners condemned for treason — although the habits of the time usually led to the omission of its more atrocious accompaniments of drawing and quartering, " by the clemency of the Crown in the case of persons of quality." Its work done, the High Steward broke his staff and declared the commission at an end. EXECUTION OF KILMARNOCK AND BALMERINO. 207 Balmerino disdained to seek for a pardon which his own conduct made impossible ; but the most powerful intervention was made on behalf of his companions. That intervention was successful in the case of Cromarty; but the 18th of August was appointed for the execution of Kilmarnock and Balmerino. Early on that day the Guards were marched to Tower Hill and marshalled round the scaffold. The sheriffs of London and Middlesex had hired a house for the reception of the condemned lords, from which they might pass easily to the scaffold. There the officers of the law met and breakfasted, and soon after ten they proceeded to the gate of the Tower, where they demanded the bodies of the prisoners. These being delivered, the mournful procession moved "in a slow and solemn manner " to the house in Fenchurch Street, where each of the lords was conducted to a separate room. The house, the scaffold, and the passage from the one to the other, were draped in black. In the chambers allotted to them the two condemned prisoners received their friends during the short time that remained, and Balmerino sought and obtained a last interview with Kilmarnock, in which they discussed and repudiated the charge that they were in any way concerned with the order to give no quarter at CuUoden ; Kilmarnock, however, admit- ting that he had been informed that such an order had been signed by Lord George Murray. Balmerino sought only to exculpate his Prince from any such cruelty, and took leave of his fellow-prisoner with the words, " My dear lord, I am only sorry that I cannot pay all this reckoning alone. Once more, farewell for ever ! " Some time was still spent in devotion, and at length, about twelve o'clock, Kilmarnock was conducted to the scaffold. He was dressed in a suit of black ; and that the spectacle might be the better seen by the assembled crowd, the black drapings of the scaffold rails were turned up, and those who stood upon the scaffold were asked to kneel. Kilmarnock knelt down and engaged for a few minutes in silent prayer, and at a signal from himself the axe fell, and at one blow his head was severed from his body. Meanwhile Balmerino was waiting in the chamber that had been assigned for his use. The horror of suspense did not betray him into a single lapse from the calm and heroic <5omposure with which he played his part in the dramatic scene. The approach of death was not darkened for him, as for his companion, by any pang of remorse or consciousness of error. Like a soldier, he acknowledged the debt he owed as the loser in a great game where the stakes were victory or 208 REPRISALS, AND SAFEGUARDS AGAINST REBELLION. death ; but the dignity with which he paid that debt was not interfered with by any doubt as to the rectitude of his own conduct. He had spent the interval in conversation with his friends, in which he showed neither fear nor bravado. He drank a little wine and ate a morsel of bread, bidding the company to drink to him " ain degrae ta heaven." When the under-sheriff came to announce to him that his time was come, he dismissed his friends as he might have broken up a social party. " Gentlemen, I will detain you no longer, for I desire not to protract my life." He marched to the scaffold with the mien of a general leading his troops to battle; and it served to mark the contrast all the more strongly that he wore, instead of the suit of mourning in which Kilmarnock appeared, the regi- mental dress which he had worn on the field of Culloden — a blue coat turned up with red, with brass buttons, and a tie wig. Far from showing any concern himself, he besought his friends to betray no sign of grief. He walked round the scaffold, bowed to the people, thanked and rewarded the prison warder, and looking to the block, greeted it as his " pillow of rest." With a calm deliberation that was almost supernatural, he put on his spectacles and read a short address to those near him, handing the paper to the sheriff to do with it as he thought proper. Once more he disclaimed all knowledge of any order against the giving of quarter, which he thought "beneath the dignity of a soldier." According to the usual custom, the executioner craved his pardon; but with careful courtesy Balmerino declared that " the execution of his duty was commendable," and presented to him the usual douceur with apologies for its scantiness. " I never had much money : this is all I have ; I wish it was more for your sake." With the most absolute calm he prepared himself for execution, felt the edge of the axe, and bade the headsman remember that mercy would consist in striking with resolution. He did not forget that the calmness of his demeanour might be taken as a proof of arrogance. "Remember," he said to a friend standing beside him, " it arises from a confidence in God and a clear conscience." He then knelt down, and after a few words of prayer, uttered aloud, he gave the signal to the executioner. But his dauntless intrepidity had so astounded the man that the blow was badly dealt, and only mangled his neck: two more blows were required before the ghastly work was done. " Pitied by all the fair, Kilmarnock died ; The brave, Balmerino, were on thy side." THE VERDICT OF HISTORY. 209 It would be difficult to say that in these two executions the Government went beyond the fair penalty demanded by the magnitude of the offence or the instinct of self-preservation. The heroism of the Jacobite attempt cannot blind us to its danger, or to the certain risk which those who were the leaders in a portentous and desperate effort must have been conscious that they incurred. No Government would be safe in overlooking or in palliating such an offence against itself, and it would have required a far stronger administration than at that time governed England to have treated such an offence with the confident contempt that indiscriminate mercy would have implied. But none the less, our human sympathy can hardly accept the dictates of political expediency in judging of individual conduct, and it will assuredly plead in favour of the accused the errors of the Government against which they rose, as well as the natural impulse of loyalty to the exiled family, which was shared to a greater or less degree by many, was to some an overmastering enthusiasm, and which only narrow partisanship could stigmatise as in itself criminal or degrading. With Kilmarnock that error had been committed under a sudden impulse, and was followed by a sincere repentance — which had not waited to declare itself until the cause had failed — although honour forbade him to desert his comrades in the struggle. In the case of Balmerino the fire of loyalty burned with a steadier flame, and knew no abate- ment from remorse or wavering. It was fed by religion, by the instincts of a soldier, by an unshaken and unshakable con- viction in the righteousness of the cause. It was inevitable that a large body of public opinion, while it could not condemn the punishment, should yet feel a lurking sympathy with its victims. It was one of those cases — always imposing a severe strain upon the administration of justice — when her edicts derive support from the logic of political argument, but none from the instincts of the human heart — where we may con- demn the criminal, but cannot regard him either with horror or contempt. We have, of course, become familiar with cases where the presence of a political motive has been held, by perverted sympathy, to excuse acts in themselves cowardly, cruel, and odious. But no such charge could fairly be brought against the Jacobite rebellion. Mistaken as they might be, many of those who joined it could not have refused the summons except by being false to their sympathies, their loyalty, their religion, and their conscience. No such expedi- tion could be carried on without that occasional disorder and outrage that must necessarily attend the march of an undis- ciplined army ; but no act of deliberate cruelty can be averred against the rebel leaders upon any sound basis of proof, and o 210 REPRISALS, AND SAFEGUARDS AGAINST REBELLION. the terrible enterprise of civil war could hardly have been carried on with less of aggravation from military excess. Contemporary political partisanship might employ regarding them the language of indiscriminate hatred and contempt; history may condemn their error and rejoice in its discom- fiture ; but the great mass of human sympathy must inevitably sway in its verdict between palliation for the error, pity for the misfortunes, and admiration for the heroism, of that forlorn hope. Of that cause Kilmarnock and Balmerino were no unworthy representatives, and their manner of death certainly did not lessen the movement of pity that stirred the nation. But the vengeance of the Government was not yet sated. Many of the obscurer prisoners lay in the prisons of Carlisle and York, and their number was increased by some 400 Highlanders who were taken with arms in their hands and driven like cattle into the shambles. To have executed such a number would have aroused the conscience even of a nation which recent danger had inclined to cruel reprisals, and a selection was made by lot of those who were to be put on trial, the rest being offered the alternative of transportation. Nowhere was a speedy condemnation more certain than in Carlisle and York, where the alarm created by the rebellion had been most acute; and there, accordingly, the rebels were chiefly tried. One hundred and thirty-three were arraigned at Carlisle, of whom ninety-one received sentence of death ; seventy-five at York, and of these seventy were sentenced. Out of these a very ample proportion suffered the last penalty, and before the end of November nearly eighty persons in all had been executed for participation in the rebellion, the share of many being very slight, and their action scarcely voluntary, while the evidence against them was in many cases tainted bo the last degree. Much as we may condemn the recklessness of the attempt, he would be callous to the extent of inhumanity who denied all pity to these wretched Highlanders, many of whom had obeyed what they believed to be the inviolable commands of their chiefs, and who now found themselves done to death by tribunals whose procedure was to them a mystery, and of whose very language they were absolutely ignorant. At the close of November yet another victim was brought to trial. This was Charles Ratcliffe, brother to that Earl of Der went water who had been beheaded in 1716. Like his brother, he had been condemned to death for his share in the rebellion of 1715, but had escaped from Newgate, and had since lived in France, became a naturalised Frenchman, and served in the army of the French king. His sympathy for OTHER VICTIMS. 211 the Jacobite cause was explained, if not excused, by the fact that as the son of a natural daughter of Charles II., he was by blood a cousin of the exiled king. In bar of judgment he pleaded that he was not subject to the court, and that he was Earl of Derwentwater, and wrongly described as Charles RatclifFe. The plea availed him nothing; and on the 8th of December he was beheaded on Tower Hill. The scene resembled that of Balmerino's execution. The prisoner was dressed in a suit of scarlet, faced with black velvet and trimmed with gold. Like Balmerino, he faced death intrepidly, forgetting no point of ceremony, omitting no detail of the usual greetings to his custodians, or the gift to his execu- tioner, and wearing to the last the courteous dignity that was bom of the conviction that he died in a righteous cause. But the murmurs against reprisals that forgot all mercy in their severity were daily growing in strength. The scaffold on which Ratcliffe was executed had been erected in such haste that the workmen were compelled to labour at it on Sunday, and the tendency of popular feeling was shown in the severe criticism which greeted even this insignificant detail. " Which," it was asked, "is the greater sin — ^to let a condemned rebel live a day or two longer, or to break the Sabbath ? What could it mean, unless some people had a mind to convince the world (quite needlessly) that they never do anything but in a hurry and without deliberation ? " Plainly the Government recognised that the patience of the nation was nearly ex- hausted, and that the holocaust of victims must soon have its end. The scaffold claimed another victim, in whose strangely dramatic career the last scene was not the least striking. Lord Lovat had been turned, by personal disappointment, from the ardent supporter of the Hanoverian dynasty in 1715, when his action had effectually broken the power of the Jacobites in the north-west of Scotland, into the unscrupulous intriguer for the Jacobite cause in 1745. The part he played was one which always had a special charm for him, that of studied dissimulation; and even after his encouragement of the rebellion amongst his own clan was no longer a matter of doubt, and had aroused the suspicion of his old friend. Lord President Forbes of Culloden, he continued to express his unfeigned surprise that his neighbour should have any doubt as to his unwavering loyalty to the Hanoverian cause. He still seemed to cherish the design of providing for either issue of the war; and although he compelled his often unwilling clansmen to take up arms, and placed his son at their head, he attempted, however vainly, to cloak his own designs, and 212 REPRISALS, AND SAFEGUARDS AGAINST REBELLION. wrote in terms of apparent candour to Forbes of Culloden^ protesting his unbroken fidelity to the Hanoverian cause. The love of dissimulation clung to the aged reprobate as a habit of his blood, long after he must have abandoned any hope of concealing his treachery. On the evening after Culloden he received the Prince in the house of one of his clansmen at Gortuleg. Now that the fatal defeat had come, and the die was cast for ever, he concealed himself for a few days in the castle of Cawdor, in the close neighbourhood of Cumberland's army; but he soon fled to the mountains, and there, in spite of his eighty years and his broken health, the old man contrived to maintain the life of a hunted fugitive for some six weeks, until at last he was captured in an island in Loch Morar, where he was discovered hidden in a hollow tree. He was carried to Inverness, and from there he wrote to the Duke of Cumberland, begging for mercy on the ground of his old friendship, and recalling the days when he had carried him as an infant through Kensington Gardens, and at Hampton Court. Even in the extremity of distress — his clan scattered, his ambition ruined, the whole fabric of his deceit and guile crushed to the dust — not only did his undaunted spirit not desert him, but he still retained the lively humour, the dexterous facility of moving language, and the strain of romantic feeling, which add a deeper interest to his dramatic personality. As he passed in a litter through the wild waste of Stratherick — that part of his vast domain of which his love was most intense — he was accompanied by the wondering and pitying dismay that told of the clan loyalty to a chief whose past record had strained it so hard. Were he to die here, he said, he would have what he always chiefly wished, "the coronach of all the women of my country to convey my body to the grave." It was not all acting which made the weary, broken intriguer find a solace in the romantic love of his clan — surviving all the trials to which it had been sub- jected. By slow stages he was conveyed in a litter through Stirling, Edinburgh, Berwick, and so to London. He was still attended by a few Highland men and women, who, thoughtless of themselves, strove to make the last days of their chief more easy in a land so strange to them, and who were allowed to watch by his bedside when the equipage rested for the night. The incidents of the journey sound strangely to our ears. A prisoner of state was being conducted to his trial on the most solemn of all charges, with his doom already foreseen. But in place of that strict custody with which it would seem only decent to guard the passage of such a prisoner, much of LAST DAYS OF LOVAT. 213 that easy famiKarity which mixed so oddly with the cere- monial observances of that century obtruded itself on the scene. His journey was attended by a curious crowd, and he was permitted to indulge himself by convivial meetings with old acquaintances. His mood of caustic humour burst forth at every opportunity. We are told how he amused himself by feigning sleep when some rash intruder peeped through the curtains of his litter and how he avenged the ill-timed curiosity by a tweak of the nose. In the inn at St Albans he met an old acquaintance in Hogarth, who came to greet him when he was in the hands of the barber, and whom he "received with a salute which left much of the lather on Hogarth's face." His journey was not so hurried as to prevent the artist from painting that portrait which remains so striking a monument of the genius of Hogarth, and the combination of savage ferocity, intellectual power, and un- quenchable humour, in his subject. As he approached the Tower of London he was met by the sight of the scaffold erected for Kilmarnock and Balmerino, and indulged in some of that stately moralising on human fate which he knew so well how to assume upon occasion. Familiarity with his antics did not prevent his warders from being impressed with the eloquence of his disquisitions. While a prisoner in the Tower he conducted himself, in spite of occasional lapses into humorous byplay, with dignity and composure. To Erskine of Tinwald, the Lord Justice- Clerk of Scotland, he wrote in terms of simple and even path- etic friendship, with all the apparent confidence of conscious rectitude, which no sense of hypocrisy could debase into cowar- dice or fear. Knowing well the arts that would be employed against him, he did not scruple to give directions as to the means by which exculpatory evidence might be manufactured to command. Like a fox hemmed in by the pack of hounds, he was determined to struggle gamely to the last. The case of Lovat was not in some respects parallel with that of Kilmarnock and Balmerino. He had not been taken in active rebellion, and there was therefore some doubt whether the statute which permitted the trial to take place elsewhere than in the place where the treason had been com- mitted was applicable to him. His claim to the peerage had been established only by the Court of Session; and as such claims could now be established only before the House of Lords, there might also be doubts as to his status as a peer. It was resolved, therefore, that he should not be presented, like the others, before the grand jury of Surrey, and that he should not be arraigned as a peer before his peers. There 214 REPRISALS, AND SAFEGUARDS AGAINST REBELLION. was another course to which no legal technicalities could be a bar, and which was of more ancient and more august authority. Articles of impeachment were moved against him in the House of Commons on the 11th of December, and his prosecu- tion before the House of Lords, as the great court of the realm, was to be conducted by " managers " for the Commons. The trial began on the 9th of March. The articles of im- peachment charged him with treacherous correspondence with the Pretender from the year 1743, and with having procured from him commissions as Lieutenant- General, and General of the Highlanders, and a patent of creation as Duke of Fraser ; with having entered into negotiations for obtaining money and troops from France to levy war against the king ; with having raised great numbers of men for the Pretender's service ; and with having been in close league with the Pre- tender's son and the other leaders of the rebellion. With characteristic elfrontery Lovat denied the charges, admitted the " mild and equal rule " of the reigning family, and simulated a tone of indignant surprise that, after the proof of his fidelity in 1715, he should now find that fidelity questioned in his old age. The trial was held as before in Westminster Hall, and lasted for six days. Owing to adjournments, sometimes nec- essary by the prisoner's health, it did not conclude until the 18th of March. During that time the old man had arrayed against him the leaders of the Bar — Dudley Ryder and William Murray, then Attorney- and Solicitor-General. His guilt was abundantly proved ; but none the less, much of the evidence was gossip and hearsay, and, where it was strongest, was so tainted as to bring some shame even on those who were compelled to rely upon it. Even in the case of the most hein- ous crimes, the punishment of which is demanded by every instinct of humanity, and where no delicate scruples can prevent the use of such evidence as is procurable, there is nevertheless an instinctive dislike of the resort to the accom- plice turned informer. But there the informer is only used to prove plain facts, or to guide the eye of the law, and the crimes detected by his aid are such as society instinctively abhors. The league between him and his accomplice in the dock has been one that was based on no idea of honour, and one in which each partner knew that he could prevent the treachery of his associate only by anticipating it. It is far different where the charge on which the prisoner is arraigned is one for which there is legal rather than moral condemna- tion, and one with which a large portion of the nation is in secret or avowed sympathy ; where the bond which subsisted lovat's trial. 215 was one based on every pledge of honour and fidelity, and in which thousands risked their lives and fortunes on that im- plicit mutual trust without which no such design could ever be attempted. Still more is the case altered when the inform- ant is not one of the meaner or more insignificant participants, but one who was the closest confidant of its leader, necessarily privy to his most private correspondence, and certain, in the event of its success, to make good his claim to the highest rewards which a restored prince could bestow. Yet so weak was the chain of evidence felt to be, even in the hands of a lawyer so consummate as the future Lord Mansfield, that the Crown was compelled to resort to that of the wretched, double-dyed traitor, Murray of Broughton, who, after having acted as Prince Charles's secretary, now exposed himself to the contempt of humanity, and saved his own worthless life, by betraying every negotiation of which the threads had been held in his hands. Men of his type are insensible to shame, and it is not surprising, therefore, to read that " he made a very brisk appearance, dressed in black velvet," and that he " spoke all the while very distinctly, and with a good deal of resolution." Lovat's life is not one that calls forth our sym- pathy, and his trickery and falsehood were black enough to darken a clearer character than his. But beside such a poltroon as Murray of Broughton, Lovat stands out as a man compared with the most base of vermin, and his record of law- less turbulence is a white sheet beside the black page that records the treachery of his denouncer. If much of Lovat's conduct in his last hours was scarcely more than acting, yet in his outspoken expression of contempt for Murray he used words of dignified truth and sincerity ; and they were words to which Scotland responded in the universal loathing which, during the years of despised existence which the wretch pur- chased by his infamy, shunned him as though he carried the infection of some foul disease. However strong is the chain of evidence by which Lovat's guilt is proved, yet he commands our admiration for the indomitable pluck with which he fought a losing battle, where all the odds were strained against him. Burdened with infirmity ; blind, deaf, and crippled by rheumatism, he could not even make notes of the evidence brought against him, much less deal with it in such a way as to match the array of professional skill which was ranged against him ; and yet his request that some one should be allowed to make such notes for him, and that his counsel should speak for him when his own faculties failed him, was sternly refused, and he was told that his counsel could speak only to points of law. It is not 216 REPRISALS, AND SAFEGUARDS AGAINST REBELLION. surprising to hear that even the callousness of the fashionable London crowd, that sought its diversion in the drama being enacted in Westminster Hall, was roused to something like shame for proceedings in which every trick and technicality of the law was made use of to run to the death a weak and broken old man of eighty, confronted by all the forensic skill which the English bar could produce, and arraigned before an assembly to whom the story of his life seemed like a tale of half -fabled marvel. To that scene his language and his ap- pearance were uncouth and almost savage, and its ceremonial pomp was strangely out of keeping with the patriarchal power that he had wielded over territories far wider, and vassals far more submissive, than those which belonged to any English nobleman. The result of the trial, however, was inevitable : on the sixth day a unanimous verdict of guilty was pronounced. On the 19th of March Lovat made a speech, not denying his parti- cipation in the rebellion, but reiterating his services in 1715, and palliating the rebellion by the treatment which had been meted out to the Highlands, — a plea to which history may accord more weight than the court was prepared, or even empowered, to give to it. Sentence was then pronounced. Lovat begged to be recommended to his Majesty's clemency ; but with the audacity of humour, which never deserted him, he could not allow the scene to close without one more gibe. Asked if he had anything further to say, he replied, " Nothing, but to thank your lordships for your goodness to me. God bless you all, and I bid you an everlasting farewell. We shall not meet all in the same place again — I am sure of that." During the interval that remained before his execution his dauntless courage and his reckless humour never for a moment deserted him, and with them he combined that vein of religious eloquence which seemed to reflect some undercurrent of his character, and the demeanour of graceful courtesy which he knew so well how to assume upon occasion. That these were fitfully combined, and showed themselves only at the prompting of wayward caprice, is true enough ; but they are not, therefore, to be condemned as all hypocrisy. Lovat was an accomplished villain : we may condemn him for his wiles, but we can hardly despise him. He was a stranger to scruples; but his is not that hypocrisy which creates in us loathing or disgust. Even when his piety is most unctuous, it is half-redeemed by the saving humour which it cannot altogether disguise. The tricks and antics are almost too patent to deceive us, and all the while the rogue seems to grin at us behind his mask. On a larger scene, and with power HIS EXECUTION. 217 resting on more solid foundations, his genius might have made him one of the great men of history. As it was, he lived out of his time ; the whole fabric of his authority was foredoomed, and was already crumbling to dust around him. And yet amidst its ruins he could still do battle bravely, and when the fight was all against him, he could add to his bravery a sleepless subtlety of device. When defeat came at last he paid the penalty with a smile, letting no whining interfere with his manliness, and no nervousness betray him into f orgetf ulness of the mask that he chose to wear and the part that it was his to play. In regard to religion he declared that he was a Roman Catholic, and would die in that faith: "He adhered to the rock upon which Christ built his Church, to St Peter." He recalled his many changes in religion; discussed once more the questions which he had argued with his professor at Aberdeen, with the priests at Saumur, and with those whom he met at the French court. His own faith was now fixed: "But I have charity for all mankind; and I believe every sincere honest man bids fair for heaven, let his persuasion be what it will." Amongst all who gathered about him in his cell, he was the most cheerful and most brisk in talk — now indulging a gleam of sarcastic humour, now paying a well- turned compliment or performing an act of kindly courtesy, and now capping with a French or Latin quotation some pithy remark or some train of religious or philosophic argument. Careful to prepare himself for the last scene, he practised with a pillow how to lay his head upon the block, till he could say "that he would be able to act his part in the tragedy well enough." The thought of his people and their glens was with him to the end. He arranged that his body was to be carried to his own country, and buried in the tomb at Kirkhill on which he had already inscribed a high-sounding epitaph; he told his jailers how once all the pipers of the North were to have gathered for his funeral, but now he was sure some of the good old women of his country could sing a coronach before him, " for I am one of the greatest chiefs in the Highlands." The execution took place on the 9th of April. The evening before he had spent in smoking and drinking a glass with his jailers, and when they drank "a good journey" to him, he said " Amen," and knocking the ashes from his pipe, observed, " Gentlemen, the end of all human grandeur is like this snuff of tobacco." The next morning was spent, according to the strange usage of the time, in what partook of the character of a ceremonial reception. After breakfast he drank to the 218 REPRISALS, AND SAFEGUARDS AGAINST REBELLION. friends who had gathered round him, and conversed on in- different subjects. At eleven o'clock, after a short private prayer, he was conducted to the apartment of the governor of the Tower, where a company of ladies and gentlemen was gathered to receive him. He greeted them with the calm courtesy with which he would have entered a drawing-room, and talked with them freely until the sheriff came to conduct him to the scaffold. He had to be helped up the steps by two warders, and the sense of humour prompted him to yet another sally as he looked round upon the crowd. " God save us ! all this bustle about taking off an old grey head that can't get up three steps without two men to help it ! " With unperturbed calmness he looked round upon the preparations, read the inscription on the coffin, rallied the executioner, and distributed the usual gifts. He did not forget the proper quotation from Horace — " Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori " ; and added one from Ovid — " Nam genus et proavos, et quae non f ecimus ipsi Yix ea nostra voco." He then knelt down, with careful attention to the directions of the executioner; arranged the signal for the blow, which, after a few moments of silent prayer, he gave by dropping his handkerchief, and one blow of the axe closed the drama which he had played with such consummate skill and calmness. His wish that his body should be carried to his Highland home had been conceded ; but when it came to the point the Government were nervous, hesitated, and at length absolutely forbade its transport. It was feared that the funeral proces- sion might be a signal for new sedition, and in the present state of the country such a risk could not be run. Perhaps the old man foresaw such a possibility. If so, it would not lessen his eagerness for the plan, as on the eve of his death he was roused to new indignation against the Government by the progress made towards the abolition of the hereditary sheriff- doms. However this might be, the prudence or timidity of the Government prevented it, and his body was buried within the precincts of the Tower. Thus ended, for a space,^ the long list of cases in which the ^ Of those exempted from the Act of Indemnity, Dr Archibald Cameron, the brother of Lochiel, was executed as late as 1753, upon the Bill of Attainder passed in 1746. But harsh as this seemed, it was to some extent excused by his being privy to a hopeless and abortive attempt to renew the rebellion in 1752. I HIS ROMANCE AND HIS TRICKERY. 219 penalty of death had been exacted from those who were arraigned for their part in the rebeUion, and with this last victim there disappeared a figure the like of which was not again to appear in Scottish history. In Simon Fraser there were united to a degree which has made his the most striking personality in the history of the Highlands during the first half of the century, all the characteristics drawn from a French stock and grafted upon the stem of the Celtic clan. As the old order withered towards decay, an apparent, but fitful, power and force were imparted to it by some of the chiefs who knew how to attract the enthusiastic affection, and by others who knew how to compel the slavish obedience, of their clans. But the power of the law and the influence of Government were giving intimation, long before it could be attested by overt acts, of the gradual but sure approach of a new system. In view of that approach, the chief who, like Lovat, sought to maintain, and even to increase, his power over his clan, had to mingle treachery and chicanery with boldness, and had alternately to defy the law and to appeal to its quibbles and subtleties to baffle his opponents. The racial elements never showed more distinctly than in the person of Lovat, but they were increased and developed by the roving life of adventure and intrigue at home and abroad, which made of him, by training as well as by inheritance, the con- summate actor, the Protean shuffler, the versatile and practised player of many parts. Nature and training alike taught him how to combine relentless cruelty and imperturbable courage with the most cunning stratagem, the deftest intrigue, and, when needful, the most unctuous profession of warm feelings of religion and benevolence. These feelings, strange as it may seem, cannot have been entirely hypocritical, unless we are to suppose that some of the most astute and experienced of his contemporaries, who chose Lovat as the friend of a lifetime, were completely deceived by a very superficial and palpable disguise. The religious feeling which is merely assumed deceives no man of any penetration for very long. It is much harder to detect that religious feeling which, true and sincere in its foundation, is being used for the express purposes of equivocation and deceit. It was not a merely superficial hypocrisy which made Lovat so dangerous as he was. It was rather the vein of passionate feeling, of deep religious conviction, of enthusiastic and romantic attachment to the clan and to its home. All these, combined with his reckless audacity and his practised knavery, made him approach, on one side, to the leader of a forlorn-hope or the defender of a beleaguered garrison, and, on the other side, to 220 REPRISALS, AND SAFEGUARDS AGAINST REBELLION. the captain of banditti or the chief of a band of cattle-reivers. He lived out of his time, and his fall is only one symptom of the crumbling of the whole system of which he was so con- spicuous a type. But measures had to be taken of a more wide -reaching effect for the security of law and order. It was not enough to make examples of those, whether in high place or in low, who had taken part in an attempt which the carelessness and timidity of those responsible for the security of the Govern- ment had made so dangerous. The possibilities of rebellion had to be stopped at their source. It was only natural that the same spirit which had offered so poor a defence should now be eager to provide against any renewal of the attempt. It was perhaps not unnatural that in the first flush of a victory attained after so long a delay, and after a whole series of defeats and failures, the sway of martial terror should prevail not only over any thought of mercy or of prudence, but even over the supreme consideration of law. Cumberland's was a spirit eminently fitted by arrogance, ruthlessness, and an exaggerated sense of triumph over what was after all but a weak foe, to be the leading agent in the work of reprisals. He was surrounded by men of a kindred spirit to his own, and was little disposed to listen to the advice of those who knew the spirit of the Highlanders, and who could take a juster measure of their guilt. No one had laboured harder to withstand the rising forces of rebellion, or had contributed more to their final discomfiture, than Duncan Forbes of Culloden, who, when the rebellion broke out, had been for eight years Lord President of the Court of Session. But he soon found that counsels of prudence and mercy were met only by mockery or suspicion, and that to be inclined to leniency was viewed as a proof of half-hearted loyalty. When he met Cumberland at Inverness, and ventured to suggest the regard that had to be paid to the laws of the country, he was answered by the derisive taunt, " The laws of the country, my lord ! I'll make a brigade give laws, by God ! " In the congenial society of his military advisers Cumberland spoke of Forbes as " that old woman who talked to me of humanity." In the West Highlands Cumberland's brigades gave laws after a fashion of indiscriminate cruelty, dealt out to all who had the misfortune to fall into their hands. The region was too remote to permit the details of that cruelty to reach the ears of Londoners, who, callous as they were, might have been roused to some indignation by the recital. As it was, the ordinary mood of Englishmen was not out of sympathy MEASURES OF REPRESSION. 221 with the policy of unmeasured reprisals, and it did not pause to make any nice discrimination of guilt. All Scotland seemed to share the blame, and Scotsmen found themselves the objects of suspicion and dislike — even when they had made sacrifices of which their southern neighbours had not dreamed for the maintenance of the reigning dynasty. Weak as the Government of the Pelhams was, it had the support of a large majority. Parliamentary opposition had for the moment dwindled down into a matter of small and selfish personal cliques struggling for the spoils of office. There were, therefore, but few voices which did not swell the shout of condemnation with which the rebellion was greeted on its fall. The first and most obvious measure was one for the dis- armament of the Highlands. The Statute-book already con- tained Acts — of 1716 and 1725 — which provided for such disarmament; but they had been virtually suspended or evaded, and the levying of the Independent Companies had been a proceeding which a strong government might have adopted as a means of using for its own purposes a splendid fighting material, but which, in a weak government, was nothing short of suicidal. Even the warmest friends of the Highlands could not now oppose a measure of disarmament so necessary for self-defence, and scarcely a voice was raised against it. Peremptory provisions were made for the de- livery of all arms, severe penalties were imposed on all who concealed them, and the search for them was placed in the hands of the victorious army, which was now spread over every part of the Highlands. Evasion was no longer winked at, and the spirit of those who might have been disposed to attempt resistance was too effectually broken to allow them to think of it. The 1st of August 1746 was fixed as the date on which all arms must be delivered, and a failure to do so was to be punished by fine and imprisonment for the first offence, and by imprisonment in case of contumacy. Continued contumacy was to render the offender liable to compulsory military service in the colonies. But to this measure was added another which spoke of a baser spirit, and which had no such justification. The poverty and necessity of the Highlanders had forced them to use for their clothing no other material than their own rough home- spun. The severity of their climate and the hardy manner of their life had determined the fashion of their garments and the manner of wearing them, and these had become a symbol of their nationality. Some remnant of that Celtic love of colour which remained amidst all the squalor of their savage 222 REPRISALS, AND SAFEGUARDS AGAINST REBELLION. surroundings had made them dye these garments after a peculiar fashion of their own, and out of this they had framed a rude system of heraldry, in which was enshrined their clan-attachment. The British Parliament now celebrated its tardy triumph over rebellion by a campaign against the tartan and the philabeg; and the use either of the colours or the fashion of the Highland garments became a penal offence. It was a sort of proscription which sowed the seeds of discontent and hatred far more deeply than the occasion was worth. Had the spirit of rebellion been indeed as wide- spread and as dangerous as the previous fears and the new- born triumph of the Southerner assumed, such a measure as this was the best means of exciting it to renewed activity. As it was, it only bred in the Highlands a mood of despair and melancholy, and served to kindle a half -sentimental sympathy elsewhere. Such trifling on the part of the Legis- lature was prevented only by accident from being the cause of serious troubles. But as it was, the tartan became the symbol, south of the Tweed, of that sort of Jacobitism which began and ended in romance, and at the most gave a deeper colouring to reviving Toryism. By the same error that deemed all Scotland to be imbued with the spirit of rebellion, it was believed that all Scotsmen wore garments that to all Scottish Lowlanders were previously but the marks of an uncouth and unfamiliar barbarism. By its incursion into the sphere of the tailor, the British Parliament gave to the Highland dress — strangely altered, it is true, and far distant from anything which had been seen on the field of Culloden — a hold upon the imagination which it could not otherwise have obtained. From being a habit which necessity had imposed on a primitive race, it became a mark of kinship, and even a national symbol. By one of the strange freaks of development with which history sometimes amuses us, it survives as the distinctive mark of the Cockney shopman on his annual holiday, when he graces the Scottish Highlands with his presence, and poses as the representative of the Highland chief. The Act which confiscated the estates of those who had joined the rebellion, and vested them in certain commissioners, was one which could have no very wide political results, and from which only a very magnanimous policy could have re- frained. The estates were not of such value as to produce by their change of ownership any very far-reaching political effect ; and even the real value was seriously diminished by the action of the courts of law. Dowers and settlements, as well as the claims of creditors, were exempted from the effect ACT OF INDEMNITY. 223 of the forfeiture; and the judges had sufficient sympathy with the luckless owners to give a wide, and perhaps not always a well-authenticated, extension, to exemption based upon these pleas. Many of those who had joined in the re- bellion secured their family estates by transferring them to kinsmen who prudently remained neutral or sided with the Government; and agents were often appointed to draw the rents who were not unconnected with the exiled owner, and managed to convey to him a certain portion of the revenue. As time went on some of the attainders were removed and the estates restored; and on the whole, in reviewing the territorial changes wrought by the rebellion, we are struck not so much by the wide impoverishment of the families which had been its adherents, as by the large numbers whose estates are even yet held by their descendants. Few Scottish families owed their decay to the rebellion: in far more frequent instances economical laws, personal extravagance, and the ousting of territorial wealth by advancing commerce, have been, at a far later day, the causes which separated the land from those who represented the former chief. The suppression of a rebellion must sooner or later be followed by something of the nature of an amnesty. For the security of the victors that amnesty cannot be unduly delayed, as the delay means a prolongation of civil strife. It depends on the spirit of the Government and the amount of courage it possesses whether such an amnesty is a mere state- ment of certain limits within which it will execute vengeance as soon as it is able to do so, or simply affirms that the lists of proscription are torn up and scattered, and that the ordinary law can deal with all offenders against its majesty for their future acts. Usually an intermediate course is followed ; and the Act of Indemnity of June 1747 may perhaps be said not to lean unduly in the direction of proscription. Some eighty persons were excepted from its provisions by name, but for all others the record was closed ; and if they chose to accept the Government as established, they might purge themselves of any taint of rebellion. The persons excepted were beyond the arm of the law; and although in one case, as we have seen, the law stretched its arm to seize the offender when he unwarily ventured within its reach, yet many were allowed as years passed to return and re-assume, more or less openly, the position of citizens within the pale of the law. But measures of disarmament, proscriptions of peculiar fashions in clothing, and forfeitures of estates, were after all of limited effect. If rebellion were to be rendered impossible, it must be by some scheme of a deeper and more widel^y 224 REPRISALS, AND SAFEGUARDS AGAINST REBELLION. reaching kind. It was not the wearing of a peculiar dress, or the possession of a stock of arms which were certain to become antiquated and useless, which made the Highlanders a nation by themselves. That was the result of living under different laws, acknowledging a separate authority, and know- ing no loyalty but to their chief. It was fostered by the prevalent system of land-tenure, which to a large extent represented notions borrowed from feudalism, and lingering on long after feudalism had been abolished elsewhere. The proprietor of the Highland estate was the head of the clan, whose members held their tenancies from him on condition of " wardship " or military service. They lived under his ab* solute sway, knowing no law but that of implicit obedience to his commands and unbounded devotion to his person. The rebellion had owed most of its danger to that unquestioning loyalty which forced unwilling tenants to follow their chief to the field, and in whose eyes devotion to the cause of the Stuarts was only a consequence of their devotion to the re- ligion of the clan. But absolute as that devotion was, and much as it struck the unaccustomed minds of English observers, it was already beginning to decay. The pride of a fancied dignity of birth, derived from the claim of kinship with the chief, the poverty of the soil, and the irksomeness of labour, had been its chief supports. The clan feuds promised a full glut of private revenge, with ample promise of plunder, such as it was. Already it had been degraded to the uses of a somewhat rudimentary commercial system, by which one clan plundered the Lowlander, while the Lowlander paid blackmail, by way of an insurance, to the clan which was his plunderer's hereditary foe. It rested partly on a strain of romantic and devoted loyalty, enshrined in the imagination of a heroic and enthusiastic race, but partly also on savage treachery and self- ish greed, with a thin veneer of diplomatic cunning. It was powerful enough in 1745 to be the foundation of a bold and astonishingly successful enterprise, but the rebellion was its last expiring effort. Failure and despair had strained it to the bursting-point ; and on the eve of CuUoden starvation and the ominous presage of defeat had driven crowds of the High- landers to escape from their standard, or passionately to swear that they would fight no more. Devotion to their chiefs had not made the drill-sergeant acceptable, nor military discipline anything but an irksome yoke. On the Moor of CuUoden it was not merely a horde of baffled clansmen, pressed by weari- ness, disease, and want, that had been crushed before an army disciplined in foreign wars, but the ruins of an ancient and barbaric system that had crumbled before the advancing ABOLITION OF HEREDITARY JURISDICTIONS. 225 power of authority and law — however ill these were repre- sented by Cumberland and his generals. It remained to write this triumph in the Statute-book, and that was the work neither of Cumberland nor of the Scotsmen who had stood fast by the Hanoverian family. It was Lord Hardwicke, the Lord Chancellor, who saw that it was not individuals only, but a system, which had to be crushed and destroyed. The hereditary jurisdictions, which were a standing menace to the majesty of the supreme law, must be ended ; and the tenure of land, so far as it kept alive the remnants of a savage polity, must be entirely changed. It is not surprising that even the most loyal of the Scottish lawyers hesitated before these measures. They were jealous of the innovations of English law. They still loved the cumbrous phraseology and the traditional antiquity of feudalism. They knew how weak in practice was the king's writ in wide regions of the Scottish Highlands, and how a rough justice had been administered amidst the clans; and they hesitated about superseding this by what might look well on paper but might be weak in working. Their know- ledge of the Highlands told them that, as things then were, a circuit court could not safely be held in these remote regions unless protected by an adequate military force. They clung, too, to the customs of those amongst whom they lived, and shrank from breaking down a system to which they owed the confidence that they had felt in the loyalty of certain clans, even if it had constituted the danger in the case of others. The Lord President Forbes was after all a Highlander, even if he had found himself for a time the representative of a minority of the Highlands. In regard, therefore, to this proposed legislation, he found himself uneasy and dissatisfied, and in sharp conflict with the policy of Lord Hardwicke. In the disarmament of the High- lands he was ready to concur; but in this, and in no more fundamental change, he found the hope of future security. It required the calm judgment of a lawyer, viewing the crisis from a distance, biassed by no personal sympathies, and firmly convinced of the ultimate triumph of the law, to foresee the proper course — to establish a more enlightened system, and to break down the barriers that separated race from race. We may regret the disappearance of an interesting and picturesque survival, but we cannot the less refuse to acknowledge that Lord Hardwicke s remedy was the right one, or deny to it the gratitude due to what worked a great benefit to Scotland. In this session of 1747 there were accordingly passed two p 226 REPRISALS, AND SAFEGUARDS AGAINST REBELLION. Acts: one abolishing tenure by wardship, and the other abolishing, at one blow, the hereditary jurisdictions in Scotland. These embraced offices so widely divided as that of the Lord Justice-General for Scotland, and those of petty clerkships in small districts to which individuals had been nominated, under some anciently granted power, for life. Hereafter justice was to be administered, not by the local proprietor, whose ancestor had secured the right of "pit and gallows," but by sheriff-substitutes, nominated by the Crown. The rights of vested interests were recognised, and all claims which were sent in were carefully con- sidered. But in place of £587,090, which was claimed, only £152,037, 12s. 2d. was allowed as the compensation- money for these rights. The Act was not passed without considerable opposition. The Tories, who still carried on a fitful contest with the Government of the Pelhams, tried to animate their ranks by appeals to the rights of property which were thus rudely assailed. The Jacobites, however powerless they might be, might still add some energy to the opposition; and many of those who had no sympathy with the Jacobite cause could not be expected to view with pleasure the disappearance of a system on which their own influence greatly depended. The patriots, who professed to dread above all things the growth of an unconstitutional power in the hands of the Ministers of the Crown, expressed their detestation of a measure which added largely to the patronage of the Crown at the expense of the ancient rights of the aristocracy, and, as they maintained, of the liberties of the people. But the opposition was in vain, and the same session saw both the Acts placed upon the Statute-book. With this work accomplished, the Government appealed to the country in an election, and they were rewarded by an increased majority. Parliamentary opposition seemed for the moment silenced, and in November of that year the king met the new Parliament with the rebellion finally crushed, with its supporters brought to condign punishment, and with the statutes which promised to serve as an effectual bar to its renewal passed in spite of the efforts of the Opposition, and the hesitation even of the friends of the Government. In the next month one of these friends whose loyalty had been most tried, whose counsels had been rejected, and whose motives had been suspected, passed away, worn out by the toil and anxiety that had fallen to his share, and still more by the vexation caused by distrust and ingratitude. Duncan Forbes DUNCAN FORBES OF Culloden. DEATH OF FORBES OF CULLODEN. 227 died in December 1747. In himself he represented a type of statesman and of lawyer which stood in sharp contrast to the generation that preceded and to that which followed him. In purity of motive, in freedom from faction, in respect for the law, in pride in its majesty, in earnest effort for the welfare of his countrymen, he marks a phase of Scottish legal history which enriches its annals. But in many of his economical notions, in the strange direction of his religious speculations, in his inexplicable blindness to the faults of some of his friends, in his old-fashioned prejudices and remoteness from the range of modern politics, he stands in equal contrast with the fore- most lawyers of England in his day, and with the new school of thought that was to arise in Scotland in the generation following his own. His steadfastness to the Hanoverian dynasty was unshaken, but much as he deplored, and ably as he combated, the Jacobite rebellion, he was not prepared for the changes that were to make its renewal impossible, and he did not grasp the new range of political interest that was to open to his country's view. 228 CHAPTER X. PARTIES IN SCOTLAND AFTER THE REBELLION. We have now to turn to a new scene, and to a new chapter in the history of Scotland. Seldom has a country started more suddenly upon a new career than Scotland did after the Rebellion. Formal and legislative changes, forced on her by the heavy hand of authority, came rapidly enough ; but the changes in habits, and even in thought, — changes which are usually the result of slow and gradual processes, — came in this instance with almost equal rapidity. The Jacobite rebellion, in spite of all its heroism, was doubtless a mistake, upon which the pedagogues of history may be justified in emptying all the phials of their denunciation, but from it Scotland emerged a new nation. In order to understand the new page of her history which now opens, we must take a reckoning of the change through which Scotland passed when the storm-cloud of the Rebellion had blown over. How did she steer her course when she had escaped the rocks and quicksands of civil war, when Jacobit- ism ceased to be a living force, and sank into a decaying but picturesque memory ? Upon the special direction which she gave to the results of her recent experience was her future history to depend. The salient fact is, that her destiny was shaped by her own hand. Outside influences touched her, but their effect was, after all, but slight : and herein lies the secret of her strength. And it is none the less a truth that the memories of Jacobitism helped to preserve the national in- dividuality of Scotland. Hitherto the mass of the Scottish nation had been hardly known to the English people. The relations between the two countries were but few,^ and the distinctive traits of national ^ A single fact is enough to mark the separation. In the year 1758 a memorial was presented praying that the post from London to Edinburgh might be short- ened from the usual ten and a half or twelve and a half days to seven. For all practical purposes Scotland was as far from the metropolis then as are the West- ern States of America from England at the present day. ENGLISH VIEWS OF SCOTLAND. 229 character were in sharpest contrast. The strangely composite character of the population north of the Tweed was very dimly understood by the ordinary Englishman. He had a vague notion of a people forming a part of the same United Kingdom as himself, and owing allegiance to a common government, but in large measure composed of men of whom he had heard as little better than savages, still wedded to primitive usages, wearing a strange and antic dress, speaking an uncouth language, and living under alien laws and customs. He knew them to be swayed by a system of tribal govern- ment, which seemed incompatible with modern civilisation; and he had not the faintest conception that the clan system might enshrine the most romantic ideas of loyalty, and might rival in its devotion the loftiest code of chivalry. The English mind has never been particularly receptive of facts outside its own immediate range ; and in this instance the English citizen had more than ordinary reason to be puzzled and perplexed. The wide gulf which divided the Highland clans from the Lowland Scots was one which the Englishman could scarcely grasp, and which he naturally ignored altogether. Even the Lowland Scot was a man whose ideas and manners were uncouth to him, and, for all he knew or cared, the Lowland Scot was part and parcel of an alien nationality, mainly represented by the barbarous tribes of whom he had heard strange travellers' tales, such as might have reached him from the unknown regions of Central Africa. That the Lowland Scot was closely akin to him in race, spoke an ancient and comparatively pure dialect of his own tongue, and was united to him in a common antipathy to the Celt, were facts alto- gether beyond his knowledge. It was enough for him that he was alien in religion, in manners, in politics, in law, and in the interests of his everyday life. The Scot had never concealed his passionate hatred of the Union with England. Only a small minority really under- stood the value of that Union, and even they did not obtrude their views too freely, and trusted rather to the effects of time and habit, than of exhortation, to conciliate the sympathies of the nation. The pride of the Scot was proverbial, and it was made both odious and ridiculous in the eyes of the southern Saxon by its accompaniments of sordid poverty and of inordin- ate jealousy. That a few Scots had attained to influence and power in England was a fact which nowise tended to lessen the antipathy of the Englishman. Their success was viewed with grudging and suspicion, and was ascribed to that baseness and chicanery which are easily imputed to a poverty-stricken race, prone to abuse its wealthy neighbours, even while it 230 PARTIES IN SCOTLAND AFTER THE REBELLION. battened on the good things which it obtained amongst them. It was thus the misfortune of Scotland to be burdened with a character for qualities the most contradictory. With the rashness, the savage propensity for fighting, the reckless dis- regard for law and order, the plundering habits and the alien language of the Highlander, were associated the cunning, the servility, the ready and dexterous craft, the rigid and appar- ently Pharisaical religious tenets, which were believed to be typical of the Lowland Scot. Out of the mixture of all these evil qualities was concocted the average Englishman's notion of the Scot ; and now, to crown all, there was ascribed to him the blame for the danger and alarm caused by the latest attempt of a discredited Jacobitism. This common verdict was absolutely unjust. It was reached by linking together, with reckless carelessness, tendencies the most inconsistent. Yet it serves to explain much of the prejudice under which Scotland laboured. Against that prejudice she had to fight in winning her just place in the Imperial partnership. During the first half of the century she had lost rather than gained ground, against the weight of adverse feeling amongst Englishmen. In truth, she took little trouble to gain an aflfection which she was not prepared to reciprocate, even had it been freely given. The Union had been carried by a minis- terial clique in the teeth of national prejudice. It had ridden rough -shod over Scottish sentiment, and its possible benefits were to the mind of the average Scotsman only chimerical at best. That the antipathy to it was often exaggerated, often ignorant, and not rarely due to some personal jealousy, did not make it any less dangerous from a political point of view. In the hatred it aroused every faction that opposed the actual Government found a useful ally. English pride, on the other hand, was wounded because a Union which could bring to England no benefit except that of security against a long- standing danger was scouted by the poorer nation, which had nothing to lose, and much to gain, by partnership. To the foreseeing statesman, the Union was not expedient only — it was an imperious necessity. But that did not prevent its rubbing national prejudice on the raw, and increasing that antipathy for which recent history, no less than divergence of habit and feeling, gave such abundant foundation. Before the Jacobite rebellion there were not a few Scotsmen who had close relations with England, who became, indeed, her adopted sons, and swelled the ranks of her statesmen, her divines, her literary men. But they had either striven with an almost servile exaggeration of imitation to become JACOBITISM AND THE ENGLISH TORY. 231 Englishmen in all but name, or they had lived, like some of her great nobles, a double life — now courtiers at St James's, and now chieftains of Highland clans amidst their vast territorial domains. Neither class really represented the Scottish nation, which, in spite of this thin stream which carried into England a certain Scottish element, remained essentially alien and distinct. Strange as it may seem, the Jacobite feeling during the first part of the century was to a certain extent a bond of union between Scotland and one section, at least, of English feeling. The English Tory, whose Jacobitism was partly a tradition of the past, but still more certainly a phase of political faction, knew that he could rely upon a steady wave of Jacobite feeling in Scotland, and that it might be trusted to cause chronic uneasiness to the Govern- ment which he hated. As long as Jacobitism remained a vague and uncertain force, which rather weakened the allegi- ance paid to a Whig Government than threatened civil war, so long the discontented English Tory was ready to own a certain sympathy with the Scotsman to whose national pride and jealousy he felt that he might safely appeal. He was not indisposed to stimulate and encourage Scottish faction, so long as it formed a convenient instrument of attack on a Government to which he was opposed. But with the final failure of Jacobitism, which left it only a memory and a ghost, to be occasionally resuscitated by the fitful efforts of a scanty remnant, even this slender bond of sympathy passed away. The English Tory found himself discredited and weakened by the reckless audacity v^rith which his Scottish allies had striven to give reality to their fervent loyalty. The attempt was now seen to be ill-timed and ill- measured. It had appealed to English sympathisers for sacrifices which called for far greater sincerity than really existed amongst those who called themselves, or at least allowed themselves to be suspected to be, Jacobites. It had come to an untimely end, and the sooner that it could be buried out of sight and memory the better, so that the scene might be left free for some new phase in the endless wrangling of faction and of parliamentary warfare. Jacobitism ceased now to be even a slender bond of union between any section of Englishmen and Scotsmen. In England it survived no longer even in the form of party spirit; in Scotland it remained for a few years more as a romantic dream. Upon Scotland the main burden of the attempt had rested ; to her remained the heaviest part of the discredit, and to her were bequeathed the most cherished memories of an heroic effort. Jacobitism ceased to be a real political force in Scotland, but 232 PARTIES IN SCOTLAND AFTER THE REBELLION. it entwined itself with a strong chord of national sympathy. In England the political feeling which had expressed itself in Jacobitism soon took a different dress, and its memory re- mained only to increase English prejudice against the Scots. In a certain sense, then, Scotland was driven even farther apart than ever from England. But the effect of the Union was stronger than mere sentiment. By slow degrees the bonds between the two countries were becoming closer ; intercourse was more constant ; commercial conditions were bringing them into more direct contact. The presence of Scottish members in both Houses of Parliament insensibly blended together large classes of each nation; long service in the same camps abroad spread the feeling of brotherhood, and wore down the differences of manners, and even of dialect. The action of a single supreme court of appeal drew the law courts closer together, even though it did not obliterate the distinctive character of Scottish jurisprudence. It might have been that Scotland would cease to retain her separate national life and become a mere province of England. It was fortunate, perhaps, that there was at the end of the Jacobite rebellion enough of national jealousy and antipathy to prevent this result. Time was certain to weaken that jealousy. Contrasts would wear away. Points of contact would become more numerous. The very physical conditions of intercourse would efface boundary marks. But it was not a small or insignificant thing that, when Scotland took up the more modern phase of life which opened with 1746, she stood virtually alone — at once in character, in custom, in religion, and in law. The great European movements in which England was so directly interested, and which were so fateful for her own destiny as well, passed by unheeded so far as the great mass of the inhabitants of Scotland was concerned. With a certain proud tenacity, and a self-centred rigidity of purpose, she turned to her own affairs; and the years which succeed the Jacobite rebellion show us no array of striking or important events, but the deliberate work of Scotland in shaping new conditions in her own fashion, and in building up for herself, on peculiar lines, a literature, a philosophy, an ecclesiastical, municipal, and economical system, which, each one of them, powerfully re- flected the national character, and made a distinct contribution to the life of the Empire. Had Scotland remained in a sulky estrangement, and had she attempted, in an exaggeration of national jealousy, to turn back the finger on the dial, and develop her intellectual and political life altogether apart from England, the end could only have been failure and LINES OF SCOTTISH DEVELOPMENT. 233 contempt. Her praise was rather that she adapted herself to new conditions, that she sought to efface needless differences, and felt strong enough to trust that her national character- istics would imprint themselves on her work without any artificial accentuation of contrasting elements. The efforts of the wisest and most patriotic Scotsmen were given to the obliteration of those distinctions between different parts of her population that might have made her a divided nation. The Lowland Scot felt his responsibility for the amelioration of the Highland districts, and went to work on it with all the ardour of missionary zeal. Her Church laboured to embrace within her educational system the most remote corners of the Hebrides. An instinct of self-preservation told her that if she were to be one nation, she must make one form of religious belief dominant everyw^here, and that she must adapt to her use the language and the customs which were dear to the Highlands. The pioneers of her manufactures and her commerce felt that they must not neglect their Celtic brethren in the attempts to build up some solid structure of national wealth. It was thus, and thus only, that she could, and did, secure that when the two streams flowed together, the Scottish character and Scottish tradition should not count for little in the mingled flood. The generation which follows the Jacobite rebellion thus shows us a Scottish national life, open to outside influence, freely reaching after outside experience, adapting itself to changing conditions, enlarging the bounds of traditional creeds and habits, and striving with much enlightenment to cope with new difficulties. Within its own sphere of influence it was bold, and in some respects almost revolutionary. It soon learned to find — nay, its poverty compelled it to seek — every opportunity for sharing in the larger destinies of the Empire. But at first its work was chiefly new modelling its own domain. The first and most striking feature of that domain was its crushing poverty. Whatever other advantages Scotland pos- sessed, she owed none to natural wealth; and even such resources as belonged to her were as yet hardly guessed, much less developed. The statistics which are available were framed on no very settled principle, and present too many discrepancies to allow us to rely with confidence upon them ; but one infer- ence at least may safely be drawn, that her poverty could hardly have been greater than it was. Vast tracts in the Highlands were so uncultivated — often so incapable of cul- tivation — that our only astonishment is that the population of these tracts, which was certainly not less than its present 234 PARTIES IN SCOTLAND AFTER THE REBELLION. amount, if not considerably greater, managed to pick up sustenance enough to maintain nature even upon the hardy fare which habit had made possible to them. The coal and iron mines of the Lowlands were as yet worked only in a few scattered centres, which did not permit the boldest imagination to dream of their future possibilities.^ Her foreign commerce was scanty, and her ports, which two or three generations later were to teem with shipping, were now little more than petty harbours, which could be used only by ships of insignificant tonnage. In 1760 there were scarcely 1000 merchant vessels belonging to all the ports in Scotland, and their aggregate tonnage was only 53,000 tons. In 1800 the number of vessels had more than doubled and the tonnage had increased by more than threefold. In 1840 there were nearly 3500 vessels, and the tonnage approached half a million tons. Such was the increase during the period which this narrative covers, and it was only the prelude to far greater things. But the start was made in the middle of the eighteenth century ; and it was not in this direction only that Scotland was preparing herself for a new career. Already a few enterprising men had begun to see the possibilities of hidden wealth. The West Indian trade, in spite of the jealousy with which it was viewed by the western parts of England, was developing in the hands of the shrewd burghers of Glasgow. Some of the leading men were spending thought and care in the improvement of agriculture. The linen manufacture was as yet advancing steadily, though it afterwards suffered a decline ; and the fishing industry was receiving legislative encouragement. The establishment of the Board of Manufactures in 1727 proved the existence of schemes of national development ; and the banks, which had been started under no good omens and with so much timidity as to give no promise of success, were making modest exten- sions of their enterprise, and venturing upon considerable although cautious increase of their capital. But, in spite of all these embryo endeavours, the fact remains beyond dispute, that the leading feature of Scottish life was still, and long continued to be, a poverty which its southern neighbours, with all their contempt for the proverbial beggary of the Scot, could hardly appreciate, much less exaggerate. With all the pride of birth and station ; with all the wide distinc- tion between the different grades of society; with all the aristocratic privilege that still belonged to the territorial ^ Even at the end of the eighteenth century the output of iron was only 18,000 tons : in httle more than sixty years it exceeded 1,000,000. In 1800 the total imports and exports were each under a quarter of a million pounds in value : half a century more raised the imports to nine millions in value. POVERTY OF THE NATION. 235 class ; in spite of vast estates and large retinues of servants, the ordinary conditions of life in Scotland, even amongst the better class, were such as would not have been tolerated by the fairly well-to-do shopman of London. An equipage was a luxury to which only a few of the wealthiest aspired. The houses were mean and confined, and even those of the landed proprietors of much pretension to pride of race and consider- ation were on a more humble scale than would now be deemed sufficient for the moderate tenant-farmer. Of the ornaments of life nothing was known. Few except the richest and most highly placed of the proprietors sought to arrange the immediate surroundings of their houses with an attention to* grace or even order. Ploughed fields reached to the very door of the dwelling-house, encumbered besides with the untidiness of the stables and the poultry-yard. This was not from a scanty supply of labour, or because wages were high, but only because domestic life had not yet learned to hide its homeliest details. With an abundant social life and much conviviality, there was joined a frugality which neither sought nor cared for any attempt at elegance or display. The cheapness of food was a sure sign of the poverty of the nation. A few pence was the price of dinner at the ordinaries frequented by the best professional classes. Butcher-meat sold for about 2d. or 3d. a pound. Eggs were about 3d. a dozen. Good claret was cheap, and, dispensed in carts which made a circuit from door to door, it formed the ordinary drink in middle-class families. The incomes even of the well-to-do bore a strict relation to these prices, which so clearly indicate the general poverty of the country. The salary of a judge of the High Court was £500 a year.^ A professor of the University was well paid at £100 or £150 a year. The average income of the clergy was about £50 or £60 ; that of the parish schoolmaster — a man of dignity in his neighbourhood, possessing the proud security of a freehold tenure of office — was scarcely £12. But scanty as this provision was, it was reckoned that the total revenues of the thousand parish clergymen of Scotland were not much less than one-tenth of the whole rental of the country. Only a few years before, Fletcher of Saltoun had proposed that the highest income which any man in Scotland should be allowed to hold should be £200 a year. Even those who sought, for controversial purposes, to place the income of ^ In 1758 some improvement took place in the pay of judicial posts. The Lord Justice- General was then assigned a salary of £2400 ; but this office was a sinecure, held by a great nobleman. The President had £1300 ; the ordinary judges £700, with an addition for those who performed justiciary functions, of £300. At that date an English judge received £2000 a year. 236 PARTIES IN SCOTLAND AFTER THE REBELLION. the country at the highest possible estimate, could not venture, even when they added to the rental all profits from agriculture, all the produce of manufactures and commerce, and all incomes derived from Government, to compute the total at more than £5,360,000, distributed over about a million inhabitants. It is not necessary to discriminate between opposing estimates to feel assured that the poverty of the country was such as scarcely to admit of exaggeration. But this poverty, fortunately, did not have its worst and most natural result in crushing down the nation to a low and degrading level of monotony. The most marked feature in Scottish society, and that which did more than anything else to develop the strength and adaptability of Scottish character, was its endless variety. It is unnecessary to point to the most dramatic contrast — that between the Highlander and the Lowlander, separated from one another by barriers of race, language, habits of life and social customs, no less than by difterence of temperament and of sympathy. But even within the Saxon boundary, with those whose traditions and whose history were the same, who had known no difference of social usage or social economy, who had been partakers of the same religious and political disputes, there were the sharpest and most stimulating contrasts. Each grade of society was nicely divided, from the great landed proprietor, whose dignity and influence were not impaired by the fact that his poverty would have stirred the contempt of a petty English squire, down to the agricultural labourer, whose condition was little, if anything, above that of the serf. Every variety of political feeling was represented, from that of the Episcopalian non- juror, who clung with rigid tenacity to the doctrine of the divine right of kings, to the philosophical republican, who, only a generation later, seemed the natural ally of the French Encyclopaedists. So far as religion is concerned, it is doubt- less the incontrovertible theory of the ordinary Englishman that the unvarying type of Scottish religion is that of the rigid Presbyterian, entrenched behind an impregnable wall of orthodox Calvinism, and only slowly and cautiously ex- panding to the liberty of modern thought by regular grada- tions from the Covenanters to our own day. The delusion is a comfortable one, and it saves all trouble of discrimination and inquiry ; but it is none the less complete in its absolute blindness to the real facts. Much of the strictness that characterised the Scottish Presbyterians of fifty years ago took its origin in England quite as much as in Scotland, and derived its strength not from the fact that it had descended in an unbroken stream from the preceding generation, but RELIGIOUS TYPES. 237 from its recalling a peculiar type of Scottish religious feeling, which was remote and historical, and had at the best been characteristic only of a very limited sect. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the peculiarity of Scottish religious feeling was not its narrowness or its strict orthodoxy, but its extraordinary laxity and variety. On the one hand, there were the Presbyterians, with fringes which clung with un- tiring — we may say with heroic — tenacity to their distinctive creeds, and which showed surprising dialectical subtlety in the nice distinctions of these creeds. But, on the other hand, there were the Episcopalians, who, under a galling and un- ceasing persecution, which was not the less exhausting and crushing because it did not resort to extremity, and did not employ the faggot or the axe as its instruments, adhered with absolute loyalty to the political and ecclesiastical ideals which they had inherited, and the high strain of whose morality scarcely suffers by comparison with the Annals of the Saints. It is true that they also pursued, with much subtle casuistry, the nicest distinctions of creed, and almost wrecked their cause, by disputes about what seem but insignificant varieties of ecclesiastical doctrine. By the law which determines that extremes should meet, they bore no little resemblance to the straiter sects of Presbyterians, who deplored the backsliding of their times, and who enclosed themselves within the narrow fold which enshrined the Ark of the Covenant received from their fathers. That Ark had been preserved, as they conceived, by their fathers' blood, and they strove with passionate zeal to preserve it intact from modern innovation. What wonder that, under such inspiration, they devised new subtleties of separation, and that a strained sense of religious duty de- veloped, as it so easily does, into an ascetic rigidity, and hence into Pharisaical, and even hypocritical, sanctimoniousness ? Such development is a characteristic, not of Scotsmen, but of human nature. But between these extremes, which have their heroic as well as their fantastic aspect, the main current of Scottish thought, in regard to religious questions, about the middle of the eighteenth century, ran in the direction of freedom and liberality of thought, often carried to an exaggerated length. There was an almost undue readiness to strip away from religious ethics any distinctive principle which seemed to mark them off from natural rectitude. There was a predominating desire to adapt religion to the maxims of the world, and to deny any feature of the religious character which stood in striking contrast to the models which human nature adopts for itself without religious guidance. An advance in material 238 PARTIES IN SCOTLAND AFTER THE REBELLION. improvement, the removal of undue restrictions, the smoothing of the wheels of life, were felt to be a work of benevolence ; and such a work was recognised as not only a becoming hand- maiden to religious duty, but even a convenient and pleasant substitute for it. It is not too much to say that the pre- vailing tone amongst the educated classes in Scotland was one which detested and despised religious enthusiasm, and identi- fied it with religious fanaticism, which attached very little im- portance to the niceties of religious doctrine, and which recog- nised little distinction between religious and natural ethics. It had to contend against a mass of prejudice and narrowness — not so much from the relics of the older creed, as from a class which had inherited the ignorance and virulence of that creed without its manliness and its heroism. There was a large section of the Scottish clergy who were ready to satisfy the prejudices of congregations by a narrow dogmatism, to flatter their bitterness by violent tirades, or to attract their attention by eccentric buffooneries. It was important for such men that they could appeal to the traditional doctrines of the Covenanters, however ill they might represent the lofty and enthusiastic boldness of the Covenanting heroes. Against this section of the Church her more educated adherents had to wage war ; and it was fortunate for Scotland that they waged that war successfully. Their victory had its drawbacks ; but that a Scottish literary school and a Scottish school of phil- osophy were formed and flourished in the eighteenth century was mainly due to their efforts. Not only was there in Scotland a great variety of religious feeling, much of it of a type very different from that with which English opinion identifies Scottish Presbyterianism, but there was also a singular richness of social types. They pass before us on the canvas of Scottish life with an almost bewil- dering variety. We are familiar with the peculiarities of the Highland chief and of the Lowland laird, the shrewd lawyer, and the unlettered, but wily, citizen. That their character- istics should be strongly marked and their individuality strik- ing, is only in keeping with the ruggedness of the national genius, and the dramatic experiences of its history. But we are more apt to forget other types — that of the cultured and refined scholar, versed in the ways of courts, with wide re- lations abroad, withdrawn from the rough business of politics, averse from religious enthusiasm, and beguiling his leisure with the pursuit of elegant accomplishments — such as Clerk of Penicuik ; that of the dilettante litUrateur, whom we could hardly conceive breathing in the atmosphere of a rugged Presbyterianism, like Hamilton of Bangor; that of James SOCIAL TYPES. 239 Stirling, the mathematician, who, after years spent in Venice and as teacher in Italian universities, settled down at last as manager of the Leadhill mines, and made them one of the largest, if not indeed the principal, commercial undertaking in Scotland ; or that of the whimsical Allan Ramsay, who dis- turbed the consciences of some, and equally pleased others, by boldly introducing dancing assemblies and theatrical entertain- ments to the capital. Whatever Scottish life was, it at least suffered from no undue monotony. It is not least amongst the women of that society that some of its most characteristic developments are to be found. They lived amongst conditions eminently fitted to stimulate their mental growth. They learned by dire experience the terrible realities of national struggle, and knew the stuff out of which tragedy is wrought. They had shared in all the incidents of the struggle except the actual clash of combat — and even of that they knew something. They drew in with their earliest breath a wealth of tradition and of romance that served them for history, and they learned by personal experience of its vicissitudes the true meaning of national life, which to most is nothing but a name. The constant flow of social intercourse, trammelled by few vexatious conventions, gave them readiness and sprightliness of wit ; and to an ingrained pride of race, which was not without its interest nor failed to impart a certain dignity, they added a breath of sympathy which daily intercourse with their poorer neighbours brought to them. Above all, they had, for the most part — what abstract political science might condemn, but what enhances the dramatic in- terest of life — an ardent, an unselfish, and a romantic devotion to a fallen cause. The instances of those ladies of the old school that appear as stately and characteristic figures on the scene of Scottish society during the last half of the eighteenth century are too numerous to be counted. Amongst them we may name Lady Hamilton of Rosehall, daughter of Stirling of Keir, who had suffered for his Jacobitism, and widow, for more than fifty years, of Sir Hugh Hamilton, a wealthy Lanarkshire pro- prietor. Her brief married life left her an ill-portioned, and soon a childless, widow ; but for all these years she remained a central figure in society — old-fashioned, but ever bright and full of sympathy ; homely in dialect, but yet stately in her simple dignity ; an eminent economist, but yet lavish in her hospitality; an ardent Episcopalian and Jacobite to the last, even when old rancours had died away, and her belated loyalty was merely a romantic monument of the past ; rigid in her ideas of social duty, but despising that concession to 240 PARTIES IN SCOTLAND AFTER THE REBELLION. fashion which would have circumscribed her society to what was modish and exclusive, to the disadvantage of the ties of kinship and association. Another was Lady Sarah Bruce, daughter of the Earl of Kincardine ; quiet, gentle, and sincere : tolerant though a Jacobite; keen in her enjoyment of life, and with an almost Rabelaisian zest for its good things. Yet another was her niece, Lady Rachael Drummond, daughter of James Lundin, a strange, eccentric, hare-brained wit and spendthrift, who assumed the forfeited title of Earl of Perth, and whose Jacobitism was of a dye so deep as almost to repeat the traditions of mediaeval feudalism. His daughter was brought up with the education of the banquet-hall and the field. Full of exuberant life, with the manners of a hoyden and the reckless audacity of a school-boy, but endowed with keen wit, with ready practical sense, and with undaunted independence ; and even, in a strange way, widely read. In the uncouth roughness of her dialect she only carried a little further the ordinary usage of the day ; but her unrestrained audacity of manner startled even a circle that was nowise over-conventional, and seemed an inherited vein of the tradi- tional "Drummond Ire." Her Jacobitism, down to the last, showed no sign of waning. Proud of her great descent, she seemed to cling to the honours of her ancient family with all the more tenacity because its glories were passing. She had no patience with those Jacobites who admitted any com- promise with modern views. " A new light ! " she would sarcastically declaim — " a new light must come in through a crack either in the brain or in the heart." Her political zeal was kindled in old age by antipathy to the Friends of the People and the Jacobins. In such a life we see on a small scale the change that wrought gradually, but surely, far be- yond the range of an old lady's opinions — by which the remnants of decaying Jacobitism came to feed the flame of a later Toryism. Like the others named before, this type of a Scottish lady of an earlier age passed away with the century in which the ideas they represented had played their part, and the end of which saw them superseded like a fashion that had decayed. From the very variety of the types which were gathered together upon a narrow scene and shared a common tradition, it almost necessarily resulted that the society of Scotland in the middle of last century was not weighed down with any burden of social convention. It was a society singularly free and giving singular opportunity for the development of in- dividual idiosyncrasies. The national feeling was strong ; but the wide divergences of religious and political opinion; the STRENGTH OF NATIONAL FEELING. 241 dramatic surprises of history, which had made them famiKar with the tragedy of civil war ; the sympathy, scarcely con- cealed, and often, indeed, accepted as a passport to social dis- tinction, for the Jacobite cause ; the divisions that had placed numbers of the same family in opposite camps ; the vicissitudes of families, that made rank and aristocratic eminence ac- quainted with the hardships and versed in the devices of a grinding poverty, — all these continued to make a society singularly free from the trammels of any troublesome mon- otony of social form. It is from all these various currents that the main stream of national development was made up, and it is not difficult to pronounce what was the direction of that stream in the middle of the eighteenth century. There was not likely to be any want of national feeling. The stern facts of history; the hatred of the Union; the jealousy of a poor and proud nation for its more wealthy and somewhat supercilious neighbour; above all, the rugged independence of national character, were certain to secure such a feeling, and to prevent Scotland from sliding easily into the grooves of English habit, and merging her individuality in that of her rival. But she was no longer under the sway of fanatical zeal which had marked the Covenanting sects, and that uncouth enthusiasm was almost as much a thing of the past as the white-heat of the Jacobite nonjurors. Both remained as the animating creeds of minor- ities, and with enough of vitality to impart a certain colour to national life. The mingling of pride and poverty, of high notions of aristocratic dignity with an almost ludicrous simplicity and quaintness of social habit, of national exclus- iveness with a strain of cosmopolitan experience, imparted a keen intellectual stimulus to the Scottish society of that day. The prevailing ambition of her leading men came to be that of advancing, on national and distinctive lines, towards the improvement of social conditions, the enlargement of thought, and an almost Pagan latitude of opinion. They detested the dictates of religious ethics which had made a pharisaical sanctimoniousness of demeanour the standard of morality, and they sought for some principles of belief higher than the artificial subtleties of theological contention. They despised the fervour of religious enthusiasm, which had been heroic under persecution, but which degenerated into the extrava- gances of fanaticism when that persecution was only a memory. They looked upon the material improvement of their country as one branch of its moral development, and refused to confine their attention to the dictates of an efiete hierocratic system. The younger men especially were animated by a spirit of Q 242 PARTIES IN SCOTLAND AFTER THE REBELLION. national and patriotic independence ; but theirs was a patriot- ism which was at once proud of national institutions, and determined that these institutions should be developed and expanded according to the dictates of a liberal spirit of intellectual and religious freedom. It is this combination of a fundamental conservatism with intellectual freedom which constitutes the chief interest of Scottish history during the next generation. It had its own pitfalls, and, as we shall see, was liable to errors of its own. But it is only by keeping our eyes fixed upon its development that we can rightly under- stand the part which Scotland played during the latter half of the eighteenth century, and rightly apprehend a national movement which has often been misinterpreted and misunder- stood. Before we proceed to examine the main factors of national life, it will be well to notice the chief agents in her govern- ment during the remainder of the reign of George II. The fall of Walpole in 1744 had led to the appointment of Lord Tweeddale as Scottish Secretary. He was a feeble man, deriving any importance which he possessed from the memory of a long line of ancestors, from great wealth, and from the fitful support of that erratic genius, the Earl Granville, whose daughter he had married. Of all men he was the least fit to deal with a crisis like that of the Rebellion of 1745 ; and the Lord Advocate of the time, a laborious lawyer of plebeian origin, named Robert Craigie, was an equally ineflScient agent. Weak as Newcastle was, he could not afford to have incom- petent subordinates. Tweeddale was deprived of office; Craigie followed him into retirement, and a new regime, which lasted throughout the reign, was instituted. The government of Scotland was placed in the hands of the Duke of Argyle, who had succeeded his brother in 1744, and who had long, as Earl of Islay, been Walpole's chief agent in the North. Virtually this meant that, so far as Scotland was concerned, the government was conducted on the lines laid down by Walpole, and that she was spared those years of contemptible and degrading time-serving which disgraced the government of Newcastle in England, and which bridged over the period between Walpole and Pitt. As his chief instrument, Argyle had Andrew Fletcher, whose judicial title was Lord Milton, and who held office as Lord Justice-Clerk. Both were men of great acuteness, of untiring energy, and of much skill in certain stratagems of statesmanship. Without command- ing power, and without any leading political principle, they nevertheless performed well the task that fell to them — that of pacification after civil war. Their influence was exerted. argyle's administration. 243 as soon as might be, in mitigating the penalties meted out to the rebels and the suspects. They did their best to promote the material wellbeing of the country. They were not, indeed, men who could stir the enthusiasm of the nation, who could guide it into new paths, or who could rise to the height of any great principle in their policy. Had they been such, they would have stood in almost supernatural contrast to the typical politician of the day. But what they did do they did well. They had to govern the nation by a judicious use of Govern- ment patronage. They had to appeal to merely selfish motives. They had to prevent any section of the nation from becoming too powerful, and they successfully managed to prevent any dangerous outbursts of party hostility and rancour. They found it to their advantage to encourage national enterprise ; and, so far as they exercised a wider influence at all, it was one which helped to smooth the way for that more tolerant and liberal mood that soon became the dominant characteristic of every phase of Scottish life. In Scottish national life there had hitherto been three main factors — the landed Aristocracy, the Law, and the Church. The first of these had done nothing, in a long and disastrous history, to merit the gratitude or the respect of the nation. For generation after generation its annals had been a long series of faction fights, in which settled government, order, and national progress had been retarded and broken up by the selfish ambition of a proud and quarrelsome class, striving only for their own aggrandisement, and using, as a means thereto, every dispute that had agitated the nation. In the fall of the ancient Church they had interested themselves chiefly as the plunderers of her wealth, which they had used to repair the ravages in their own fortunes produced by ceaseless faction fights. They had assumed the guise of ardent religious reformers, but it was only because religious reform promised a rich harvest of spoil. The Reformed Church had emerged from the struggle with all the zeal and fanaticism which were natural to a despoiled and poverty- stricken Church, owing no gratitude to the Law or the State, and disposed to attach but little weight to her connection with it. The domains of the Church had fallen into the hands of the landed aristocracy, and the Church was forced to supply, by the arrogance of her claims to spiritual authority and by the assertion of her independence of the State, some compensa- tion for that calm and secure dignity which rich endowments and overpowering social influence gave to the reformed Anglican Church. The landed aristocracy used for merely selfish purposes the 244 PARTIES IN SCOTLAND AFTER THE REBELLION. plunder which their sacrilegious selfishness had gained. They were without public spirit. The interests of their dependants was as nothing in their eyes. For advancement they looked only to England, and found it only in a slavish subserviency to one or other English party. In all the struggles that for two generations past had shaken Scotland to the base, they had taken the lead ; but it is impossible to point to one Scotsman of the territorial class who had risen above the troubled waters of faction, and had known how to guide and moderate its excesses. There are many instances of men who won and who deserved great influence ; but that influence had always been gained or strengthened by intrigues with English parties, and had never managed to make itself the leader or exponent of Scottish feeling. Much as we may find to praise in the conduct of John, Duke of Argyle, his career ofiers, in this respect, no exception to the rule. Their dependants were still little else than serfs. For their material advancement nothing had been done. From any political influence, or from anything which could arouse their interest in the government of the nation, they were rigidly excluded. In the disastrous struggles of the Jacobite rebellion, their sides had been deter- mined, not by their own sjrmpathies or predilections, but by the fiat of their territorial superior. Even Argyle did not scruple to add to his own influence by alliances with intriguers like Lovat, and by the patronage of freebooters like Rob Roy. The connection between the landed proprietor and his serfs, and that between the chief and the members of his clan, was a romantic and picturesque one, redeemed by the heroism inseparable from loyalty even when unthinking and blind; but on the side of the chief it did not from generation to generation produce a single great national leader who could aspire to guide the destinies of the nation for its own good, and nothing else. With the abolition of the hereditary jurisdictions a blow was struck at the territorial aristocracy from which it could never hope to recover. These jurisdictions were a remnant of medisevalism, inconsistent with every principle of sound policy, and remaining only as a monument of the overweening power and selfishness of a class. For the first time Scotland found herself with the essential attribute of a nation — the uniform administration of the law. For the first time the liberties of the individual were secure, so far as law could make them. Hitherto it was only their passionate love of freedom and their unswerving heroism in its defence which had kept Scotsmen free in spite of the defects of law. It is worth noticing that it was to the help and to the guidance of THE COURTS OF LAW. 245 English statesmen and English lawyers that she chiefly owed her escape from a thraldom far greater than ever threatened her from any foreign foe. The second factor in importance in Scottish national life was the authority of the Law Courts. The sphere of their influence was indeed restricted. Over wide tracts of Scotland the king's writ did not yet run ; and even where its authority was respected, it was curtailed by the hereditary jurisdictions. But, in spite of this, it necessarily, as the sole representative of the supreme authority of the State, carried enormous weight, and decided all questions of property. But hitherto it had been in great measure the subservient tool of the faction which happened to be in power, and suffered itself too often to be an agent in the hand of the executive authority. The chief criminal judge was still an hereditary nobleman, and his colleagues on the bench were often quite as much ministers of state as the unbiassed exponents of the law. In matters where political interest did not intrude, the administra- tion of the law was just, and its representatives were men of commanding ability, and of much professional skill and erudi- tion. The pride of a great profession, which soon learns that its strength rests upon its independence of political dictation, was already planted, and was sure to grow, but as yet it yielded but scanty fruit. The authority of the bench was, however, weakened not only by political bias, but by its close connection with, and its subserviency to, the landed aristocracy. From the ranks of that aristocracy its members were chiefly recruited, and by sympathy and habit, as well as family bias, it was ever prone to reflect the feelings of the class from which it sprang. In questions affecting that class, the opin- ions of the judges were confidently anticipated, and it was notorious that they were coloured by family sympathy. Their skill and dexterity as exponents of the law were much more frequently shown in finding specious theories to defend the opinion to which they were pledged than in steering a straight course to the goal of absolute justice. The retarding alliance was soon to be thrown aside, and the connection of the law with the landed aristocracy was to remain only as a beneficial tradition, observed sufficiently to secure for the profession high social weight and prestige. The Scottish Bar and Bench, even before it shook ofl" the territorial bias, had been dignified and graced by men of profound learning and lofty character. But here again Scotland was to no small extent indebted, for the ideal of an unbiassed tribunal, to example and contact with the leaders of English law and to the influence of the Supreme Court of Appeal. The intercourse thus founded became the 246 PARTIES IN SCOTLAND AFTER THE REBELLION. basis of mutual esteem and of frank interchange of opinions ; and the pursuit of a common end could not but tend to plant more deeply a sound theory of the principles by which that common end was to be attained. For at least one generation after the Jacobite rebellion, owing to the many questions which arose in connection with the forfeited estates, the intricacies of feudal law were pressed to the utmost, and the most recondite subtleties took the place of broad and sound legal principles. Scottish jurisprudence ran the risk of being crushed under a mass of learning most of which was little but lumber. From this fate it was in no small degree preserved by contact with the jurisprudence of England and by the new treatment rendered necessary by the development of commercial law. There was yet another potent factor in the national life, which touched still more closely the deepest sympathies of the Scottish people. This was the Church, which had, as one of its leading charges, public education, and, as its chief handmaid, the parish school. Whatever might be the case with the other great national institutions, the reputation of the Church for public spirit stood high, and her recent action gave her the right to great independence, and to great con- fidence in her own future. She owed nothing to the landed aristocracy. Against her no charge of luxury or of worldly aggrandisement could be brought. Her history and the intense allegiance of the nation had secured for her such independence of the law as rarely falls to the lot of an established Church. She could appeal for her sincerity to a long course of persecu- tion manfully withstood, and had merited the gratitude of the dynasty by unswerving loyalty to the Revolution settle- ment. She had, it is true, at certain stages in her history, encouraged a somewhat gloomy and bigoted form of religious belief, partly the result of the violent reaction against Roman Catholic traditions and against Episcopacy, and partly the consequence of that enthusiastic zeal to which persecution naturally gives rise. Many of her adherents, steeped in the literature of the Scriptures, and intellectually exercised in' the subtleties of theological disputation, were provided with powerful controversial instruments ; but the very vigour and intensity of their conviction, based, as it was, not on mere enthusiasm, but on a certain rude dialectic, was subject to strict limitations, and might well have imposed somewhat narrow and galling bonds upon the intellectual development of the nation. What strikes us most in the years following the Rebellion is the courage of the Church, not only in combating the elements of disorder within her own bounds. THE CHURCH. 247 and in shaking herself free from any sentiment of narrow or rancorous religious bigotry, but also in maintaining her own independence, and showing that her loyalty to the established constitution was equalled by the fearlessness with which she claimed a high place in that constitution, and in the social development of the nation. Already in the preceding generation the Church had passed through some epochs of controversy, which had led to the formation of dissenting bodies, dangerous both from their numbers and the respect which they commanded. It is an odd fact, considering the popular estimate regarding the multiplicity of the phases of Scottish doctrine, that disputes as to theological tenets were not numerous in the history of the Scottish Church, and belong only to a comparatively brief period of her life. The most serious had its origin in 1720, and arose upon a question which had been prominent in almost every phase of Christian doctrine, and belongs, perhaps, to the central controversy, which must agitate the minds of men as to the limits of human responsibility. The doctrine of predestination, which affirms that the ultimate fate of every human soul is fixed by divine decree from all eternity, is, in truth, but one phase of the insoluble dispute as to Free-will and Necessity ; and intimately connected with that doctrine of predestination is the question whether the benefits of Christianity, and the promises which it holds forth, are to be won by the struggles of the individual towards what is right in conduct, or by his acceptance, with implicit faith, of the doctrine which his creed affirms to be essential to salvation. The question is only one passing phase of a problem which — whatever the balance of profit or loss which we are inclined to give to it — must always divide into two streams that part of human thought which is attracted to philosophical speculation. The problem is, in the philosophical aspect, doubtless as important as it is intricate ; but for those who regard it only as a factor in the secular history of a nation, it involves no great difficulty. The tendencies of the two theories, which must ever prevail on the subject, are perfectly clear. He who believes that rectitude of conduct and obedience to the moral law are the main essentials, must inevitably tend to displace the supreme importance of a dog- matic religious creed. He, on the other hand, who elevates that creed to the first place, and believes it to be the primary and essential condition of the salvation which his Church offers, must just as inevitably tend to lower the supreme eminence of the moral law, and must give a certain encourage- ment to those who postpone the dictates of duty to a formal 248 PARTIES IN SCOTLAND AFTER THE REBELLION. creed, and who cloak hypocrisy of conduct under an artificial orthodoxy. The dispute is one which, in one form or another, must for ever divide men into two camps ; and he who studies mankind in history is better employed in searching for that which, in either creed, might reasonably attract the ardent faith of its supporters, than in seeking for its exaggerations or its absurdities. The opening quarter of the eighteenth century found the Scottish Presbyterian Church exposed to two influences. On the one hand were those who looked back with reverence upon the recent history of their creed, and who, under the pressure of persecution from which that creed had emerged victorious, clung with an unyielding tenacity to every point in its tenets, and recognised in the devoted support of these tenets the essential duty of a Christian man. On the other hand were those who, while they accepted the doctrines of their Church, found themselves unable to accept what they held to be its exaggerations and absurdities as something hallowed by the fire of persecution, and who believed that for an epoch of greater peace and for the advancement of the nation's weal, something else was quite as essential as rigid adherence to an iron-bound creed. The conditions of the time, the inevitable encroachments of a modern spirit, the fainter colours in which the traditions of persecution were handed down to the younger generation, the necessary result of increasing contact with a larger society, with new experience and opposite traditions, — all these developed a modern party in the Church. On the other hand, the intellectual mood which had been engendered by hardship ; the sense of national independence, wounded in pride and sensitive to any outside dictation ; the keen dialectic which controversy had developed ; the enthusiastic defence of the citadel of the faith against what seemed to be the assaults of a time-serving and oppor- tunist latitudinarianism, — all these were equally potent agents in an opposite direction. Any one skilled in the weather portents of religious storms might easily have foretold where the tempest of controversy in the Scottish Church must soon burst forth. It was in 1720 that the struggle became acute; and its main features need not delay us long, as we have here to deal with it only as one phase of the nation's history, and with none of that detail which might be in place in an ecclesiastical history. About that year the minds of those who clung to what they fancied to be the chief stronghold of orthodoxy — the supreme importance of faith and the worthlessness of any merely ethical system — were much stirred by symptoms of THE MARROW CONTROVERSY. 249 what appeared to them as unsound teaching. The subject of dispute — the old dispute between Arminianism and Antino- mianism — was evidently a symptom of the widening gulf between those who clung to a rigid dogmatism, and those who wished to liberalise the teaching of the Church. In their nervous anxiety, the dogmatic school gave an emphasis to their assertion of the absolute sufficiency of orthodox belief, which shocked the common-sense of their more reasonable neighbours. " It was not," they maintained, " sound or ortho- dox to teach that we must forsake sin in order to our coming to Christ." Whatever the logic of the theological position, such a dictum is apt to scandalise ordinary consciences ; and the pioneers of the more modern way of thinking saw their opportunity, and not unskilfully made use of it. While the controversy was yet in its early stages, some one suggested, as a useful treatise on the much-debated subject, a volume written by a certain Edward Fisher, gentleman commoner of Brazenose College, Oxford, in the year 1646, under the title of "The Marrow of Modern Divinity." The book reflected the tone of dissenting thought in England at the time it was written, a tone not distinguished either for very liberal theology or for very sound ethical principles. The book itself was harmless enough, but it is the bane of theological dis- cussion that it accentuates the rough corners of peculiar tenets, and exaggerates them into elements of bitter contro- versy. The older and narrower party took the " Marrow " as the standard of doctrine round which they rallied ; and they were perforce driven into extreme statements of that side of the controversy which it favoured. The Moderate party had even now sufficient strength in the Assembly to turn the scales against the adherents of the " Marrow." The most daring and unguarded statements of the Antinomian point of view — the thesis " that a believer could not commit sin ; " "that the Lord is not angry with a believer for his sins;" " that a believer hath no cause, neither to confess his sins, nor to crave pardon at the hand of God for them, neither to fast nor mourn, nor humble himself before the Lord for them " — such maxims formed easy subjects for attack. The instincts of mankind condemn such doctrines. Their practical result it is not difficult to foresee. To the unbiassed reason of the ordinary man they appear to degrade and discredit the whole religious system in the name of which they claim to speak. They provoke at once disgust and ridicule, and sound intelli- gence recoils from them as from a real danger to society. Only a patient and passionless consideration of the question — the very sort of consideration which it is least likely to 250 PARTIES IN SCOTLAND AFTER THE REBELLION. obtain — teaches us that such doctrine, palpably pernicious as its tendency is, can nevertheless find conscientious supporters, when once men allow themselves to be involved in the meshes of theological logomachy. In truth, the " Marrow " men only erred in driving their logic to the length of practical ab- surdity ; and their exaggeration gave to the Moderates the opportunity for a far-reaching victory. The assembly em- phatically condemned the Antinomian teaching, and in doing so, it gave a very decided bias, in a direction which was practically sound and rational, to the teaching of the Church for the rest of the century. The " Marrow " controversy was the first episode in the struggle between the rigid and the latitudinarian parties in the Church, and that the latter conquered was an event of no little consequence for Scotland. The " Marrow " men were defeated ; but however repugnant to common-sense or sound principle their tenets may seem to be, unquestionably they represented the popular side in the controversy. Their defeat was due to policy and to skilful management — not to the force of numbers. The next struggle in the Church found the forces divided into almost identical camps, but marshalled under different banners. The late fight had been upon a point of doctrine ; the new fight was on a point of ecclesiastical order. Those who had adhered to the doctrine of the "Marrow" now fought for the rights of popular election : those who had rejected the crudities of Antinomianism were determined now to maintain the author- ity of the law and to contend for the rights of patronage. It was on this last question that the first serious beginning of Dissent in Scotland took its rise. It was in the year 1732 that Ebenezer Erskine, the minister of Stirling, began the campaign against the rights of patrons, which, he contended, amounted to a placing of the Church of God under bondage to man. The exercise of these rights — frequently, perhaps, their abuse — had given rise to widespread discontent, and Erskine found an abundant array of adherents. The cause was maintained with equal vigour by his brother Ralph Erskine, of the Presbytery of Dunfermline; and in the eastern counties, of which Fife was the centre, the Anti- patronage cause was overwhelmingly strong. Sermons were preached in bold defiance of the laws of the Church, which it was impossible either to condone or to ignore. The Anti- patronage party declined, even on the orders of the superior ecclesiastical court, to ordain ministers rightfully presented to charges under this existing law. The question was brought before the Assembly, and no alternative was open to that court but to proceed to sentence of deposition. It is easy to THE GROWTH OF DISSENT. 251 condemn such action, and to lament that greater leniency was not shown. A certain type of mind will always feel prone to press such pleas for leniency, and to think that to do so betokens breadth of mind and generous toleration. They forget that in ecclesiastical disputes toleration beyond a certain point means merely a cowardly condonation of law- lessness; that on the part of an Established Church it is a betrayal of its trust ; that its inevitable result is to enthrone in place of law the caprices of individual or party fanaticism ; and that it is fatal to any real religious liberty. Religious liberty, in its popular and demagogic sense, is often identical with liberty for the fanatic to trample on the law. In its sound and constitutional sense it means the security to every citizen that law shall reign supreme over sectarian caprice. To permit any trafficking with that supremacy is not tolera* tion : it is a cowardly and dangerous betrayal. The aims of the Erskines were doubtless upright and conscientious. Personally they are entitled to the praise of bold and unselfish fighters for what they believed to be the pure and primitive order of the Church. But the Church had to choose between their deposition and the alternative of ceasing to be an Establishment based upon the law of the land. Their deposition naturally led to the formation of the Secession Church, where they might safely and with perfect freedom inculcate those doctrines which they conscientiously believed, but which the law prevented the Established Church from tolerating. That Secession Church was the first of a long and numerous brood, almost all of which sprang from disputes over the vexed question of patronage. It is the habit of many ecclesiastical historians to lament that Seces- sion, and to condemn what they are pleased to call the intoler- ance which found in deposition the only remedy for the evil. We may venture to dissent from both the blame and the lamentation. The Church, as a State Establishment, was the custodian of the law, and had no alternative but to cast out from her pale those who defied that law. The formation of a dissenting sect is an episode which the secular historian may perhaps view without any serious dismay or any overwhelm- ing regret. Religious liberty permits each man to adopt his own form of religious belief and of ecclesiastical government. That variations in belief or in conception of government should lead to new varieties of sects is no very appalling calamity ; and perhaps the safety-valve thus opened may not be useless when the pressure of religious enthusiasm becomes unduly great. But that men should be permitted to remain within the pale of an Established Church and trample on the 252 PARTIES IN SCOTLAND AFTER THE REBELLION. laws prescribed for that Church, is an expedient more danger- ous to the public weal than the most prolific crop of dissenting communities. These doubtless embody many jealousies and mutual antipathies, which are none of the mildest, and the existence of which we may reasonably deplore. But human nature contains within itself abundant fuel to keep alive the flame of antipathy ; and it is questionable whether that flame requires to be fed by the jealousy of the sects. It is possible that it would not burn less relentlessly even if the inherent differences of temperament which sectarian separations reflect were glozed over by a specious and fictitious union, and if all, however radically different, remained within the pale of a Church whose law was interpreted, and whose government was directed, by each according to his own vagrant fancy, or — still worse — his own conscientious belief. Diversity of sect need not breed internecine hatred : an unreal and hypocritical union, within the bounds of a Church that is ready to shape itself to suit every idiosyncrasy, is a far greater evil. For good or ill, however, the Church cast out from herself that portion of her adherents who conceived themselves to be the most rigid and unyielding custodians of the essential purity of the faith and order committed to their charge. It is not for us to pronounce on the merits of the dispute, or on the justice and expediency, in a religious sense, of the course pursued by the Church. We have to regard it only as it affected the secular history of the nation, and as it shaped the progress of national thought. And there can be no question that this elimination of an untractable element left to the Church a power which was but very slightly impaired, and allowed her freedom to shape a course which vitally affected the nation. The Dissenters became a powerful and an im- portant element in Scottish life. But they speedily diverged into new branches, and dissipated their strength in hair-spun disputes as to various degrees of orthodoxy in the domain of ecclesiastical order — maintaining, throughout all, no very def- inite antagonism as regards religious creed. They left the course of the Established Church all the more untrammelled by reason of their desertion. Henceforward, for what re- mained of the eighteenth century, the dominant party and the prevailing spirit in the Scottish Church went strongly in the direction of a moderate and latitudinarian creed. The Church maintained, with zeal and firmness, what it held to be an essential orthodoxy. It was proud of its independence, and accepted its State connection, not as a price paid for the sacrifice of that independence, but as its chief and distin- guishing sign. It had no desire to smooth down or surrender THE RISE OF THE MODERATES. 253 the distinctive tenets of Presbyterianism, so as to adjust them to the forms of Anglican Christianity. But however well marked might be the landmarks of the National Zion, it was animated by a spirit which sought to adapt itself to more modern needs, and which employed secular as well as religious means to effect its work. In the minds of this dominant party the Church was to cultivate order and discipline, quite as much as enthusiasm or fanatical zeal for orthodoxy. It was to raise its priesthood by securing recruits who were more fitted for the intellectual and literary arena of the new generation, than for the fiery atmosphere of the conventicles in the stirring times of the hillside Covenanters. It was to secure for itself political support. It was to conciliate society by a demeanour which did not frown on the pleasures and ornaments of life. It was to take an active part in the promotion of every scheme of public improvement, and was to accept as a Christian duty the advancement of the material welfare of the nation. The Church of Scotland, under the guidance of this party, was to be an intensely conservative, but at the same time an intensely modern, influence in the nation. It was conservative in the sense that it sought for no new creed, and did not aim at reading a new sense into the old tenets ; that it preached no doctrine of social revolution, and made no appeal to popular prejudice, but sought rather to curb that prejudice, and minimise its possible power ; that it did not strive to free itself from the law, but strove to base its foundation on legal discipline and settled order. But it was modern in the sense that it confined itself to no mere ecclesi- astical concerns, but ranged over the whole field of human in- terest ; that it sought to ally itself with advancing thought and new developments of literature ; that it inculcated a lenient, if not even an accommodating, code of morals, and gave to a new society the liberty of action that modern taste required. It must not be supposed that, because this party became the dominant factor in the Church's history for at least sixty years, they were without opponents even amongst their own brethren, or that the triumph of their policy was the immed- iate result of the elimination of the seceders. Within the Church there were still many whose views approached very closely to those of the deposed clergy, and who not only re- gretted the deposition, but sympathised very deeply with the doctrines and views of ecclesiastical polity which had been its cause. There remained an ever-present and sometimes a power- ful opposition, which was known as the High or the High- flying party, who would fain have infused into the Church much of the Covenanting spirit. That opposition embraced 254 PARTIES IN SCOTLAND AFTER THE REBELLION. men of wide influence and commanded deep respect. It was at times a convenient instrument in the hands of designing politicians, who looked with suspicion or dislike upon the secular influence of the Church, and who thought that such influence might be lessened, by the encouragement of a party whose aims and methods were more purely ecclesiastical. But in the main, the history of those sixty years shows us the Moderate party gradually coming to the front, skilfully planning their course, and maintaining it throughout with singular success. The close of the Rebellion left the Church with a strong claim to the gratitude of the reigning dynasty and to the friends of law and order. Her chief rival, the Episcopal Church, had already lost all positive influence, and was now burdened with the negative disability which was the penalty of her Jacobite leanings. Had the Presbyterian Church still been impregnated with the Covenanting spirit, as must almost necessarily have been the case had she continued to embrace wdthin her pale the seceders whom she had so recently cast forth, the consequences might have been serious for a Government so weak as that of Newcastle, and the Union might have been maintained only at the cost of another civil war. As it was, the Church was as fair and moderate in her triumph as she had been steadfast in her loyalty. Such of the demands of the civil government as transgressed the ordinary rules of decency and decorum — as, for instance, the attempt to make the parish clergy the agents of a detective political police — were rightly met either by disregard or by remonstrance. But for the rest, the Church was content to pay to a Government which had owed its preservation in great measure to the Church's loyalty, an observance which a strictly Covenanting Church might have found it inconsistent with conscientious scruples to yield. It is not surprising to find that the Church, or a large party within the Church, sought for some advantage which it was deemed that justice might decree to her, and for which her loyalty might well give opportunity. A claim was put for- ward for an increase in the payments to the clergy. The claim had much to commend it. The total rental of Scotland was at the lowest computation £800,000 a year, while the highest estimate placed it at nearly twice that amount. The amount of the tithes was variously estimated at from £57,000 to £80,000. In many cases the incomes of the clergy fell below £30 a year, and the average was little, if anything, over £60. The last settlement of these revenues had been made in 1633, and since then the wealth of the country and CLAIM FOR INCREASED CHURCH REVENUE. 255 the cost o£ living — both doubtless moderate according to any modern standard — had enormously increased. The landed aristocracy had enriched themselves by the shameless plunder of the Church, and it seemed only fair that the remnant which still belonged to the Church should comprise, for its own small share, a proportion of that increase that had swollen the whole. All these arguments might fairly be used in favour of the attempt; yet it was doubtful whether that attempt was prudent or well timed. It had its origin amongst some of the more sanguine Churchmen of the West country, whose sturdy Whiggism was not prone to make light of its own merits, and who thought that the hour of triumph might be the most opportune for securing revenues which would increase their power. But, on the other hand, it could not be asserted that, poor as the Church was, the average income of the clergy did not compare favourably enough with those of England. She was a poor Church, but scarcely a poverty- stricken one. Compelled to a rigid frugality, her clergy were not driven to the verge of starvation. The powers which were vested in the Court of Session enabled that Court to revise the income of any particular parish, and, on good ground shown, to grant an augmentation of the stipend. It was a bold, but perhaps an impolitic, design at such a juncture to appeal to Parliament for new statutory powers. As it turned out, the only effect of the scheme was to raise a storm of indignation amongst the heritors. The Jacobite and Episcopalian interests were strong amongst that class, and it would have been more than was to be expected from human nature had these interests failed to accentuate the conflict between the demands of the Presbyterian clergy in the first flush of their triumph, and the selfishness and greed of the landed gentry. No such magnanimity was shown. The overweening pride and the thirst for worldly lucre that prompted the parish clergy to ask Parliament to grant them the affluence represented by £80 a year were represented in the most odious light by their old ecclesiastical foes. The underlying sympathy between the landed gentry and Episco- pacy became more strong, although for the moment the terrors of proscription prevented its publication. The sympathy lived through that proscription, and took more definite shape when the proscription was removed. Other causes subsequently strengthened the alliance ; but through whatever phases it passed, it was marked by that same grasping greed on the part of the territorial aristocracy which showed itself with undeviating impartiality both in resisting the legal claims of the Established clergy and in confining within the narrowest 256 PARTIES IN SCOTLAND AFTER THE REBELLION. limit any liberality which they showed to the clergy of that unendowed Episcopal Church to which, as a class, they attached themselves. The attempt was foredoomed to failure. It did not secure the hearty support of all whose championship of the Church was most ardent, and who were least inclined to bate any of her privileges. Amongst her more moderate adherents it was openly discouraged. By her enemies it was made an occasion of ridicule and invective. A deputation was appointed by the Assembly to proceed to London and to prosecute the scheme at Court and in Parliament. But it was to no purpose. The King received the deputation, professed his interest in the Church, but gave them a plain hint that their presence was more needful in Scotland than in London. Despair enforced the course which prudence might have counselled earlier, and the scheme was quietly dropped. It had been complicated by a claim of a somewhat similar kind advanced on behalf of the parish schoolmasters. Like that of the Established clergy, the position of the schoolmasters was fixed, and such emoluments as they enjoyed were secured to them by statute. They had a freehold tenure of their office, and had acquired — often with ample right to it — an influence and dignity which were considerable, and which even the scantiness of their pittance did not altogether annul. The average income of the school- masters was scarcely £12 a year. The claim on their behalf was almost irresistible, and a nation so strongly convinced, as the Scottish people was, of the vital necessity of a sound education as a prime condition of national welfare, was certain, sooner or later, to admit and liquidate that claim. But the double demands were pitted one against the other, and their force was lost. The schoolmasters had to wait a while until they were raised to a rate of livelihood equal to that of the farm-servant. Thus far the attempt of the Church to assert her claim had been met by failure. But she entered upon a more sound and, as it turned out, a more successful policy when she turned to the maintenance of discipline within her boundaries. Without such discipline it was seen by the clearer heads amongst her adherents she must soon cease to be, in aught but name, an Established Church. A fiercer party, appealing to the heated prejudices and to the religious rancour of popular fanaticism, might impose itself on the Church, and might not only drive from her portals all real liberal opinion, but might force their yoke upon the whole people of Scotland. If this was to be resisted, the principle must be established beyond gainsaying that the discipline of the Church and the FALSE ESTIMATES OP THE CHURCH. 257 authority of the law must be obeyed, and that the Church was to be not an endowed sect, in ever-recurring antagonism with the State and recognising no law but her own, but rather a dignified national institution, defended and yet con- trolled by the law, and, through her alliance with the State, securing for all the priceless advantage of liberty and in- dependence, as against the tyranny and rancour of contending ecclesiastical factions. It has been the habit of those who contemplate the history of Scotland, and view her contests from an alien standpoint, to mass together under a general appellation, to which they are much addicted — that of the Scottish Kirk — all sections of her religious and ecclesiastical factions. This has saved them much trouble, and enabled them with much convenience to compass an easy classification. On one side is ranged all that is bitterest in rancour, all that is narrowest in dogma, all that is most irksome in social convention. The rigorous superstitions of the Covenanters, the subtle religious meta- physics of sects which held fast by the same main religious tenets, but whose very sympathy in larger questions developed amongst them hair-splitting distinctions as to special points — all that sanctimoniousness of manner which the precision of an ascetic creed is apt to share with a time-serving hypocrisy, and all that pharisaical rigour which imposes upon the vigorous impulses, no less than upon the weakness and the waywardness of human nature, a yoke from which it angrily revolts, — all are ranked in the same phalanx. Against this solid force is set all that symbolises the romance, the poetry, the music, and the fire of the nation, no less than all that makes for its growth in wealth and in intelligence ; and between those two it is inferred that there is an undying enmity. Such superficial critics ignore the fact that much which they identify with the main stream of the religious and ecclesiastical history of the country consists only of side- streams and back-eddies which broke away from the central current, and carried with them much of the froth and foam and turbid water which that main current could so well spare. When we consider the history of the Scottish Church, and the part — no mean one — which she had to play in the history of the country, we may turn our eyes steadfastly away from the Seceding bodies, of which she had so fortunately freed herself before she had to take her part in the most notable advance which the nation was now to make. Nay, more than this, we must discount the extravagances, the fanaticism, the turbulent zeal, which a certain section within her own boundaries yet exhibited. We have to see how a certain R 258 PARTIES IN SCOTLAND AFTER THE REBELLION. number of determined and enlightened men obtained, after a singularly bold and skilful struggle, a position of dominance in the Church, and maintained that position, by virtue of their talents and their liberality, for two generations at least. We shall doubtless have to observe in that dominant party the faults of their own qualities, and to detect in them a proneness to certain errors which weakened their influence and perhaps paved the way for a reaction. But it is none the less true that they played a manly part in a new phase of Scottish intellectual development. , Before we enter upon the questions which agitated the Church in the years which followed 1750, it may be well to notice some of the leaders of her parties, and their most striking characteristics Amongst these we may name Professor Leechman of Glasgow University, whose teaching had an enormous influ- ence upon the younger clergy who came under his charge, and whose philosophic methods not only enlarged the scope of Scottish theological teaching, but stimulated more inspiring and liberal views of religious truths. Widely as he was separated from the older and narrower school, his own simple and ascetic life was a bulwark against any charge of laxity, and he held himself aloof from the buffoonery into which the convivial habits of the time were only too apt to degenerate. The philosophic abstractions in which he was prone to indulge gave to his teaching a suspicion of heterodoxy in the eyes of the older school, and perhaps encouraged, amongst weaker heads, that propensity for ethical disquisition which sometimes prevailed unduly in the sermons of the younger clergy of the day. Simple and abstracted himself,^ he was a convenient figure-head for that Moderate party to which he essentially belonged, and to whom his high and saintly character neces- sarily brought weight against any charge of undue laxity. Of a very different type was Dr Alexander Webster, the leader of the High-flying party, of whom we shall hereafter have more to say. Unlike Leechman, he was a ready speaker, " fertile in expedients, prompt in execution," and with all the acuteness — his enemies said, the want of principle — that enabled him to shine in ecclesiastical discussion. Without much solid ability himself, he was skilful in drawing to himself the credit for the designs of others. It sounds ^ Dr Alexander Carlyle had the privilege of his acquaintance when a young student at Glasgow University. Leechman's house was open to him and to others, and Carlyle gives an amusing account of the silence and inaptitude for society of the learned Professor, and of the profuse conversation of his wife, who deemed herself an authority in criticism. Carlyle found the latter so tiresome that his visits ceased. TYPES OF CHURCH LEADERS. 259 strange to have to add that the leader of the strictest party in the Church was notoriously addicted to a profuse conviviality. That conviviality he joined, in a marvellous combination, with the most fervent and even unctuous devo- tion, and it did not prevent him from exercising, for many years, an unbounded sway over his own section of the Church. Another typical figure, belonging to an older and more conservative school, of which the Moderates were to some extent the heirs, was Principal Tullidelph of St Andrews. In a certain species of lofty and rotund eloquence he had, in his prime, no rival in the assembly, and he was compared by no mean judges even with Lord Chatham in his glory ; although the same critic shrewdly adds, that whatever the stateliness and dignity of his matter, "he certainly had not so much argument, nor such a convincing force of reasoning." Even with such abatement, the praise may seem unduly high ; but however lofty and Olympian the old man might be, he was hardly fitted to shine amidst a new generation, where the wits were sharpened and the debating powers quickened by intercourse with a wider circle, and by acquaintance with more modern literature than had prevailed when Tullidelph was young. He well maintained the more dignified type of a Scottish clergyman, and kept the Church from yielding to the aggressive violence of the more popular party. But it required stronger powers and more quick and adaptable capabilities to gain for the Moderate party the commanding influence which a new generation achieved for them. Such were a few of the more influential clergy of the earlier part of the century. A new school was rapidly grow- ing up ; but meanwhile they powerfully aflected the course which the Church took in the controversies which were rife in their own day. The most hotly contested point in the struggle upon which the Church was now engaged was still, as for more than a generation back, the question of patronage. The Act which restored lay patronage in 1711 was still as much honoured in the breach as in the observance. The rights of the patrons were frequently set at naught; and so comprehensive were the functions of criticism and of approval assumed by the congregations, that a presentation to an incumbency often meant little more than an introduction to a long, harassing, and most frequently unsuccessful, contest to establish rights which it was the business of the popular representation to weaken, and which could best be assailed by attacks on the character, mental qualifications, or doctrinal soundness of the unfortunate presentee. These objections, however vapid, 260 PARTIES IN SCOTLAND AFTER THE REBELLION. irrational, and perverse they might be, found ready acceptance from the local Church Courts or Presbyteries. The cause was carried to the General Assembly of the Church. Before that larger tribunal, the frivolous and captious nature of the objections was easily detected, and an order for the induction of the presentee was issued. But that order the Presbytery frequently failed to carry out, either from sympathy with the objectors or from a timid fear of consequences; and the authority of the Church was thus set at defiance.^ To over- come this difficulty the Assembly resorted to the somewhat questionable device by which the Presbytery was relieved of the duty, and the orders of the Assembly were performed by delegates — or, as they were called, " riding commissioners " — who had frequently to seek the protection of the military in carrying out the function. Such a device wsCs an undue and cowardly compliance with the pretended scruples of a stubborn and unruly Presbytery, and it had the effect, which might have been expected, of weakening rather than enforcing the authority of the Church and the Law. It became evident to the more far-sighted of the Moderate party in the Church that such temporising was no longer possible. In this party there were some young men — notably Alexander Carlyle of Inveresk, William Robertson, afterwards Principal of Edinburgh University, and others of their friends — who were resolved to make a stand against such weak-kneed measures as seemed to give countenance to the Dissenting sects. It had become the habit in the General Assembly to dismiss the clergyman of a recalcitrant Presbytery with a mild rebuke which carried with it none of the severer penalties for dis- obedience. At length, in 1751, the refusal of the Presbytery of Linlithgow to settle a presentee in the parish of Torphichen, seemed to give a suitable opportunity for a trial of strength. A certain number of the younger clergy and laymen of the Church met and concocted measures by which a somewhat more severe sentence than was usual should be passed on one member of the defaulting Presbytery. In that Assembly they were defeated ; but it was a defeat which was of so much ^ At times the action of the Anti- patronage champions in the Presbyteries was not without a whimsical strain of humour. On one occasion we find the Assembly ordering a certain Mr Thomson to be "inducted" to the parish of St Ninians. A Mr Finlay of Dollar volunteered for the duty, but when the luckless presentee appeared, he was addressed from the pulpit by his proffered introducer in terms of unmitigated reproach and insult. He was told that in saying that he accepted the charge in the fear of the Lord he was guilty of heinous blasphemy ; he was assured that the speaker and 20,000 more true men would go twenty miles to see him deposed ; he was adjured to abandon his claim ; and finally, in so many words, he was admitted to the cure. Such degradation of a solemn service did not seem to the High-flying party to be a breach of good taste. THE MODERATE POLICY. 261 advantage to them that it gave them a sense of comradeship, a distinct policy, and a conviction that time was on their side. Next year an even more notable case of disobedience came before the Assembly, in which the Presbytery of Dunfermline — the district most steeped in dissent from its intimate con- nection with the Erskine family — were the defaulters. What had but a year before been a minority was now a majority ; and they had the courage of their opinions. The principal oifender was a Mr Gillespie of Carnock, a man of high character, and with no special love for dissent, but whose conscientious scruples had made him the stubborn opponent of patronage. A large majority of the Assembly now voted for his deposition; and the very respect in which he was held, while it enhanced the halo of his martyrdom, proved all the more surely the strength of the party which was resolved to maintain the legal discipline of the Church. Henceforward their course was clear. In must be noted that, however opposed this new and growing party was to the extreme Whiggism of the Covenanters, and however close their political connection came to be in later days with the Tory party, they were as yet most closely allied with the men who had been the leading adherents of Walpole in Scotland, and to whose hands Walpole had chiefly intrusted her administration. Such men were the new Duke of Argyle, formerly Lord Islay; the Lord Justice -Clerk Milton; Andrew Pringle, afterwards, as Lord of Session, known as Lord Alemoor ; and Hew Dalrymple, Lord Drummore. The Government of Newcastle, feeble, spasmodic, and narrow in range, con- tinued in large measure to govern Scotland through these men, but, just in so far as it did not do so, tended to alienate the Moderate party from the Whig cause, and to throw that party into the hands of the Tories. As regarded the present, the Government in London, knowing less of Scotland than of Central Africa, interfered little in her affairs, and were well content to find that a strong party in her Church was so far separated from the stubbornness which was the proverbial characteristic of Presbyterianism, as to be keenly defending the theory of the subordination of the Church to the Law. Even Newcastle's ignorance could hardly fail to appreciate a state of things so surprising and so fortunate. It was thus that the Moderate party in the Church first recognised its own power and began to shape its policy. It is, perhaps, somewhat misleading to speak of that element in the Church as a party at all. It really embodied a principle, which was of the first importance in the history, not of the 262 PARTIES IN SCOTLAND AFTER THE REBELLION. Church merely, but of the nation. Its ideal was that of a Church which, abandoning the fantastic theocratic notions of a previous age, should conceive its best independence and freedom to be based on the Law. It was not to be humble and subservient, but neither was it to assume an authority which would make its members the slaves of ecclesiastical domination. Abandoning likewise the harsh and forbidding code of morality which frowned upon all secular pleasures, held aloof from all intellectual progress, and assumed to itself a mood of sanctimonious gloom, the Church was to consider the advancement of material comfort and prosperity as an important sphere of its work, was to take an active interest in the chief intellectual developments of the age, and was to adapt itself to all those ways of modern life which recog- nised social pleasures and amusements as in no way opposed to the highest ideal of Christian duty. According to this ideal, the Church of Scotland was to embrace within herself much of that more expansive and more attractive phase of Scottish life which had formerly sought refuge within the more indulgent bosom of the Episcopal Church, but which, in the depression and misfortunes under which the taint of Jacobitism had submerged that Church, was only too ready to accept shelter in another haven. 263 CHAPTER XL ECCLESIASTICAL AND SECULAR INNOVATIONS. The main strength of the Moderate party — if we can call that a party which represented rather a widespread tendency of national thought and feeling than a deliberate organisation — lay not in the elders of the Church, who grudged the independence of their juniors, but in the younger men, who were better fitted to grasp the tendencies of the time, and who saw in the maintenance of the discipline of the law the best guarantee of the status of the Church and of her liberality of spirit. The older Moderates had been eminent for respect- ability, but they had scarcely the gifts required for carrying the war into the enemy's country, or for using the secular weapons of wit and sarcasm. That older school was well typified by Principal Tullidelph, already named, whose gaunt and solemn figure, and whose somewhat cumbrous eloquence, gave him a ponderous but ineffective dignity in the councils of the Church. He was hedged in by an overpowering sense of his own respectability, which made him an easy prey to ridicule, and enabled men of less august personality to goad him into an impotent rage, and exposed him as an easy victim to their gibes and their sarcasm. Another was Dr Patrick Cumin, whose learning and sagacity were weighted, in the view of some,^ by defects of temper, even although they were supported, as in the case of the leader of the opposite party, Webster, by what was then a qualification of some importance, a constitution which enabled him to sustain with fortitude and endurance the conviviality of the times. But for the coming struggle, younger and bolder men, more fit for the heat of the fray, were necessary ; and their influence was to ^ Dr Alexander Carlyle imputes to him such defects, but Ramsay of Ochtertyre seems to take an opposite view. Carlyle may have been prejudiced by the fact that even Cumin's Moderatism did not induce him to look kindly on the attend- ance of the clergy at theatrical representations. 264 ECCLESIASTICAL AND SECULAR INNOVATIONS. be enhanced by the alliance of others whose literary position gave them an independent reputation. A supply of such younger and more quickwitted men came to answer the demand. Circumstances favoured them, and they were shrewd enough to take advantage of their opportunities. The debates began to take a somewhat lumbering course in the hands of the Conscript Fathers of the Church. Their hitherto unassailed dignity rendered them indolent and care- less. The laymen deserted the Assembly when the Assembly became dull, and when the excitement of a racy and personal debate no longer tempted them to abandon the delights of the tavern and the carouse. Business became halting, and the need of new blood was perceived. It was the conviction that the wheels of the machine were driving heavily that led, about this time, to the introduction of a new custom into the debates. It had hitherto been the habit to call upon the older members of Assembly to deliver their opinions, and when they had given judgment, little was left to the juniors but a silent vote. But now this custom was broken, partly by the sluggish apathy of the elders, partly by the pushing and forcible manners of the younger men ; and these younger ministers, to the astonishment of their elder colleagues, boldly took it upon themselves to initiate debate, and to propound indepen- dent opinions. However distasteful such action might be to the older school, it was soon made evident that the younger party had the spirit, the eloquence, and the sagacity, needed to maintain their self-assumed position and to do good service to the Church's cause. The Assembly now became an arena for the display of talent in debate, and for the prosecution of a spirited policy. Within its walls the younger clergy could match themselves against the leading lawyers and politicians of the day, and found themselves able to hold their own against men who had won renown even in the more stirring scene of St Stephen's. To lead a party in the Church became no ignoble ambition. It was no longer necessary to represent a narrow and bigoted fanaticism. On the contrary, it became the mode of the day to affect latitudinarianism, and, with a natural reaction, these younger men assumed an almost obtrusive liberality of opinion, and prided themselves on being men of the world, claiming to take a leading part in all the affairs of the nation, and fired with a not ungenerous desire to attract to the service of the Church all that there was of light and leading in Scotland, and to further every move- ment tending to national prosperity. By the older and more solemn conservative school, their sprightly vigour was looked upon partly with the indignant astonishment of mastiffs THE YOUNGER MODERATES. 265 watching the brisk gambols of trim-built terriers, partly with the misgiving of a pedagogue, half -amused and half -shocked at the tricks of a mischievous pupil, partly with the indulgence of a parent, who felt that the vivacity of youth would pass. But to the narrow and bigoted rancour of the extreme faction, which tolerated rather than welcomed the association with the State, and were on the alert to detect any attempt to interfere with the independent jurisdiction of the Church Courts, the younger men opposed a bold front, in spite of repeated charges of laxity and irreligion. To the mood and temperament of the High-flying party the new school were an utterly accursed crew, hateful at once for their principles and for the means and methods by which they sought to advance these principles. But opposition only gave them new courage. The struggle which they thus maintained comprises the most interesting part of Scottish ecclesiastical history for the next two generations. The man who was to exercise the chief influence as leader of this party during the next generation, and as one of the most distinguished ornaments of his Church, was Dr William Robertson. He was himself a son of the manse, and was born in 1721. After an education at what was then one of the most notable parish schools — that of Dalkeith — he proceeded to the University, where he was the contemporary of several men whose names became distinguished both in Scotland and beyond her borders. Some of these young students, wearied of the dreary prelections of their theological professor, formed themselves into a Speculative Society, and sharpened their faculties by the gymnastic of debate. Amongst these Robert- son was a leading figure; and although in after years he scarcely shone in an arena which was one of marvellous con- versational capacity, his faculties were certainly quickened in these earlier scenes. At the age of twenty-three he was ordained minister of Gladsmuir ; and a year later, by the death of his father and mother, he was left in sole charge of a young family of brothers and sisters. About the same time the troubles of 1745 broke out, and the young clergyman found nothing in- consistent with his profession in proceeding to Edinburgh for service as a volunteer, and, after the city was surrendered to the rebels, in betaking himself to the camp at Dunbar, and offering to serve under Sir John Cope. Such an experience did not count for nothing in the development of the future historian. When the troubles of the Rebellion were over, Robertson returned quietly to his charge at Gladsmuir, where he soon gained a reputation as a preacher of high literary merit, as a 266 ECCLESIASTICAL AND SECULAR INNOVATIONS. good parish clergyman, and as a man of singular charm of manner. He had a near neighbour, Patrick, Lord Elibank, one of the most lively and interesting conversationalists of the day, who was at first strong in his Jacobite sympathies, but who, through the influence of Robertson and another neighbour, John Home of Athelstaneford, the author of "Douglas," changed his views, and became a peaceable member of the literary galaxy that adorned Edinburgh in the succeeding generation. From Gladsmuir, Robertson moved to the parish of Lady Tester, in Edinburgh, in 1758, and in 1759 he published his first historical work, "The History of Scotland." In 1769 he published his " History^ of Charles V.," and in 1777 that of "America." Each of these books attained a popularity which seems somewhat extraordinary to modern readers, upon whom their pomposity and somewhat superficial philosophising are apt to pall. The}^ gained the ear of the reading public, and not only secured for their author fame of no mean kind, and the pleasant posts of Principal of Edin- burgh L^niversity, and Historiographer to the King, but also a pecuniary return that was unexampled in the literary profession of the day. We know Dr Johnson's opinion of the books : " He loved Robertson, but he would not talk of his book," he once said to Boswell ; and the keen perception of Johnson could not brook the prolixity of Robertson, his painting of fancy portraits evolved from his own conscious- ness, his intolerable verbiage, his "mass of wool covering a very little gold." Posterity, we fear, has confirmed Johnson's verdict ; and the history which pleased the polite readers of last century, and appeared to them as even more correct and dignified than that of Gibbon, is not likely to come again into vogue. But none the less he performed a work and achieved a fame, which added immensely to the influence of his Church, and enhanced the position of her clerg3^ Robertson was first a member of the General Assembly in 1746, but it was not until the more stirring session which succeeded that of 1751 that, as a young man of thirty, he began to take a leading part in the debates. The question of patronage was then at its most critical stage ; and the younger party in the Church were determined to secure the independ- ence of the patron and — as they held — of the clergy, by insisting that the settlement of presentees should proceed according to the law of the Church. It was not, in their opinion, enough that a Special Commission should be ap- pointed to perform a duty refused by a recalcitrant Pres- bytery. The Presbj'tery must comply with the order of the Assembly, or must face the alternative of deposition. THEIR WIDE INFLUENCE. 267 Robertson took a prominent part in the debates on the subject in 1751, and had the support of some of the foremost laymen in the Assembly, including Sir Gilbert Elliot and Andrew Pringle. They found as yet little support in the Assembly, and obtained only 11 votes against nearly 200 which were cast in favour of temporising measures. Con- fident that they had common-sense and the laws of the Church in their favour, Robertson and his friends continued the struggle until it ended next year in the firm handling of the recalcitrant Presbytery of Dunfermline, and finally in the deposition of Gillespie. Such an example restored order to the Church and began a new era in her history. " Young men of genius and ability," to use the words of Dr Carlyle of Inveresk, " were no longer afraid that the knowledge acquired, and the habits induced, by a liberal education, would disqualify them for obtaining popular calls, and thus exclude them from benefices." But Robertson, as we have seen, found other fields for the display of his abilities besides Church courts. Edinburgh was then the centre of a brilliant literary coterie, which comprised names that stand high in the annals of English literature, and could rival the metropolis itself in the ardour with which every variety of literary efibrt was pursued. The members of that coterie were able ^by education and by genius to extend their range far beyond the limits of their own country, and were the friends and intimates of men of similar pursuits in every European capital. No development of literary and philo- sophical activity was ever more sudden and more far-reaching ; and the result was that Edinburgh, in the course of one generation, advanced from the position of a comparatively small and unimportant town, whose political influence had decayed, and which had never advanced a claim to be a centre of thought and literary influence, to become the chosen resort of all who were interested in philosophical speculation, in historical research, or in the advancement of literary culture. This influence penetrated into all the leading ranks of society. The landed aristocracy, who had hitherto nursed the decay- ing embers of their former power in ignorance, overbearing tyranny to their inferiors, and political intrigue, now began to take their part in a more liberal scheme of thought and life, and found their advantage in admitting other claims to social recognition than those of a long and not always a very illustrious pedigree. The lawyers began to find that law was not merely a clumsy and mechanical apparatus composed of lumbering precedents and whimsical theories, but a system which had its base in principle, and might be expanded and 268 ECCLESIASTICAL AND SECULAR INNOVATIONS. developed on philosophical grounds, and linked to every form of intellectual progress. And it is no small praise to Robert- son and his party that they managed to secure for the Church its share in this general expansion, and to prove that its clergy might be men of such scholarship and literary achievement as to entitle them to take their place amongst the leading men of the nation, and to make their influence felt even in the southern metropolis. In 1754 there arose in Edinburgh one of those institutions which were characteristic of last century, and which did much to aflect its development. In that year the Select Society was formed by Allan Ramsay, the portrait-painter and son of the poet, whose courtly manners, versatile genius, and wide and varied experience had made him the favourite artist of the most select clique of London society, and had endeared him to the choicest spirits of many lands. The Society met at first in the Advocates' Library, and began with a member- ship of fifteen, but soon increased. It comprised, indeed, all that was most choice in a circle that has rarely been excelled, or even equalled, in any town of the same size as was Edin- burgh in the middle of last century. There were gathered together men not only distinguished by every variety of talent and distinction, but whose characters presented that endless diversity of humour and of taste that give to any society its chief relish and delight. We are apt to picture to ourselves the eighteenth century as the age of formal manners and conventional ideas, settling down into a dull sedateness after the feverish political struggles of the preceding century. We see its leaders stalking, with grave demeanour and in stately dress, through the ample space which they kept for themselves by holding far aloof the vulgar herd, with whom they sought no contact, and in whose fate they took an interest that seems but cold and remote, if compared with the energetic and fussy benevolence of our own day, with its imagined millennium when all classes will be fused. The echo of their voices seems to fall on our ears in measured tones, and in turns of phrase that sound conven- tional and insincere. We read of their aims in philosophy, in religion, and politics with the suspicion that they are all selfish and superficial, and that they never reached to the kernel of the human interest involved. We look back upon their literary achievements, and, while we are forced to admire their esbsy extent of range, we still nurse a satisfactory pride in our own specialising and minuteness of research. But it is only when we come to see them as they are, that we realise how closely many of their phases of mind approach to our own. THE SELECT SOCIETY. 269 how strong and permanent has been their influence, and how full they were of that strong and lusty impulsiveness which gives its chief charm to any human society. The Select Society which Allan Ramsay founded soon embraced all that was worthy of notice in this much diversified group. Within a year its numbers rose from fifteen to more than a hundred, and comprised the leading members of the aristocracy, of the legal profession, and of the clerical order. Amongst these Robertson and his confreres took no mean position ; and, from being a despised and inferior class, the clergy were now found to be worthy combatants either in the debates of the Society or in the friendly rivalry of conversation at the convivial parties with which its meetings concluded. To shine in such a galaxy was no easy task. There was David Hume, about whose name there gathered a suspicious cloud of atheism, which did not weigh with undue heaviness either on himself or his companions, and which seemed only to serve as a subject of easy banter, the extent and sincerity of his doubts being only vaguely guessed, and the strictness of his heterodoxy being open to suspicion. His facile and genial philosophy was much more of a literary interest, than an anxious attempt to solve metaphysical ques- tions, or to frame a new speculative theory. It did not detach him from his fellow-men, who were content to follow in the beaten tracks, and to accept the ordinary notions of current orthodoxy as, on the whole, a sufficiently satisfactory basis for the conduct of life. It gave him, indeed, a bond of sympathy with those around him, because they, like him, were anxious to escape from the trammels of a narrow and confined theology, and to accept their share in the larger speculations which were going on in the world beyond their own circle, and were not prone to be timid before speculative questions which, a generation before, it would have been held an act of daring impiety even to broach. They did not, indeed, extend any sympathy to his assaults on revealed religion, because they felt that such assaults were only too likely to arouse the fanatic enthusiasm which it was their chief business to com- bat ; nay, even that assaults on revealed religion were apt, in the hands of less equable and fair-minded apostles than Hume, to partake of the spirit of that fanaticism, and to borrow many of its weapons. They felt that their strength lay in avoiding all such questions, in entrenching their own freedom by the laws of the Church, which involved the orthodoxy of her doctrines, in promulgating a code of less restricted morals, and in extending their influence by excursions into the do- mains of secular literature. Hume wore his heterodoxy 270 ECCLESIASTICAL AND SECULAR INNOVATIONS. lightly. He did not refuse to conform to the ordinances of the Church; and he would rally the preacher of the new- school, in a friendly banter, upon the parallel between his sermon and one of Cicero's Academics, and regret that " such heathen morality should pass in East Lothian." ^ On the Monday morning another tone would emerge; and the ap- pearance of a Bible in the breakfast - room would move a simulated dread, and lead him to beg that " the enemy might be taken away." It is evident that Hume and his friends, hoAvever sincere might be their own tenets, and however heartily they might have maintained them in serious combat, would find little difficulty in adjusting their intercourse, and were at one in their sympathetic hatred of a narrow or fanatical bigotry. No man could have sought for a companion mora delightful or entertaining than Hume. With wide experience, with the dignity of an independent thinker, with the concentration and abundant stores of the student, he united a simplicity which thought no evil, and an almost childlike pleasure in the happiness of social intercourse. He fenced himself in with no artificial barrier of haughtiness or reserve. He had an easy flow of humour, which was in his case accompanied, as it not always is, by that social tact which is rooted in good-nature and benevolence. " His conversation," says one of his friends, "was truly irresistible, for while it was enlightened, it was naive almost to puerility." He excelled above all in that perfect form of raillery which Swift has described — the art of making apparent sarcasm suggest the best qualities of those against whom the sarcasm appears to be directed. No man could attract more successfully all characters and all ages. He could soothe the aged or the unfortunate as happily as he could please the young and frolicsome. With all his calmness of temper, and all his boldness of speculation, he was like a child in his discernment of character, and partook in no degree of that useful, but not altogether pleasant, faculty of reading character with a judicial eye. If he was an object of suspicion to those whose peace might be disturbed by rumours of his atheism, they were quickly disarmed by his irresistible personality. The mother of Adam, the architect, welcomed to her table all her son's friends, but warned that son against bringing the atheist within her doors. But Hume was brought into the circle under another name, and his identity was carefully concealed. "Your companions are all agree- able," she told her son, " but the large jolly man who sat next me is the most agreeable of them all." "This is the very 1 Dr Carlyle's " Reminiscences." DR ALEXANDER CARLYLE. 271 atheist, mother," answered Adam, "that you were so much afraid of." "Bring him here," was the answer, "as much as you please : he is the most innocent, agreeable, facetious man I ever met with." No wonder that his companions loved him, that the younger clergy found his attentions to them flatter- ing, and that they rejoiced to find sympathy from one whom their predecessors, one or two generations before, would have judged fit only for the gallows or the stake. No wonder that they refused to believe the worst that was said of his unbelief, and encouraged the notion that his calm and almost indifferent scepticism covered an underlying faith which seemed a neces- sary ingredient of a character so lovable. Another of this circle was Dr Alexander Carlyle of Inver- esk, whose " Reminiscences " have preserved for us a wonder- ful picture of the society in which he moved. In a long life he combined a marvellously wide range of experience. In his youth he had been witness of the stirring scenes of the Rebellion, and had been an actual spectator of the battle of Prestonpans, which took place close to his father's manse. His knowledge of political parties extended from Walpole to Pitt, and his literary interest embraced all the wide range from Allan Ramsay to Burns and Southey, and Wordsworth and Scott. He had seen the rout of Sir John Cope, when the whole power of the British Crown was shaken by the onslaught of some three thousand undisciplined Highlanders, and he lived to hear of the battle of the Nile, when England became mistress of the seas. As a boy he had seen Lovat in his cups, and as an old man he discussed with his correspondents the merits of the Anti- Jacobin. He had entered into every circle of society, from that of the Covenanters, still lingering in the south-west in the days of his youth, to the coteries of Bond Street and Piccadilly. Throughout the whole of the last half of the century we see him pursuing one persistent aim — that of liberalising the Scottish Church, promoting, by every means in his power, her close connection with the State and the Law, and combating all that savoured of the barren and bigoted code of morals that regarded all that was secular as wicked, and all that appertained to the embellishment of life or the amusement of its leisure as the manifestation of the powers of evil and as a tampering with the accursed thing. The in- cidents of the struggles in which he and his sympathisers were involved will emerge as we survey these years. On the other side in the Church were some men of note who represent characteristics that are marked and interesting. The Church was now freed, for good or ill, from those who dissented from her new spirit and felt themselves bound to 272 ECCLESIASTICAL AND SECULAR INNOVATIONS. resist her new policy. More than one seceding sect had formed itself outside her pale; and as time went on, the propensity to find new causes of discord grew by exercise, and led to new swarms forming hives for themselves, whence they denounced in no measured terms the lax tenets of those with whom they had been associated up to a certain point in their secession from the Establishment. Thus the Associate Presbytery, which had been formed after the expulsion of the Erskines in 1739, soon broke up into two sects — the Burghers and the Anti-Burghers — according as they judged the Burgess oaths, which affirmed the duty of maintaining the religion established by law, to be such as a nice conscience could accept or reject. Gillespie and his adherents formed another sect, which called itself the Relief, and which did not view its separation from the Church on the question of patronage to be a matter which need involve a permanent banishment from her fold. Once begun, the genius of dissent multiplied itself rapidly, and each phase repeated the spirit of resistance to an Erastian establishment, but found elements of discord in subtle degrees of the variation from her discipline which they represented. But even within the Establishment there were men who sympathised in spirit rather with the seceders than with the party to which men like Robertson and Carlyle adhered. The chief of these was Dr Alexander Webster, minister of the Tolbooth Church, whose leading traits we have already touched upon, and whose varied characteristics serve as an epitome of much that was distinctive of the time and scene in which he played a conspicuous part. In 1745 he was in the prime of his life and influence, and had many natural gifts that made that influence a powerful one. He was a man of striking and imposing appearance, of abundant mother- wit and natural eloquence. The most learned could not but admit the force of his pulpit oratory, and to the mass of his audience he had an irresistible attraction. But, on the other hand, he was rough and unpolished in manner, and frequently degraded himself and his position by coarse horseplay and by unseemly conviviality. Not that the latter altogether detracted from his influence, or was without its use. In an age when hard drinking was the fashion, it was no small matter to possess a head strong enough to preserve its clear- ness after prolonged potations, and to have a well-earned reputation for being able to drink the strongest topers of the day under the table. It was said, indeed, that in such scenes he preserved his decorum and restrained the outbursts of his boon companions. But even in that age the fame of a seasoned J)R ALEXANDER WEBSTER. 273 reveller could at least be used to a man's detriment by those who had other reasons for detraction; and the nickname of Dr Magnum Bonum, which his potations of the favourite Scottish drink — claret — won for him, was banded about not altogether to his credit. Added to this, he was a sedulous spiritual adviser of wealthy dames, and was remembered by them in legacies which were quickly spent in that easy, if not spendthrift, way of life, in which his soul delighted. All the stranger is it that such a man should for many years have occupied the position of leader of the High-flyers, or strictest party in the Church, who adhered most tenaciously to Calvin- istic doctrines, resisted the encroachments of patronage, and welcomed the popular enthusiastic preaching of Whitefield. It would be wrong to accuse Webster of conscious insincerity. He was a man of ardent temperament, impassioned eloquence, and keen sympathy. To such a man the attractions of the society in which he lived were irresistible. It was a part of his character — perhaps a part of his better qualities — that he cared little for his own self-respect, and threw himself with zest into the vigorous and unrestrained conviviality that was the fashion of the day and place. As he found himself forced into the position of leader, he was compelled to adapt himself to the exigencies of that position, to the sacrifice at times of strict consistency and of high-toned honour. He was alternately in opposition to, and a supple supporter of, Lord Islay, as Walpole's representative in Scotland, according as the lofty themes of the patriot party stimulated him to opposition, or the interests of his own party in the Church made it necessary to cultivate the reigning power. While the ostensible leader of the High-flying party, he was not insensible to its weaknesses; and it is recorded of him that he lamented the necessity which he was under of voting with fools while he drank with gentlemen. His opponents did not spare his weaknesses ; but, on the whole, we may fairly judge him to have been a man of generous sympathies and warm aspirations, who was forced into a position for which he cared little, and who was indisposed to press harshly the asperities of ecclesiastical controversy. He was by no means an edifying specimen of a Christian clergyman, and his energies were too often devoted to purely secular business — as his connection with the building improve- ments in Edinburgh, where he advised the magistrates over copious libations — or to the financial rather than the religious interests of the Church, as in the settlement of the Clergy Widows' Fund, which owed much to his tact and energy. But it was plain that the remnant of the stricter party in S 274 ECCLESIASTICAL AND SECULAR INNOVATIONS. the Church, which had remained within her borders after repeated secessions, were not a powerful or very enthusiastic faction when they found their leader in such a man. Partly from disinclination, partly from the pressure of circumstances and the loss of influence, he gradually withdrew from ecclesi- astical disputes, and for many years before his death, in 1783, he had ceased to play any leading part in them. It is characteristic of him that the last night but one before his final illness was spent in prayer at the house of one of his wealthy lady friends, and the night which succeeded in carousing at the tavern with a company of his friends. Amongst the men whose position was not so well defined, but who wavered between the two parties, were Dr Robert Wallace and the two brothers Wishart — the Principal of Edinburgh University and his brother George. The first was chiefly distinguished as a mathematician; but into his ministrations he brought more of the ardour of the poet and of the high aspirations of the philosopher than of the hard and dry intellect of the mathematical professor. He entered the lists of controversy with Hume, roused the patriotism of the nation by his political dissertations, and indulged a certain vein of religious philosophy when the Scottish philo- sophical school was in its infancy, and when its assaults on religious orthodoxy were hardly anticipated. It was, indeed, chiefly by his amazing versatility that he was characteristic of his time ; and in the midst of all his various activities and speculations, he found time for the delights of social inter- course, of which Edinburgh was then the choicest of centres, and left behind him, when he died in 1771, a memory of the most cultivated, the most ingenious, and the most courteous of companions. The Wisharts were men of good family who had the benefit of an English education, and who brought to the Scottish Church something of the spirit of English dissent in which they had been bred. Both were men of high scholarship, but it was Dr George Wishart who attracted the larger following and won the largest share of affection and respect. It was characteristic of the man and of his earnestness as a parish priest that he bound himself but slightly by the ties of party allegiance, and found it easier after the death of his brother, who had belonged to the popular party, to draw closer the ties of sympathy that drew him towards the moderate party.^ ^ We learn this from the Recollections of Ramsay of Ochtertyre, a rambling but rich mine for the study of Scottish characteristics of the latter half of the eighteenth century. VARIETY IN EDINBUKGH SOCIETY. 275 Such were some of the men who formed the society of the Scottish capital in the years that followed the Rebellion — a society singularly rich in interest, and at the same time singularly marked by the strong and vigorous contrasts among its elements. There was a powerful strain of the old enthusiasm and high-strung ethical strain of the Covenanters, mixed with a free and almost boisterous love of social enjoy- ments, which that Covenanting spirit had never expelled, but which it had forced into a certain semblance of decorousness which might strike a stranger as hypocritical, but which was in truth only the effervescence of a perfervid vigour of life. There was a substratum of rigid Calvinism, side by side with a philosophical spirit which treated religion as only one phase of philosophical discussion, and which looked with some leniency, if not with actual sympathy, upon systems which inevitably assailed religious orthodoxy. There was a sturdy adherence to Presbytery, as the ecclesiastical form distinctive of the nation's history, joined to a wide toleration for other systems of ecclesiastical polity, which it held to be matter of secondary importance. There was a tenacity in maintaining Scottish modes of diction and Scottish methods of thought, while at the same time there was enough of literary inter- est and literary acumen to see that the dialect and expression of the southern nation must be acquired — although with the labour necessary to acquire a foreign tongue — before any im- pression could be made by Scotland upon the prose literature of the combined nations. The revival of the Scottish ver- nacular, which was to find its culmination before the century closed, and was to leave its mark on poetry, was as yet only in its infancy, and awaited a stronger genius to give to it its full force and influence. There was a society, rough indeed, and almost primitive in some of its phases, but rich in nat- ural energy and variety, and abundant in its opportunities of quick and varied suggestiveness. There was a spirit of Whiggish independence that exaggerated the tenets of the revolution, and was bold in its schemes of national develop- ment ; and side by side with it there was a quaint and roman- tic strain of Jacobitism that did not cease to penetrate the spirit and aflect the tone of society, even although it had abandoned any practical scheme of making itself politically operative. The politics of the central government were re- garded from afar, and the view of them was singularly unlike that of the petty factions which struggled for power about the waiting-rooms of the Pelhams and the purlieus of St James's and Leicester House. Particular acts of the Govern- ment were indeed criticised or scanned with jealousy ; but in 276 ECCLESIASTICAL AND SECULAR INNOVATIONS. the main, that Government was supported by the most stable elements of Scottish society as a bulwark against disorder, a sound helper towards national prosperity, and as a tolerant and unprejudiced, even if not a cordial or enthusiastic, sup- porter of the Scottish Church. Only slowly and by degrees were the later distinctions between the Whig and Tory parties to find their counterparts in Scotland. In this society the Church undoubtedly held a predominant influence. Within the Universities there was little idea of combating her influence. Her clergy were gaining day by day an advance in social consideration and in influence. More and more they were discarding the narrow and fanatical spirit that had distinguished her adherents under the pressure of resistance to tyranny. Their culture was wider, and they were asserting for themselves a more indubitable position in the world of letters. And in addition to this, the Church courts were attracting more and more the attention of the leading laymen, and especially of the lawyers. Her Assembly was an admirable school of debate, and the Scottish Bench and Bar were well represented in its discussions. This drew together more closely the lay and clerical elements of society, for the advantage of both. The parties in the Church had their lay as well as their clerical adherents. The contact broke down, on the side of the clergy, any spirit of ecclesiastical domination, and, on the side of the lawyers, it inspired an atmosphere of less pedantic and cramped discussion, and inculcated a more popular and direct method of oratory. The spread of literary and philosophical discussion widened the range of legal argu- ment, and substituted a more free and a more liberal treat- ment of legal questions, and one which dissipated the narrow and scholastic methods of the older legal school. Lawyers and clergy alike found themselves associated in common projects of national improvement, and in common topics of literary and philosophical interest ; and the association boded well, not less for the nation than for the two professions. The various phases of Scottish society in the period of George II.'s reign which followed the Rebellion of 1745 are indeed bewildering in their diversity ; and before summarising the principal topics of these years it is necessary to give some picture of them. First came the territorial aristocracy, stript of much of their power, and with no wealth that could com- pensate its loss. Many of the leading families had paid the penalty of political defection in the forfeiture of their estates ; but the attachment to the old families was still so great, little as they did to deserve it, that we find many of them manag- THE LANDED ARISTOCRACY. 277 ing by one means or another to recover a portion at least of their hereditary property, even where a skilful distribution of the family between the different sides in the civil war had not enabled some member of the house to pose as its representative, and prove a sufficient modicum of loyalty to supply a claim for possession. By various deftly contrived alliances with the leaders of English politics, the remnants of the territorial aris- tocracy contrived to maintain some influence and importance, and they still enjoyed a social predominance to which high notions of the dignity of birth gave a certain solid value. But as yet they had but little notion of cultivating their estates to profit. Agriculture was in its infancy, and the innate conservatism of the national character made the struggle of agricultural reformers a slow and arduous one. Beyond agriculture hardly any means of money-getting was open to them. Mercantile pursuits were still despised; nor were they indeed more than sufficient to satisfy the wants of the urban population. For the younger members of the territorial families almost the only resource was foreign service and the British army, and those who did not pursue such a career did their best to eke out a livelihood in such callings as would now be deemed derogatory to their rank — those of petty tradesmen or innkeepers. The latter calling especially, strange as it ma}'' seem to our ideas, yet retained enough of the dignity of the Boniface, exercising a genial hospitality with something of independent authority, to en- able it to claim some social consideration. It was no un- common thing for a poorly provided younger son of some noble family to be found as the keeper of some petty hostelry. In their manner of life there was a strange mixture of rustic simplicity and social pride. The domestic arrange- ments of Scottish mansions were such as would be deemed sordid by the moderately prosperous tradesman of our day. Fresh meat was rarely seen in the houses of the moderate laird between December and midsummer. The language of ordin- ary intercourse was that of a primitive provincial dialect, Down to 1754, and even later, the use of a carriage was deemed an effeminate luxury, and a few carried their disdain of such a conveyance down to much later years. The edu- cation of the better class was meagre, and they knew little of the affairs of the world beyond their own immediate sur- roundings. With occasional bursts of extravagant display, they lived for the most part with the simplicity of Canadian settlers, and the plainest and most homely fare was only at rare intervals exchanged for an abundant, if not elegant, hospitality. To close the day in their cups was considered 278 ECCLESIASTICAL AND SECULAR INNOVATIONS. not only as involving no disgrace, but as a becoming sign of social complaisance without which the character of a gentleman would have been incomplete. On the other hand, on special occasions, to which their keen participation in social life made them susceptible — particu- larly at marriages, christenings, and, above all, at burials — there was much lavish display. The copious and often coarse hospitality of the Scottish funeral has become proverbial. It was indeed a necessary concomitant of their social tastes. The boon companionship which played so large a part in their life was not to be forgotten in its last scene, and the pervad- ing sense of the closeness of the ties of kinship made the death scene of any prominent member of society a chosen and peculiar occasion for the cementing of these bonds. The honour, nay, even the respectability of the family, was bound up with the observance of a lavish hospitality on such occasions, which led too often to scenes of coarse brutality and ruinous extravagance. So it was in dress. Ordinarily the dress of the landlord differed little from that of the most humble of his tenants. But on great occasions an expenditure on a lavish scale was considered necessary. Bridal dresses and trousseaux were fur- nished with much magnificence, and no little money was spent on rich materials and costly lace. The only check upon such expenditure was the fact that such rich apparel — towards the fabrication of which the art of the dressmaker went for little, and which was little affected by the vagaries of fashion — was commonly transmitted from generation to generation, and formed no insignificant part of the " tocher " or dowry. The ladies' dressmaker was commonly the tailor, the niceties of whose art were small and scanty. Not until the middle of the century did the calling of the milliner become common even in Edinburgh. The fashion of moving from place to place was necessarily restricted. The state of the roads was an effectual bar to the use of carriages, and when these were first introduced in any numbers, about the middle of the century, they were signs of state and dignity rather than accessories of comfort. For the most part such rare journeys as were performed were accom- plished on horseback, and the ladies rode on pillions behind their spouses. The habit usual amongst the aristocracy of spending a certain part of the year in Edinburgh gave to that city something of the dignity of a social centre, and brought the landed gentry into the closest contact with a highly cul- tivated circle of men whose learning and talents made the THE LEGAL PROFESSION. 279 northern capital no unworthy rival of London. Nowhere were a larger number of men rising rapidly to fame for their genius and their learning gathered in the easiest habits of social intercourse. That circle had its attraction not for Scotsmen only, but for notable visitors from England and the Continent, and the genial gatherings in the old tenements that towered on either side of the High Street in a long line from Holyrood to the Castle, were known by the accounts of many from all lands who had found there an interest and a zest which were not surpassed in the most brilliant coteries on the banks of the Thames or of the Seine. Of this society perhaps the chief interest was contributed by the dominant section of it — the legal profession. The leaders of that profession still retained a close connection with the territorial aristocracy. Its gains were not large according to modern computation. The salary of an ordin- ary Judge of the High Court, even as recently augmented, amounted only to £700 a year. But the dignity of the office was great. The occupants of the Bench were entitled to the euphonious title of " Lord," and designated by the names of the estates which they had inherited or acquired. The older habits, which had made the judge to a large extent the henchman of the Government, and had linked their acquire- ments to the dusty learning of the civil law, which they expounded in a series of wire-drawn disquisitions, were now passing away. The study of the Pandects and the application of cut-and-dried maxims of the schools no longer absorbed the attention of the legal profession. An approach was made to the study of English legal principles, and without yielding any jot of the independence of Scottish national jurisprudence, the necessary intercourse between the leading lawyers of both countries, which was involved in a single Supreme Court of Appeal, insensibly brought about new sympathies and gave expansion to traditional methods. The heads of the legal profession were now men of great independence and of high spirit, but at the same time of wide interests, who were gradually enlarging the scope and adaptability of the legal system which they administered, and who often brought to its exposition an abundant equipment of general learning which enabled them to associate on equal terms with the greater lights of literature, scholarship, and philosophy. There were men amongst them whose homeliness of manner and of phrase and whose rugged nationality made them quaint and interesting members of a strangely mixed society; but their peculiarities were the result of a sturdy and masculine origin- ality, or of an eccentricity which was too proud to conceal 280 ECCLESIASTICAL AND SECULAR INNOVATIONS. itself, and only in rare cases of a mere provincial ignorance and pedantry. But high as was the dignity and independence of the bench, and wide as was its learning, the administration of the law presented some strange contrasts. The functions of judge and jury were only slowly becoming defined. The principles of the law of evidence were only vaguely grasped. Commer- cial law was only to grow with use, and where it was now called into requisition it was interpreted largely according to the obsolete maxims of the older writers on the civil law. The rules of criminal procedure were but loosely observed. It appears to have been no uncommon matter for a juryman to absent himself during the hearing of the evidence, and after he had refreshed himself at a neighbouring tavern to return and give his verdict in the light of such knowledge of the case as he might have gathered in the gossip of Parliament Close. Where there was, according to the phrase, ^' a famine of evidence," it was no uncommon thing for the public prose- cutor to bargain with the prisoner that he should receive a sentence of transportation instead of running the risk of a trial where the odds were almost evenly balanced between an acquittal and the gallows. In a trial which engaged much attention in 1752 — that of James Stewart for the murder of Campbell of Glenure, and which resulted in the conviction and execution of the prisoner, a man of high character and good birth — it appeared that the procedure had been hopelessly faulty. The jury had been composed of men belonging to the Clan Campbell, whose head was the Duke of Argyle, and with such a jury no Stewart stood a chance of acquittal on the charge of the murder of a Campbell. Callous as it was, the public conscience received in this travesty of justice a shock from which it did not soon recover when the proof of a miscarriage of legal procedure, resulting in the judicial murder of an innocent man, became more and more overwhelming. The legal administration of the country was in the hands of men for the most part of high character and principle, and almost invariably of acute and keen intellect ; but all that can be said of it is that it was approaching, but was still far from attaining, the standard necessary for a settled and ex- panding society entering upon new and complex activities, which demanded a humane and enlightened application of fixed legal principles upon well-regulated methods. Besides the landed gentry, the clergy, and the law, there was another section of society which was rapidly advancing in position. At the beginning of the century, commerce, except in the narrowest sense, scarcely existed in Scotland. COMMERCE. 281 By the middle of the century it had not made any great advance, and nothing is more noteworthy than the fact that by far the most rapid advance of Scotland in wealth has occurred almost within living memory. But in 1750 the first movements of commercial enterprise were already set on foot. The mineral wealth of the country had already been tapped. The trade with the American colonies was established on a sound foundation. The linen manufacture was rapidly expanding. No great fortunes were yet made, but it was of the first importance for the future of the country that the leaders of her earliest commercial efforts were men of shrewd character and of enlightened public spirit, whose sense of political responsibility had been de- veloped by a very carefully organised system of municipal government — not popular, indeed, in its basis, but calling for very considerable discernment in its administration. That municipal government contained, indeed, much that was corrupt, and it was to all intents and purposes entirely irresponsible. But it placed authority in the hands of men who were often keen -sighted and prudent, zealous for the welfare of their town, and confining the advantages which they reaped from its administration within well - defined limits. Faulty as it was, no one could ever assert that Scottish unreformed municipal administration contained within it the widespread and flaunting political corruption which has in modern days, and in other countries than our own, given to popular municipal government an unenviable notoriety. The style of living amongst the citizens was plain and unpretentious, but their perseverance in thrift found an ample reward. As they advanced in wealth and in position, they did not hold themselves, and were not treated, as a class altogether apart from that of professional men. They attended the universities, they encouraged literature, they were even tolerated, where personal merit warranted it, within the intimate coteries of literature and of science; and in the ensuing century not a few of the leading families in Scotland owed their origin to some forebear who had played a worthy part in the first movements of Scottish commercial enterprise. Of the prevailing tone of politics it is somewhat difficult to speak definitely. There was still a vague and hazy back- ground of Jacobite feeling, but it was little more than a feel- ing, indulged in partly by way of romance, partly by way of a national protest. To those who shared in it, it seemed to impart a certain touch of aristocratic bias, and soothed sus- ceptibilities that were irritated by the aggressive Whiggism 282 ECCLESIASTICAL AND SECULAR INNOVATIONS. of more modern spirits. It had about it a halo of fashion and an aroma of gentility, which affected especially the female section of society, and which kept it alive long after it had lost all active power, and when the romance of loyalty had become only a memory, to be revived, when the recollections of civil strife had become cold enough, to serve as safe ma- terial for the hand of genius to work upon. To the southern Scot, the mountains of the Highlands were no longer an almost fabulous region, peopled by dangerous and lawless neighbours. They were a part of the nation, for the help and improvement of which new schemes were started, and over which the Church spared no pains to extend her hold. Measures of re- pression were occasionally resorted to, and the Act forbidding the wearing of the Highland dress was enforced with some- what senseless rigour. But the conviction was slowly gaining force that the question of Highland pacification was not one for the military authority, but for the philanthropist and the economist. Nothing in the history of Scotland during the last half of the eighteenth century is more important than the persever- ance with which a policy of conciliation, combined with a strong but relentless pressing of the influence of the dominant Scottish creed, was pursued. Difference of race and religion, combined with a policy of repression, would have bequeathed an undying hatred, and would have made of Scotland a second Ireland. The difference of religion might easily have con- tinued. That it did not so continue is due mainly to the enlightened policy which led the Scottish Church to spare no pains to spread its influence, and which based that influence on the parish school, and hardly less to the generous deter- mination to share with the Highlands, as far as possible, the advantages of improved economical conditions. The landed aristocracy were selfish, but they never repeated the errors of absentee landlordism and of alien sympathies which compassed the lasting injury of Ireland. Apart from this question of Jacobitism, which was retreat- ing into a shadowy distance, the political divisions of Scotland were in no way parallel to those of England. The party terms Whig and Tory had never borne the same meaning north and south of the Tweed. On the whole the balance of moderate opinion in Scotland gave a general support to the successive ministries of Walpole and the Pelhams and the elder Pitt. No wide body of opinion was affected in Scotland by the violent invectives of the fiercer faction fights which agitated England. If we examine the correspondence be- tween the political managers of Scotland and their chiefs in POLITICS IN SCOTLAND. 283 the Government, we are constantly struck by the vainness of their efforts to explain Scottish topics in language that could be intelligible to men who were immersed in the toils of parties at Westminster, and to whom Scotland was a problem which they neither understood nor sought to understand. No country was ever helped less by its responsible Government than Scotland was by the English ministries of the latter days of George II. The attacks upon and the defences of Walpole, which to the Englishman seemed the very kernel of politics, fell in Scotland upon listless ears, and the denuncia- tions of the patriots roused there no enthusiasm. There was a chronic grumbling against the Union, but its outbursts were only occasional, and it required some special episode to arouse them. In the main the Government was represented by the Argyle family and their adherents. John, Duke of Argyle, who had entered more fully into English politics, died in 1743, and his brother and successor, Archibald, Earl of Islay, re- tained his connection with English parties only as a means whereby he might maintain his complete hold over Scottish affairs, as he continued to do until his death, at the age of eighty, in 1761. It will be our business hereafter to trace and to account for the growth and increased bitterness of two obstinate contending factions in Scottish politics. But for the present, if we set aside the vague and only half- acknowledged presence of a Jacobite element, sentimental rather than practical, we shall find that the most hotly con- tested wrangles in Scotland, during the closing years of George II., turned rather upon ecclesiastical and social than upon political questions, with an occasional interlude in which the spirit of Scottish nationality was aroused by some real or fancied insult. It is therefore in the social aspect of these years, and in the intellectual and material development which they witnessed, that their chief interest lies. From the earliest years of the century, when the universities were acquiring greater influence and further expansion by the substitution of the professorial for the tutorial system, a cus- tom sprang up which had important results in stimulating intellectual activity. This was the formation of clubs, begin- ning amongst the students, but developing into associations of men of mature years and busy lives. Some of these we have already mentioned. But the list was long. Amongst the earliest of these was the Rankenian Society, which had much to do with the impulse towards philosophical speculation which formed so marked a feature of the century. This club continued to flourish from 1716 to 1760. A more important body was the Select Society (already named), founded by 284 ECCLESIASTICAL AND SECULAR INNOVATIONS. Allan Ramsay, the painter, in 1754, which speedily comprised all the leading men in Edinburgh. Amongst its members were enrolled Hume and Robertson, Adam Smith and Fer- guson the historian, John Home, the author of " Douglas," and Professor Wilkie, the author of the " Epigoniad," besides Lord Hailes, Lord Monboddo, and Lord Kames, all men who joined to high legal position an active and keen interest in historical and philosophical questions. It did not last so long as the Rankenian Club, but it transmitted its spirit and its aims to other societies that sprang from its example. It was largely due to this society that a literary undertaking called the Edinburgh Review started in 1755 upon a brief career, which ended after two numbers had been published, but which, after the lapse of half a century, was to bequeath its name to an organ destined to a long and an eventful history. A later society was that called the Poker Club,^ which was started in 1760. The Medical Society was first set on foot in 1731, and was enlarged in membership and in scope by Maclaurin, the celebrated professor of mathematics, in 1739, so as to embrace all subjects of literary and philosophical interest. It was then called the " Society for Improving Arts and Sciences," or the " Philosophical Society," and in 1783 was extended into the Royal Society of Edinburgh. From an early period in its existence it offered premiums for various practical improvement^ and for essays upon subjects of econ- omic interest ; and its influence on the development of new systems of agriculture and new methods of manufacture was wide and lasting. All these and other similar societies were important, not only for their active encouragement of all schemes of national improvement, but also for the powerful impulse which they gave to intellectual development. Their chief feature was the intermixture of all classes, political, legal, and mercantile, and the free footing upon which the territorial gentry, the representatives of the aristocracy, and the clergy met with those whose claim to consideration rested only upon profes- sional merit or upon sincere interest in intellectual problems. It was in the tavern where they met for the exchange of serious argument and lively repartee that the stranger visiting Edinburgh was best able to appreciate the peculiar charm of its society — so famed for its comprehensiveness, its energy, and its matchless versatility. The stage upon which they acted may to our eyes seem a small one. The nation had as yet made little way upon ^ From its stirring the embers of a keen contention about the organisation of a Scottish Mihtia. SCHEMES OF IMPROVEMENT. 285 the path of national prosperity. Its material development was as yet but small. The range of intellectual interest was comparatively limited, and the methods of last century may seem to us to take insufficient account of the vast variety of popular wants. But weighed simply by their advances on the previous age, we shall find matter for astonishment in their many-sided activity. The Board of Manufactures owed its origin to a stipulation in the Treaty of Union, by which a certain sum was to be allowed for the encouragement of fisheries and manufactures in Scotland, as an equivalent for the custom and excise duties imposed upon Scotland towards the payment of the English national debt. Commissioners were appointed to administer this fund, and in 1727 letters patent were issued constituting a Board of Trustees for managing the revenue upon a settled plan. That Board was composed of men of the highest station in the kingdom, and it was zealous in its efibrts for the encouragement of every form of commercial enterprise.^ Men whose occupations seemed likely to engross them in altogether different pursuits threw themselves, in their leisure hours, with enthusiasm into schemes for the improvement of agriculture. In Edinburgh there were new efforts towards founding a satisfactory system of poor relief. The Infirmary was established on a scale before undreamed of. The embellishment of the capital — favoured by natural situation beyond any capital of Europe — was the aim of a large and comprehensive association, which did not scruple to propose the hazardous legislative experiment of compulsory purchase — then deemed to be a dangerous and revolutionary interference with the rights of property — in order to accomplish its aim. Nor were schemes of improvement limited to the capital. The nation felt that a new responsibility was placed upon it in the administration of the Highlands — subdued indeed, and stript of their ancient clan system, but as yet centuries behind the world in all the essentials of civilised life. The administration of the forfeited estates, which from 1745 to the restoration of these forfeitures in 1784, remained in the hands of the Commissioners of Annexed Estates, was conducted on enlightened principles. The Commissioners took account of the needs of the native population, and spent freely from their revenues in promoting the religious and intellectual welfare of that population. New roads were to be made, new manufactures encouraged, new outlets opened, and capital, trifling to the estimate of 1 Owing largely to their encouragement, the annual value of the Scottish linen manufacture rose from £103,000 in 1728, to £424,000 in 1758, and doubled the latter value in the next thirty years. 286 ECCLESIASTICAL AND SECULAR INNOVATIONS. to-day, but unduly extravagant according to the more timid critics of 1750, was to be spent in cutting new waterways through the length and breadth of the land.^ Nor were the softer sciences for the lightening and brighten- ing of life neglected. Literature was not to be confined to grave and serious subjects. Mechanical and inventive genius was not to be spent only on the useful. The fine arts found their patrons; schools of design were opened under the patronage of those to whom commerce was slowly bringing her rewards.^ A lighter note was heard in her poetry, and the echoes of distant ages, when Scottish song was more light-hearted, were beginning to be heard. Scottish prose was beginning to escape, not only from the trammels of provincial dialect, but from the even more dangerous pitfall of undue and affected imitation of English models, which had been a marked feature of the style of Scottish writers in the earlier part of the century. The great difficulty with Scottish authors was to handle English style otherwise than as a language studied only from books. " Our greatest difficulty," says Beattie, in a letter quoted in his Life by Sir William Forbes, "is to give a vernacular cast to the English we write. . . . We who live in Scotland are obliged to study English from books, like a dead language. Accordingly, when we write, we write it like a dead language. . . . Our style is stately and unwieldy, and clogs the tongue in pro- nunciation, and smells of the lamp. ... In a word, we handle English as a person who cannot fence handles a sword." To perceive this besetting error was to go a long way towards curing it. The fanatical fervour which deemed that religious worship was sincere only in proportion as it was uncouth was losing its force, and schools were established in various towns in which some musical instruction could be obtained, and the services of the Church rendered less repellent to any ear save that of the chastened enthusiast. Scotland had once given token of a popular taste for music. Might not the faculty dormant only since the early years of the sixteenth century be once more awakened ? ^ The project of a canal between the Forth and the Clyde is said to have been suggested by Charles II. At that time it was abandoned, but revived in 1722. At length, in 1762, it was taken up by the Board of Manufactures, and was carried into execution in 1768, at a cost of £300,000. This was more than double the whole revenue of Scotland at the time of the Union. In 1706 that revenue was £100,000; in 1800 it had grown to £1,790,000; and at the latter date it was only entering upon its period of greater expansion. ^ Mr Robert Foulis, printer to the University of Glasgow, opened a school for painting and sculpture in his own city about 1750. The same object was attained in Edinburgh in 1758. ENTERTAINMENTS . 287 By - and - by, even more questionable allurements were flaunted in the eyes of the people, to stir the ire and awaken the opposition of those who looked askance upon such danger- ous innovations. In 1755 we hear of entertainments at Comely Garden, near Holyrood, in the fashion of those at Vauxhall. Dancing assemblies became frequent. Theatres were opened and received abundant patronage.^ It is true that a potent reason prevented even highly flavoured comedy from exer- cising any very deleterious effect. Being acted in English, they were not understood. A lady of the day was questioned as to her feelings in listening to some play of doubtful propriety. "There was nothing wrong that I saw," she answered ; " and as for what they said, it was high English, and I did not understand it." Lastly, — and worst of all ! — a dramatic play was actually produced by a minister of the Church, and its rehearsals were followed with eager interest by some of his fellow-clergy, who did not scruple to show themselves at its first representation, having previously, it was whispered, personally assisted at the rehearsals, and caroused with those scapegoats of society — the actors and actresses. It was time for oflended propriety to rouse itself to resistance. The descendants of John Knox, the grandchildren of the Covenanters, might well deem that the iniquities of Babylon were coming upon them in a flood. It was in 1757 that this episode, which stirred abundance of feeling at the time, took place. John Home, the minister of Athelstaneford, was a young clergyman of a singularly simple and lovable character, but quite unfitted for the rough and acrid warfare of the ecclesiastical arena. His experience had already been a strange one. He had taken an active part in the Rebellion (of which he afterwards wrote an account) on the side of the Government, and owed his life, when taken prisoner by the rebels, first to the magnanimity which led the Chevalier to deal leniently with his captives, and then to the dexterity with which he and some companions managed to escape from the castle of Stirling. He had now produced a play, under the title of "Douglas," of which the literary merits are not so apparent to modern readers as they were to his contemporaries, but which had its own literary importance as a precursor of the romantic revival which was ere long to make itself more distinctly felt. The play was refused by Garrick ; but under the patronage of the leaders of Edinburgh ^ Theatrical entertainments had been given from 1719. "Macbeth" was one of the plays most liked by an Edinburgh audience ; and the Jacobites used to find allusions in the scene between Macbeth and Malcolm which were accentuated by significant applause. 288 ECCLESIASTICAL AND SECULAR INNOVATIONS. society, and with all the curiosity naturally aroused by a bold innovation, it was represented on the Edinburgh stage, and enlisted on its behalf not merely the sympathy of a society anxious to escape from the trammels of conventional pro- priety, but a full measure of patriotic ardour. This was in the autumn of 1756 ; and strange stories were current of how the most notable of Edinburgh citizens had actually played at the rehearsals, and had hobnobbed with actors whose very names were an embodiment of licentious disregard for all wonted proprieties. In the early months of 1757 a coalition was formed between the High-flyers of the Church and those who had other causes of jealousy, with the view of exercising condign discipline upon the bold innovators. At the head ot the denouncing phalanx was the leader of the stricter party in the Church, Dr Webster, whose lack of personal austerity, as we have already seen, had procured for him the nickname of Dr Magnum Bonum. Like others of his party, Webster was scandalised by any indecencies except those of the table, copious indulgence in which was not held to detract from the sacred character. Dr Cumin, who was still the nominal leader of the older Moderates, joined forces with Webster, partly from a fear that his own party might be compromised, and partly from jealousy of some of the younger adherents of that party. Dundas of Arniston, then Lord-Advocate, whose life and character, with due allowances for the idiosyncrasies of the time, entitled him to all respect, but who had some hereditary leaning to the High-flying party, and who was not more averse than they from the pleasures of the table, joined in their opposition. He was moved thereto largely by the fact that the Duke of Argyle and his henchman Lord Milton, who belonged to the opposite political party — so far as political parties could be said to be opposed, when they rested on very little basis except that of personal connection — were pronounced patrons of Home. It is to be noticed that the habit of attending the theatre on the part of the clergy was not entirely new. It had already been usual for the country clergy, when visiting Edinburgh, to relax their habitual deference to the exigencies of public opinion, and to spend an occasional evening in the theatre, where, as they were not known, their presence could cause no scandal. But now the attendance was open and avowed : and the chief culprits were some of the younger clergy, whose attitude was one of pronounced defiance to the stricter brethren. Some half-dozen of these clergy belonged to Presbyteries in the immediate neighbourhood of Edin- burgh : and the influence of Webster induced the Edinburgh Dr ALEXANDER CARLYLE, MINISTER of Inveresk. THE THEATRE. 289 Presbytery to address remonstrances to those neighbouring Presbyteries against their peccant members. The threat of proceedings appalled some of the weaker brethren, who pleaded inadvertence, and promised to amend their ways — and excused themselves on the strange ground that they had done all they could to elude observation. Others took a bolder line, and amongst these the chief was Dr Alexander Carlyle of Inveresk, who was the centre of the more liberal party in the Church. While he boldly maintained the moral rectitude of his action, he was skilful enough to take his stand upon every technical plea which the laws of the Church furnished, and which he knew to have a peculiar charm for the ears of his ecclesiastical brethren. He found support in his own congregation, and while he yielded all outward tokens of respect to his clerical critics, he made no secret of his intention to be the sole judge of his own conduct, and professed no repentance for his error. The boldness of his attitude had its reward. The Presbytery of Dalkeith, before which he was "libelled," found its action questioned, and was glad to temporise. In the end a mild sentence of rebuke was passed by the Synod, to which the case was appealed, and this was finally approved by the Assembly. Carlyle "trusted that he would not give cause of offence in future" — but left it vague, whether that offence would be avoided by an alteration in the views of the Church, or by a restraint upon his own liberty. A resolution was passed that ministers should not attend the theatre. Both parties were glad to avoid extreme measures : but it was fully recognised that the resolution was a brutum fulmen. Those who wished to attend the theatre did so as they pleased, and the freedom of action thus vindicated led to such a change of habit and of judgment that in 1784, when Mrs Siddons was playing in Edinburgh, the Assembly held its meetings on the alternate days when she did not perform — as on the other days no quorum could be brought together. Even lax inter- preters of the dictates of ecclesiastical decorum might doubt whether such compliance was altogether decent, or was demanded in the interests of private relaxation. It is only a new proof that the Scottish character is somewhat prone to extremes. On the whole, the triumph for Carlyle and his party was complete. Cumin's trimming lost him the leader- ship of the Moderates, which passed to Robertson. John Home, the first cause of all the hubbub, who had no taste for ecclesiastical strife, retired from the ministry, and took leave of his congregation in a sermon which moved his flock to tears. The episode is interesting in itself as an illustration T 290 ECCLESIASTICAL AND SECULAR INNOVATIONS. of the change of manners. It is interesting also as showing how the Moderates were at this time so little identified with the Tories, that they acted in alliance with the Whig ministers against the Tory Dundas, who was courted by the High-flyers — the lineal descendants of the old Covenanters of the hills. It may, not unreasonably, be said that a Church which thus occupied its thoughts and the energies of the younger men in securing a certain relaxation in a not very important point of social practice, was not deeply interested in the more serious problems of religious thought, and was not profoundly imbued with any far-reaching question of social ethics. The excellence, as literature, of Home's tragedy has not been accepted by posterity; and its importance as an instrument in affecting thought may well be doubted. But each age has its own work to do : and while we may not claim for the more liberal party in the Church of Scotland in the middle of last century any lofty appreciation of the more complex questions of social morality or the more abstruse problems of religious belief, we must at the same time remember what were the conditions of the time ; how needful it was to break the bondage of a narrow-minded convention, and to open the door to some wider literary influence : and as a forerunner of what was to come, the work of Carlyle and his friends was not without its solid weight. They were not great or heroic reformers : they were simply men of the world, conscious of a certain rectitude of purpose, bold enough to resist a cramping convention, asserting in their own way, and for their own time, a liberty which was to have far-reaching results. They put forward no claim to profound admiration, or to enthusiastic elevation of purpose : but none the less they played a manly part, from which men less conscious of their own sincerity of purpose might well have shrunk. He understands but little of the weightier issues of Scottish history who sees in the stern creed and ascetic manners of the Scottish Covenanters nothing but an erroneous code of morals, and a narrow scheme of religion. That code and that religion had impressed themselves upon the national character, and given to it much of the dignity and tenacity, much of the singleness of purpose, to which it owed its strength. But these had done their work : and it was no small thing that a body of men now became a dominant power in the Church who were bold enough to look beyond her borders, to recognise new influences, and to resolve that to her service there should be attracted talents and tastes which had long been weighed down by the sterner SUPPORT OF THE GOVERNMENT. 291 mood which her stormy history had forced upon her. With many opinions and many principles which separated them from the speculations of the philosophers, and which made them unable to embrace all the new views that were ap- proaching in the domain of literature and of thought, they were nevertheless able, across these difierences, to join hands with men of diverse type, who were advancing on lines that affected a wider arena than that of Scotland. This struggle had concerned Scotland alone, and its object had been to keep Scotland abreast of her southern neighbour. The next question which agitated the minds of Scotsmen was more directly political, and the same impulse which had prompted men to shake off an outworn convention now prompted them to claim for Scotland her part in a great national movement, which might help to bury in oblivion the memories of recent political events. However much Jacobitism might remain, as a more or less romantic memory, it was none the less clear to men of discrimination that its day of active energy was past. The existing dynasty had lost for Scotsmen much of its personal aspect, and had gathered about it a certain feeling of general loyalty to the Crown, which was perhaps not the less strong that it was not based upon familiarity with the court of George II. There was no party in Scotland that bore any resemblance to the Patriots of England, who were believed to be imbued with something like Jacobite principles, chiefly because they gave point to a virulent opposition to the existing govern- ment. In Scotland that government was looked upon with no enthusiastic devotion certainly, but with a sort of modified respect that invested it with high functions as maintaining the law, and as a bulwark against any extremes of opinion or any disturbing elements which might prove dangerous to national prosperity. On the whole the Hanoverian dynasty towards the close of George II.'s reign found more consistent support in Scotland than in England. If its distance made it a somewhat shadowy entity, it at the same time served to conceal its weaknesses. If the power of Parliamentary management was felt less in Scotland than in England, so also the weakness and vacillation of a Newcastle was less readily made the theme of sarcastic denunciation there. And now a more powerful luminary was rising in the Parlia- mentary firmament, and the achievements of Pitt were to be acclaimed with scarcely less fervour north than south of the Tweed. The threatened success of rebellion had taught the English nation that the internal defences were less powerful than they 292 ECCLESIASTICAL AND SECULAR INNOVATIONS. ought to be, and that if the Government was to be strong it must organise the instruments of its power. It was in obedi- ence to this warning that the militia was organised by the Act of 1756 for England. It was a citizen force, resting entirely upon the territorial interest, and through it, basing the stability of the Government at home upon a new and strong foundation of quasi -military discipline. Some were inclined, upon what were probably insufficient grounds, to doubt its usefulness as an effective force; but it certainly gave to the territorial interest, as the most permanent element in the nation, a new sense of its importance, and it soothed the fears of a standing army, which had as yet by no means vanished from the breasts of constitutional sticklers. But a deep feeling of resentment was aroused throughout Scotland when it was found that the memory of the Jacobite rising was too vivid for the same measure to be attempted there ; and that the distrust of her loyalty was too strong for her to be permitted to have a militia of her own. It was not only the deprivation of a doubtful privilege, but the un- deserved suspicion that was cast upon her, that stimulated many of those most confident in her real loyalty to feel indignant at the slight thus shown.^ The topic was felt with sufficient strength to arouse very considerable discontent, and to lay the foundation of a very real opposition to English administration in the minds of many leading Scotsmen. We shall subsequently see how strong this feeling grew. ^ It was argued with some force that even in the disarmed counties, where Jacobitism had been most rife (Perth, Kincardine, Aberdeen, Inverness, Nairn, Cromarty, Argyll, Banff, Sutherland, Caithness, Elgin, Ross, and part of Forfar and Dumbarton), out of 120,000 men fit to fight, only 2500 had joined the Chevalier, or 1 in 48. 293 CHAPTER XII. SCOTTISH NATIONALITY AND ENGLISH JEALOUSY. For some years before the end of George II. 's reign Jacobitism had lost its serious aspect. Its associations were not without much that was attractive even to those who might have been startled had their half - romantic sympathy been translated into practical shape. The honest burgher was not averse to the suspicion of sympathy with a cause that recalled his own distant relationship to some family of great and ancient tradi- tions. His womankind knew that such sympathy would not render them less welcome in the eyes of some ancient dame who was their neighbour, and whose friendship, in spite of her poverty, and pride, and caustic tongue, was cherished as reflecting a social glory which the mere smug respectability of civic prosperity would not yield. The sympathy, perhaps, went no further than a nod or a wink, a quiet toast to the king over the water, or a sentimental pity for those whose name and honour had not gone with their power and their domains. To have been "out in the '45" involved no social disgrace ; to have been a traitor to the cause, like Murray of Broughton, involved an indelible stain, even in the eyes of the most ardent Whig. Scott's father was no Jacobite, but the presence of Murray in his family circle, even for a few minutes, was felt as a pollution. The burgher and the small tenant did not find it always to his disadvantage, even from a practical point of view, to cultivate a sly tenderness for that cause which had once commanded the adherence of the vast majority of the Scottish aristocracy. But he would have listened to no appeal to his pocket, still less to the instincts inherited from his fighting forebears ; and he would have checked with much indignation any too outspoken utterance, in a mixed company, of sympathy with a cause for which he indulged a discreetly veiled tenderness. But there was another cause, hopeless, indeed, and far from 294 SCOTTISH NATIONALITY AND ENGLISH JEALOUSY. any likelihood of practical realisation, which found much more outspoken and independent support. It was the cause of Scottish independence as opposed to the Union. For more than a generation after the Union had been passed, there can be little doubt that the immense majority of the Scottish nation would have eagerly seized any opportunity for its dis- solution. Men of prudence and foresight; those who could weigh dispassionately the tendency of modern politics ; those who had studied the condition of the nation, and knew what might contribute to her commerical prosperity — all these were decided supporters of the Union. But to those moved more by prejudices and impulses than by reason — naturally a con- siderable majority — the Union was a matter of undying regret. Its advantages seemed remote and problematical; its injury to the national pride, and the yoke it laid upon national independence, were palpable and evident. It seemed to presage the loss of all that was distinctively Scottish — in legal institutions, in ecclesiastical politics, in social customs. The Scottish capital became less and less a centre for the aristocracy, and Scottish rents were too often spent in an attempt to vie with the magnates of London society. But a generation had wrought a great change. As Scot- tish commerce developed, and Scottish wealth increased, there was less and less disposition to quarrel with the conditions under which they had thriven, distasteful as these conditions might in certain aspects have been. Those who desired to go so far as the breaking of the Union were probably now a small and insignificant minority. Mur- muring against the Union might now and then be taken as a sign of Jacobitism, but it was by no means tabooed, and those who indulged these murmurs made no secret of them. To dissolve the Union was not a scheme which came within the range of practical politics. But Scottish independence was a plant of vigorous growth, and from its branches there could be hung any amount of discontent with the errors of English administration, and the injustice of English parliaments. A Jacobite restoration and the repeal of the Parliamentary Union were both causes which could lead to no practical result. Those who drank, in the company of their boon companions, to the king over the water, were quite aware that he was likely to remain there, and would have been much perplexed by his sudden reap- pearance on their shores. Those who lamented the days when the Parliament House in Edinburgh was the cradle of Scottish law, knew that its walls would never again echo to the angry debates which their grandfathers had FEELING AS TO THE UNION. 295 followed, and that the armed retainers of the Parliament men would never again gather in its Close. But the Jacobite concealed his sympathies; the grumbler at the Union made a boast of his. To own Jacobite sympathies too explicitly was still dangerous; to disown some lingering regret for Scottish legislative independence would have been a reproach to any Scotsman. But when Scotland settled down after the echoes of clashing armies had died away, she had reached to a practical if not a very clearly defined compromise on this matter. The Union was a garment which had been forced upon her, which was at first ill-fitting and irksome, and which she would fain have thrown aside. But habit had fitted it to her limbs, and made it natural and convenient. It was aggravated by no agrarian difiiculty, and by no division of the nation into opposite religious camps. In spite of all its partition into diverse dissenting sects, the broad basis of Presbytery practically dominated and united the nation. The Roman Catholics were powerless. The Episcopalians did not belong to that section of society from which sedition springs. Scotland was naturally slow to admit any ground for gratitude as due to the event which brought the loss of her independence; but none the less the weightiest part of the nation was quite conscious of the boon, and would have resisted any attempt to reverse the policy, or to relax the closeness of the legislative partner- ship. Commerce had grown by leaps and bounds. New harbours were built; new facilities for transit were pro moted ; new schemes of material improvement set on foot with the help and under the auspices of the Imperial Parlia- ment. Intercourse, and the interchange of services between the nations, increased. Scotsmen found their way to the colonies, and there, as members of one empire, the distinc- tion between North and South Briton was weakened, if not obliterated. The great professions in England were freely open to Scotsmen, who, as they attained to the prizes of these professions, did not lose their prime interest in Scot- land, but drew the relations of the two countries closer than before. Many of the upper classes of Scotland sent their children to England for education, and, on the other hand, it was no unusual thing for wealthy Englishmen, attracted by the high reputation of some of the Scottish professors, to arrange that their sons should spend a year or two under their charge before entering on the business of life. British armies were led to victory by Scottish as well as by English generals. The wealth of the East Indies was shared by 296 SCOTTISH NATIONALITY AND ENGLISH JEALOUSY. Scotsmen, and the Nabob became a distinctive feature of Scottish even more than of English Society. Scottish litera- ture did not lose its individuality, but its chief representatives in history and in philosophy felt that it could advance only by adopting an English dress, and they sedulously set themselves to acquiring, almost with the labour which the study of a foreign language involved, the niceties of English style. By the time that the century had run little more than half its course, the barriers between the nations had been in great measure obliterated. The two streams were to run in the same course. But it did not follow that the two currents should not preserve their identity, so far as to be distinguish- able even although they flowed within the same channel. Scotland had, in fact, settled for herself a convenient com- promise between her own national existence and that history which she shared as the partner of her southern neighbour. It is our business to describe the forms of that compromise, and to trace its practical working throughout some three generations. In doing so we must follow a method widely- different from that which we would employ were the subject of these pages the history of an independent and self- contained nation. A great part of such a history is excluded from our purview. The larger constitutional questions are no longer to be fought out on Scottish soil. The vicissitudes of government have now another scene, and their effects in Scotland are to be traced only as reflections of what was passing on a larger stage. The exciting contests of the Legislature only awoke faint echoes in Scotland ; and upon the decision of momentous questions which during that period settled the position of Great Britain in the world, Scotland could only exert a comparatively small influence. But none the less during these three generations Scotland has a history of her own. She had a Church, a legal system, above all a national life and national tradition. That national life still lingered in the close-pent purlieus of Edinburgh, which was only gradually beginning to extend herself beyond the narrow ridge that ran between the palace of Holyrood and the castle that crowned the rocky height that now rises in the centre of a city spread round it for miles in every direction. Between that palace — the scene of dramas that have wakened all the chords of romance and poetry — and the castle that serves as the most august monument of the nation's history, there ran one long street, flanked by lofty tenements, to which access was gained by grim, narrow, and noisome passages. Along that street the OLD EDINBURGH. 297 pageants of centuries had passed; high festival and darkest tragedy had been enacted on its causeways; struggles that had shaken all modern nations had seen many of their most exciting episodes transacted there ; and the annals of some of the most illustrious houses of Europe must recall that street in telling of the fates of their most conspicuous members. And in the middle of the eighteenth century the very houses which had been tenanted by the nobility of previous centuries, and which, in their almost barbaric grimness, seem a faithful picture of mediaeval times, still housed the aristocracy, the landed gentry, and the great lawyers of the Scottish capital, who were slow to alter even the outward semblance of that life that had been handed down to them by their ancestors, and who clung to the sordid surroundings that a few years later would have been despised, as habitations, by their own menials. There, in houses piled storey upon storey, whose only access was by a foul-smelling common stair; in airless filth,! and in darkness to which the sun could rarely penetrate, there congregated a proud, albeit a poor, aristocracy, a gay and most sprightly society, one of the most learned and witty professional circles of which Britain could then boast. A few bold and ardent projectors were indeed planning new and visionary developments of the city. To the north of the narrow ridge of rock to which the city clung, and along the back and side of which its lofty tenements were perched, there lay a deep valley at the bottom of which there was a muddy swamp called the Nor' Loch. It was proposed to span that swamp by a bridge which was to be a triumph of modern engineering, and beyond that bridge to extend the city across the spreading fields that reached to the Firth of Forth — those fields over which the beleaguered citizens from the rock-perched city had but a few years before seen the dragoons of Sir John Cope flying in disorder before the Highland hordes that had scattered them at Prestonpans. The older citizens shook their heads at such rash designings. Their city would no longer be the same if they deserted the grim abodes that had housed their fathers for generations back. A new and altered city would then replace the ancient ^ The simplicity of the means by which the most oflPensive household refuse was got rid of in Edinburgh has been often described, and the warning cry which assailed the ears of the nightly wayfarer, "Gardyloo" {gardez Veau), which presaged an unsavoury avalanche. In 1758 the Edinburgh Town Council made some feeble efforts after sanitation, or at least superficial cleanliness. Household nuisances, it was ordained, were to be laid down only between the hours of 11p.m. and 6 a.m. Householders were to keep the gutters clean, and no nuisances were to be thrown from the windows. These rules were probably more honoured in the breach than in the observance ; and generations were yet to pass before any system of drainage was adopted. 298 SCOTTISH NATIONALITY AND ENGLISH JEALOUSY. capital. The past was too closely present with them to allow them to share in such a sacrilegious pilgrimage. Fairer and more convenient mansions ; the more luxurious appurtenances of modern civilisation; the exigencies of sanitation; even the necessities of cleanliness might be obtained in the new faubourg — which certainly were impossible in their present abodes; but at what cost of simple and inexpensive society, with what break-up of old conventions, with what fatal effects upon that homely, dirty, unwholesome, but withal sprightly, vivacious, and intensely social, life which they had inherited from their fathers, and to which they would fain cling, in spite of all the allurements of sun, and air, and sanitation? In such a society, were national traditions likely to die ? Nor was it so in Edinburgh alone. Even where commerce throve, and with it the new influences that commerce brings, it was not at any sacrifice of national characteristics. The shrewd citizens of Glasgow did not wait until new men with new-fangled notions came to exploit their fresh opportunities of colonial enterprise. They knew how to combine their old modes and ancient usages, with a commercial alertness well adapted to work a fresh market with advantage. Their municipal customs were the slow growth of centuries, and time, as well as the uncertainty of their origin, had involved them in hopeless confusion. In the case of the Royal Burghs, it was assumed — even although the assumption had little basis — that charters had at one time or another been granted. But the privileges rested upon little else than prescription, and formed the subject of constant litigation. These privileges comprised an exclusive right of trading which operated most harmfully upon the advancement of commerce, and which had in great part fallen into desuetude. A jovial body called the Convention of Royal Burghs assumed to itself a right of supervision and of settling disputes: and to its action, soon after the Union, was due the settlement, in some sort of order, of the " setts " of the Royal Burghs — the name given to the ordinances which established their privileges, and ordained the manner of electing magistrates, &c. Subsequent litiga- tion (in the latter part of the eighteenth century) proved the authority of the Convention to have been illegally assumed : and the law of Scottish municipal government remained in a very chaotic state until the Municipal Reform Act of 1846. But on whatever basis it rested, this at least was common to all, — that the administration of the Scottish burghs was in the hands of purely co-optative bodies, and that the general body of the people had no power to interfere. Municipal adminis- tration remained the closest of unreformed governments — GLASGOW AND ITS GROWTH. 299 narrow, strict, conventional, and even bigoted, but in the main honest and upright — a business which could be done with clean hands and sound consciences. Had the magistrates of Glasgow been merely dullards, clinging to old habits, they might have let the new harvest pass to other hands. Had they been men who knew no ambition but that of gain, recognised no distinction but that of comparative commercial acuteness, and who governed themselves by no inherited traditions, and were tired by no national pride, their city might have sprung up with mushroom-like growth into the ignoble magnitude of some cosmopolitan caravanserai in the Western States of America. As it was, it grew steadily but surely, from the trim little town nestling in green fields and washed by a limpid but shallow river, that had moved the admiration of successive travellers for its well-ordered and cleanly picturesqueness. The account of all of them is the same. Defoe tells us in his ' Tour in Scotland ' that " Glasgow is one of the cleanliest, most beautiful, and best-built cities in Great Britain." "Glasgow," says Captain Burt a few years later, " is to outward appearance, the prettiest and most uni- form town that I ever saw, and I believe there is nothing like it in Britain." So Pococke in 1747 finds it equally striking in its beauty. "The old town stands on the hill at some distance from the river, and bounded to the east by the Molendinar rivulet in a rocky glen. The Cathedral is at the east end, and the rest of the hill, formed into gardens to the south, has a pretty effect." Of what the city was to become the beginnings were alread}^ made, and its progress was rapid. It had not, however, as yet laid aside the douce manners, nor abandoned the decent observances, of its many prototypes of Bailie Nicol Jarvie, although it was making its first step towards the vast and solid expansion that in a hundred years was to convert it into the second city of the Empire, receiv- ing at its quays freights from every part of the world, and distributing its manufactures into every known mart. Not less than the capital, Glasgow learned how to rise to new opportunities while preserving the characteristics of the soil. The same spirit is found amongst the territorial magnates of the Lowlands ; keen to appreciate, and prone, almost beyond the bounds of prudence, to adopt, all the newest methods of English agriculture; vying with one another in an eager pursuit of all the latest improvements ; exploiting, in obedience to a new demand, the riches that lay beneath the surface of the soil, and which were to make the wealth of Scotland independent of an inclement climate; yet all the while preserving, with absolute fidelity, the ancient usages, 300 SCOTTISH NATIONALITY AND ENGLISH JEALOUSY. religious, social, economical, that were linked with the life of the nation, and constituted its central fibre. So also in the remote fastnesses of the Highlands, an ancient system was crumbling into ruins in the fall of the hereditary jurisdictions, but was, all the while, establishing a new hold upon the imaginations and the sympathies of the nation, by its tradi- tions of romance, of poetry, of the undying instinct of race — a hold so strong, indeed, that a somewhat clumsy literary fiction, under the name of the ' Poems of Ossian,' gained great vogue, only because it seemed to reflect with some truth the ancient traditions of the race, and to clothe them in a dress of weird and picturesque language. In every aspect we may trace this double tendency of Scottish life : the desire, on the one hand, to cling to old traditions, to hug to its breast all national characteristics, to remain staunch to national usages and customs ; and, on the other, to grasp the spirit of the new age, and to adapt itself to the functions which it had to play as a partner in an expanding empire. Material changes, the preponderance of common interests, increasing intercourse, were already bringing Englishmen and Scotsmen close to one another, and as time moved on were to bring them much closer still. But in 1750, they still stood leagues apart, sundered by tradition, taste, sentiment, language, and all the conditions of life. Individual Scotsmen penetrated into Eng- lish society, and made of themselves its intimate members. The nation as a whole shared in a business partnership with England, but the untravelled Scot knew nothing of the Englishman and shared none of his thoughts. It was in the sphere of general administration that Scot- land approached most closely to the main stream of English politics. But even here it would be a total misconception to suppose that the vicissitudes of parties in each country had any very close association. Those chiefly responsible for Scottish administration had to be more or less in touch with the leading English Ministers. From them, or at least through them, they received directions, and to them they transmitted reports and obtained the royal sanction for their acts. In regard to principle they were supposed to be in sympathy with the English Ministry, although this did not prevent occasional opposition on the part of the Scottish Minister to the action of the English Government, and did not necessarily imply that he implicitly followed them in regard to imperial questions. But the practice of the English Government varied in regard to this from time to time. Sometimes the practice was to deal with Scottish affairs through various London offices, according to the nature of the business that had to be SCOTTISH ADMIiNISTRATION. 301 transacted. The Secretary of State for the Home Depart- ment, for instance, frequently assumed into his own hands the management of Scottish business. The tendency of this was, of course, to lessen the distinctively Scottish element in ad- ministration, and to force it into conformity with English methods. At other times Scottish administration was mainly in the hands of one Scotsman, through whom all reports were received, on whose recommendation appointments were made, and upon whom an independent responsibility rested. With- out the name he necessarily occupied the position and wielded the power of a representative of the crown. The extent of his general agreement with his English colleagues was some- what indefinite, as was also the extent of the confidence they reposed in him. Occasionally — and for the last time in the case of the Marquis of Tweeddale in 1744 — this independent responsibility had been recognised by the nomination of the Scottish Minister as Secretary for Scotland ; but Tweeddale's administration was coincident with the outbreak of the Rebel- lion of 1745 ; his capacity was unequal to the task of dealing with it ; he fell with the short-lived Ministry that had replaced Walpole, and his was the last nomination to this office, until it was revived in recent years. For the most part the respon- sibility for Scottish affairs was a matter understood rather than definitely defined, and its extent depended more upon the character and ability of the agent than upon any fixed arrangement. During the reign of George II. the chief direction of Scottish affairs rested in the hands of Archibald, Earl of Islay. He was a man of marked ability, high attainments, and great energy ; and on the whole, although he often stooped to the devices of political intrigue,^ and was distrusted by many, he maintained a high character for honour and rectitude, and exercised vast influence in Scotland. His part in the adminis- tration continued to be the largest one throughout the whole Ministry of Walpole, although Walpole suspected him of hav- ing betrayed him and sided with his enemies, and although both he and his brother, John, Duke of Argyle, whom he suc- ceeded as Duke in 1743, had on several occasions — notably in regard to the course of action after the Porteous riot — strenu- ously opposed the views of English Ministers. In the later years of the reign, after a short interruption, the Duke re- ^ He obtains a mixed character from the caustic pen of Horace Walpole, as "a man of parts, quickness, knowledge, temper, dexterity, and judgment ; but of little truth, honour or principle, and no attachment but to his own interest. A pedantic, dirty, shrewd, unbred fellow of a college, with mean aspect, bred to the duplicity of the common law and made a peer, would have made such a man. " 302 SCOTTISH NATIONALITY AND ENGLISH JEALOUSY. covered his supremacy, and preserved it amidst all the vicissi- tudes of Administrations to his death in 1761. In these later years the English Government had neither time nor power to interfere much in Scottish affairs. The Duke of Newcastle was busied with all the pettiness of personal squabbles, and was only too ready to rid himself of a branch of administra- tion for which he had not the necessary knowledge, and which could not aid him in the lower devices of parliamentary cor- ruption. Pitt was absorbed in the weightier questions of foreign wars and in the direction of imperial policy. In steering his way amidst the changes and vicissitudes of party government in these later years of the reign, Argyle had to deal with no strong predilection for either side on the part of the Scottish nation. On the whole, that nation was content to accept the general policy of the Whigs ; but the intrigues of the Court, the selfish combinations of various cliques, and the restless struggle for place and power passed almost un- noticed, and for the most part disregarded, by the Scottish people. Their interest centred in questions relating exclu- sively to Scotland, although at times the eagle-like supremacy of Pitt and the glory of his conquests roused them to enthu- siasm on personal and patriotic grounds. The vast majority of the nation were sincerely attached to the Hanoverian dynasty, and were impatient of the political intrigues which troubled the peace of a monarch of whose foibles they knew nothing, whose reign had added much to the greatness and glory of the empire, and whose Ministers they were prepared to support so long as Scottish interests were not disturbed. And for the most part they found these interests unassailed and secure. The close of the reign found a Ministry in power which rested on the broadest basis of party. It united New- castle, with all his wide-spreading system of parliamentary management, and his great Whig connection : Pitt, the idol of the nation, whose genius raised him head and shoulders above all competitors ; the Grenvilles and the Bedfords, and a long list of men who secured the allegiance of almost every type of political opinion : men who had basked in the sunshine of Whig prosperity in the past, and men who were in the near future to be the leaders of the Tories. Opposition was prac- tically hushed to silence. Even for an English politician it would have been hard to describe the complexion of the Government ; to Scotsmen it was simply His Majesty's Govern- ment, and as such commanded their loyalty. The only topic of criticism was their administration of Scottish affairs, and that was satisfactorily managed by Argyle and his henchmen. It would be hard to say whether in 1760 the balance of ACCESSION OF GEORGE III. 303 Scottish opinion inclined most to the Whigs or to the Tories, if we regard these parties as representing any set of principles. Anything like republican or subversive opinions, although at a later day they secured some adherents, would probably now have received but short shrift in Scotland. The landed in- terest was strong, and no question of social or political reform had presented itself to the nation. While a large number were in favour of some alterations of the law of patronage in the Church, yet the Moderate party, which was then domi- nant, strongly opposed it ; and there was little likelihood that such a question should be a crucial one in the division of parties in the Imperial Parliament. On the whole, the in- stinct of the nation was for settled government, although amongst the educated classes there was a large infusion of a speculative spirit which might easily develop into a move- ment towards political reform. It was easy to foresee that the bent of Scottish feeling would be decided by the treatment which might be meted out to questions of purely Scottish interest, and not by any strong sympathy for or against the main political parties in the Imperial Parliament. Such was the position when George III. came to the throne. His accession involved, almost necessarily, a recasting of the Ministry. By temperament, by education, and by conviction, he was inclined towards the firm maintenance, at least, if not the extension, of the authority of the Crown. He was resolved, not from ambition, but from dogged and consci- entious obstinacy, to be no king in name alone, and to allow no overshadowing of his own power by the dominant influ- ence of his Ministers. The fact that he was the third of his family to ascend the throne, that by birth, by association, and by sympathy he was entirely English, and that with him the foreign element, which had inspired distrust and fostered unpopularity, came to an end — all gained for him a secure loyalty which had been accorded neither to his grand- father nor to his great-grandfather. This concurrent loyalty added weight to his own bias in favour of increasing the personal element of the throne in the Administration. Other circumstances contributed to the same end. The very strength of the Ministry hastened its fall. It comprehended so many shades of opinion that divergence was sure to show itself within the ranks. The triumphs of the war blinded those whose share in these triumphs was greatest to the burdens it imposed. They forgot that throughout the nation there was increasing grumbling against taxation, rendered necessary chiefly by the foreign connections of the Hanoverian family — connections of which the people fondly hoped that 304 SCOTTISH NATIONALITY AND ENGLISH JEALOUSY. they were now to be set free. But if some of the Ministers were disposed to ignore these grumblings, there were others who shared the feeling of uneasiness and discontent and who longed to see some period to the war. The rifts in the Ministry began, and they soon widened until what had been a compact and secure citadel became a rickety shed through which every wind could blow. Other adverse influences told in the same way. The loyalty which the young king commanded had rallied round the throne a Toryism of a deeper shade than was represented in the Government — the Toryism that found a home in the breasts of those who had cast their Jacobitism, but were ready to find a new centre for their hopes and their loyalty in the person of their youthful sovereign. It was a Toryism which drew its chief inspiration not always from very well-argued political theories, but chiefly from a sturdy and undying detestation of the Whigs, under whose domination they had groaned for more than a generation. It was shared by all classes, and it repre- sented not so much a divergence of political opinion as a fundamental discordance of temperament. The Whig atti- tude — limited, selfish, conventional, and centred in a little clique that had personal aims to serve — could not perman- ently attract the nation. The honest, albeit bemused, brain of the country squire moved him to welcome the discomfiture of the Whigs and to hope that their supremacy was at an end. Once more the older landed gentry were seen at Court, from which they had been virtually banished during all these years when placemen and the moneyed classes had pushed them aside. Fashions that had not been seen for twenty years — and then only for a brief period — again crowded the ante- rooms of St James's. But the simple squire and the old- world dowager would not have accounted alone for the change of feeling. Men of brains, too, welcomed the break-up of an intolerable thraldom. What was hated by the country squire was despised by the intellect of a Johnson and a Wesley. It is easy to sneer at the illogical loyalty which could find in a Hanoverian sovereign a centre round which advanced monarchical principles could gather. But human nature is not constructed upon logical principles; and yet, even were logic in the case, the Tory squire, who was just casting the slough of Jacobitism, as well as the deeper thinker who refused to accept the Whig theory of the constitution as a sound one, might perhaps find a consistent defence for cloth- ing a Hanoverian king in the garb of monarchical theories. If it was only that thereby the reign of Whiggism might be ended, the principles which underlay the ideals of Straflbrd REVIVING TORYISM. 305 and of Clarendon, and had found exponents in Swift and in Bolingbroke, were not without attraction in 1760 for intellects brighter than that of the honest but prejudiced Tory squire. But before the actual break up of what had been a strong and a triumphant Ministry could come, a practical ground of dissension must present itself, and this was speedily found in the desire of a large section to bring the war to a conclusion. Its glories had been great, but its cost was overwhelming. It was easy to arouse a storm of indignation against any possible peace. To the conquerors, unless they have absolutely crushed their foe, any terms appear inadequate as an exchange for a long series of victories. In proportion as the area of warlike operations has been wide, so the aims that should be attained are vague and indefinite. The burdens that were lately so galling are soon forgotten, and popular opinion is apt to think of peace as a boon only to those who have had the worst of the war. A few more efforts, a few new victories, it may well be argued, would clinch the triumph and leave the enemy ready to accept any terms of surrender. It was only natural that to Pitt the peace should seem a poor ex- change for triumphs in which his own part was the greatest, and those who had no real share in these triumphs shared his disappointment because peace involved the loss of their own power. The moneyed men of the city, who found their profits in an increasing national debt, and the crowd in the street, who missed their accustomed bonfires on the news of victory, swelled the outcry and stormed against what they represented as a shameful betrayal of the nation's hopes. After a lapse of fifty years history strangely repeated itself. In 1710 as in 1760 a seemingly impregnable Whig Ministry had crumbled to its fall. The Tory party in each case made a bold bid for power, and endeavoured to cement that power by bringing to a conclusion a war which had been conducted with signal success, but with somewhat dubious results, by the Whig Government. In 1763 as in 1713 the peace was obtained in spite of the rabid denunciations of those who had found in the war the best buttress of their own power. In the earlier case the charge of Jacobite intrigue had been added to that of betrayal of English interests; in the later case, the added charge had been not that of Jacobitism, but of designs of arbitrary straining of the royal prerogative. The parallel was so far curiously exact. But there was one important difference. In 1713 the Tory Government had on its side a master -hand, who could place at its service the mightiest satirical power that English literature had ever seen. In 1763 the Tories had no Swift, and the most vigor- u 306 SCOTTISH NATIONALITY AND ENGLISH JEALOUSY. ous pens and voices in the nation, inferior as they were to his, were the devoted slaves of their opponents. To examine in detail these disputes would lead us far beyond the sphere of Scottish history. But one very pro- minent aspect of this furious faction fight, into which the nation was plunged before the new reign was many months old, directly and immediately concerns Scotland. The de- feated party were shrewd enough to see that an outcry becomes much more popular which has a personal object. Those who had stood closest to the young king before his accession, and whose counsels were believed now to be his chief guides, were his mother, the Princess of Wales, and the Earl of Bute. Upon them the whole storm of popular fury was skilfully directed. The most atrocious scandals regard- ing the relations between Bute and the Princess, which in the confidence of private talk were mentioned only with a smile of absolute incredulity, were studiously spread abroad for pop- ular consumption.^ By those whose business it was to inflame the English crowd, no representation of Bute's tyrannical designs was held too absurd for grave recital. It was nothing to them that this respectable and high-minded, but by no means highly-gifted, nobleman showed none of the usual signs of ambition; that he had reached more than middle age without any interference in politics; that he sought the first opportunity of retiring from ministerial responsibility, and, in order to dispel the charges of under- hand influence, lived largely in those southern countries of which the climate suited his precarious health, and where those masterpieces of art which were his chief delight were mostly to be found. Even in the limited sphere of Scottish politics Bute was hitherto unknown save as the nephew of the Duke of Argyle, who had no high opinion of his abilities. That such a man should suddenly develop into an ambitious, bold, and ruthless conspirator against the constitution of his country; that he should have sought retiral just when his schemes were, in the judgment of his enemies, crowned by complete success; and that he should have retired without any of those rewards which were held by most Whig states- men to be the chief end of statesmanship — these were indeed prodigies in the world of politics little short of miraculous. But yet not only was this portentous fiction gravely concocted out of the simple fact that an early friend and adviser con- ^ Wilkes, to his friends, did not hesitate to declare his absolute disbelief in such ignoble stories, but this did not prevent him from insinuating them in the ' North Briton ' ; and even Macaulay, who cannot seriously have given to them a moment's credit, mentions them with a rhetorical phrase that might easily im- ply belief. THE MINISTRY OF BUTE. 307 tinued to exercise considerable influence over the mind of his youthful pupil, but its acceptance has become a fixed article of belief with every Whig historian. The anger of the Whigs at their discomfiture did not expend itself entirely upon the Princess and the favourite. The ribaldries vented upon them were ignoble enough. It was bad enough that the mother of the King could not show herself at the theatre or in the street without being assailed by foul-mouthed indecencies which passed uncon- demned by eminent statesmen who found a sweet-smelling incense in the flatteries of the same crowds. The rancour of faction could hardly go farther than when the King and his Ministers could not reach the Mansion-House without military protection against a crowd that reserved its cheers for the statesman who had retired, but had retired covered with marks of his sovereign's favour and the recipient of his lavish bounty. But the rage of popular frenzy did not stop here. It was not satisfied without involving in the howl of indignation against Bute the whole Scottish nation. It is true that the Earl of Bute was a Scotsman, a Scottish land- lord and a Scottish peer. But his family connections were very largely to be found in England ; in his own country he had lived a retired life and he did not even hold the very modest political distinction of being a representative peer. Whatever his supremacy in the councils of his sovereign, it certainly brought no accession of favour or of influence to Scotsmen. Many of that nation already occupied the highest positions on the English Bench ; amongst English politicians, and in the English Church, their number was neither in- creased nor diminished by any act of his. Amongst men who adorned literature at the beginning of the reign an astonish- ing number were Scotsmen whose merits were acknowledged quite apart from any national feeling on one side or the other. A few of these shared the favours of the Crown, but the num- ber who owed such favour to any intervention of Lord Bute was exceedingly small. One of his chief Scottish proteges was the very orthodox Whig, John Home, the author of " Douglas." All this is not matter of conjecture, still less an inference drawn from any prejudiced view of facts ; it is a truth too evident to require proof. It is equally true that the inter- course between Englishmen and Scotsmen was becoming day by day more close, and that such intercourse was darkened by no mutual repulsion or scorn. Scores of the most repre- sentative men of either nation indulged in cordial corres- pondence, into which the thought never intrudes itself that any barrier of racial difference came between them. There 308 SCOTTISH NATIONALITY AND ENGLISH JEALOUSY. were occasional outbursts of jealousy, but these took more often the dress of banter and of jesting than of rancour or of spleen. Even Wilkes, who revelled in abuse of the Scottish nation, and returned weekly to the congenial task of bespattering the nation with petty insults, could nevertheless write with consummate cynicism in a letter to a friend : "I love the people of Scotland for their hospitality and friendship, as much as I admire them for their strong manly sense, erudition, and excellent taste. I never was happier than when in Scotland last." The half -bantering abuse of Scot- land and Scotsmen was doubtless a tradition of some standing which could occasionally assume some bitterness of expression and was confined to no one party. The Tory thought it right to decry Scotsmen because they were Presbyterians, and there- fore irreligious or hypocritical; because they were poor, and therefore turbulent and discontented. The rugged prejudices of Dr Johnson made him assume towards Scotland a tone of contemptuous intolerance, but it did not prevent him from forming ardent friendships with Scotsmen, admiring all that was romantic in her history, and rousing himself in his old age to explore her remotest regions at the cost of much irksome labour and unwonted fatigue. All this half -jocular abuse amounted to very little. But it was in the mouths of the more virulent amongst the self-styled patriots that it developed into studied insult such as might well have planted seeds of enduring enmity. No party pamphlet was complete without its quota of virulence hurled against a nation with every device that might make it the more galling to national pride. The Court was represented as crammed with needy Scotsmen eager to clutch the spoils of England. The darts of the witlings were sharpened at their expense. "He could not," wrote one,^ " go to the Court for fear of the itch, which would reduce him to go to the Princess's Court for brimstone." The long catalogue of insults which the drunken fury and coarse wit of Churchill strung together in the ' Prophecy of Famine' met with rapturous applause. No Scotsman could attend a popular assembly in London or pass along its streets without meeting on every side tokens of the bitter hatred and contempt of his country which had been sedulously spread abroad in order to take vengeance on a Minister to whose influence the fall of the lately dominant Whig party was ascribed. Throughout all this, the attitude of Scotland in the main was one of contemptuous indifference. The struggles of English parties were very little to her. The foul-mouthed 1 Sir W. Stanhope. PREJUDICE AGAINST SCOTLAND. 309 vituperation of a Wilkes or a Churchill she could afford to despise. When we look for any decided signs of contem- porary Scottish feeling, what strikes us most is the calm ignoring of the attacks which seemed to prevail. Occa- sionally there were reprisals or isolated bursts of angry retort. Wilkes received a challenge — which he managed with some adroitness and detriment to his honour to elude — to answer for his insults in a duel ; but it was sent, not by an inhabitant of Scotland, but by an obscure scion of a pro- scribed Scottish family of the name of Forbes, who had enlisted in the service of the French king. Although an attitude of dignified contempt was the best treatment for such Billingsgate, these insults were not with- out their permanent eflTect. In 1760, as we have said, it would have been hard to say towards which side of English politics the prevailing Scottish feeling lay. As time went on its sympathies became much more marked. It was inevitable that Scotland should associate the political principles of those who posed as the friends and vindicators of liberty against the aggressions of the Crown with the venomous abuse that had slandered Scotland, because it chanced that a Scottish noble- man did for a few years command the confidence of the king. Fortunately these slanders bred no perpetual jealousy between the nations. But the rabid arguments which sought to main- tain that the liberties of the country were in danger from which it could be preserved only by defenders with the cyni- cal effrontery of Wilkes, the besotted rancour of Churchill, or the vulgar braggadocio of Alderman Beckford, were involved in the same contempt with which the abuse was received. The "patriotism" which found such representatives did not prove to the taste of Scotland; and from the rancour of agitation which for ten years disturbed England and made her party politics a by- word and a reproach — which cloaked the most sordid devices of faction under the specious name of a defence of liberty — Scotland, fortunately for her honour, stood proudly aloof. Naturally this stirred the bile of all who found the touchstone of political rectitude in firm adherence to the prime article of their creed — the immacu- late virtues of the Whigs. It would be amusing, if it did not reveal the depths to which political hypocrisy might sink, to find Horace Walpole gravely concluding a tirade against the encroachments of tyranny with these word^: "The Scotch were whatever their masters wished them to be, and too envious of the English, and became too much provoked by them, not to lend all their mischievous abilities towards the ruin of a Constitution whose benefits the English 310 SCOTTISH NATIONALITY AND ENGLISH JEALOUSY. had imparted to them, but did not like they should engross." ^ But it is perhaps a mistake to attach to any political utter- ance of Horace Walpole more weight than might fairly be ascribed to the chatter of a sprightly monkey. Scotland might at least be grateful to the abuse of Wilkes and of Churchill if it saved her from any sympathy with their sordid and hypocritical defence of liberty. Withdrawn from all but a half -scornful contempt for the rabid faction fight which absorbed English politics, Scotland was occupied chiefly with her own aflairs. The accession of George III. made no change in the administration of Scottish affairs, which remained in the hands of the Duke of Argyle. Stable as was his influence, he learned before his death that it might be strained too far, and his last nomination of a domiciled Englishman as member for Edinburgh met with a rebuff*. His power continued, however, until his death on 15th April 1761, when it naturally passed to his nephews, Lord Bute and Mr Stuart Mackenzie. As usual, the influence of the "favourite" was exaggerated by those who saw no scheme of ambition too great to be attributed to him. The crown of Scotland, too, has fallen on Bute's head," are the words of Walpole on the effect of the death of Argyle. The belief in Bute's all-pervading influence was too firmly implanted in many Whiggish breasts not to lead to the direct and immediate conclusion that every change in Scottish administration must tend to place the direction of Scottish affairs in his hands. As a fact, the threads of Scottish administration remained in the hands of his brother, Stuart Mackenzie, for some three or four years. He was naturally in constant communication with Lord Bute, who took the interest in Scottish affairs that was inseparable from his position as a Scottish landlord and nobleman, but whose influence was necessarily bounded by the limitations of his knowledge. In tracing the course of Scottish affairs for the next ten years, the part which Bute has to play in the narrative is of the very smallest.^ 1 Memoirs of George III. , vol. iv. p. 84. ^ Scotland was so much involved in the assaults upon Lord Bute's Administra- tion that it has been necessary to refer in some detail to the circumstances connected with it. To follow all the Ministerial changes of the next ten years would be to write the history of the United Kingdom, not of Scotland. But for convenience of reference it may be well to summarise these very shortly. Pitt's resignation in October 1761 left Bute virtually Prime Minister, free to carry out the negotiations for the peace. That peace was arranged before the close of 1762, and was signed in February 1763. Within a few weeks Bute resigned, and for the two years which followed George Grenville was Prime Minister. The period was memorable chiefly for the passing of the Stamp Act, which first stirred the discontent of the American colonies, and also for 8C0TLAND AND ENGLISH POLITICIANS. 311 It would indeed be a serious error to suppose that the trend of Scottish history is to be learned by tracing the designs or following out the machinations of those who from time to time had charge of Scottish business. This is not without its interest, and occasionally it illustrates the progress of events ; but we must not forget the peculiar conditions under which these Scottish agents of the Govern- ment had to work. They served in a double capacity: to a certain extent they were the representatives to Scotland of the principles of the party which for the time were dominant, but to a far greater extent they were the repre- sentatives of Scotland to the executive at Westminster. Whatever Cabinet was in power had to find agents, more or less in sympathy with its views, to deal with Scottish questions. But the tie of party allegiance was not very strong in the case of such agents, and on more than one occasion they had, as representatives of Scottish feeling, to take an independent line of their own. This might be irksome and inconvenient to their principles, and such independence was occasionally resented; but it was found difficult to govern Scotland in any other way. The Scottish members of Parliament were either keen and quick-witted advocates steeped in the traditions of their profession, seasoned representatives of the society to which they belonged, and reflecting in every trick of speech and the prosecution of Wilkes, and the important question it involved as to the legality of general warrants. In July 1765 Grenville's Administration was replaced by that of Lord Rockingham, which repealed the Stamp Act, and did something to soothe the irritation which Grenville's arbitrary measures had provoked. But Rockingham was unable to withstand the attacks of a varied but powerful opposition ; and in 1766 the King had recourse to the more powerful assistance of Pitt, whose influence in the nation surpassed all others. In July 1766 Pitt became Lord Privy Seal and Prime Minister, and was created Earl of Chatham. But his acceptance of a peerage vastly diminished his influence in the nation, and failing health had weakened his powers. From the spring of 1767 he virtually ceased to play any part in the Administration of which he was nominal head, and finally retired in October 1768. His colleagues, the Duke of Grafton and Lord Camden, the Chan- cellor, remained in office for more than a year longer. But they became gradually estranged from the policy of the King, who exercised a predomi- nant influence, and whose most trusted Minister was Lord North, leader of the House of Commons and the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The bitterness of faction was never more intense ; the attacks upon the Ministers of the Crown were never more fierce, culminating as they did in the powerful and scathing satire that poured forth at rapid intervals during the three years from January 1769 from the mysterious pen shrouded under the name of Junius. Office was no restful haven, and for those who felt that their influence upon the Administration was virtually gone, it became a galling and intolerable burden. At length, in January 1770, the Duke of Grafton and Lord Camden resigned ; the Whig element was virtually excluded from the Administration, and Lord North entered upon his long and disastrous Ad- ministration as First Lord of the Treasury. 312 SCOTTISH NATIONALITY AND ENGLISH JEALOUSY. manner its racy characteristics, or they were landowners of old family whose affections were rooted in Scottish soil. From among these the agents of the Government had to be selected; but they were not men who could quickly learn the shibboleths of English party, or who were disposed to forget that they were Scotsmen first and members of His Majesty's Government only in the second place. A few of them, no doubt, entered more deeply into party bonds, and sought preferment in wider and more ambitious scenes; but as they did so, they gradually drifted away from Scottish administration and their names no longer belong to Scottish history. At times, no doubt, this sturdy independence was resented, and the English Government endeavoured to merge Scottish administration in the English executive, so that no single man or set of men should assume a separate respon- sibility or acquire the weight that attached to the repre- sentative of Scotland.^ But for the most part that tendency was resisted, and English Ministers were taught to under- stand that Scottish representation must remain in Scottish hands, and that those responsible for it must not forget in the ties of party allegiance the separate duty that lay upon them as the representatives of Scottish interests. It is this which makes the contrast between the Scottish and Irish executive so marked. The Scottish Minister owed allegiance to his English colleagues, but he was never allowed to forget that he was also the protagonist for his own country. The Irish officials too often limited their duty by the allegiance which they owed to those whose subordinates they were, and neither knew the feelings, nor cared to risk their posi- tion in defence of the interests, of the country that they had to administer. So arranged, Irish administration pro- ceeded smoothly, but it sowed the seeds of rebellion and gave nurture to disaffection. The government of Scotland gave occasion to much friction, and its footsteps were often dogged by outspoken grumbling or angry assertions of divided views and interests, but it left room for the plants of national independence and imperial loyalty to grow and flourish side by side. ^ It is curious how far this feeling prevailed in England. The dismissal of Mr Stuart Mackenzie from the office of Privy Seal by Grenville in 1765 was strongly denounced by Pitt. But even when he denounced that dismissal, and made it a reproach to the Marquis of Rockingham that he did not replace Mackenzie, he was careful to add that the restitution was not to involve his restoration "as Minister for Scotland" (Caldwell Correspondence, Part IL vol. ii. p. 79). The concentration of Scottish administration in one hand was felt to be a dangerous element in the balance of English parties. SCOTTISH MILITIA QUESTION. 313 Whatever the provocation given or felt as a consequence of the rabid invective with which the very name of Scotland had been pursued in the heat of English faction, it produced no tendency towards a sulky isolation. With an intelligence that accepted, with cordial admiration and abundant grati- tude, much in English modes and usages that a jealous eye might have deemed alien to her own traditions, Scotland knew how to combine a temper sensitive to any slight, and alert to detect anything that might injure or impair national independence. It is just this combination that gives character and interest to Scottish history. Even the year 1761 saw a striking illustration of it. In August we find the Select Society of Edinburgh promoting a society for improving the reading and speaking of the English language in Scotland. The society was to be supported by voluntary subscription, and it had the patronage of Lord Auchinleck (the father of James Bos well). Lord Alemoor, Sir Adam Ferguson, Dr Blair, Principal Robertson, and the great architect, Adam. It is curious to notice that the elocutionist employed — to whose instigation, indeed, the scheme was chiefly due — was Thomas Sheridan. No illiberal or bigoted Scottish prejudice would have prompted such a plan ; nor would it have thriven had the prevailing feeling of Scotland been one of jealous provincialism. All that was intellectually strongest in Scot- land felt that her proper place in general literature could only be attained by learning an adept use of the tools of the literary trade, and that the most essential of these tools was English style, and not any pedantic or perverse preservation of the vernacular. It was in no way inconsistent with this that the poetic genius of Scotland should spend its best energies, as it was now doing, in the revival of the vernacular language and the native spirit of her song. Still less was this liberal acceptance of a style alien to her own inconsistent with a vigorous assertion of Scottish privileges. The same winter which followed the foundation of this society for improving the reading and speaking of English saw the renewal of the long-standing struggle for a Scottish militia. England had now obtained a militia of her own, which was felt to be not only a defence against disorder, but a safeguard of liberty. To Scotland a similar privilege was denied. Was Scotland, it was indignantly asked, not to be trusted with such a safeguard ? Was she a conquered country, to be denied the organisation of a constitutional force so successful in England ? Was the memory of a rebellion, of which no renewal was possible, to be an everlasting bar against a 314 SCOTTISH NATIONALITY AND ENGLISH JEALOUSY. privilege which was her due? The irritation which the refusal caused was not confined to one class. Citizens and countrymen, landowners and merchants, professional men and farmers, clergymen and lawyers, all banded together to assert the rights of their country. Meetings were convened, clubs were formed, pamphlets were written, every national senti- ment was appealed to, in order to press for a right the denial of which implied a mean and unworthy suspicion of Scottish loyalty. All this vigorous lashing of the tail of the Scottish lion was useful enough in its way. It was absurd to argue that the danger of Jacobitism forbade the organisation of a militia. The mingled feelings of jealousy and timidity that led to its refusal were contemptible, and time was certain to dissipate them, as in truth it did. But meanwhile Scotland did not greatly suffer. The lashing of the lion's tail is at no time an unhealthy exercise, and if it produces no very practical effect, this is frequently because there are divided feelings even in the breast of the noble animal. So it was now. It might to a casual observer seem as if there were no discordant counsels, and as if Scotland were roused as one man to the indignant assertion of her rights. But in truth it was not so. The wave of popular anger was not unbroken. The meetings were not all of one mind. If most of the towns and counties were loud in their demand for a militia, a large and powerful minority were inclined to doubt, and even to oppose. Jacobitism was doubtless a mythical danger, but was Scotland rich enough to bear such an expense ? Had she a sufficient number of leisured and moneyed men to officer such a force ? Was her commerce sufficiently secure, and had it so safely weathered its infant stages, that it could suffer such a serious competitor as a citizen militia with its many distractions ? Was the population sufficient to support it, and could the labourers be spared from agriculture, where generations of arrears had to be overtaken ? All these were doubts which might and did enter into the minds of some patriotic Scotsmen, and till they were removed, Scotland might well content herself with a vigorous assertion of her rights, but await with patience the fitting moment for their practical assertion. That moment came in good time. These two contrasting movements are typical of much in the relations between Scotland and England at this time. Proud of her traditions, Scotland was not so foolish as to let that pride blind her to what was to be learned from her neighbours. Determined to assert her rights, she took care to let no injury pass unnoticed, even though the moment THE CHUECH AND DISSENT. 315 might not be propitious for their practical assertion. If doubts appeared even in her own domestic circle, she allowed time for these doubts to be removed. She could be patient because she had confidence enough in her strength to secure ultimate relief. But such international questions which had one aspect for home and another for external application really occupied only a small part of her attention. She had home affairs which absorbed her more completely, and which could be discussed with no interference from outside quarters. Of these the principal was the Church. By the beginning of the reign of George III. the chief dissenting bodies had taken up a position from which no return to the central body was possible. They were riveted fast to their own notions of ecclesiastical government, and of the proper relations between Church and State ; and these inevitably drove them further and further apart, as they were matters not of speculative theology, as to which men's minds must necessarily vary as time passes, but matters of daily practical life, differences on which must bring men into constant collision, and on which divergent opinions become more and more antagonistic as the actual struggles sharpen the tempers of those engaged in them. The peculiarity of dissent in Scotland is that it rarely arises from doctrinal or speculative disputes. In regard to such matters there was seldom any difference of opinion, so far as the formularies of the different bodies were concerned. The prevailing theo- logical views were Calvinistic, and amongst all who adopted the Presbyterian form of Church government, there was no professed or ostensible variation in regard to this. Different sects might indeed doubt one another's orthodoxy, and might impute to one another a laxity which, in the abstract, they unanimously condemned. Their fundamental ground of divi- sion was as to the title-deeds of the ecclesiastical domain, and the rights which that domain could claim against the State and the Civil Law. This is a feature which due consideration will show us to be essentially characteristic of a Church where disputes were fought out, not in the writings of theologians, but in the heated arena of ecclesiastical courts. There had indeed, as we have already seen, been disputes in Scotland as to the fundamental doctrine of salvation by faith or by works — one of those topics which, in one form or another, are typical of contradictory views of human destiny and of the foundation of human ethics. But it is worth observing that the main weapons of that controversy had not been of home 316 SCOTTISH NATIONALITY AND ENGLISH JEALOUSY. manufacture, but had been imported from other armouries; and such disputes had all merged themselves in the more practical and better defined struggle as to the relations between Church and State. While, however, this struggle indicates no professed diver- gence as to the criterion of orthodoxy in Christian belief, it must not be supposed that the dominant party in the Church was not divided from the Dissenters by wide variety in tone and feeling. The Dissenting bodies had, indeed, by this time, stripped off much of their wilder extravagances. The antic speech, and uncouth demeanour, which had, only a generation before, been typical of them, and had linked the idea of religious fervour and strict orthodoxy with the upturned eyes and sing-song drone of the religious enthusiast, had in great measure been dropped. The younger generation of dissenting clergy were, like their predecessors, men who were respectable by the strictness of their lives, but who, unlike these pre- decessors, had discarded many of the signs by which that earlier generation had gained their popularity, and increased their hold over a people with whom the frenzy of an en- thusiastic religion was an inheritance of the past. They had retained, however, a formality of tone in which those ill- affected to them discovered something of hypocrisy, and they rejoiced in a behaviour and in a mental attitude which divided them sharply from the more secular spirits of the day. With them the rigours of ecclesiastical discipline suffered no relaxation. They clung to the habits of extempore prayer and preaching, and were ready to pardon or even applaud uncouth eccentricities which were accompanied with the proper unctuousness of tone. Orthodoxy in points which to others appeared trifling was to them a standard from which no deviation could be permitted without bringing down upon the unwary divergent all the terrors of a religion of which the sanctions were revered only in proportion as they were appalling. Even within the Church there were those who sympathised with such an attitude, and who, while they found no reason for an absolute break with the National Church, yet deplored the laxity that prevailed within her borders. But such men were now in a minority. The dominant party in the Established Church were now the Moderates, who, after a severe struggle, had succeeded in bringing her in line with the more liberal thought of the day. Under the guidance of this party the Church took up the position of a general supporter of the Ministers of the Crown POLITICAL ATTITUDE OF THE CHURCH. 317 when the Government was attacked with all the fury of faction, and when the throne was not spared in the diatribes of Wilkes and his confederates. In no case could these excesses of virulence have obtained much sympathy in Scotland. The objects for which they strove — if, indeed, they had any consistent object — were not such as stirred any interest there. The character of Wilkes was not one which the Scotsman was likely to stomach.^ The Church, at least, was not to be shaken from its attitude of inde- pendent support of the Government and of the Crown, which meant more, perhaps, then, than any special set of Ministers. We may take the appointment of Dr Alexander Carlyle, one of the most pronounced members of the party, to the Moder- atorship of the Church in 1770, as marking the full triumph of those with whom he was associated, and the Assembly by whom he was elected to the chair passed a loyal address to the Crown, in which the prevailing virulence of political agitation was expressly condemned. Such support, however, was an independent one, and did not prevent the Church from asserting, with force and authority, claims which touched her much more nearly than the disputes which raged between the House of Commons and the City of London. We have already seen how a vigorous, and, it would seem, a well-grounded attempt had been made some years before to secure a more adequate payment for the clergy. The de- mands had been moderate. The project was defeated, but the Church retreated without dishonour. She withdrew none of her claims. When the window-tax was established, she suc- cessfully vindicated, by the aid of Dr Alexander Carlyle, the legal exemption of the clergy. Within a few years she again stood forward to claim for the schoolmasters of Scotland some addition to the miserable pittance which the niggardliness of the landed gentry had assigned to that class. The Church could fight for her helpmate, the school, with more effect than she did for herself, and the boon was at last extorted from the reluctant heritors. In all this, indeed, the Church only reflected the general feeling of Scotland. It is amusing to find the agents of the Government in Scotland perplexed by the absence of that discipline which would have made their task a comparatively ^ We must not forget, however, that amongst speculative politicians in Scotland Wilkes found a certain modicum of commendation. Adam Smith found his views not altogether unpalatable, and was not ashamed to own a certain sympathy with his attacks. 318 SCOTTISH NATIONALITY AND ENGLISH JEALOUSY. simple one. "I don't believe," says Mr Stuart Mackenzie, writing as Lord Privy Seal to his friend Baron Mure, — "I don't believe there is a country in Europe where the want of that quality (obedience) is almost universal, except Scot- land."^ It would, no doubt, have been more pleasant if Scotland had given her support unaccompanied by any conditions and hampered by no inconvenient assertion of her claims ; but it is none the less certain that in such a case her future place in the partnership would have been much less considerable than it actually became. ^ Caldwell Correspondence, Part II., vol. ii. p. 183. 319 CHAPTER XIIL SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CHANGES. It would be a complete mistake to fancy that Scotland during these years was occupied exclusively with disputes as to ecclesiastical government, or even with arranging the terms on which she was to live with that partner whose predominance was sometimes asserted with brutal and irritat- ing bluntness. On the contrary, she was in the throes of a very acute period of economical transition, with the usual dis- turbances that such a transition brings in its wake. With no lack of energy, she was striving to cope with a new state of matters in her own borders. What is most characteristic of the nation in these years is the growing prevalence of a public spirit, interested in the development of her institutions, not unwilling to remove abuses, and prepared generously to extend the benefits of her rapidly increasing prosperity to those regions which but a few years before had been beyond the range of her law and her police. To begin with the capital, we have already alluded to the scheme for extending her boundaries beyond the narrow ridge which ran between Holyrood and the Castle. The scheme had long been afoot. Even so early as the beginning of the century it had been a favourite object with the Earl of Mar, whose influence ended with the ill-fated attempt of 1715. Since then it had been revived. New powers, which en- countered much opposition from those whose more precise notions of the rights of proprietorship were shocked by them, were given to the authorities of the city for the prosecution of the work ; and even powers of compulsory purchase, which seemed to be a violent and socialistic innovation, had been obtained. The best engineering skill which could be secured was employed upon the task of building the connecting bridge, but alas ! in the first instance, with dismal failure. Possibly the business arrangements of the unreformed Cor- 320 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CHANGES. poration (washed down as these always were by copious libations) were not exactly of a kind to secure the most sound and honest workmanship. The foundations of the structure were scamped. Scarcely had the first span of the bridge been constructed before the piers were found to be insecure ; and new expenses, which then seemed enormous, but nowadays would seem trifling to a petty provincial town, had to be faced. But there was enough of public spirit to push the scheme ; and Edinburgh began to develop from the huddled crowd of dwellings which had been her limit for centuries, into a spacious, luxurious, and dignified modern city. She lost, indeed, some of her old picturesqueness, and the miserable taste of the day threw away a splendid opportunity in rect- angular streets of a monotonous architecture, which banished all the diversity and beauty that might have been gained by preserving some of the trees which were ruthlessly destroyed. But the extension of the city did at least provide for decent sanitation, and for a life in which some attention was paid ta the amenities of modern civilisation. Another project of material improvement, more extended in its range, was that of a navigable canal from the Forth to the Clyde. When first mooted, this seemed a chimerical design ; and to increase the difficulties of the promoters, divergent views as to its size and direction soon appeared. Some proposed a small canal which should join the Forth at Carron,. and lead direct to Glasgow. Its object was to open a ready access from the eastern seaboard to the Glasgow market, and the promoters were chiefly Glasgow merchants. The esti- mated cost was £40,000. Over a sum which would scarcely cover the transactions of a day in one of a hundred merchants' offices in Glasgow at our time, the whole of the west of Scot- land was keenly excited. The other scheme, for a much larger canal, which would be navigable for sea-going vessels, and was to join the Clyde, not at Glasgow, but at Dumbarton, was chiefly promoted by the Board of Manufactures. This scheme, it was argued, was alone worthy of Scotland ; but the^ public mind was staggered at the estimated cost, which was no less than £80,000 ! The bolder spirits were not daunted by this cost, great as it might seem. If the project were to be carried out, let it be done once for all on a scale that would satisfy posterity. Why should Glasgow only, and not all Scotland, benefit ? With equal energy it was maintained on the other side that Glasgow's commercial interests were some- thing to be weighed even against the amenities of Edinburgh. A practical and possible scheme should be proceeded with, even although the fashionable world of Edinburgh should not CANALS AND ROADS. 321 have a broad and magnificent canal upon whose banks they might construct an ornamental promenade. To indulge vain hopes of a scheme which involved impossible expenditure would only be to postpone indefinitely a feas ble project of high commercial promise. The matter came to be a struggle between Edinburgh and Glasgow, and abundant floods of rhetoric, of argument, and of sarcasm, were poured forth on either side. If it were only as an early symptom of the grow- ing jealousy between the East and the West the dispute would be of interest. Eventually a compromise was arranged. The large canal was undertaken, and although it was to debouch at Dumbarton, a branch canal was to open an easy access to Glasgow. The estimate for this was £100,000 ; but so far did the resources of Scotland even then exceed her own cal- culations, that a larger ultimate cost was found to be no crush- ing burden. The whole story illustrates how the commercial importance of the country was then passing through the day of small things. It is only such incidents that enable us to realise the difference that a century has made. Other schemes were on foot for increasing the facilities for transit. Up to the beginning of the eighteenth century roads were few and ill constructed. Since the rebellions of 1715 and 1745 Government had been busy in constructing the great military roads that were to open up the Highlands. Partly from Jacobite disaffection, which saw in these roads a strategic movement fatal to their hopes, and partly, also, from simple obstinate attachment to old habits, the districts chiefly affected viewed these efforts with disgust. But their advantages forced themselves on attention, and the opposition died away. Every county now saw the urgent need of decent roads, but the only method by which this could be secured was the clumsy one of exacting the six days of statutory labour, due annually from every tenant. The burden was heavy : it was unequal : and it produced poor results. The bolder spirits were now advo- cating a road assessment, and their proposal was making way. Besides material improvements, the time was also marked by commercial activity, and by the study of the conditions under which that was possible. No branch of this was more important than the banking system. Its history in Scotland is so peculiar that it merits some notice even in a general history of the country. It shows the national characteristics in their most pronounced form. It is curious that the first legislative recognition of banking is almost synchronous in England and in Scotland. It was in 1694 that the Bank of England was established : the Act of the Scots Parliament, establishing the Bank of Scotland, was X 322 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CHANGES. passed in 1695. Oddly enough, the chief founder of the Bank of England was William Paterson, a Scotsman who was the prime mover in the ill-fated Darien scheme : the foremost in forming the constitution of the Bank of Scotland was one Holland, an English merchant. But after the first start was given, each nation assumed and maintained the exclusive management of its own concern. Except for almost simultaneous origin, the two schemes were as different as they well could be. The wealth of England was already great. The financiers of London could make their own terms with Government, whose exigencies they met, and from whom they obtained in return a monopoly which shaped the future system of English banking, and to which critics of that system ascribe all its artificial restrictions, involving as they did the necessity for the constant interven- tion of the Legislature. In Scotland the system started as it remained, with few exceptions, for a century and a half, almost entirely unrestricted. The Act of 1695 authorised the formation of the Bank of Scotland and gave to it a monopoly ; but that monopoly was not made perpetual, as it subsequently became in England. It was to endure only for twenty -one years. Such limited monopoly was absolutely necessary to secure any chance of success; it was fortunate that it did not last long enough to prevent the free competi- tion which enabled the tender seedling of Scottish financial effort to thrive in a sterile soil. Its nominal capital was only £1,200,000 Scots, or £100,000 sterling ; and even of this moderate amount only £10,000 was paid up, and for several years was amply sufficient to cover the operations. But its power was enormously extended by what became one of its chief functions — the issue of paper money. The circulating medium of Scotland was at that time, as we have seen, something like £600,000 or £800,000 in nominal value, but was seriously depreciated. With such deficient machinery, growth in commerce was impossible, and the issue of notes gave to it a much needed extension. As was natural, when the laws upon which a paper circulation must be based were little understood, the experiment was hazardous, and difficulties arose even so early as 1704. But Scotland was a small nation, where the credit and the good sense of prominent citizens were readily known and appreci- ated. The Bank for a time was obliged to suspend its money payments. But some of the leading citizens examined its financial state and pronounced it sound ; and such a certificate was amply sufficient to restore public confidence. The infant enterprise resumed its course, strengthened by the lesson which BANKING. 323 it had received as to the necessity of a bullion reserve. Its success was great, and equally marked was the benefit it brought to a commerce which was only then making its first slow and faltering steps in advance. The profits of the share- holders were large, amounting on an average of nine-and- twenty years to 17 per cent; but such profits naturally led to competition, and fortunately for Scotland that competition was not prevented by monopoly, as in England. By an Act of 1708 the Bank of England had been effectually secured against any rival by the prohibition of any other company of more than six persons for the purpose of carrying on the business of banking. Joint -stock enterprise was thus shut out from the field, and the only rivals which the Government Bank had to meet were the private banks, which could offer only a feeble and ineffectual opposition. Not so in Scotland. There the Bank of Scotland had only its own energies to trust to, and, unfortunately for itself, it became involved in suspicion of Jacobite leanings — proclivities hardly suitable to the unromantic conditions of commercial success — and incurred the disfavour of the Hanoverian Government. Competitors were ready to share its gains, and the proprietors of the Equivalent Stock — Government securities by means of which the payment of a Scottish indemnity for the financial con- sequences of the Union was guaranteed — obtained in 1727 a charter authorising them to carry on the business of bank- ing under the name of the Royal Bank of Scotland. But it must be noticed that although their charter was useful as an authority, it did not confer the power of issuing notes, but only recognised what was an unrestricted right. The charter was a sign of Government patronage, but it was nothing more. The paid-up capital of the new enterprise was only £22,000. The ensuing year saw a fierce warfare between the two companies, in which each endeavoured to destroy the credit of its rival. Each bought up as far as it could the paper money of the other, and endeavoured to force it to suspension of payment by sudden presentation of the notes. To protect themselves, the pernicious device of an optional clause was introduced, permitting the notes to be payable on demand, or, with a small interest, six months after presentation. It was a necessity for self-preservation, but it eventually forced on the first legislative restriction of banking powers in Scot- land. For the present, however, it did not destroy the system. Gradually the folly of an internecine warfare was recognised. Terms were arranged between the rivals, and each was con- tent to tolerate the existence of the other. Meanwhile their rivalry enormously increased the opportunities for commercial 324 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CHANGES. enterprise in Scotland, by providing it with the necessary- instruments of a currency, which the poverty of the nation would otherwise have rendered impossible, and by permitting the system of cash credits (first adopted in 1729), by means of which brain and energy unprovided with capital were enabled to devote themselves to the improvement of the country, and to develop new openings for trade. Amidst storm and stress, in spite of unpropitious circum- stances, and amidst the disturbing influences of the rebellion of 1745, the system still went on and prospered, and the field of banking enterprise was shared freely by many private banks, started by men whose recognised credit in the eyes of their countrymen secured the necessary confidence. After the rebellion a new and important rival came into the field in the shape of the British Linen Company, originally formed for the encouragement of the linen industry, but now embrac- ing banking within the range of its operations. The impulse towards improvement of the country and the development of commerce was immensely stimulated. The slow and feeble steps by which former advances had been made were ex- changed for bold and rapid strides. Banking increased by the very efforts for which it gave facilities, and its enterprise took more dubious shapes. It seemed as if there could be no bounds to the increase of wealth by the simple expedient of increasing the paper circulation, and making it a more convenient medium. Notes for trifling amounts — frequently for a shilling — were issued, and the optional clauses took a dangerous and pernicious form. They were often made pay- able in kind as well as in specie, and the issuer pledged him- self only to pay " in money or in drink." The currency was thus absolutely debased ; and it was no exaggeration which satirised the absurdity by the issue in Glasgow of a note of the Bank of Wasps, with the motto " We swarm," promising to pay on demand " one penny sterling, or, at the option of the Directors, three ballads, six days after demand ! " The freedom which had distinguished Scottish banking, and which had saved it from the galling fetters of monopoly, had been of immense advantage. It had given enormous facilities to a country whose poverty prevented it from reaping the benefit of its energy. The multiplicity of private banks, great as it was, had not — thanks to the pressure of public opinion and to the national character — led to the dangers which might have been expected. But now it was evident that it had been abused, and that some protection against the abuse was absolutely necessary, unless the system of credit was to break down. The larger banks now pressed THE BANK OF AYR. 325 for some check upon the scandals which had grown up ; and in 1765 the Lord- Advocate Miller was induced to bring in a Bill dealing with the subject. By this any optional clause, either as regards time or mode of payment, upon paper money, was prohibited, and no notes were to be issued for less than £1 sterling. But while this checked the most glaring evils which were threatened from the abuse of the system, it did not secure the country against the dangers involved in the free banking system. The nation was becoming more and more eager in the race for wealth, and it was not unreasonably convinced that great opportunities lay before it. Manufactures were more actively carried on. New openings for commerce were offered by our successful wars. Improved agriculture was a favourite occupation, and seemed likely to redouble the value of the soil. Luxury in living had enormously in- creased, and the extension of the Scottish metropolis had given rise, with more ample accommodation, to a style of living hitherto unknown. It might well seem that the only requirement was capital, or what might seem to be the same thing as capital, in a circulating medium easily procured. The opportunity for rash and speculative banking was only too tempting. In these circumstances a new banking enterprise was undertaken, offering facilities hitherto unknown. A bank was opened at Ayr by a company known as Douglas, Heron & Co. in 1769. It had a large number of subscribers, includ- ing some of the greatest names of Scotland, whose credit was based upon vast landed estates. Its nominal capital was £150,000; but that by no means represented the extent of its operations, which altogether dwarfed the scanty begin- nings and cautious advances of the older banks. It offered accommodation on the most easy terms, and it seemed likely to usher in a new era for the smaller landowner, who lacked the capital for the development of his land, and for the penniless adventurer, who thought that his brains, if sup- ported by a nominal credit, could open to him a commercial Eldorado. Meanwhile its operations were carried on by an unlimited supply of paper money, which was produced with- out stint. The engine which in cautious hands had sufficed to raise Scotland from the torpor of poverty was now, under reckless and misguided impulse, hurrying her over a precipice. It did not take long to work the inevitable ruin. In 1772 the crash came. The bills of the bank were returned, pro- tested, from London, and its credit sank as quickly as it 326 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CHANGES. had risen. Its total liabilities were £1,250,000 — a sum which, a few years before, it would have seemed impossible for any Scottish credit to have raised. The crash produced wide- spread distress. Families, whose landed possessions had for generations given them a high position, were irretrievably ruined. The greater part of Ayrshire changed hands. But the disaster was not without its good side. Ruinous as it proved, yet it is satisfactory to find that the liabilities were eventually — only, it is true, after long years of effort — dis- charged by the shareholders, and did not fall on the creditors of the bank. The land changed hands, but the stimulus which even ill -based capital had given to its improvement had a lasting effect. It is to the credit of the Scottish banking system that all the larger and older banks, and many of the sounder private banks, weathered the storm with no loss of stability. The national system had grown with the growth of the country, and had been developed by the energy and steadiness of the national character. It had the strength of a national product, and it survived this shock, even although — save for the Act of 1765 — it had none of the securities which a restrictive legislation might have given to it. We shall see later how, on at least two occasions, it met critical circumstances by methods of its own, and resisted with indomitable pertinacity the restric- tions, founded upon English principles, which the British Parliament sought to impose upon it.^ It is important to notice, as an additional sign of com- mercial enterprise in Scotland, that in the very year when the fall of the Ayr bank occurred, there was an important change in the bankruptcy law of Scotland. Hitherto that law had been singularly unjust, and seemed to be framed with the express purpose of defrauding certain creditors. These had been allowed to reckon by priority of arrestment, and every opportunity had been given for a debtor to make a fraudulent arrangement with a selected creditor, by giving him timely notice, and thus enabling him to secure himself to the prejudice of the rest. The Court of Session had endeavoured to remedy this to some extent by ordering that all arrestments within thirty days after bankruptcy should be of equal force. This order of the Court — perhaps of doubtful authority — was now confirmed and extended by Act of Parliament. Had the amendment of the law not taken place, it is obvious that no sound system of commercial credit would have been possible. That it did ^ Viz., the restriction of cash payments in 1797, and the small-note scare in 1826. CONPITIONS OF LABOUR. 327 take place proves that the nation was alive to the necessities of a new state of economical conditions. But economical changes do not come about without pro- ducing serious difficulties, and of these Scotland had her full share. Certain troubles, of which we find a periodical recrudescence in the larger towns during these early years of the reign of George III., are symptomatic of a revolution in the conditions of employment. Up to a date not very far removed, labour at a daily or weekly wage had been almost unknown. Even now, it was very rare in the country districts, and for agricultural employment was practically non- existent. For many years yet to come, the domestic servant in Scotland was a permanent member of the family, with a practical partnership in all the family affairs, and exercising that freedom of speech and action which long familiarity, coupled with indubitable fidelity, necessarily gives. But, at an earlier stage, outdoor labour was almost on the same footing. Each estate had its workmen, whose position was handed down from father to son, and who rarely contem- plated a change either of habitation or of master. The labourer was not, indeed, attached to the soil by law, but by custom and habit he seldom moved, and formed a mem- ber of a household rather than a hired employee. Even in towns this state of things had almost been paralleled up to a recent date. Now it was fast passing away. The old system gave a raciness and an interest to the earlier phases of Scottish social life which one parts with regretfully; but it could not meet the advancing requirements of trade and manufactures which were to revolutionise the country during the next two generations. Again and again in these years we find ominous symptoms in combinations of labourers in a particular trade, striking for a rise of wages. Such com- binations were pounced upon by the law, and met with drastic treatment at the hands of the magistrates. Heavy fines and imprisonment were rigorously dealt out to all who took part in them. They checked the manufacturing prosperity of the town — which was interpreted strictly as the commercial prosperity of the master — and that was enough to procure their condemnation. It had not even dawned on the minds of men that freedom involved the right to dispose of one's labour for the highest price which legitimate combination could extort. But we must not forget that summary discipline in these matters was not confined to workmen. Only a few years before, the brewers of Edinburgh had resolved to close their breweries in con- sequence of an obnoxious tax. It was deemed no excessive 328 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CHANGES. straining of the law when the authorities stepped in to force them to carry on their trade, in order that the lieges might not be deprived of their beer, whether the manu- facture was carried on at a loss or not ; and strange to say, the brewers resumed their trade, and yet did not find them- selves entirely ruined. It is one of the advantages of a paternal government that it can generally distinguish between a fit of sulking and a real financial difficulty. The same summary measures were now dealt out to the workmen, and even an employer who presumed to grant demands which his fellow - employers had refused to yield found his generosity dealt with as a crime and punished by a fine ! It was just as well that restrictive laws should be courageously impartial in their operation. But economical changes, new conditions of labour, increasing population, and the constant migration of a thriftless and useless country surplus into the towns, soon forced to the front another question. The problem of the support of the poor was one of the most serious which the next century had to face. At a later day, we shall find it dividing men of equally honest convictions, and to whom it is only fair to ascribe equal benevolence of intention, into two hostile camps, sundered from one another by radical differences as to the ethical aspects of the question. At present the con- troversy was only at its earliest stage. In former days the problem of the poor had not been one of great difficulty in Scotland. The humbler class were linked to their betters as their domestic dependants, or as members of their clan. Where such bonds were insufficient, many quaint and kindly usages prevailed which helped the poor to eke out some kind of existence, and licensed beggary was a common incident of Scottish life, and lent to it a trait which was not lacking in interest and picturesqueness. Only a hundred years before, an assessment was made permissive for each parish by the Legislature; and where it was adopted, the funds, eked out by the collections at the church doors, were administered by the heritors and kirk -session of the parish. How far assessment was prevalent over Scotland in 1770 it is impossible to say with accuracy. When Sin- clair's * Statistical Account ' was compiled some twenty years later, it prevailed over some two -thirds of the population; but the progress in the interval had probably been large. In 1770 the question of the poor in Edinburgh had reached an acute stage. Beggary had grown to the proportions of an intolerable nuisance. Crowds of Highlanders, shiftless, ignorant, and dirty, gathered in the most noisome corners THE POOR LAW. 329 of the old town, and . earned a precarious livelihood by running errands and doing odd jobs as caddies. The pro- vision of education was lamentably insufficient, and the whole machinery of parish administration was unequal to the task of dealing with this new swarm of immigrants. Poorhouses were built with the hope of making it possible to deal with the aged and helpless poor; but the existing resources fell appallingly short of the necessities. The only means by which they were supported were the church- door collections; and church -going was so sure a mark of all who claimed respectability that this yielded a regular, if insufficient, revenue. It appears that something like 30s. or £2 might be counted upon as the contribution to the poor which each adult church-goer would give; and the fact that the collection was made in open "plates" at the church door rendered it no easy matter to elude the con- tribution. But it still fell short of the needs; and even with the niggard expenditure of £3500 a -year on houses which contained 680 inmates, the church collections failed to meet it. In such circumstances an assessment was pro- posed under the statute of 1672. The proposal aroused in Edinburgh the fiercest opposition, and the detailed facts that are recorded give us some inter- esting particulars as to the valuation of the capital. If an assessment were imposed, it was considered certain that the church-door collections would cease ; charity and rate-paying for the same object do not naturally go well together. And in that case, appalling estimates were drawn of the probable assessment. The total valuation of the old town was £34,000 : that of the new town (so soon to be the abode of all the wealthy in Edinburgh) was reckoned at £3000 only. But to add to the iniquity of the tax, it was pointed out that houses to the value of more than £12,000 — or nearly one- third of the whole — were exempt from taxation as belonging to the "privileged" class — that is, the senators and vari- ous dependants of the College of Justice. On the remainder a tax of 10 per cent would yield only £2500 ! It would be rendered all the more galling because the richest class would be exempt. The legal aristocracy of Edinburgh was to be free from an oppressive tax, while at the same time the old and time-honoured source of income, which connected the support of the poor with religious ordinances, and which had all the soothing gratification of an act of charity, was to be swept away. It is no wonder that the proposal was rejected. The poor law expenditure grew apace. Spas- modic efforts were started, and some attempt was made to 330 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CHANGES. board out the children, and so free them from the degrading associations of the poor house. But even in 1790, when Sin- clair's ' Account ' was compiled, Edinburgh gave no statistics of an assessment for the poor. It was at length forced upon her; and we shall find, when energetic attempts were next made to deal with a difficulty of which the dimensions were constantly growing, that the assessment principle was opposed, not in the interests of the ratepayers, but in the proud belief that individual and congregational zeal in the performance of a charitable duty were better agents than a legal rate administered by paid agents. The struggle will come before us at a later date. The economical changes through which the country was passing acted equally upon the opposite scale of society. The system of land tenure was undergoing a revolution. The landed aristocracy had always been jealous of their privileges and tenacious of those conditions of property that safe -guarded their class. Pride of birth and aristocratic exclusiveness taught them to guard their position even by provisions which severely restricted the rights of the nominal proprietor, and kept him bound to his paternal domain under conditions which often involved grinding poverty. The Entail Act of 1685 had limited the proprietor of an entailed estate to the strictest life ownership. He could not burden the estate to plant a single tree, to bring the most barren moor into cultivation, or to carry out the most necessary improve- ments. He could not meet the demands of his creditors to the extent of a single penny beyond his annual rents; and estates passed under the strictest settlement from father to son, which formed nothing but a damnosa hcereditas, but which nevertheless kept an old family in secure posses- sion, albeit restricted to the soil like the veriest serfs. In 1690 the aristocracy managed to pass another statute, which prevented the forfeiture of an entailed estate for treason. This was done away with by the Act of 1708, which assimilated the law of treason to that of England, and which thus rendered a man's direct heirs, although not the remainder men, subject to forfeiture. The policy which the aristocracy pursued — that of pro- tection of the permanence of their own order — was sound enough from their own point of view. But the economical difficulties of the existing law sterilised the land, and pre- vented the improvement of the most important national asset. Public opinion grew more and more strong in con- demnation of a state of things so thoroughly harmful to the public interest ; and even the judges, bound as they THE LAW OF ENTAIL. 331 were by sympathy and association to the territorial aris- tocracy, were almost unanimous in their denunciation of the system. Land, it was seen,- could not safely be excluded from the ordinary laws of a commercial community, and doubtless the pressure of the law upon individual heirs of entail made them not unwilling, even against the abstract interests of their class, to turn a ready ear to proposals for a modification. This was pushed most strongly by Sir John Dairy mple, and at length in 1770 an Act, commonly known (from the name of the Lord Advocate of the day) as the Montgomery Act, was passed, which permitted a tenant of an entailed estate to grant leases of farms for nineteen years, and building leases for ninety-nine, and to burden the estate with the cost of permanent improvements up to a certain amount and under certain conditions. In 1824, by the Aberdeen Act, tenants for life could burden their estates with provisions for their widows and children; and the change thus wrought was carried much further by the subsequent legislation. Throughout every class of society and in all parts of Scotland changes of the first importance were in progress. Scottish character does not at least lack the charm of variety, and each part of the country had its own marked peculiarities. The Border counties were settling down after the days of the old Border raids, when the insecurity of the police system had made each man's arm the chief protection of his life and his property. After the long waste of mutual plunderings, the inhabitants on both sides of the line were acquiring, with greater stability of order, new prosperity ; but they retained much of the old independence that had always marked them, and that rugged physical courage and sturdy force of intellect that make them even now a type that ranks high amongst the citizens of Great Britain. In no part of the country were the farmers more prosperous than were the tenants of these wide pasture-lands, and nowhere did they approach so closely in tastes and habits to the old type of English yeomen. In the eastern Lowlands, whose tradition and romance had entwined itself with every mountain and valley, and lived in a thousand lays that had grown into the hearts of the people, the lingering memories of an older state of society were even more powerful, and it is no wonder that in such a region Scottish romance found its chosen home. In the west, the old covenanting spirit was still strong. It was there that the religious revival which soon after swept over the land found its securest settlement, recalling as it did the older days when religious feeling was stirred to enthusiasm 332 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CHANGES. by persecution. As in these older days, the passion of re- ligious feeling was found side by side with a keen and acute grasp of worldly wisdom — a combination which satire may easily ridicule, which not unnaturally provokes suspicions of hypocrisy, but which to students of human nature is not per- haps without a suggestive interest. On the north-eastern coast there was to be found a population — chiefly Scandinavian in origin — which was sharply divided from the rest of the people both in character and in habits. The county of Fife had been the chief nursery of dissent, and held itself aloof from the rest of Scotland with a tenacity of purpose that became proverbial. On the other hand, the fishermen who dwelt along the northern part of the coast seemed to have absorbed into their nature some of the hard air of the sea from which they drew their livelihood, and kept themselves jealously apart from the agricultural population that peopled the Mearns. Many a Mucklebackit family were to be found along that coast, and the great limner of Scottish manners drew from a familiar type. Their life of hardship and stern combat with the elements was one that passed by inheritance from father to son. They intermarried with one another, and sought neither kinship nor intercourse with the upland folk. With the religious and ecclesiastical disputes of Scot- land they had little sympathy ; and, curiously enough, with other traits which even to this day mark them ofl" from their neighbours, they have inherited also a predilection for the Episcopalian form. Nowhere has that form retained from the past a stronger hold upon the humbler class than it has amongst the fishermen of the east coast, unaided by the zeal of any intrusive proselytism. In all these regions, however, with much variety of phase, there was one preponderating type of character — strong, rugged, and quick in intellectual effort; tenacious of old habits, self-centred and reserved in its pride of race, and accustomed by long habit of endurance to master difficulties and to force a livelihood out of unpromising materials. But there remained the wider mountain tracts where the popu- lation was purely Celtic, where the memories of enmity were the inheritance of centuries, and which, down to a late day, had lived outside the pale of the ordinary law. To settle the new economical position of these regions, and to conciliate their inhabitants, was the most difficult problem that Scotland had to face. The clan system had broken up : what was to take its place ? How could these barren moun- tain tracts become amenable to law, and share in the general prosperity of the country ? The Highlands could no longer THE HIGHLAND POPULATION. 333 be left in ignorance and poverty. The pastime and pre- carious subsistence which they had hitherto found in war were now denied them ; and they could not be abandoned to the life of thieving which seemed the only alternative to starvation. Already they had flocked in large numbers to the towns, and congregated there, gaining a scanty and precarious livelihood — neglected, sordid, ignorant. Such a destiny was a poor one for a race which possessed many of the finest qualities that can exist in humanity. Friends and enemies could, with almost equal grounds, ascribe to them strangely different characters. Lazy, dirty, treacherous, thieving, and untruthful — such might be the epithets that an enemy would apply to them, and he might adduce no weak arguments to justify the condemnation. Romantic, loyal, and devoted; generous and hospitable; with singular grace of manner, and incomparable power of intellectual adaptiveness — all these were the qualities which a more sympathetic study of the race might reveal. It is to the credit of Scotland that she did not shirk the task which fate flung upon her, and the Church was not the last agency to attempt that task. Every effort was made — often in spite of scanty success — to establish new industries in the Highlands, and to bring to them some share of the new commercial prosperity. Many of the landlords outstript their own class elsewhere in enlightened efforts to break the vicious system of agriculture and to encourage modern methods. The Assembly of the Church appointed a Commission of Inquiry, and Dr John Walker, one of her ministers, as a result of most careful investigation, made proposals for dealing with the Celtic question, which have their practical interest even for our own day. He saw that the one essential condition was the spread of the English language — an opinion which the sentimentalists of our own day have vainly tried to controvert. To do this by means of English ministrations he pronounced a hopeless task : the only possible machinery was that of English schools. Already the English schools, established by benevolent effort, had done a world of good; but much more remained to be done. Every effort must be made to check the influence of the Roman Catholic Church; and however suitable the policy of toleration might be for a later day and under more easy conditions, it can scarcely be questioned that to bring the Highlands within the fold of one religious communion was an indis- pensable instrument in making them share the common life of the nation. Nor was the condition of the High- landers in the large cities forgotten. Every effort was 334 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CHANGES. made to raise their state, to educate their children, and to bring them within the influence of religious ministrations. In 1768, by means of a public subscription, a Gaelic Church was opened in Edinburgh. There was to be no violent breaking with their old habits and customs: but the influ- ence for good was to carry out its mission by enlisting these habits on its side. The difficulties indeed were great. The sledge-hammer force of economical truths was making it every day more clear that these barren regions could not, under natural conditions, support the surplus popula- tion that had grown up amongst them. But against the hard teaching of these economical truths there was a powerful feeling of attachment to the soil, which made the Highlander cling to his mountains and his glens with a passionate in- tensity of love. These mountains and glens, aided by the characteristics of his race, had impressed his mind with a heavy shroud of superstition which was strangely blended with the poetry and romance that formed a part of his being. The Highlands had not yet become the playground of the wealthy Englishman, who brought to them a new and not always very healthy source of profit: and it was no small thing that, before that day arrived, the work of Scotland for the development of the Highlands had already borne good fruit. During the first decade of the reign of George III. Scotland was thus busily engaged with the problem of a transition in her economical conditions. One industry is so closely con- nected with the national character that it merits special attention. The agriculture of Scotland went through a revolution in the course of last century. In the earlier part of the century its conditions were primitive in the extreme, and these, combined with an ungenial climate and a soil which was fertile only when skilfully manipulated, produced a state of the utmost poverty. But it was a poverty with which the independence of the national character combined an indomitable thrift, and to which its many - sided intellectual vigour added much content and enjoyment. The smaller tenants, surprising as it may seem, were, in the dearth of commerce, the chief moneyed men of an unmoneyed country, and their savings were frequently lent at good interest to the gentry upon whom the burden of expense attending their station necessarily fell. But the savings of thriftiness bring content and satisfaction not in proportion to their amount, but from the simple fact that they exist; and so long as their existence is possible the motive to increase the rate at which they swell is com- AGRICULTURE. 335 paratively weak, especially with a nation which had abun- dance of additional interests. The primitive methods of agriculture, therefore, still continued. A community of culture, by which the neighbours in a hamlet shared field with field in alternate parcels — what was called the "runrig" system — was the general habit. Individual enter- prise and activity found no encouragement under such a system. On the other hand, the tenants, if they did not make the most of their holdings, had little to fear in the way of extortionate rents from landlords with whom they claimed kinship, and to whom it never occurred to prefer a money gain to the traditional bonds of relationship or family ties in accordance with which their tenants were selected. But such a system could not endure with the advance of wealth and the increased incentives to its accumulation. Nothing is more striking in the history of Scotland during the eighteenth century than the rapidity with which the country passed from an almost patriarchal system to the economical arrangements of modern times. It was in the Highlands where the primitive system lasted longest in its integrity, but where also it most rapidly underwent trans- formation. The abolition of the hereditary jurisdiction did much for the Highlands ; but it accomplished its task at the expense of much that produced hardship for a generation. Estates which had been held on terms approaching very closely to those of feudal service now lost the weight and dignity which were adjuncts of proprietorship, and were held as sources of revenue, to be turned to the most profitable uses. In place of the black cattle, the rearing of which had been the chief source of revenue to the Highland proprietor, it became more profitable to stock the Highland pastures with sheep, for whose guardianship few hands need be em- ployed. This was an undoubted economical advantage, and it was pressed with patient and unremitting zeal by a certain David Loch, who wrote with much intelligence on Scottish manufactures, and saw a great future for the Highlands in connection with the woollen industry, which he desired to see flourish even at the expense of the linen trade. For his day, he was undoubtedly a man of foresight and intelligence ; and he would have been a wild and visionary dreamer who would then have prophesied that the future wealth of Scot- land was to depend on her minerals — then scarcely more than guessed at — and on the many gigantic industries to be based upon them. But however economically sound might be the spread of sheep farms, it had another aspect which was less cheering. The Highland glens lost their closely 336 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CHANGES. packed inhabitants — all bound to the chief and recognised by him as not dependants only, but kinsmen — and only roof- less walls and deserted garden-plots preserved the memory of many populous townships. Those dispossessed refused to find a refuge amongst the Lowlanders, who were their tradi- tional foes, and whose manners and language were equally unin- telligible, and preferred emigration beyond the Atlantic, where their lot was often little above that of slaves. The old ties were broken; the Duniewassals, or gentlemen tenants, who claimed kinship with their chief, and who found in the tradi- tional debt of military service something that exempted them from an obligation to industry, rapidly disappeared. With them, any semblance of a middle class between the greater landlords and the humbler tenants faded away ; and with its eclipse, there came a change of manners and of ideas that transformed the Highlands. Something of the same kind went on in the Lowlands, where no such sacred tie as that between the chief and his vassals existed. There the smaller tenants found an easy refuge in the towns, where growing commerce offered an ever more tempting bait. By means of the progress of the banking system, and perhaps still more as a consequence of foreign intercourse, money increased. Scotsmen who had sought their fortunes in the East or West Indies returned with much ready money, which they were eager to invest in acres of their native soil. Land that was rarely in the market — and which, indeed, was hardly a marketable commodity — now commanded a ready sale at some thirty years' purchase, and its resources had been so little developed that it amply repaid the outlay of capital upon it in the way of planting, manur- ing, draining, and fencing — occupations which comfortably occupied the leisure, and adequately remunerated the invest- ments, of the moneyed Scot, who had braved the adventures and dangers of the East, and now sought to close his days in the dignified ease of a landlord backed by ample capital. Methods of cultivation necessarily improved under such con- ditions. Roads were constructed, and in almost every county the moneyed men found in the Road Board a little council where administrative capacity was not lost, and where there was a wholesome emulation of zeal. All the tenants were induced — or forced — to contribute their share of labour for the common work, and the military roads constructed by the Government aided in the work. Carriages became not un- common, and carts with spoked wheels, hitherto scarcely known, began to make the transit of goods more easy, and thus to widen the markets. TRANSFER OF ESTATES. 337 The natural result of this was that the landlords found themselves in the possession of a marketable commodity, and their expenses increased. The lavish style of living practised by the Indian nabob must not be allowed to obscure the dignity of the older families. Their family pride, which might have rendered them secure of rivalry, only tempted them to new expenses, with the inevitable result. The in- debtedness increased ; the sale of estates led to the breaking of old ties, and the establishment in their place of merely commercial relations. The necessity of raising rents to their utmost estranged tenant from master, and made the new tie a mere colourless reflection of the old one.^ Alongside of this there was another tendency — the result of enlightened notions and of earnest public spirit — which equally helped to bring about that revolution in agriculture which the new commercial spirit infused into the landlord class rendered inevitable. Amongst the wealthier landlords, accustomed to spend a large part of the year in England, there arose a fashionable emulation in the introduction of English methods of farming. They were aided by a large class of speculative gentlemen farmers, who relieved their professional labours by agricultural pastimes, and who prided themselves on the ingenuity of the schemes which they evolved in their study, and in the midst of philosophical lucubrations. In all this there was much that was absurd. Money was lavishly spent on projects which led to nothing but the expenditure of much ingenuity and the eventual jeers of the men who held to the practice of their fathers. But with all their absurdities the ultimate consequence was all for good. Their theories were often whimsical. In their slavish imitation of English methods they often forgot that they had to deal with the stubborn factors of a Scottish climate and a Scottish soil. They lost much money and moved much ridicule. But they contributed in the end to the breaking down of antiquated methods, to the use of modern implements, to a scientific rotation of crops, to the substitution of convenient appliances for costly manual labour, and to the abolition of systems of culture that exhausted the soil. They had to meet with abundant opposition. Their failures provoked criticism. Re- ligious bigotry stood in their way, as when the Antiburghers objected to the use of "fanners" for winnowing corn, on the ground that it amounted to an impious usurpation of the functions of the Deity in the " creating of wind." But slowly, and in spite, not of opposition only, but also of their own ^ In the story of ' St Ronan's Well,' Scott has given us a graphic picture of this state of matters. Y 338 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CHANGES. often whimsical impracticality, the agricultural reformers won the day. They learned to adapt English methods to the Scottish " tids " or seasons, and the theories which they had pushed to the detriment of their purses and their credit for sound judgment were worked to good purpose by more practical men. About 1760 successful war still further increased the capital of the country, and the sale of estates became still more easy and more lucrative with competition amongst purchasers. Prices both for corn and for stock increased largely, and the extensive use of paper money, owing to enlarged banking operations, made the apparent capital still more abundant. Luxury of living and emulous attention to display became more common. Various commodities which had before been of rare occurrence now sprang into common use. Even the humbler tenants, if their stores, painfully accumulated, were less, indulged themselves in more of those appliances which later generations have converted into necessities. But the old content was gone ; the old ties were broken : a new world had replaced that which had once prevailed throughout the land. It does not fall within the scope of a work dealing with the leading features of Scottish history to enter into literary criticism or to discuss in detail the successive phases of poetical composition. But it is necessary, in order to com- plete the picture of Scotland in the eighteenth century, to see what was her contribution to the literature of imagination and how this reflected the characteristics of the time. The opening of the century succeeded a long period of sterility in poetical composition. Whatever the opposition offered to the Union, and however both in its results and in the manner of its adoption it may have outraged Scottish feeling and inflicted for a generation or two a rankling wound, it was nevertheless inevitable that it should stir men's minds and produce something of literary activity. Intellectual movements are not chilled by distaste for legis- lative processes ; any important change in the life of a nation, be it the parent of enthusiasm or of disgust, quickens the stimulus to imaginative work. It is the stern experience of long struggle, the absorption in bitter controversy such as engaged men during the seventeenth century, that numbs the creative faculty. However distasteful it might be, the Union brought peace and brought the germs of a new pros- perity. The clash of weapons was silenced, and peace and prosperity left men disengaged for calmer and quieter pursuits. In the opening quarter of the century social life was lively INTELLECT a AL ACTIVITY. 339 and engaging. Intellectual activity was stirred by the clubs that grew in luxuriance in the capital, where conviviality and wit throve better than the stern tenets of ecclesiastical and political factions, and where even those who hated the course of dominant politics yet cherished their own tenets, rather in the guise of romantic and patriotic sentiments, than of political convictions which compelled a practical struggle. All that threatened to obscure and obliterate the traditions of Scotland, all that weakened the sense of her nationality, all that portended her subjection to the moods of her more powerful neighbour, stirred a sense of patriotism that was not altogether unpleasing, even to those who indulged in jeremiads on her fallen greatness. Such an atmosphere was eminently fitted to encourage the literary side of Scottish national life, and the exasperation of offended patriotism found in that sphere a safer and a more congenial occupa- tion than in the fierce and more irksome toil of supporting in the political arena a failing cause. The reawakened literary activity took two distinct lines, linked to one another in some of their aims, and combining in their ultimate results but diverse in their methods. The first was the revival of the vernacular literature, and the adapting, to a new generation, the older forms of Scottish song. In this kind the most active worker was Allan Ramsay, who, from being a barber's apprentice, developed into a bookseller, and gradually achieved a literary position in his own generation that was unique, and placed his country under an obligation for greater results than any which he himself achieved. In the collections which en- gaged his first literary efforts he recalled the Scottish ver- nacular literature of ballad and of song, uncritically indeed, and with none of the nice discrimination which was yet to be applied to the older treasures by genius greater than his own, but none the less with a freedom, a homeliness, a sympathy, and a wit, which breathed into his collections something far stronger than a mere antiquarian interest, and which attracted the attention of far more than a liter- ary audience. It is easy to find fault with his methods, to decry his free handling of the older traditional forms, and to point out where he falls below the grace and simplicity of the older national muse. But yet it is doubtful whether a nicer scholarship or a more refined literary taste would have accomplished what the homely industry and the racy wit of the Edinburgh bookseller wrought for our old litera- ture. The simplicity of the national genius was not lost. The characteristic touch of humour blended with romance, 840 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CHANGES. that formed its most distinctive feature, was preserved, with a certain freshness and verve, by the individuality of Ramsay, and his sympathy with the realities of life and with nature made him keep in touch with what was the most valuable inheritance of Scottish song. His geniality won for him the favour of the leading spirits of the nation. His revival of the older forms harmonised not with the taste only, but with the deeper feelings, of his day ; and whatever the lim- itations of his genius, the author of the " Gentle Shepherd " claims the profound gratitude of his nation as one who trans- mitted a tradition, and who passed on the torch through the hands of Robert Fergusson to the more powerful arm and more commanding genius of Burns. But he did not stand alone, although in this line his work is vastly more important than that of any compeer. There were others who passed away from the vernacular, and who carried into the main stream of English poetry something of the spirit of the Scottish muse. Scottish poetry had other qualities besides those of quaint dialect, rustic humour, and legendary story. Its first instinct, and that which gave to it its most enduring influence, was that of sympathy with nature — a sympathy not based on any pathetic fallacy, not weighted with any burthen of ethical allusion, but direct, simple, and real. Of those who carried this strain into English poetry and breathed into it a breath of freshness after a long period of restraint and artificiality, by far the greatest was Thomson, Ramsay's contemporary. But there were others who, in a lesser degree, laboured with Thomson to acquire what was a foreign diction, and who accomplished the painful task, it may be with some loss to the vigour and freedom of their own genius, but certainly with vast and far-reaching influence on English poetry. But it is no part of our present task to follow the course of the national stream after it mingles its waters with the mightier river of English literature. It is our business rather to trace the reflex influence on Scottish thought and life. Thomson found a home in England, like his weaker compeers. Mallet, and Armstrong, and Falconer; but his genius still exercised a great influence on his countrymen. Some of his pictures of nature are drawn from his own land; some of his portraits are painted from his fellow- countrymen; and undoubtedly the place his genius gained for him tended to foster and encourage the cultivation of an English style by Scottish writers. The vernacular was kept alive, and its embers were yet to be rekindled in one glorious blaze by the matchless genius of Bums. It was THE ROMANTIC INFLUENCE. 341 a tradition to which only consummate genius could impart that vitality and permanence which fixed it for all time in the form in which its immortality was to be enshrined. Another medium was needed for the large body of the Scottish contribution to English literature ; and there can be no doubt that the success of the Scottish aspirants to a place in English literature was the most direct and effective encouragement to the literary activity shown in Edinburgh during the latter half of the eighteenth century. In the sphere of poetry, if there were no stars of the first or even of the second magnitude which appeared in Edin- burgh, yet there was a long line which reflected a very respectable brilliance on the Scottish capital. In the genera- tion which followed that of Ramsay and Thomson there came Home, the author of " Douglas " ; Wilkie, the author of the " Epigoniad " ; Falconer and Logan, Beattie and Michael Bruce. Each merit some attention, and from among the forgotten pages of their poems, once popular and greedily read, there may still be culled passages of high merit that have lingered somehow in the mouths of men, long after the fountain from which they are drawn has been lost in oblivion. But one characteristic they all partook of, and it was one which not only affected all the literature of the coming age, but gave Scotland a powerful place in de- termining the predominant spirit of that literature, and that characteristic was the strong and lasting one of Romance. In spirit and in form, in subject and in treatment, this fresh inspiration, which was to bring new colour and new animation into the conventionalities of life, was the most pervading influence in all their work. They had adopted a foreign tongue; they wrote very largely for a foreign public ; they imitated foreign models and foreign mannerisms. In much they repeated the artificial tricks of the older school of English poetry, but they had given to it a new note in their instinct for nature, and now they added a new inspiration in lighting up the music and the fire of Romance. They had sought their medium and their language, even their manner, in the English school, and not only did they never entirely break away from it, but the alliance pro- duced an effect on Scottish literature that never died away as long as that literature retained any separate existence. No one who studies the prose style, the temperament, even the poetic diction of Scott, can fail to see that, with all his romance, it has become familiar to him in a diction which echoed something of the school, not of Pope and Dryden only, but of th^ir less gifted and more artificial successors. 342 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CHANGES. It may not be amiss here to note one singular outburst of popular feeling which turned upon an almost forgotten lawsuit, and which serves as an illustration of the immense interest aroused by the fate of her historic houses. For some years about this period, there was probably no subject of greater interest to the majority of Scotsmen than the great Douglas lawsuit. During these years, it is not too much to say that it divided the nation into two hostile camps. For a time it seemed likely to establish new principles of law. It set class against class. It provoked bitter family feuds. It directly influenced political parties. It has now sunk below the stream of history, and emerges only as an illustration of the social features of the day. The case turned upon the succession to the Dukedom of Douglas. The last Duke died childless, and the succession would naturally have passed to the family of the Duke of Hamilton, which would then have absorbed the two premier dukedoms of the country. But a claim was put forward by Archibald Douglas, as the son of Lady Jane Douglas, the niece of the late Duke. The circumstances of his birth were undoubtedly suspicious. It was alleged to have taken place in an obscure lodging-house in Paris — hardly the fitting scene of birth for the probable heir to one of the leading families of Scotland — and when his mother had passed the mature age of fifty years. It was easy to see how a fraud could well have been perpetrated, and the starting of such a claim was not likely to be looked upon with favour by the adherents of the great family of Hamilton. On the other hand, it was clear that the birth had been acknow- ledged by the parents; and even had a wrong motive been proved on their part, it was unlikely to have been pressed to the length of a death-bed acknowledgment, as was the case here. The cause divided Scotland, as we might expect. On the one hand, the upper classes generally strongly sup- ported the Hamilton claim, and did not scruple to accuse that of Douglas as a self-evident fraud. His rights found sympathy, as a rule, only amongst the lower classes; but that sympathy took very tangible form. The claimant appeared to rise from poverty and obscurity. The evidence on his behalf was undoubtedly strange and hard to credit. The broad principle of law, that children were the oflspring of their apparent parents, unless these parents expressly disallowed paternity, seemed here to be pushed to danger- ous lengths. It demanded, in this instance, a severe strain on credulity, and it was urged in subversion of the long- admitted claim of a great family. On the one hand, there THE DOUGLAS CAUSE. 343 was sympathy for that family, and undoubtedly a prepon- derance of probability. On the other hand, there was a prin- ciple of law which was ordinarily applied, and which, it was argued, ought not to be set aside because it told in favour of an obscure and almost friendless claimant against a powerful family. This is not the place to canvass minutely the legal arguments: it is sufficient to point to the popu- lar aspect of the case. After a long and careful hearing before the Court of Session, the judges were evenly divided, and a decision adverse to the claimant was given by the casting vote of the Lord President Dundas. This was the signal for an unthinking burst of popular fury; and so strong was the feeling, that the houses of the adverse judges were attacked, and the dignity of the Court seemed to be assailed. On appeal, the case was carried to the more impartial tribunal of the House of Lords, and there, apart from the excitement of partisanship, a decision which favoured the popular view was given by the unanimous voice of the law lords. The general principle of the law prevailed, and was affirmed by the dispassionate voices of such men as Lord Mansfield and Lord Camden. The popular opinion obtained a triumph. But the decision was an un- fortunate one for the aristocracy of Scotland. It undoubtedly appeared to rebuke the sympathy which the Scottish Court had shown for that aristocracy ; and it did not serve to increase their love for the supreme arbitration of what might still be held to be a foreign tribunal. Before we leave this phase of Scottish life that existed in the early years of the reign of George III., let us glance at two pictures of our country, drawn by the hands of strangers of very different character. Both help us "to see ourselves as others see us," though the value of the pictures is vastly different. In 1769 the indefatigable tourist, Pennant, paid a visit to Scotland, and his description so stirred Anglican curiosity, that he was tempted to that pitfall of authors — a second and a longer book, describing a new tour over much the same ground. It shows the practised hand of the hardened globe-trotter — quick to catch impressions, faithful in its records, describing with painstaking accuracy the lead- ing features of the scenes through which he passed. He is impressed by the neatness and trimness of the towns — above all, by the air of solidity given by their stone-built houses. He doubtless astonished the Saxon, accustomed to regard Scotland as little more than the home of barbarism and poverty, by telling of the noble domains that he found scattered through the land. Now and then he gives long 344 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CHANGES. descriptions of strange and characteristic customs — doubtless gathered at second-hand — and he enlarges them by copious illustrations of other customs elsewhere which he had read or heard of in his multifarious journey ings. Occasionally he gives his own experiences; and he helps us to know the clergy of Scotland by telling how they were " the most decent and consistent in their conduct of any set of men I ever met with in their order," and how they were " very much changed from the furious, illiterate, and enthusiastic teachers of the old times" — those old times which had served to give the prevailing impression to himself and his countrymen. We have abundant information about the fauna of Scotland, and about its antiquities which he had pictured to illustrate his book. Bishop Percy thought Pennant's volumes insufferably dull and tame, and probably most modern readers will agree with the verdict. From beginning to end, it is the Cockney describing a life into which he could not enter, whose strange- ness he did not really comprehend, the romance of which he was incapable of picturing to himself in the prosaic surround- ings of his own plodding life. But Dr Johnson — to whose hand we owe the companion picture — knew the difficulties of description, and was more lenient in his judgment than Bishop Percy. He recognised Pennant's care and accuracy and his power of observation, and he knew how hard the unwonted task had been to his own massive intellect. His own tour had been the cherished aim of many a long year, spent in the toil of professional literature and circumscribed by the narrow world of Fleet Street. He came with im- bedded prejudices, which he parades with a half - humorous and nowise rancorous persistence. But if we wish to see what the country was, we have to go, not to the well-trained and assiduous hack, but to the untried but keen-visioned man of genius, who tested each new incident in the alembic of his own insight and his own incomparable breadth of sympathy. The easy flow of his narrative never strains either the efibrt of the writer or the patience of the reader. It ranges over every phase of the subject, expatiates on its many-sided interest, theorises upon its meaning, throws a sidelight upon every passing scene, and gives us, to the very life, the Scots- man as he appeared to the old man who had made city life one with his own, and whose fancy and whose insight were quick with the liveliness of genius, in spite of the narrow range of experience in which he had moved for seventy years. It is to Johnson that we go to see the life, the houses, the food, the garments — nay, the very speech and manners of the Scotsmen amongst whom he passed, and who were attracted Johnson's journal. 345 to his personality by the magnetic force of a master-mind. He alternates, with inimitable power, grave disquisitions with quaint humour ; he describes incidents, not as they assumed importance to the commonplace traveller, but as they threw a subdued light upon the character of the people, or as they pointed a striking contrast. It is to him, and not to Pennant, that we must go if we are to see how the traits of character that live to this day were present more than a hundred years ago, and how traces of the old and barbarous customs of medigevalism were blended with the new influences of modern life. He tells us of the wonderful grace of manner that gave to the humblest Highlander something of the instinctive grace of a gentleman ; how their readiness of reply was based upon an anxiety to please, and how the truth or falsehood of their information was a petty accident which the graces of social intercourse taught them to neglect. He enters with wonder- ful insight into their religious feeling, and catches instinct- ively the lingering symptoms of old customs. He dwells over their superstitions — half-sympathetic with their mood, half- humorous in his grave exposition of their origin. He makes of his very unfitness for the unwonted rdle of a cicerone an added charm, and he disarms our criticism by his closing words, "My thoughts on national manners are the thoughts of one who has seen but little." Yet when we have read his book, we feel that we have an added insight, not only into the Scotland of that decade, but into the extent of its contrast with the English society of the day. Pennant's book is a useful itinerary; Johnson's Journal has the indescribable but irresistible charm of a monument of literary genius. 346 CHAPTER XIV. FROM 1770 TO 1780. The next decade is one of the highest importance in the history of Scotland, although its results are to be traced, not so much in any outward effects, as in the laying of the foundations upon which the history of the next generation was to be based. The economic changes of which we have just spoken were problems of the deepest interest for Scot- land. She found herself face to face with a new state of things, which, throughout all her borders, was working a gradual change in social conditions. The political results developed more slowly still. At first sight, it might appear as if the period from 1770 to 1780 was a colourless and stationary one ; but in truth it was one of those periods in the life of a nation when the forces which were to rule the next generation were taking shape. In the first place, it was during this period that the dis- tinctive character of the Scottish citizen for at least three generations to follow was most definitely shaped. As it is conceived by his Southern neighbour, that character is a strange medley. The conception is one to which remote history and legendary romance have alike contributed. It is drawn from the wild fury of civil warfare : the lawless recklessness of unrestrained robbery : the scenes of fierce religious contention and the gloomy fanaticism which was for a time the inevitable inheritance of that contention — all alike have lent some lurid colour to the picture thus care- lessly throw on the canvas. It is a picture drawn partly from intercourse with the quiet and phlegmatic Lowlander, and partly from the tales of the fiery and romantic Celt, the hereditary foe of the Lowlander. Such a conception sank into the mind of the Englishman when he had little oppor- tunity of correcting it by personal experience. It has remained ever since as an irresistible and dominating im- RELATIONS BETWEEN ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND. 347 pression, if not an actual belief. The barriers between the two nations have gradually grown weaker or have broken down. It is only on occasion, nowadays, that a pasteboard, painted to look like a barrier which is long since out of date, is set up by the exigencies of a faction, or to suit the passing humour of some small and insignificant group. Even the Cockney might now be found to smile at the traditionary picture of the Scotsman which habit and inheritance make him, almost involuntarily, form to himself. For the first half of the century Scotland had been to all intents and purposes as separate from England in thought and character as if the Act of Union had never been passed. That Act had stimulated rather than checked the mutual dislike. A vague picture of a country alien in race and language, difiering in law and custom, from which resistance and danger might be expected— such was the aspect in which Scotland appeared to the Englishman. This dislike and these fears seemed to be fully justified by the Jacobite rebellions; and the fact that these rebellions found sympathisers in England did not in any degree lessen the feeling of uneasy perturbation with which England regarded the country of their inception and of their passing triumphs. When the final fall of Jacobite pretensions came, in 1745, there was an opportunity for the two nations to grow together and each to view with less asperity the idiosyncrasies of the other. Signs were not wanting that it might be so. In Scotland, at least, a large and influential body of the people were anxious to break down the marks of separation, to promote intercourse, to pay the flattery of imitation to English custom and English usages, and even in literature to cultivate English models. The victories of the Empire were hailed by Scotland as things in which she shared, and the foresight and genius of Chatham found a means whereby the heroism of the Highland clans might be one of the bulwarks of the dynasty which it had so recently shaken by an eflbrt of desperate valour. The fringe of possible disorder being thus turned into a fertile recruiting ground, it might have seemed natural that the more peaceable parts of both nations should have coalesced into one, and have grown into unity of habit and of custom, of thought, religion, and even of law, which would have left the lines of demarcation only as memories. Whether the Empire as a whole, or Scotland as a part of it, would have been any the better for such a peaceable solution of the position, is a matter on which it is at least permissible to have a doubt. Unquestionably it was a consummation which a statesman would have been compelled to desire, and 348 FROM 1770 TO 1780. which he would have been justified in pressing forward by all means in his power. To achieve it would have appeared a model of political strategy. It would have hastened the commercial prosperity of Scotland by at least a generation, and by means of it some points of divergence which even now keep the two nations in separate grooves of thought and feeling might have been obliterated. But just as surely much that has been of vast moment in the development of character, in the range and variet^^^ of the national tempera- ment, even in the actual product of the national genius, would have been undreamt of, and England and Scotland would never have been what they are now in combination. But however this might have been, events made it impossible. There is a saying of Johnson with regard to Bute which is not without interest in this connection. "It would have been better," said Johnson, "if Bute had never been Minister, or had never resigned." What Johnson probably intended was, that the ideal which stood in a shadowy way behind Bute's Ministry, the ideal of a nation united under the crown, and content to forget the separation and distinctions either of nationality or of party, was a desirable one, if only it could have been made permanent or real ; but that without this permanence the influence of such a fancy was harmful rather than good. Taken in this sense, the saying is one for which there is ample justification. The dream which Bute for the moment typified, but which he in no way originated, was an attractive one; but his attempt to realise it left parties ex- asperated, and was the beginning of a faction fight of un- exampled bitterness. It tore the two nations asunder, and made it certain that they would follow separate lines of thought, of sympathy, and of politics. Its results were seen at every turn of our road through the history of the next eighty years ; and it was largely due to the events with which the reign of George III. opened that Scotland has a history of her own to chronicle for at least two generations more. The wild outburst of popular feeling that involved the whole Scottish nation in the prejudice against Bute; that united statesman, essayist, poet, and satirist in an insane crusade against anything that hailed from the north of the Tweed ; that made no gibe too trite and no sarcasm too fierce to be an instrument wherewith to provoke the susceptibilities of the Scot; that pointed the attack of Junius on Lord Mansfield, and made a Scottish .accent or Scottish descent amply suffi- cient grounds for accusations of political corruption against a statesman — all this was treated by Scotland with an apparent apathy that is almost surprising. The answers to those attacks. ENGLISH INSULTS. 349 as we have already said, were comparatively few. Some of the chief agents of the Government in Scotland were not ashamed even to bend to the storm, and to deprecate the sup- port of congratulatory addresses from Scotland on the Peace, lest these should provoke the suspicion of the English. The attitude of Scotland in this wild outburst of epidemic madness was that of dignified disregard, but none the less the iron entered into her soul. Insults may not provoke a war of words, but they are none the less felt. Nor were these insults without an accompaniment of positive wrong which might well stir the indignation of a proud nation. The refusal of a Scottish Militia on account of the alleged danger from lingering Jacobite pretensions, not only involved an imputation upon the undoubted loyalty of the vast majority of the nation, but it was a distinct financial wrong, inasmuch as the imperial subsidy was paid to the English Militia partly out of Scottish taxation. Scant attention was paid to the claims of Scottish commerce, and schemes of fiscal improvement were neglected and delayed. More than once the Lord Advocate, as chief representative of the Government in Scotland, had to express his sympathy with legislative proposals, but to confess that he might press them without success upon an apathetic Ministry. The result of all this was that Scotland was driven back upon herself, and that out of the various elements in her midst she had to construct a national character widely separ- ated from that of England. It is no exaggeration to say that the years from 1770 to 1780 created a wider line of demar- cation than had existed five-and-twenty years before. From that decade date many of the most characteristic features of the national type, which for fifty years more was to stand in what often seems unnecessary isolation from English methods and English habits of thought, and which was to bequeath, even to our own day, a tendency to divergence which any tactlessness or negligence on the part of Parliament or of the Government might even now widen or aggravate into active discontent. It was not the Scotland of Knox or of the Covenanters that was revived. Just as little was it the Scotland of the Jacobites. From these it drew some char- acteristic traits, but in the main it was a Scotland dominated by bold speculation, full of a desire for intellectual and material advance, proud of its own history and its own national peculiarities, ardent in the pursuit of its own lite- rary ideals ; jealous at the same time of its independence, pro- voked by virulent attacks and thoughtless gibes, and firm in the determination that its association with the predominant partner should be one of which it need not be ashamed. 350 FROM 1770 TO 1780. We have not, then, to study the history of Scotland in the pages of imperial history, on which she had little influence except in sharing the burden of national defence. Isolated Scotsmen achieved for themselves great place and power, and Mansfield, Loughborough, Erskine, and Eldon show the in- fluence which Scotsmen could exert on English law. But that influence they achieved not as Scotsmen, but as im- migrants. During the earlier part of the century Scotland had been divided into two camps. The Jacobite cause had kept a large and influential class distant from all political influence, and proscribed at once in liberty of action and in property. It comprised the great majority of the territorial class, and in- cluded many men of culture and high feeling, who were tabooed as disaffected and as rebels. But this feeling had now died away. Jacobitism was now little but a romantic embroidery on Scottish life, a peg to hang poetic sentiment upon. Its traditions and its monuments were all around, and permeated Scottish feeling — but as a memory only. The Episcopalian Church had been the refuge of many who were alienated by the uncouth usages and unattractive creed that were associated with one party in the Presbyterian Church. But as that party diminished in power and influence, a more liberal spirit pervaded the Church. The Episcopalians were no longer nonjurors, and were no longer looked upon with suspicion and dislike. They were recognised as Scotsmen, and gained more and more the respect which was due to their moderation and dignity of spirit. So also with the Highlands. Within living memory, the Highlands had been , the centre of threatening lawlessness, of which the outbursts of rebellion had been but symptoms. They had been an unknown region, not amenable to the ordinary laws, and owning allegiance only to an almost barbaric system of clan government. Now they were no longer an undiscovered land. Their fastnesses were penetrated ; Englishmen and Scotsmen alike found their scenery and their customs a mine of interest, and Scotsmen became proud of their poetry and romance. A few years before the Scottish vernacular literature was neglected and despised; it now became a field for anti- quarians and a source from which Scottish genius drew fresh inspiration. It would be absurd, of course, to say that all these elements coalesced, and that there was not abundance of controversial material within the Scottish nation. The Episcopalian was still looked upon with suspicion by the remnant who rep- resented the rigid Covenanter of an older day. Within the SEPARATE INTERESTS OF SCOTLAND. 351 Church itself there were divided parties, and the High-flyers still accused the Moderates of laxity and latitudinarianism. The boldness of philosophical speculation was dreaded by many, and its dangerous tendencies were freely denounced. Those who had been born and bred in the traditions of a proud hereditary caste were indignant at the intrusion of a new moneyed class, who threatened to push them aside. But on the whole the controversies were fought with com- parative mildness. The High-flyer did not shun social inter- course with the Moderate, and the clergy did not think their orthodoxy endangered by association with the speculative philosophers. The Jacobite was left free to indulge in specu- lative tenets of divine right, and to toast the king over the water, if he did not flaunt his forlorn treason in the face of authority. Of political discussion there was almost none, and even what there was bore no resemblance to the party divisions that divided England. The patriotism of such as Wilkes had never awakened one chord of sympathy in Scotland, and Scotland had practically no interest at all in the reiterated attacks that fell upon the imperturbable calm of Lord North's Administration. The American War, of course, had a bear- ing too direct upon the prosperity of Scotland not to arouse, to a certain extent, her interest ; but, with few exceptions, her inhabitants, or those who represented them, were content to support without question the measures of Lord North. The tirades of the Patriots had their eflect in disgusting the great body of Scotsmen, and Scotland was effectually cut off* from an Opposition which owed much of its influence to the foul- mouthed libellers of a nation. In her eyes, the King's Ad- ministration, under whatever Minister it might be named, deserved their loyal support, if only because it was attacked by those whose patriotism consisted chiefly in selfish factious- ness and reckless abuse. The forty-five Scottish members of the House of Commons were, almost to a man, supporters of the Government. Before the decade was passed, the whole influence of the Government in Scotland was centred in the powerful hand of Henry Dundas (who became Lord Advocate in 1775), and in few of the parliamentary fights did he find any of his own countrymen arrayed against him. The only doubt, indeed, was how far, at a critical moment, the Govern- ment could reckon on the presence or the active interest of their supporters. In the famous division on Mr Dunning's motion with regard to the power of the Crown in 1780, there were only seven Scottish members who voted against the Government. Twenty-three voted for the Government, but 352 FROM 1770 TO 1780. fifteen, or one-third of the whole representatives, did not take the trouble to attend. When the whole of Britain was divided between those who sent addresses to the crown in favour of the American War, and those who sent petitions begging that means of conciliation should be pursued, the vast majority of the towns and counties of Scotland were to be found amongst the "Addressers." Glasgow, whose interests were so closely bound up with the American trade, was amongst the few exceptions.^ In both these cases it may of course with justice be said that the Scottish members of Parliament represented only a handful of men who exercised an exclusive and most artificial franchise, while the municipal bodies were corporations of the closest kind, which in no way represented the bulk of the inhabitants. But there was no resentment whatever against their action. The country was simply indifferent. Even with the most restricted franchise, an excited state of public opinion shows itself in the demeanour of the onlookers. In Scotland, if an election was contested, it was fought merely upon personal grounds, or on the merits of some local dispute, or when some burning question about the disputed settlement of a minister or the privileges of a trade guild was at stake. In ordinary society politics was tabooed, and men preferred to discuss the pros and cons of a protracted litigation, the practical advantages or disadvantages of a certain rotation of crops, or problems as to the origin of society and the basis of our ethical notions. The flame of loyalty to the sovereign burned steadily enough, if it was not fanned into any special brightness by opposing blasts. Round the name of George III. had gathered something of the old attachment to King which had fed the last days of Jacobitism; and he was not loved the less because his choice of a Scottish favourite had been used as a weapon by his assailants. "Administration" was regarded as little more than the necessary mechanism by which the King must govern; and it was the duty of every loyal citizen to support it as something to which a rare, but more or less eflScacious, appeal might occasionally be made. It was during this placid period, when political disputation was all but silent, when parties hardly existed, but when Scotland was thrown back on herself by the outburst of factious libellers, that the foundations of the later Tory party were laid. Its political outlook was not very wide, nor did it cherish any very comprehensive political ideas. ^ The chief purchases of American tobacco by the farmers-general of France were made through Glasgow agents. MEAL-MOBS. 353 But it commanded the support of many men of high intelli- gence. It rested upon much that was deeply rooted in the national tradition. Above all, it was in large measure the champion of a distinct nationality; it cherished national customs, and it rested on resentment at national insults. Before the end of the decade we may trace the beginning of other movements. But first it will be well to observe some events of the time by means of which the development of social and economical as well as political change may be inferred. The first of these is the strange outbreak of meal-mobs, as they were called, which took place in 1773. The rise in rent and the gradual growth of manufactures had increased the price of food. This was ascribed to the exporting of grain, which was possible after the home markets had been supplied. The growth of an artisan class which had no direct interest in agricultural production had been the cause of this rise in price ; and it was this class whom the increased price chiefly affected. Not only were they of no political account in them- selves, but they had no such connection with the landed in- terest as gave them any reflected importance. The pressure of hard prices turned their thoughts against the exportation of grain, and by a strange infatuation they thought that a remedy might be found by destroying the stores which were supposed to be accumulated for purposes of exportation. There were two ways in which the law prevented grain from falling to its natural price, neither of which was so much as questioned yet by the political economist. One was a bounty on exported corn ; the other a fixed market price, above which the corn had to rise before importation was permitted. It was only in this generation that political economists were be- ginning to question the foundation of such artificial methods of fixing prices ; but the mobs sought a ready and less philo- sophical method of stopping the exports, which, as they fancied, were the cause of high prices, by trying to destroy them before they were sent abroad. These meal-mobs of 1773 occurred chiefly along the banks of the river Tay between Perth and Dundee. One granary after another was attacked by what were apparently well- organised mobs, consisting chiefly of the artisans from the towns. The farmers were naturally defenceless, and there was absolutely no system of police to which they could turn. The local authorities were completely paralysed. Where a few rioters had been arrested, their liberation was success- fully demanded by a larger crowd, with whom terms had to be made on condition that the stored grain should not be z 354 FROM 1770 TO 1780. exported, but sold in the local market for such price as it might fetch. The agricultural interest was thus at bay, and liad to seek safety in their own power of defence. The county gentlemen met together under the presidency of the Sheriff, and arranged the signals by which they should assemble with a sufficient number of their own dependants to repel any attack. In the maintenance of order it was thus neces- sary to have recourse to the most primitive methods. By these methods, which linked together landlord, tenant, and farm labourer for the protection of an industry in which they had a joint interest, the outbreaks of the artisans were for the time checked, and the authority of the fiscal laws was vindicated. Two lessons had been learned from this brief ex- perience: the first, that, for its own protection, society must turn its attention to the condition of the poor; the second, that order must be safeguarded by some system of police. Each of these lessons produced speedy results. Edinburgh led the way in the establishment in the same year of a Society for the Relief of the Honest and Industrious Poor. Throughout almost all the counties, with Mid-Lothian and Forfarshire as the leaders, there were voluntary combinations for the establishment of a police force to be supported by the subscriptions of the inhabitants. It was by practical lessons in social economy and in self-government such as these, and not by the share that she was allowed to take in imperial politics, that Scotland learned first to play her part in political affairs. The lesson was learned far more quickly than it would have been learned in England under like conditions. England was too large, her provinces too much detached, their circumstances and conditions too varied, to allow one example to permeate the whole. But in Scotland, the lesson, once learned, quickly took root and spread. The leading men of each county had a common meeting - place in the capital. There they exchanged ideas, discussed plans, and arranged their schemes. There they had, in Dundas, the advantage of a master-mind, prompt to advise, skilful to guide, and equipped with abundant information as to the circumstances of each county. Scotland was detached from the general current of imperial affairs; she lacked any semblance of representative institutions ; her parliamentary, like her muni- cipal franchise, was nothing but a name. But she was learn- ing the lesson of self-government, and it may be questioned whether the internal administration of Scotland under Dundas did not move under a stronger guidance from the centre, and with more of the strength that comes from unity, than did England under the guidance of the central Government. POOR RELIEF : EMIGRATION. 355 Edinburgh was the capital of Scotland in a sense that London never was of England. The Tayside rioters were brought to trial, but it is notice- able that evidence against them was not easily procured. Their defence was conducted with skill, and the case against them was not unduly pressed. Many of those put on their trial were acquitted, and the highest sentence on those con- victed was that of transportation. The trials present a striking contrast to those which a few years later throw a stain on Scottish legal procedure. Clearly society felt strong enough for self-defence, and saw no need to press too hardly on the errors of misguided men, acting under the strain of poverty and starvation. It turned with all the more assiduity to the more pleasing task of aiding the poor. The Edinburgh poorhouse was an institution of some years' standing. Hitherto it had depended on voluntary contributions and on church -door collections. These were no longer sufficient to cope with the increasing need, and the annual deficit was mounting. The more for- ward spirits had, as we have seen, already urged the adoption of a poor-rate; but the opposition was so strong that the scheme had to be abandoned for the time. But these were not the only signs that labour difficulties were making themselves felt in Scotland. In Greenock dur- ing the same year there were riots by sailors who demanded higher wages, and whose demands had to be met by tempor- ising.^ But fears of a more urgent kind arose from the wide- spreading emigration from the Highlands. Shipload after shipload of able-bodied men, with wives and families, were compelled to quit their country for the American Colonies. The Highland glens were being fast depopulated, and not only were feelings of commiseration stirred in the hearts of those who saw nothing but evil for their country in the desertion of her sons, and of onlookers like Johnson, but, besides all that, the draining of a ready source of supply for the labour market was seen to threaten the very existence, much more the advance, of Scottish manufactures. The char- acter of the population that was thus deserting Scottish soil in ever-increasing numbers is best judged from the fact that these bands of emigrants in almost every case carried with them a schoolmaster, to be supported at the common cost. ^ Two or three years later disputes of a similar kind arose in Edinburgh, owing to a demand by the journeymen tailors for higher wages. The dispute was settled in a summary fashion. The Justices at Quarter Sessions fixed the wages at a shilling a-day ; and any journeyman who demanded, or any master who paid, a higher sum was to be liable to fine and imprisonment. An early lesson in compulsory arbitration, which finds advocates even in our own day ! 356 FROM 1770 TO 1780. A nation does not lightly part with emigrants who lay such store by their parental and social duties as these. Such emigrations were perhaps chiefly caused by, and were cer- tainly most commonly ascribed to, the decay of the clan system and the break-up of the old social ties. But this was not always so; and we find evidence that it was some- times due not to the lessened power of the feudal chieftain, but to the fact that the representatives of the old clan rulers still exerted such influence as they retained in the systematic encouragement of rapine, robbery, and disorder, which rendered it impossible for the peaceful farmer to secure or to retain a livelihood. It is to be feared that this was, not rarely, the true version of what romance might picture as the unwilling departure of the faithful dependant from the chief whose protecting care had sheltered him until changed conditions destroyed the power of doing so.^ But whatever the cause, there can be no doubt as to the miseries which these emigrations entailed. The shipowners who contracted for their freight were under no supervision. At times complaints arose, and inquiries were made which proved that the ships were little else than floating prisons, on which the emigrants embarked only to die from starvation and disease brought on by the neglect of every sanitary pre- caution, or to be done to death by those who made a contract that would be profitable only if the majority of the passengers died before the voyage was nearly over. Some alarm was caused about the same time by the threatened fall in the linen trade. From the beginning of the century until 1769 the trade had rapidly advanced. Its value to Scotland was enormously exaggerated, and a mod- erate amount of commercial foresight would have discovered that it could form no very decisive element in the nation's prosperity. Now it showed what was a slight, and, as it turned out, a temporary decrease, which was doubtless in part owing to the growth of other industries, and particularly to the rival claims of the woollen manufactures, which held promise of far higher moment for Scotland. But the alarm which this decrease excited was used in order to press a protective duty on imported linens. The attempt was un- successful, but no one sought to question the expediency, on general grounds, of such a duty. The protection was refused only because other rival trades deemed it to give an unjust ^ In the 'Scots Magazine' for 1774 (June) we find a letter from a certain Mr James Hogg, giving this robbery and its encouragement by the neighbouring lairds, as the real ground for the emigration of himself and a large body who joined him from Caithness. HENRY DUNDAS, 1ST Viscount Melville PARLIAMENTARY REFORM. 357 advantage over themselves. The interest of the consumer was as yet disregarded except in the arguments of the spec- ulative economist, whose theories were only slowly to bear fruit. In 1775 a new Parliament had met. Once more North could face with a secure majority an Opposition which could not, somehow, add to all its restlessness and ability of attack any power of attracting support from the nation. As before, the majority for the Administration was swollen by the con- tingent from Scotland ; and in May of the same year, Henry Dundas, the son of one Lord President and the brother of another, was appointed Lord Advocate, sitting in Parliament as member for Mid-Lothian. Henceforth, for nearly thirty years, the Administration, as far as Scotland is concerned, really meant Dundas. We shall have to follow his career, so far as it is directly concerned with Scotland, and we must discern his hand as the most powerful in her government, even when his attention was wellnigh absorbed in wider spheres. For the moment he had an easy task ; but before he had been a month in office he had to take an active part in a controversy which might, but for the interposition of other events, have developed into one of the first importance. For long there had been grumbling at the absurdities of the Scottish parliamentary franchise. It belonged only to ten- ants holding directly of the Crown as superior, and had no necessary connection with the possession, much less with the occupation, of the land. But, on the other hand, the superior who held of the Crown could split his holding into many votes, and create what were merely fictitious qualifications to such an extent as to flood the real proprietors. This could only be limited by the threat of the larger proprietors to create such fictitious votes up to the full extent of their hold- ing, and so outdo their smaller competitors. Only rarely did a limitation even of such questionable expediency operate as a deterrent. In this year an attempt was made to initiate legislation on the subject. The plan was started when Dundas was only Solicitor - General ; but in the month of October, some five months after he became Lord Advocate, he presided at a meeting held in Mid-Lothian for the discussion of the subject. When the discussion began, Dundas, with characteristic caution, refused to declare himself ; he preferred to listen, for reasons which he would afterwards explain, to the opinions of others. These opinions were, by a large majority, in favour of the project, only Sir John Dairy mple and a few more speaking against it. When the vote had been taken, Dundas declared 358 FROM 1770 TO 1780. himself an enthusiastic supporter of the Bill. He had, he said, refrained from giving his opinion in case that of the freeholders had been different, and he had thus been compelled, at their behest, to act in Parliament contrary to his own con- victions ; but now that he could count on their support, he was determined to push the matter forward. His speech was one which savoured much more, indeed, of the Whig parlia- mentary reformer than of a Tory Lord Advocate in Lord North's Administration. "He hoped," he said, "to see the day when the nobleman of £10,000 a-year would not disdain to take off his hat to the gentleman of £500 ; when he would seek to gain influence, not by a preponderating number of votes, but by the way in which he did his duty to his neighbours, and thus deserved popularity." Dalrymple did not lessen his opposition, and prophesied that the Bill would meet with such opposition from men in power above that it would never pass into law. Dundas doubted the truth of Dalrymple's surmise, but at all events he would press the measure. The declaration is a curious proof of the slightness of joint responsibility then existing between diflerent members of a Government. The time soon slipped by when Dundas was disposed to preach parliamentary reform. The season for that passed for him, as it did for the greater statesman whose henchman he became. But the episode thus falling at the outset of his career is not less interesting in its personal application than as a symptom of a growing readiness on the part of the leading men of Scotland to advance, from the lessons of local administration, by providing something less absurd and anom- alous than the existing parliamentary franchise. It is still more curious that the advocacy of the project should have come from Lord North's representative in Scotland, and that the opposition should come from one who counted amongst the opponents — so far as Scotland contained opponents — of the Administration. Dundas came to power with every advantage of birth and natural endowment. He belonged to a family which had established a sort of prescriptive right to the great positions of the Scottish judicial Bench. Four generations of the family had succeeded one another on that Bench, and amongst them had been some of its chief ornaments. Personally he was a man of striking presence, with an impressive style of oratory, which his broad vernacular did not render less effective after the ear became accustomed to the emphatic burr. But above all, he was a man born to direct and guide administration, and with quick insight to discover and attract HENRY DUNDAS. 359 adherents. His character stood justly high, and whatever the clouds that gathered about his later career, not even his enemies would pretend that he himself was guilty of any dishonourable act, or stooped to an ignoble device, even amidst the chicaneries of politics. It would be idle to claim for him complete political consistency; but such a claim could not be made for any statesman of the time, and would be little to his credit unless as proving an almost adamantine strength of rigid obstinacy. Take him for all in all, the name of Henry Dundas is one of which Scotland may well be proud, not as a Scottish administrator only, but as an actor on a wider scene. But whatever the personal ability of Dundas, he derived his influence mainly from the fact that he represented so completely the Scottish society of his day. He belonged to one of its most powerful families. To him, as to most of his compatriots, party divisions meant little, and he was mainly desirous of preserving the existing basis of society, and of advancing upon a course of well-planned national improve- ment, so far as this was consistent with the maintenance of the landmarks of constitutional government as it was then understood. He was thoroughly Scotch — in feeling, in sym- pathy, and even in peculiarities of manner and of diction ; and even when he came to add to his functions as dictator of Scotland great achievements on a larger scene, he never lost these peculiarities. He was on terms of intimate and assured friendship with those who carried on the traditions of an older day. He had all the love of conviviality that marked his countrymen. He was in full sympathy with the Moderate party in the Church, which comprised almost all that gave to her lustre and distinction. He was one of the most characteristic figures of a time in which Scotland was producing a new national type pieced together out of her past inheritance. Let us take as instances two of those closely connected with him, representing peculiar features of the society of the day. One was Alexander Lockhart of Covington, who was at this time raised to the Bench by the legal title of Lord Covington. He was now an old man, having been born at the beginning of the century. His grandfather was the Lord President Lockhart who had been murdered by a disappointed litigant. His father was the well-known Jacobite, Lockhart of Carn- wath, whose memoirs are a storehouse of information re- garding the machinations of the Jacobite party, and the intricate network of schemes which attended its gradual decay. He had himself been in close sympathy with that 360 FROM 1770 TO 1780. party, but, like many others, on the accession of George the Third he transferred his loyalty ungrudgingly to the first native-born sovereign of the Hanoverian dynasty, and found a substitute for sympathy with a vanished cause in devotion to the throne. He was a man of aristocratic mien and manners, whose pride and superciliousness had been increased by long neglect at the hands of the dominant party of the Whigs. As an advocate he had been distinguished for zeal and versatility rather than for the balance of his legal judgment; and while his violent temper had involved him in frequent disputes, from which he did not emerge with his personal honour unimpaired, and although his passion for play had kept his fortunes low, he was still the object of much personal regard, and was deemed by many to have suffered undeserved neglect. On the urgent representation of Lord Mansfield, and with the support of Dundas, he was now raised to the Bench; and the appointment seemed to mark the readiness of the Government to obliterate those memories which kept the Jacobites in a state of proscription. Another was a man of a very difierent cast — Robert Mac- queen, afterwards raised to the Bench as Lord Braxfield. As the son of a local solicitor in Lanark, he could boast no aristocratic birth ; and to the end of a long life he preserved unchanged the coarse and uncouth exterior that marked his origin. He was a man of boisterous manners, who carried his love of society into an excess of roistering conviviality from which all thought of decorum and of personal dignity was banished. To this he joined a massive force of application and a strength of intellect by which he towered above all his contemporaries. The incidents of a later day, when he was one of the most strenuous combatants against what were, or what were supposed to be, the forces of Revolution, have made him live to posterity as a sort of Scottish counterpart of Judge Jeffreys ; but whatever the outbursts of a fiery temper and prejudices, which he never sought either to curb or to conceal, his character appeared very difierent to his contemporaries. He was without literature, and showed an open contempt for the philosophical and speculative pre- dilections of many of those amongst whom he lived. But his massive grasp of legal principles, his rugged sense, his acute- ness, and his perspicacity won the respect even of his bitterest foes ; while his abundant good-humour, his genial if coarse bonhomie, and his unfailing wit, made him beloved by his intimates. We must beware of trying such a man by any standard based upon the staid manners and settled procedure of modern judicial usage. We must remember all the jeal- EDINBURGH IMPROVEMENTS. 361 ousies that he united against himself ; the resentment of the literati against one who scouted their pretensions and had no sympathy with their pursuits ; the rancour of his weaker contemporaries, whose chicaneries he detected, and for the flaws of whose arguments he did not conceal his contempt; the condemnation of those who were shocked by the licenti- ousness of his language and the absence of all restraint in his conviviality; and, finally, the bitterness of a depressed and angry party, against whom he deemed it his duty to turn all the engines of judicial authority. But still we must accord to him the praise of a great lawyer, of a powerful intellect, of a man who resorted to no mean and petty tricks, and who rigidly pursued the ends of justice according to his lights. He too was one of Dundas's staunchest adherents. But the day when a fiercer fight was to present the char- acter of the leading men in a picture of more contrasted light and shade had not yet come. For the present, Scotland was occupied chiefly with careful and piecemeal efforts at her own advancement. The capital was gradually making herself more worthy of her name. Already the long-projected bridge over the Nor' Loch had added, to the narrow limits that had sufficed for ages, a large and increasing suburb. There was now a project^ for adding to the space southwards by improv- ing the access in that direction by a bridge over the Cowgate, as the depression on the southern side, flanking the saddle- back on which the city was built, was called. The cost would nowadays seem modest, and is an index of what was counted a great enterprise in those days: it was estimated at £8600. But it was not suffered to pass without protests from those who preferred things as they were. It was prophesied that this extension southwards must, sooner or later, ruin the city. The new suburb to the north had lowered the rents obtained for the high-pitched tenements which crowded within the city walls. This further addition would lower these rents still more, until soon there would be no resources available for the necessities of taxation. In 1771 an event took place which was not without signi- ficance for Edinburgh, when the foundation-stone of a new High School was laid with great ceremony, and when a project was begun which was hailed as a most hopeful one by all her leading citizens. It was an important step for- wards in a sphere of which Edinburgh had good reason to be proud as that of her leading industry. ^ Eventually carried out under the Provostship of Sir J. Hunter Blair, the partner of Sir William Forbes in the most notable firm of private bankers in Scotland. 362 FROM 1770 TO 1780. A change, tentative indeed, and hesitating at first, but with more far-reaching consequences than the projects of the city iEdiles, was that which was accomplished by the legislation of 1775, which emancipated the colliers. It is strange, indeed, to read that only then was the condition of slavery abolished in Scotland. Scotland had obtained in 1701 her equivalent to the Habeas Corpus Act. But that Act expressly enacted that its provisions were not to extend to colliers and salters. Up to 1775 these labourers were serfs in the fullest sense of the word. They were cut off by the stigma of slavery from their fellow -men. They were bound to the mine in which they worked, and were sold as a part of the working machinery. Once a child was entered for the work, his liberty was no longer his own; and as the necessities of his parents allowed them no choice, the child of a collier was almost certainly a slave from his earliest years. Even when this stain upon Scottish civilisation was partially removed in 1775, the action of the Legislature was cautious and timid. For the existing serfs the period of emancipation was slow, and the end was only to be obtained by legal process, which was rarely within his power. It was only in 1799 that the last relic of this barbarism was removed. During the rest of the decade the local affairs are of little moment. We read of a struggle between the Trades Guilds and the Town Council of Edinburgh, in which the former represented the more popular side, and which seemed to portend an attack upon the flagrant abuses of a close muni- cipal government. The city member. Sir Lawrence Dundas, seems to have sympathised with the Town Council ; and when the Trades Guilds complained of his betrayal of their interests, he could only plead that he felt bound to maintain a neutral attitude. The dispute lasted long, and it ran high enough to turn the election in 1780, when Sir Lawrence Dundas was defeated by Mr Miller, an advocate, the son of the Lord Justice -Clerk. The defeat was a confirmation of the power of his namesake, Henry Dundas, and of the Duke of Buccleuch, of whose party Sir Lawrence had been one of the leading opponents, and whose anger he had specially aroused by being one of the seven Scottish members who supported Mr Dunning's famous motion on the power of the Crown. More than one dispute arose, in which Edinburgh was fiercely fought by Glasgow and the Western shires, as to the fixing of the price at which com might be imported. No one — amongst practical politicians — then opposed in principle the prevention of importation when the prices fell below a certain NATIONAL DEFENCE. 863 standard. The question was only how that standard should be fixed. Before the Union this had been fixed from time to time by the Scottish Privy Council. By an Act of 1741 the power was vested in the Court of Session. In 1773 it had been transferred to the Sheriff* of the county. A Bill was now proposed to restore it to the Court of Session, and thus provide greater fixity and security for agriculture. The struggle became- one between the landed interests and the farmers of Mid-Lothian against the growing manufacturing interests of the West. Glasgow urged that the price at which importation should be permitted must be low, and that the prices of the Edinburgh market, where agricultural produce was abundant, must not rule for all Scotland. The landed interest, on the other hand, felt their pockets threatened, and looked upon such pretensions as endangering the very con- stitution of the country. But before the decade closed we find abundant symptoms that smaller local interests were waning, and that an era of fiercer party struggle was approaching. Opinions on either side as regards the justice and the expediency of the Ameri- can War were becoming much more distinctly marked. The foreign complications of Britain were now brought home to Scotland in the most vivid way by the appearance of priva- teers on her coasts. When it came to the town of Leith being closely threatened by a flotilla under that wild nautical adventurer, John Paul Jones (a renegade Scot from Kirkcud- brightshire, who sailed successively under the flags of America, of France, and of Russia), the excitement grew apace. The incident roused an outburst of patriotic vigour over the whole country. Town after town voted funds to fit out ships for the national defence, or provided bounties for seamen who would enlist for service. The pressgangs were busy, and per- haps these bounties were meant only to cloak a compulsory enlistment. But anyhow, they showed that the people were roused to the need of defending their coasts and homes. Once more an attempt was made to wring from the Imperial Parliament a measure for the establishment of a Scottish militia, and once more it met with a rebufl". But this did not stop the national zeal. The citizens began to enrol them- selves as volunteers, and to stimulate their martial ardour by the platoon exercise, and by valorous marches through the streets with the magistrates and town officers at their head. Volleys were fired to show their indomitable courage, and the diversion was closed by cheers for the King, followed by an unlimited carouse. Throughout all parts of the country the foreign struggle in which the Empire was engaged began 364 FROM 1770 TO 1780. to excite a much more real and lively interest than ever before. And as the martial feeling of the country grew, so the utterances of those who opposed the Government policy became more decided. The Moderate party in the Church were still able to obtain votes for loyal addresses to the Crown, in which the speedy crushing of the American rebellion was made the subject of confident aspiration. The close municipal corporations for the most part followed the same strain of loyal invective against the rebels. But other notes made themselves heard. The Glasgow traders found the pressure on their nascent prosperity caused by the war a severe strain on their loyalty, Dr John Erskine, the leader of the High-flying party in the Church, and one of her most respected clergymen, preached against the war, and found many sympathisers in a congregation which was the largest and most influential in the capital. When the chief question which divided English political parties began to form in Scotland opposing camps, which were divided also on the fundamental question of ecclesiastical politics, it was certain that these English parties would soon have their counterparts there. Shortly before the year 1778 there arose the first tentative discussion of a question which was to have a much deeper influence on Scottish politics, albeit an influence totally out of proportion to its intrinsic importance. This was the ques- tion of the removal of Catholic disabilities. The question was one on which an agitation was proceeding at the same time in England. But instead of the division of parties on the subject corresponding in England and Scotland, it was in many respects fundamentally different. Many of the fiercest opponents of the Administration were, in England, in favour of the repeal of these disabilities. In Scotland, on the other hand, the mere suggestion of their repeal gave the opponents of the Government precisely what they sought for — the opportunity of an effective and popular attack on the Ad- ministration. In both countries the struggle damaged the Government, but in only one respect was the damage of the same kind. In both countries they were charged with vacillation and temporising; but in England they were ac- cused of insufficient vigour in suppressing the riotous out- burst which the legislative repeal of the disabilities had caused; in Scotland the whole weight of the charge was that they had tampered with a design which would have delivered the country, in the opinion of the opponents of the measure, into the hands of the Roman Catholics, and would CATHOLIC EMANCIPATION. 365 have wiped out a chapter of Scottish history which popular sentiment deemed the most glorious. The question of Catholic Emancipation wounded the Government through the Moder- ate party in the Church. That party had no reason to be ashamed of the part it played in the discussion ; but it mis- took the temper of the nation, and suffered a reverse in consequence, from the effects of which it never completely recovered. In that year the first talk was heard in Scotland of a Bill being contemplated which should bring such relief to the dis- abilities of the Catholics as had been given in England just before. No Roman Catholic could sit in Parliament or on any municipal body, nor exercise the franchise for either; and these disabilities it was now proposed to remove. But further than that, no Roman Catholic could hold property; no Roman Catholic could take part in the education of the young. These were restrictions which amounted to per- secution, and it was suggested that they should be removed. Further, it was in the eye of the law a crime to open a Roman Catholic place of worship or to celebrate the Roman Catholic ritual. Usage had, in fact, relaxed this restriction, and Roman Catholic chapels had been built in some of the larger towns which had caused no offence to a population who scarcely noticed their existence. It could hardly have been anticipated that the proposal to give them a modified sanction by the law should awaken all the slumbering ran- cour of religious bitterness. But more than this, the very presence of Roman Catholics in Scotland was forbidden by the law. No one could give them shelter for three nights without making himself liable to severe penalties. Any one lying open to suspicion of holding the tenets of that religion could be summoned and examined by the Presbytery of the bounds. These provisions of the law, indeed, it would have been absurd to enforce. It may well have seemed a mere act of constitutional decency to efface from the Statute-book the remnants of such barbarous intolerance. But on the first note of the intended change being sounded some alarm was felt. The memory of old religious fights, and all the fierce animosity which they had called forth, was slumbering, but was not dead. At first, however, the full extent of the feeling was not gauged. Those most prone to alarm put questions to the Lord Advocate, who did not scruple to avow that some such intention was entertained. For a time those who saw its justice and were anxious that a bad page should be torn out of the statute-book, were firm to their purpose. A motion was proposed in the General 366 FROM 1770 TO 1780. Assembly to protest against any such scheme, but by the influence of Principal Robertson and the Moderate party it was defeated. This did not, however, stay the fury of popular feeling, nor were the High -flyers dismayed at the defeat of their first attempt. They quickly saw that here, at least, they had the whole force of popular sentiment on their side, and that this was a lever which they might use with telling effect against the dominant party. Dr James Erskine found here a more telling theme than he had found in decrying the justice of the American War. In England the resistance had been slower, and when it did break out, it was chiefly confined to the more ignorant classes. In Scotland the outburst of anti-Catholic feeling was at once clear and decisive, and it united on its side the vast majority even of the educated class. Under such stimulus, it is not surprising that the violence of the mob soon broke out. In February 1779, the Roman Catholics were the victims of lawless attacks both in Edinburgh and Glasgow ; not indeed of such appalling magnitude as soon after, under the insane leadership of Lord George Gordon, reduced London to a state of anarchy, but sufficient to show the fury of the people and to shake authority. In Edinburgh, a building in the Trunk Close, where a Roman Catholic bishop resided, and where, as was reported, there was a Popish chapel, was burnt to the ground before the eyes of the city -guard ; and next day the house of a Popish clergyman in Blackfriars Wynd was at- tacked and plundered. The house of Principal Robertson, who had countenanced the motion for repeal, was threatened. He himself received letters announcing his coming murder; and the pillage of shops whose owners were reported to be Roman Catholics was a daily occurrence. The same scenes were enacted in Glasgow, and the magistrates could only temporise and endeavour to appease the mob by assuring them that the project of repeal was definitely abandoned. The Government discovered too late the mistake they had committed, and that the forces of order were too weak to per- mit them to advance farther in the path they had chosen. Whatever might have been the difficulty of pushing forward a scheme which at the worst was only premature, such vacilla- tion was fatal. The assurances now given that the proposal was abandoned did not suffice to calm the feelings that had been aroused. A Society for the Defence of Protestant Inter- ests was established. No alarm was too absurd to find credit with an angry mob whose fanaticism had been aroused, and whose ignorance suffered them to accept as true any fable which their leaders chose to invent. The matter was debated POPULAR OPPOSITION TO IT. 367 in Parliament, and the course of the debate showed how little connection there was between the opposition which the Government had to : meet [ at St Stephen's and that which thwarted their plans in Scotland. At Westminster, Fox and Burke declaimed against the weakness of the Government that had allowed a fanatical mob to defy the law, and urged the duty of toleration and the urgent necessity of purging the statute-books of laws which were barbarous and out of date. Meanwhile the Scottish Opposition accused the Government of being in league with the Pope to betray the Protestant liberties of the country ; and one of the Scottish representa- tives, Lord Frederick Campbell, did not scruple to say that he would take every child of a Roman Catholic father from his parent's hands and compel his education in a Protestant school. Burke carried on a heated correspondence with one of the Opposition party in Scotland, who might have sided with him in denouncing Lord North, but who held the main- tenance of the disabilities to be above all secular policy. This strange complication amongst their opponents did not, how- ever, make the position of the Government any easier. They had abandoned their scheme, but in abandoning it they had inflicted a deadly blow on their friends in Scotland. The Moderates had supported repeal on much the same grounds that the Tories seventy years before had granted toleration to the Episcopalians, because they hoped thereby to crush fanat- icism. But they had miscalculated in their estimate of the forces which they had to encounter. They had mistaken a superficial latitudinarianism for a real abandonment of prin- ciples which the religious struggle of no ancient date had burned into the hearts of the people. They had not, indeed, to contend with the keen dialectical skill and enthusiastic conviction of the Covenanters; but the memories of these were reflected — albeit faintly and in a grotesque travesty — in the lawless fanaticism of an ignorant mob. The Moderates found themselves now denounced as Tories in politics and as Revolutionists in religion ; and neither of these was a char- acter which Scottish tradition tended to render popular. Nothing remained but to bury the project with decency. Neither party had much to gain by prolonging it. The opponents of the Government counted amongst their party many who had no wish to appear as foes of toleration. An alliance with a lawless mob was inconvenient. A few were found, indeed, to defend the outbreaks of violence by saying that the Roman Catholics were there in defiance of the law, and that their places of worship, being forbidden by express statute, had no more right to protection than the known 368 FROM 1770 TO 1780. haunts of thieves and highwaymen. The more respectable of the High-flying party could scarcely countenance such incentives to robbery and murder ; and even had they dared to do so, the outbreaks of the Gordon riots in London gave an object-lesson which could not be overlooked. A last debate took place in the General Assembly. The project of repeal was admittedly abandoned, and the fight had to take place upon a sham issue. No one attempted to deny that the feel- ing of Scotland was, for the time at least, absolutely opposed to the scheme. To that feeling the Moderates professed to yield. So far as reasoning and eloquence went, they had an easy superiority over their opponents. They denied the danger of repeal; they vindicated their own attachment to Protestant tenets ; they mocked the absurd fears which had been aroused in an ignorant mob. But all they could achieve was that the motion passed by the Assembly should be one of satisfaction at the abandonment of the scheme, instead of one denouncing its authors and exciting still further the alarm of the nation about imaginary dangers. So ended a dispute in which the Government had rashly, and without an adequate estimate of the feeling of the country, propounded a scheme which had the sympathy of the very men who were the chief opponents of the Government in England, and had afterwards found themselves unequal to carry it through. The initial rashness and the subsequent vacillation of the Government had been turned to good account by those who were jealous of the Moderate party in the Church. The struggle left behind it a rancour of party feeling of which the next few years saw an amazing growth. 369 CHAPTER XV. FROM 1780 TO 1784. After the project for the repeal of the Catholic disabilities was effectually disposed of, the agitation died down, but it did not prevent suspicion from rankling in the minds of a large number of the people. The outrages of the mob in London, under the reckless leadership of Lord George Gordon, had indeed sufficed to turn all thinking men against excesses whose only possible excuse was the fanaticism of bigotry; but outrages did not alter the sympathies of the uneducated crowd, and still less did they modify the tactics of those who found in these sympathies convenient instruments for their own party purposes. When Lord George Gordon was brought to trial, the crowd was still in his favour, and the eloquence of Erskine, then in the full flush of his oratorical fame, and careless how he abused the forms of the court in his zeal for his client, was sufficient to extort from the jury a verdict of Not Guilty. To the mob, sunk in the usual ignorance, and misled by a more than usual passion of reckless faction, the verdict was no doubt congenial, and it must be recorded with shame that it was hailed with acclamation in Edinburgh, where the reception of the news was celebrated by bonfires and illuminations. It was a new, and not a very healthy symptom, that the triumph of mob rule in England should arouse the sympathy of Scotsmen, who had been wont to look upon its excesses with the indifference of spectators. The Assembly of the Church still continued to pass loyal resolu- tions, in which the excesses of fanaticism were condemned. But amongst the mass of the people the Protestant Association was still predominant, and its effect on party feeling was not modified, as it was in England, by the fact that toleration was supported by such members of the Opposition as Fox and Burke. In Scotland, the Opposition, such as it was, found its best policy to be unmitigated persecution of their Catholic 2 a 370 FROM 1780 TO 1784. fellow - subjects, and supplied its necessary heat from the flames of popular fanaticism. For ten years the Opposition had been noisy and energetic rather than powerful, so far, at least, as numbers went ; but now the Ministry of Lord North was verging towards its fall. The war was dragging its weary length, uncheered by any notable successes and accompanied by increasing dangers and augmented taxation. Ministers spoke with uncertain and varying voices as to their policy and their intentions, and the resourcefulness and quiet humour of Lord North were no longer a match for the unwearied attacks of an Opposition that compensated its paucity in numbers by copious eloquence and amazing versatility in Parliamentary fence. Scotland, indeed, was not greatly concerned in the party fight raging at Westminster ; and her indifference to it was due partly to the political influence of Dundas, and partly also to the instinctive sense which Scotland still retained that the fury of faction was unsound, affected, and unreal. The mass of the Scottish people had no direct means of making their influence felt. All the parliamentary electors in Scotland numbered little over two thousand, and many members of this select body held their franchise on an unreal and fictitious tenure. The men of real political influence could be counted almost by scores, and they were thoroughly under the guidance of those who held the reins of Administration. If the county elections were entirely in the hands of the territorial aristocracy, who formed almost a family of their own, the burgh elections were even worse. These were decided by the delegates from the various groups of burghs that formed each constituency, and there was not one of these delegates that had not his price, and that was not open to a deal with the highest bidder. And the highest bidder was almost certainly on the side of Administration. Popular feeling might, indeed, ex- press itself by riotous assemblies and by attacks on property, but from any approach to free representation, in any form, it was rigorously excluded. Yet it would be wrong to say that the predominant loyalty to Crown and Administration was forced upon Scotland against its own free-will, or that its only basis was the fact that political power was absorbed by a privileged class. Power was in the hands of a narrow and often selfish oligarchy, but on the whole that oligarchy represented the best feeling and soundest sense of the nation. Political influence was, indeed, in the hands of a small number, but in many respects that small number was singularly typical of the whole. The same characteristics and the same sympathies pervaded all society. The outburst UNITY OF SCOTTISH FEELING. 371 of feeling antagonistic to Scotland at the beginning of the reign had left inevitable results. Scotland was driven in upon herself ; her very isolation nursed all the strength of her national feeling, and evolved a national individuality built upon traditions, homely characteristics, and the close sense of kinship that was ever intensely strong in her soil, and that now began to embrace the Celtic fringe which for ages had been divided by a marked contrast from the Low- lands. The very smallness of the country made the sense of nationality — or " kindliness " in its stricter sense — more strong. There was no wealth sufficient to create wide distinc- tions between class and class. Powerful as was the influence of birth and hereditary rank, it was an influence which pervaded all classes, and in which none was too poor to have a share. A distant cousinship made the bonnet-laird partake the feelings of his feudal superior, and he in his turn formed a link between the highest in the land and his own humble dependants, who shared the name and claimed the kinship of the great territorial magnates. Simplicity of life combined with the love of hospitality was the habit of all alike, and every class was impregnated with that bonhomie which often degenerated into coarse and brutal excess. The meal -mobs and the occasional strikes of the labourers show that on the outer fringe of the social fabric there was growing up a discontented and hitherto down- trodden class who found the new conditions of life unsupport- able ; but it was as yet a small section, to which even a free system of representation on the widest scale then dreamt of by the most visionary reformers would have given absolutely no weight. On the whole, such wealth as the country pos- sessed was fairly distributed. There was no extravagance of luxury and but little of grinding penury. The better class was alive to its duties, and was ready to give money and labour to works of philanthropy, if such philanthropy involved no dangerous political principle. Scotland was without any representative system, but there is no reason to think that at this time, if any such system had existed, its political colour would have been in any way diflerent from what it was. Another effect of the smallness of the country was the concentration of social and political influence in the capital. The population of Edinburgh was not much less than eighty thousand souls — a number in excess probably of any four other towns in Scotland ; but this preponderance in numbers only faintly expresses the preponderance in importance of the capital. Commerce had not yet grown to such an extent 372 FEOM 1780 TO 1784. as to balance that influence by changing Glasgow into the second city of the Empire for financial weight. In Edinburgh was gathered all, or almost all, that was important for social weight, for administrative capacity, and for marked supremacy in literature and in thought. In population, if not in wealth, she could hold her own with any city of the Empire except London ; and as a literary centre she was not only a second when there was no third in the race, but she could even prove an attraction for many to whom the literary coteries of London were open. The society that gathered there was a singularly picturesque one. For generations it had dwelt in the rookeries of the High Street, pent so close that all the leading families might seem to be the inhabitants of a single wide-stretching tenement, where they were thrown into constant contact, and knew each other as the members of one great family from childhood to the grave. Slowly, and with a certain reluctance, some of the more innovating spirits had found homes in the New Town ; but the Old Town was still the central hive towards which their affection gravitated, or to which their patriotism clung. And it must be remembered that nowhere in the British Isles had any municipality roused such a sense of local patriotism as that which Edinburgh inspired in her citizens. The noble and the judge, the advocate and the clergyman, the well-to-do shopman and the porter or caddie, the sleek bailie and the captain of the town-guard — each and all dwelt in a city which was a veritable home to them. All were known to one another as familiar faces in the streets. Their physiognomy, their foibles, their dress, and the measure of their conviviality — all were a bit of the daily life of the city: the fame of some was the pride, the eccentricities of others the habitual amusement, of their fellow-citizens. Divided they might be in sympathies and in opinion, but they were members of one family, held together none the less closely because family affection was varied by domestic bickerings. The very variety, indeed, was one cause of the closeness of this society, because it made it self-sufficing. Within the narrow circle was comprised every type. The Jacobite tradition still survived. None would have readily spared from Edinburgh circles the aristocratic dames who held the tenets of their ancestors, and who could defend them with nerve and grit. Even those who made no parade of public sympathy for such notions were proud of their friendship, and acquired social importance if they could claim their kin- ship. With all their aristocratic pride, these ladies were tied down to no trammels of conventional habit. They presented ITS VARIETY OF TYPE. 373 every variety of demeanour, from the grave dignity of the grande dame to the free manners of the hoyden, who knew that no simplicity of dress or life could deprive her of the respect due to her birth. One and all preserved, with rigid tenacity, the marked peculiarities of Scottish diction, and would have scorned to debase her pedigree by affecting a language which was not that understood and used by the humblest of her neighbours. None deemed that poverty was an indignity, but all looked upon a certain measure of hospitality, however humble, as the first and most essential object of such scanty means as she possessed. It was much the same with the male portion of the community. Ingrained habits of conviviality did not interfere with the dignity that enshrined the highest class; but the scenes to which it led effectually prevented that dignity from assuming an austere or stern pride. The dignitary issued forth in the morning to meet the ungrudging tribute of respect from his humbler fellow-citizen; but the carouse made him seek his home at night under equally deep obligations to the friendly guidance of the caddie, who respected him none the less because he had a fellow-feeling for his weakness. Within this society there was a wide and healthy divergence of opinion. Amidst all the picturesque surroundings of tradition, the impulses which were to stir the new generation were as strong in Edinburgh as in any corner of the Empire. Religion was there as tolerant, speculative philosophy as bold, scientific discovery as keen -sighted as in any country of Europe. Romance was already awakening a new or slumber- ing sense, and poetry was there learning to acquire a direct- ness and simplicity which was to overturn the formal traditions that had prevailed throughout the century. In the poorest country to be found within any of the leading kingdoms of Europe, the foundations of the science which was to lay down the principles regulating the distribution of wealth were being propounded. It was a society self-centred, and yet keenly alive to all the larger movements going on beyond it. Its members travelled widely, but kept their hearts always upon home. It went abroad and studied others closely ; and in its turn received with hospitality, and yet with self-respect and pride, those who came to it to learn what it had to teach. It was little wonder that for such a society the course of English politics had small interest or charm. The scorn and sarcasm of its southern neighbours gave to it, with all its diversities, one point in common, that of proud concen- tration, and the violence of English faction as displayed at 374 FROM 1780 TO 1784. Westminster only disgusted it. The name of Chatham had roused and attracted it. To the educated and those who were frequent visitors to London the names of Burke, and even of Fox, were familiar. But the Rockinghams and Shelburnes, the Sandwiches and the Cavendishes, emerging in all the tortuous political intrigues of the day, were names and names only to them. Loyalty to the Crown, and sup- port of the Administration as representing the Crown ; the firm desire to maintain the supremacy of the Empire, and to suffer no trafficking with revolution ; a fixed determination that even if political changes of detail were necessary, these changes should be carried out on no revolutionary principle, and should involve no fundamental alteration of the constitu- tion ; a common persuasion that, however bold might be their philosophical speculations, there should be no disturbance of the State religion as an accepted article of belief and as a system of social police — all these were principles which animated the whole of this complex and vigorous society, w^hatever their differences of opinion in detail. In the autumn of 1781 the whole nation was stirred by the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown, which virtually closed the war. Naturally it led to the fall of Lord North's Ministry; but it is no part of our business here to discuss the question of his paramount responsibility for the issue of the war, as to the grounds of which English political leaders had shown an almost bewildering variety of opinion, and in the conduct of which the Government had been assailed by every weapon which an unpatriotic faction could contrive. In Scotland, as elsewhere, the natural impulse was to lay the blame on the Ministers of the Crown.^ The dominant note of Scottish politics was what was known as the Revolution Whig ; and although that phrase was little more than a sort of high-sounding title to political orthodoxy, and was professed by many whose opinions diverged amaz- ingly, yet the name and memory of Chatham were power- ful enough in Scotland to make the contrast between his triumphs and the failures of North a poignant one. But there was no such virulence of feeling as was stirred by the ^ It would be hard to give any connected or consistent account of Burns's politics, according to the party shibboleths of the day ; but he knew his country- men's sympathies, and doubtless he expressed a prevalent feeling when he wrote in 1786 in the " Dream " : — " But faith ! I muckle doubt, my sire, Ye've trusted Ministration To chaps who in a barn or byre Had better fill'd their station Than court yon day." A POLITICAL BUSYBODY. 375 invective of party rancour in England, and still less was there any inclination to abandon loyalty to the Crown, or to despair of the possibilities of national defence. The martial ardour of the Volunteers was as strong as ever ; and however easily such a movement lent itself to the sneers of those to whose political views it formed an impediment, yet it gave proof enough that the patriotic zeal of the nation was not abated. It is true that amongst the Scottish members some who had before supported Lord North were now stirred to opposi- tion, and joined in that natural condemnation which dogs the feet of failure. Sinclair, the member for Caithness, whose name emerges in so many spheres of activity during the next generation, and to whose officious versatility Scot- land was only one of the many domains for the adminis- tration of which he deemed that Providence had made him responsible, had gone to Westminster in 1780 as one of Lord North's supporters. But for such a man the wire- pulling of party had irresistible attractions. He was not without merit, and certainly not without a kind of ability, unilluminated by the faintest ray of humour. But his fussi- ness knew no bounds. He had scarcely taken his seat in the House before he was making profuse offers of support to the Prime Minister. Within a few months he was busy over a reconstruction of parties, and was in correspondence with half the members of Parliament. Pamphlets poured from his new-fledged pen with bewildering rapidity. He was ready to gauge, and if need be to reorganise, the naval power of the country, and doubtless, on an emergency, to assume its command. Political economy had no secrets for him ; he pursued statistics with the ardour of an infatuated lover, and he laid down the law with absolute conviction on every knotty question of financial policy. There was no possible sphere of activity upon which he was not at all times ready to thrust himself, and none in which, when once he had appeared on the stage, he did not deem it part of Nature's arrangement that he should take the lead. In 1782 it was only natural that such a man should take the Government most summarily to task. He had no doubt but that the ruin of the nation was impending, and as little hesitation in assigning the responsibility. But all Scotsmen were not quite so cocksure. Adam Smith — a consistent Whig, if ever there was one — replied to Sinclair's confident predictions of national ruin by words of wisdom — "Be assured, my young friend, there is a deal of ruin in a nation." Other Scotsmen besides Adam Smith waited the 376 FROM 1780 TO 1784. issue with some confidence, and were not disposed to strain the case unduly against the Ministry. Even Sinclair's new-born opposition zeal could not exactly guide him to certainty as to the composition of any Ministry that was to take their place. In those who succeeded North, there was certainly little that could rouse the interest or stir the enthusiasm of Scot- land. Rockingham's Ministry represented a strange union of the old Whig aristocracy, whose political creed was bounded by implicit faith in the divine right of the great Whig families, with the fresher strain of Whiggism now led by Shelburne, and claiming to represent the creed and inspiration of Chatham. Accident had brought these two parties together, but they hated one another almost more than either hated North. In a few months Rockingham died, and the feeble tie which had held together a partner- ship so ill-assorted was broken. Shelburne became First Minister in July, and as a consequence Fox and Burke resigned. Fox's place was taken by Pitt, who became Chancellor of the Exchequer, and under this reconstructed Ministry the Peace of Paris was signed in January 1783. Meanwhile a coalition had been formed between Fox and North in opposition, which amazed the nation, and played havoc with any claim which Fox could ever maintain to political principle. In February 1783 that coalition man- aged to snatch a victory from the Government. But the King refused at first to succumb to the fate which saddled him with such an ill-omened alliance. For weeks he sought expedients to escape from the necessity, and it was only when all expedients failed him that he consented to accept the Duke of Portland as First Minister, with Fox and North as Secretaries of State. Amidst these kaleidoscopic changes Scotland had remained a puzzled, an indifferent, and latterly a disgusted, spectator. She rightly deemed them to be symptomatic of the lowest degradation of party politics, out of which the country was to be lifted only by the rise of some transcendent leader. The intricate causes influencing such changes were secrets into which Scotland had neither the wish nor the means to penetrate. It was enough for her that, so far as the supreme interests of the nation were concerned, such changes were absolutely without significance. The logic of facts, too grim to be questioned, directed the course of Imperial politics, and dictated the terms of the Peace of 1783. In that Peace no Minister or set of Ministers had any more real influence than the winds have upon the bare mountain CHANGES OF MINISTRY. 377 tops across which they sweep. This or that concession of form was demanded by one Minister to save any flimsy pretence of consistency to which he might lay claim with regard to the American colonies. One had once thought that conciliation was expedient, but that the sovereign rights of the British Parliament must in the abstract be maintained. Another had thought the claims of Parliament overweening, and had advocated concession not only in practice but in theory. So they squabbled amongst themselves as to points of form — whether an acknowledgment of independence should or should not precede negotiations — and so on. Such quibbles were absolutely worthless in face of the fact that coercion had failed, that our armies were destroyed, and that the stern reality of defeat must be acknowledged. We may well be thankful that negotiations begun on a basis so compromis- ing, and conducted amidst such factious bickerings in the English Parliament, did not result in even more humiliating concessions. What deemed itself enlightened opinion strongly condemned any attempt to retain Gibraltar ; but, fortunately for the Empire, such self -appraised enlightenment failed then, as it may be hoped it will often fail hereafter, to move the instinct of the British race. Ministers might have sur- rendered the gateway of the Mediterranean at the prompt- ings of party politics, but, fortunately, behind Ministers there stood the stronger barrier of popular judgment, un- enlightened, but none the less decisive. The fate of war had snatched from the scene the bone of contention which had served for party warfare for a dozen years. Factions were forced to turn to other things. Minis- ters made spasmodic and feeble attempts to carry out piece- meal legislation. But they were divided and half-hearted, and without any guiding principle; and so far as Scotland was concerned, they refrained even from the attempt. So long as the Rockingham Administration held together, and even during that of Shelburne, which lasted till May 1783, Scotland seems, on the whole, to have accepted the successors of Lord North with acquiescence, if not with any great cordiality. But the fact was that the changes down to the latter date left Scottish administration practically unaltered. It remained in the strong hands which had guided it since 1775. Dundas was Lord Advocate under Rockingham and Shelburne, as he had been under North. To pretend that by so remaining he was guilty of inconsis- tency is to bring against him a charge from which no poli- tician of the day could be pronounced free. If Dundas had been consistent amidst all the various evolutions of party. 378 FROM 1780 TO 1784. he would have stood alone. For months the Treasury and the front Opposition benches were the scene of transforma- tions to be equalled only on the boards of a theatre in the pantomime season, or by the shifting reflections cast by the quick -moving slides of a magic - lantern. Now Fox and Dundas faced North and Pitt; a few weeks later Fox and North were side by side, and joined in denouncing Pitt and Dundas; now Fox and Pitt were found supporting a project of reform opposed by Dundas ; and before we have time to classify them anew we find Pitt and Dundas in one lobby, Fox in the other. What possible consistency could any single figure maintain amidst the maze of such a bewilder- ing dance ? Which is in a position to accuse another of lack of allegiance to a principle ? But to advance such a charge against Dundas is indeed to misunderstand the whole position. During these strange years, a Minister really fulfilled a double role. He took his place in the rough-and-tumble contest of debate. In these debates it was doubtless recognised that each member of the Government should have a regard for the interest of the Government, and should do his best to maintain its majority. But how he was to do so was left to himself to judge, and the varying judgments of the different members of the Government often led them into opposite lobbies, and made them attack one another in debate. The bonds of adminis- trative discipline were so loose as hardly to be felt, and their texture was so flimsy as to be almost invisible. In these parliamentary fights Dundas had no difficulty in reconciling his own independence with the very moderate concessions that had to be made to the demands of the Government Whips ; but in the other role which he had to fill — that of administration — Dundas had a freedom of action far greater than that open to any other member of the Government. Under successive changes Dundas remained virtually king of Scotland, and within his own domain no one dreamed of attempting any interference. Under Shelburne and under Rockingham, as under North, Dundas was practically uncon- trolled. When the Coalition of Fox and North held power for a few months, then indeed the position of Dundas became irksome, both for himself and for the English Ministers. It became evident that he must be replaced ; but so strong was his hold on Scottish administration that the Ministry hesi- tated and seemed to shrink from the change. Months passed, and Dundas still held the administration in his hands, and it was only on the eve of their fall that the Coalition Ministry replaced Dundas by Henry Erskine, who had a few weeks' THE YOUNGER PITT. 379 tenure of the oJfice of Lord Advocate before the advent of another and more enduring Administration. Before the close of 1783 the Coalition Government had fallen, and the shifting phases of degrading faction fight were ended in the accession to office of the man under whose rule England was to remain during the momentous years that closed the cen- tury. It was in December 1783 that the King took the decisive step that freed him and the nation from the debasing scenes through which it had passed — scenes in which one reputation after another was bartered away for a few months of deceptive power. For the time it looked as if the King had risked his authority by an unlucky venture, and as if the new Government would last only for weeks, if not for days. The younger Pitt's acceptance of office as First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer was laughed at as "a boyish prank." The schoolboy who had ventured to assume office in the teeth of an adverse majority was scarcely to be dealt with except by derisive sneers at the freak by which he presumed to wear for a few days the emblems of power. For the moment his arrogance was intolerable, but it would soon give place to amusement at his fall. One man alone saw the probable issue of the game, and ventured all upon his loyalty to Pitt. Others might deride : Dundas alone never wavered in his firm belief that the future lay with the one man in Parliament who was born to rule. For five months Pitt had to maintain an unequal fight against a bitter and derisive majority. He could only maintain his position by a lofty and invincible pride. Derision changed to furious and almost inarticulate invective. The outraged faction, whose fury he treated with calm disdain, felt not the semblance only, but the reality of power slipping from their hands. They stood condemned before the tribunal of the nation, stripped of character and credit, and knowing that dissolution would carry them to ruin. Pitt was not to be hurried. He would vouchsafe no answer to the angry questions as to his intentions, save an absolute refusal to share his confidence with the House. For these five months this youth of twenty-five maintained the combat against an Opposition frantic with baffled rage. Night by night he found himself in a minority. All the eloquence, all the debating power, all the official experience were in the balance against him. His only aids were his own un- daunted courage and the unswerving loyalty of Dundas. Dundas did not again assume the office of Lord Advocate, but, with the Treasurership of the Navy, which was to lead 380 FROM 1780 TO 1784. to still higher and more responsible office, he combined the supreme direction of Scotch affairs. At length, in the spring of 1784, the dissolution came, and the new election gave Pitt a substantial majority and left his opponents a shattered and defeated remnant. The first campaign in the long fight that lay before him was now past. But the memory of these days of intrepid combat, when they two stood alone in the breach, was not to pass away. Henceforth the friendship between Pitt and Dundas was that of the comrades who had fought side by side in a forlorn hope. For more than twenty years it was to endure unshaken and ungrudging, and even amidst the clouds that gathered about its ending, although foul suspicions and false charges might tear the heart-strings of Pitt and hasten his end, they left the friendship unbroken even amidst the tragic surroundings of his death. Under the influence of Dundas, Scotland gave to Pitt in 1784 a majority even more decisive than that in England. It is true that Fox, prevented by the scrutiny from taking his seat for Westminster at once, found a temporary refuge in the constituency of the Orkneys, of which he was so eminently fitting a representative. The defeated represen- tative of an English party assumed the character of the " carpet-bagger," which in later days has been so often found convenient. But this did not materially alter the political complexion of the Scottish representation, which remained a solid phalanx under the sway of Dundas, and upon which Pitt found that he could rely with an assurance not always to be placed upon his English supporters. What, then, let us ask, was the secret by which Dundas was able to gather into his hands, and to place at the disposal of Pitt, what was, to all intents and purposes, the almost unbroken weight of Scottish opinion ? We have seen how strongly marked, how self-centred, and yet how full of diversities Scottish society was. Her national feeling, always strong, had been sharpened by the insults of English faction-mongers. She had no representa- tive system, but such a force of national feeling as then prevailed in Scotland could not but tell even on the narrow- est of political castes. Powerful as he was, Dundas could not have commanded Scotland, and determined her place in the struggle which occupied the closing years of the century, had he not thoroughly understood her and been in the closest sympathy with her most characteristic traits. Of the society which we have described, it would be hard to point to a more striking representative than Henry Dundas. SECHET OF THE POWER OF DUNDAS. 381 The family of Dundas was one of the most ancient in Scot- land, and was descended from a younger son of an Earl of Dunbar in the twelfth century. The immediate stock from which Henry Dundas was sprung had long been settled at Arniston, and had acquired a sort of hereditary rank in the judicial hierarchy. His own father, grandfather, and great- grandfather had all been judges of high repute. Early in the century an episode occurred in the family which showed that the hereditary Toryism of the race could, on one occasion at least, burst into Jacobitism. Henry Dundas's grandfather was a judge in the year 1711, and Edinburgh society, or a part of it, was much scandalised when his eldest son, James, who seems to have been a man of marked talent, but of somewhat turbulent moods, made himself the medium through whom the Duchess of Gordon presented to the Faculty of Advocates a medal of the elder Chevalier. The movement was too evidently a manifesto of faith on the part of the Jacobites, and as such it was treated, and made the subject of a remonstrance by the Hanoverian envoy. So inconvenient was the display, that the old Judge, to mark his disapproval of the action, made a will disinherit- ing his eldest in favour of his second son, Robert, who, to his own honour, destroyed the will, and declared his thank- fulness that it had not lain concealed in his father's cabinet till his death, and then appeared to disgrace his name.^ This second son, Robert, became successively Lord Advocate, Judge, and eventually Lord President. As head of the Court of Session, he was probably the most powerful and respected representative of Scottish law in the century, and left the memory of a character in which the rugged national traits are most fully illustrated. In his court he ruled with the absolute sway of a tyrant, who made no attempt to conceal the contempt with which his consummate intellect treated those whom he deemed the drones of the Bench. He was a warm friend but an implacable enemy — moved by gusts of passion; and yet a genial boon companion, and one who could act with warm generosity towards those who sought his aid. He was one of those Scotsmen of that cen- tury — and they were not a few — who combined an ingrained fibre of religious fervour with a life which, in some respects, seemed to defy public opinion in its freedom and licence. ^ The elder son retired to France, but soon embroiled himself in a quarrel which cost him his life. Fancying himself neglected at some fashionable ordin- ary, he hired three places for the next day, and then appeared with two dogs which he seated on each side of him, and addressed as "Monsieur le Comte" and "Monsieur le Chevalier." The insult was resented by one of the company, who challenged him, and killed him in a duel. 382 FROM 1780 TO 1784. To the outward observer, the dogmas of Christianity seemed to have but scanty weight with him ; but he was a rigid Presbyterian, hated the Episcopalians with portentous vigour, and despised the philosophical discussions which occupied so much of the attention of the lettered Scotsmen of his day. The conviviality of the day he carried to an excess which was considered rather as a proof of a vigorous brain than treated as an outrage on decorum. On one occasion we are told that his orgies at a country tavern were prolonged so late that his coachman burst into the room and declared that he would keep his horses waiting no longer, and the Judge was with difficulty dissuaded from avenging such a breach of the laws of good-fellowship by committing the man to the Tolbooth on the spot. Under his vigorous sway the business of the court was reduced to an order which it had never known before, and he carried to the bench the same impetuous logic, the same virile force, and the same contempt of any of the ornaments of diction, which had made him the most powerful and impressive of advocates. The first Lord President, Dundas, died in 1754. His eldest surviving son was already high in office, and six years later succeeded to the place his father had occupied as Lord President. He possessed less than his father's force of character, but repeated his contempt of ornament in diction, his earnestness in promoting the efficiency of his court, and his plain and blunt common-sense. For twenty-seven years, from 1760 to 1787, he upheld the dignity of that court, and won high respect as an upright judge, although he seems to have had an unhappy faculty of running counter at once to popular feeling and to the preponderating weight of legal opinion. In the great Douglas cause his casting vote was responsible for a decision which roused the unthinking animosity of the Edinburgh mob, and which was upset on appeal by the consenting voices of Mansfield and of Camden. Once again, in 1778, he was found amongst the minority who withstood the arguments of his own brother in favour of the emancipation of a slave who landed on Scottish soil, and again found his opinion set aside by the House of Lords, as it was inevitably bound to be in view of the decision recently given in a similar case in England. Although nothing was more alien to his whole nature than the prin- ciples of the Whigs, it is equally clear that he won but scanty love from the Tories, and earned from them only a somewhat grudging tribute of respect for his uprightness. He had no tincture of literature, and seemed to feel the jealousy of a rugged and narrow nature for those who were the chief lights of the brilliant society round him. HIS CHARACTEKISTICS. 383 His younger brother, Henry,i a man of another type, faithfully as he represented some of the family traits. When his father, the Lord President, died, Henry was only in his thirteenth year, having been born in 1742. He thus belonged to another generation from his elder brother, and the differ- ence of age was not wider than that of position. He was educated entirely in Edinburgh, but he was distinguished even as a boy, and Edinburgh was no ungenial nurse to one whose intellect was quick and strong, although its destined field was to be one of action and not of thought. He was called to the Bar at the early age of twenty-one, and not his distinguished descent and powerful family con- nections alone, but also his own commanding ability, won for him an almost immediate supremacy. At the age of twenty-three he became Solicitor-General. From that time his rise was rapid and unchecked. He was abundantly equipped for the fight. He was of commanding stature, with a countenance at once engaging and manly, with a voice that commanded attention ; a debater of rare dexterity and consummate boldness, and with industry and pliability that knew no bounds. But his was not the pliability of servility or obsequiousness. Throughout a long fight, amidst all the cross-currents of politics, in prosperity and in defeat, as the unquestioned ruler of his country, and when hunted down by the full pack of those who had courted him in his triumphs, he never for a moment showed one sign of fear, never bated one jot of his independence. He never schemed for promotion, but commanded it and accepted it as his unquestioned due. His reputation became the spoil about which contending forces raged, but not for one moment did he either supplicate the support of the Tories or attempt to mitigate the rage of the Whigs. If his aims were not exalted, they were at least worthy of respect ; if his ambition was grasping, it was always manly. Early in his career he braved the frown of the King, who paid him the sincerest compliment — that of fear ; ^ and in his last days he endured with proud defiance the angry shrieks of popular obloquy. It would be idle to claim for Dundas any very far-seeing scheme of policy or any deep-lying principle according to which he shaped his political conduct. He was steeped to the ^ By the Lord President's second wife, a daughter of Sir William Gordon. ^ ■■^ "The more I think of the conduct of the Advocate of Scotland," wrote George III. to Lord North, " the more I am incensed against him. . . . Men of talents, when not accompanied with integrity " (to the King this spelt "sul)mis- sion "), "are pests instead of blessings to society, and true wisdom ought to crush them rather than nourish them." But George III. soon learned that the crushing process would not do with Dundas. "Let him be gained," he writes later to Lord North, "to attend the whole session and brave the Parliament." 384 FROM 1780 TO 1784. lips in the traditions and moods of the society amidst which he had been brought up, and the peculiarities of which, even in his strong and pronounced provincialism of diction, he rather flaunted than concealed. The Toryism which he represented was one shaped by the exigencies of party fight rather than by any comprehensive theories; and the contending speculations which were the sport and the excite- ment of the quick and lively Edinburgh society of his day were perhaps scarcely of a sort to exercise any profound national influence, or to impress the masculine vigour of a man like Dundas. But we find that before the clouds of the closing years of the century had gathered, and before faction had acquired the bitterness that belonged to it in that murky atmosphere, Dundas was not without sympathy for schemes of far-reaching reform, and that he had early aspirations not altogether unlike those that animated the earlier days of Pitt. In their earlier impulses they were perhaps not less akin than they became when, year after year, Dundas stood by Pitt's side and did him yeoman service in the thickest fights of a fierce and unrelenting warfare. Dundas never became a political leader. He founded no party; he represented no permanent constitutional principle; he transmitted to a later generation no inheritance but the memory of his own strong personality and indomitable courage. But in one respect his position was almost unique. Alone amongst them Henry Dundas remained a Scotsman to the backbone, and built his influence upon the unques- tioned sway that for thirty years he exercised in Scotland; and yet he carved out a place for himself in the wider arena of Westminster; he made his hand felt in the guidance of the most vast of Britain's dependencies: he had so full and vigorous an influence in Imperial policy that even when Pitt, and Fox, and Burke were on the stage, the history of that policy cannot be followed without giving a large place to his name and to the part he played in it. By his friends he was not only admired, but warmly loved. A genial companion, as that was understood in his own country, he did not find that the concomitants of such a character was interpreted in a sense very widely different in England, and the orgies of Edinburgh taverns were not an altogether unfitting preparation for the social festivities of London. To children he was a delightful playmate, and in later years the family of Scott used to beg successfully to be allowed the treat of sitting up to supper " when Lord Melville was to be the guest." When he revisited Edinburgh in the days of his greatness — when, as Scott writes, "the HIS POPULARITY. 385 streets of Edinburgh were thought too vulgar for Lord Melville to walk upon" — he used to spend much of his time in climbing the lofty staircases of the Old Town tene- ments, to pay his respects to the old ladies who represented the monuments of an older and more picturesque generation, now passing from the eyes of a newer world. ^ In his friend- ships and in his enmities, in his ambitions and in his fights ; in his rough, unpolished, and even coarse, but always vigorous eloquence; in his prejudices and in his rough-and-ready, but not always keen or discriminating judgment;^ in his imperviousness and in his truculence, there was always about him something massive and manly. His opponents might fear, but they never could dislike, much less despise him. His power was absolute. " Who steered upon him was safe ; who disregarded his light was wrecked. It was to him that every man owed what he had got, and looked for what he wished." These are the words of a political opponent, who is, nevertheless, bound to add : " This despotism was greatly strengthened by the personal character and manners of the man. . . . He was a favourite with most men, and with all women. . . . He was not merely worshipped by his friends . . . but respected by the reasonable of his oppon- ents; though doomed to suffer by his power, they liked the individual."^ To literary discernment he made no pretence. His life was one of action, and it was divided over too many spheres, and immersed in too much of turmoil, to permit him to become one of the literary brotherhood of Edinburgh. But a discerning contemporary tells us that* "although his brother and guardian, the Lord President, had been much ^ Cockburn, who was his nephew by marriage, although the keen opponent of that political party which Dundas typified, speaks warmly of his kindness and playfulness with children. And he gives us a striking picture of Dundas's mother. " In the same chair, on the same spot ; her thick black hair combed all tightly up into a cone on the top of her head ; the remains of considerable beauty ; great and just pride in her son ; a good representative, in her general air and bearing, of what the noble English ladies must have been who were queens in their family castles and stood sieges in defence of them." ^ As an instance of this we may take his attitude towards Warren Hastings. He had himself started the attacks on Hastings, when their ultimate effect was ^ not foreseen. Of the weightier charges he acquitted Hastings, but perhaps the I earlier bias led him to form too quick a judgment on the others, or made him too [I impatient to wait for the proper explanation. There is little doubt that Dundas li was the main cause of Pitt's compromising attitude, in a matter in which firmness [ would have been not only more just, but also more politic. But it is impossible to read Dundas's private letters without feeling convinced that Dundas, in his prejudice against Hastings, was perhaps yielding to an indiscriminating judg- ment, but was honestly taking the view which he would have preferred not to take had he thought any escape from it possible. \ ^ Cochrane's ' Life of Lord Jeffrey,' vol. i. p. 78. * MS. of Dr Alexander Carlyle. 2b 386 FROM 1780 TO 1784. alienated from the most distinguished literati, (Henry Dundas) no sooner approached to man's estate than he overcame all his family prejudices, and even conquered his brother's aversion, and, courting their society, soon became the favourite and friend of all the men who were eminent for learning or fine talents." And to have been the early patron, the warm friend, and the trusted leader of Sir Walter Scott gives him a connection with literature which is certainly not the least of the claims which Henry Dundas has upon the admiration of his countrymen. That admiration the ungenerous and spiteful revival of those charges of malver- sation which were so amply disproved is not likely to lessen. To recall them, not by explicit statement, but by half -veiled hints, is one of the meaner tricks which party animosity is loath to abandon. Such was the man who now came to dominate Scotland in her domestic affairs, and to represent her in the scene of Imperial politics. Let us see some of the features of those domestic affairs during the earlier years of the long comrade- ship between Dundas and Pitt. We have already noticed that Scotland had little sympathy with the "Patriots," who had attacked Lord North and his Administration with all the ingenuity of party rancour. Here and there might be heard a note of opposition to the American policy of the Government, and anxiety had been expressed for conciliation ; but such notes were rare, and such anxiety did not weigh very heavily. But as the pressure became more severe, the suspicion grew that "Administration" was not always wisely guided, and might conceivably cease to deserve support. Scotland was not ripe for any violent attacks upon the power of the Crown, and listened with indifference to the tirades against a profligate and corrupt Minister, whose crimes could only be expiated on the scaffold. All such invective it rightly considered as little more than stage-play. But, on the other hand, it was quite ready to accept the fall of North's Ministry as a well-deserved reverse, and to welcome the ac- cession to power of the Whig Ministry of Rockingham, which included Fox and Burke. That Ministry commanded con- siderable support from the Moderates as well as the more extreme Whigs.^ The Moderates had respected Burke and Fox for their support of the repeal of the Catholic Penal Acts. They were not sorry to see the near prospect of the end of an unfortunate war. Even when the death of Rockingham transformed the Ministry into one representing the other ^ In 1784 Edmund Burke was elected Lord Rector of Glasgow University — an election which would have been hopeless if the Moderates had been opposed to it. SCOTLAND AND PITT'S MINISTRY. 387 wing of the Whigs, and deprived it of the aid of Burke and Fox, it did not lose the general acquiescence of Scotland. It commanded at least that modicum of respect which is rarely denied to a Government that seems to have fair prospects of continuance. The Moderate leaders found it expedient to court the new powers.^ In the General Assembly of 1782 the more extreme party mustered courage to defy their Moderate opponents and propose an amendment to the Ad- dress to the Crown, which reflected strongly upon the Govern- ment of Lord North, and praised the new powers at their expense.^ The debate ran high, and was conducted with some vigour; and the proposal was defeated, not so much on the ground of absolute dissent from its opinion, as on the safer maxim that politics was no proper occupation for a Church court. No political party in Scotland as yet questioned the sound orthodoxy of the Whiggism of the Revolution as a political creed, and the Ministry either of Rockingham or of Shelburne would no doubt have found in Scotland no considerable opposition, especially so long as the Scottish Minister was Dundas. But the coalition between Fox and North, under the nominal leadership of the Duke of Portland, was a strange portent, which could hardly be expected to be acceptable to Scotland any more than England. Its fate was scarcely doubtful. Dundas ceased to hold office, and for a few weeks Henry Erskine took his place. Fox's India Bill roused an opposition in which Scotland played her full share, threaten- ing, as that Bill ^id, to destroy the privileges of a Company which had helped to enrich not a few of Scotland's sons. The Coalition Ministry was indeed no more than a passing episode. The accession of Pitt first to office, and, after the election of 1784, to unquestioned power, opens to Scotland a period which certainly offered pre-eminence, and which seemed at first to offer the prospect of peace, prosperity, and reform, during which her resources might be extended, abuses amended, and the faulty parts of her economy set in order. No part of that economy required more careful handling than the Church. The Moderate party had gradually ac- quired sway, and had devoted itself to maintaining the Erastian principle, believing that in the supremacy of law ^ Amongst the MSS. of Dr Alexander Carlyle I find drafts of several letters addressed hj him to Burke when in office. 2 The proposed clause ran thus: "While your Majesty has taken into your immediate service men of the highest abilities and possessing the confidence of the people, we cannot despair of the public welfare ; but hope that, by the blessing of Divine Providence, the dark cloud that hangs over the kingdom will be dispelled, the dignity of the Crown maintained, and peace speedily restored." 388 FKOM 1780 TO 1784. lay the best hope of real liberty in the Church. It had vin- dicated the rights of the patrons, and claimed, with some justice, to have raised the whole character of the Church for learning, dignity, and orderly procedure. The Church had under their rdgime proved itself the free and independent ally of authority, and could demand as its due an equal measure of consideration from Ministers. But it had never truckled to political intrigue, and, with wise foresight, had never forgotten to make itself, while the ally of Government, at the same time the fearless assertor of Scottish equality.^ What was the position now, and what course did it behove Government to pursue ? Let us recall the main features of the Church's history during the century. The restoration of Presbytery with the Revolution had found the people ex- asperated by persecution into fanaticism, and led by a clergy whose past history had been adverse to learning and moder- ation, and whose present circumstances compelled them to reflect in their own lives and in their teaching the fanaticism of their hearers. Popular election had made them the humble servants of their hearers, and they were neither fitted by education nor character, nor free by their position, to adopt any other attitude. In 1712 had come the Act restoring patronage, but for nearly thirty years patronage had been little but a name. It had been exercised with timidity, and it failed to restore the clergy, or to enable them to rise to a position of freedom, and independence of the prejudices of the mob. In 1739 came the Secession, to the leaders of which we may ungrudgingly concede the praise of high aims, of sturdy independence, of unselfish adherence to what they believed to be a duty of conscience. But it is none the less true that by the Secession of 1739 the Church was freed from a party that had been a clog upon her advance and a hindrance to her usefulness, to her dignity, to her self-respect. The rancorous fanaticism which had eaten so deeply into the vitals of Scotland was still rampant, and still checked the spread of intelligence and the freedom that might break through the clouds that darkened the life of the nation. But now a period of greater freedom and liberality began. The lay patrons selected their nominees with care. Men of position and education found a career open to them in the Church. Her ranks were filled with the most promising of the younger men. Education and culture were no longer a bar, and the clergy began to take their place as one of the leading sections of Scottish society. In history and in philos- ^ No class of men spoke and wrote more strongly in support of Scotland's claim to a militia of her own than the Moderate clergy. THE CHURCH OF THE MODERATES. 389 ophy, in science and in poetry, she could point amongst her clergy to men who had won conspicuous fame, whose names were known far beyond the borders of Scotland. She was proud to attract to her courts and to count amongst the laity interested in her government the leading men amongst the landowners and the great lawyers, and even amongst the higher nobility. Whatever there was of light and leading in Scotland was counted in the ranks of the Scottish Church. Hers was not a position of bated breath and whispering humbleness, and she had no need to stoop to the conciliation of the mob. Fanaticism and superstition were no longer her characteristics. The meeting of her General Assembly, which took place every May in Edinburgh, was one of the most important functions of the Scottish year. It was attended by all the pomp and ceremony which surrounded the Lord High Commissioner who represented the Crown, and whose office and function were the only relics that remained to the Scottish capital to remind her of the days when she had pos- sessed a court of her own. Within one of the aisles of the ancient metropolitan church of St Giles, there gathered all the intellect and ability which Scotland could produce, and on that smaller stage there took place debates which might even rival that of St Stephen's, and which were the best nursery for eloquence and skill in oratorical fence which Scotland had to show, or which could be found in any corner of Great Britain. From every burgh and from every High- land glen there came representatives, to mingle uncouth pro- vincialisms, and to show that the Doric of the capital was not the only variety to surprise an English ear. They carried away from these discussions a sense of the weight and dignity of their Church and sound lessons as to her authority and her intimate union with the Law. The debates were under the guidance of her leading clergy, with whom the nobility and judges did not disdain to mingle, and to stand as the victors or the defeated in honourable contest. From that centre there stirred a pulse that was felt throughout the remotest corners of the land. But prosperity and ease had produced their natural dangers. Patronage ceased to be exercised with the same discriminating care. The laity became careless and indifferent, and often chose for the nominees men who were their humble tools. The patronage of the Crown was often made a tool of political jobbery. The better amongst the Moderate party were as averse to such servility as they were to the domin- ation of the mob. They desired that the law should be supreme and that order should prevail; but it was to be 390 FROM 1780 TO 1784. for the good of the Church, not in order that the Church might be the slave of political intriguers. They desired that their Church should be the proud ally, not the humble dependant, of a political party. Naturally the opposite party — the High-flyers, or the Wild Party, as it was called — found here their opportunity. Once more they hoped to regain some of their lost influence. They sought for an augmentation of their stipends, not by process of law, and not by the judgment of the courts that could increase clerical incomes as circumstances permitted, but by a bargain which would have sold the legal privileges of the Church in turn for a meagre but universal increase of stipends. The Moderates opposed this, and sought rather to create with- in the Church a few dignified, and, as things then counted, almost lucrative positions, which would have attracted suffi- cient men of eminence to give a character to all the clergy. Once more the High -flyers sought to petition Parliament against patronage, and were only prevented from doing so by the firm resistance of the Moderates. The opportunity was taken by the Moderates to expunge from their records an annual reflection on the evils of patronage, which from custom rather than conviction had been allowed to remain as a yearly ceremony of absolute insignificance. Its removal once and for all was a triumph not only for the Moderates but for common-sense. But that party had not always the upper hand. Only a year or two before, the extreme party had proved their power by supporting the fanaticism of the mob, and refusing to consent even to a very moderate toleration to the Roman Catholics. The wiser spirits in the Church saw the danger, and warned the new Ministry in no doubtful tones. ^ There must be no abuse of patronage, either on the part of the Crown or of the lay patrons. Nomination must not be given as a means of securing a parliamentary vote. The leading laity must be urged to take part once more in the deliberations of the Assembly, the triumph of the High-flyers in the matter of the Roman Catholic disabilities having been largely due to the abstention of the most prominent laymen. In the exercise of their patronage the Ministers of the Crown must carefully consult the leading men of the Church. For the principals and professors of the Universities they must choose men well aflected to the present Establishment. They must not forget the duty of attracting men of ability to the ranks of the clergy, ^ Amongst the MSS. of Dr Alexander Carlyle I find a careful memorandum on the Church drawn up for the information of Pitt in 1784, in which the dangers are described and remedies proposed. They are such as are noticed in the text. MEASURES OF CONCILIATION. 391 not by a general scheme of augmentation, which would only excite the jealousy and fears of the landowners, but by a well- considered scheme of improving the pay of some of the leading positions within her pale. By this means, and by this means alone, could they find the Church an independent, and therefore a safe and trustworthy, ally against that fanaticism towards which, alike in religion and in politics, the Scottish character was only too prone. Such a policy may be applauded or con- demned, according to the sympathies of the reader ; but the aims of the Moderate party are at least stated by themselves with no ambiguity, and with no attempt at concealment. On such a fair statement they based their claim to the support of what appeared to be a strong, a permanent, and an enlightened Administration. In regard to other matters, we can trace a desire to heal old feuds and to draw together parties before divided by the memory of old wrongs, so that the country might the better enjoy the prospect of advancing prosperity. The Jacobite party was now but a shadow of its former self, out of which all real danger had departed. The old racial differences were buried and forgotten, and a generation had laboured with no small success to bring the Celtic and the Lowland inhabitants more closely together. With the abolition of the hereditary jurisdictions, the clan system had become little more than a name; and the chief economical difficulty of the Highlands was, indeed, that the proprietors learned with too great quick- ness to divest themselves of the character of chieftains, and to assume that of rack-renting landlords. The Church, and other agencies besides the Church, had been busy in labouring to improve the lot of their Celtic countrymen. They had spread amongst them new industries ; they had promoted agriculture ; they had stimulated mental interest and intercourse. Thou- sands of Highlanders had joined the army: the number of recruits was reckoned at 10,000 a year; and on a hundred battlefields in India and in America the blood of Highlanders had been shed to cement the bond between them and their southern brethren. It was rightly judged that the time had come when old proscriptions should be ended, and when forfeitures which had been redeemed upon many a stricken field should be restored. Accordingly one of the first Acts of Pitt's Government was that by which Dundas restored to the representatives of their former owners the forfeited estates which were vested in the Crown. The amount of revenue was not large ; but the spirit of the Act was one of conciliation, and it was not thrown away. In 1784 the last of these estates was restored to those who could establish a hereditary claim, 392 FROM 1780 TO 1784. and a truce was called in a civil war which had spread its fit- ful efforts over wellnigh a century. The Act was not passed without some grudging voices, including that of Thurlow, being raised against it ; but it was placed upon the Statute- book without real difficulty. It appears that some effort was made about the same time to remove some of the attainders and to restore the titles to the descendants of those who had forfeited them. The sullen opposition of Thurlow was this time successful, and the effort was abandoned ; nor did it meet with more success when it was renewed a generation later. Another and more sentimental grievance was removed in 1783 when a Bill was passed repealing the Act of the 19th year of George II., by which the Highland dress was pro- scribed. The original Act had been prompted by a singularly childish animosity; and its maintenance became little more than an absurdity when the dress had become the symbol to the world of all that was most courageous and most loyal in Britain's " far-flung battle-line." It may be well to anticipate by a few years, in order to deal with another instance of a similar desire to obliterate old penal disabilities. The Episcopal Church of Scotland had, as a whole, been staunch in its Jacobitism, and had maintained a ghostly adherence to a political creed which it had been powerless to advance. Gradually its political keen- ness had melted away. It had earned real respect by the elevated morality and lofty tone of its clergy, and had gathered about it an increasing number of the more highly educated class. The closer that the connection with England became, the more natural did it seem that many of those who had ties with England should find it congenial to use a liturgy which, in the main, was framed on the model of the English establishment. By the dominant party of the Scottish estab- lishment it was neither feared nor disliked, and they avowedly sought to extend to it a fuller measure of toleration. The older nonjuring Bishops were one by one gathered to their fathers, and Episcopal chapels, whose congregations had no thought of Jacobitical conspirings, were established in great numbers. All things pointed to a settlement, and when, in January 1788, the death of the young Chevalier removed the last real claimant who might have revived expiring loyalty, all difficulty seemed to be removed. The Bishops of the Episcopal Church, in a solemn synod, pledged themselves to use the prayers for King George. In the spring of the following year they petitioned Parliament for relief from penal disabilities. Again the grudging temper of Thurlow 1 See Lockharfc's * Life of Scott,' vol. vii. p. 28. SCOTTISH MILITIA QUESTION. 393 barred the way. A Toleration Bill was stopped by him in the ensuing session, but at last, in June 1792, it became law, and the ill-fated but romantic association between Jacobitism and the Church which had longest maintained the forlorn cause of divine right was broken for ever. When Scottish Episcopal ordination was by statute made a valid qualifica- tion for the holder of a living in the English Church, the Scottish Establishment placed no bar to the enactment. Another sore still rankled in Scottish breasts, this time not confined to any one party. Again and again, since the establishment of the militia for England, Scottish patriots had claimed the same rights for their country. Again and again it had been denied. The burden of the taxation ; the danger of placing arms in the hands of disaffected persons; the hindrance that it might prove to advancing commerce, and the restriction it would place on the labour market, — all these had been urged as pleas against it, and for many years they had found strong support even among Scotsmen. But gradually the opposing party in Scotland had become less numerous. The danger could no longer be alleged to exist. All Scotsmen of light and leading — including Henry Dundas, whose elder brother had formerly opposed it — were now advocates of the militia; and its opponents in the English Parliament were chiefly those who dreaded its interfering with the fruitfulness of Scotland as a recruiting field for the regular army. Year by year the feeling became more strong; nor was the desire for a measure, which might not only secure Scotland against invasion, but which might teach her sons to give a good account of themselves, in any way assuaged by the raising of some regiments of Volunteer Fencibles. On the contrary, this was looked upon with some jealousy as placing undue power in the hands of a few wealthy landlords. The constitutional right of Scotland to a force which would give every Scotsman in rotation some experience in the use of arms was keenly urged. In 1782 a Bill with this object was again promoted. But by English influence there was tagged to it the condition that the Scottish militia should not be merely a reserve citizen force, but that drafts should be made upon it for the regular army. To such a condition its supporters refused to submit, and once again the Bill was lost. Not until the year 1797 did the Scottish militia become part of the constitutional forces of the Crown on the same footing as the English. Amongst those who had fought for it most strenuously by his pen may be counted Dr Alexander Carlyle, the doughty minister of Inveresk. To him it was not only a constitutional right, not only a 394 FROM 1780 TO 1784. defence and a security, but a school of manliness from which he would not have his country shut out. The landowners complained of it because of its expense; the merchants because it interfered with trade; the politicians because of its danger; the political economists because it seemed to err against the fundamental law of division of labour, which bade a soldier be a soldier and nothing more. All their fears and fancies Carlyle roughly pushes aside. As a minister of the Church Militant he would have his country strong; and he was convinced that the strength was to come not by a few companies of Volunteer Fencibles that allowed the wealthier class to play at being soldiers, but by a systematic and extended military training that would permeate every class of the nation. With steady courage, and under enlightened guidance, Scotland was thus healing her old sores and asserting her national rights. Her Church was well ordered, her literature stood high; she no longer held herself aloof in sullen isola- tion. Her material prosperity was increasing apace. Towns which a few years before were of a size that nowadays would scarcely entitle them to be called more than hamlets, were advancing in population, in wealth, and in luxury of living. Edinburgh was on a par in population with any other city except London ; and in all else she held a position which she shared with London alone, as a centre of thought, of literature, and of social interest. A contemporary writer ^ has left a comparison, based on personal observation and a study of facts, between Edinburgh at the beginning of the reign and Edinburgh on the eve of Pitt's long Ministry. At the beginning of the reign it was almost confined within the city walls. It was now spreading on every side, and had added a large and luxurious city to the pent-up closes of its ancient Castle rock. Two millions sterling, it was estimated, had been spent in building within twenty years — more than three times the whole currency of Scotland at the time of the Union. The houses which had sufficed in 1760 for the nobility and judges were now despised by all but the humblest classes. In 1760 a stage-coach set out once a month for London, and consumed fifteen days upon the road. Now there were fifteen coaches to London weekly, which made the journey in four days. In 1760 literary property was hardly known; since then Hume had earned £5000 for the concluding portion of his History, and Principal Robertson had made £4500 by one only of his many works. In place of the wretched change-houses which had received ^ In the 'Edinburgh Evening Courant.' PARLIAMENTARY REFORM. 395 the traveller in 1760, he now found hotels where every luxury was obtained. In 1760 a scanty market had been supplied chiefly by travelling vendors, and any sudden strain produced a dearth. In 1782 a [fleet of 600 merchantmen and several sail of the line had lain in Leith Roads for two months without affecting the Edinburgh market prices by a single farthing. It is true that all this marvellous advance was accompanied by increasing luxury, and by some relaxation of a severe and primitive morality. Such changes are always apt to be exaggerated by those whose temperament leads them to look with nervous apprehension upon a code of morals which differs in any way from that to which they have been used. A dark picture is easily drawn, and it is scarcely the interest of any contemporary to raise a doubt as to its truth. The stricter and more formal ethics, which were identified with a narrow scale of living, and were fortified by a restricted religious creed, had certainly passed away. The dominant party in the Church had perhaps been somewhat inclined to identify strictness with hypocrisy, and had deliberately en- couraged a freedom in religious thought, and an emancipation in the more precise social usages, which might give rise to scandal. But it would be absurd to pretend that any real laxity in morals prevailed to any extent in Edinburgh during the closing years of the century, however gloomy was the picture which officious moral censors might draw, and how- ever rigid were the maxims which the revival of religious enthusiasm and fervour prescribed. Compared with any modern capital, the conventions of Edinburgh society in 1784 would probably seem unduly severe. Such a state of society as we have described naturally gave rise to projects of what seemed safe and necessary political reform. One subject above all occupied the public attention, and met with much encouragement from the political leaders — that of a reform of the political representation. The scan- dals of the existing system were patent to all. The burgh members were elected by narrow municipal bodies which were self -chosen, and which were corrupt to the last degree. For the thirty county representatives there were less than 2000 constituents, and many of these held the franchise upon the most absurd and iniquitous custom, by which the free- holder could split his superiority and create a number of purely fictitious claims. Meetings were constantly held dur- ing these years to denounce these iniquities, which met with almost no defenders, and the foremost men in the Adminis- tration were in full sympathy with these denunciations, and 396 FROM 1780 TO 1784. were pledged by their own past action to take vigorous steps to remove the wrong. Dundas himself shared with Pitt the honour of being an early advocate of parliamentary reform, which would almost inevitably have brought municipal reform in its wake. Even those whose privileges were attacked could oppose nothing to the rising wave, and busied themselves only in making the best of opportunities which their own con- sciences told them must be short-lived. Such was the position and such the prospect of Scotland at the opening of the long Ministry of Pitt and Dundas. We shall soon see how the sky became overcast, and what storms were brewing. 397 CHAPTER XVL THE TORY AND WHIG PARTIES IN SCOTLAND. The early years of Pitt's Administration were, for Scotland, years of ease and prosperity. The cessation of the war had lowered prices and opened new markets, and in every sphere of industry prosperity was advancing rapidly. Edinburgh was spreading fast, far beyond the old limits of her narrow lanes and lofty tenements. The manufactures were thriving, and the American and West- Indian trade had resumed its old prosperity. Glasgow was no longer " a neat little town " on the banks of an insignificant stream ; it was already showing signs of its coming commercial importance, and the new canal, as well as the deepening of the Clyde, was opening to it new markets. Already on a little loch in Dum- friesshire experiments were being made, in a very small and humble way, at steam-navigation, which was destined before two generations had passed to make Glasgow the harbour of rich-stored argosies, trading with every corner of the habitable world. The woollen trade was thriving in the Lowlands ; the wealth hidden in the coal and iron of the soil was being rapidly discovered ; and even for the Highlands new advantages were dawning in the quiet extension of sheep -farming and in the English market for black cattle. The distilleries, which also found their chief market in London, were increasing rapidly. Agriculture, under the guidance of enlightened pioneers, was making satisfactory progress. The old "run-rig" system of culti- vation was rapidly disappearing, and the proper rotation of crops and the use of chemical manures was accepted by the great majority of farmers. In these years the capital of the Bank of Scotland, which but two generations back had been only £100,000, rose to £600,000, and its shares were sold on the London Stock Exchange at more than 100 per cent above par. The little town of Paisley, which had now 398 THE TORY AND WHIG PARTIES IN SCOTLAND. obtained a canal of its own, and thus secured a waterway to distant markets, was now a great manufacturing centre, to which English capitalists were attracted in almost as large number as the Scotch. Under the stimulus of advanc- ing commercial prosperity some recklessness of speculation was inevitable, and the heavy taxes rendered necessary by a long and unfortunate war caused some uneasiness. But on the whole, the nation might well congratulate itself on a flowing tide of wealth and of commercial activity. New luxury in the style of living, as a matter of course, followed upon the heels of this prosperity. Mansion-houses of greater pretensions, and with all the appurtenances of art and modern contrivance, were springing up. Increased rents rendered the landlords a more wealthy class, and this consoled them for the loss of so much of their old im- portance, of which recent legislation had stripped them. The old convivial habits still prevailed in all their un- constrained coarseness; but they were compensated by the zest and energy with which social intercourse was indulged. The old lines of demarcation in manners and in language were still preserved, and the colloquial dialect, even of the highest classes, was such as would not be understood south of the Tweed. But this did not prevent Scotsmen from sharing to the full in the thought and literature of England, while they cherished with reasonable pride that which was distinctively their own. The, most intellectual among Scots- men were cosmopolitan in spirit, but they bated no jot of pride in their own nationality, and pursued with new vigour their researches into Scottish antiquities and their interest in the vernacular literature. In religion the old characteristics seemed to be wellnigh effaced. The old parties of the Moderates and High-flyers were still maintained, but the Moderates dominated the Church and imposed their authority upon her councils. The Dissenting bodies still held their own, but their efforts were comparatively lax, and they made no way in the present mood of the nation. The old rigidity of doctrine had disappeared, and the ordinary discourses of the pulpit resembled moral prelections rather than doctrinal exposi- tions of religious faith. Some years before, the keen and bracing mood of English dissent, as preached by Wesley and by Whitefield, had stimulated and invigorated the nerves of the Scottish dissenting sects. But the country was not prone to import its religion, and the stimulus had passed away. A strange and wild outburst of unthinking popular fanaticism had for a short time burst out under the ignoble NEW SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT. 399 influence of a female religious leader of the name of Buchan, and had found in the south-west of Scotland — long the chosen home of the Covenanters — a congenial soil. Its votaries had believed themselves exempt from death, and implicitly accepted the assurances of their mad leader that with her they would be sharers in Elijah's lot, and would be rapt to heaven by supernatural agency. But they made no per- manent impression, and the brief and spasmodic ravings of fanaticism rather served to accentuate the prevailing tone of easy and tolerant latitudinarianism. In Edinburgh, above all, intellectual activity was strong. The political economy of which Adam Smith was the chief apostle was exerting a powerful influence over the minds of the younger generation. The Scottish Philosophical School was devoting itself with increased assiduity to speculation as to the principles which underlie politics and society. The Church was too strongly Erastian in spirit to draw apart or to claim any domain as exclusively her own. Patronage was readily extended to dawning genius, and, under the smiles and favour of those who found literary patronage a pleasant and congenial adjunct to social life, influences were growing up which were destined to touch new chords of national sentiment. It was into such a society that there burst the meteor- like genius of Burns. His opinions followed the lead of no party, and were independent of the mood of any age. Jacobite and democratic, Calvinist and Socinian, strongly national by tradition, and yet cosmopolitan in mood — his views defied all classification, and were moulded into definite form only by the fire of his own temperament and by the indomitable might of his genius. Even while he felt its limitations, he revelled in the easy and pleasure - loving mood that prevailed in the social circles of Edinburgh, and accepted, half in contempt and half in gratitude, the flattery of their welcome. Combining the moral earnest- ness that must lie in the recesses of genius with the moral waywardness that is often entwined with its fibre, he found in that flattery at once a stimulus and a snare. He felt its emptiness and its superficiality, but he could not resist indulging his senses in its incense ; and even while he was inspiring into the veins of the nation a new impulse, and rousing its nerves to the tension necessary for a great upheaval of social change, he was himself in part a victim to the applause of those whose delusions his genius was to dissipate. It is hard to conceive an atmosphere more inspiring for 400 THE TORY AND WHIG PARTIES IN SCOTLAND. the generation then growing up. The fashions of a bygone age had not passed away, but they were held with the genial ease of those who thought them indisputable, and knew them unassailed. There was but little of angry contention where all were practically of one mind. The range of society was large enough to embrace many varieties, and yet small enough to permit of the unrestrained freedom of social intercourse, where each man was known with all his idiosyncrasies and foibles, and not merely as the particle in a social mass that rubbed its edges smooth in the mon- otony of social convention. Religion was regarded only as a safe and decent appurtenance of life, and was stripped of its sternness and its rigid terrors. There was a wide and fairly prosperous middle - class, which recognised its leaders and submitted to their authority, but where no man towered so high in wealth, or rank, or intellect as to be unapproachable by his fellows. Scotsmen could win great place and power in England, could share in all that England had to give, and could exercise a dominant part in the government of her newly consolidated Empire in the East; but they had still the proud possession of their own exclusive past ; and now the genius of Burns was breathing into the Scottish Muse a fire and a vigour that were to be the harbingers of new feelings and new impulses far beyond her borders. Such was the Scotland which Henry Dundas was to sway, partly by the vigour of his own indomitable common-sense and the athletic thews of his manhood, partly by the completeness with which he represented her dominant mood. It was only natural that, in such a state of society — were it only as a sign of its energy and as a reflection of its advanc- ing prosperity — there should be projects of reform. These were directed chiefly to the correction of the undoubted abuses that existed in the burgh administration — partly the effect of long-standing institutions which belonged to a system that was obsolete and unsuited to the time, partly of corruption which had crept in by vicious habit. The "sets" of the burghs, as they were called, or the charters under which they were governed, were in most cases more than three hundred years old, and were based upon a somewhat doubtful tradi- tional authority. They reflected a state of politics and society which had long been covered over by the dust of ages. In these earlier times the burghs were little more than appendages to the estate of a powerful neighbouring proprie- tor, and it was not surprising that the scheme of government devised for them should have had in view solely the main- ABUSES OF BURGH ADMINISTRATION. 401 tenance of his authority. A little knot of his dependants had administered the affairs of each town virtually as his agents, and had kept up the continuity of that administration by being self -elected. But changes had crept in; the influence of the burghs increased, that of the landed proprietors had decayed. Charters had been lost, and the burgh government was carried on according to a system that had often little basis beyond usage and tradition. As the eighteenth century advanced, these abuses had become more and more marked. A knot of petty tradesmen, without intelligence or public spirit, administered the affairs of the town chiefly or solely for their own interest. The rating was casual and of doubt- ful legality; the accounts were unaudited. The town pro- perty, which, scanty at first, had, in course of time, grown in many cases into a valuable asset, was squandered and dissi- pated by a system of scarcely disguised plunder, upon which the sole check was the mutual suspicion and jealousy of the little band of pilferers. Leases of town property were granted on nominal considerations. Improvements were utterly neglected. The prisons, the poorhouses, the useless town- guard, the cleansing of the streets, — all were regarded as but instruments for petty peculation. And the evil did not end with the town itself. Groups of these burghs sent fifteen members to Parliament, and the election was entirely in the hands of the delegates. That votes were to be secured by barefaced bribery was a thing of common notoriety. At times a scandal of corruption became too flagrant to be tolerated in absolute silence, and occasionally there was an investigation before a court of law. But it was hard to bring home the guilt, and harder still to aflfix to it any penalty ; and the rare cases when such investigations took place left the offenders scot free. But now the townsmen were advancing in independence and in intelligence. The burghs felt their own importance, and were determined to secure regularity in their administra- tion. The little knots of corruption that absorbed all muni- cipal power must be broken up, and rising taxation compelled attention to securing what remained of the town property. There were murmurings on every side. Forty-nine burghs joined in petitioning Parliament for redress. The Convention of Delegates from the burghs met annually in conclave at Edinburgh, and swore not to desist from the task of cleansing this Augean stable until it was accomplished. Many indeed, knowing how hard that task would be, were hopeless of suc- cess. " Reform the burghs ! " said one who was asked to help the cause of reform ; " you might as well try to reform hell." 2c 402 THE TORY AND WHIG PARTIES IN SCOTLAND. But at first the great majority of better opinion in Scotland was ready to join in stamping out the abuse and letting light in upon these obscure nests of corruption. The burgesses of Dumbarton in 1787 brought an action against their magis- trates to enforce an audit of the burgh accounts. Public sympathy was entirely on their side. That maladministra- tion existed was too evident for doubt. But every legal quibble was brought to bear to prevent investigation. When the case was tried before the Court of Exchequer, the judges were compelled to decide for the magistrates, but they did so in a manner rarely heard in a court of justice, openly avowing that they gave the decision against their feelings and their sympathies, and urging the defeated side not to cease their agitation until they had compelled the Legislature to listen to their demand for a just reform. It seemed as though a few years only would pass before this long-standing abuse should cease to exist. Dundas was not unwilling to listen to reform : Pitt was only too ready to help it forward. But in an evil day for Scotland this sound measure of reform became a tool in the hands of faction. A scent of what was approaching seemed already in the air ; the one side was attracted by anything that seemed to savour of revolution, the other seemed equally to dread the redress of abuses, lest it might proceed too far. The delegates from the burghs sought support in London, and they found it willingly accorded to them by an Opposition that sought for any topic which might bring them credit and might associate the Gov- ernment with the defence of wrong-doing. Here they found good material ready to their hands, and Sheridan and Fox quickly developed an amazing interest in the wrongs of petty burghs which were to them no more than names. The sub- ject was too useful to be parted with expeditiously, and so session after session a motion was brought up, or leave asked to bring in a Bill, for Scottish burgh reform, when only a few weeks remained before prorogation. The tactics of the Oppo- sition were plain enough, and, with some lack of foresight, Dundas played into their hands by trying a hopeless defence of abuses which could not be denied. If Scotland was bad, England was no better. There were means by which an audit might be forced by legal process upon sufficient evidence of its necessity ; rights could not be rashly abridged without compensation and without evidence that they had been abused." Parliamentary reform was already receding into the dim distance under the impending shadow of the French Revolution, and burgh reform could not be accomplished with- out touching on that problem, which every day was becoming HINDRANCES TO REFORM. 403 more difficult. At length the topic became one of which the Opposition stood forth as the sole champion, and in regard to which Government assumed a position of determined resist- ance, and the hopes of reform for that generation were ab- solutely dispelled. It must be admitted that some of the means by which it was pressed added little to its weight. One of the judges of the Court of Session, Lord Gardenstone, a man of sprightly wit and erratic activity, who showed energy in all subjects but that of his profession, and affected a somewhat ostentatious neglect of his judicial duties — a man, further, whose character won him scant respect, and whose avowed contempt for religion shocked even a tolerant age — made himself the marked champion of reform. He subscribed to the expense of the agitation, and was one of the most zealous speakers at the Convention. His ardent advocacy seemed to gather new strength from a visit to France, where he cultivated the society of those whose ideas gave the note to the first movements of the Revolution. One of his chosen intimates at home was a man who, at a later day, was trans- ported for sedition. A century ago there prevailed no such strict ideas of judicial decorum as those to which we are accustomed ; but even in that age such conduct on the part of a judge could hardly advance the cause of which he made himself so marked a partisan. It was the misfortune of Scot- land that burgh reform became tainted in the thoughts of men with the suspicion of revolutionary aims, and the oppor- tunity which at one time seemed to offer was lost in the gloomy struggle into which the nation was soon to plunge. A few years before the abuses might have been swept away with the consent of all that was best in the nation, and this might have brought in its wake a sound measure of Parlia- mentary reform. As it was, it struck the first note in the contest which was to divide Scotland into two bitterly hostile camps. Side by side with this it is almost amusing to watch another episode which provoked the susceptibilities of Scot- land, and which encountered an unthinking and unreasoning opposition. The rude breath of economic reform actually threatened the Court of Session, and proposed to cut down the roll of judges below the mystic number of fifteen. With all its cumbrousness of method, and all its quaint attachment to the relics of antiquarianism, the Court of Session was, as a whole, an institution of which Scotland might be justly proud. It was secured by the Act of Union ; and although a reform of method and a reduction of numbers were not matters which could be deemed outside the range of reasonable speculation, 404 THE TORY AND WHIG PARTIES IN SCOTLAND. the suggestion was enough to provoke a good deal of national feeling. Fortunately for Scotland, she had a doughty, albeit a self -constituted champion. In a letter burning with all the heroic ardour of patriotism, James Boswell generously threw himself into the breach. "My friends and countrymen," he wrote from London in 1785, "be not afraid. I am upon the spot. I am on the watch." But lest this puissant champion- ship might fail, he exhorts his fellow-citizens to resist to the death such a trampling on their national privileges as would be implied in any diminution of the solemn tradition that found the chief ward of unspotted justice in the fifteen judges who could occasionally meet in solemn conclave, and whose somewhat homely discussions alternately awed and amused the listening crowd. The threatened danger passed, and another institution was safe for a few more years from the desecrating hand of reform. It was not likely, when the ranks were closing for a long struggle, and when any hints at change were received with more and more of suspicion and misgiving, that any attempt at reviving the old theme of restoring free election in place of patronage in the Church should receive much consideration. Once more, in 1785, we find the matter mooted in the Assembly ; and strangely enough an overture " to consult the landed interest" on the subject was strongly supported by Henry Erskine, and others of the nascent party who were to match themselves with the adherents of the Government. Perhaps it was hoped that the selfish jealousy with which the landed interest regarded the claims of the Church to an in- crease of stipends, had made a breach between them and the Moderate party which might cause the landed interest, if con- sulted, to pronounce against patronage. If so, the hope was disappointed. The landed proprietors might be jealous of the Church, but they were too sensible of their own interest to break with her. The motion was lost by 100 votes to 64. The opposing parties were coming more and more clearly to recognise the line of demarcation between them which every day was marking with more vivid clearness. The storms abroad were casting their shadows upon Scotland; and the violence of the faction fights at Westminster was reflected in the increased virulence of political disputes at home. It is curious to notice the different effects that these dis- putes had in Scotland. There was one which for a time agitated London to a high pitch of excitement. The charges against Warren Hastings were precisely of the sort to stir an easy and indiscriminating benevolence — hardly to be dis- THE TRIAL OF WARREN HASTINGS. 405 tinguished from selfish folly — to a fury of pious indignation against supposed oppression. All the resources of eloquence, restrained by no sense of responsibility, nursed that indig- nation till it fancied itself the purest of virtues, and forgot that it was serving the purposes of faction and of captious criticism of a great career. All that indignation was presently to fade away into a pale and ineffective oblivion until it was once more revived in a later day by the rhetorical out- bursts of Macaulay, to be finally laid to rest by the judicial and unimpassioned criticism of Sir James Stephen. But for the moment the turn of fashion, and the impulse of the crowd, was to applaud the attacks upon a distinguished public servant, and to apply to the obscure and intricate involution of Eastern affairs the ready judgment which served well enough — corrected by the sound common -sense of the average man — for the discussion of home affairs. From the very first there was something of unreal and simulated display in the whole process. The trial was con- ducted with all the pomp and dignity that made of it a fashionable excitement. Its danger to national interests was forgotten, and the very picturesqueness of the scenes about which its incidents were grouped gave it additional eclat For once the bitterness of faction found on its side many whose motives were above question. Whether Pitt was wise in yielding to the storm, whether he might not have maintained a more dignified course in resisting a prosecu- tion which was perilously near to persecution, may perhaps be doubted; but there can be no doubt that both he and Dundas were honest in their belief that some of the charges against Warren Hastings were true. Their private corre- spondence proves so much, but it does not prove more. It does not prove that the belief in his guilt on the part of those to whom Hastings was justified in looking as his champions was not prompted — it may be unwittingly — by political exigency. A stern refusal of all compromise with rash and exaggerated denunciations would, to our mind, have reflected greater honour upon Pitt in the eyes of posterity. A readily admitted conviction as to the guilt of a great public servant, on the part of the minister to whose chivalry he trusted, is apt to be suspicious, when it coincides with the exigencies of party warfare. Undoubtedly Pitt might have been overborne by the swelling tide of popular indig- nation had he stubbornly refused to admit that amidst ex- aggeration there was a residuum of truth; and the caution that made him concede something to the foe was only too natural. Pitt's own conscience did not tell him that he 406 THE TORY AND WHIG PARTIES IN SCOTLAND. was unfairly deserting one whom he was bound to defend; when he admitted part of the case against Hastings, it was unquestionably on the ground that he had persuaded him- self that the part admitted was true. None the less, the injury which he inflicted on the great governor was more deadly than the most eloquent denunciations of his sworn foes. In England this blunted the edge of the Opposition's attack ; but it was not so in Scotland. India had become the coveted resort of numbers of Scotsmen, to whose energy and talents much of the laborious construction of our Eastern Empire was due. Rough and ready methods, the expedients that must occur to the mind of the beleaguered general, were not judged there under the exciting stimulus of rhetori- cians, or according to the complacent theories of arm-chair politicians. On the whole, Scottish opinion was in favour of Hastings; and Pitt's desertion of his cause, though it did not lose him Scotland's support, was none the less a strain upon her fidelity. His attitude of half-hearted defence and of trafficking with a virulent prosecution was too subtle to be understood, and too indefinite to be admired, by a generous people. But if Pitt failed to carry with him the entire sympathies of Scotland in his conduct in regard to Hastings' impeach- ment, there was another struggle which he had to main- tain in which he had her cordial support. In 1788 the first cloud of insanity fell upon the king. There was much probability that the cloud would soon lift, and that the king would once more assume the government. But the moment was seized by the Opposition, who had gained the Prince of Wales for their faction, to assert his rights to an unlimited Regency, which would virtually have abrogated for ever the rule of George III., would have overturned the existing Ministry, and would have delivered the nation and the Crown into the hands of those who had already proved themselves to be an unprincipled faction. The crisis was one of vast importance, and on Pitt's part it called for a courage that could brave almost certain disaster, in the hope that some happy chance might give an issue from a hopeless impasse. To almost all his adherents, it seemed as if Pitt's Government was doomed, and as if he had made an implacable enemy of the Prince, into whose hands power was soon to pass, and who had acquired an unsound and superficial, but prevailing, popularity. The crisis was averted only by the sudden restoration of the king in the spring of 1789, while the Constitutional question of the SCOTTISH LOYALTY. 407 Regency was under hot discussion. What our destinies in the immediate future would have been, had the fates decreed otherwise, it is hard to say. The nation must then have met overwhelming danger, with only a motley and dis- credited crew to guide her course. Here, at least, Pitt had no half-hearted support from Scotland. By a strange revulsion of feeling, that nation which had longest maintained the struggle against the family of George III. was now the staunchest in its .loyal attach- ment to his person. Conviviality was always in excess in the Scotland of that day; but it never launched into such boisterous and uproarious excess as when it celebrated the birthday of the king. Scotland knew little and cared less for all the tittle-tattle about the king's friends; for all the high-sounding theories that professed to mingle respect for the Crown with reiterated denunciations of its action. It associated the attacks upon George III. with the virulent abuse of Scotsmen that had been rampant in the days of Lord Bute. It knew the antics of Wilkes and the Patriots only by distant hearsay. It had never understood the polit- ical faith of those who had extolled the American rebels in order to injure the ministers of the Crown, and had rejoiced in the successes of these rebels, which their own factious bitterness had done so much to assist. But scarcely had this episode passed before the first threatenings of a greater storm were heard, and Pitt had to face the heaviest task of his life. The signs of anarchy and revolution became rife in France in 1789 ; and to the vast majority of the British people the Crown appeared, above all the contentions of faction, as the chief security against the contagion of such an example. If anything had been wanting to confirm the hold of Pitt and Dundas upon the Scottish nation, it was supplied by their steadfast defence of the ajfflicted king when all the odds in the fight seemed against them, and when they were defending a dismally forlorn hope. During the next generation we have to follow an entirely new phase of Scottish history. We have to see how Sc©t- land became divided into two hostile camps, whose antagonism became the more intensely bitter as the arena of their strife was small. On such a stage, faction is certain to follow personal lines, and to become the source of keen personal animosity. The strife of party was bitter enough in England. There it was an inherited tradition; it had its source in wide divergences of opinion; it had been inflamed by at least half a century of Parliamentary struggle, which during 408 THE TORY AND WHIG PARTIES IN SCOTLAND. the reign of George III. had assumed a virulence which was almost without example. But within a few years the intensity of party feeling in Scotland, of a type hitherto scarcely known, became even keener than anything which England could show. And the remarkable peculiarity of this development was, that it took its rise in divergences which were super- ficial and unreal, and in which no considerable amount of national feeling was involved; that it left the larger part of the nation absolutely untouched ; that it was fostered and fomented with assiduous care altogether out of proportion to its importance ; and that those who came under its influ- ence looked back upon it with feelings absurdly exaggerated, and mistook for the work of a party struggle changes which were really the effect of a far-reaching social transformation, with which Whig and Tory had equally little to do. During the eighteenth century Scotland had indeed found ample occasion for strong outbursts of national feeling, and had been divided into opposite parties, resting upon funda- mental differences. The question of Union with England; the Jacobite rebellions ; the divergences upon ecclesiastical government, — each of these had stirred the whole nation, and might at any moment have given rise to civil war. Some minor questions had given rise to considerable feeling — such as the hereditary jurisdictions, the refusal of a Scottish militia, and the incidence of taxation. But all these had followed lines quite distinct from those of English parties. For a hundred years, the dominant tone of all Scottish politicians who were not avowed Jacobites — and the latter had dwindled by this time into little more than the memory and the shadow of a party — had been that of Revolution Whigs. The distinctions of the House of Commons had found no counterpart in Scotland. The name of Patriot, as a synonym for the most virulent of factious partisans, was unknown within her borders. Amongst Scottish represent- atives at Westminster there were some who were adherents of the Administration, others who were in the Opposition interest; but their attitude was determined by personal considerations, and had little to do with fundamental polit- ical differences. At the beginning of Pitt's Administration, Scottish society was undergoing a great change. The great landlords had lost their vast personal following, and in place of it were fain to be content with the increasing rent-roll which the advancing prosperity of the country brought them. The towns were gi'owing rapidly in importance, and the development of manufactures was bringing a new element into play. Scots- SCOTLAND AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 409 men were less and less confined within their own borders, and were losing something of the exclusiveness of national feeling. All were conscious of anomalies which existed in her Parlia- mentary representation, in her system of burgh administration, and in her total want of all local government. The evils of the absurdly strained system of entails were fully recognised, and it had already undergone some modification. In 1784, it might have been expected that wide and far-reaching changes would soon be brought about in Scotland, without exciting any violent storm of party warfare. Meetings in favour of Parliamentary reform were attended by men of influence, who belonged exclusively to no one party: the cause of burgh reform had, as we have seen, received decided support from the judges on the bench. Any violent division between Whig and Tory was unknown. And even when the various movements which preceded the French Revolution began to stir men's thoughts and excite their passions in England, they aroused no strong feeling in Scotland. It would be vain to look there for any such dreams of new political and social ideals as caught hold of the minds and fancies of some of the strongest intellects in England. Even in England, the influence proved evanescent, and before many years were past, the orgies of the French Revolution had dispelled the illusions of those who had im- agined that a new dawn of hope for humanity was near. But in Scotland no man of wide influence or commanding intellect was carried away by the new enthusiasm. Those who were supposed to represent the revolutionary tendency were men of little power, leaders only amongst weaklings, borrowing their ideas and their words from English writers, and more fit to serve as objects of pity than of anger. Those who, sheltered behind constitutional forms, endeavoured to use popular discontent as an instrument of party, were men without any serious following, and were unfit, either by mental endowment or by character, to be the leaders of any important movement. At a later day, and on a distant view, they might be elevated into heroes, and a political party of a very different complexion might indulge in the fancy that a great national movement, of which that party was the heir, was then inaugurated. But as a fact, the so-called revolutionary party in Scotland was based upon no impulse of intellectual force, was encouraged by no Scotsman of weight or character, and had absolutely no influence but a negative one — that of checking a tendency towards mod- erate reform, and postponing it for more than a generation. The first steps taken by that party were timid and ten- 410 THE TORY AND WHIG PARTIES IN SCOTLAND. tative. There existed a society to commemorate the revol- ution of 1688 ; and its name was found convenient as a cover for the new designs. It showed some new energy in cele- brating the memory of William III. and the glories of our own Revolution ; but its members hardly concealed the fact that the ideas which they professed bore a closer resemblance to those which were in active operation in France than to those which animated the Convention Parliament of 1688. Stories were repeated of gatherings where the achievements of the French National Assembly were toasted, and where the name of Tom Paine was received with applause; where Liberty and Equality and the Rights of Man were vaunted as the weapons by which the existing state of society was to be overthrown. Meanwhile the picture of the ghastly freaks of epidemic madness in Paris, with all its crudities and its barbarities, was stirring men's feelings to their depths, and it was little wonder that the vapourings of the association of the Friends of the People, which now began to hold its meetings in various Scottish towns, should arouse at once alarm and indignation. All that was strongest in the nation was driven into a mood which, not unnaturally, became one of intolerant reaction. Jacobitism had died out, but the sympathies it embodied infused themselves into the party that now stood forward as the bulwark against an aggres- sive proletariat. Ideas of reform, which a few years before found support from both parties, were now banished from the political creed of men who saw nothing but danger and disaster in any tampering with revolution. The abuses of burgh administration could not now, it was thought, be touched without setting the match to an explosive mine. It may be well to recapitulate briefly the contemporary history of that question. It 1783 it had begun to occupy the close attention of the delegates of the burghs. In 1787 a definite scheme was formed. It did not seem impossible then to obtain the support of the Tory administration for this scheme; but it was found that Pitt and Dundas refused to move. Recourse was then had to Fox and Sheridan, and under their auspices the question was mooted in Parliament, but met with determined opposition. Year after year the motion was renewed, but the Lord Advocate paliated the abuses, and resisted change. At length in 1792 he brought forward a weak and temporising measure which would have done so little that the Opposition rejected it, and it was quietly dropped. Next year found the alarm of innovation too strong to permit any hope of success for a scheme of reform, and, almost with the acquiescence of the Whigs, it was PROJECT OF REFORM ABANDONED. 411 left untouched for a few years more. Still more was this the case with the larger and more important question of Parlia- mentary reform. The anomalies of the franchise had a few years before been admitted by all. Now even the moderate Whigs avoided the subject, which was left in the hands of the societies which avowed more or less sympathy with the aspirations of the French Revolution. To the quiet nerves of retrospection this may seem unreasonable; but who can wonder that men, who were living under the appalling re- ports of the orgies of the French Convention, shrank with some horror from societies which avowed their complicity with the leaders of that Convention, which borrowed their catchwords from its reports, and which took for their political manual the ribaldries of Tom Paine, whose name figured amongst the foreign members of that assembly which now terrorised France, and was a menace to all Europe ? The landed gentry, the clergy, the magistrates, the well-to-do tradesmen, — all were at one in their detestation of political change when it was associated with revolution, when its aim seemed to be plunder, and when its plans seemed likely to be realised only by sweeping away all the landmarks of the constitution. To proclaim oneself an adherent of reform was now to assume a character of reckless political profligacy, and to mark oneself out as an enemy of society. To a large extent, no doubt, this was the exaggerated alarm of a propertied and privileged class. Strong argu- ments could be adduced for the necessity of reforming many abuses in Scottish administration; but abstract arguments are apt not to be listened to when indignation has been kindled and patience exhausted by the crimes of those who were held up as models for imitation, and whose chief passion, openly avowed, was virulent hatred of our country and her Government. Common-sense was outraged, and patience was exhausted by the flimsy theories of men who preached a millennium, and found the evidence of its advent in the foul deeds now being enacted in the name of Liberty on the soil of France. It is true that the advocates of reform attempted to dissociate their schemes from revolutionary methods; but their sincerity was more than suspected when their methods were examined. The nation had been pre- pared for reform ; but its attention was now arrested by what it saw abroad, and it stayed its hand and stood at gaze. The brotherhood of man had no charms for a shrewd and practical race, proud of its traditions, jealous of its nationality, and keenly alive to the grades which distinguished class from class. The wiser heads in Scot- 412 THE TORY AND WHIG PARTIES IN SCOTLAND. land knew the charms which fanaticism had for a Scottish populace, and judged that such fanaticism might find sus- tenance in politics now, as it had in religion in the past. The dominant latitudinarianism, far from making Scottish society pervious to vague aspirations, made it all the more callous to popular enthusiasms. Dominant Toryism might, no doubt, become obstinate, bigoted, selfish, and domineering. But in its inception it was rather cynical, critical, and im- patient of excess and folly. Its first movement was one of contempt; it was only as time went on that it became angry and virulent. The agitation for reform was now identified chiefly with the association of the Friends of the People. Three topics had before been chiefly urged : the reform of the Parlia- mentary franchise, the reform of burgh administration, and the institution of trial by jury in civil cases. The last of these was popular in appearance; but it was quite per- missible to doubt whether it had any necessary connection with constitutional liberty, or whether it would introduce any substantial improvement in the administration of the law. The arguments in favour of the first two were certainly strong, and the reform of the burghs seemed to threaten no constitutional danger. But the strength of the demand might fairly be doubted when it was found to be annually urged, not so much by Scottish members as by Fox and Sheridan, whose chief object was too evidently to find a telling subject for debate, and to embarrass the Govern- ment. In 1790 the Whig Club of Dundee passed an address to the National Assembly of France. It is true that the address contains absolutely nothing against our own con- stitution, and makes no attack either on the Crown or on the aristocracy. But the example was a catching one, and other addresses were more suspicious in their origin, and less guarded in their language. In Scotland as well as in England the alarm increased; and in Scotland especially the advocates of reform sank in credit, while their complicity with more subversive schemes was more than suspected. The most prominent Parliamentary opponent of the Govern- ment from Scotland was the Earl of Lauderdale ; and neither by talents nor by character was he a man likely to impress his countrymen. Acrid, passionate, and crafty — with all the lower arts of a political intriguer, but none of the re- source and persuasiveness that make an intriguer successful — Lord Lauderdale is one of the least attractive figures in Scottish history during the forty years which follow. It was consistent with his character, that reform ceased REVOLUTIONARY SOCIETIES. 413 to have charms for him when it ceased to be an engine of faction, and that he closed a long career of political restless- ness by opposing, with all the scanty influence which he possessed, the accomplishment of that Parliamentary reform, in times of peace, which he had used as an instrument of faction in times of storm and danger. It was not surprising that such a man, at a time like this, should be suspected of knowing more than he avowed of the less scrupulous tactics of those who urged reform. Before long these last brought themselves within the arm of the law. In May 1792 the meetings of the Friends of the People had become so frequent, and their tone had become so menacing, that a Royal Proclamation was issued against seditious writings and meetings. It was the subject of fierce Parliamentary debate, in which Pitt and Dundas had now the aid of Burke against the tirades of Sheridan and Fox. The Government carried the day, time after time, by overwhelming majorities in the Commons; and by an even greater preponderance of voices in the Lords, where the chief opponents were Lord Lansdowne — as little trusted now as when, under the name of Lord Shelburne, he had gained the reputation for shiftiness and trickery which marred his eminent talent — and Lauderdale, who outdid Lansdowne in the art of arousing suspicion, but was in- comparably his inferior in statesmanship. The opponents of the Government outside Parliament became more desper- ate and more bold. On the king's birthday in June there were serious riots in Edinburgh, where an angry crowd assembled to burn Henry Dundas in effigy, in revenge for his opposition to burgh reform, and when his house was attacked and the rioters dispersed only by the military. Another meeting of the Friends of the People was held at Edinburgh in the following month; but although this came within the terms of the Royal Proclamation, and although the Government were aware that methods more dangerous than those avowed were being pursued, no prosecutions were as yet instituted. Early in 1793 several persons were prosecuted for illegal meetings and for drinking seditious toasts ; and two booksellers, named Stewart and Elder, were indicted for publishing the 'Rights of Man.' Much eloquence may no doubt be spent, and specious arguments may be adduced, in denunciation of such an invasion of the liberty of the press and of free debate. But with the tocsin sounding in Paris; in a society alarmed and indig- nant; and under the pressure of a war which avowedly proclaimed for its ulterior object the destruction of the 414 THE TORY AND WHIG PARTIES IN SCOTLAND. English constitution, the Government would have either risen to a surprising height of abstract philosophical argu- ment, or sunk to a surprising depth of political weakness, had it failed to act firmly towards those who made them- selves instruments in disseminating the vulgar and seditious garbage of Tom Paine. In none of these cases, however, was any punishment more severe than a few months' im- prisonment inflicted. By this time, however, the opposing ranks had closed, and in the heat of the conflict calm and constitutional methods were scarcely to be expected. It can hardly be said that at this juncture the action of the judicial body in Scotland was guided by wise counsels, or by strict impartiality. It may be well to consider how that judicial body was now formed, and what were its chief characteristics at this time. In many of its usages, and in its methods of apply- ing the law, the Court of Justiciary was a relic of the past. That it had been little altered hitherto, and that in spite of faulty and narrow principles it had nevertheless earned the high respect and confidence of the country, was due mainly to a series of judges of remarkable ability, who had been trained in a school that inured them to state- craft and to public life. The nominal head of the Court was the Lord Justice-General, who was usually a nobleman of commanding position and influence. But under him the administration of the Criminal Law, and in a great measure the maintenance of public order, and the direction of the executive, had long been in the hands of the Lord President and the Lord Justice-Clerk. The holders of these offices were generally men who had previously had a long training in public life, and came to power with an experience wider than that of the mere lawyers. Throughout the century — in Duncan Forbes of Culloden ; in more than one genera- tion of the Dundas family; in men like Fletcher; and in one like Lord Auchinleck, the rugged but forcible parent of James Boswell — these offices had occupants fully equal to their responsibilities. In the abstract, it may seem expedient that the judicial element should be entirely sep- arate from the executive, and in times of settlement this is doubtless the case. But under an administration such as that of Scotland during the greater part of the eighteenth century, the wider experience and larger outlook which the judicial Bench thus acquired, was of distinct and indisput- able value. But this political enlargement of the judicial functions had now almost disappeared. For at least a generation there had THE SCOTTISH BENCH. 415 been no rebellion calling for prompt and yet skilful action in sudden emergencies. The executive government in Scotland had become largely a matter of routine ; and such as it was, it had been gradually assumed into the hands of the Secre- tary of State for the Home Department. Of the judges now on the Bench few had ever sat in Parliament; none had gained experience in practical administration; and they lacked the knowledge of affairs which is above all things important for a judge at times of political excitement, and which more than compensates for the danger that former attachment to a political party may give undue bias. At this time the office of Lord President had recently been assumed by Sir Islay Campbell of Succoth — a man highly respected, an astute and careful lawyer, but with no experi- ence of political life, and no claim to commanding ability or vigour of personal character. The Lord Justice-Clerk was Robert Macqueen (Lord Braxfield), a man who, unlike the majority of the Scottish judges, was of comparatively humble birth, and had not, in climbing the ladder of professional success, divested himself of the coarse homeliness of his orig- inal station. He was a man whose experience was bounded by the Parliament House ; but his powerful intellect and masterful character made his personality all the stronger and more forcible because a contracted sphere and narrow experi- ence had concentrated its powers and left him without the useful, if sometimes debilitating, lessons of compromise which are learned from contact with a variety of men. In all the political trials which now ensue. Lord Braxfield undoubtedly is the leading figure on the Bench : coarse, domineering, sarcas- tic, but yet with an intellect ever on the alert, instinct with a rough and ready common-sense and humour, and keen to detect any weak point in the argument for the defence ; withal regardless, even to consummate contempt, of popular opinion. His habitual carelessness of demeanour and freedom of language made him give utterance to gibes and sarcasms sometimes on the Bench, and sometimes in the privacy of social intercourse, which were repeated and perhaps exagger- ated, and which were far from adding to the dignity of the judicial office, or to its reputation for impartiality. Nor were there amongst his colleagues any who could counteract or temper his vigorous personality. Amongst them was Lord Gardenstone — already noted — whose char- acter was too flimsy, and whose attention to his professional duties was too slight to give him any real weight. Another was David Rae, Lord Eskgrove, a man of much acuteness, and an able lawyer of an antique and narrow type, but whose 416 THE TORY AND WHIG PARTIES IN SCOTLAND. oddities both of intellect and of demeanour moderated the respect which he might otherwise have obtained. Lord Hailes was a cultivated and learned man, whose thoughts were per- haps more occupied with antiquarian investigations than with the maintenance of a judicial sway ; while Lord Monboddo was known rather for his quaint eccentricities and social humour than for any consummate mastery of the law. Early in 1793 a somewhat odd illustration of the lack of prudence on the part of the Bench was given. A scene, doubtless carefully rehearsed, and more edifying than strictly constitutional, was enacted between the Lord Provost of Edin- burgh and the Judges. The worthy Provost appeared, attended by the appurtenances of civic dignity, and delivered an address to the Judges on the excellence of the constitution, and the wickedness of those who found any fault or blemish in it; and this address was answered by a long homily from the Lord President, in which the wickedness of innovation and the dangers of sedition were duly urged for the benefit of the lieges. This homily was entered on the records of the Court. It was probably not the means best calculated to impress a suspicious public with the strict partiality of the judicial Bench. In August 1793 took place the first of the trials for sedition which attained much notoriety, and which afterwards became favourite, and, it must be admitted, favourable, topics of declamation amongst those who were in search of instances of Tory tyranny and of the persecutions endured by the pioneers of the later Whig party. It was that of Thomas Muir for sedition. He was a young man under thirty years of age, the son of a well-to-do commercial man in Glasgow, who had purchased a landed estate known as Huntershill. Young Muir was a man of more than average ability, of ardent temperament, and over-strained ambition, who, after a good education, had passed as an advocate, and employed the abundant leisure which the early years of that career offered, in political discussion, and in ventilating, at the meetings of the Friends of the People, views which were not perhaps very advanced, but which in the existing state of public opinion were inopportune. There is no evidence to prove that his aims were other than sincere and his motives honest; and in the abstract it was difficult to con- demn an agitation for Parliamentary Reform, of which Pitt and other members of the Cabinet had, only a short time previously, been ardent advocates. The French Revolution had inspired new hope in those who still pursued these aims ; but the very fact that they received new impulse from the TRIAL OF MUIR. 417 events in France was the very reason why, to another and a more numerous section, they should now appear dangerous and revolutionary. Muir had attended such meetings and taken a leading part in their discussions. The Scottish branch of the association had first met at Glasgow in October 1792, and Muir was elected its vice-president. He had been in constant communication with the most strenuous advocates of drastic political change, and — a circumstance which told heavily against him — he had been associated with Irish politi- cal societies from which real danger was to be expected. At a meeting of delegates at Edinburgh, in December 1792, he brought forward a strongly worded address from the Society of United Irishmen, and endeavoured to persuade the delegates to reply in the same tone. In common, probably, with all those who watched with interest the struggle between Burke, who was now denouncing revolution, and Tom Paine, who was its English protagonist, he had discussed the pamphlets of the latter, had even been the means of disseminating them, and had recommended some of the writings of the French revolutionary authors. In his own words, as repeated at his trial, there was nothing very extreme or dangerous, and although he had freely discussed the most advanced political theories, there was ample evidence that he had expressed doubt as to their applicability to British politics, and had counselled moderation. But, on the other hand, he had made himself obnoxious to those whose nerves were not unreasonably shaken by the events now going on in Paris, he had encouraged meetings of societies which were dis- countenanced by Government, and he was received with cordial friendship in Paris by some of those who were the chief actors on the French scene. It was suspected — as it afterwards appeared, not without reason — that some of those who discussed the necessity of political reform, were prepared to take practical and violent steps to enforce it upon an un- willing Government. Doubt, suspicion, and irritation were almost necessary elements in a society which viewed with bitter hatred and serious alarm the contagion of the French example which had already aroused the indignant protest of Burke, and was giving rise to increasing dread on the part of Pitt. Indignation and fear found new ground when the French republic declared war against England in the opening days of 1793. It wafs no wonder that the tide of feeling ran fiercely against a small and insignificant section, which at such a time were pleading not merely for some measure of Parliamentary reform, and for the amendment of the more glaring anomalies, but who found the moment well chosen for 2d 418 THE TORY AND WHIG PARTIES IN SCOTLAND. urging universal suffrage and annual Parliaments. But it is none the less to be regretted that the Courts of Law allowed themselves to be swayed by panic and by prejudice. The prosecution of Muir and others was resolved upon by the Government, and it can scarcely be said that they could have satisfied public opinion in Scotland had they refrained from it. Nor can much be said against the conduct of the prosecution by the Lord Advocate, Robert Dundas of Arniston, son of the Lord President, and nephew of Henry Dundas, the Home Secretary. The prosecutor could scarcely do otherwise than urge as strongly as he could the points that told against the accused. It was for the Bench to hold the balance ; and this is just what, unfortunately, the Bench did not do. The Lord Justice-Clerk Braxfield made himself more than prose- cutor: he strained every point against the prisoner with a vindictive spite which not justice alone, but statesmanship, would have forbidden. Muir had committed a grave error in breaking the bail which had been granted after his first arrest in January 1793, and not appearing to take his trial in February. As a consequence he was outlawed, and eventu- ally appeared to take his trial in August very seriously com- promised. But he had in no way concealed his movements, nor attempted to evade his final arrest. His presence in Ireland, in London, and in Paris was perfectly well known. His motive in visiting Paris was one which perhaps involved undue intimacy with the revolutionary leaders and their designs, and certainly implied the assumption to himself of too much of a representative character; but he no doubt honestly desired to prevent, so far as he could, the execution of Louis XVI., which he and others who sympathised with the Revolution deemed likely to injure the cause. He might have kept himself out of the clutches of British law-courts ; but he voluntarily returned to Scotland, and surrendered himself to justice there. He doubtless thought that political discussion could scarcely be held to be treasonable; but he mistook the temper of the nation, and certainly did not fore- see that such temper would be reflected and exaggerated on the judicial Bench. Braxfield answered his appeals to the examples of notable members of the Government who had advocated reform by reminding him, with all the insolence of sarcastic humour, that these personages were not within the jurisdiction of the Scottish Courts. So far from admit- ting that discussion was lawful, he declaimed against any proposal that would have given representation to other inter- ests than those of the landed gentry. He strained against the defendant the delay which had unavoidably occurred in RESULT OF THE TRIAL. 419 meeting his trial. He imputed it as an additional wrong that the populace had shown sympathy by applauding the prisoner in court. He declined to admit any flaw in the existing administration, and assumed that any criticism of it was in itself a wrong. With all the force of a strong but narrow intellect, and of a character that scorned any traffick- ing with opinions which he honestly believed to be wrong and dangerous, he refrained even from giving that appearance of decency which, with equal danger to the prisoner, he might have adopted, by concealing his own violent prejudice, and his complete sympathy with the indignation and alarm of those who deemed that the excesses of the French Revolution might ere long be enacted at home. It is impossible to bring against Braxfield any taint of corruption, or any desire to conciliate the Government, whose position indeed his out- spoken prejudice gravely compromised. He was no time- server, and had no personal aim to attain. But his virulence was none the less indecent because it was thoroughly honest. Otherwise the trial was little but a travesty of justice. The jurors were all selected from a constitutional society which met at Goldsmith's Hall, out of whose lists Muir's name had been struck, and which might therefore be held to have prejudged his case ; and his challenges were summarily repelled, on the ground that, if allowed, they would infer the rejection as a juror of every loyal citizen. None of the usual indulgences granted to a prisoner conducting his own case were allowed him ; but he and his witnesses were bullied and browbeaten. In the result Muir was convicted not merely of " leasing " — an ancient and well-known Scottish legal term borrowed from the French lese-majeste — but of the more serious charge, unknown either to custom or to statute law, but held to be valid at common law, of "sedition." For " leasing " the ordinary punishment would have been banish- ment. But sedition, it was held, left to the judges an " arbit- rary " punishment. To have inflicted a sentence of banishment only upon Muir and his associates would merely have sent him to propagate his opinions in England, or somewhere be- yond the Scottish border. More than this seemed necessary, and he was therefore sentenced to fourteen years' transporta- tion. Like others similarly sentenced, he was sent to Botany Bay. There he purchased some land and remained for two or three years ; but he was rescued by a foreign ship, and after some adventures by sea, in which he was severely wounded, he landed in France, and was conducted in triumph to the capital. But the wound was found to be incurable, and after a few months' residence on French soil, where his presence 420 THE TORY AND WHIG PARTIES IN SCOTLAND. was welcomed as a sign of defiance to the English, he died in 1798.^ Muir's trial took place in August 1793. In the next month it was followed by that of Thomas Fyshe Palmer, an English- man of good family, educated at Eton and Cambridge, who had formerly been in orders in the Church of England, but was now a Unitarian minister at Dundee. The charo^es against Palmer were even more flimsy than those against Muir, and the proof of his having used any inflammatory language was if anything less conclusive. He was accused of having printed an " Address to their fellow-citizens " from a " Society of the Friends of Liberty," but although he was apparently the agent by whom it passed into the printer's hand, he was certainly not the author, and seems to have discountenanced its issue. He also was condemned to trans- portation for twelve years. Meanwhile the alarm grew, and however a minority might protest against the miscarriage of justice, their remonstrances tended only to convince many that the danger was still more real, and that it could be met only by increased severity. In December of the same year the magistrates prohibited a meeting of British delegates at Edinburgh, and the wide- spread ramifications of the society, as well as the flagrant insult which they oflered to public opinion in adopting the very phrases used in the French National Convention, roused the indignation to fever pitch — all the more that the sym- pathy for the accused amongst the lower class became every day more evident. In October, William Skirving, a friend of Palmer, who had been educated at Edinburgh University for the Nonconformist ministry, and subsequently became an agriculturist of some repute, had published an account of Palmer's trial which had represented it as a martyrdom likely to lead to notable results. He was himself deeply involved, as secretary, in the arrangements for the Convention of Delegates, held at Edinburgh between October and December 1793, which was undoubtedly an infringement of the Royal Proclamation of May 1792, and which was summoned to protest against the proposed suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act. In January 1794 he was brought to trial, also for " sedition," a word which he professed not to understand, and to which he refused to plead. The populace showed their sympathy by taking the horses out of his carriage and ^ His health had probably been seriously injured before the wound, by the horrors which, it was well known, attended a sentence of transportation. Gerald and Skirving (see post), on whom similar sentences were passed, survived their landing at Botany Bay only by three months. OTHER TRIALS FOR SEDITION. 421 drawing him in triumph to the court. The same month saw the trial of Maurice Margarot on the same charge, and it also was attended by riots in the streets. Those who feared the danger of advanced political opinions now saw their fears confirmed. They found the delegates using the suspicious names of " Citizen," of " Sections," of " Committees of Secrecy," and believed them to be backed by a well-arranged scheme for arousing the terrors of mob-law. In March of the same year another Englishman, Joseph Gerald of Marylebone, was found to be carrying on revolutionary machinations in Scot- land; he too was brought to trial, and, like Skirving and Margarot, he was sentenced to fourteen years' transportation. The conduct of the trials might be indecent, and the sentences passed might be unduly severe. But the Government could hardly have prevented drastic action on the part of an out- raged society, had they not shown themselves prepared to guard against designs which seemed to threaten property and order, or had they yielded in fear of the anonymous threats of reprisals by the hand of the political assassin which constantly reached them. In April 1794 the Tory youth of Edinburgh took the law, indeed, into their own hands. A handful of Irish students frequented one of the theatres, and irritated the audience by refusing to uncover when the National Anthem was sung. The magistrates had insufficient police control to prevent a serious riot. A band of the younger bloods of the constitutional party took posses- sion of the theatre, and enforced the respect due to loyalty by the summary arguments of oaken clubs. The riot led to no worse result than a few broken heads, and it is chiefly memorable from the fact that a certain young advocate, whose future fame was to outlast all these disputes, of the name of Walter Scott, was not ashamed to be a leader in the fray, and not averse in future years to recount his adventures in defence of loyalty outraged by the Hibernian visitors. There were a few more arrests for charges of sedition of the same kind as those already dealt with. But the Govern- ment seemed to think that enough had now been done, and were perhaps convinced that in the Court of Justiciary, they had put in motion an engine which was a little too drastic in its methods. The trials and sentences were matter of keen discussion in Parliament, and many of the Whig speakers inveighed in no measured terms against the iniquities of the processes, and the scandalous bias of the judges. Unfortun- ately, Parliament is the worst possible tribunal for pronouncing on legal administration, and the Opposition spent themselves in vain eflbrts against an impregnable stronghold. Fox and 422 THE TORY AND WHIG PARTIES IN SCOTLAND. Sheridan were, indeed, eloquent in their denunciations. They refused to listen to what they deemed to be legal quibbles, or to pay " implicit obedience to the doctrines of professional men." They quoted with indignation the dicta of Braxfield as to the proper limitation of representation to the landed interest, and the hint given by another judge that torture was the only suitable punishment for such a crime. They prayed God to help the people who had such judges. But, after all, even when aided by the rasping virulence of Lauder- dale, they could scarcely be accepted as authorities upon Scottish law ; and the feeble minorities which they were able to command rather encouraged than prevented further severities. So far as strict law was concerned, it is safe to assume that the unanimous opinion of Scottish lawyers at that day was right in pronouncing that its dictates were obeyed at once in the indictments and in the sentences. In any case, it was amply established by the highest authorities, that no appeal lay against the Justiciary Court of Scotland. There might be just as little doubt that flagrant bias had been shown, and that the judges had permitted considerations to operate which they had no right to entertain. But there was no possibility of submitting legal evidence of this ; and although it might have been possible to rectify such perversion by the exercise of the royal prerogative, the Opposition took the most certain way of rendering this impossible by the misguided course which they pursued. No one could have rendered Braxfield's action more safe against adverse criticism in Scotland than did Fox and Sheridan and Lauderdale. In May 1794 there came the English Act suspending the Habeas Corpus Act, and the analogous Scottish Act of 1701. Only an insignificant minority in Scotland even whispered a protest : by the great majority of those who could make their influence felt it was welcomed as a defence against impending danger. In September of the same year came a new trial — that of Robert Watt and David Downie — for high treason. There was no longer a question only of dangerous meetings, of resolutions that were tainted with revolutionary bias, of the distribution of questionable writ- ings, and of addresses that were suspected of meaning more than they said. This time there was evidence of actual armed conspiracy. Confederates had been sworn ; signals for a rising had been arranged; arms and money had been collected. It is true that the preparations were paltry and insignificant. But to allege this as a ground for leaving them unnoticed and unpunished, is inept and irrelevant. Their guilt was not measured by their insignificance; and it is TRIALS FOR TREASON. 423 absurd to suppose that in the temper of the public mind in 1794, when the excesses of the Revolution were in full swing, and when the resources of our country were strained to the uttermost in maintaining a war which was avowedly pro- claimed by the foe as a means of revolutionary propagand- ism — the discovery of concealed arms, and the exposure of murderous plans, should not have roused the indignant alarm of the governing class, and made stern action not a matter of choice, but of compulsion on the Government. Watt — a despicable and cowardly wretch, who had for a time enacted the part of a Government spy, but had at length found conspiracy a more hopeful game — was sentenced to death, and was hanged without a word of remonstrance from any one. Downie also was sentenced to death ; but after repeated reprieves he was at length liberated, on condition that he banished himself from the country. He transferred his activities to the soil of America. Even this amount of mercy was not approved by the Scottish supporters of the Government. But now the question was not one merely between theo- retical reformers, who more or less justified their own classi- fication with revolutionists, and the party who saw in such reformers a danger to society. The pressure of the war with France was more and more severely felt. Taxes were increasing; harvests were scanty; prices were rising fast. Starvation stared many of the poorer classes of the towns in the face ; and the advance of manufactures had made these classes much more numerous and more formidable than they had been a generation before. In England bread riots were frequent, and Birmingham was the scene of bloodshed in June 1795 — not for the last time in her history. The contagion spread to Scotland, and the populace became more and more difficult to control. Inevitably men's minds turned again to ideas of reform, and the conviction was pressed upon them that repression was not a permanent panacea. Amongst the younger professional men there were many, who did not seek a crown of martyrdom by acts provoking to prosecution, but who were tired of the old ways, weary of the irksome domin- ation of an older generation, disinclined to take with grati- tude the scraps that were thrown to them, and not altogether disposed to think that these scraps corresponded with their own very adequate appreciation of their personal merits and qualifications. Such feelings are made up partly of political aspirations, partly, also, of personal ambitions; and in the reminiscences of the actors the element of political aspiration is, perhaps not unnaturally, somewhat unduly exaggerated. 424 THE TORY AND WHIG PARTIES IN SCOTLAND. None of these young men made common cause with Muir or Palmer, with Skirving or with Margarot. When the French Revolution was at the high tide of its fury, they certainly did not express any sympathy with it. They had no desire for overturning property, annihilating the professions, or con- founding distinctions of classes. But the existing state of things was not promising either to their tastes or their ambitions. The permanent proscription of public meetings closed the door to the aspirations of youthful eloquence. The Parliamentary representation of Scotland was a field from which all but a few privileged persons were hopelessly ex- cluded. The ladder of professional advancement was one which had to be climbed by slow and painful degrees, and by a process of dismal and repulsive drudgery. The growing monotony of type and characteristic amongst the prominent denizens of Parliament Close, made it less attractive : and we must not forget that the generation which had lived since George III. became king, and which had seen the old types pass away, and the Jacobite become only a memory and a tradition, had not by any means made Edinburgh a more exciting or attractive place of residence than it was in the third quarter of the century. Small wonder was it that a band of young men became restless and discontented, and were unwilling to repeat the maxims of their forebears, with implicit credulity. Small blame to them if, in looking back in later days, they were apt to mistake the promptings of dis- content and reasonable ambition for the unalloyed ardour of political zeal. In a political retrospect, however, we are not, perhaps, bound to take them entirely at their own valuation, or to believe that the fire of pure political zeal, without any alloy of personal aims, was sufficient to keep their enthusiasm alive. It was in December 1795 that a matter was first mooted which had much to do with the first formation of a distinct Whig party amongst the professional class in Edinburgh. That party did undoubtedly give shape and definiteness to a very marked phase of Scottish political thought, down to a period after the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1795 two bills were proposed — one to put a stop more effectually to seditious meetings, the other for the safety of the king's person against such threatening attacks as had been made on him in the streets of London on the 29th of October of that year. These attacks had called forth a general outburst of loyalty ; and it was feared that they were now to be made the occasion for a serious encroachment on the liberty of the subject. Protests were made by the attenuated Whig party in HENRY ERSKINE. {Painted by Raebitrn.) HENRY ERSKINE. 425 Scotland ; and a public meeting was held in Somer's Tavern on the 28th of November, at which the Dean of Faculty, Henry Erskine, moved a series of resolutions which con- demned measures "which strike at the very foundation of the constitution." By a strange error of judgment there was tagged on to these resolutions a clause condemning the French war; and a fatal connection was thus established in the creed of the Scottish Whigs between the defence of con- stitutional liberty and want of sympathy with the struggle of the country against a powerful and aggressive tyranny abroad. There was now no talk of prosecution and of penal measures ; but it became clear to the Tories that there was an organised body in the country, with a well-defined but obnoxious polit- ical creed, which must be met by all the resources of deter- mined and unflinching party organisation. The question now was, what action should be taken to mark the general opposition which that political creed excited ? The leading name amongst those who attended the meeting, and thus gave their countenance to the supposed enemies of law and order, and the avowed sympathisers with our foreign enemies, was that of Henry Erskine. Personally he was a man of eminent gifts and of great popularity. His position at the Scottish Bar was supreme. He belonged to an ancient family, the lustre of whose name was increased by his own eloquence and acknowledged wit, and by the successes of his brother on the larger stage of the English Bar. For a brief period in 1783, when the supremacy of the Dundas family had been set aside under the Coalition Ministry of Fox and North, the only man who could fill the place of Lord Advocate was Erskine. No personal feeling would have operated against such a man. But he held, by election of the Advocates, the position of Dean of Faculty, which, although entirely honorary and unofficial, made him the head and representative of the Bar. It was quite certain that the opinions which he had expressed were not those of the vast majority of the men to whose suffrages he owed the post, and whose sympathies he thus belied. Apart from any question of the freedom of political opinion, it was only natural that the Bar should resent the position in which they were thus placed, and should refuse to allow even acknow- ledged eminence and supreme personal popularity to be grounds for their own misrepresentation. For ten years in succession he had been elected as Dean. But in December 1795, a body of eight advocates, of leading position, gave him warning that his re-election would be opposed. Of the issue of the contest there could be no doubt, and Erskine had only himself to blame if the general voice of his professional brethren resolved to 426 THE TORY AND WHIG PARTIES IN SCOTLAND. assert itself. That he should resent what could not but appear to be an attempt to fetter his freedom of action was only- natural. That he should prefer that freedom of action to any recantation was not only natural, but inevitable, and to have done anything else would have been inconsistent with his position and his character. But none the less natural was the action of his opponents, who found themselves compelled to choose between their public duty and their personal friendship. The election came on in January 1796, and Robert Dundas, the Lord Advocate, was chosen Dean of Faculty in Erskine's stead by a majority of 123 to 38. The representative of the Ministry thus became, at the same time, contrary to the usual and of late years the uniform practice, the chosen representative of the Bar. Political difference has never since, most happily, been the deciding element in such a contest, but it would be rash to predict that it never again may. It is inevitable that political feeling may at times rise so high, and that political differences may strike so deeply at the roots of social order, or turn upon so vital a question of national danger, as to compel all loyal citizens to postpone every minor consideration to the dictates of their political consciences. Such a crisis undoubtedly existed in 1796. It is true that pressure was in some instances brought to bear, and that a few wavering votes (including those of some who in later years belonged to Erskine's party), which might have been cast for Erskine, were influenced by powerful patrons ; but the majority was far too great to permit a doubt that the election represented the preponderating feelings of the Faculty as a whole. Those feelings may have been exaggerated or mistaken. Whether they were so opens a much more ex- tensive argument ; but to urge that their assertion at such a time was due only to prejudice or intolerance, is to create a fictitious martyrdom, and virtually amounts to denying to the Faculty the free right of electing their own representative. But however that may be, the circumstance unquestionably became the starting-point of a new political departure. Hence- forward war was openly proclaimed. Definiteness and pre- cision were given to the tenets of the Opposition ; and from 1796 a Whig party was regularly organised in Scotland, and gradually acquired not only a distinct creed, but tactics and characteristics of its own. During the next two or three years it made no way what- ever against the solid phalanx of the Tory party. That party was now animated at once by patriotic ardour and by the fear of revolutionary change. Either the example of French rev- olutionary methods or the danger of French invasion would, separately, have been sufficient to give vigour to party feeling ; TORY AND WHIG PARTIES. 427 when combined, as they now were, they were irresistible. It is true that the widespread volunteer ardour, which turned Edinburgh into something like a standing camp, and converted sober citizens into martial enthusiasts, was not confined to one party. To have stood aloof entirely might have been suspici- ous, and would certainly have involved social ostracism ; and those, therefore, who hated the war, and judged resistance to Napoleon to be a form of insanity, were harassed by drills, and had to don the uniform and practise the manual exercises, with as much painful and irksome regularity as those who found their pleasure in all the panoply of war, and whose imaginations pictured its glories more vividly than its re- mote, but none the less real, possibilities of danger. There is something comic in the situation which made the universal fervour a means of inspiring hope and buoyancy in those who supported the war, and dragged along as unwilling victims those who thought the war a popular folly, and did not in their hearts desire for it any more triumphant ending than it would probably have had, in case of recourse to the aid of their puissant arms. Meanwhile the Tory party, however alarming the prospect abroad, felt themselves triumphant at home, and the tone of the metropolis of Scotland was predominantly in their favour. For a few years from 1796 the Palace of Holy rood was occupied by the Royalist exiles from France, the Comte d'Artois and his family ; and the presence of such guests was eminently likely to rivet in Edinburgh society the convic- tion of the wrongs they had suffered, which might easily have their counterpart at home. The general election of 1796 gave the Government a new mandate of authority from the nation. In 1797 the end of a long struggle was reached in the grant of a Militia Act for Scotland; and the fact that in a few districts there was riotous resistance to its enforce- ment, only proved the necessity for firmness in the mainten- ance of order. Armed bands gathered, and by threats and violence compelled a timid magistrature to suspend the levies. But the resistance was short-lived, and a few comparatively unimportant trials effectually crushed it. The riots caused by the starvation price of grain, and the poverty which was the necessary result of a costly war, were of greater danger ; but these too were local, and they rather gave adequate ground for severe measures than occasioned any serious alarm. In 1798 the Society of United Scotsmen, an offshoot of the Friends of the People, again made itself heard of, and in January of that year a certain George Mealmaker, who had appeared as a subordinate agent in the previous trials, 428 THE TORY AND WHIG PARTIES IN SCOTLAND. was sentenced to transportation for fourteen years. In 1799 a combination of journeymen shoemakers, in order to raise wages, led to a conflict with the authorities; and the pro- ceedings at the trial which ensued are curious as showing the very modest theories on the subject which the most ardent Whigs of that day ventured to profess. The Lord Advocate urged the wickedness of such combination, the wrong which it might inflict on manufacturers, and its serious danger to society. Henry Erskine defended the prisoners, but he did not attempt to combat the views of the prosecution. On the contrary, he admitted the wickedness; abandoned altogether any assertion of a right on the part of the workmen ; excused them only on the ground of their utter ignorance ; and de- precated severity only on the ground of their entire repent- ance and sincere promise of amendment. We have travelled far since 1799 ! Before we quit this period it is well to advert to a matter which shows the contrast between the financial conditions of England and Scotland. In 1797 national credit was in the sorest straits : the pressure of war and the consequent heavy taxation ; the disturbance of trade, and the frequency of bad harvests; as well as the alarm of invasion, — all these had made the commercial atmosphere a stormy one. Bankrupt- cies were frequent, and it seemed as though public credit might be swept away by the hurricane then threatened. To avert this the Bank Restriction Act was passed, which sus- pended specie payments by the Bank of England. In Eng- land the authority of the Legislature had to be called in to preserve the equilibrium, by making the notes of the bank, which had a legislative monopoly, the only authorised cur- rency. The crisis was equally acute in Scotland ; but there no monopoly existed, and no such restrictive legislation was possible. In these circumstances the nation met the crisis by independent action. The banks — products of no system of legislative dry-nursing, but the spontaneous growth of national enterprise — boldly threw themselves upon the forbearance and good sense of the nation, and did so with signal success. With no legislative sanction — nay, without any legal author- ity whatever — they resolved by common consent to suspend money payments. So healthy had been the growth and spon- taneous development of Scottish banking, that it was able, with the general acquiescence of the nation, to take a step which had been possible in England only under the aegis of the Legislature. No better proof could be furnished of the faculty of the nation to produce a system adapted to its own needs, and strong in the trust which it had inspired in the nation. 429 CHAPTER XVIL THE SCOTTISH SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY. At this point it seems well to turn aside from tracing the growth of party bitterness in Scotland, and the formation of two opposing political camps, in order to glance at one special phase of Scottish life and thought during the eigh- teenth century, which culminated towards its close. No account of Scotland in that century would be complete if it omitted an estimate of the work of the Scottish philo- sophical school, and the part it played in moulding the char- acter of the nation. This is not the place to enter upon any detailed examination of the special tenets of each member of the school. For us the main point of interest in the history of the movement is its bearing upon the national life and character. There are certain points which it is well to note as a preliminary to the examination. First of all, those who formed the school were all essentially Scottish in character and in sympathy. It may be said of one that he was not born in Scotland ; of another, that he spent a large part of his life in France; of a third, that he had imbibed, as an alumnus of Oxford, something of the spirit of the English universities. Few, indeed, of the men of leading in Scotland during the eighteenth century were without some tincture of cosmopolitanism, and hardly one circumscribed his experi- ence or his literary friendships by her boundaries. But each one of them by descent, by education, and by warmest sym- pathy, was distinctively a Scotsman. In Scotland all his interests were centred ; within her territory all his strongest sympathies lay; and he looked upon her soil as that on which he would choose to end his days. Whatever may be the merits or demerits of the school as a whole, it was un- doubtedly from first to last a product of Scottish genius and of Scottish character, and as such it takes its place as the 430 THE SCOTTISH SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY. most durable school of philosophical thought, connected by one consistent thread of opinion, which Great Britain has yet seen. Next we may admit, without disparagement to the emin- ence of its exponents, that they were not, as a rule, men of striking ability or originality. There is at least one marked exception to this rule. But for the most part the leaders of the Scottish school were rather men of strong character, of unwearied perseverance, and of consistent aim, than men whose words have remained as a living force for all time. Almost all were men who influenced their own generation by the force of personal contact and of personal character. Their power in this direction remained a vivid tradition, and was not restricted in its results. But all the same, it is chiefly a tradition, and is not enforced by any vital effect which their written words have upon the thoughts, or any currency which they obtained in the mouths, of men of later generations. Their function indeed may not unfitly be compared to that of the great actors of a past age. Their names continue to be familiar to us. They worked with consummate skill upon the feelings of the audiences who felt the spell of personal contact. Their influence was preserved because they did much to mould the feelings of those audiences, and so affected powerfully the history of each succeeding generation. But, with one or two exceptions, this was the limit imposed upon them by the very nature of the function which they had to discharge. Because the philosophy which they inculcated was mainly shaped by the exigencies of its employment as an instrument of education. The establishment of abstract principles was not with them a leading motive. They cared little for long or subtle arguments, and did not trouble themselves overmuch about the technical structure of their systems. They did not search for fine distinctions, nor did they perceive how casual divergencies in statement might involve serious principles, and might, if pursued to their logical conclusion, land them at diametrically opposite poles of thought. They sought rather for points of contact, and found such points of con- tact in their common aim of giving a practically efficacious training to their scholars without ranging themselves into hostile camps. The territory which they cultivated admitted of various kinds of tillage, each of which might yield its quota of sustenance to the common weal ; the debatable land beyond, they were content to consider as outside their range. The whole school, from first to last, was centred in the SCOTTISH UNIVERSITIES. 431 universities, and those who partook of its labours beyond the walls of the universities were exceptional, and scarcely- repeated the main characteristics of the school. It was, indeed, the principal instrument by which the Scottish universities recovered and extended their influence over the nation at large. From their first establishment, the principal part of the Scottish universities' curriculum had consisted of logic and the various branches of moral and mental philosophy. From these the other branches of education had developed, and they had all assumed the aspects of new growths grafted on the parent stem. Even the classical languages had been only of later introduction, when the grammar schools had been found insufficient to furnish the alumni who flocked to the universities, with the general acquaintance with these languages which was deemed necessary as a sound foundation on which a structure of mental science might be built. But the political struggles of the seventeenth century had been a period of dire adversity for the universities. Their scholars had decreased; their revenues had decayed; the purposes for which they existed occupied but a second- ary place in the attention of the nation. They had done their best — but not always successfully — to resist the en- croachments of the Church Courts, which aspired to a universal domination. Although they had more than once protested against interference, they had been able only imperfectly to check it. After the Revolution, the Regenting system, as it was called, by which the graduates, or those who corresponded to graduates, carried on the tuition of the younger members of the university, was still in force. Under that system all the subjects of the curriculum were taught by one or another Regent to a certain number of the alumni; but the instruction was carried on by means of prescribed compendiums, in which the pupils were duly exercised, but from which no discursion was permitted. Under such a system no progress in any special science was possible, much less encouraged; and the only training which the students obtained was through the practice of dialectical argument on the subjects dealt with in these compendiums, which cultivated subtlety and dexterity in verbal fence, but provided no field for intellectual expansion, nor permitted any practical application of principles to the ever -varying scenes of ordinary life. A Commission in 1695 did its best to perpetuate this 432 THE SCOTTISH SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY. system, with the purpose, it may be, of checking any bold- ness of discursive speculation, and curbing any tendency to bring a practical influence to bear on the national life. It was assumed that the Regenting system was to be perpetual; and upon each university was imposed the task of preparing a compendium in the four principal subjects then admitted to the curriculum — Logic, Metaphysics, Ethics, and Physics. Glasgow and Aberdeen apparently neglected the injunction ; but Edinburgh and Saint Andrews prepared compendiums of metaphysics and logic, which were destined to have but a short tenure of life. The older system was, indeed, doomed to disappear. The Regenting system was neither suited to the new needs of the nation, nor was it fitted to stimulate any real intellectual life in the universities. In 1708 it had practically dis- appeared in Edinburgh; in 1727 in Glasgow; in 1747 in Saint Andrews; and in 1754 in Aberdeen. In its place came the Professoriate, by which a special professor was appointed for each of the various subjects — though the range over which his teaching was expected to extend was still wide enough to be astonishing to modern ideas — and his academical discourses were to take the place of the dreary prelections in prescribed compendiums which had formerly prevailed. Such a system contained in it the germ of a new life. All depended upon the professors chosen. Fortu- nately the public spirit, and the zeal for learning of the universities, was equal to the task; and the professors for the most part proved themselves able to rise to the level of the function now laid upon them. The instruction was now given by regular courses of formal lectures, in which the professor had a free range, and in which he became the leading and authorised representative of the branch of mental or moral science over which he was chosen to preside. It was his interest to attract and stimulate pupils, to extend the range of his science, and open up new fields of specu- lation, bringing his own personal influence to bear in the enforcement of his views. Such a change could not but be stimulating; and it is to the honour of the Scottish youth that they rose to the new level of the teaching, and met with ready zeal such enthusiasm as the professor brought to his subject. The old practice of academic disputation was abandoned, and in its place came the numerous societies established by the students themselves for inquiry and dis- cussion, which became one of the distinctive features of Scottish universities, and to which we shall have further occasion to aUude. No change could have worked more PERSONAL INFLUENCE OF PROFESSORS. 433 rapid effects. The students were thrown back upon a world of their own, where they struck fire from the contact of their own vivid energies, and were prepared to respond with the warmth of enthusiasm to the personal earnestness of a professor whose tongue was no longer tied to the dreary pages of a prescribed compendium, but who felt that he had a free and fruitful field before him which he might cultivate after his own fashion. Only a few years passed until the lofty eloquence of Bishop Berkeley touched a chord amongst the young Scottish students, which it missed amongst his own countrymen. The bishop found a pleasure in encouraging their interests in a system more lofty and inspiring than the materialism of Locke. The idealism of Berkeley caught hold of their imagination, altogether independent of its logical completeness and con- sistency. The first Professor (in the modern sense of the word) of Moral Philosophy in Glasgow was Gerschom Carmichael, the commentator on Pufiendorf, whose influence was good, but whose tenure of the professorship was too short to be pro- ductive of great results; and his place was filled, on the invitation of the Senate, by a former ahimnus of the Univer- sity, Francis Hutcheson. His tenure of the chair was the opening of a new phase of Scottish university life. Hutcheson was a Scotsman by descent only, apid not by birth. His grandfather had migrated from Ayrshire to the north of Ireland, and both he and his son had been ministers of the Dissenting Presbyterian body in the neighbourhood of Armagh, where the philosopher was born in 1694. It is observable that the epithet of " Dissenter " is applied to him even by his colleague and biographer Leechman, a clergyman of the Established Presbyterian Church in Scotland, although he can hardly have regarded his Presbyterian brethren across the channel with that bitterness which they excited in the minds of some members of the Irish Establishment. Francis Hutcheson seems to have been noted, even in his earliest years, for the same sweetness of disposition, the same unselfishness, and the same keen intellectual activity that marked him throughout life. From an academy near his birthplace he passed to the University of Glasgow, where he spent the years from 1710 to 1716. On his return to Ireland he was licensed as a Presbyterian preacher, and was induced to come to Dublin and open a private school there, under very notable patronage. Viscount Molesworth, the Lord-Lieutenant, Lord Carteret, and Archbishop King were amongst his friends; and it was by the direct intervention of the archbishop that 2 E 434 THE SCOTTISH SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY. proceedings against him for having violated the Test Act, by opening his private school as a Dissenter, were stayed. He subsequently had the countenance of Walpole's arch- emissary, the Primate Boulter; but there was one notable inhabitant of Dublin who dwelt at St Patrick's with whom such friendship would not ingratiate him, and who could not have viewed with leniency the virtual suspension of the Test Act by Walpole's ministers in favour of a schoolmaster belonging to the sect that of all others Swift detested with the fiercest bitterness. It is odd, indeed, to think of the contrast between two products which Dublin gave to the world within less than two years. In 1727 the world was startled by the despairing cynicism of * GulKver's Travels ' ; and in 1729 the genial optimism, and the generous, if some- what superficial, enthusiasm of Hutcheson laid the foundations of a new method of education and a new school of thought in Scotland. In that year he was invited by the Senate of Glasgow University to accept the Chair of Moral Philosophy. It was perhaps as well for his future peace that the rest of his life was to be spent elsewhere than in the neighbour- hood of the "savage indignation" of the dean. He had received some offers, it appears, of preferment in the Irish Church ; but he rejected them with a wisdom and good feeling greater than that which prompted others to make such offersi Hutcheson had already published some books of a kind which the previous generation had produced in sufficient numbers, and of which the coming century was to see in Scotland a very copious crop. The titles sufficiently indicate their character. One was an ' Inquiry concerning Beauty ' ; another an ' Inquiry concerning Moral Good ' ; another an 'Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections.' They were the fabrics turned out from a work- shop whose methods were sound enough, and whose objects were sufficiently laudable. Its operations ranged over that debatable ground that lay between criticism in its modern sense, and proper metaphysical inquiry. In a certain sense they were philosophical, because they examined and theorised upon the powers of the mind and the motives of human action, and professed to probe into the recesses of human knowledge. But before the mystic region of metaphysical in- quiry they hung an impenetrable curtain which they painted to look like philosophy, and into that region they refused to penetrate. Those who ventured into it they deemed to be daring and perhaps impious intruders, or they laughed at them as deluded mystics, who accepted as verities the FRANCIS HUTCHESON. 435 tigments of their own imaginations, or who were imposed upon by vain words that signified nothing. On the other hand, they narrowed the range of their criticism by too much attention to method, and by making the end and aim of their system the inculcation of moral principles with which criticism had not any essential connection. The exponents of their school of thought — because, with all their varieties, they belonged essentially to one school — were often men of strong religious principle and devout piety. But their religion stood apart from their moral system, and they treated it as some- thing separate and distinct, to which they were to pay a reverence more or less sincere, but which was not to be the keynote of their teaching. It was not to be a means of penetrating behind the veil that hid the most mysterious problems of human existence, but was only to serve as a more rigid barrier, preventing any attempt to lift that veil. Others again, like Shaftesbury, treated religion as little but a system of imposture, which might be formally accepted, but of which the only real purpose was to impose upon the vulgar. But with all its limitations the school of thought to which Hutcheson belonged was eminently useful for educational purposes. To the young, whose minds were just opening to the consideration of the larger questions of life, and who sought for something that would give connection and con- sistency to all branches of knowledge, the teaching they had to supply was admirably stimulative and suggestive. It touched upon every interest in their life; it stirred a wide range of chords in their feelings ; and the undoubted earnest- ness of the teachers made personal contact with these some- thing of which the impression remained as a vivid force in their future lives. But it had a restrictive effect as well. It forced them into one mould of thought, and prevented that free discursiveness of youthful energy which combines a certain boldness and originality with all the recklessness of undisciplined inquiry. It is not without interest to find an observer so acute as Dr Carlyle of Inveresk noting that in his day an inefficient professor was not without his advan- tages. He explained to Lord Elibank, many years later, that the reason why the young clergymen of his generation so far excelled their predecessors was that their professor of divinity was " dull and Dutch and prolix," and the young men were thrown back upon their own resources and formed opinions far more liberal than those they could have got from their professor. But this was a principle upon which it would hardly have done to construct the scheme of a successful university course. 436 THE SCOTTISH SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY. In 1729, then, Hutcheson came to Glasgow. The change must have been a welcome one to the young Dissenter, with his Whiggish principles. Not only did he quit the dreary drudgery of a private school for a position in which he was the authorised representative of an important branch of scientific inquiry, which he could treat according to his own views, but the atmosphere of Glasgow must have been a pleasant change from that of Dublin. He passed from an arena where he was the humble dependant of an unpopular Whig clique, upon which the most vigorous intellect of the city looked askance, and where the choicest society was com- posed of men who would have crushed the Dissenters into impotence if they could, for one where the academic group of which he became a member held an easy and undisputed supremacy. In place of a society in which a few wealthy men were dominant, and their opponents pressed their political views with the bitterness of exasperation, he found a genial literary circle, where social intercourse was easy and pleasant, and where life was so organised that its chief attractions were open to men of narrow means. His mood appears clearly enough in his opening address on taking possession of his chair, which was delivered, according to a custom already passing into desuetude, in the Latin language. " Non levi loetitia" says he, "commovehar cum almam matrem Acade- miam me, suum olim alumnum, in libertatem asseruisse midiveram." He was not slow to use that liberty to which his old university had called him. The duties of his chair were exacting enough. He had to lecture on Natural Religion, on Morals, on Jurisprudence, and on the Greek and Latin moralists. Not content with this, he gave lectures on Sunday evenings to crowded audiences, composed of citizens as well as students, on the Christian evidences. He at once stepped into the position of a public exponent of his themes ; and it was a necessity of his success that he should base his teaching upon some central principle. It was the habit of the day to seek for some primary motive upon which our notions of morality were formed. Sometimes such a motive had been sought for as a thing superior to, and independent of, religious principle, as in the case of Shaftesbury. At other times, as with Butler, the doctrines of Christian morality had been shown themselves to yield such a principle, and they had been expounded in a shape which entitled them to rank with other philosophical systems. But in truth this line of inquiry might be carried on with no thought that it could trench on the dangerous ground of religious doctrine. The religious man might base his HIS MORAL SYSTEM. 437 conduct upon the dictates of revealed religion ; but this did not lesson his right to find for himself a consistent system of morality which might claim a logical consistency, and which might buttress at least, if it did not supplant, the duties imposed upon him by his religious faith. The aim of all these systems of secular morality was not to find a basis for duty and an explanation of man's place in the system of the universe by any metaphysical inquiry, but only to refer all virtuous motives to some common principle, which might give to them an apparent consistency. It was not meant that this common motive operated directly in impelling us to any particular act, but only that if motives were sufficiently analysed they would be found to have a uniform basis, and to be capable of being traced back ultimately to a single principle. This was no very abstruse inquiry. It solved no mysteries. It did not seek to rest itself upon any unassail- able logical foundation. It claimed only to be the result of careful observation of human action, and as observation grew and analysis became more systematic, the notion which was formed as to the central principle might alter or become subject to modifications, without an absolute abandonment of the results based upon the inquiries which had preceded. By Hutcheson, as by Shaftesbury, the principle which was held ultimately to regulate our conduct, and to give the motive to virtuous action, was what he called the Moral Sense. It is evident that this, for all practical purposes, was hardly distinguishable from what the religious moralists called Conscience. It accepted, indeed, that part of Chris- tianity which was most easily grasped, and it either ignored, or regarded as something of which it might not venture to treat, the deeper mysteries of the Christian religion. Many might be disposed to deny to such a system the char- acter of philosophy at all ; others again might be inclined to say that in its practical bearing upon human action it sought after pretentious symmetry rather than a real satis- faction of doubts, and was impressed by an ambitious pursuit of formal theories rather than by a vivid desire to realise the actual intricacies of human action. With all that we are not concerned when we attempt to estimate its historical results; and there can be no doubt that as an educational instrument it was admirably fitted for the work that it had to do. It stimulated just that amount of mental inter- est which young men can readily form. It gave dignity to human conduct, and prevented any tendency to that way- wardness of caprice by which young lives can be wrecked through their own perverse ingenuity. If it conducted them 438 THE SCOTTISH SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY. to no cloud-capped peaks of metaphysical speculation, it at least prevented them from sinking into the noisome gulfs of self-abandonment. And its influence in this direction was admirably enforced by the personal contact with such a man as Hutcheson. From the first he commanded the enthusiastic devotion of his students. By character he was eminently fitted to attract that devotion. In countless reminiscences we can realise the manner of man he was. His outward aspect did not belie his disposition. Tall and robust of figure, with an open and bright countenance, with a carriage neg- ligent but easy, with unimpaired health, and the subtle charm of absolute simplicity, he made his way to the hearts of his hearers with consummate ease. "He was gay and pleasant," his biographer Leechman tells us, "full of mirth and raillery, familiar and communicative to the last degree, and utterly free from all stateliness and affectation." He became at once a power in the university and amongst the citizens of Glasgow. His helpfulness was boundless, and from a narrow income he contrived to spare enough for charity to poorer students. Not youths alone, but grown men thronged year after year to his lectures; and we are told that it was no uncommon thing for the same student to attend his course for five or six consecutive years. For the function of public lecturer he was eminently fitted, not by his gift of eloquence alone, but by the electric power of a quick and ready enthusiasm. To the last he refused to write his lectures, and delivered them without notes, "walking," as we are told by Dr Carlyle, "backwards and forwards in the area of his room." As his outward aspect and manner, so was the disposi- tion of the man. His temper was quick, but so well under control that its vivacity only added to his charm. It is indeed a sufficient proof of his attractive power that though his own sympathies were with the High-flying section, he commanded the unbounded admiration of the Moderates in the Church — and that their cordiality was not lessened even by the fact that his old Dissenting predilections made him favour the Anti-Patronage party in the Church. The part he took in ecclesiastical disputes was not a large one; and the Moderate party, if they did not find him an ally in their Erastianism, at least knew that his teaching was of a sort which struck at the very root of that illiberal religious creed against which they had to fight. The tide of the battle was running almost too quickly in their favour ; and already amongst the younger clergy there was a strain of modish JOHN STEVENSON. 439 scepticism which was soon to infuse into their sermons a feeble affectation of philosophical argument which scorned to deal with the simpler truths of Christianity. So far as Hutcheson was personally concerned he discouraged such a habit; but it is doubtful whether, in spite of himself, his teaching did not tend to foster it. His undisguised admira- tion of Shaftesbury was certainly a trait which might not unnaturally raise suspicion of his orthodoxy in the minds of those who were not unreasonably nervous as to the en- croachments of scepticism ; and however strong his personal piety might be, it was doubtful whether it received much additional weight from his vindicating for Shaftesbury a sincere attachment to the Christian religion. Hutcheson's tenure of the chair at Glasgow was not long. He died in 1746. But many others in the Scottish univer- sities arose to carry on the work which he had begun. Amongst those whose personal influence was strong, although we have no evidence of the basis on which it rested, was John Stevenson, who was Professor of Logic at Edinburgh from I7e30 to 1775. He was admitted, even by those who placed his influence most high, to be wanting in originality, and to have been content to rest his teaching on the accepted methods of the school of Locke, which had at least the ad- vantage of being simple and easy of comprehension. But Stevenson was evidently a man who could appreciate the merits of new theories, even better perhaps than those who excogitated empirical systems of their own. In his earlier days, as he was fond of recalling to his later students, he was a member of the Rankenian Club, which had succeeded in drawing Bishop Berkeley into a correspondence as to certain questions which raised doubts regarding his system in the minds of the Scottish students. But Berkeley's system did not thrive long in Scottish soil, and stirred only the enthusiasm of the younger students. Stevenson fell back later on the less fertile and inspiring products of his own country. Later in life, he welcomed the appearance of a sounder method in the Scottish school, and one which approached more nearly to a philosophical system, in the writings of Reid; and he was not withheld by any slavish obedience to his older tenets from remodelling his lectures so as to embrace the leading features of Reid's philosophy. But with him, as in a certain sense with Hutcheson, it was his personal influence which chiefly impressed his students. He taught them to apply the principles of the ethical system which they learned, and the disciplined argumentative power with which it furnished them — which was after all of far 440 THE SCOTTISH SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY. more importance than its logical completeness or consistency — to the problems of ordinary life, and to the formation of a correct literary taste; and it was no small tribute to his power that the historian, Principal Robertson, was wont to acknowledge that he owed more to Stevenson's instruction — and above all to his lectures on Aristotle's " Poetics " and on Longinus " On the Sublime " — than to any other influence in the course of his academic studies. Nor does this testimony of Robertson stand alone. Dr Alexander Carlyle tells the same story. "Whether or not it was owing to the time of life at which we entered this class, being all about fifteen years of age or upwards, when the mind begins to open " — and a Scottish youth of last century did not consider him- self a tyro at that age — " or to the excellence of the lecturer and the nature of some of the subjects, we could not then say, but all of us received the same impression — that our minds were more enlarged, and that we received greater benefit from that class than from any other." Like Hutche- son, his kindness to his students was marked and constant; and in the composite picture of eighteenth-century Scotland, with its keen activity of intellectual interest, many men of greater learning and more imposing pretensions played a smaller part than Professor Stevenson during these five- and-forty years. His memory is none the less worth recalling because no neglected volumes with his name on the title- page load the shelves of our libraries. But it was not within the walls of the universities alone that the prevailing taste for philosophical speculation made itself felt. Within these walls its objects were mainly educa- tional, and its tendencies were so far concealed by the practical application to the affairs of life which it was the duty of its exponents to impress. Beyond the academic classrooms there were two others especially — men of very different calibre from one another — who contributed to the body of philosophic literature which Scotland was then amassing. These were David Hume and Henry Home, better known by the judicial title of Lord Kames, which he assumed on his accession to the Bench. They could hardly be classed together, were it not that they were both philosophical writers without being professors, and that both fell under the suspicion of heretical leanings from which the professors were exempt. David Hume was without question the man of greatest mental grasp whom Scotland produced in the eighteenth century. His central ambition was literary fame, the absorb- ing pleasure of his life literary interest, and he contemplated the controversies of his day with a serene and imperturbable DAVID HUME. DAVID HUME. 441 ease and indifference to which his contemporaries were strangers. It cost him no trouble to grasp the fact that the so-called philosophy of his day was a mass of disordered fragments, and that the nonchalant materialism of Locke was destructive of any creed based on a sure foundation. He carried that system only a step further in showing that on its basis all knowledge was accidental, and that the theories that were propounded with so much confidence were conjectures only. It was not his to reconstruct a system of metaphysics: that was left for a later age and for another country. But the work he did he did for all time; and it was to show that a system of knowledge based only on experience could attain no higher authority than that which experience could give. In practice and in character he was a philosopher in a sense that none of the others were : serene in temper, unmoved by attack, calm in the face of an almost sublime abnegation of all that gave life its deepest meaning to most men, and looking down with an indifference, which only genius could prevent from degenerating into arrogance, on all the wrangling of the day. No man could carry a creed of despair with more imperturbable good-humour, or could maintain a standard of morality with more perfect consistency upon the somewhat meagre motives of innate pride and dignity. The reason was that Hume's literary genius made him express something that is more or less a truth of every man's experience; and that his literary sympathy enabled him to understand and appreciate, if he did not share, the religious motives that stand as sentinels to human conduct. It has often been the habit to represent Hume's formal def- erence to the dictates of revealed religion as only a species of elaborate sarcasm. It is hard to say on what proof such a forced interpretation rests. The symptoms of religious feeling which showed themselves in his temperament — symptoms supported by too many authorities to be easily ignored — have been studiously minimised: but to do this is only to misunderstand the nature of the man, and to be blind to that wide range of literary sympathy which made all human feelings find some echo in his heart. It was after a wandering and unsettled youth, to which the solitary anchor was his literary ambition, that Hume fixed himself for some years in France, and there composed the book which was to mark his philosophical position. It was written when he was only twenty -five, and probably no book of the kind, destined to exercise such an extended influence, was ever written by a man of that age, certainly never with greater ease or more supreme command of his 442 THE SCOTTISH SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY. own ideas. It was not till 1739-40 that the 'Treatise on Human Nature' was given to the world, and its reception by a generation which failed to grasp its real importance in the history of thought might well have daunted a man of less consummate courage. In Hume's own words, the book " fell dead-born from the press without reaching such a dis- tinction as even to excite a murmur amongst the zealots." But he was too well poised to allow such a disappointment to unman him. " I was resolved not to be an enthusiast in philosophy while I was blaming other enthusiasts," he writes to a friend. He was confident of the ultimate prevalence of his views : he never wavered from the belief that, on the basis of the theories that had been accepted by the great mass of those who troubled themselves about such matters, his inferences were necessary and inevitable. "My prin- ciples," he writes to the same friend, as a matter of certain conviction, " would produce a revolution in philosophy : and revolutions of this kind are not easily brought about." But he also recognised that time was needed for the real bearing of his ideas to be felt, that when felt they w^ould meet with no favourable reception, and that he had essayed a thorny path. " My fondness for what I imagined new discoveries made me overlook all common rules of prudence, and having enjoyed the usual satisfaction of projectors, 'tis but just I should meet with their disappointments." Meanwhile he is not overwhelmed with despair. " In a day or two I shall be as easy as ever." No man ever possessed in a more supreme degree that faculty of " seeing the favourable more than the unfavourable side of things " : a turn of mind which, as he himself declares, "it is more happy to possess than to be born to an estate of ten thousand a-year." For a dozen years, with intervals of employment abroad, which enlarged his experience and widened his range, Hume continued to produce several volumes of moral and political essays, and recast his philosophical speculations. The special features of these it is the business of the historian of literature or philosophy to discuss in detail. We are concerned only with their effect on the age when they were written. Their destructive side was only slowly appreciated by the world at large, and even amongst those who were engaged in such discussions, the conclusions of Hume's philosophy seemed merely to be a new phase of the never-ending theories w^hich they were accustomed to propound, and not what he knew them to be, "a revolution in thought." They accepted him as a new member of a philosophical debating society ; and although they combated his arguments, opposed his con- HUME AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 443 elusions, and invented new theories to overturn his special views, yet after all they considered him as one of themselves, as an associate of their fraternity, and as an ally in the common fight against the " zealots." It was their business to encourage discussion, and they must not look too severely upon any extreme conclusion tO which the pursuit of in- dependent thought might lead. Here and there replies, animated by a more determined spirit of hostility, were put forth ; but it was only as years passed that the full effect of Hume's position was appreciated, and that a solid mass of opinion was aroused to bitter opposition. So far as Scotland was concerned, the hostile opposition arose, not from those who combated Hume's system by weapons taken from the armoury of philosophy, but from those who disliked and suspected all philosophical discussion. Those who met him on his own ground disputed his conclusions, but they did so with the tempered hostility of brethren in the craft. Their moderation of tone was enhanced by the personal friendship which Hume's character commanded. They pre- ferred to throw in their lot with him, rather than with those whom they classed with the bigoted fanatics of a former generation; and it is not surprising that when Hume was a candidate, first for a professorship in the university, and then for the librarianship of the Advocates' Library, he found all that claimed to be enlightened amongst the choice spirits of Edinburgh ranged enthusiastically upon his side. But Hume's was not a spirit which could find its satisfac- tion in maintaining a struggle which he knew well must increase in bitterness. His only philosophical principles were simple and easily stated : having set them forth he found little charm or interest in defending them by any subtlety of argument, or finely-drawn rejoinders. His ambition lay, above all things, towards literary fame; and he found its satisfaction rather in historical composition, to which he turned in 1754. It may be that Hume abandoned the sublimity of speculative effort, and, as some have thought, was content with triumphs in a lesser field. But we are concerned only with his place and work in developing the thought of the century. His task therein was completed when he turned to the more congenial employment of historical writing, after he had achieved independence, and had rounded off" a life in which success had been attained, not by feverish effort, nor by rushing into the arena with angry and splenetic zeal, but by calm and persistent pursuit of deliberate aims. He had said his word; he knew that its effect was certain and inevitable; from the undignified 444 THE SCOTTISH SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY. polemics that insistence would have made inevitable, he resolutely withdrew. He was no perfervid missionary of free thought to benighted zealots; but only a man of un- rivalled clearness of argument and expression, who recoiled from no conclusions to which his reason led him, but withal succeeded in keeping on pleasant terms with those who would have shrunk from the daring boldness of his attitude had they only understood it, or had they fancied that he was doing anything else than propounding a new theory on matters which formed a convenient subject of harmless, and withal interesting, speculations. Personally, he had every quality that could attract friendship, and smooth the inter- course of life ; a comprehensive generosity, an eager interest in the affairs of others, a gentle and playful humour that sweetened all around him, even if it was partly due to a detachment from the ordinary impulses of humanity that was almost cynical. So warm, however, was the affection which he inspired, that his friend Adam Smith seemed to be indulging in no language of hyperbole, when he used with regard to the chief assailant of commonly received religious ideas in that age, the following words: "Upon the whole, I have always considered him, both in his life- time and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit." The other extra - academical philosopher was a man of a very different type. Henry Home was the representative of an old but impoverished family in Berwickshire, whose aim in life was to secure a competence by the practice of the law, and to attain to a place on the judicial Bench. In this he succeeded, by persevering industry and a careful attention to the strict routine of professional duty. But he found that the practice of the law, then gradually broadening from the cramping limits of the older text -books into a system in which a clear grasp of principles and an acute mental habit of applying them were essential, was greatly aided by ex- tended studies. These studies, with a restless industry, he engrafted upon his professional training, with little assistance from any foundation of liberal study in his youth. To this work he brought a mind well practised in the subtleties of the law, but lacking that critical faculty which is rarely developed except by sound preliminary training in a wider field. Throughout all his discursive wanderings in the field of philosophical or political speculation, his curiosity was more conspicuous than his desire for sound knowledge, and his eagerness in the pursuit of some specious line of argument HENRY HOME, LORD KAMES. 445 than his sense of proportion. Hume's contributions to phil- osophy were completed before he had reached his fortieth year, and were illumined by the clear light of genius, and regulated by the calm tenor of a mind which sought only the full development of its own powers, and treated all inferior objects with a stoical contempt. Lord Kames began his disquisitions only when he had attained to professional eminence, and had hardened the fibre of his mind on the subtleties of the law. Hume had all the directness and simplicity that arose from a clear ray of thought running through all his works: Lord Kames involved himself in a thick tangle of physical and mental experiment, and with painful effort pieced together a mass of inconsistent theories, built upon notions that he formed as the result of his own unguided and discursive reading ; and delivered the whole in a cumbrous diction, relieved by no literary grace. It pleased him to revive the doctrine of Final Causes, and to trace from the supposed certainty of their action, a convenient plan which was not inconsistent with, and might therefore by a convenient mental effort be supposed to prove, the existence of a Deity; and by a similar effort of mental agility, the existence of a principle of virtue might easily be conceived as a possible Final Cause in the region of ethics. The old contradiction between Freewill and Necessity he solved by a well-adjusted compromise, in which Necessity was conceded as a law of the universe, but Freewill was conceded as an adroit contrivance by which Divine power deluded humanity into a mistaken belief in its own liberty. To have accepted the views of Hume would have been an inconvenient and dangerous excess of boldness on the part of a senator of the Court of Justice, and it was therefore necessary to contrive a good working theory which might claim exemption from an}^ accusation of heresy. His attitude towards religion was indeed rather that of the humorist than the professed sceptic. Reverence was as little an element in his character, as was the earnestness of sincere doubt. His speculations were indeed the result rather of restless curiosity than of a crav- ing for more light. But meanwhile Hume was courted by him not only as an enlightened ally, but as a cordial and sympathetic friend, from whom he was parted only by some unimportant details of philosophical nomenclature. The lawyer's love for a definite statement was satisfied by his own crude and whimsical theories; and he could hardly be expected to apply to himself the words which Dr Johnson used of such optimistic moralists as were common in that day, whose very superficial orthodoxy approached closely to an 446 THE SCOTTISH SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY. absolute renunciation of religious feeling, " Surely a man who seems not completely master of his own opinion should have spoken more cautiously of Omnipotence, nor have presumed to say what it could perform, or what it could prevent." Lord Kames was a man whose words have been voiceless to any generation beyond his own. Even with his own friends, his speculations can hardly have carried real weight, however indulgently they were treated as the efforts — earnest enough in their way — of an acute and ingenious, but ill- trained and ill-balanced intellect. They could only have had any vitality of interest to a generation singularly vacant of any engrossing occupation or any profound thought; and it was only because such vacuity was in a certain measure char- acteristic of that generation that they found a partial audience. But they are none the less of historical interest, as showing how the activity of a keen, restless, and discursive intellect, with more superficiality than earnestness, was spent in specu- lations which were conceived to buttress religion and to con- stitute a philosophical system. His activity was, however, many-sided. He sought, with perhaps more zeal than discretion, to play the part of a literary Maecenas. He was energetic in schemes of agricultural development, and was not forgetful of the interest of his ten- ants, nor without considerable influence upon various national improvements. Sceptical as we may well be of any high estimate of his mental calibre, he was a characteristic figure in his day, and accentuates many of its traits by exaggeration and by travesty. He represented all the indomitable energy of the race, and its persevering struggle against odds. When he attained to the dignity of the Bench, the long tension brought a reaction, and he turned with zest to the pursuits of what he deemed elegant literature and lofty speculation, undeterred by any consciousness of the limitations of his early training. He made up for the dreary toil of thirty years by taking his judicial duties lightly, or by indulging his own vein, and perplexing his colleagues in wire -drawn disquisitions, which savoured more of the sophist's chair than the judicial Bench. As was often the case with his country- men, he relieved the long restraint of toil by indulgence in antics that frequently fell to the ridiculous, and cultivated with assiduity the reputation of a wit, which degenerated not rarely into the indecency of the buffoon, and suffered the restraints neither of dignity nor of good taste. The stories we read of his sallies after he reached the Bench ^ and relaxed himself in the ease of convivial society, remind us of those ^ It was his habit on the Bench to address his brother judges as ** Ye bitches." ADAM SMITH, 447 which at a somewhat earlier day relieved the monotonous rigidity of the uncompromising Covenanters, when human nature at odd intervals asserted its power of throwing off a too prolonged restraint. He was not a great lawyer ; he was in no sense a philosopher; his literary taste was frequently perverse; his political speculations were whimsical and often absurd ; his wit had often much of boyish mischief, asserting itself against the restraints of authority, and never rose to the serenity of humour. But in his indomitable energy, in his industry, in his freedom from timidity or any bashfulness bred of his own defects, he was characteristic of his age. That he found relaxation and interest in quasi-philosophical speculation did not make him less so. But to return again to the academical exponents of the thought of the day, we come next to one whose ethical speculations led him into a field which he has largely made his own. Adam Smith's niche in the temple of fame is that of the political economist ; that branch of thought which has been nicknamed the " dismal science," and which it is the almost avowed boast of some in our own day to have ban- ished to Saturn. Adam Smith was born at Kirkcaldy in 1723. From the Grammar School of his native town he passed to the Uni- versity of Glasgow in 1737, and from thence, as Snell Ex- hibitioner, to Balliol College, Oxford. It is a curious fact that the endowment which secured for him his introduction to an English university was one founded in the seventeenth century with the express purpose of training clergymen for the Episcopal Church of Scotland, with which Smith, like most of the Scottish literary school, was entirely out of sympathy. But if he did not imbibe at Oxford the tenets of the High Church party, he drank deeply from the fountain of her scholarship. He remained there for seven years, and returned to Kirkcaldy, with no fixed aim as to his future career, but that of pursuing literature and speculation — a pursuit upon which the Scottish student was able, through the widening opportunities of university life, to enter with fair expectation of a moderate competence, unassisted by the depressing influence of literary patrons. He had been strongly impressed by the teaching of Hutcheson, and he began his €areer as a professional exponent of literary themes by lecturing at Edinburgh on rhetoric and belles-lettres in the years that followed 1748. It was then that he became a member of the Edinburgh literary circle, and formed an intimate and afiectionate friendship with Hume. In 1761 he was appointed to the Chair of Logic in Glasgow, and in 448 THE SCOTTISH SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY. the following year to that of Moral Philosophy, which had been vacated by the death of Hutcheson four years before, and had since been occupied by one whose tenure of the office was unimportant. In the Chair of Logic, Smith devoted his time mostly to those prelections on rhetoric and belles-lettres which had occupied his time at Edinburgh. In the Chair of Moral Philosophy he followed the method usual in his time of developing a theory of ethics. The school to which Smith belonged discarded, as mystical and fruitless speculation, all search into a metaphysical basis for the moral instincts of mankind, which should seek to give to these instincts their place in the scheme of the universe, or to fix them amongst the eternal verities. They rightly esteemed that the founda- tion of such a scheme had been shattered by the preceding encroachments of materialism, and that until some construc- tive system should take the place of the debacle brought about by Locke, and carried to its logical conclusion by Hume, no such universal scheme was possible. On the other hand they shrank, as moral citizens and eminently estim- able men, from exposing the poverty of the ethical specula- tion of the day by resting all moral sanction upon historical or conventional foundations. Instead of this, they sought to explain moral ideas by referring them back to some apparently simple element in human nature of which they were but one manifestation. Hutcheson had found such an element in a Moral Sense which had its basis in the affections. Smith found it in Sympathy, and his was an explanation congenial to one who regarded men chiefly as members of the body politic, and whose chief interests lay in propounding theories as to the laws by which that body was governed, and as to the maxims upon which its relations should rest. It may be doubted whether Adam Smith's theory of Sympathy as the source of our moral ideas was anything more than a speciously convenient classification ; but it was evidently an easy transition from such a theory to turn to disquisitions upon the laws that should regulate the action, or guide the development, of social and political units. Even in the days of his Glasgow professorship his specu- lations had taken this turn, and the foundation of his political economy had been expounded in his lectures there. But in 1764 he was tempted, by an offer to accompany the young Duke of Buccleuch in the Grand Tour, to resign his professor- ship ; and the circles into which he was thereby thrown, as well as the experience he thereby gained, contributed power- fully to intensify his prevailing bias. In the year that followed his residence on the Continent he devoted himself ADAM SMITH, Author of 'The Wealth of Nations.' THE WEALTH OF NATIONS. 449 to the study of economical questions, and this study resulted in what was undoubtedly an epoch-making work — his ' In- quiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations/ The degree of originality which that work can claim has long been a disputed point. Adam Smith had, no doubt, imbibed in France many of the ideas of the French Encyclopaedists. But it was with perfect honesty and with perfect right that he claimed the merit of independent thought. Because, in truth, the ideas to which he gave expression were in the air, and it was only natural that each man who could give them shape and body for his own countrymen should feel himself entitled to the praise of an original thinker. It has been claimed for Smith that his position gave him admirable opportunities of studying practically the operation of econ- omical laws. He lived in a commercial community. He was on terms of intimacy with practical men. He was laborious in collecting statistics in support of his views. He had seen much of foreign countries, and been intimate with men of many various types. This theory of his development of an economical system is not without its specious side. But it will not stand the test of strict examination. As a man of business Smith was singularly inept. In society he was shy and diffident. He was absent-minded, and the theories which he propounded in conversation were often eccentric and ill- balanced. No man could have been more unversed in all the ways of practical life. As a fact he only propounded, as a thinker and a recluse, ideas which were the result of historical evolution, and he is one more amongst countless instances of the truth so constantly exemplified, that ideas which are vaguely in the air often receive their embodiment, and are aided in their ultimate effect, by the solitary efforts of a thinker, who to all appearance is absolutely removed from all vital contact with practical life. The credit which is thus due to him is really far greater than that which would be his if it were proved that he had reached his conclusions by building them upon a laborious edifice of personal observa- tion and carefully gathered statistics. But there was an essential flaw in his system, however extensive its results, and however indisputable were some of its positions. Smith proclaimed the doctrine of Free Trade, and that doctrine eventually bore sway amongst his countrymen, and vitally affected their future history. But in building that doctrine upon a moral basis he was essen- tially wrong, since it led him to promulgate, as necessary and universal truths, what were indeed but phases of his- torical development. The mistake arose from a certain an- 2 F 450 THE SCOTTISH SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY. alogy between his ethical and his economic theories. Each endeavoured to claim for mere explanations the authority of moral principles. It was just as true, and just as false, that human society rested upon a basis of free commercial re- lations, as it was that moral obligations rested upon a basis of sympathy. As a fact, both were only explanations of a pre- vailing tendency. And also as a fact, just as moral obligations have a basis higher than sympathy, so human society must rest upon foundations which often disregard the tenets of political economy. This flaw in his system does not destroy its usefulness. The course of history was moving in the direction which Smith indicated, and it was well that the trend of that history should be set forth in the systematic exposition of a solitary thinker. But the universality which the system claimed, the moral authority which, in consequence of its origin, it was forced to assume, were essentially unreal. Smith compiled an economical code, and he claimed for it the absolute truth of a philosophical system, and the rigorous authority of a moral law. Not a little of the opposition afterwards encountered by his system, not a little of the irritation bred by the assumption of moral superiority on the part of the political party which became its chief representative, were due to the error, so natural to his time, and so char- acteristic of the school of thought to which he belonged, of mistaking their own explanation of mental processes for a binding moral law, and their own account of one phase of historical development for a necessary and universal truth. But with all drawbacks, Adam Smith must be counted not only one of the greatest influences, but also one of the most characteristic figures of the age. He was a man of simple life, wrapt in abstract thought, a stranger to all the baser ambitions of ordinary life, yet devoting himself, with singular tenacity of purpose, and with singular boldness, to work out a theory which had a profound effect upon the most practical side of human life. In another age than his, the recluse student, who struck his contemporaries as one utterly lacking even ordinary discernment of character, would have hung back in timidity from propounding views which were to be effectual only by moulding the action of men. His artlessness, his modesty, his occasional wayward eccentricity of view, which appeared to his intimates as almost childish, gave additional interest to the concentrated perseverance with which he worked out his system. His ordinary conversation consisted of long philosophical har- angues, varied by fits of silence and reverie, and by the THOMAS REID. 451 utterance of paradoxical opinions which he was ready to retract upon a show of opposition.^ Averse to disputation, and unwilling to excite alarm or to scandalise religious opinion — he yet drifted away almost insensibly from that safe anchorage of dogmatic belief which seemed to the out- sider the destined refuge of every Scotsman. To him Voltaire was the greatest genius whom France had ever produced. Hume was his beloved friend — nearest to the ideal of a perfectly wise and virtuous man which human frailty would permit. Yet he lived unassailed by any ran- cour of religious dogmatism, and only caused an occasional mild resentment, when during those religious exercises to which no conscientious scruples made him refuse to conform, some suggestion which came to him in a fit of reverie or abstraction caused a smile to pass over his face. He found a difficulty, we are told, in conforming to the custom which required that a professor should open his class with prayer. But when informed that the rule could not be waived, he complied by uttering a philosophical disquisition in the form of a prayer.2 Adam Smith died in 1790, before the excesses of the French Revolution might have brought to him, as they did to others like him, some doubt as to the tendency of opinions with which he had largely sympathised. His career as pro- fessor ended in 1764, in which year two other men, destined to play conspicuous parts, entered upon their tenure of philo- sophical chairs in Glasgow and in Edinburgh respectively. These were Thomas Reid and Adam Ferguson. They pre- sented a strong contrast to one another in many ways ; but each was strongly characteristic of the age in which he lived. Thomas Reid was born in 1710 in a remote village in Kincardineshire, where his forefathers had for centuries been planted as ministers of the Scottish Church in her various vicissitudes. His mother was one of the twenty-nine children of a Banffshire laird named Gregory, whose descendants fur- nished a long line of distinguished pioneers of science both to the Scottish and the English universities. Like his fore- fathers, Thomas Reid became a minister of the Church of Scotland; but the keenness of doctrinal disputes had no attraction for him, and he took no prominent part in the ecclesiastical contests that raged in her Church Courts. He had as little about him of the religious reformer as of the religious bigot; and to those accustomed to think of the Scottish clergy as the embodiment of covenanting zeal and ^ Carlyle's ' Reminiscences,' p. 279. 2 Ochtertyre MSS., vol. i. p. 463. 452 THE SCOTTISH SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY. doctrinal subtlety, the clerical career of Reid, typical though it in truth was of many of his brethren, must come as something of a surprise. For a time after he had completed his course at Marischal College, Aberdeen, Reid lingered on as librarian, an office which gave him ample opportunity for study, and his interest seems chiefly to have lain in the direction of mathematical research. As a young man he visited England, and under the protection of his uncle, David Gregory, Professor of Astronomy at Oxford, he had abundant opportunity of access to the leaders of English thought and scholarship. In 1737 he was presented by the Aberdeen University authorities to the living of New Machar ; and there he became a victim of the anti -patronage zeal which then disturbed the Church. He was not allowed to take possession of the charge without opposition that went the length of personal insult and violence. But his quiet earnestness, although aided by none of the partisan- ship of the zealot, won its way to the hearts of the parishioners, and made him beloved amongst them. "We fought against Dr Reid when he came," said an old parishioner long afterwards, "and we would have fought for him when he went away." And yet he had gained their devotion by no compliance with the more rigorous doctrinal notions, and by no sympathy with the narrowness of the older tenets. His modesty — perhaps it is not unjust to add, his absorption in other interests — led him to read the discourses of Tillotson instead of composing sermons of his own. The practice is one which laymen of a later day might not resent; but it would hardly have proved acceptable to Scottish zealots of the older type, and it sufficiently shows that a Scottish clergyman of the day had other interests than those comprised in doctrinal dis- putes, and that his congregation might yield their respect and their affection to a different type of spiritual teacher than the moss preacher who had kindled the fiery zeal, and fed the sectarian pride, of their forefathers. While still minister of New Machar he published some results of his philosophical studies in the Transactions of the Royal Society of London, and his reputation as a man of learning advanced. In 1752 he was recalled to his university as Professor of Philosophy — a somewhat compre- hensive theme, which was taken to comprise physics and mathematics, as well as logic and ethics. The principle of the Regenting system, already alluded to, by which a single teacher conducted his pupils through a wide range of studies, still prevailed largely at Aberdeen, although in HIS PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEM. 453 the southern universities it had given way to the Pro- fessorial system, by which one man became the authorised exponent of one subject only. But the wide range of his duties did not change the bent of Reid's speculations; and it was during his professorship at Aberdeen that he pro- duced in 1764 the 'Inquiry into the Huma.n Mind/ which permanently fixed his philosophical position, and which procured for him, in the same year, an invitation from the University of Glasgow, to occupy the Chair of Moral Philosophy, then vacated by Adam Smith. He held the chair until 1780, and thereafter he published, as the fruit of his later studies, the 'Essays on the Intellectual Powers' in 1785, and the 'Essays on the Active Powers' in 1788. In the three works named we have the full exposition of his system. This is not the place to describe in detail, or to discuss, the foundations of that system. It is sufficient to point out only its place in the history of Scottish thought, and to show how it is characteristic of the time, and yet has features of its own which give to it a special interest and importance. As we have seen, Reid was no religious or doctrinal zealot. Polemical discussion was hateful to him, and he was not likely to be found in the ranks of those who looked with horror on philosophical speculations which seemed to shake traditional creeds, and who attacked with partisan zeal the exponents of these speculations. But his attitude is chiefly interesting as it shows how a man of devout and earnest character, endowed with a marvellous faculty of patient and persistent thought, could spend his life in maintaining a firm foundation for fundamental truths, with no aid from the rancour of fanatical zeal, and without holding a brief for any narrow doctrinal creed. More than any other of his contemporaries he combined an absolute devotion to philosophical inquiry, with the calmness and the chastened moderation that belong to the philosophical character. To most of his philosophical contemporaries, doctrinal Christianity was a matter in which they had at best only an occasional interest. They would fain keep on civil, even on respectful, relations with its avowed ad- herents, and any attack upon it they deemed inexpedient, and would even, in a mild way, combat philosophical tenets which seemed likely to subvert its foundations. But further than that they were indisposed to go. For their philosophical speculations they drew an ample arena, the combats on which were conducted according to stated rules, and all the combatants, whatever the variety of their arms 454 THE SCOTTISH SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY. and of the devices on their shields, were to be treated more or less as members of a brotherhood, whose variety of opinion contributed additional interest to their not un^ friendly encounters. On the fringe of that arena there lay the wide extent of conventional belief and traditional doctrine, which they regarded as something outside their pale of interest, and the consuming zeal of which they were scrupulous not to imitate. Such an attitude might be enlightened, dignified, and even intellectually bracing, but it did not contribute either to earnestness or to sincerity of thought. With all this Reid was essentially in contrast. He re- mained on friendly terms with his intellectual contempor- aries. He was divided from them by no bitterness of partisanship. His wide range of interest was in sympathy with theirs. He adopted many of their methods. Like them, he looked on the inductive method propounded by Bacon as the sole guide for human inquiry, and vied with them in abjuring the errors of metaphysical hypothesis. He professed himself anxious to carry into the sphere of mental and moral science the principles which Bacon had advocated in physical inquiry ; and it was in obedience to this anxiety that he applied himself to what was called an examination of the powers of the mind. So far Reid resembled the others, and in method seemed to follow their example. But, in truth, it is the aim of his researches far more than their method that fixes his place in philosophical inquiry. His object was to vindicate the fundamental laws of belief, and to place truth on an unassailable foundation. If he proceeded by the inductive method, it was to lead to a conclusion the very opposite of that materialism which the inductive method might seem to favour. It was to prove that materialism was itself only one of those metaphysical hypotheses which its supporters had so uniformly decried. His method was not really a purely inductive one, as he himself would fain have believed. Its sheet-anchor was the foundation of belief as something independent of all hypo- thesis, defying explanation or analysis, and for that very reason to be accepted as an unassailable truth. But he pro- ceeded to support this by driving home his inquiries into the phenomena of the mind, and by so turning attention away from any hypothesis as to what may be accepted as the basis of knowledge. It was not his to establish a metaphysical refutation of materialism; that was reserved for others in different surroundings, and unfettered by the intellectual habits characteristic of Reid's time and country. But by his HIS PKINCIPLE OF COMMON SENSE. 455 persistent inquiry into the laws of thought, he placed on a higher level the acceptance of their essential truth and of their unassailable necessity; he vindicated for thought that sovereign power which could not admit the arbitrament of any alien tribunal, which defied any analysis, and which baffled the impotence of any hypothesis which sought to ex- plain it. His principle of Common Sense was the central point in the system. The name provoked opposition, and it is un- doubtedly open to the objection of using a term of ordinary language, where it denotes mother- wit, or practical judgment, in a technical sense, to embrace the primary and universal truths which the human mind is compelled to accept. But the very homeliness of the term had no doubt its attraction for Reid, who desired above all things to find for this supreme and fundamental sovereignty of thought an acceptance more ready than would have been accorded to the jargon of philo- sophical technicalities. Whatever fault may be found with his nomenclature, the central feature of his system, by means of which he controlled and steadied the speculations of those of his countrymen who might otherwise have been led to ex- tremes which they little contemplated, was just this doctrine of Common Sense. It was by this that he attained to a posi- tion essentially different from his contemporaries, however much he adopted their methods. Had he broken away from these, his influence might have been smaller than it actually was. He worked through his own countrymen, and he afiected them mainly because he used the methods and adopted the phraseology of their school. It was this which helped to make them accept the central principles of his system — so essentially different from those to which their more superficial inquiries were conducting them. The bolder and more pro- nounced materialists of England, such as Priestley and Darwin, perceived how Reid's system told against their own, and knew no measure in the energy of their attacks upon it. On the pther hand, in another country and amongst very different surroundings, a new edifice of philosophical speculation, more truly akin to Reid's than any other of his time, was being raised by Imanuel Kant. It is odd to notice how Dugald Stewart — the disciple and biographer of Reid — had so little conception of the real trend of Reid's system, as to append to the praise of Reid, a warning against " the new doctrines and new phraseology on the subject, which have lately become fashionable among some metaphysicians in Germany." Reid's tenure of his chair came to an end in 1780, and he died in 1796. His life had been a singularly calm one, and his chief characteristics had been an indomitable faculty of 456 THE SCOTTISH SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY. patient thought and a sincerity of purpose that never wavered. Such influence as he possessed was gained by quiet and per- sistent effort ; and he did not affect his contemporaries either by any marked originality of genius, or by a striking or eccen- tric personality. His contemporary exponent of moral phil- osophy in Edinburgh was a man of a very different type. There could not be a contrast more marked than that between the quiet and simple minister of New Machar, pursuing the even tenor of his way with the silent and unobtrusive modesty of the secluded student, and the bustling, impet- uous, and somewhat theatrical figure that now comes upon the stage. Adam Ferguson was born in 1723 in the Highland village of Logierait, where his father was minister, and where he was near enough to the turbulent elements amongst the Highland clans to include amongst his family traditions some experience of the realities of civil war. He had no inclination to the Jacobite cause in these days when its hopes ran high, and his first publication was a translation of a sermon delivered in Gaelic to the Highland regiment of which he was chaplain, denouncing the Pope and the Pretender with sound Whiggish orthodoxy ; but he was none the less, in affection as well as in character, a thorough Celt, with all the impulsiveness and dash that belonged to the race ; and in later days, when Jacobitism was only a romantic memory, he was wont to delight his friends by his singing of Jacobite songs. Alone amongst the philosophers he spoke the language, and was stirred by the traditions of the Gael, and retained for the Celtic race to the end of his life the passionate attachment which it never fails to inspire. After he had mingled in the gay society of Paris, and learned the ways of fashionable life, he still cherished his admiration for the characteristic traits of his own people. "Had I not been in the Highlands of Scotland," he writes long after, " I might be of their mind who think the inhab- itants of Paris and Versailles the only polite people in the world." But amidst the Highland glens he found a courtesy all the more perfect that it was untaught. He sees in the Highland clansman, who had never passed beyond the moun- tains that shut his glen from the world, one who " can per- fectly perform kindness with dignity; can discern what is proper to oblige," and who, "having never seen a superior, does not know what it is to be embarrassed." From the school of Perth, Ferguson passed to the University of St Andrews, and thence to the divinity classes at Edinburgh. In 1744 the offer made to him by the Duchess of Athole, of a chaplaincy in the Black Watch, made it needful that he ADAM FERGUSON. 457 should be licensed to preach after less than the usual pro- bation, and this allowance was granted. With his regiment Ferguson passed to the scene of war, and he was present with them at the battle of Fontenoy. According to report, he did not confine himself strictly to his spiritual duties. Scott tells how, when the regiment charged, the commanding officer found his chaplain at the head of the column with a broadsword in his hand. He was obliged to remind him that his commission did not warrant his presence there. "Damn my commission," cried the chaplain, whose Celtic blood was stirred by the scene; and he threw it to his colonel. Whether the story is true or not, the undaunted chaplain gained on the battlefield an experience which stood him in good stead as moralist and as historian, and he loved to recall the scene in order to give fresh point to a well-turned enunciation of some moral exhortation that had the ring of Roman eloquence. " The author has had occasion to see the game of life played in camps, on board of ships, and in presence of an enemy, with the same or greater ease than in the most secure situation," he tells us in the preface to his 'Moral Science.' It would not be fair to grudge him the benefit of such a picturesque allusion, or to inquire too exactly how far it advances any philosophical argument. It may be doubted whether his formal profession as a minister of the Church of Scotland had attractions as strong for Adam Ferguson as that military experience which fortune threw in his way. He continued to compose sermons, which had a certain verve and eloquence of their own; but they were moral essays of a somewhat pretentious kind, in which religion played only a secondary part. In this he merely reflected, in a more than usually vigorous manner, what was a mode of the day, which endeavoured to get rid of the old doctrinal subtleties by turning its attention to a scheme of ethics which differed but little from that which was ex- pounded by the moralists of the later Roman republic. Some ludicrous stories are told of Ferguson in this connection. We hear how he had lent a sermon to an ignorant and un- lettered brother in the church, who astonished his hearers by preaching on the superiority of intellectual to mere super- ficial qualities, supporting his thesis by numerous quotations from Plato and Aristotle, with whose writings he was not understood to have any previous acquaintance. Further inquiry elicited the very frank confession that the sermon was the composition of the militant chaplain of the 42nd Highlanders. 458 THE SCOTTISH SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY. In 1754 Ferguson resigned his chaplaincy, moved thereto perhaps more by weariness of the clerical profession than by any desire of a more restful position in which to pursue its aims. At all events, from that time forth he abandoned the ministerial office. " I am a downright layman," he writes to Adam Smith, and begs to be no longer addressed by the epithet of " Reverend." Henceforward he turned his atten- tion to ethical and critical essays, with those excursions into political speculation which suited the intellectual taste of the day. He became a member of the Select Society, estab- lished by the younger Allan Ramsay, and is hereafter to be counted as one of the leading intellectual lights of Edinburgh, whose connection with any strict religious creed was somewhat remote. He became tutor to the sons of Lord Bute ; and was soon engaged as one of the warmest champions of Home, whose theatrical essay of "Douglas" was giving scandal to the stricter brethren. We hear of him as one of the little company — composed of Robertson, David Hume, Dr Carlyle, and Dr Blair — who took upon themselves the characters of Home's tragedy in a private rehearsal. Adam Ferguson, we read, took the role of Lady Randolph. The Scottish clergy had indeed made startling advances in their ideas of decorum. Like many of his brethren who felt that the pulpit was an inadequate scene for the exercise of their talents, Ferguson had his ambition fixed upon a chair in one of the Scottish universities. In 1758 there was a scheme on foot whereby a resignation was to be procured by the payment of a certain sum, and by a little shuffling of the cards, a place was to be found for Ferguson. The transaction did not seem to savour of jobbery so much as it would have been held to do in our own day; and we must be chary of passing too severe a sentence upon it when we find that amongst its ardent supporters is to be numbered Adam Smith. However that may be, the scheme miscarried — apparently over a difference as to the amount to be paid. Ferguson found consolation next year in his appointment to the Chair of Natural Philosophy in Edinburgh. It was characteristic of the time that Ferguson had no misgivings in accepting the chair, in spite of utter ignorance of his subject. His audacity gave rise to Hume's friendly sarcasm — that Ferguson had more genius than any of them, as in three months he had learned enough of an obscure science to be able to teach it. In 1764 he exchanged this chair for the more congenial one of Moral Philosophy, which he held till 1785. In 1765 he published his 'Essay on the History of Civil HIS ETHICAL APPEAL. 459 Society.' He was now sufficiently identified with the some- what lax school of speculative moralists, upon which the more orthodox began to look askance. Beattie was now preparing for his doubtful championship of the older methods of thought, and on what was apparently a meagre acquaint- ance with the book, he felt it to be his duty to decry it. "Our Scottish writers are too metaphysical," he writes to Gray apropos of the book; "I wish they would speak more to the heart and less to the understanding. But alas ! this is talent which Heaven alone can bestow, whereas the philosophical spirit (as we call it) is merely artificial, and level to the capacity of every man who has much patience, a little learning, and no taste." Gray refuses to accept his friend's verdict on Ferguson's book. "He has not the fault you mention," is Gray's reply ; " his application to the heart is frequent and often successful." The dry light of reason was indeed not likely to be the chief concern of such a tempera- ment as that of Ferguson; and it might have been wished that the author of the "Minstrel" had remembered his own maxim, and not rashly strayed, as we shall presently find that he did, into a field for which nature had not equipped him. The fault of Ferguson was certainly not that he neglected appeals to the heart or to the feelings. He did not, indeed, seek to rouse the ardour of religious fervour. With him the religious motive was a very secondary one. " We must not," he says, "trust to whatever may bear the name of re- ligion or conscience, or to what may have a temporary vogue in the world, for our direction in the paths of a just and manly virtue."^ Virtue, he says again, may transmit its lessons " through the channels of ingenuous literature and the fine arts, no less than in the way of formal instruction." But the motives to which he did appeal — the assumed instinct of perfection, the dictates of manliness and courage, the impulse to heroic action — all these were not unfitting engines in an appeal to the feelings of the heart. Whether they would stand the dreary and monotonous strain of the exigencies of daily life, and would form motives sufficient for the ordinary frailty of humanity, may well be doubted. But we cannot deny a certain sympathy to the ardent Celt who then preached a stoicism, based on heroism, to the callous spirit of the eighteenth century, and who enforced its lessons by the wide experience which his adventurous life had brought him. Life was a game, according to the maxim which he is fond of repeating: we must play it like men. For a man so restless, so whimsical, and so impulsive, no 1 ' Principles of Moral and Political Science,' ii. p. 320. 460 THE SCOTTISH SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY. theory of life would have been tolerable which did not suggest heroic action on a stirring scene. He had all the Celtic craving for variety, and his curiosity to learn the ways of men increased by what it fed on. He had abundant opportunities of travel. As tutor to Lord Chesterfield, he again visited France in 1774, and held intercourse with Voltaire. To draw out the great man, he tells us with some humour, "he encouraged every communication, even jokes against Adam and Eve and the rest of the prophets — (such jokes were not over-galling, and such collocation did not seem amiss, to Ferguson) — in order to be considered as one who had no ill-humour to the freedom of fancy in others." In 1776 we find him in America as secretary to the Com- missioners who had to treat with Washington, and carrying a momentous message to Congress. He returned to throw himself with new zest into his intellectual tasks : and in 1783 he published his 'History of the Roman Republic' — a work which, under the guise of history, is in truth a series of lec- tures on ethics and politics, with a strong leaven of stoicism. Retiring from his chair in 1785, he prepared for the press his ' Principles of Moral and Political Science,' which may be taken as the substance of his teaching in the chair. It is a work which few but the curious now find leisure to consult. But Ferguson is none the less interesting as a typical figure of his time, in spite of the not undeserved neglect of his works. Amongst a galaxy of men — none of the first rank in intellect, but all of more than respectable calibre — he has a place all his own. He achieved it partly by his wide and varied experience of life. But it was aided by his Celtic tempera- ment, which gave a freedom and a verve to his speculation which was lacking to others of his school. Morality was to him essentially a thing of great deeds upon a great stage. The type he sought for was that of Aristotle's great-souled man. The subtleties of free - thinking would have vexed his soul as much as the subtleties of doctrine : but he was more than any of them — however little he would have avowed it — the type of a purely pagan morality. His stoicism was a picturesque fiction, indeed, and none confessed more frankly than he that in the affairs of everyday life he was nervous and irritable to the last degree. Such in- consistency need not be ascribed to him as a peculiarity amongst philosophers. His courage, his vigour, his quick impulse, and his warm affection are none the less worthy of note in an age which is usually deemed to have been one of apathetic formality. No wonder that, as he lingered on in a hale old age to his ninety-third year, he commanded HIS LATER YEARS. 461 the respect and veneration of a younger generation, and earned the decisive verdict of Scott — " a firm man, if ever there was one." In spite of the deadly illness of fifty years before, he remained hale and hearty to an extreme old age, and lived to pronounce his nunc dimittis after the news of Waterloo. He was, we are told, a singular apparition : with long white hair, animated eyes, and cheeks like autumnal apples; stalking with dignified steps, a long staff* held at arm's-length ; " his gait and air were noble ; his gesture and his looks full of dignity, and composed fire ; " and with his wrappings of fur and copious greatcoats, he looked like a philosopher from Lapland. Nor did he owe his fiery tempera- ment to the free living common amongst his contemporaries. Considerations of health forced him to an ascetic diet; and his son tells us what a pleasant sight it was to watch Ferguson and another of his philosophical comrades, forced to similar diet, "rioting over a boiled turnip." Nor must we forget, in taking leave of a notable and picturesque, although some- what erratic, personality, that it was in the house of Adam Ferguson, where he gathered all that was distinguished in the Scottish capital, that a memorable literary conjunction was witnessed — when Burns, then in the plenitude of his genius, met, and by an intuitive sympathy singled out for notice, the boy who was to divide with him the devotion of his countrymen — Walter Scott. The chair of Adam Ferguson was filled in 1785 by Dugald Stewart. By this time the place of the Scottish school of philosophy, both as regards Scotland and beyond its borders, was becoming more and more defined. That it was alien to much that was most deeply rooted in the religious character of an older generation of Scotsmen, there can be no doubt. It is just as little doubtful that beyond the sphere of its influence there remained a large body of intelligent and strenuous, if somewhat narrow, conviction, which would have recoiled in horror from many of its conclusions, and would have suspected its methods, had it ever troubled itself with inquiries into either. The more rigid party in the Church did occasionally question the influence of the philosophical teaching of the day, and when the scandal rose to its worst in the writings of Hume they attempted, without success, to invoke the engine of ecclesiastical dis- cipline. But amongst the reading public, the free discussion of these questions produced but little disturbance. The chief exponents of the current philosophy were careful to avoid polemics as far as possible, and with the thinking public, this procured for them, if not an altogether favourable, at 462 THE SCOTTISH SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY. least a lenient construction. The most notable exception to this rule was the publication, in 1770, of Beattie's ' Essay on Truth.' Beattie had been born in 1735, and, after study- ing for the Church, had abandoned the intention when he found that his trial discourse, in which he had indulged a too luxuriant fancy, was sarcastically referred to as poetry rather than prose. In 1760 he became a colleague of Reid as Professor of Philosophy in Aberdeen ; and after some not unsuccessful essays in Poetry he came before the world in the guise of a defender of the Faith against the attacks of Hume. The book had an enormous vogue, and procured for its author a renown which, however evanescent, was for the moment astonishing. But it was in England rather than in Scotland that its reception was most flattering. George III. invited him to court, and conferred on him a pension of £200 a -year. The University of Oxford bestowed on him their doctor's degree, and archbishops vied with one another in compliments and invitations that he should enter the Church. Johnson and Burke, with that generous leniency of judgment which giants owe to dwarfs, hailed him as the champion of religion, and hushed such misgivings as they may have felt about the value of the book by loud praise of the author's good intentions. But as a fact the book was but a piece of literary flotsam such as is often cast up by the breaking waves of controversy. As a philosophical disputant Beattie is beneath contempt. Occasionally he scores a good point, but it may almost always be traced to Reid. He makes a sound accusation against the Scottish school, that they were ignorant of the work of the ancient philosophers and blind to their merits; but the accusation is one which he was utterly incapable of pushing home. The book is indeed a commonplace and frothy mixture of popular invective and almost childish argument. Had he possessed the sarcasm of a Butler or a Swift he might have attacked philosophic foibles as they had been attacked in ' Hudibras ' or in the ' Tale of a Tub,' with no aid of argument, and with only the keen lance of wit. But, alas ! to quote Beattie's own words of Ferguson, " that is a talent which Heaven only can bestow." Only one or two in an age can enter the lists of controversy with no arms but those of wit. Many more may venture to meet a sophism in argument, and to encounter it with its own weapons; but such an encounter implies skill of fence, quickness of eye, and consummate training. Poor Beattie had none of these. In place of them he brought to the fight only a mass of half-digested arguments, padded out with DUGALD STEWART. 463 irrelevant bursts of turgid invective. The English Tories hailed such an ally — from a quarter where he was least to be expected — and forgot in their welcome to take a just measure of their recruit. But in Scotland the book had a much less flattering reception, and when it appeared in all the magnificence of a reprint in quarto, the list of subscribers contains but a sprinkling of his own countrymen amidst an imposing crowd of English names. In truth, the need of such championship was not greatly felt in Scotland. Whether because the Scottish school of philosophers had captivated the taste of their educated countrymen, or because they had faithfully reflected its tendency, it is at least certain that a tolerably convenient pact had been arranged between them. The Scottish Church and the Scottish reading public were not unduly sensitive about the rigidity of doctrinal orthodoxy; and the Scottish philosophers, so long as they kept within certain limits and showed no obtrusive scepticism, were not tolerated only but respected. Hume's 'Treatise' was now thirty years old, and the teaching of Reid was a more powerful antidote than the feeble commonplaces of Beattie. Such was the position of matters when Dugald Stewart became the chief representative of our Scottish school. In a certain sense he may be said to close the list; and in him we may assume it at once to have culminated, and to have come to the end of the work which was to be performed on the old lines. His was not the most powerful intellect amongst the exponents of the school, nor had he even that measure of originality which belonged to some of his pre- decessors; but he summed up in himself many of their characteristics, and in the main the inheritance which it had to leave to a later generation was transmitted through his hands. He was born in Edinburgh in 1753. Unlike any of the others, he was nurtured in the air of university thought: he was the son of the Professor of Mathematics, and breathed in his youth the atmosphere of an academic society. After spending some years at his own university, he passed to Glasgow, where he came under the influence which pre- dominated in all his speculations — that of Dr Reid. From Glasgow he returned at the age of nineteen, to undertake the duties of his father, who was disabled by illness ; and a few years later he added to these the duties of deputy for Adam Ferguson, during his mission to the American Colonies as secretary to the Commissioners who were to treat with Washington : undertaking, with that vigorous power of 464 THE SCOTTISH SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY. mental exertion which was characteristic of his race, a course of lectures on astronomy. Such an extended range of systematic study might terrify the slacker energies of a later day, and it is to be feared that we cannot apply to ourselves the soothing reflection, that the standard of attain- ment demanded was less than that which would be expected in these days of greater specialisation. The very compre- hensiveness of intellectual interest served as a stimulus, and enabled Stewart to bring to the service of the main occupa- tion of his maturer years, a wealth of illustration which strict application to a single subject would have rendered impossible. In 1785, on the resignation of Adam Ferguson, Stewart succeeded to the Moral Philosophy chair, the duties of which he discharged until 1810. His veneration for Ferguson was second only to that which he felt for Reid ; but no two men could have been more striking contrasts in character, than the fiery and impulsive Celt who had gained his chief lesson in life in the camp and in action, in travels and in affairs of State, and that calm, self-centred, cautious, and well- balanced inheritor of university traditions who took his place. It would be impossible to claim for Stewart the fame of an original thinker, or to maintain that he inaugurated any new philosophical era, or even contributed very largely to the development of thought. He was cautious to follow in the footsteps of those amongst his predecessors whose teaching seemed to be most sound, modifying their views only in minor points. Such a system as was common to them all — admirable as an educational instrument — admitted of endless modifications in its discursive review of mental processes, and in its ample exposition of these processes to be detected by observation of human life. Such an analysis of more or less patent phenomena permitted variety not only between different exponents, but between the exposition of the same teacher from day to day. New facts occurred, new observations accumulated, new relations were perceived ; one process of analysis suggested another, and new fields of illustration constantly opened themselves to the view. But if he brought no original impulse to the school, the limits of which were indeed fairly well defined, there was no one who expounded its methods with greater acceptance or success than Stewart. His argument was not always close or accurate ; his style was diffuse, and his illustration sometimes lavish in its copiousness. But his range of learning, as learn- ing was esteemed in his day, was wide. He had travelled HIS WIDE INFLUENCE. 465 much, and had mixed on easy and familiar terms with men of every class. He had a fund of smooth eloquence. His char- acter, calm, benevolent, and studiously courteous, fitted him admirably to attain that unquestioned and unquestionable authority which made him potent as an oracle amongst his students, and gave to his professional prelections something of the influence of powerful pulpit ministrations. In his time, and mainly through his influence, although also through the high traditions of his predecessors, the University of Edinburgh became the resort of men of all countries. From England many of those most fitted by birth, station, and ability to influence the coming generation, thronged to the northern university as to a Mecca of learning. In his class- room many who, but a few years before, would have looked upon Scotland as a country sunk in ignorance and poverty, and alien in political ideas, sat side by side with the Scottish youth and imbibed the notions which were to form their principles throughout life. Sydney Smith and Brougham, Palmerston and Lord John Russell, Scott and Hamilton, were all amongst his pupils. At an age when their own minds were most open to such impressions, they caught the en- thusiasm which his teaching inspired, and learned to find their intellectual sustenance in a learning which was Scottish to the backbone. There they imbibed, and from thence they transmitted an admiration for their teacher, and a firm faith in his guidance which could hardly be paralleled unless we go back to the groves of the Athenian Academy. But Stewart's teaching extended beyond the sphere of mental or moral philosophy, and passed into the range of practical politics. Such an extension always has its dangers. It necessarily bases its political theories upon the same lofty level as its moral aspirations, and assumes for them an authority which is frequently open to question, and which opponents are apt most bitterly to resent. Whatever theories of morality may be devised, there can be little variance as to the practical precepts of virtuous action. But political science admits of no such uniformity of judgment. Its foundation rests in history, and its precepts must vary according to our reading of history and our application of its lessons to the circumstances of our own time. Men will vary infinitely in reading and applying these lessons, and they will sturdily refuse to accept the maxims of their opponents, however cunningly deduced, as unbending rules of political conduct. The political disquisitions of the Scottish philosophical school were not exempt from such an assumption. The whole bent of their thought had inevitably carried them in the direction 2g 466 THE SCOTTISH SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY. of liberal ideas, of which the Whig party claimed a monopoly. They had shaken themselves free from the narrow and bigoted sectarianism which had kept Scotland in bondage for long. They prided themselves with some justice on having given intellectual freedom to their country. While for the most part they kept on good terms with the Church, their association with her had been rather that of courteous toleration than of close sympathy. They accepted the latitudinarianism of her dominant party — that of the Moderates — but they had no interest in her ecclesiastical politics, and did not understand the pride of an Establishment, that was jealous of dissent, and proud of alliance with the State as a means of freedom and independence. In propor- tion as the Church extended her claims and sought to assert authority over the universities, and drew closer and closer the bond that knit her to the Tory party, the philosophers drew apart from her. Amongst them Dugald Stewart was perhaps the most pronounced in his Whig sympathies, and it did not tend to cordiality that he occasionally assumed a tone of almost arrogant condescension, and took sedulous pains to disown any interest in ecclesiastical affairs. In his earlier days Stewart had gone far with the French encyclopaedists, and had cultivated a sympathy with the aims which they set before them. It is true that he disavowed their later tendencies, and did not disguise his detestation of many of the principles which bore fruit in the French Revolution. But his method of combating these was by what he called "an enlightened zeal for political liberty," and what the opposite party decried as a dangerous tampering with revolution. As the tide of political feeling rose higher, and divided Scotland into two angry camps, the philosophical speculations which had hitherto been accorded an easy toleration began to be stigmatised by the Tories as a seed-bed of innovation, dangerous alike to Church and State, and the fervent zeal of the Tories was denounced by the Whigs as an attempt to build up a new tyranny upon the ruins of freedom alike in thought and in politics. The calm of the academic precincts was invaded by the angry voices of political and ecclesiastical strife, and the Scottish school of philosophy, in its narrower and home-bred phase, was broken up amidst the darkening clouds of an embittered warfare. Henceforward it assumed a new shape, and its older traditions lingered only as a memory. Its firm hold upon the intellectual growth of the nation was gone. The Scottish universities were still to boast names of great weight in philosophical speculation. But they no longer governed the minds and dominated the feelings of a whole generation. They were no longer of exclusively DECAY OF THE NATIONAL SCHOOL. 467 Scottish growth. Their work belongs no longer to the history of Scotland, but to the history of philosophy. Their influence was confined to an academic clique. The very generation which followed Stewart's tenure of the Moral Philosophy chair showed how surely this change was operating. To his bitter chagrin, and by the weight of party influence, his successor in 1820^ was not his own nominee. Sir William Hamilton, but John Wilson, better known under the sobriquet of "Christopher North." A few years later Hamilton obtained the Chair of Logic, and for the next generation these two — a strange and ill-assorted couple — represented the philosophical teaching of the university. Both were Oxford men, powerfully influenced by the spirit of that university, and owing comparatively little to their Scottish education. But with this, w^hich in itself distin- guished them from their predecessors, all resemblance ends. Wilson was a turbulent personality, with a whimsical strain of romance and poetry, a few stray notions of literary criti- cism, and an overflowing torrent of animal spirits which he himself and many of his contemporaries accepted as genius. But of any power of concentrated or systematic thought he was absolutely destitute. He might carry on the traditions which made literary criticism one of the subjects of philo- sophical disquisition, but it was in a method and with aims far different from those of his predecessors. He was open to literary impressions by which they were unstirred, and he caught something of the spirit of a school of poetry which had not arisen in their days ; but for philosophical speculation he was incapable, either by nature or by training. His compeer Hamilton was a man of far other calibre. In his view, philosophy enfolded secrets to which the Scottish school resolutely closed their eyes ; it pointed out new paths upon which they would not have dared to enter. He attained a position in the history of philosophy of which Scotland might well be proud. But he spoke to a studious and a narrow class, and powerful as his influence was, it never guided the nation's thought, and never attempted to mould her history. Such, then, during the course of the century, was the progress and the decay of the Scottish school philosophy. No history of the nation could ignore that school as a potent influence. But it does not belong to history to estimate its place in the region of philosophical thought. Only some of its most distinctive features come within our range. There were, doubtless, limitations in the range ^ Stewart ceased to do the active work of professor in 1810, but he continued till 1820 to hold titular office, during the tenure of Brown, who discharged the duties of the chair from 1810 till his death in 1820. 468 THE SCOTTISH SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY. of these thinkers, and in certain respects an insufficient equipment for their task. They were ignorant of the achievement of ancient philosophy, and knew but super- ficially its chief exponents. Its infinite depth of meaning — its irony, and what we may call its humour, were sealed books to them. Of mediaeval philosophy they were equally ignorant, and of its vast results, and grasp of metaphysical conceptions, they could not form the most faint idea. Bacon was to them a veil between the thought of their own day and the more dim and distant past, and beyond that veil they never sought to penetrate, save to ridicule what they deemed to be the vain and useless gropings of ages whose very alphabet of thought was to them nothing but meaningless hieroglyphics. Nor, to come to a much later day, can we claim for any of them any grasp of thought even remotely approaching that of Newton; any such delicate philosophical perception as that of Berkeley; nor even that consummate power which Johnson, in spite of all his impatience of consecutive philosophical argument, wielded with such ample ease, of striking out of a single philosophical maxim its kernel of human interest. The realm of thought which was being opened by their con- temporary, Kant, was one into which they had no wish to enter, and where they could have found no foothold. To these deficiencies they added some positive faults. They lacked ease of expression, and to many of them, we must remember, literary English was almost a foreign tongue to be acquired by slow and painful effort. They often used artificial and conventional language; and they sometimes erred against the instinct of humour, and forgot the pitiful contrast between their lofty theories of human perfectibility and the very wretched reality. But for all this it would be mere blindness to decry their merit, to minimise their influence, or to forget the pride with which Scotland may fairly regard them. Rarely has such a long succession of men been found, who not only shaped the thought of their country with such consistency, but kept its intellectual aims on so high a level of dignity. From no country of such size, in the face of such adverse fortune, and whose rise from the deepest depression had been so recent and so sudden, has there sprung up a distinct and well-defined school with such a vitality of its own, and which can maintain with such justice its claim to be reckoned with, wherever human thought and its phases are objects of curiosity and research. 469 CHAPTER XYIII. HENRY ERSKINE AND THE YOUNGER WHIGS. So far we have traced the progress of political affairs down to the dispute as to Erskine's tenure of the Deanship of the Faculty of Advocates. The assault had ended, as it w^as bound to end, in his being deposed from the office. The only surprising thing is that he should ever have proposed to continue to represent a profession the vast majority of which held his openly expressed opinions in abhorrence. In the later reminiscences of those who were then entering upon a political struggle, in which they deemed themselves the pioneers of enlightenment, that con- test over a professional election is recounted with the epic grandiloquence of an Homeric conflict. But there was really nothing out of the ordinary about it. A few young Whig advocates disliked their Tory elders, and would have been very glad if the personal popularity of Henry Erskine had enabled him to hold a post where he might flout the opinions of these elders. The design failed; and so they denounced the narrowness, the bigotry, the intolerance of the Tory party. But in truth the incident marks only the determination of the Tory party at last to take steps to curb the aggressions of the Radicals. Up to this time party spirit had not run very high in Scotland. For the greater part of the century, most Scotsmen, who did not adopt Jacobite views, had professed a general adhesion to the tenets of the Revolution Whigs — tenets which covered a very sound substratum of practical Toryism. Those who held more advanced views were deemed to be so unimportant that they might be treated with an indulgent toleration. But the limits of indulgence were reached when the official representative of the most conservative profession in Scot- land was found to be an apparent sympathiser with revol- utionary tenets. It was a challenge to combat which the 470 HENRY ERSKINE AND THE YOUNGER WHIGS. Tory party could hardly shirk; and the issue proved their incontestable supremacy. At the same time it gave to their opponents that definite attitude as a political party, which was the first necessary step in their advance. In later days the Whig party were wont to count the deposition of Erskine as the opening of their calendar. Some of them played no very heroic parts in the struggle, and gave votes against Erskine at the bidding of powerful patrons. Nothing makes a man so strong a partisan as to have voted against his party and his conscience, and then to find that it has not paid. As the century drew to its close, Scotland had changed so completely that it now contained ample material for new political combinations. The balance of numbers and of weight was passing from the country to the towns; and even in the towns themselves the older commercial families, who formed an aristocracy of their own, were being thrust aside by a new and energetic body of manufacturers, of lower social position, of rougher manners, and likely to form easier recruits for any party which aimed at sweeping reforms. The population of Scotland had grown from about 1,000,000 at the time of the Union, to about 1,250,000 in 1755, and to about a million and a half in 1790. But it had gravitated towards the towns in a far greater pro- portion. To the ideas of our own day, indeed, the towns appear small. Only seven had a population which reached five figures — Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Dundee, Perth, Paisley, and Greenock. But these towns had grown, in the aggregate, by 100,000 in the forty years preceding 1790 — considerably more than their total population in the year of the Union. On the other hand, in many of the country districts there was a distinct decrease, and the shifting of the population was only one sign of the change in the condition of the nation. It by no means follows, however, that because great changes were in progress, Scotland was willing to forget her past. On the contrary, the very generation which saw the older types undergoing disintegration, became the most careful to mark them, and the most sedulous to preserve their memory. Traditions which had before been accepted as matters of course became invested with a new dignity. Scottish antiquities, Scottish vernacular literature, the ballads that lived by oral transmission amongst the people, — all these became the objects of enthusiasm and of untiring study. Scotsmen saw that characteristic features were being obliter- ated, and therefore strove to preserve them. It was in Edinburgh above all that the feeling of attach- EDINBURGH SOCIETY. 471 ment to older traditions prevailed, and it is there that the history of Scotland was centred during the closing years of last century. There, for part of the year at least, was gathered all that was most characteristic of Scottish life. There the wires of the administration were pulled. There new agricultural schemes were promulgated and discussed. There was the seat of Scottish law, of Scottish ecclesiastical government, of Scottish banking. There was still the resort of such of the Scottish aristocracy as had not yet yielded to the tempting custom of dividing their time between their estates and London. It was through Edinburgh that the stranger chiefly knew Scotland, and he found in it an epitome of almost every Scottish type. Edinburgh was not then, as it soon afterwards became, in the words of Sydney Smith, " a pack of cards without the honours." It combined within it a strange medley of coarseness and refinement, of sottish living and high thinking, of rough buffoonery and stately manners. Pomp and dignity were to be seen side by side with conditions of life in which the decencies of modern usage were set at defiance. In spite of the growth of the New Town, stately equipages and courtly dresses were still to be seen moving about the fetid alleys of the old city, which were blissfully exempt from any rules of sanitation or even of cleanliness. In many of the social gatherings there was to be found a severe etiquette, side by side with arrange- ments that would have disgraced a village ordinary. The Assembly Room, where the most aristocratic society held its dances — ruled on the most stringent lines of social formality — was situated in one of the ancient wynds. It contained only one room, through the open door of which the smoke of the footmen's flambeaux was wafted in, and soon made the atmosphere dense to suffocation. At a certain period of the evening dancing was suspended for supper to be brought in. When the festivities came to an apparent end, the ladies were conducted to their chairs in the glare of smoking torches, and were attended to their homes, each by her cavalier, with hat in one hand and drawn sword in the other. But the festivities did not really end there. When the picturesque train had been escorted through the narrow lanes and under the foul-smelling archways, the same cava- liers returned to the supper-room and held it a point of honour to bring in the daylight by drinking to the health of their mis- tresses — " saving the ladies," as it was called — until the larger part of the company lay helplessly drunk. Yet these same gentlemen were nice in maintaining the punctilios of honour, careful as to all the rigidities of conventional etiquette, and 472 HENRY ERSKINE AND THE YOUNGER WHIGS. would have been horrified, had they been charged with a brutality that would not have been amiss in a company of Covent Garden porters. The amusements were not all of the baser kind. Music was enthusiastically cultivated, and in a grimy room in the squalid purlieus of the Cowgate — St Cecilia's Hall, which Cockburn could recall in later days, with perhaps some partiality of memory, as "the most beautiful concert-room he had ever seen " — performances of no mean pretension were given. The theatre was now largely patronised, and Mrs Siddons had no more enthusiastic audiences than those of Edinburgh. There were, no doubt, those who denounced the more frivolous pursuits of Edinburgh society, lamented the loss of pristine rigidity, and foretold still further laxity as rapidly approaching. But even they neither preached nor practised any severe asceticism. They did not fall short of their latitudinarian brethren in the enjoyment of good living. Their suppers were as social, their symposia as long and as copious, as those of the Moderates. The severer aspects of religion were softened down, and, in the descriptive phrase of one who could recall these days, there was, even amongst the High-flyers, a large measure of "pious pleasantness," that made them not less acceptable as members of a genial and self-indulgent society. Such is one aspect of Scottish society about the close of the eighteenth century. Undue laxity was not the feature which most struck some observers. A picture drawn by a pencil touched with sarcasm, and in which the tincture of sympathy has not the faintest trace, sometimes helps us to realise characteristic traits. Eminent as the Scottish capital not unjustly claimed to be — in intellect, in fashion, and as the centre of a bright and attractive social life — it had another aspect that might strike the casual English traveller, and if we watch it with his eyes, it helps us to picture it with a good deal more of vivid reality. In the year 1811, two young English travellers visited Edinburgh : and the impression it made upon them is painted for us in a few pages of deft and humorous description by the one of the pair who has left a biography ^ of his illustrious companion, unique in its wayward humour, and odd blending of sarcasm and admiration — so intermixed that we can hardly tell where one ends and the other begins. Shelley and Hogg took up their residence in Edinburgh for some weeks in that year; and upon none did its quaint combination of all the decencies ^ Hogg's 'Life of Shelley.' SHELLEY AND HOGG IN EDINBURGH. 473 with all the sordidness of life; of picturesque beauty with mean and repulsive corners; of gay society with sombre formality — strike with more whimsical effect. The inns dirty and slatternly, but the fare good; the lodgings capa- cious but melancholy ; and above all a dominant gloom, which respectability thought it decent to cultivate, and which clung most tenaciously about the strict religious observance which it united with a generous measure of conviviality. The travellers found a well-developed sense of national superiority — in Scottish phrase, "a good con- ceit of themselves" — flourishing in the modern Athens. According to its inhabitants, the Old Town could not be matched for solemn and historic interest, nor the New Town for spacious and grandiose magnificence. To learn its usages and to see its sights was in itself an education for the ignorant Saxon. In its own estimation it stood unrivalled for its wealth of erudition, and for the pro- foundness of its philosophical speculation. Its lower classes were uncouth in appearance and unintelligible in language ; but underneath the unpromising outside, they compelled themselves to believe that there lay mines of indigenous philosophy. Above all, the stolid solemnity of the crowds that " drew nigh unto the kirk " on the Sunday, and moved in one unbroken mass of melancholy, but complacent, de- jection to their places of worship, struck the young poet with a sense of almost agonised bewilderment, and his friend with a humorous ludicrousness that his pages have preserved to us with vivid liveliness. It was Shelley's lot to be rebuked for profaning the Sabbath solemnity by laughter in the street — which almost brought him within the terrors of the law ; and, with daring curiosity, he pene- trated the churches only to be brought to the verge of hysterical frenzy by the dire denunciations which struck upon his sensitive ear. He even witnessed a solemn catechising of "the domestics and the children," which moved him to a shriek of laughter, only good luck en- abling him to escape the dire penalties of ecclesiastical wrath. The whole picture is surpassingly humorous. It is strange to recall the wayward and sensitive poet, moving in a scene peopled by figures that to him were as distant as the denizens of another world. The outward strange- ness bafiied and perplexed him; the solemn staidness of the citizens moved the sarcastic vein of his friend; but to both the real spirit of their Scottish fellow - subjects was hidden beneath a veil as impenetrable as any Cim- merian fog. The life of the two nations was slowly 474 HENRY ERSKINE AND THE YOUNGER WHIGS. blending ; but to casual travellers like these, Scottish char- acter was still shut off from their knowledge by a thick and impassable barrier, which poetic imagination could not pierce, and whose solid mass only blunted the edge of the darts w^hich sarcasm hurled against it. Travellers like Hogg and Shelley knew no more of the life of Scot- land, and no more appreciated its real meaning, than do the visitors to a waxwork understand the thoughts and feelings of those whom the figures represent. They could not distinguish convention from reality, habit from conviction, what was formal from w^hat was bred in the bone. Scottish society was a blend so curious that it would have taken wiser heads than those of this young couple to understand its strange and mingled features. But this delicately poised situation, in which the old and the new were nicely balanced, could scarcely remain long unchanged. The time was coming when old memories were to be assailed by intrusive innovations. One by one, the old haunts were deserted, the old figures vanished, the old customs passed away. The levelling hand of modern usage was ruthlessly pushing aside the quainter forms of the older society, and substituting for them more and more of its own dreary monotony. The aristocracy began to drift away from Edin- burgh. The society of the Scottish capital became more exclusively professional, and suffered by the change. Even the professional element was diminishing in range, and there were signs that the literary supremacy of Edinburgh might pass away. Its little coteries of philosophers and literati were no longer what they had been a few years before. The purely intellectual web was wearing perilously thin, and had to be replaced by something a little more stirring to the blood and more suggestive to the imagination. Life was becoming less interesting, and a solace was not to be found in the lucubrations of philosophy. Men craved instinctively for some of the inspiration of romance to relieve the dismal struggle between picturesque but de- caying memories and the prosaic monotony of modern life. Such changes as those which we have noticed, even had there been no other cause for division, must inevitably have produced different effects on the men who came under their influence, according to their temperaments. Some must have welcomed them ; others must have clung regretfully to the relics of the past. Some must have found in them a much- needed emancipation from usages and conventions that were irksome and unmeaning. Others must have hated their HENRY ERSKINE. 475 intrusion into the quiet and even tenor of a genial and comfortable society. But all such differences were soon to be sharply accentuated by schisms that had deeper causes than individual temperament. It was these that became active and virulent in the last decade of the old century, and the opening years of the new one. It is curious that the name to which the newer party looked back as that of their leading representative, and about which the first keen party fight was fought, was that of one who, by birth, tradition, temperament, and taste, belonged far more to the old than to the new regime. Henry Erskine was a scion of one of the oldest families of the Scottish aristocracy. He was not without pride in his descent, although it was too genial to excite resent- ment, and tempered by too much taste to be ridiculous. His earlier days had been spent in the gay scenes which crowded the old town when it was still the resort of the Scottish aristocracy, and he had every gift of nature to make him an ornament of such a society. Pre-eminently handsome, he had a grace of manner that made him wel- come in every circle, and the influence of his wit and bonhomie was irresistible. He entered into all the genial life of that gay society, but was singularly free from its coarser and more licentious characteristics. Without being a student, he had a retentive memory, and scholarship much above the level of that usual, even in the professional circles of Scotland. Clinging fondly to her traditions, and with no disdain for her provincialisms, he was yet qualified by every grace and accomplishment to shine in far wider circles. With friend and foe alike, his easy geniality, and his light and ready wit, made him a choice companion, and won him lifelong friends amongst those most sharply divided from him in political opinion. Even the victims of his sarcasm forgave one in whom good-humour was always uppermost, and in whose presence dulness seemed out of place. Some of his gifts he shared with his elder brother, the Earl of Buchan, and with the younger, Thomas, who, after a brief service in the navy and afterwards in the army, suddenly started to the foremost place at the English Bar, and rising to the Woolsack, left behind him a memory of forensic eloquence that has perhaps never been equalled in the legal annals of England. But he was without the consuming conceit and absurdity, which sometimes approached in- sanity, in the elder brother, and he had none of that gloom and waywardness that obscured the splendid talents of the younger. For more than half a century Lord Buchan 476 HENRY ERSKINE AND THE YOUNGER WHIGS. was a standing jest to the citizens of Edinburgh. In his own mind he was the chief prop of Scottish patriotism, the originator of all that was most notable in the pro- ducts of genius or the discoveries of science in his day. He patronised Washington — whom he honoured by the title of cousin — lectured the royal family, gave his im- primatur to the works of genius, and in his old age supplied the materials for a wondrous piece of tragi- comedy by forcing himself into what seemed likely to be the death - chamber of Scott, in order to explain the arrangements for the funeral, which were to be carried out under his august patronage. He began as the ad- herent of Revolutionary principles, and ended by kicking the * Edinburgh Review ' from his door, and in either case he deemed that his decision was conclusive of the matter. In grace of person and dignity of manner, with all this absurdity, he rivalled his brother Henry; and even his lofty assumption of patronage never broke the fraternal affection that bound the brothers to one another, and never provoked the dexterous wit that played so lightly about others. To those who knew them, it seemed strange that one family should produce so much wit and so much absurdity; but to Lord Buchan the only wonder was that one house should bring forth such a galaxy of talent. It was the Duchess of Gordon who answered his boasting of the family talents, by remarking that she presumed the wit came by the mother, and was settled on the younger branches. In the history of Scotland, save as an instance of odd eccentricity nearly akin to madness. Lord Buchan is a neg- ligible quantity. But it was altogether different with Henry Erskine. For a quarter of a century he stood forth as the leader of the party opposed to Dundas, and the two figures towered easily above all others. No two men could have been more sharply contrasted. Dundas was without literature, scholarship, or the lighter accomplishments. Such eloquence as he possessed was based on force and common-sense, and in no wise upon grace or elegance. If he had genius, it was for action, and his strength lay in consummate judgment, in dexterity in the management of men, and in restless and untiring industry. Erskine gave to his profession only what he could spare from music and poetry and genial interest in all the varied affairs of men. He was a force at the Bar, not from the extent of his legal knowledge, and not from the grasp of his intellect, but from the wit and grace which coloured all he did. He contrasted strangely with the promi- HIS POLITICAL POSITION. 477 nent figures of the Parliament House. Beside the coarse and uncouth, but massive personality of Braxfield, the quaint oddities of Monboddo, the farcical absurdity by which Esk- grove furnished endless mirth to the mimics of the Bar, Erskine seemed like a denizen of another world. He intro- duced within the gloomy portals of the Parliament House a grace of diction, altogether free from pedantry, to which its walls had never before rung. He formed a new fashion and began a new school of forensic eloquence, and that, com- bined with his irresistible personal fascination, made his name, and, long after, his memory, things to conjure with. It was the combination of high birth, of strong attachment to fashions which were waning, of graceful and genial social gifts, with opinions of a democratic and revolutionary cast, that made of him a personality so attractive. In a society that was assuming more and more of a narrow professional colouring, he stood out as a representative of aristocratic elegance, varied accomplishments, and principles that were deemed dangerous and anarchical. Such a figure has an irresistible attraction. He was a link with an older society, and made an admirable figurehead for a political party that stood in need of just such a leader to give them weight and influence. But with all this Erskine's political career was astonish- ingly ineffective. His interest in the popular movements of the day was genuine enough, but was combined largely with something of the graceful condescension of one who was an aristocrat by birth and taste. His part in ecclesiastical affairs was not that of the earnest Presbyterian, who was drawn towards the tenets of an older and more rigid school. It was necessary for him to become the ally of the High- flyers, but there was little of real community of sentiment between him and them. So far as the religious opinions of his family went, they partook of the strain of religious thought inculcated by Whitfield (whose teaching never proved very congenial to Scotsmen), and by -the sect which followed the lead of Lady Huntingdon. He himself, by the accident of his being brought up apart from the rest of his family, never came directly under this influence ; and he was so strongly inclined to the Episcopalian form, that at one time he seems seriously to have contemplated taking orders in the English Church. Political exigencies, perhaps, as much as anything else, made him in later life a prominent champion in the Assembly of the party opposed to the Moderates, but it may be doubted whether he had anything more than a formal and superficial sympathy with his ecclesiastical 478 HENRY ERSKmE AND THE YOUNGER WHIGS. associates. As a lawyer, with all his ready wit and quick intellect, and with all the sway which his graceful eloquence acquired for him on a scene where dull and ponderous ped- antry had long been the prevailing characteristic, he never gained the reputation or the weight which sound legal learn- ing would have brought to him. In politics he was rather prized as the leader of a section whose social influence was small, and whose position was vastly raised by the alliance of a man in the first ranks of the Scottish aristocracy, than obeyed as one whose administrative capacity fitted him to shape the counsels of a party in the State. The period when he first held office was unfortunate. He became Lord Advo- cate for a few months in 1782, under the ill-omened Coalition Government of Fox and North, and he then became identified with Fox's India Bill, which, had it passed, would have aftected most adversely the hopes of aspiring Scotsmen of attaining power and influence and wealth in the East. When that Government fell and was replaced by Pitt, Erskine was so far mistaken in his political forecast as to think that Pitt's power was only a laughable farce which must come to con- dign failure before many weeks were over. The results of the election of 1784 proved how lamentably he and his party had been mistaken, and he found himself one of a hopeless minority with no prospect of recovering power for many a day. No career was thenceforth possible to him but one of resistance, not only to the dominant political party, but to all the prevailing current of opinion in society and at the Bar. In a certain sense this gave him a unique position. He was the friend and intimate of all who formed the most select of Scottish society, but he was in sympathy with those who stood outside its pale. To his advocacy was naturally in- trusted any cause which seemed hopeless, and which could be maintained only by one who had no political future to be wrecked, and whose rank enabled him to identify himself without danger with unpromising clients. His generosity made him the ready patron of the poor litigant, and his name was hailed as that of the friend of the weak ; but he had also to plead the cause of those who had nothing to commend them save that they had incurred the terrors of the law, and whose interests were to be served rather by bold and im- passioned appeals than by legal argument. He became the leader of forlorn hopes, the man whose popularity and wit enabled him to defy the powers arrayed on the side of the law with an ease and a nonchalance which would have been impossible to a man of less assured social eminence. In this position he was greatly aided by his election to that ONE OF HIS CLIENTS. 479 office of Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, his deposition from which has already been discussed. No one doubted his chivalry or his honour ; no one could accuse him of fighting only that he might force his way against prescriptive privilege. In all the endless byplay of a stirring and active society he took a leading part. When Mrs Siddons came to thrill Edinburgh audiences, her chief patron was Henry Erskine. His protec- tion encouraged and stimulated the genius of Burns, and his personal charm drew the poet into a warm admiration and a sense of grateful friendship, and made his wayward and not very definite political opinions assume the guise of devoted adherence to the party led by Erskine. If the thick crust of conventional Toryism was to be broken, there seemed no champion whose spear was so likely to shatter it as Harry Erskine. At times he had strange clients. One of the most curious of these — a figure strangely illustrating one phase of Edin- burgh life — was Deacon Brodie. He was a young citizen belonging to a respectable commercial family. By specious manners and unfailing audacity he had acquired considerable influence, and as a member of the close corporation had dex- terously managed to gain political influence, which he em- ployed on the side of the Whig candidate. Sir Thomas Dundas. But, in spite of all this, strange stories were told of his life. Whispers were heard that his means of livelihood were doubt- ful, and that he was in close alliance with criminals. His morals were licentious and he was known to be an inveterate gambler ; but it was further asserted that he had been all but detected, when himself carrying on the business of a burglar. At length he was concerned in an organised robbery of the Custom House, and the treachery of some of his confederates brought him within the grasp of the law. His only reliance was in Henry Erskine, and with that " most game cock of the lot,'"' as he called him in his sporting parlance, he took his trial with some confidence. The cause was hopeless ; the evidence was overwhelming ; a well-concocted alibi broke down ; and Erskine had to fight only by dexterous appeals to the pity and the fears of the jury. Even his eloquence was of no avail, but the scoundrel did not lose hope, and he perhaps thought he might place reliance on the political party whose cause he had favoured. Even when he was condemned, he hoped that a trick might rob the scaflbld of its terrors for him ; and he jested with his fellow-councillors to the last, and took leave of some of them with the words, " Fare ye well, Baillies ; ye needna' be surprised if ye see me among you yet to tak' my share o' the Dead Chack " — as the collation which followed an 480 HENKY ERSKINE AND THE YOUNGER WHIGS. execution was then called. But the gallows did its work securely, and the memory of the honest Deacon remained only to tell us something of the strange ingredients that went to make up the civic life of the Scottish metropolis a century ago. As the reforming party began to develop their opinions, and found them met by the ever-increasing fear of change which the French Revolution was spreading amongst the dominant class, it was only natural that the leading part played by Erskine should become more and more prominent. But he somehow failed to assert his authority. So far as Burgh Reform was concerned he was at one with his followers, but he refused absolutely to adopt the scheme of Parliamentary Reform, and refrained from joining the Society of the Friends of the People on this ground. His brother Thomas went farther in this direction; but Henry was sufficiently in sympathy with the dominant feeling of his own class to think that the moment was ill-chosen for urging the wider movement of Parliamentary Reform, and he lost much of his weight in the inner counsels of his party from his scruples. When the more strino^ent Acts acrainst sedition, however, were being pressed, he put himself in the forefront of the struggle ; and it was by attending, and taking a leading part in, a meeting to denounce them, that he aroused the opposi- tion of the Faculty of Advocates, which led to his loss of the place of Dean in 1796. By this time the antagonism of the two parties was fully marked. The war, added to the Revolution, had joined patriotic fervour to the fear of anarchy. The nation was stirred by military ardour. The Volunteer force was organised, and all classes of citizens crowded into the ranks. To have refrained would have been to court the reputation of a Jacobin and the disgrace of cowardice. But a new type of political partisan was now quickly rising, which was based on other ideas and had far other sympathies than those of Erskine. A younger generation was coming up which had more than political ideas to stir their energies. They were young, they were poor, they were ambitious; they thought not meanly of their own abilities, and they not unnaturally wished to storm the strongholds of hide-bound custom and old-fashioned manners. To them the old-fashioned ways savoured of a world which was not disposed to admit their claims, and which treated their preten- sions with disdain. In the days gone by it had been impious to sharpen the shafts of ridicule against the dignitaries of the day ; their oddities and eccentricities were accepted as part FRANCIS JEFFREY. THE YOUNGER SCHOOL OF POLITICIANS. 481 of the established order of things. The younger spirits pined for something more lively, but they submitted to this tyranny, and solaced themselves with dreams of romance. Scott has painted such a youth for us in the Allan Fairf ord of ' Red- gauntlet/ where not a little of autobiography is interwoven with the character. But the new generation had no such dutiful submission as Fairford practised, and perhaps they had not the resources of consolation which Fairford's romance supplied. They had to make their way, and polit- ical partisanship of a more or less pronounced type seemed a good way of making it. The leading spirits of this little group were all young men. Erskine was their titular head, their hero, and their orna- ment. But they belonged themselves to another type. Amongst them were Francis Jeffrey, Henry Brougham^ Sydney Smith, and Francis Horner. It would be absurd to deny their conspicuous talents and praiseworthy enter- prise; but they certainly had the defects of their qualities^ Jeffrey was a man of extraordinary sprightliness and untir^ ing zeal. He had keen literary interests, and, within a very- limited range, much acuteness of critical insight. He saw very clearly what was assailable in the existing state of things, although his political ideas were rather those of the versatile lawyer than of a statesman, and were, as those of the lawyer are apt to be, confined in their range. To him and to his friends, the old ways of Edinburgh were, at best, amusing, but more often irksome and distasteful. He would gladly have broken down the distinctive marks of Scottish nationality. After a course at Glasgow University, he studied as an undergraduate at Oxford; and although the spirit and tone of the English University was profoundly distasteful to him, his antipathy did not prevent his return- ing to Edinburgh with a grotesque imitation of the Southern speech. As was said of him by Lord Holland, "he lost his broad Scotch, and only gained the narrow English." In his later years he cherished a deep and abiding love of his coun- try, but it was the love of long custom and of an affectionate nature for the scene of his early friendships — not the romantic love of the poet, or the passionate ardour of the enthusiast. We are bound to admit his deftness and his versatility ; no one could deny his political sincerity ; it would be harsh even to belittle his literary gifts. But to him the wider range of imagination was a closed region. As a lawyer he made no claim to professional erudition. Even as a forensic orator, he never attempted to appeal to the feelings, or to rise to the highest flights. But he poured forth arguments with a 2h 482 HENRY ERSKINE AND THE YOUNGER WHIGS. rapidity and a versatility that at once astonished, amused, and flattered his hearers, and made him eminently successful in appealing to the not very high standard of the juryman's intelligence. So it was in literature. His estimates of men and books were quick, confident, and lucidly expressed, but singularly narrow in range. His political views were definite and practical, but of wide or far-reaching political ideas he had absolutely no conception. Nor could it be said that the little clique of which he was perhaps the moving spirit con- tained any member who can claim a place in the foremost rank of any line of life. The boisterous force and ill-balanced energy of Brougham disturbed the serenity of the Court of Session for a few years before he carried them to a larger scene, where they failed to win for him the permanent respect of his countrymen. The sprightly wit of Sydney Smith found a short and not very congenial field in Edin- burgh. The plodding assiduity and eminent respectability of Horner enabled him to carry away from Edinburgh a well-earned esteem, although even his friends were obliged to admit that he owed nothing to talent or genius, and we are painfully struck by the truth of Scott's passing jibe, which found, in Horner's solemn earnestness, a certain remin- iscence of Obadiah's bull. All these last speedily forsook the scene where they never found themselves at home, and part of their weakness was, that they never understood either the humorous, or the romantic, side of the phase of life that was passing away, and at which they tilted with quite unneces- sary energy. Their work was full of limitations. It was useful in its kind; refreshing in its very confidence and succinctness; decaying and neglected by a later generation, because it was without the saving salt of humour, and with- out the living breath of imagination. Such was the little knot of young men — not all Scotsmen, not all remaining in Scotland, not, as a rule, very closely attached to Scottish nationality, but yet for a few years exercising considerable influence over her destinies. Personal circum- stances to a large extent accounted for their attitude, and circumstances also, rather than deep conviction, developed their political ideals. These were not indeed as definite as they after\\ards fancied them to be. In the supreme interest of the war, schemes of political reform were not very strongly pressed. Burgh Reform had indeed its adherents, but they were not very active in the cause. Parliamentary Reform was receding into the distance, and failed to command the support of any considerable party. Fear of anarchy and impatience and contempt of political theories, much more THE TORY PARTY. 483 than any deliberate preference for tyranny and oppression, made men ready to support repressive measures against all that savoured of sedition, and intolerant of those who excused or palliated it — as the young Whig party were suspected of doing. But more than all, the patriotic ardour was strong, and the Whigs were guilty of the fatal error of displaying a lack of sympathy with that ardour. It was this and the scant sympathy they showed for what was distinctive in Scottish tradition that weakened their influence and made it that of an active, self-confident, and pushing clique rather than that of a weighty political party. Between the mem- bers of the party there was no very close cohesion. Erskine was their ostensible leader, whose name they revered and whose character reflected honour on them. But he did not guide their counsels. The rasping vanity and bitter viru- lence of Lauderdale made him little fitted to acquire influence amongst a group of young men who trusted their own wit and did not spare his foibles. Sir Gilbert Elliot, afterwards Lord Minto, was being quickly estranged from the whole party, and followed the guidance of Burke rather than of Fox. Even amongst themselves the little group did not always see eye to eye, and were ready to accuse one another of a flippancy and pertness from which none of them was wholly exempt. On the other side was the party which, belonging equally to the new rather than to the old generation, yet clung to the old political ideas from temperament and impulse rather than from any bigoted dislike to reform. They reverenced the name of Dundas, and were grateful for the honour he had brought to their country. Pitt, as the champion who had fought against long odds, was to them a chosen hero. Their feelings were racy of the soil, and they were unwilling to bate anything of Scottish nationality or to lose her dis- tinctive character by modernising tendencies. Their patriot- ism was without bounds, and into the pomp and display of military preparations they entered with a boyish enthusiasm that fanned the flames of their political zeal. It was no wonder that they were impatient and intolerant of a young and arrogant clique that flouted Scottish prejudices, decried loyalty, and whose views of the war were strongly coloured by their conviction of England's waning power and by dis- trust of the rectitude of her cause. We need hardly wonder that it was this party rather than the other which attracted to itself the strong common-sense, no less than the enthusiastic genius, of Scott. He was the friend and companion of many on the other side, but political animosities broke and weakened 484 HENRY ERSKINE AND THE YOUNGER WHIGS. many of these bonds ; and amongst those friends, whose names have passed like chaff upon the wind compared with his enduring fame, there gradually grew up a fashion of decrying his Toryism as an intellectual weakness, as an error to be condoned rather than as an essential part of his character. Nothing is more amusing than to watch their comparative estimate of themselves and him, and to find them placing Scott and Jeffrey side by side — not wholly to the disadvantage of the latter — as ornaments of the Scottish capital. It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that the Tory party in Scotland had not an aspect less pleasing than that which it presented to Scott's imagination and patriotism. A large proportion of that party was hide-bound with pre- judice, narrow, jealous, and selfish in their aims, and defending privilege only because privilege belonged to their class and faction. There can be no doubt that much of the administra- tion — the municipal administration much more than that of the central authority — was at once oppressive and corrupt. It would be wrong to say that there was any conscious tyranny or any deliberate cruelty. But society was in danger, and the dominant class had neither the humour nor the leisure to weigh individual rights very narrowly. There was something of the rough-and-ready discipline of the quarter-deck about the manner of preserving the peace. Men will always forgive a good deal of this sort of hectoring on an emergency if those who hector are honest, able, and clear-sighted; but if they are selfish, purblind, and narrow, if for the brisk confidence of command they substitute the intrigue and wire-pulling of a corrupt and selfish clique, they are only too likely to work up any irritation which exists into chronic and deep-rooted discontent. The economical conditions of Scotland were undergoing a rapid transforma- tion. New classes were asserting themselves. It was hope- less to suppose that the conditions of labour recognised by the existing law could adapt themselves to the state of things created by growing commerce and manufactures. The re- strictions upon land tenure were galling and antiquated, and hardly capable of defence. Above all, local administra- tion was hopelessly rotten, and each year that it continued was adding to the permanent evils that it wrought. We have seen how both Pitt and Dundas had, in their younger days, been ready to welcome Reform. How such plans had been broken and such hopes dispelled in England is an episode in the larger history of the Empire. But it is certainly to be regretted that the abandonment of Reform PARLIAMENTARY REFORM ABANDONED. 485 for England carried with it the same result for Scotland. There the anomalies were even more glaring and absurd — at any rate, they were more matters of common knowledge. It would have been a bold — perhaps almost a reckless — course for Dundas, to have continued to embrace within the tenets of the Tory party a fixed aim of Reform in Scotland, and to have based the principles of the party upon the hope of a realisation of that Reform, as soon as foreign troubles were settled, and as soon as the dangers of sedition and anarchy were dispelled. The influence of the Crown, and the dead weight of the English Tories, would probably have made such a scheme impossible. But this we may safely say, that it would have deserved success, and that, in all probability, it would have given a different aspect to the fortunes of the Tory party in Scotland, for the whole of the next century. Nor would there have been, in such a scheme, anything either inconsistent with the traditions which had been inspired by the most clear-sighted amongst the Tory leaders of the past, and with the principles of Dundas him- self, or alien to the sympathies of the best section of the Tory party at the moment. The ideals of Swift and Boling- broke had shown how Tory principles could be identified with the advocacy of popular rights, with the redress of anomalies, with a broadening of the basis upon which loyalty rested. A later day was to revive these ideals. At one time it seemed as if Pitt and Dundas might have anticipated that later day. Had they been able to do so, the history of Scotland since their day might have been very different, and her political position might have been reversed. But the dead weight of the less intelligent section of their party was too heavy for them. Fate made them the leaders of a Toryism which had its generous, its romantic, and its patriotic side, but which was dominated by the hard and dull resist- ance to all change which was the natural instinct of a narrow, a selfish, and a privileged class. The error is one which is chiefly to be traced in its results, and we need not blame too severely those who failed to grasp at the moment the possibilities of the situation. Had they boldly pushed schemes of Reform at a moment of national danger, they would probably have encountered insuperable difficulties, would certainly have alienated many of their own party, and might have given to their opponents the chance of bringing a charge of unscrupulous and reckless truckling to the forces of anarchy. The Whigs of that day were not very bold. They dreaded anarchy, partly because it might discredit themselves, still more because it indirectly 486 HENRY ERSKINE AND THE YOUNGER WHIGS. helped the Tories ; and they would not have been unwillmg to denounce any wide-reaching scheme of Reform as a con- cession to anarchical tendencies. However that might be, we may regret the failure of the Tory leaders to embrace a bold plan of campaign, nor are there wanting indications in contemporary evidence that such a plan might have been successful. Again and again we find Scott asserting that the Radicalism of 1793 was a safer and less disorderly element than the Radicalism of 1816.^ " Had the party," says Cock- burn, " with the absolute command of Parliament, taken the gradual reformation of these evils into their own hands, they might have altered and strengthened the foundation of their power." 2 Obstinate and bigoted resistance to change was for the moment a safe — perhaps the only easy — course, but it was a short-sighted one, and year by year its inadequacy became more clearly recognised. Such as they were, however, the two political parties now became more clearly divided into hostile camps. They had each their own rallying-points. For the Tories, the annual celebration of the King's birthday on the 4th of June came to be the moment for the revival of loyalty and for confirming the dread and hatred of Revolutionary ideas. On the other hand, the birthday of Fox was made to serve as the annual renewal of Reforming faith. In 1802 came the first vigorous and decided effort of the younger Whig party in the establishment of the ' Edinburgh Review.' It showed an energy, an intellectual alertness, a power of initiative, that compel our admiration. It came to replace a host of periodicals carried on after a dull and plodding method. It was written with a force, a vivacity, and a liveliness that marked a new advance in journalistic — that is to say, in conjoint — literary effort. Its very name acquired, for the Northern capital, an influence far beyond her own immediate circle. But it is easy to exaggerate its importance. One of those who belonged to the little clique that found no words too strong to describe their own achieve- ments, speaks of the new ' Review ' as " a pillar of fire " ^ which was, forsooth, to guide a nation wandering through the desert in the darkness of the night. When we look back from the safer perspective of a century, the phrase is grotesque enough in its exaggeration. So far from guiding the nation's march, these young men were indeed following footsteps that were very freshly printed, and they had very little distinct- ness of idea as to the direction of their course. The sceptical 1 See Lockhart's 'Life,' vi. 119, 140. ^ See Cockburn's 'Memorials,' p. 279. ^ Cockburn. THE 'EDINBURGH KEVIEW/ 487 philosophy which had established itself in Scotland during the century just closing had left a taste for a sort of easy dialectic and a habit of somewhat crude rationalising. This developed very easily into that very tempting, but cramping, pursuit, smart critical disquisition, which found its own self- complacency gratified by summoning before its judgment-seat the customs, the ideas, even the achievements, of the past, and passing upon them a ready and unhesitating condemna- tion, according to a criterion which it applied without any qualms of modesty, or of doubt. The ' Edinburgh Review ' did not make itself so much the organ of a political party, as the medium of a phase of thought, on which that party throve. Nothing could have been more alien to the deeper instincts of the national feeling. But none the less these dapper critics, wrapt in the conviction of their own infallibility, found a congenial soil in Scotland as it then was. They were the natural outcome of the facile latitudinarianism that had masqueraded as free-thought for a generation past. They dreaded nothing so much as being thought provincial, and so they forgot to be national. They were shocked to find them- selves charged with irreligion ; but there can be no reasonable doubt that their whole attitude was one, not of scoffing at, but of ignoring, religion. It was not religion only, but that wide range of feelings — even of tastes and predilections — which lie close to its domain, that found but scant recognition from this little clique. They had their petty code, their peremptory canons of criticism, as shallow as they were definite, and in the application of that code, and these canons, they were narrow and mechanical. Phases of thought which were alien to their own; depths of speculation which they could not fathom ; flights of imagination which were beyond their ken — above all, a type of poetical creation which they never learned to appreciate — all these were treated with a smart and attractive sarcasm, and made the butt of perfectly self-satisfied ridicule, which mistook itself for wit. This pleased a wide class in a generation which was active-minded, alert, and fairly educated, but where profound intellectual power and Avide scholarship were rare. Nothing flattered the conceit of such a class so much as the notion that they were in possession of a touchstone that made them infallible judges of all literary merit, and of all speculative theories. Nothing inspired that infallibility with more sprightly con- fidence than to put into its hands the weapons of sarcasm and ridicule. Nothing made its self-complacency more impene- trable than just that fair modicum of education and of read- ing, which was incapable of measuring itself with really 488 HENRY ERSKINE AND THE YOUNGER WHIGS. profound or extensive scholarship. This luscious and tooth- some diet was just what the * Edinburgh Review ' set before its readers ; the appetite they brought themselves ; and for a time, with a certain class of Scottish society, and with a certain type of minds beyond her borders , the ' Review ' and its promoters were much in vogue. Its distinctly partisan phase — so far as politics were con- cerned — rather developed out of the taste to which it pandered, and out of the ideas upon which it worked, than was the prime motive with which it started. In its early days it ran a tilt against no principles of the Tory party. It was only as it grew older that it began deliberately to press the views for which the Whigs were fighting. It was by an article on the Spanish campaign, which seemed to preach the hopelessness, if it did not even ridicule the folly, of national resistance to foreign despotism,^ that the ' Review ' first assumed for itself a pronounced party bias, and alienated the sym- pathies of many who had before been amused by its spright- liness, if occasionally irritated by its pertness and its flippancy. But the new line now adopted, which ran counter to the patriotic ardour, then in the full impulse of its force, did more than alienate the Tories. It gave pause to many even amongst the Whigs. If Scott's Toryism made him instantly cease his own contributions, and even withdraw his name from the list of subscribers to the ' Review,' we must not forget that it was Lord Buchan, the Whig head of the family to which Henry and Thomas Erskine belonged, who kicked it from his door, in the full belief that the contumely offered by his aristocratic toe would finally destroy the influence of the young and unabashed periodical. So far the new party had the best of the fight. Even those who were most opposed to them admit that they counted on their side the brightest and most energetic amongst the young men of the day.^ They were, by their position and by their inspiring motives, quick to attack and ready of fence. In the existing state of things they had, undoubtedly, much to provoke their ridicule, and much to give point to their smart invective. They mistook their own restlessness and ambition for missionary zeal; they fancied they were born to reform the world ; and they exaggerated the cleverness of their own ^ The article was written, it is understood, by Brougham, and was strongly denounced even by some of his fellow-contributors. This is the verdict of Lockhart in ' Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk.' But we must not forget that Lockhart was writing anonymously, and that the compliment may have been prompted, as much by a desire to conceal his own identity as by the sincerity of his belief in its truth. The 'Letters contain a good many hints that rather attenuate the praise. * Blackwood's magazine/ 489 invective because they saw so clearly the absurdity of much that they attacked. But the moment that they ventured on decided advocacy of opinions which had many enemies they found themselves in turn attacked. The business of publish- ing was just at that period acquiring new and unprecedented activity in Scotland. Hitherto the booksellers had proceeded on narrow lines, and had never ventured to gauge the pos- sibilities before them. One of the most notable of the older school was Creech, whose shop was the resort of the literati of Edinburgh, and who was himself a notable figure in the social and civic life of Edinburgh, but whose business ventures never went much beyond that of agent for the London publishers. In Scotland education was so diffused as to offer splendid scope for new enterprise by providing a wide reading public. The possibility was first perceived by Archibald Constable, and he saw with unerring judgment that author- ship, like any other employment, must be based on business principles. He had already partly worked the rich mine that lay in the genius of Scott. He made a bold appeal to the reading public, and was thus able to offer a price for his literary wares that was a revelation to the world of letters. It was in the pride of this new discovery, and the possibilities that it opened, that he launched the ' Edinburgh Keview,' and he maintained his supremacy until the spirit of party, added to trade competition, started new rivals to his power. He had started the idea of authorship as some- thing which might yield a high recompense to the author, and yet enrich the publisher ; and it was as a business enter- prise that he fostered the zeal of the promoters of the 'Edinburgh Review.' But Archibald Constable was now to meet a rival: and Blackwood soon found an opportunity of making himself the literary agent of the opposite party. Much to their surprise the Whigs found that they possessed no monopoly of controversial deftness, and that the art of using the weapons of sarcasm and ridicule in controversy was not theirs alone. They had found it easy to lead an attack : they found it more difficult to meet the outspoken jests of a keen, a cynical, and a sarcastic band of opponents. In 1817 'Blackwood's Magazine' was started, and the young Whigs, who had assumed a role which they could fill to their own complete satisfaction in the ridicule of their elders, found that their own withers were susceptible of considerable wringing. In the satire of the Chaldsean MS., contributed to 'Blackwood's Magazine,' the caustic pen of Lockhart found an admirable vehicle for ridiculing the 490 HENRY ERSKINE AND THE YOUNGER WHIGS. members of the Whig party. In the heat of the fight personalities were permitted which not even literary skill could excuse, and which have fortunately ceased to be in accordance with the taste of a respectable reading public. Meanwhile some notable incidents had occurred in the history of parties. Pitt had found it necessary to face, in addition to the vast burden of costly and not very successful war, the galling aggravation of Irish rebellion, which a generous fiscal policy towards Ireland had done nothing to avert. He provided a wholesome sedative in legislative union ; but when he attempted to add to that measure one for the removal of Catholic disabilities, he had found him- self met by such opposition from the king as compelled him to resign in 1801. The Government of Addington, who took his place, involved no decided change of policy ; it was only a shadow of Pitt's administration, without the guidance of the master hand. When war broke out again in 1803, in spite of all efforts to avert it, there could be little difference of opinion as to the danger with which an overwhelming military despotism was threatening, not England only, but all Europe. One pilot alone was fit to face the storm, and for three years more Pitt stood forth, the " beacon light " in danger, the "warder on the hill." But, just at the crisis of her fate, the "stately column broke," the "beacon light was quenched in smoke." Crushed by anxiety, with a burden too great for broken health to bear, amidst clouds and thick darkness, Pitt closed his marvellous career. Before he died, his heart had received its bitterest wound in the virulent, but somewhat ignoble assault which, amidst the plaudits of a crowd of respectable mediocrities, was made upon his closest friend, Henry Dundas, now Lord Melville. It was in 1805, that a paltry charge was started against Melville, which the solemn pedantry of some, who ought to have known better, magnified or degraded into a charge of embezzlement. Administrative reform had in the last generation made immense advances; but as an inheritance from the past, considerable irregularity in the system of public accounts had not unnaturally survived. In the inquiries of a Commission it had emerged that some such irregularity had occurred in the accounts of the Navy when Dundas had been Treasurer. One of his subordinate officers, a zealous and devoted civil servant, had apparently been allowed to transgress some rules, which had only of recent years been enforced; and money belonging to the naval accounts had been employed for other services. How far the petty irregularity in the behaviour of the account- IMPEACHMENT OF DUNDAS. 491 ing officers had gone, it is difficult to say ; but no one who knew Dundas could suspect him personally of any dis- honesty, or greed of personal gain. When first called upon for explanations, he had treated the inquiries somewhat cavalierly; and, in the consciousness of personal rectitude, he had refused any explicit answers. His enemies found here just the means of a telling attack which suited them ; and one is tempted to even greater provocation against the apparent friends who admitted, with astonishing ease, the probability of charges, from which Dundas's character might, alone, have been a sufficient defence. An impeachment fol- lowed, before the House of Lords. Not for the first time in recent memory, all the theatrical ceremony of a State trial was invoked, in order to give dignity to what was really a mockery of legal procedure, in which the solemn Pharisaism of austere political virtue was allied with the paltrier venom of political animosity, so as to magnify into a portentous charge of corruption and malversation, what was at most but a condonation, on the part of a minister, overwhelmed with vast responsibilities at a great crisis in the nation's history, of some irregularity in the accounts of his subordinates. The ultimate result was the dissipation of the cloud of suspicion; but such was the virulence of faction, that even the acquittal did not prevent insinuations of guilt, or turn aside the cowardly and ungenerous ani- mosity which studiously kept alive memories that served to weigh down the influence of an opponent too strong to be crushed by other means. When the charge was first started it was hailed with unseemly joy by those who had been wont to tremble at Dundas's voice. But this triumph, although it produced some notable effects, and above all added an additional bitterness to the anxieties of Pitt's closing days, was short-lived. The clamour was still at its height when Pitt died in January 1806. His Ministry was succeeded by that of All the Talents — with Lord Grenville as Prime Minister, Thomas Erskine as Lord Chancellor, Henry Erskine as Lord Advocate, and Lord Lauderdale as the manager of Scottish affairs. Under that Ministry the trial began in April 1806; and it ended in June, in a triumphal acquittal. The tide now turned quickly. The news was received with joy in Scotland, where those who knew Lord Melville, both friends and foes, were well aware that peculation was one of those petty crimes to which his life and character gave the lie. Edinburgh proposed to celebrate his triumph by a public illumination. Political foresight and tact, no less than generosity, would have 492 HENRY ERSKINE AND THE YOUNGER WHIGS. prompted his opponents to remain quiescent in the national rejoicing, even if they did not share it. But, by a strange excess of timidity or of spite, the outward manifestation of that rejoicing was prevented by John Clerk, now Solicitor- General, who issued a warning to the magistrates, on the ground that the illumination might lead to rioting. The Ministry that was guilty of this pettiness was short-lived and ineffectual. They attempted changes in the Scottish Law Courts, which on many grounds seemed reasonable enough, but which were certain to cause search- ings of heart amongst those who suspected all such reform as a tampering with the Union. Some of their proposals were carried out by their successors, but they were them- selves unlucky enough to incur the odium of first mooting the change, and at the same time to lose the credit of succeeding in the attempt. The Ministry fell in April 1807, and the real power of Melville was at once restored. He was once more sworn of the PriNy Council, and although his place in the Govern- ment was taken by his son, his influence in Scottish affairs continued to his death. The fall of the Ministry of All the Talents brought to an end the short-lived gleam of sunshine that had fallen upon the Whigs of Parliament House. Their reign had not been a prosperous one. Henry Erskine had once again, after an interval of three -and -twenty years, donned the gown of Lord Advocate. He had entered Parliament, but he had done so with two heavy make-weights against him — the burden of years and of a great reputation. The wit which shone brightly in a circle accustomed to the easy domination of his graceful personality found no scope in the new scene of the House of Commons. His eloquence was already recognised in Westminster Hall, where the Court of Appeal had been thronged by a critical audience eager to compare him w4th his younger brother, who had won the greatest triumphs of the English Bar; but it never succeeded in gaining for him a Parliamentary reputa- tion, even although the powerful personality of Pitt, which had been like an incubus on the facile eloquence of Thomas Erskine, was removed. It may be doubted also whether he fully retained his influence in his own party, even although his name was a rallying-point, and still haxi all its efficacy as a centre of aftection and of pride. But the Erskine family was no longer dominant in the councils of the party. The brilliant career of the Lord Chancellor was destined, before many years were over, to fall under PRESIDENT BLAIR. 493 a cloud. The overweening vanity, and almost insane eccentricity, of Lord Buchan, made him the object of amuse- ment rather than respect; and Henry Erskine was not of the stuff out of which a failing party can fashion a useful tool. No wonder that he found his merits recognised more in words than in deeds, and that, when the Whigs were hoping, a few years later, to secure some new influence through the unstable and fickle alliance of the Prince Regent, one of their wire-pullers should have written, in words that accidentally came to the eyes of Henry Erskine, " We must get rid of the Erskines." ^ Erskine, indeed, was to owe to the generosity of the Tories, and not to the loyalty of his own party, his nearest approach to high judicial office.^ Meanwhile the Tories recovered their power, not only by the renewed influence of the Dundas family, but by the conspicuous talents and character of some of their leaders. Some of the foremost of the Whigs gradually gravitated towards their party. Lord Moira and Lord Minto, succes- sively Governors - General of India, were now more closely associated with the Tories than with the Whigs. In 1808, Robert Blair, whose calm strength and superiority to personal ambition won for him the unquestioning respect alike of political foes and friends, became Lord President, and for two short years gave all the weight of his consummate intellect to enhancing the dignity and authority of the Court, and to improving its procedure, and established a reputation that made his premature death fall on all with the effect of a national calamity.^ When Lord Melville passed suddenly away while awaiting the funeral of his friend Blair, and in the house next to that in which Blair had died, he transmitted much of his own influence as the secure inheritance of his son. It was only the modesty of his nephew — now the Chief Baron — which prevented him from acceding to the solicitation that he should accept the headship of the Court which his father and his grandfather had filled so well. During these years, from 1807 to 1816, the office of Lord Advocate was held by Archibald Colquhoun of Killermont, a ^ Ferguson's 'Henrj^ Erskine and his Times,' p. 513. 2 In 1804 Charles Hope, who had long been his friend, in spite of sharp polit- ical controversy, had pressed upon him the post of Lord Justice-Clerk, which Hope himself accepted, only after Erskine's positive refusal. ^ One of the most notable compliments ever paid to Blair was the sotto-voce remark of John Clerk, when Blair had demolished in a few sentences an elaborate, but sophistical, argument by Clerk — "Eh, man ! God Almighty spared nae pains when he made your brains. " 494 HENRY ERSKIXE AND THE YOUNGER WHIGS. man of high respectability, and distinguished as one of the intimate friends of Scott, but commanding no weight of political influence. The management of Scottish affairs dur- ing these years rested chiefly with the Dundas family. The larger questions of reform were for the time laid to rest, but the Government during these years remodelled the Court of Session, which in 1808 ceased to sit as one Chamber, and was reconstituted as two Divisions, one of which was presided over by the Lord President and the other by the Lord Justice- Clerk. In 1815 there was established the Jury Court, with three Commissioners, for the trial of civil cases with a jury. This did not indicate any bigoted resistance to change, and it looked as if minor reforms at least might be carried out with the assent of both parties. The literary struggle, however, was maintained with no cessation of energy, but rather with an increase of bitterness, between the ' Edinburorh Review ' and ' Blackwood's Magfazine.' The latter was carried on with a recklessness of satire and invective which could be excused only by the youth and audac- ity of men who loathed the self-complacency and narrowness which, in literary as well as in political measures, they attri- buted to those who had first brought the weapon of ridicule to bear, and who proved so sensitive to attacks which they had certainly provoked. Meanwhile in the field of practical politics there was little active fighting. The nation was now at one in regard to the war, and all other thoughts were hushed in the absorbing impression of national danger. In Charles Hope, who had succeeded Blair as Lord President, the Court had a dis- tinguished head, whose character gave him a commanding sway, and who had now stript much of the impetuous ardour which had in earlier days sometimes impelled him to a par- tisanship, always honest, but occasionally injurious to his judicial character. On the whole the administration of Scot- land, although too much concentrated in a single clique, and repressing with too blind a Toryism the tendencies that were making for inevitable change, was yet none the less vigorous and able, and by no means lacking in enlightenment. But the heavy cloud of national danger was dispelled in 1815, and the result of the sudden closincr of the Ion or foreioTi war was to create, or at least to give impetus to, serious do- mestic difficulties. What these were we shall see in the next chapter. 495 CHAPTER XIX. THE OLDER TORYISM AND ITS FAILURE. In 1815, the close of the war, in the battle of Waterloo, marked an epoch the like of which had hardly occurred in the history of the British nation. The nightmare that had weighed on the souls of a generation had suddenly passed away. The bands of an iron and aggressive tyranny were shattered. The long travail of an arduous and often hopeless struggle in which Pitt and Nelson had spent their lives was now over. The cost had been heavy, but the prize was won, and the greatness of the country was once more vindicated before the world. The event affected different men in the Scottish nation according to their temperaments and their sympathies. Some, like old Professor Ferguson, took it as a double release, and were content to close their lives in what was to them the calm sunset after a long and stormy day. Others felt that it braced their patriotism anew, and inspired them with hopes of still better days to come for their nation. Others again felt it only as a relief from what they deemed a too great burden of military spirit, and were glad that the nation was freed from the overwhelming pressure of a great cause, the enthusiasm for which had not appealed to their imaginations, and which had never compensated them for the postponement of domestic reforms upon which their polit- ical party had staked its future. It is curious to note how some of them received it — not so much as the breaking of a dark and dismal cloud achieved by the steadfastness of the nation, but rather as the turning-point which might make their little schemes bulk more largely in the eyes of a nation that had escaped from one absorbing effort. "The appear- ance of everything was changed," says Cockburn. " Fear of invasion, contempt of economy, the glory of our arms, the propriety of suppressing every murmur at any home abuse, the utter absorption of every feeling in the duty of warlike 496 THE OLDER TORYISM AND ITS FAILURE. union — these and other principles, which for twenty years had sunk the whole morality of patriotism in the single object of acknowledging no defect or grievance in our system, in order that we might be more powerful abroad, became all inapplicable to existing things." He entirely ignores the fact that for these twenty years the nation had been right in feel- ing that one duty stood pre-eminent above all others, and that the absorption in that duty was not only a necessity of national existence, but a means of strengthening the moral fibre of the nation. The crisis had passed; the parochial politician forgot that the devotion which that crisis had called forth had a value in itself, and that the substitution of a state of things which left the scene free for the lesser fights of political parties was not all pure gain. The war had certainly retarded much -needed reforms, but it was absurd to suppose that with the more ardent and patriotic spirits the romance of war should suddenly pass away, and that they should rest contented with the more demure and less exciting work of pursuing internal reform. Memories of factious opposition rankled in their thoughts, and they were in no way disposed to turn a willing ear to proposals that had been urged amidst the smoke of cannon and in the ex- tremity of national danger. But the nation emerged from the war transformed in its whole character. Material conditions had vastly changed. New ideas had taken hold of the minds of men, new interests occupied their thoughts. Changes in the social state which had been imperfectly measured amid the noise of battle, now became apparent in all their force and significance. During the quarter of a century that ended with 1815, Whiggism had been gradually crushed out of the higher social ranks of Scotland by the sheer weight of Tory pre- dominance. The personal influence of Henry Dundas had done much to accomplish this. But many circumstances had helped him. The hard-headed common -sense of the nation was impatient of theories and of doctrinaire schemes of reform which were, to say the least of it, ill-timed. Wealth was in- creasing, and those who were busy in acquiring a share of it had no mind to be diverted from the pursuit by whimsical plans of reform, which were somewhat impatiently classed with revolution. The sense of nationality was strong, and that sense is always inclined to be Conservative in its sym- pathies. The respect for tradition, for family influence, for a certain rugged discipline which accommodated itself to the temper of the nation, was a powerful ally of the Tories. It is true that some of the distinctive features of that discipline NEW TEMPER OF THE NATION. 497 had passed away. Social usage had been strangely modi- fied. The old rigidity of manners had been softened and made more adaptable. The high and impregnable fortress of Pres- byterian doctrine had fallen before the assaults of modern thought. Daring speculations had transformed Scotland from the most dogmatic to the most latitudinarian of nations. All this, it might have been thought, would have had a precisely opposite effect, and instead of confirming the domination of the Tories might have prepared the way for the triumph of the Whigs. But we must remember who were the chief representatives of this easier code of morals, and this lati- tudinarian type of religion. They were the Moderates in the Church ; the professional classes who held all that privi- lege and hereditary right could give them, who advocated greater freedom in morals and religion, not because they hated tradition or longed for change, but because they dis- liked the bigotry, the narrowness, and the obstinacy which they associated with the stricter school, and who refused to accommodate themselves to a code of morals and religion which would have robbed of its charm that easy and pleasant social life which was the most prized of their privileges. The High-flying party provoked their sense of humour, and humour, always a powerful ingredient in the composition of feeling and of sentiment, is apt to prove an element of diver- gence rather than of union between an intellectual class and its less educated fellow-citizens. Thus it was that the very elements that were working to remodel Scottish society, and to transform Scottish character, became allies of the Tories, and helped to draw them further and further from the classes below. Just as Toryism crushed out the nascent seeds of Whiggism from the upper class of society, so the reforming zeal penetrated the lower classes, and seemed to gather to itself some of the enthusiasm of the older Covenanters, and to appeal to impulses in the heart of the nation which were the strongest and the most enduring. As the reforming spirit, expelled from the upper classes of society, filtered downwards, the more extreme became its aims, and the more bold and violent its methods. It was no longer a question of calling small and select meetings of professional men, of agitating for Parliamentary and burgh reforms, and of indulging in vague aspirations after liberty. On the contrary, the new and wider Radical party was animated by a sullen discontent; its spirit was that of obstinate and dogged resistance to authority; its aims were socialistic and subversive ; and its methods were those of the secret association, which was prepared at small pro- 2l 498 THE OLDER TORYISM AND ITS FAILURE. vocation to proceed to violent means. The contagion of the times had bred a fever in the blood, but very palpable outward circumstances aggravated that fever, and made the inflammation spread. From being a nation almost incredibly poor, Scotland had already laid the foundations of manufacturing and commercial wealth. The towns were growing with surprising quickness. The country districts would in any case have been deserted under the attractions of constant employment and compara- tively easy wages which were open in the manufacturing centres. But the state of agriculture was, from independent causes, telling in the same direction. More enlightened methods were pursued, agricultural experiments became a favourite hobby, increased capital was required, and as a natural consequence large farms took the place of petty holdings, and the rural population was necessarily decreased. So far as the Highlands were concerned the same thing occurred on a vast scale. The political economists of the day saw — and, so far as their own range of vision extended, saw quite correctly — that the best commercial use of the vast tracts of Highland land was not to attempt upon them a feeble culture which a sterile soil and an inclement sky alike forbade. To people these tracts with sheep was a scheme of eminent commercial sagacity; whether its social wisdom was so certain is quite another question. It was due to Sir John Sinclair's restless and pervading influence that vast flocks of Cheviot sheep now occupied the moun- tains which a few years ago had been valueless, except as the homes of a numerous and ignorant, but withal an inter- esting, population. The Highland estates became enormously more valuable ; but they lost their population. In place of petty occupiers, who maintained a precarious existence upon their scanty holdings, there came a few well-to-do tenants who could afford to stock the land; who paid good rents with perfect regularity, but who owed no allegiance to their landlord, and were disposed to resist any domination on his part. Those who, fifty years before, had been the poor but almost insanely proud members of a clan which owed obedience only to its chief, now found a home across the Atlantic, or swelled the crowd of artisans who sought employment in the towns. But if an increasing manufacture brings a wave of wealth, it brings also a surf of poverty, and leaves a flotsam and jetsam of misery and discontent which has no parallel amongst the population of a moun- tain-side. To these last money payments were almost unknown, but they rarely lacked that small modicum of GROWTH OF DISCONTENT. 499 sustenance with which habit had made them content. With the towns it was different. The demure and cautious bur- gesses of Glasgow no longer found themselves surrounded by a well-disciplined and respectful bevy of apprentices and artisans. They had to fight for every inch of commercial ground they gained, and the city already held in its midst the beginnings of the noisome slums and Alsatias where the artificers of that wealth were crowded in disease, and squalor, and discontent. The old comradeship, the old sym- pathy between class and class, the old feeling of kindly nationality which bridged over the gulf between different ranks and softened the contrasts of wealth and poverty, — these were things that could not breathe in the atmosphere that gathered about the crowded dwellings of the Glasgow artisans. There were those also, not pent in city lanes, and conning day by day and hour by hour their theme of discontent, but scattered amongst the outlying counties, whom econ- omical conditions made the object of pity and of reproach to the national conscience. The Highlands, as we have seen, had undergone a vast change. Depopulation was a sad and regrettable remedy; but had it been suffered to proceed unchecked it would have worked its cure. Un- fortunately, however, it was checked, and that in the most unwholesome way, by the influence of artificial causes. The heavy duties placed on salt and barilla, which were the sources from which soda could most easily and cheaply be obtained, rendered it impossible to import them with profit for the purpose. Some substitute had to be found, and, most unfortunately for the Western Highlands, it was found in the kelp gathered in the seaweed. As the price of soda grew, the kelp manufacture, which was profitable only in consequence of an unwise import duty, was enormously developed, and became a staple industry in these unhappy regions. It gave a false stimulus to population; once again these regions, which could not by any bounty of Nature rear more than a scanty number of inhabitants, became crowded beyond their capacity. Throughout the whole of Scotland there was thus grow- ing, in spite of all its advance in wealth and in commercial activity, an uneasy sense of discontent. Social conditions had grown up with which existing social arrangements could not grapple. Poverty was growing side by side with wealth , and the question soon forced itself upon the attention — How was that problem of poverty to be dealt with ? In the later years of the war matters had been steadily 500 THE OLDER TORYISM AND ITS FAILURE. going from bad to worse. From 1808 to 1813 there had been a series of bad harvests. Foreign supplies were closed, and, as a consequence, there had been an enormous rise in prices, — wheat rising from 75s. to 108s. a quarter. This naturally gave an artificial stimulus to agriculture. In 1813 there had been an abundant harvest. Two years later came the peace, which suddenly opened the Continental markets, with their competition fatal to the farmer at home. In 1815 wheat fell to 60s. a quarter; and in order to safe- guard the agricultural interest, the price at which corn could be imported was raised from 66s. to 80s. An inflated agricultural prosperity was bolstered up by artificial legis- lative restrictions, already condemned by the most enlight- ened thinkers of the day. The evil was not confined to agriculture. There had been an immense amount of over-trading. Goods had been thrown upon the foreign markets far in excess of the demand. The rapid growth of wealth had stimulated emu- lation beyond the bounds of prudence. Bankruptcies ensued. The manufactures received a sudden check. Thousands were thrown out of employment ; starvation threatened the thick- pent populations of the larger towns; and sanitary arrange- ments were so utterly neglected that disease soon followed upon the heels of want. Wages fell to the starvation-point ; and yet in 1816 the crop was once again very bad, and war prices again prevailed. The handloom weavers, whose occupation was just that which gave most opportunity for the perpetual discussion of grievances that gradually rubs them into a sore, were thrown out of employment. Dis- affection was rife, and it was scarcely kept in check by a threatening display of military force. Now, in face of a lately acquired peace, and when the nation had scarcely done rejoicing over a splendid victory, she seemed to be torn by internal discussions far more dangerous and more fierce than those which had been crushed with an impatient, and perhaps somewhat ruthless, hand in 1793. In the face of such a state of things, one party desired to make these discussions the instrument of their own political advance- ment; the other was disposed unduly to neglect them, because the memory of the struggle in which the nation's very existence had been imperilled was yet fresh upon them. To deal with such a state of matters there was required a Government at once firm and enlightened. Without any tampering with the forces of Revolution, a far-seeing Ministry might have shaped the new impulses to good ends, and might have reconstructed the political machine so as to have fitted LORD Liverpool's premiership. 501 it to new social conditions, and given to all classes their share in the vastly increased wealth and power of the Empire. Unfortunately no such Ministry appeared; and for a dozen (years the titular Prime Minister was Lord Liverpool, the man of all others least capable of impressing himself on such an epoch. He was eminently respectable, conscientious, and industrious ; with sufficient tact and con- ciliation to combine in his Administration the most diverse elements, and yet to provoke no jealousy against himself. But he was essentially a mediocrity; and as such he was First Minister during twelve years of most critical import- ance in our history, and yet shaped no policy, had not the faintest conception of political reconstruction, was blind to all the deeper movements of the time. He had inherited the traditions of a narrow clique, and believed it to be a part of the scheme of Providence that this clique should be left undisturbed in their privileges, and, in the slumber of a respectable lethargy, should dispose of the destinies of the country. They thought themselves to be the defenders of the Constitution and to be keeping Revolution at bay. The opposite faction raged against them as tyrants and denounced them for their stubborn resistance to Reform. In truth, they were only dullards, whose imagination could not even conceive the magnitude of the task that had fallen upon them. But Lord Liverpool's premiership covered a long series of years and a chameleon - like change of policy. Himself the creature of circumstance, he serves only as a titular connecting-link between men of the most diverse character and tendencies the most opposite. The first part of his term of office was that in which the master-spirit was Castle- reagh, — that intricate and perhaps misunderstood character, whose name became a by -word of reproach amongst the opposite party, as representing all that was most reactionary and repressive in the Toryism which they held to be only a form of the worst political profligacy. It was, indeed, far from being even a tolerable regime. It represents all the worst features of a narrow, selfish, and lethargic oli- garchy, which vainly imagined that it could grasp the sceptre dropped by Pitt. The second period in Liverpool's premiership is that in which, under his titular headship, there were combined three men who, each of them, represented a principle and a policy; now bound together by a mutual respect, now estranged by radical difference of view; each rendering to the other that homage which magnanimity demands, and which it instinct- 502 THE OLDER TORYISM AND ITS FAILURE. ively accords; perplexed by misunderstandings, but never- theless conscious, as their predecessors never were, of the greatness and dignity of their task, and each earning his honoured place in history by virtue of political insight, of courage, and of great achievement. If the first part of Liver- pool's premiership is stained by the selfishness of a narrow and purblind clique, the second is ennobled by the names of Canning, of Wellington, and of Peel. The first period was one in which it seemed that the Government held its duty performed when it was quick to take alarm and stern in repression. The second was one in which new ideas were pressing to the front, and in which differences of opinion amongst the leaders rested, not upon nervous timidity and sel- fish intrigue, but upon broad grounds of principle. The lesser spawn of faction still knew only the old names and the old passwords of party, but the Toryism of Peel and Canning had little in common with the Toryism of Castlereagh. It is, however, no part of our business here to enter into the details of party struggles in the arena of St Stephens, nor to trace the course of imperial politics. We are con- cerned with these only as they affect the history of Scotland. And here also we can see that the difference between the two periods is clearly reflected, however little the adherents of each party, immersed in the personal struggle, might per- ceive the larger issues involved. In 1816, when the alarm was at its height, and when dis- content was rapidly ripening into revolt and social anarchy, the Lord Advocate Colquhoun was promoted to the office of Lord Clerk -Register. To the place thus left vacant, which was soon to involve difficulties calling for consummate tact and most delicate statesmanship, there succeeded Alexander Maconochie, a man of mediocre talent and of no commanding position at the Bar, known chiefly as the son of a judge who had acquired high reputation in his day. Upon him, in conjunction with a typical member of Lord Liverpool's earlier Administration, Lord Sidmouth, then Home Secretary, fell the duty of providing against the danger with which Scottish society, especially in the city of Glasgow, appeared then to be threatened. The weavers of that city had lately entered into a combination for demanding higher wages, which had been checked and punished with the rigour which the law then dealt out to all such combinations. But this only aggravated the discontent. The combinations now assumed the form of active political associations, which undoubtedly cherished designs of violent measures to sub- vert existing society. They had their counterparts in Eng- LABOUR GRIEVANCES. 503 land; and in Scotland, as in England, the Government set itself to countermine these machinations by the doubtful and dangerous expedient of political espionage. The spies of the Government comprised one Richmond, who had him- self narrowly escaped the penalty of the law as a member of one of the trade combinations, and whose honesty was as open to doubt as that of the fraternity of informers usually is. From his information it became known that the weavers' association had bound itself by an oath to adopt violent measures if its grievances were not removed ; and suspicion was attached even to the men of the Black Watch, then quartered at Glasgow. Richmond, from some scruple, refused, himself, to take the oath, the taking of which might have helped him to obtain further information, but he was able, nevertheless, to procure what purported to be a copy of it for the use of his employers. In the beginning of 1817, the state of tension, both in England and Scotland, became still more strained. An attack was made on the Prince Regent by the London mob as he was returning from opening Parliament; and this was at once made the ground for introducing such coercive measures as had been adopted in 1795 after a similar attack upon the King. It was proposed to suspend the Habeas Corpus Act. The debate took place on the 26th of February, just after the Lord Advocate had taken his seat as member for the borough of Yarmouth in the Isle of Wight. The House still hesitated to adopt a measure so severe as the suspension of the Habeas Corpus; but its scruples were removed when at a critical point in the debate the Lord Advocate read to the House the terms of the oath disclosed by Richmond. In view of such clear evidence of daring disaffection the objections of the Whigs were swept aside and the proposed measure became law. Arrests were now made in Scotland, and two offenders, Alexander Maclaren, a weaver, and Thomas Baird, a grocer, were arraigned, the first for uttering a speech incentive to violence, and the second for having published it. Maclaren was a workman whose record was good. He had been employed as foreman, but the pressure in the labour market had reduced him to absolute penury, so that even with superior skill he could earn only five shillings a -week for fifteen hours of labour a -day. He had been a sergeant in the Volunteers, and, until the grip of poverty had made him desperate, seems to have been a loyal supporter of the Administration and an opponent of disorder. His crime was that at an open-air meeting held at Kilmarnock on 504 THE OLDER TORYISM AND ITS FAILURE. a wild winter's night, he had used some dangerous expres- sions. He had urged his hearers to petition the Crown. "Let us," he said, "lay our petitions at the foot of the throne, where sits our august prince, whose gracious nature will incline his ear to listen to the cries of his people, which he is bound to do by the laws of the country. But should he be so infatuated as to turn a deaf ear to their just petition, he has forfeited their allegiance. Yes, my fellow-townsmen, in such a case, to hell with our allegiance," He had spoken of the House of Commons as decayed and corrupted ; as "not really what it is called, not a House of Commons." He had declaimed against a Government who, in the midst of the French Revolution, with its aspirations after liberty, had "declared war not only against the French nation, but against the friends of liberty at home." He had abused the "hirelings of the Church." He had declared England to have been governed for twenty-five years by "a usurped oligarchy, who pretend to be our guardians and represent- atives, while, in fact, they are nothing but our inflexible and determined enemies." These words were strong. They may have had some justification, but however posterity may judge, practical politics must always be chary of admitting justification for an incentive to sedition. They w^ere, however, such as would at a calmer time at most have been received with some severe, perhaps some contemptuous, criticisms. He was an unpractised speaker; he had been unwilling to appear as spokesman at all ; and the Govern- ment, had it judged his words with the calm impartiality of confidence, might have easily found an excuse for the vehemence of a starving man. Baird was a man of higher station and of more prosperous circumstances. He also had been connected with the Volunteer force, where he had held a captain's commission, and while a sincere, he had always been a moderate, advocate of Parliamentary Reform. His crime was that of having printed and disseminated the speeches made at the meeting, although he had in vain re- monstrated against the violence of some of the expressions. In all this there was nothing which could not have been safely left without notice, and certainly without criminal prosecution. But the Government determined to prosecute on the somewhat vague charge of sedition, which had been invoked in the trials of 1793, and which was more compre- hensive than the crime of " leasing -making," although the latter was better known to Scottish jurisprudence. But " leasing -making " involved a personal offence against the sovereign, which might have been hard to prove. The SEDITION TRIALS. 505 charge of sedition was more dangerous to personal liberty, because the proof rested upon a series of more or less doubt- ful inferences with regard to the effect of words, as to which difference of opinion was inevitable. No specific act had to be proved; no definite consequences had to be shown to follow from the words. It was enough to demonstrate that the words were such as would direct hatred, contempt, or distrust, against any part of the Constitution. Arguments on such a theme must always be somewhat subtle, and their inferences more or less remote; and in such a case the resort to fear or prejudice in support of the arguments which the prosecuting counsel employed was almost certain. It cannot be said that there was any browbeating of witnesses, or any such evident bias on the Bench as had been seen when Braxfield conducted the trials of 1793. Both the Court and the prosecuting counsel were studiously courteous, and treated the defending counsel with ample respect. But they gave voice to the general uneasiness which pervaded the upper classes, and felt no doubt what- ever as to the imperative duty which lay upon them to save society by crushing out any inflammatory appeals 'to a starving and discontented crowd of workmen. Behind all their arguments there is a fixed conviction that in the main the Constitution, as it existed, was excellent, and that to attack it was a crime. Abstract opinions on Reform might be held, but if they were based on condemnation of existing arrangements — and it is hard to say on what else an argument in favour of Reform could be based — then they became criminal. Particular Ministries might be criti- cised and attacked, but if the attack became general, if it was directed against the constitution of any existing Estate of the realm, then it was seditious, and was held to deserve condign punishment as such. The defending counsel were John Clerk, a fierce and pugnacious Whig of the older school, and Francis Jeffrey, whose eloquence was such that even Lord Hermand, with that generous and impetuous frankness that was character- istic of him, declared that if he had been a juryman, and had been obliged to give a verdict after that speech, he feared that his own judgment would have been led astray, and thanked Heaven that no such duty was imposed upon him. No very intolerant prejudice existed where such kindly criticism was dealt out to the eloquence of Jeffrey, by a judge whose political opinions were diametrically opposed to all that Jeffrey represented. The defence offered by him did not apparently rise to any 506 THE OLDER TORYISM AND ITS FAILURE. very great height of forensic eloquence. There were the same appeals as in 1793, to the vehement rhetoric of Pitt and the Duke of Richmond in favour of Reform, as justifying the expressions which were now arraigned as seditious ; and these appeals were answered, as they had been answered before, by the judge telling the jurymen that it was not their duty to find that lawless expressions, which might have been uttered in the past, rendered such expressions less lawless, as now arraigned, and that the fact of the House of Commons having neglected to notice, and even condoned, dangerous rhetoric, was no reason why such dangerous rhetoric was now to be excused. Jeffrey could quote from the mouth of Lord Meadowbank, the father of the Lord Advocate, bold and fervid words in favour of the resort to armed resistance ; but it was answered, with that logical precision which, however cogent in form, is apt to fail in being persuasive, that the fact that armed resistance might at times be a moral duty, did not render it any the less a legal crime. The jury found the prisoners guilty, and they were sentenced to the comparatively mild punishment of six months' imprisonment. But such a conviction could not strengthen the Administration, and the honours of the fight remained with the defending counsel and with the political party to which they belonged. The result of the next trial was even more unfortunate. The Rev. Neil Douglas, who belonged to the sect of the Universalists, or those who, in opposition to Calvinistic doctrine, preached the creed of universal salvation, carried on religious worship in a hall of the Andersonian Institute in John Street, Glasgow. His congregation consisted of the poorest class, and his pulpit manner seems to have combined a certain rude imaginative power with a per- fervid rapidity of utterance that made the old man at times unintelligible. In lecturing upon the book of Daniel, he drew a somewhat dangerous parallel between Nebuchad- nezzar and George III., and between Belshazzar and the Prince Regent. Much depended upon the application of the parallel, and it was difficult to say whether the poor King was said to be driven from the society of men for crimes like those of Nebuchadnezzar, or only likened to the Babylonian king in fate, although distinguished from him in life and character. In any case, the preacher evidently prayed for the King and Prince with a fervour which might claim to be loyal, even although it might infer a somewhat uncomplimentary assumption of the urgent need A LEGAL FIASCO. 507 for Divine intervention on their behalf. Jeffrey and Cock- burn were the defending counsel, and they had an easy task in procuring the acquittal of the prisoner; the Solicitor- General had himself only ventured to ask a verdict of not proven. The Crown counsel now directed their efforts to a new batch of trials, which were to turn upon the evidence of the informers they had employed, and which were to fix guilt upon some of those who had taken the oath which had been read to the House of Commons with such dramatic effect by the Lord Advocate. The principal trial was that of Andrew M'Kinlay, a Glasgow weaver. There seems to be little doubt that M'Kinlay was implicated in a treasonable association, and that he had administered the seditious oath which bound the adherents of that association. But the conduct of the Crown lawyers was bungling and inept, at the very moment when bungling and ineptitude were most fatal. The charge was at first one of treason. That was abandoned, and again and again new indictments were attempted. Alike the friends and the opponents of the Administration were stirred to anger and contempt. The Scottish Tory members felt themselves betrayed, and com- plained of the scandalous mismanagement of Government business. Romilly and the English Whig lawyers were joined with Brougham in open derision of the Lord Advocate Maconochie. Lord Sidmouth was, however, loyal to him, and at length, in July, the trial began. But it resulted in a dismal failure. The case was ill-prepared. The witnesses were doubtful and suspect. In such a case it is almost inevitable that recourse be had to those who turn Crown witnesses in order to procure safety for themselves. This must necessarily give rise to suspicion, and for that very reason scrupulous care must be observed. The Crown witnesses were kept secluded. The agents for the defence were denied access to them, and were not even told what their testimony was to be. Finally, one of them managed, by throwing from the window of the room where he was confined a roll of tobacco in which a paper was concealed, to convey the impression to the prisoners' friends that he was being bribed to betray his old confederates. On the day of the trial a dramatic scene occurred. This witness was asked in the usual formal way "whether any one had given him a reward, or promise of reward, for being a witness ? " The answer, to the surprise of all, was " Yes." " By whom ? " he was next asked. " By that gentleman" — pointing to the Advocate-Depute. Rarely has such a scene 508 THE OLDER TORYISM AND ITS FAILURE. taken place in a British court of law. We need not believe that the charge was strictly true. But the examination of the witness had been conducted with extreme carelessness and irregularity. It was admitted that promises of safety had been given. This involved transport to another place, and from that to promise of a livelihood was but a short step. We may admit that the character of the leading Crown lawyers rendered it impossible to believe that they had personally been guilty of tampering with a witness. But inferior agents had been mixed up with the work, and it is more than probable that expressions had been used which gave countenance to the notion in the witness's mind that a distinct ofter had been made to him. The Crown counsel were now the arraigned instead of the arraigners. The defending counsel knew how to make the best of this startling turn of matters. The trial was quickly closed with a verdict of Not Proven, and the remaining trials were abandoned. But the matter did not end there. The case was severely handled in the House of Commons, and covered the Scottish Administration not only with condem- nation but contempt. Even the English Attorney -General could not assert that the course pursued by the Lord Advocate was consonant with English practice, and the defence made that the Lord Advocate was not only public prosecutor but a police magistrate, was one which had a dangerous and doubtful aspect. It was not surprising that proceedings, which were not only abortive, but discreditable, closed the career of Maconochie as Lord Advocate. In 1819 he ascended the Bench with the title of Lord Meadowbank. For a year matters went quietly enough. Discontent appeared to be less rife, and Government had no tempta- tion to renew the prosecution. The agitation for Burgh and Parliamentary Reform continued, but it appeared to be carried on by more constitutional methods. The Cato Street conspiracy and the Manchester Riots, however, had shown the temper which prevailed in England, and Scotland was to follow suit. In 1820 the office of Lord Advocate was filled by Sir William Rae, who had succeeded Maconochie. In some re- spects he was well qualified to represent the Scottish Bar. He was the son of Lord Eskgrove, a judge of the Court of Session, whose grotesque manners, coupled with a strong and outstanding character and a firm grasp of the older traditions of the Scottish legal school, had made him a notable person- ality, and a few years before his death this worthy judge obtained the honour of a baronetcy. His second son, Sir RADICAL AGITATION. 509 William Rae, was now the holder of the title. Sir William had never won a leading practice, and was one of those whom the newer and more energetic school of rising lawyers had pushed aside; but he was none the less a respectable representative of the older school, whose rigid Toryism was tempered by high character, however hemmed in by narrow conceptions of constitutional liberty. To his lot it fell to deal with a state of matters that came within measurable distance of civil war. After the abortive trials of 1817 there had followed a period of comparative calm. But the distress increased, and with this distress came a fierce agitation for political change. Parliamentary Reform, although it had been pushed aside in the stress of war and of threatening danger, had been long a moot topic, discussed with more or less of moderation. It now assumed a more violent form. The name of Reformer was now discarded for that of Radical, and the more truculent methods now used were met by a corresponding bitterness on the opposite side. Both parties were facing one another with more hostile intent, and there was a tension and strain in men's minds that boded no good to social order. The riots in Manchester in August 1819 brought the nation into the temper of armies spoiling for the fray, and into that mood where constitutional methods are apt to disappear in the bustle of opposing camps. A little spark would then suffice to kindle a conflagration. Before the year was over a meet- ing took place on Glasgow Green, in which the Manchester rioters were spoken of as the martyrs of liberty butchered by a selfish and ruthless Administration. Secret societies were organised, and there was an uneasy tension in men's minds like that electricity in the air which precedes a stormy con- vulsion in Nature. The combinations of workmen assumed a menacing form ; bills were posted up inviting all operatives to abstain from labour on a certain day; and those who had any property to defend felt themselves to be on the brink of anarchy and revolution. The constitutional reformers dis- countenanced all violent methods, but it was only natural that, in the general alarm, they should be roughly confounded with the Radicals in a common condemnation. The Lord Advocate, who on the whole kept his head better than some of those higher in the Government, was not disposed to ex- aggerate the danger, but to have disregarded it would have been a gross neglect of his duty, and peace was preserved by an abundant display of armed force. In April 1820 there was recrudescence of the dangerous elements, and on Sunday, the 2nd of that month, the secret committee which called 510 THE OLDER TORYISM AND ITS FAILURE. itself the "Committee of Organisation for forming a Pro- visional Government/' posted proclamations commanding the people to cease from work, and summoning them to armed insurrection. Glasgow wore the appearance of a city under martial law. The Yeomanry were called to arms, and while the peaceful citizens were on their way to church, when the streets should have been slumbering in their usual Sabbatical calm, they found every corner occupied by military pickets, and troops of hussars galloping through the city. It was rumoured that the London mail was to be stopped a few miles from Glasgow, and that this was to be the signal for open rebellion. It was easy for the Whigs, who chafed at their long exclusion from power, to blame the Government and to sneer at their unnecessary fears. Selfish bungling and an inability to discern the signs of the time might have had much to answer for in producing such a state of things. But the atmosphere was surcharged with excitement, and we can scarcely be surprised that the dominant party were in no mood to listen to counsel based on a belittling of their alarm. On the following day it was evident that one part of the orders of the Secret Committee had been obeyed, and for miles round Glasgow the labourers ceased from work and gathered in sullen and threatening crowds. On Wednesday it was believed that these crowds were to move against the city from the surrounding country, and that only by an overpowering display of military force were the would-be rioters to be held in check. Sixty thousand men were vir- tually gathered to defy the law, and bands of armed rioters marched about the roads, surrounding the country mansions and demanding the surrender of arms. The inhabitants were kept in a state of nervous tension, listening to the sounds of midnight drill, and the blacksmiths' shops were burst open, their owners expelled, and the forges used for the manufacture of pikes. Had the military force of Scotland been what it was seventy years before, when the Highland clans marched unopposed into the heart of England, the Constitution would not have lasted for a day. On the morning of Wednesday, the 5th of April, when it was expected that the attempt was to be made, the authorities were found to be fully prepared. Five thousand troops were drawn up in the streets — more than enough to hold in check the disorganised and half -armed forces of lawlessness and anarchy. When night came on the crowds became more bold ; drums Were beat and shots exchanged. A crowd of three hun- dred men, more resolute than the rest, had the courage to face the soldiers, but a cavalry charge scattered them, and a dozen RIOTING AND ITS SEQUEL. 511 of the ringleaders were made prisoners. Farther off in the country, at Bonnymuir, the "Radical war," as it was called, rose almost to the semblance of a pitched battle. A band of armed rioters there attacked a trooper of the Yeomanry, whom they stopped on the highway. He returned to his headquarters, and a troop of Yeomen sent to disperse the crowd were met by a volley from the rioters. A few minutes ended the fray, and nineteen men were taken prisoners, after ■a hopeless struggle in which a few lost their lives. The Government could no longer trifle with such a state of affairs. The rioters were terrified, but mildness would soon have revived their spirits. The search for arms was vigorously prosecuted, and many arrests followed. A Commission of Oyer and Terminer was issued, and sat for the trial of the rioters between 23rd June and 9th August at the places where the riots had been most outrageous — Stirling, Glasgow, Dumbarton, Paisley, and Ayr, It was composed of the Lord- President Hope, the Lord Justice - Clerk Boyle, with the Chief Baron and the Chief Commissioners of the recently established jury court, and two of the Justiciary Judges. In all, true Bills were found against ninety-eight persons, fifty-one of whom managed to escape. Twenty-four were sentenced to death, but only three were executed — Wilson, who was hanged at Glasgow on the 30th of August, and Hardie and Baird, who were hanged at Stirling on the 8th of September. Enough had been done to vindicate the law, and the Government had shown itself ready not only to check anarchy, but to impress upon the local authorities a wholesome sense of their responsibility for the maintenance of order. But the difficulties of the Government did not end here. The Opposition was vigorous and alert, and was at no loss for material wherewith to feed the flame of discontent. They might deride the danger of anarchy and disorder which the Government had to meet, but they found their opportunity in a deep-rooted anger which pervaded the great mass of the nation. In proportion as the Government of Lord Liverpool , increased the rigour of the Tory principles, the Whigs sought for new cries against them, and the middle- class was not slow to respond to their call. As Prince Regent, George IV. had been the ally of the Opposition, but he was now estranged from them, and in the degrading quarrel between himself and the Queen there was found a new means of attack upon the Government. Popular discontent assumed the championship of the Queen, and the vindication of her fancied wrongs became a new rallying cry, however little her 512 THE OLDER TORYISM AND ITS FAILURE. cause had to connect it with the graver incentives to discon- tent. The Administration found itself assailed at once by those who were jealous of the Tory monopoly of office and of power, by those who suffered from restrictive laws that fettered industry and crushed the popular voice, and by those who fancied that, in becoming the champions of a persecuted woman, they were resisting the high-handed tyranny of a profligate aristocracy that truckled to the Crown. The popular aspect of this opposition showed itself by the common and not very convincing expedient of public meetings. Such meetings had long ceased to form an ordin- ary part of the public life of Scotland. To hold them in the open air was, under the existing code, illegal; and the Administration were able to close the doors of most of the public halls against those who sought to use them for the purpose. At the end of 1820 the Lord Provost of Edinburgh was asked to summon a public meeting in order to petition the King to dismiss his Ministers. He refused to do so, but the Whig leaders determined to proceed without his sanction. The meeting was held on the 16th of December at the Pantheon, a large building ordinarily used as a circus, and it was attended by all the leading Whigs of the capital. Abundant ridicule was thrown upon the scheme, and Tory poetasters made merry over the unabashed lust for office which they assumed to be the chief incentive of the Whigs. The meeting was large and enthusiastic, but its very size made it unruly, and gave to the other party an easy oppor- tunity of deriding such an appeal to the mob in the interests, as was asserted, of selfish seekers after office. The meeting was, indeed, dominated chiefly by the Whig section of the Parliament House, whose professional jealousies, perhaps, did not very completely embody the deeply-rooted distrust which the nation felt for the Administration. The chair was occupied by James Moncriefl*, afterwards a judge of the Court of Session, and prominent parts were played by Jeffrey, Cock- burn, and Clerk, all of whom suffered personally from the domination of the Tories, and had something to hope from the triumph of the Whigs. But the speeches at the meeting found their echo in a wider audience out of doors, and a petition against the Ministry was signed with more than seventeen thousand names. The Edinburgh meeting was only one of many held all over Scotland, and no gibes or sarcasms of the Tories could hide the fact that the Govern- ment was face to face with a rising storm of popular dis- content. The days of that purblind Toryism which had marked the earlier period of Liverpool's Administration were WRANGLINGS OF THE PRESS. 513 numbered, and a demand for Reform which would not be gainsaid had asserted its indubitable force. Within a comparatively narrow circle the battle was mean- while raging fiercely. A literary war of unexampled bitter- ness was being carried on, and it soon proceeded to extremities, in which personal character was not spared, and from which there arose consequences revolting to the better feelings of society. The ' Edinburgh Review ' and ' Blackwood ' had, as we have seen, for some years been the rallying-points of either party. But numerous more or less reputable prints took part in the fray. During the preceding century many newspapers had been established in Scotland, and the three insignificant journals which existed at the Union had now increased by tenfold. Whatever their sympathies, however, they had scarcely assumed the guise of party organs; but in 1817 the 'Scotsman' was established as the champion of the Whig party. The 'Clydesdale Journal' was founded in the West of Scotland as the Tory organ; and in 1820 it began to appear in Glasgow under the name of the ' Sentinel.' Its attacks on the opposite party were fierce enough, but they were outdone by those of another paper founded in 1821 under the name of the ' Beacon.' Its ostensible editors were men of no position or mark, but it was supported both by the purses and the pens of men of greater weight whose contributions were secret. Its tone was truculent enough, and those attacked displayed a sensitiveness which public men have learned in later days to discard. First, Mr James Stuart of Dunearn, who was attacked by the paper, took the law into his own hands and caned the printer : in the street. A second object of vituperation, Mr James Gibson, appealed to the Lord Advocate, who denied partnership in the concern, but admitted that he himself and others had subscribed a bond pledging themselves to be responsible for its debts. This rash admission involved many leading Tories in the squabble, and the afiair went near to involving a name so honoured as that of Scott in a duel. The matter was arranged only by the withdrawal of the parties to the bond, and this virtual surrender led to the fall of the paper. But the venom of personal attacks continued with increased bitterness in the 'Sentinel.' Again the man most severely attacked was Mr Stuart of Dunearn, who was stigmatised as a coward in some verses which appeared in the paper. His anger now led him to institute proceedings against the publishers, one of whom saved himself from an action for libel by giving up the name of the writer, who was discovered 2k 514 THE OLDER TORYISM AND ITS FAILURE. to be Sir Alexander Boswell of Auchinleck, the son of Johnson's biographer. A duel was the consequence, and in it Boswell was killed. The death of a well-known and respected member of Edinburgh society awakened men's minds to the outrages to which political bitterness might lead, and gave a certain pause to the fiercest fighters. Men of self- respect sought to dissociate themselves from such scandals, and a certain self-restraint supervened, which tamed the thoughtless rancour of this guerilla warfare of the pen. But for the time the matter was judged solely on party lines. Stuart's second was the Earl of Rosslyn ; that of Boswell was Mr Douglas, afterwards Marquis of Queens- berry. Stuart was no practised shot, and the issue of the duel was unexpected. Few in that day were so opposed to the practice of duelling as to consider that Stuart's action merited punishment, and the general voice of society was not against him; but none the less the trial of Stuart for murder became in reality a party struggle, and his acquittal was a triumph for the Whigs. The Government now resorted to a means of reprisal which was at once bungling and undignified. It appeared that the two publishers of the 'Sentinel' had dissolved partner- ship ; that Borthwick — the betrayer of Boswell 's name — had agreed to relinquish his property on being recouped the money value of his partnership, and although the bargain had not been completed by the payment of the price, it was thought that an action for theft might lie against him for the abstraction of Boswell's manuscript. The action would at best have been founded upon a technicality, and however base was Borth wick's conduct — and of this no question can be raised — to indict him upon such a charge came perilously near to persecution. However that might be, the Government did not even show the courage of hold- ing to the course which they had chosen. They vacillated, changed their tactics, and eventually abandoned the prosecu- tion. The matter was made the subject of an animated debate in Parliament, where the conduct of the law officers was impugned by Mr Abercromby, and a condemnatory motion was rejected by a narrow majority of twenty-five. So fierce was the spirit aroused, that the debate almost led to a duel between Mr Abercromby and the Advocate Depute, and this was prevented only by the arrest of the advocates, who were summoned to the bar of the House and compelled to make an apology. The whole proceedings raised a ferment which it was THE OFFICE OF LORD ADVOCATE ASSAILED. 515 hard to appease, and amongst other consequences they led to a bitter attack upon the powers of the Lord Advocate. That officer had by various circumstances concentrated enormous prerogatives in his hands. He exercised by pre- scriptive right almost all the authority of the Adminis- tration in Scotland. He represented the powers of the ancient Privy Council of Scotland; and by recent usage he joined in himself not only a large mass of legal pre- rogatives, but was at the same time the sole repository, so far as the Scottish people were concerned, of the power of the Crown in Scotland. The extent of his authority had long been a matter of gibe and sarcasm. On one occasion it was announced that all the great officers of State had left in a single coach for Scotland; and after an imposing string of titles, it was added that the coach contained only one person — the Lord Advocate. But these sarcasms now became concentrated in a deliberate attack upon the office. The Whigs made this a party cry, but it had enough of speciousness to induce Sir Robert Peel, who was now Home Secretary in place of Lord Sidmouth, to make some inquiry on the subject and to ask for a report from the judges. Their report was adverse to any change, but the matter was none the less urged in the 'Edinburgh Review.' One of the most strenuous advocates for a change was Henry Cockburn; but his views were modified when, at a later day, the office fell to his own party. It was a strange error of tactics on the part of the Whigs that they urged, not the substitution of a purely political officer for the Lord Advocate, but that the administration of Scotland should be centralised in the hands of the Home Secretary. It was only a part of that short-sighted policy which made them belittle the national independence of their country, and, in their fear of the influence of the Dundas family, pre- fer that the symbol of that independence should be destroyed rather than that it should be in their opponent's hands. They lived to repent such tactics. Matters such as these, however, after all only affected a comparatively small section of the population. The Op- position had, in the flowing tide of popular discontent, a lever far more powerful than that which was supplied by the petty feuds of the Parliament House. The older type of Toryism was swept away by irresistible forces stronger than those of any faction. A change came over the spirit of Lord Liverpool's Administration. The place of those who represented only the dull and torpid weight of selfish Tory- 516 THE OLDER TORYISM AND ITS FAILURE. ism was taken by the statesmanship of Canning and of Peel. Inert resistance was no longer deemed to be the sovereign and infallible antidote to disaffection. We have now to see the beginnings of various plans — partial indeed and imperfect, but none the less honest in intention — for removing the causes of popular discontent, and setting right the grievances by which the time was out of joint. 517 CHAPTER XX. LARGER AIMS IN POLITICS AND IN THE CHURCH. It is hard to say to what length resistance might have been pushed by the mere inert weight of a dead, unintelli- gent repression, in the hands of a party whose political horizon was bounded by the aim of maintaining obsolete privilege. The Tory party rested, in the earlier decades of the nineteenth century, not upon its ostensible leaders, but upon a vein of sentiment and feeling which pervaded the country, and which led abler and more honest men to cast in their lot with it. That sentiment was fed upon tradition, upon distrust of the catchwords and parrot-cries of the Whig Reformers, upon patriotic zeal and the memory of a long and heroic struggle, and upon profound hatred for Revolutionary propaganda. It was not disposed to be too critical of the methods which the responsible Government followed in checking that propaganda. It respected the law and did not identify its assertion with persecution. It hated those who sought to belittle England, or who shrank from the Imperial task which it fell to her to dis- charge. Above all, in Scotland it was inspired by national feeling, and detested anything which seemed to obliterate national traditions. There was in that party much which needed only enlightened statesmanship to give it force and energy, and even the boldness necessary for political advance. To such statesmanship the nation would have been ready to forgive some severity in repressive measures. But that by no means proves that it did not perceive that some reform was necessary, and that it would not have been willing to follow courageous and enlightened leaders upon a path of wise and moderate improvement of political conditions. As things were, the Tory party was uneasy and disturbed. The wisest heads in that party saw that repression might be carried too far. They perceived, only too clearly, that no 518 LARGER AIMS IN POLITICS AND IN THE CHURCH. one had arisen to grasp the reins that had fallen from Pitt's hands. They hated the glib and self-satisfied creed of the Whig faction, but they in their hearts distrusted still more the blindness of those who believed that Reform was to be met by an obstinate refusal to read the signs of the times. After the death of Castlereagh, the Government of which Lord Liverpool was the nominal head began to wear an aspect quite different from that which it had previously borne. Liverpool continued in office, but only because his was the most convenient name under which various elements could be grouped. His weakness could excite no jealousy. The state of matters was one which would appear strange under the rules which now operate in regard to the soli- darity of a Government. We would find it difficult to imagine how Ministers, divided upon essential points, should continue to hold office together, and how the members of the same Administration should be in discord over a matter so essential as that of Catholic Emancipation. But in fact the spirit of the Government had changed, and the odd divergence of its members on leading features of policy was, for the moment, no unhealthy symptom of the working of the new and more liberal ideas that were making their way slowly but surely. Peel and Canning made government in Scotland possible; the continuance of Castlereagh's influence might have converted it into another Ireland. The Cabinet now contained men whose statesman- ship was founded upon principles and upon ideas, and who were not merely the representatives of a narrow and selfish clique. Their general policy was liberal in the best sense of the word. They differed upon several fundamental topics, but they were at one in the desire to redress griev- ances, to govern the country for the country's good, and to judge political questions by a standard altogether different from that of selfish class interest. Into the general tendency of their administration it is not our business here to enter; we have to attend only to its eflect on Scottish politics. Outwardly the change in the spirit of the Administration produced no very distinct alteration in the position of parties in Scotland. The office of Lord Advocate remained in the same hands. There was on the part of the ruling party the same unwillingness to adopt reforms without [due caution, the same dislike of innovation, and, in deference to feelings which were deeply rooted in many of their sup- porters, the same hesitation to grant concessions which would alter the fundamental features of the Constitution. NEW IDEAS OF REFORM. 519 But the influence of those who resisted reform became less, and they were compelled to admit light on one after another of the dark places of Scottish administration. A spirit was arising in Scotland, not in the narrow arena of political faction, but amongst her leading men on both sides, which was in sympathy with the higher tone of English statesmanship, and which was bringing about a new era in her administration. The struggle in the Parlia- ment House continued with all the bitterness of selfish ambition and with all the virulence of personal animosity, but the spirit which prevailed throughout the nation was being essentially transformed. Already, as we have seen, the venerable monument of the Supreme Court of Judicature had undergone considerable changes. It was now the subject of further modifications. The manner in which political trials were conducted had greatly improved during the last generation, and we can no longer find instances of the grim and drastic humour which travestied justice, and which alternately shocks and amuses those accustomed to the more decent procedure of modern times. But abuses still remained. Amongst these was the method of selecting juries, which left them virtually to the choice of the presiding judge. In 1821 an alteration of the law in this respect was proposed, by which the juries were to be chosen by ballot. The Bill failed in that session, but in 1822, after being opposed by the Lord Advocate, it was passed in a modified form, with the support of the Home Secretary, and by the operation of the new Act a certain number of per- emptory challenges was secured to the prisoner. The proposal for ballot was again put forward in 1824, and although then defeated, it was carried, as a Ministerial measure, by the second Lord Melville. It could not any longer be averred that the Tory party was rigidly opposed to all reform. In the session of 1824 a Bill was introduced by the Home Secretary for a remodelling of the judicature, founded upon the report of Commissioners who had been appointed in 1823. The century so far had seen great changes in the Court of Session — the chief monument of Scottish independence, and at the same time the chief centre of time-honoured abuses. In 1808 the Court had been divided into two divisions, and the old conclave of the fifteen judges had come to an end. In 1815 juries had been introduced in civil cases. The method of choosing juries in criminal trials had quite recently been changed so as to lessen the power of the judges. Now a change was to be introduced into procedure. The Commis- sion consisted not of Scotsmen only, but included English 520 LARGER AIMS IN POLITICS AND IN THE CHURCH. members, whose presence might well have excited some national prejudices. Their report was sweeping, and their recommendations, which tended to the shortening of procedure, and to greater finality of judgments, roused much searching of heart amongst those who had battened on the old abuses. Those interested against the changes were able once more to get up an apparent agitation in Scotland against the measure, and it was abandoned for the time. The next session, how- ever, saw it placed upon the statute-book.^ Meanwhile other topics had again commanded attention. The question of Burgh reform was stubbornly fought on both sides. The abuses of the system were only too evident ; and in 1822 the Lord Advocate was forced, in deference to the con- viction on both sides that reform was necessary, to introduce a measure for giving a jurisdiction over the burgh accounts to the Court of Exchequer, while leaving untouched the glar- ing abuse of self -election by the magistrates. Instead of ap- peasing, that Bill only stimulated the ardour of those who pressed for sweeping reform. The stronghold of privilege was being rudely assailed, and the days of its triumph were numbered. The larger question of Parliamentary reform, which was destined to revolutionise the Constitution, was now in the air. Whatever might be the arguments for such reform in England, they were of tenfold strength in Scotland. The wisest heads amongst statesmen might view that question with alarm, and might see in it the seeds of revolution ; but they were not likely, in face of such a question, to attach undue importance to the comparatively provincial topics of minor reforms in Scotland, or to spend their force in defend- ing abuses in which only a narrow and selfish clique were interested. One by one these abuses were assailed, and only a half-hearted defence of them was attempted. The gust of popular opinion was now blowing more freely, and was scat- tering the dust of long-established usage, which seemed to be venerable only because it had slumbered undisturbed so long. When Canning became Prime Minister upon the death of Liverpool, this tendency became still more marked, and to many in Scotland it seemed as if a Whig Ministry had really taken the place of the Tories. The Lord Advocate remained the same, but the powers of his office were for the time effaced. Lord Melville, who had long exercised much of the influence which he had inherited from his more strenuous father, now ceased to do so, and Scottish business was intrusted to the new Home Secretary, Lord Lansdowne, who was to act with the advice of three men who were avowed adherents of the Whig 1 6 Geo. IV. cap. 120. THE MINISTRY OF CANNING. 521 party — Lord Minto, Abercromby, and Kennedy of Dunure. It may be doubted whether such an arrangement, which dis- sipated responsibility and tended greatly to increase the pernicious influence of any factious clique, was a sound or wholesome one. It aroused a certain suspicion and distrust, but, on the whole, the Ministry of Canning commanded the support of all that was best in Scotland, and the blessings that it might have brought to the country were none the less considerable because it was not too closely identified with the triumph of the comparatively narrow Whig clique in the Par- liament House, which claimed to have a monopoly of poli- tical foresight, and to be the sole defender of popular rights. Greater changes were soon to be proposed, and on the imperial question of Parliamentary reform Scotland was to be split into opposite camps, corresponding to those which divided England. But for the moment it appeared as if the keen party fights which had raged in Scotland for more than thirty years, with a bitterness in inverse proportion to the arena on which they were fought, were to be hushed in a common desire to have done with effete usage and with the worn-out lumber of political abuses. Even the contact with the large political arena of England was not without its effect in this direction, and it is noteworthy that we find Scott impressed strongly by the fact that all the little divisions which held men asunder in Scotland, and labelled them under party names, were less marked and produced less bitterness of animosity in London than upon the floor of Parliament House. Political animosity is never so keen as when it divides a profession, and is stim- ulated by rival claims to the prizes of that profession ; and this is precisely what happened in the legal circles of the Scottish capital. It was this element of professional jealousy which gave a false and misleading colour to the political history of the country during the first thirty years of the last century. With the Whigs no wickedness or folly was too great to be ascribed to their opponents. It was their constant assump- tion — an assumption which grew to be a cardinal article of the Whig creed — that the long domination of the Tories in Scotland led naturally to the swing of the pendulum which brought power to the Whigs, long trodden under foot, but ever struggling to raise the standard of political virtue. On the side of the Whigs, we are often told, there was all the ability, all the vital energy, and all the political virtue of the nation : their opponents were wedded to privilege, and for more than a generation had owed their supremacy to nothing but the prevalence of dull routine, to the fictitious nervous- 522 LARGER AIMS IN POLITICS AND IN THE CHURCH. ness of Revolution which they were able to inspire, to the warlike enthusiasm which they kindled by the pomp and circumstance of the parade-ground, and to the fact that they were the dispensers of the loaves and fishes of promotion. These are hardly very adequate explanations when we come to examine them. It seems to be forgotten that the prevail- ing spirit amongst the Moderates and Tories, whatever else it was, was certainly not predominantly one of dulness and routine. On the contrary, they had managed to infect Scottish life with an almost undue spice of sprightliness and vivacity, and to shake with a surprising and refreshing roughness some very inveterate habits of routine and conven- tional solemnity. The displays of the parade-ground were hardly likely to throw a glamour over the eyes of a nation not prone to scenic effect, nor were attacks on property apt to rouse undue nervousness amongst a people the great majority of whom could indulge in the proverbial laugh of the poor when confronted by the robber. The truth is that the triumph of the Moderates, who, for all practical purposes, may be said to have formed the soundest element in the Tory party, had been due to the inevitable reaction against the severe sanctimonious rule of the Covenanting spirit. Human nature could not stand such a prolonged strain, and several concurrent influences tended to encourage the reaction. Crushed, defeated, and discouraged as it was, the Jacobite leaven had nevertheless permeated the nation, and more zest was given to it by the fact that it seemed to reflect the national spirit that still chafed against the Union. A small but singularly powerful intellectual society, which cherished national traditions and was imbued with the " kindly " spirit of the Scot, made dexterous use of this prevailing feeling. The grip of the landed aristocracy on the heart of Scotland was strong, and, in spite of the selfishness and greed which often marked its economical action, it did not lose its in- fluence by withdrawing itself from a homely sympathy with other classes, even while it retained its pride of birth and its tenacity of the privileges — sometimes the empty privileges — of rank. The strength of the Tories lay in their close sym- pathy with the mass of the nation, as exemplified in the char- acter and career of such a man as Henry Dundas; and that strength was far too great to be swept away by a small polit- ical clique of smart Whig writers, who sought their allies largely to the south of the Tweed, and who prided themselves upon being superior to the provincial prejudices of their own people. The influences which sapped the foundations of the Tory supremacy lay far deeper and appealed by more power- RELIGIOUS REVIVAL. 523 ful motives to the national character. These influences came from different, almost from contrary, sources. In the first place, the Tories carried down from the days of the Moderates a certain mood, half cynical and half humorous, which inevit- ably made them cling less closely to old prejudices. They had associated freely with the society of the English capital, and were mellowed by the association. As the danger from abroad passed away, and the tension of men's minds was less, a general softening of political asperities supervened, and the bitterness of faction became less, except within the small circle of aspiring placemen. Movements towards reform found a certain sympathy in both parties. It seemed as if a fusion might take place, and towards the close of the period of which we are treating the Government of Canning seemed to be based on such a fusion. Something else than the mere selfishness of privilege was now the motive power in politics. But by far the most important of the influences which now began to affect Scotland was of a very different kind, and came from the religious revival. Again and again through- out the previous century the old religious spirit had attempted to reassert itself, to impose a strict system of ethics, to rekindle strong enthusiasm, to bring back the Church to the purer ideal of primitive independence, and to a stricter view of orthodox belief. Each such attempt had led, so far, not to a change within the Church itself, but to a new secession from her fold. Such secessions had not been based in any case upon the preaching of new doctrines or upon the assump- tion of new liberty, but had been resolutely directed to the restoring of some old doctrine or the furbishing anew of some crumbling carved work in the pinnacles of the ecclesiastical temple. For a time, and over a restricted area in the West, the old Covenanting spirit had welcomed the religious revival as imported from England under the influence of Whitfield; but it was soon found that an invincible barrier of orthodoxy divided him from the Scottish sects, and he neither under- stood nor appreciated the wire-drawn subtleties upon which their religious enthusiasm rested. The religious revival was to be of Scottish growth, and was to find in Scottish soil the genius that was to give it force and influence. The descend- ants of the High-flying party began to reassert themselves, and, under the vigorous and racy, if somewhat boisterous and demagogic, generalship of the Reverend Andrew Thomson, they recovered much of their influence over the heart of the nation. But the main part in this new movement was to be taken by a spirit touched to finer issues and with far more 524 LARGER AIMS IN POLITICS AND IN THE CHURCH. expansive sympathies. The predominating influence in the Scotland of the new generation was that of Thomas Chalmers. His personality and his career are not of bio- graphical interest alone : they were the expression of a national force — perverted indeed, and misrepresented by many of the movements to which his consummate energy gave rise, but none the less distinct in the enthusiastic support it gave to the spirit of nationality, and powerful in its personal influence. Of no man is the biography more] clearly the reflection of the various phases through which the national spirit passed, and to none was it given to leave the imprint of his character more indelibly on the nation's history during his own generation. We may trace errors in that career, and we may regret some of its results, but it is none the less part and parcel of the nation's life, and brings no little lustre to her history. Thomas Chalmers was born in 1780. His family had in previous generations given more than one minister of respect- able position to the Church, but his father and grandfather were merchants of fair standing at Easter Anstruther in Fife, a county which has contributed not a few notable names to Scottish annals. He was one of a family of nine sons and five daughters, all educated under the patriarchal sway which was still to be found in Scottish homes, and which gave a sturdiness of character altogether unlike anything which blind parental tyranny would have inspired. His father combined with a zealous Conservatism in politics a strict adherence to the Calvinistic tenets, and an earnest cast of religious principle which in his earlier years rather galled the exuberant spirits and daring independence of his son, although it neither lessened his respect nor impaired the warmth of his aflection. The temperament of that son was one of vigour and intensity ; his temper was keen, his humanity and his enjoyment of life fervid and impetuous, and in his earlier years he leant towards the liberal view of ethics which characterised the Moderates. He held a vigor- ous attention to secular interests, and a combative assertion of secular rights, to be in no way incompatible with the proper discharge of ministerial duties. Although he early chose the clerical calling as that which attracted him most, he did not allow it to blind him to other interests, and he threw himself with vigorous earnestness, and under the stimulus of a keen ambition, into the pursuit of mathe- matical science and of literary distinction. In later days he looked back with bitter regret to what he came afterwards to regard as undue latitude of opinion and culpable laxity in THOMAS CHALMERS, D.D. THOMAS CHALMERS. 625 religious fervour. There is nothing in the record of these early years inconsistent with a high sense of duty and a whole-hearted devotion to the sacred office ; but it was com- bined with something which, as compared with his later attitude, seemed lax and worldly, and far beneath the lofty standard of ethics and of religious zeal which he desired to impose upon his native exuberance of temper. It is charac- teristic of him that, with all his keenness of intellectual effort, he found the teaching of Dugald Stewart tame and jejune, and that the calm and balanced platitudes of that professor, which a more complacent and self-satisfied majority deemed to be the products of consummate philosophical wisdom, repelled his sympathy and strained his patience. His grasp of mathematical truths and of applied science was rather vigorous and effective than profound or exact, but he brought to both an ardent imagination, which gave to these pursuits a vividness of interest that absorbed his enthusiastic energy. To his eyes they were coloured with a brilliancy and an attractiveness which they assume only for ^ few. It was to these pursuits that his attention was chiefly devoted, and in them that he hoped to find the best outlet for his ambition. He had early found employment in connection with the teaching of mathematics at St Andrews University, and he was firmly resolved that his clerical calling should not in- terfere with his work in this field. But his popularity as a teacher — a popularity due to his marvellous powers of exposi- tion and to the rich vein of imagination which clothed his conception of scientific truths — was resented by the duller but more authorised representatives of the Faculty, and he found himself thrust aside with little ceremony by men to whom his genius was something of a reproach. The repulse fretted his ambition, and it assumed, in his eyes, the appear- ance of a slur upon his profession. His pride taught him to believe that that profession ought not to yield place, even in secular eminence, to any such ignoble jealousy, and there was no conscious personal feeling in his determined resistance to the restriction which it was sought to place upon him. He pressed his rights to the verge of insubordination, and seemed to take a delight, which might be undisciplined, but was far from ignoble, in flouting the pretensions of older and duller men. As an extra-mural teacher, he gathered audiences that shamed the University professors; and it was in the char- acter of a champion of the Church that he stood forth as the sturdy assertor of his own independence. This phase of his life soon passed away, but it left as an inheritance a dislike and disdain of that aspect of Moderation which was, above 526 LARGER AIMS IN POLITICS AND IN THE CHURCH. all, dominant in the University of St Andrews ; and that dis- like assumed the importance, at a later day, of a far-reaching episode in the history of the Moderate party, and as such coloured the subsequent history of his country. He was yet a very young man when he became the ordained minister of Kilmany. From thence he went to Glasgow to be minister of the Tron Church in 1815; in 1818 he was transferred to the newly-founded parish of St John's in that city; from there he went back to St Andrews, in 1823, as Professor of Moral Philosophy; and in 1828 he became Professor of Divinity in Edinburgh University, where he remained until the Disruption in 1843. Such is the brief record of the outward episodes of his career. It is rather, however, -with the phases of his thought and his activity, and with the degree to which these influenced or reflected the nation's history during his generation, that we are concerned. Chalmers at first belonged to the Moderate party in the Church, and he was, even more decidedly, a strong adherent of Conservative thought, as he conceived it. But his cer- tainly was not the Conservatism of privilege or of reaction. He disliked Radicalism for its secular taint, for its defective appreciation of national characteristics, for its proneness to substitute socialistic methods for the individualism which his innate love of freedom craved as a necessity of his being. His Moderatism, however, was short-lived. He had been attracted to that party because it gave a wider range to clerical activity, because it asserted individual liberty, because it based the rights of the Church on the sound foundation of the law, and pressed the privileges and the independence which were hers by reason of her alliance with the State. The Moderate party had done great things for Scotland, and it found its adherents amongst the brightest intellects of the Church. It had been amply justified in its fight against what it believed to be concessions to fanaticism, and against a narrow and formal code of ethics. But Moderatism was essentially unfitted to deal with the problems of the new generation, when the rapid increase of wealth and of popu- lation was accompanied by increasing poverty and discontent, with all their baffling problems that craved solution. To all the landmarks of national history Chalmers was passionately attached — to the Church, to the Crown, to the hereditary aristocracy. They appealed to his imagination and his patriotism ; they were opposed to the doctrinaire radicalism which his soul hated, and which he thought degrading to the moral fibre ; and they seemed to him in no way incom- HIS TEMPERAMENT. 527 patible with that attachment and sympathy between class and class in which he placed his ideal of social happiness. A monotonous identity of rank and interest would have been distasteful to him ; the hereditary distinctions enshrined to him a part of the nation's history which he would not wish to see obliterated. He would certainly not have recognised the name; he would most probably have scouted the idea; but Chalmers' political standpoint was none the less much nearer than he knew to the type that it is the fashion in our own day to classify under the name of Tory democracy — to its enemies a laughing-stock, to its friends the embodiment of a generous ideal. It is typical of Chalmers, and it lends additional interest to his career, that he had to maintain, even when his reli- gious opinions assumed a more sombre cast, a constant struggle against certain vigorous impulses of his nature which he dreaded as too secular. He was full of enjoyment of life ; keenly alive to all its interests ; drawn irresistibly into its contests ; fighting for his convictions with a passion- ate love of the combat. In his earlier days he had been an ardent volunteer; he spoke of himself as one for whom the military career would have been most to his taste ; his pulpit eloquence burst forth in almost extravagant defiances to the foreign foe who threatened our liberties, and on one occasion, we are told, he prayed that the day which saw the fall of British independence might be his last. Literary distinction was the aim of his early ambition ; and the very ring of his oratory had much of the secular about it. He had a passion- ate love of nature, and clothed it with a halo of romance. But with all this he was constantly on his guard against these tendencies, and suspicious of their hold upon him. The enthusiasm of his nature made him dread lest they should make the light of religious fervour burn more dimly, and perhaps also lest they should be misunderstood by his later religious associates. With no conscious dissimulation, he was nevertheless constantly inclined to find a religious motive for impulses and energies which did him no dishonour, and if he could not find it, to distrust and battle with them. The struggle did not render him less lovable or less sincere. It was in this mood that, as his conception of duty deepened and his ideal of the clerical profession rose more high, he broke away from the Moderate party and threw himself with fervour into what he had before thought " the drivelling fanaticism " of the Evangelical school. The real distinction between him and others of his party was that he combined the new light of re- 528 LARGER AIMS IN POLITICS AND IN THE CHURCH. ligious enthusiasm with an ardent conservatism. The New- Light party had been in sympathy with Whiggism, and under that influence had verged towards Dissent. Chalmers' attitude seemed based on a new conception. In the ardour of his attachment to the Church and to the Constitution he knew no bounds. While he would admit no taint of latitudinarianism, he would confine himself by no narrow- ness of sympathy. He bated no jot of the legal privileges of the Church ; but he would keep her lamp burning with a religious enthusiasm no less consuming than that of the most fervid Dissenter, inflamed with the zeal of a new- found sectarianism. It was an attitude which a few years before would have appeared absolutely impossible; that it now found such an exponent was the chief feature of the generation. It was, of course, upon the resistless power of his eloquence that his influence chiefly rested. The echoes of oratorical prowess are apt to wax faint as the spoken word withdraws into the past, and becomes only a tradition; and we are then inclined to accuse a preceding generation of undue bias and of a lack of criti- cal discrimination, when we recall its enthusiastic praises of the achievements of eloquence which called forth its admiration and stirred its pulse. But the testimony as to Chalmers' power is too strong to admit of doubt or cavil. Of the usual physical aids to eloquence he possessed none. His voice was poor, his accent provincial, his gesture mon- otonous, and even his eye lacked fire and was veiled by a heavy eyelid. The first impression upon his hearers was often unfavourable, and even when he had warmed to his theme his expressions were sometimes uncouth and harsh. How much of this was due to the unconscious art of the orator who learns to touch the chords at first with an uncertain hand and so enhances the later effect, we can- not now say. To many the eloquence of Chalmers as read, seems to have something of superficiality, and un- doubtedly he essayed subjects of scientific and of philo- sophical interest where he had neither the learning nor the dialectic power to be more than a popular exponent whose flow of language foams with the turgidity of a shallow stream. But this need not blind us to his genius and his skill. There was something about the cast of his oratory that was peculiarly secular; at times we fancy ourselves reading a debating speech by Burke or Sheridan; the sentences at their best flow with an easy cadence, and are enriched by copious imagery and by skilful use of antithesis. Humour, sarcasm, dexterous allusion, the keen HIS WORK IN POOB RELIEF. 529 shafts of irony and indignation, are blended in their com- position ; but while the qualities are there which would have commanded attention at the Bar or in the Senate, the effect and force of the whole is redoubled by the pervading power of religious enthusiasm. A pulpit orator has at all events this advantage, that, unlike other speakers, he may always rely upon the heart-whole sympathy of the vast majority of his audience. This is too apt to engender platitudes; with such genius as that of Chalmers it gives to the ring and movement of the orator the easy swing and sovereign force of an impetuous stream. It was this which gave to him unrivalled sway over his countrymen. The chief work in which Chalmers engaged when in Glasgow, and which helped largely to decide his attitude towards the questions and parties of his time, was the attempt to solve the social problem of poverty, and of its increase alongside of advancing national wealth. He sought to give it a religious aspect. He chafed at the secular avocations which crowded upon his ministerial duties. He tried to find religious grounds for each of his theories of political economy. All this involves some- thing of a fallacy; but in the case of Chalmers it had none of the moral weakness of a fallacy. Mistaken he might be, but the earnestness of his effort never to rest without some religious impulse to fortify his ideas, gave them a sincerity and a force in which their real value lies. The problem with which he sought to deal was that of Poor Relief in the case of a new, a populous, and an over- crowded city parish. The Scottish system of poor relief was a matter of slow and indigenous growth. At first the only aid given to the poor was that which rested upon certain social customs varying with each locality. In some parishes the Yule-tide gifts were gathered by a band of volun- teer collectors, and distributed amongst the poor. There was a wide prevailing custom of mutual help. The mar- riage of a young couple in humble circumstances was an opportunity for levying contributions on the neighbours to establish them with the necessaries of life. To smooth the anxieties of old age, the locality would contribute to pro- vide grave-clothes, and so secure for those ending their lives the prospect of a decent burial. A class of licensed bedesmen were enrolled, and custom had given them a sanction almost equal to that of statute law. Certain days and certain hours of the day were recognised in many towns as reserved for the operations of the tolerated beggars ; as long as the exactions were not unduly strained, 2 L 530 LARGER AIMS IN POLITICS AND IN THE CHURCH. the custom was not resented by the fairly well-to-do. As population increased, however, begging became more closely associated with crime and degradation, and there were efforts to repress it; but these efforts were often hesitating, and had to encounter some determined opposition from those who found in the old customs a relic of neigh- bourliness and mutual helpfulness which they would fain preserve. So far as there was any organised administration of funds for the poor, it was in the hands of the ecclesiastical authority. In 1597 this was entrusted to the kirk-session. In 1672 there was a discretionary power given to levy an assessment; but even though the heritors were com- bined with the kirk -session in raising funds, their dis- tribution rested with the latter. In the last decade of the eighteenth century the ratio of the enrolled poor — even although the imposition of an assessment had been common for fifty years — was still very moderate. In 1791 it was only eighteen for each thousand of the pop- ulation, as compared with forty - eight in England. In the first quarter of the present century it increased con- siderably; but there was still a widespread unwillingness to follow the lax example of England. It was only when discontent and altered social conditions forced the problem on men's attention that the necessity of action one way or another was felt. The necessity became more urgent year by year, and at length, in 1840, it forced on an official inquiry, the fruit of which was seen in the Poor Law of 1845. But by many Scotsmen that issue of the long struggle was looked upon with deep and lasting regret, as a degradation of the nation's independence, and a distinct premium upon unthriftiness and waste. The work of Chalmers in this field twenty years before this consummation was reached represents an attempt by other, and, as he conceived, higher, agencies to stave off the evil of a universal poor-rate. This is not the place to describe with minuteness of detail the scheme by which Chalmers proposed to deal with the poor of his own parish of St John's. Its general features are, however, of considerable interest. He based his plan on his own reading of the lessons of political economy, and if that reading was not strictly scientific, and bore — perhaps too strongly to let it serve as a gauge of the proper application of economical laws — the impress of his own emotions and his own convictions as to what was for the ultimate good of humanity, it is none the less OPPOSITION TO A POOR RATE. 531 attractive on that account. His leading aim was to trust to men themselves to work out their own salvation, and to rescue them from outside agency which would limit their independence, restrict their liberty, and weaken their moral fibre. He detested the idea of an assessment for poor relief, and he assailed it from every side, and with the most diverse weapons. It checked the flow of gener- osity and of mutual helpfulness, and thus starved the best instincts of human nature. It broke with the mem- ories of the past, and created a rough breach in the tradi- tion of Scotland. It made men into machines, and effaced their feeling of a common brotherhood. For the benefit of the economist he urged its extravagance, as proved by the contrast between England and Scotland in the past, and by the somewhat unconvincing comparison between what his own impetuous ardour and personal influence could achieve in a single parish with what was done by official agency over the wide arena of England. It was, he asserted, false to human nature because it sought to develop character by means of a modicum of comfort, whereas character must be the starting-point, and comfort not its source but its result. He wished to keep at a distance all official agencies, and all statutory remedies. But there was a special feature in his scheme which marks his attitude in ecclesi- astical matters. He determined to work on the old paro- chial system, and to induce each parish, which he held to be represented by the congregation of that parish, to recog- nise its own responsibility, and to exercise its own energy in coping with the difficulty in its midst. Chalmers' ideal would really have made of the Church congregation an ever active and powerful agency of economical admin- istration. The Church was not merely to be a religious teacher, it was to gather into its own hand the social organisation of the parish, and to be the motive power in its civil administration. His idea of an Established Church was not Erastian; it was not based upon any high notion of hierarchical authority; it was parochial in its essence, and he had no sympathy with the conception of the Church as a vast agency dominated by central discipline. But it was none the less an extended and ambitious scheme of ecclesiastical polity. To him the Church was not necessarily the authoritative exponent of the Truth, possessing an intrinsic claim to obedience as the guardian and divinely appointed receptacle of true doctrine; it was rather an agency for spreading the truth, 532 LARGER AIMS IN POLITICS AND IN THE CHURCH. to be judged and tested by the energy and learning and sincerity of its clergy — not by their ecclesiastical authority. It was to be a guide, a living influence, an ever active ally of the State, sharing in the task of economical administra- tion, and exercising its influence in every social question. In his conception its task was a great, a proud, and a dig- nitied one; and yet it was to achieve it, not as possess- ing any inherited authority, but by its own living energy. The growth of new sects, the spread of religious dissent, the rivalries that such dissent produced, Chalmers was ready to ignore. To many phases of the new sects, to much of their doctrine and many of their principles, he was in no way radically opposed, but rather hoped that they would stimulate the Church by a healthy rivalry. Other phases of religious doctrine he looked upon as dis- tinctly wrong, but against these he would not show intoler- ance, not because he judged them leniently, but because he had no doubt of the ultimate triumph of the Church. If her own energy did not enable her to hold her place, some other agency, more true to the high calling which he held to be hers, would assume the task and maintain the truth. That agency would be the most active, the most sincere, the most faithful, the most self-sacrificing: by its energy, not by its authority, it would hold its place. If the State ignored it, the loss would be that of the State, and not that of the Church. Its identity from age to age, its traditions and its inherited authority, its apostolical succession, its hierarchical claims, all these meant little to him. But a State which should ignore the religious prin- ciple was to him no State at all. That Church which was most living and most energetic, which rose most completely to the height of its task, that Church and that alone was the real palladium of the religious prin- ciple ; and for it he would claim all the endowments, all the authority which the State could confer, and all the reverence which it was bound to show. It is a peculiar ideal of a Church establishment, and one to which, perhaps, only a minority of the adherents of Church establishment in our own day would subscribe. It is doubtful whether it took sufiicient account of the ever - shifting phases of the national attitude towards religion. But it was a manly and bold theory, and it served admirably to inspire his own enthusiasm, and to give earnestness to his own un- tiring activity and devotion. This was the central inspiration of his own efforts in organising poor relief. The Church was to combat the ills HIS WORK IN ST JOHN's PARISH. 533 of poverty by raising the moral standard of society. It was by its congregational agencies to be the dispenser of a free charity, from which each man would keep aloof only at his own peril. Its aid was not to be restricted to those of its own creed ; but such {liberality was to rest not upon any abstract theory as to the equal rights of all forms of belief, but upon a sure confidence that the truth must prevail, and that all variations from it were in their nature evanescent and doomed to decay. To such a man as Chalmers, success, within the range of his own activity, was almost certain, and in his own parish, so long as he remained as its administrator, and even while the impress of his own personality as a great figure in the Scottish world was felt, that success was assured. It was in 1818 that he changed from the Tron Church, one of the old city parishes of Glasgow, to the newly established parish of St John's. Up to that time the administration of poor relief was singularly ill-organised. There were two sources of that relief: first, the Church collection, administered, on the recommendation of the kirk-session of each Church, by the General Session, consisting of all the ministers and elders of the city. When their resources failed they were supple- mented by the town hospital, which administered the legal assessment. This plan effectually crushed all independence, and it was singularly extravagant. Those who admitted the paupers to the roll, in the first instance, were responsible only for their own funds, and when these were exhausted they were able to hand on the poor whom they had placed on the pauper roll to the unrestricted purse of the town hospital. They had no motive to be strict in placing names on the pauper roll, seeing that they were responsible only for a small proportion of their cost. Such a system sapped all legitimate strictness, and produced a stream that was swollen by the laxity of the first admission, and by the ease with which the burden was handed on. Chalmers came to a clear understanding with the Town Council — an understanding which was ratified by the Court of Session — that the poor of St John's should be dealt with separately, and that the parish of St John's should assume the whole responsibility for them. His first principle was the strengthening of the parochial system. With him that was hereditary, as it was, indeed, linked with all that was most characteristic of the Scottish spirit. So strongly had his father adhered to this principle that he had refused to go to a church within a stone's throw of his own parish, even when his son was to officiate in it. The parish was to him, 534 LARGER AIMS IN POLITICS AND IN THE CHURCH. as it was to most Scotsmen, a mere extension of the family- principle — as strong in its bonds, and as supreme in its command of his affections. To Chalmers, it seemed that the most effective way of combating the difficulties of the great towns with their gathering crowds of population, and their seething social difficulties, was the parochial system, that had given its impress to the country districts. The parish was to bear its own responsibilities, and was to reap the benefit of its own economies. It was to stimulate independence, to promote mutual help, to cultivate sedulously the germ of a pride of character, that grew best in the wholesome soil of neighbourly sympathy. What was saved — and much was saved — in the relief of pauperism was to be spent on the establishment of parish schools. These schools were to be cheap but not to be free ; and they were to be open to all — rich and poor alike. Their object was not to be that of raising men out of their station, but that of making them worthy citizens whatever their station might be. His ideal was that of a nation where even the humblest might be enriched by what was more than outward wealth — where intellectual pleasures were to be the common inheritance of all — not a mere machinery for the redress of social inequal- ities. These last Chalmers held of comparatively small moment, and he regarded their abolition as the day-dream of whimsical theorists. His object was, as he himself put it, "not to raise men in the artificial scale of life, but to raise them on that far nobler scale which has respect to the virtues of mind, and the prospects of immortality. It is to confer a truer dignity upon each than if the crown of an earthly potentate was bestowed upon him." It might suit political theorists to speak of this as a Utopia; to the mind of Chalmers it was a real and practical aim, which his own earnestness and enthusiasm enabled him to foresee in vivid realisation. But, alas for the ultimate success of his scheme, and for the hopes of Scotland, the current of feeling and of political party was all against him. For a time the scheme succeeded. Its economy was amazing. The poor-law administration of the district, which had before cost £1400 a -year, sank to £280, and it was not only easily met by the congregational funds, but left a handsome surplus out of which schools were established on a flourishing foundation, and the crying evil of the city — its fall from the high ideal of Scottish educa- tion — was successfully fought. The scheme met with keen opposition and with untiring ridicule; but its enemies were forced at last to resort to the theory that its success depended JOINS THE EVANGELICAL PARTY. 535 only on his own genius and his indomitable power of organ- isation. A Chalmers was not to be found in every parish : his very success was a reproach to his more lukewarm brethren, and the conviction slowly spread that a remedy for the evils of a new state of society must be sought by the more mechanical and prosaic methods of legislation. Before his death — when Chalmers had drifted into other contro- versies, and had become the leader of the movement which was to deal the Church of his enthusiasm the most deadly blow that she had ever suffered — the necessity of a legal assessment for the poor was fully admitted and had become an essential part of the constitution. Staggering under the disaster of the Disruption, the Church could no longer hope to fulfil the function which he had so proudly claimed for her; and his own hand had dealt the blow to which her weakness and her crippled powers were due. Powerful as he was as a party leader, and strongly as he impressed himself upon the life of the nation, Chalmers to a certain extent stood alone, and we are often struck by the fact that his associates shared only a portion of his spirit, and were his allies only in a fragment of the scheme which he made his ideal, and which was so rich in promise for Scotland. He broke away from the Moderate party; but he retained, in all its force, the pride which had belonged to the Moderate party of the previous generation, and which had made the Church, as conceived by them, the influential ally of the State, screened off from no secular interest, and claim- ing a leading part in all agencies for good. The Evangelical party impressed him strongly, and perhaps affected him with an undue measure of what to its enemies appeared sancti- moniousness : but even when he spoke most strongly with the tone of the Evangelical, he did not bate one jot of his desire that the Church should take a lead in literature and in learning. He was surrounded by many to whom such things had a tincture of secularism, and who were ready to condone feebleness and unctuousness for the sake of the fervour of their religious enthusiasm ; but his own spirit was not tamed to conformity with such a view. No one felt more strongly — even though at times he seemed to recoil from the feeling — that religion might make a bad man good, but could not make a weak man strong. There was a vigorous solidarity in Chalmers' opinions, even when they seemed to bring him into contact with diverse parties. With his Evangelical fervour, he retained some- thing of the old spirit of the Moderates. He distrusted above all, that which supplemented individual effort and in- 536 LARGER AIMS IN POLITICS AND IN THE CHURCH. dependence by formal or mechanical aids. With the Whigs, he opposed the Corn Laws ; but it was not because, like them, he thought the Corn Laws unjust in their aim, or unduly favourable to the agricultural interest, but because he thought that they attempted to do by legislative means what should have been left to the operation of natural laws. With the Tories, he opposed Parliamentary reform ; but not because he feared that Parliamentary reform would destroy privilege; rather because he thought that political weight should follow, and should not precede, worth and education, and because he did not choose that the constitution should be at the mercy of an unjudging mob. He was no worshipper of rank ; but he looked upon hereditary distinctions as landmarks in the nation's history, and as the expression of her traditions. No man assailed more vigorously a craven fear of authority ; but no one in Scotland had his enthusiasm more stirred by the visit of George IV., which seemed to revive something of the old spirit of Scottish loyalty. The democratic spirit was strong in him, but he was repelled by the impiety as well as by the iconoclasm of the political agitator, and strove to dis- sociate his own efforts at social reform from any sympathy with the violence of reforming zeal. There was no more devoted Scotsman, no more keen Presbyterian ; but his whole spirit was attracted by the learned dignity and by the ornate ritual of the Anglican Establishment. He was the ardent supporter of her rich endowments, and he owned a sympathy with her to parallel which we must go back to the days of Robertson and Carlyle. " We hold it," he says in a burst of admiration of the Anglican Church, " we hold it a refreshing spectacle at a time when meagre Socinianism pours forth a new supply of flippancies and errors, when we behold an armed champion come forth in full equipment from some high and lettered retreat of that noble hierarchy." " Sir," he said on another occasion, when an opponent of ecclesiastical endowments was decrying the vast revenues of the Bishopric of Durham, "if all that has been received for the bishopric since the foundation of the See were set down as a payment for Butler's ' Analogy,' I should esteem it a cheap purchase." As a parish minister Chalmers might have continued to exercise a powerful influence on social questions in Scotland during the decade from 1820 to 1830, and might have won for the Church a decisive part in the development of the nation. It is matter of regret that in 1823 he broke away from that position, and chose the more leisured post of Professor of Moral Philosophy at St Andrews. It was in pulpit eloquence that his strength chiefly lay, and the gain HIS ACTION IN THE CHURCH COURTS. 537 to literature by his leisure was but small. Worse than that, his leisure involved him more closely in the discussions of the Church Courts, and in the heated atmosphere of these scenes his more free and independent ideals had less scope. Let us see how the contests on which he now entered shaped his course and forced him step by step into an attitude which was widely separated from that which he held as one who sought to make the Church play a lofty part as social re- generator on Conservative lines. In the same year in which Chalmers transferred his energies from Glasgow to St Andrews, he took a prominent part in a controversy in the Church Courts which marked the advance of a new spirit in the Church. The Moderate party had always vindicated for the Church and her clergy the right to take a large part in secular and, above all, in literary work. They looked upon this as likely not only to con- tribute to her dignity, but to liberalise her spirit. They dreaded — perhaps with exaggerated fear — a too exclusive absorption in ecclesiastical interests or in religious occupa- tions, and thought that the influence of the Church was enhanced by the enlargement of the horizon of her clergy, and by this opportunity of their attaining a better compe- tence than was provided by the limited resources of their parochial charges. This feeling had led them to favour plur- alities, and to resent any self-denying ordinance by which ministers should be debarred from adding parochial charges to other offices. The Evangelical spirit which was now re- asserting itself, and which represented, in a modified form, the old spirit of the High-flyers, or (as they were called when their tenets were even more pronounced) the " Wild " party, was strongly opposed to this, and resented the intrusion of secular engagements upon the attention of those selected for parochial charges. In the year 1823 this controversy was sharply exercised over the case of Dr Macfarlane, who, being Principal of Glasgow University, was nominated by the Crown to one of the charges of the High Church of Glasgow. The Presbytery refused to give eflect to the presentation, and the matter ultimately came before the Assembly, where Dr Chalmers, who had drifted far from the views of his earlier days, took a prominent part in sup- porting the decision of the Presbytery. The Assembly con- firmed the presentation ; but although defeated for the time, the Evangelicals managed to show that their strength in the Church was enormously increased. That party was now led with great ability, and almost superabundant energy, by Dr Andrew Thomson, of St George's 538 LARGER AIMS IN POLITICS AND IN THE CHURCH. Church, Edinburgh. He was endowed with all the qualities most effective in debate, with a strong flow of humour, amaz- ing eloquence of a rough sort, great powers of sarcasm, and a readiness in strategy which would have gained for him undisputed eminence even on the larger arena of St Stephen's. Besides all this, he was a man of undaunted courage, and un- resting vigour, and his high fame as a pulpit orator, added to the social popularity which his genial wit and buoyant spirits won for him, made him unquestionably a leader, not in the Church only, but in every secular business of the metropolis. Of the higher traits of Chalmers' genius, of his imagination, his romance, his lofty chivalry — Thomson pos- sessed nothing. But the partnership of the two was invin- cibly strong. None of the Moderate leaders could be placed in comparison with these two, and for the few years that remained to Thomson the friendship between them was one of intense and unabating warmth. In 1825 the discussion on pluralities was renewed. Chalmers was the chief spokesman for the Evangelical opposition, and his speech marks, as clearly as any other circumstance, the contrast between his earlier and his later attitude. An admir- able opportunity for a passage of most effective eloquence was given by a maladroit debater, who quoted an early and anony- mous pamphlet, known to be from Chalmers' pen, in which he had asserted (in opposition to Playfair, who sought, on grounds quite different from the Evangelicals, to exclude the clergy from university appointments) that his own experi- ence proved to him " that after the discharge of his parochial duties, a minister could have five days in the week of un- interrupted leisure for the prosecution of any science in which his taste might dispose him to engage." Chalmers rose to the occasion. In well-chosen language he admitted the author- ship of the twenty - years - old pamphlet. He had hoped "that it was mouldering in silence, forgotten and disre- garded." He was deeply grateful to the gentleman who had given him an opportunity for a public recantation. He oflfered himself "a repentant culprit before the bar of this venerable Assembly." He had written the pamphlet, stung by what he thought a slight on the clergy of the Church, and he had maintained that devoted attention to the study of mathemathics was not dissonant to the proper habits of a clergyman. " Alas ! sir, so I thought in my ignorance and pride. I have now no reserve in saying that the sentiment was wrong, and that, in the utterance of it, I penned w^hat was most outrageously wrong. Strangely blinded that I was ! What, sir, is the object of mathematical science ? GROWTH OF A NEW SPIRIT. 539 Magnitude and the proportions of magnitude. But, then, sir, I had forgotten two magnitudes — I thought not of the littleness of time — I recklessly thought not of the greatness of eternity." With these words, Chalmers marked, not for himself only, but for his Church, a vast change of attitude which power- fully affected the whole country. The old spirit which had prevailed in the last half of the eighteenth century, and which extended far into the nineteenth, was passing away. Stripped of some of their exaggerations, without those absurd- ities which had moved the sarcasm, not of the opponents of the Church alone, but even of such of her clergy as Dr Alexander Carlyle — but not perhaps altogether without some of the old fierceness of ecclesiastical rancour, the Evan- gelicals were again coming to the front. It was not given to all to blend the new spirit with the broad genius and rich humanity of Chalmers, or with the genial buoyancy of Thomson. But unquestionably the future, for a time, was to lie with that new party, which seemed also to be in sympathy with the new spirit dominating English politics, and awakening an echo also in the political aspirations of the best Scotsmen of the day. During these years Chalmers continued to mingle in other than ecclesiastical controversies. He still fought with vigour against the proposals for extending an assessment for the oor. He still resented all unnecessary interference of the tate. The socialism he advocated was to be Christian. But his Christian socialism was not to be a system by which, in accordance with the theory fashionable in our own day, Christianity is to be made the basis of a vast network of legislative interference. It was to be a work of the Church, not merely in its conception, but in its operation, and was to be enforced by religious — nay, by ecclesiastical — sanction. It was essentially the same motive that made him welcome the repeal, by Canning and Huskisson, of the laws against combinations of workmen, while he protested with equal vehemence against any extension of such combinations as would limit in any way the freedom of the individual workman. From the strenuous assertion of individual free- dom he never wavered, however much his position changed in regard to other disputes. In 1828 Chalmers quitted St Andrews, where he had resented the prevalence of the old Moderate spirit, and where he had done his best to stir the embers of a religious revival, for Edinburgh, where he was appointed Professor of Divinity. In 1829 we find him taking a prominent part 540 LARGER AIMS IN POLITICS AND IN THE CHURCH. in support of the Catholic Relief Bill, which was then being promoted by the Tory Government of Peel and Wellington. In that year a great meeting was held in Edinburgh in support of the Bill, and the most prominent members of both political parties took part in it — an instance of com- munication which was almost unexampled, and which was all the more strange, when we recall what had been the violence of opposition to any semblance of such relief on the part of the Evangelical party or their predecessors in 1780, when advocacy of the removal of disabilities had well- nigh cost the Moderates their power in Scotland. Chalmers' advocacy of emancipation was bold, and he brought to its service all his eloquence. But it is permissible to doubt whether it was based on altogether logical grounds, or whether it embraced a conception of religious liberty which would satisfy the more ardent supporters of that very in- definite term. Chalmers avowedly supported Catholic Relief, as a means of injuring Catholicism, and with the hope that it might sap the foundations of that creed. Such confidence was based on a singular want of political foresight, and it involved a species of toleration which the Catholics might not unreasonably resent. Doubtless it was sincere ; but symptoms are not wanting which show that Chalmers had in his later years some doubt whether the secure confidence which he then expressed was altogether justified by facts and results.^ But with 1830 a new epoch opens. The political world saw a reversal of long-cherished theories, and a transfer of influence from one party to another which was paralleled by that in the Church. We have now to see how these two streams advanced for a time apart, and then gradually mingled. In this sketch of Chalmers' work, we have sought to show how, typified by him and stirred by his surpassing influence, a new spirit pervaded Scottish life, and helped to enlarge the national view of social and political questions. It was a spirit confined to no one party, and of which the credit cannot be assumed by any political clique, however active and self-assertive. ^ See Life, by Dr Hanna, vol. iii. p. 259. " I hare been candidly informed, " says his biographer and son-in-law, *' that when spoken to about the Roman Catholic Emancipation Bill, not long before his death, he said it was a historical blunder." The gloss which Dr Hanna puts upon this does not materially alter its purport or effect. 541 CHAPTER XXL 1830 TO 1834. We have seen two influences which were gradually, but profoundly, changing the course of politics in Scotland. In place of the older and more narrow Toryism of Castlereagh, built upon a fear of revolution which old memories of national danger kept alive, and stimulated by all the selfish- ness of privilege, there was now a new spirit which aimed at reconstructing the political machine to the new needs of the time, inspired by high hopes and guided by wise and thoughtful statesmanship — a spirit to which Peel and Can- ning, each in his different way, mainly contributed. That spirit was no monopoly of a Whig faction; for the moment, indeed, many of those who represented it with greatest distinction belonged to the Tory and not to the Whig party. The same influence extended to Scotland, which had her full share in the larger motives of the age; and far beyond the little clique that clung round the 'Edin- burgh Review,' and fancied itself the sole hope of political regeneration, it aroused sympathy amongst Scotsmen of light and leading. In its popular phase — because it had a pop- ular phase — that spirit received a powerful stimulus from the wave of religious revival that was passing over Scot- land, and it is impossible to deny that even in the ecclesi- astical disputes to which that revival soon gave rise, and which we shall presently have to examine, the new move- ment received some additional impetus. But it does not follow that the older spirit of Scottish Toryism, which did not rest upon privilege alone, but was' based largely on venerated traditions and on keen national feeling; which was honestly distrustful of innovation, and which had no sympathy with the religious revival, so alien to the older spirit of Moderatism ; which had something of romance in 542 1830 TO 1834. its composition, and felt an aversion to the modern maxims of the economist and the doctrinaire — it does not follow that this spirit was entirely dead. The great luminary, whose magic hand had made the spell of Scottish romance potent all over Europe, was wedded to the older views. Scott was indeed no adept in political science. His opinions were not those of any party, but exclusively his own. They were coloured by the poetry of his nature, and, while they had something of the free-lance, their very intensity of conviction, and their loyalty to old, and above all to national, traditions, gave them a halo of chivalry which puzzled and perplexed the lesser men around him. The very tenacity of his friendships, and his loyalty to the names of the past, made smaller men criticise and carp at that which they did not understand. His geniality and breadth of character prevented him from feeling any very strong sympathy with the enthusiasm of religious feeling that seemed to swathe human morality in the swaddling bands of a somewhat unctuous and obtrusive code of re- ligious ethics. We have heard, by oral tradition, a charac- teristic saying of Scott's to a lady who confessed that, in an age of increasing strictness, she sometimes indulged in the more innocent social pleasures — " It is refreshing, madam, nowadays to find a lady who is no better than she ought to be." His political ideals — and, after all, no ignoble ones — were Pitt and Henry Dundas; and he found no such men amongst his new contemporaries. The Whigs were to him the descendants of the old Jacobins ; and even where he saw the necessity for change he was not disposed to entrust the process of change to their unhallowed hands and irreverent methods. He was still to make a doughty fight for Scot- tish privilege, and to wield a lance against principles which seemed likely to increase the influence of his lifelong foes. That fight was waged on the unlikely field of currency reform. In such a field Scott had little honour to gain, and it can hardly be maintained that he was fitted either by nature or by training to be a calm or dispassionate judge in such a dispute. But he had many points on his side, and even less enthusiastic maintainers of Scottish privileges than Scott might well have been stirred to com- bat in such a cause. The Scottish bankers were able, and, on the whole, cautious, men. We have seen the growth of the Scottish system ; how admirably it had been adapted to the needs of the country; how free it was from the unwholesome monopoly which had been the bane of Eng- lish banking; and how few comparatively had been the SCOTT's defence of SCOTTISH BANKS. 643 serious disasters which had marked its free development. But however able in business Scottish bankers might be, they were hardly possessed of those gifts of sarcasm and of humour which could give vogue and popular form to their contentions. It was a godsend to them when Scott sharpened his sword for the fight, and descended into the controversial arena, in a mood that brooked no surrender. His opponents had undoubtedly some strong arguments to back their proposals. The reckless speculation which was characteristic of the time gave only too much ground for the economists to raise questions as to the soundness of the financial position of the country; and a check upon the paper currency became urgent. But the urgency was mainly a matter which concerned England. It was pressed largely in the interests of that monopoly, which had made of English banking an artificial system resting upon legis- lative nostrums. Had the proposed restriction been con- fined to England, no objection would have been raised. But the newest reformers were wedded to the notion of uniformity. They could not tolerate any anomaly, on what- ever historic basis, or on whatever national predilection, it might rest. Amongst their proposed reforms they included the curtailing of the power of Scottish banks to issue £1 notes. Unfortunately, by habit, by motives of convenience, by all the conditions under which its commercial operations had grown out of the most unpromising beginnings, Scot- land clung to these notes with an almost passionate attach- ment. The proposal to abolish them roused the keenest resentment; and the resentment required only a powerful champion to give to it the importance of a national dispute. Scott was no uncompromising Tory. His sound common- sense made him perfectly able to discern when resistance to change might be exaggerated, and when concession was wise. "Tory principles," we find him saying in his Diary in 1825, after attending a festal gathering of the adherents of the cause, " were rather too violently upheld by some speakers." "There are repairs in the structure of our constitution," he says in the same Diary less than two years later, "which ought to be made at this season, and without which the people will not long be silent." These were not the words of an uncompromising enemy of change. But the threatened curtailment of Scottish privileges roused him to resistance to what he deemed an unworthy concession to the doctrines of the economists by the Tory Government ; and in a mood of passionate anger which he seldom showed, he stood forth as the whole-hearted defender of the existing state of things. 644 1830 TO 1834. His own recent financial misfortunes seemed to sting him into even greater bitterness of resentment, and to confirm him in a determination to prove himself independent of all polit- ical parties. His fight for Scottish privileges was carried on, not against a Whig Government, but against Canning and his friend Lord Melville, the son of his early patron, Henry Dundas. In three letters which he issued under the signa- ture of " Malachi Malagrowther," he roused a storm of anger against the proposal which stirred the national spirit of his country, moved the animosity of the economists, and effectu- ally deterred the Ministry from the proposal. The Scottish notes were preserved, and continued to form the main part of the currency. It requires no long memory to recall the time when sovereigns were taken in their place only with reluct- ance and suspicion; and even now, in many parts of Scot- land, while the suspicion of specie payments has disappeared, inveterate and traditional habit still makes the greasy and begrimed notes a more grateful and congenial medium. For the political aspect of the struggle Scott had little care. From year's end to year's end I have scarce a thought of politics," he says; but the "late disposition to change everything in Scotland to an English model " roused his pa- triotic zeal to the boiling-point ; he " rejoiced to see the old red lion ramp a little, and the thistle again claim its nemo me impune." He was glad to find that " Slalachi reads like the work of an uncompromising right - forward Scot of the old school." He knew that old friendships would be risked ; but he regretted that the Scottish managers were lukewarm to the fight, and he despised the cautious timidity of their sub- servience to English ideas. "Ah, Hal Dundas," he writes, " there was no truckling in thy day ! " He rejoiced to find that once more Scotland was ready to respond to an appeal made to her national instincts ; and no thought of the conse- quences held him back. He foresaw what it meant for him- self ; but his only regret was that those whom he had counted as his friends did not share his own enthusiasm. The fight, hot and keen while it lasted, had some serious consequences. It made of Scott a far more confirmed op- ponent of concessions, and ranked him far more decidedly, for the few years that remained of his life, on the side of what seemed a party of stern and uncompromising resistance to change. This attitude of angry contempt for the new political nostrums that were rife became part and parcel of his stern fight against the misfortunes that clouded his later days. The apparent compromise of principle that brought Canning HIS OPPOSITION TO REFORM. 545 close to the Whigs in 1827 was viewed by Scott with strong suspicion. He did not see — perhaps did not wish to see — that a new spirit, powerfully affecting Scotland, was creeping into politics. Meanwhile he distrusted the alliance, because he feared that it might bring about a sweeping measure of Parliamentary Reform, which he conceived as inevitably the precursor of revolution. This was no proof of a narrow spirit on Scott's part ; it only showed that in his last years he clung to the ideas that had been accepted as part of the national creed in his earlier days, and could not shake him- self free from the traditions of his life. There was much that was singularly prophetic in his forecast of his own nation's destinies. He did not deceive himself as to the tendency of popular opinion. " The whole burgher class of Scotland," he writes to Sir Robert Dundas in 1826, "are gradually prepar- ing for radical reform — I mean the middling and respectable classes ; and when a burgh reform comes, which cannot per- haps be long delayed, ministers will not return a member from the towns. The gentry will abide longer by sound principles : for they are needy, and desire advancement for their sons,, and appointments, and so on. But this is a very hollow de- pendence, and those who sincerely hold ancient opinions are waxing old." Whatever Scott's opinions might be, there is no question but that he held them sincerely. To one thing he clung with all the tenacity of a romantic spirit : that was the supreme value to Scotland of her own national distinctiveness. He dreaded a constant series of legislative changes, conceived, as he deemed them to be, on artificial lines. " Scotland," he writes to Croker, " completely liberalised, as she is in a fair way of being, will be the most dangerous neighbour to Eng- land that she has had since 1639. ... If you unscotch us, you will find us damned mischievous Englishmen. The rest- less and yet laborious and constantly watchful character of the people, their desire for speculation in politics or anything else, only restrained by some proud feelings about their own country, now become antiquated, and which bald measures will tend much to destroy, will make them, under a wrong direction, the most formidable revolutionists who ever took the field of innovation." He distrusted the Whig tendencies of the Government ; and when Canning died, only a few months after he had become Prime Minister, Scott thought that all his wit and eloquence, all his ambition and his debating power, had been wasted in a hopeless attempt to conciliate irreconcilable views. He saw how helpless and evanescent was the figment of power in the hands of that " transient and embarrassed phantom " (as 2m 546 1830 TO 1834. Disraeli describes him), Lord Goderich ; and he hailed with equal respect, if not with equal cordiality, as a relief from such feeble shuffling, the leaders of the opposite parties, who knew their own minds and stooped to no compromises — the Duke of Wellington and Earl Grey. Meanwhile he contem- plated, if not with sympathy, at least with no active misgiv- ing, the movement towards Catholic Emancipation in 1829 ; and although he was not one of those who attended the great meeting in Edinburgh — where both sides were represented — in favour of that measure, he yet was prepared to welcome it as justified by the circumstances of the time. Scott's dread of reform was, then, a feeling prompted by ardent love of the past, and not by any unwillingness to redress abuses. And for the bulk of the nation, a new spirit of compromise had dawned. Parliamentary Reform did not yet seem so near as it really was. Its discussion did not yet produce the bitterness of feeling which it was shortly to call forth : and so far as other topics were concerned, the political parties seemed to be coming closer together. The last twenty years had seen great changes. It was no longer the fashion to hush all talk of reform, and to treat it as the certain pre- cursor of revolution. New ideas were rife ; new interests were making themselves felt : and the nation was prepared to touch abuses with a bolder hand. A new sense of social duty had asserted itself ; and the absorption of power by a privi- leged territorial class was no longer possible. In 1829 Jeffrey was elected Dean of Faculty, which proved that political feeling was not strong enough to keep a prominent Whig out of the position of first representative of a profession, the majority of which held political opinions the very reverse of his. It is true that, as a concession to the generosity of his opponents, and as a becoming recognition of the responsi- bilities of the position, Jeffrey ceased to be editor of the 'Edinburgh Review.' But the election made it clear that the party he represented had attained to a position far different from that which it held when he started the 'Review,' seven-and-twenty years before, as one of a hope- less and hated minority. The question of Parliamentary Reform necessarily made a dividing mark between Whig and Tory. But for the moment that question was a speculative one, and the Tory party had lost its high pretensions and modified the rigidity of its creed, and many of its members were not unwilling to aid in the work of social regeneration. The new spirit found, as we have said, a powerful ally in the Church. Under the guidance of such a man as Chalmers — Conservative in his principles, but none the less the friend GROWTH OF THE EVANGELICALS. 547 of many of the Whigs, and associated with them in many of their schemes — the Church had been animated with a greater zeal, and was roused to greater keenness in grappling with the problems which with increasing; urgency were demanding solution in a society rendered more complicated by the in- crease of wealth and the shifting of the old landmarks. The old traditions were passing away; the old social order was becoming a memory of the past ; and the old political distinc- tions were being obliterated. The Tory and the Whig parties still kept up their contest ; but it was largely personal, and largely concerned with the tenure of office and of power — things which touch only a few. The interest of a large part of the most energetic and active in Scottish life was occupied with her expanding commerce and her increasing wealth; for the rest the absorbing topic lay in ecclesiastical politics. Literature and philosophy ceased to be, as for a large part of the previous century they had been, the chief interests of the educated classes. The fervid assertion of Scottish nationality and the taste for Scottish antiquities, only a short time before so fashionable, now engaged the attention of none but a select few. The outburst of poetry and romance which had been so rich in the generation that had passed since 1790, lost its strength and faded into secondary importance. The one most distinctive symptom of the mood of Scot- land in the first quarter of the nineteenth century was the recrudescence of a new type of religious revivalism, coming to lay a chilling hand upon the buoyancy that had made the last century so attractive, to impose new maxims of conventional ethics upon habits that were genial even to laxity, and to forge new fetters upon the easy latitudinarianism that had long been the dominant char- acteristic of Scottish thought. Without due attention to that new symptom, we cannot understand the phase which Scottish life now assumed. The Evangelical party had now become distinctly the most powerful in the Scottish Church. It was a party whose characteristics we may not all find to be uniformly attractive, but it had gained much in attaching to itself such a man as Chalmers, the strongest personality in Scot- land at this time. He was not moulded very closely on the lines of the Evangelical party, as these are ordinarily drawn. In early life he had leant, as we have seen, to the Moderates; and to the last, more than perhaps he himself knew, his temperament was not alien to Moderat- ism and to all that it implied. His conception of the Church was that of a great steady force in society — vigorous, 548 1830 TO 1834. powerful, lettered, and not without a dignified pride. The conservatism which he had inherited from his father, com- bined with the strength and impatience of folly and of cant which were of the essence of his character, made him unwilling that his Church should bend to mob -rule or truckle to ignorant fanaticism. In this he reflected the feelings of the Moderates. But Moderatism had the defects of its qualities. It stood aloof from popular religious move- ments. A certain coldness, indifference, and want of earnest- ness — which became all the more marked as its more able leaders passed away, and only a few were left to represent its higher traditions — repelled a temperament so impulsive, so forcible, and so sincere as that of Chalmers. As his sympathy with the Moderates waned, his conception of the Church became modified, and he schooled himself to look with less impatience on the more strict tenets of Evan- gelicalism. To him the Church was still to be dignified,, lettered, independent; but she was to be a missionary Church, working mainly for the poor, taking upon herself the burden and charge of poor relief, dominating all politi- cal movements by maintaining the supremacy of character and religious conviction as the engines by which the lot of the poor was to be bettered. The Church and the nation were to be one and indivisible ; and this granted, he was ready to accord a half -contemptuous toleration to creeds that were outworn, and to extend a hand of brother- hood to sects that were divided from the Church only by small distinctions. In 1831 there had come a curious doctrinal phase amongst one section in the Scottish Church, which decried the stalwart rigour of Calvinism and preached a sort of universalist creed; and which, more strangely still, even through the teaching of educated, high-minded, and cultivated men, attempted to bolster up that creed by a strange farrago of miraculous tales of the renewal of the gift of tongues. It was a symptom — albeit in a feverish and excited form — of the general wave of intensi^ fied religious feeling that was passing over the country; but though viewed with compassion rather than anger by such a man as Chalmers, it was summarily expelled from the Church as an unsound and unhealthy manifestation. Its representative was Mr Macleod Campbell, minister of Row, a man whose character stood high, whose religious convictions were of the purest and most enthusiastic type, and who continued for more than a generation later to command the affection and veneration of a large number of his countrymen. He was now deposed from the ministry. CHALMERS* RELATION TO CHURCH PARTIES. 549 and harsh as the measure was by many deemed to be, it had the tacit sympathy of Chalmers. According to his notions, however desirable it was to encourage religious zeal, that zeal must be tempered by common -sense and restrained by ecclesiastical discipline. Chalmers had drifted before this date, far indeed from the older Moderatism, but we must not overlook the element which he inherited from the Moderates. Like them, he never bated any of the Church's privileges. Like them, he never looked upon her as the mere tolerated proUg4e of the State. He never identified her with resistance to constituted authority, and never sought to make her the ally of democratic aims. She was to be a patriot Church, working for the people, but independently of the people, building up a higher tone of morality and a higher ideal of social duty, but careful not to associate herself with the political party who were claiming a monopoly of reforming zeal and of patriotic virtue. He viewed with coldness, if not with positive dislike, the political nostrums of the day, and if he was democratic in his aims and in his missionary zeal, he had as yet certainly no wish to be democratic in his methods. Chalmers thus invested, with more of religious zeal, aims which lay at the root of much in the tenets of the Moderates of the previous generation. They too had preached the theory of an independent and a powerful Church. They too had endeavoured to make the Church an engine of social amelioration, and of increased intelli- gence and education. Like Chalmers, they had clung to Scottish traditions, and had looked with pride to the part the Church had taken in winning for Scotland a high place in literature. But they had become too exclusive in their alliance with one political party. In this they were false to their own traditions, and sorely did they pay the penalty; it narrowed their range and led directly to their downfall. Chalmers rescued much that was valu- able in their tenets, but he left their spirit behind him, when he was caught by that religious revival which their coldness and indifference, amounting almost to sarcasm and irony, had done much to provoke. The earnestness of that religious revival, the repressive chill which it cast on much that was most attractive in Scottish social life, drew the two parties widely apart. Earnestness led to enthusiasm, enthusiasm to fanaticism, and fanaticism to something which its opponents might not unfairly call Pharisaical pride. Those who clung to the older party met the revival with 550 1830 TO 1834. sarcasm and ridicule, looked askance on the perfervid out- bursts of religious zeal, and openly defied the strict rule which was intruding itself again, with something of Cov- enanting memories, into the code of minor social ethics. They claimed to represent the literature, the wit, the romance, and the poetry of Scotland; and the Evangelical school were thus driven into a mood that viewed with suspicion all that was secular, and identified religion with something that its enemies called sanctimoniousness. Chalmers, in his own eyes and those of his contemporaries, was now a devout adherent of the Evangelical school. But by the deeply - rooted conservatism of his nature, by the force of his historical imagination, by that romantic impulse which was stronger in him than any party creed or shib- boleth, by the manly vigour which could not be divorced from his utterances and his acts, he held no small tincture of the better phase in the spirit of the older party in the Church. From that party he broke away because it had become cold, apathetic, and indifferent. It had lost its old fire and freedom ; it had lost something of its national tradi- tion. In its highest form it had achieved much for Scotland, and had given to her a proud position in the intellectual world. But it had lost its attraction for many of the best Scottish spirits, and the reaction brought a tide that swept Chalmers with it. His later ecclesiastical fights and the associations into which these led him carried him far indeed — and carried his country still further — from the ideals that had once been his. He became, in spite of himself, and he did all he could to make his Church, demo- cratic not in aim only but in methods. That Church did not pass through the dust and turmoil of the fray without carrying away marks of the battle. It grew narrow and cross-grained in the process of asserting, with uncompromis- ing rigidity, a position that became every day more palpably illogical. Its unbending sternness in denouncing all who questioned that position, inevitably impressed upon it a character of self - righteous complacency, and almost com- pelled it to assume that Pharisaical attitude which it often came to wear in private life and morals, and which it only slowly dropped as the bitterness of contention became less. Chalmers did not himself become a political partisan, but he bequeathed to that large section which, under his guidance, broke away from the Scottish Church, a spirit that for a generation at least was the mainstay of Scottish Whiggism. By 1830 Chalmers had taken an active part in many ecclesiastical fights in the General Assembly. By means of THE WHIGS AND THE EVANGELICALS. 551 these fights the Evangelicals had gradually won back the supremacy which they had lost so long. By the death of Dr Andrew Thomson in 1831 Chalmers became the recog- nised leader of that party. But this made no alteration in his ostensible attitude towards political parties in the State. He still remained a steady Conservative in politics, opposed to Parliamentary Reform, distrustful of State interference with the individual, viewing with profound distrust the political nostrums of the day. How was it that this gulf was bridged over, and that those who stood in many re- spects so far apart — the Whigs and the newer party in the Church — came to join hands ? For many years before 1830 the Whigs were hopelessly shut out from power. The very hopelessness of their case made their tenets more extreme. They were compelled to show toleration to those more daring spirits who contem- plated revolutionary methods. They protested with all the vehemence of a powerless and therefore irresponsible party against the efforts of administration to preserve society against assaults. They denounced these efforts as attempts to curb liberty and to impose tyrannical rule. They had looked to very little help from the national Church and its adherents, and had been compelled to defend the utter- ances of those who attacked established creeds as well as established political authority. The Radicals had often attacked religion as the submissive servant of authority, and the Whigs could not safely repudiate the Radical propaganda. But this cost them much in the eyes of Scots- men, who clung with inherited affection to their Church, and were jealous of any attempt to undermine the purity of her doctrine. Nothing is more striking than Chalmers' identification of political agitation with irreligious pro- pagandism during the decade from 1820 to 1830; and so long as the two were identified in his mind, he could show no sympathy with either. But as time went on the Whigs came within measurable distance of power, and, as it approached, power created a sense of responsibility. The organs of the Whigs began to speak with more respect of religion. The changes which they advocated became more definite and more restricted. Reform became more and more distinguished from revolution. The Whigs, by antici- pation, began to look on themselves as likely soon to assume the responsibilities, the anxieties, the burdens of administration. They drew farther and farther away from the Radicals. They began, perforce, to study those tactics by which a position might be defended, as well as those 552 1830 TO 1834. by which a stronghold might be assailed. As the crisis of the struggle approached more closely, their policy became more cautious and more deliberate, and they were drawn into closer relations with the leaders of that party in the Church which had fought the Moderates when the Moder- ates were identified with the Tories. But the alliance did not come yet. The Whig party was scarcely animated by a spirit likely to make it feel any very strong sympathy with religious zeal or enthusiasm. In the fight for Parliamentary Reform Chalmers maintained a firmly Conservative attitude. When the windows in Edinburgh were illuminated on the passing of the Reform Bill, Chalmers refused to join, and as a consequence had the windows of his house broken by the mob. It is, indeed, odd to find him, after the Reform Act was passed, regret- ting it as likely to throw legislative power into the hands of men of business to the exclusion of men who have leisure for study and reflection ; and quoting Ecclesiasticus on the danger of entrusting with the arcana of government men whose hearts and hands are full of the common business of life.^ This was hardly the sort of opinion to make a sound Whig. But it was chiefly the affairs of the Church that were to change his attitude, and to make him the leader of a movement that broke down the chief bulwark of Conservatism in Scotland. Other minor causes contri- buted to alienate him from the Conservative party. We have already seen the keen interest which Chalmers took in the discussion of the problems of political economy. To the title of a scientific economist he had, indeed, no claim. But his views were distinct, and they were not only held with all the ardour of his nature, but were ad- vanced with all the power of his enthralling eloquence. His chief treatise on the subject was published in January 1832. It went counter to many of the accepted doctrines of the dominant school. It avowed distrust of the current nostrums, made light of the effect of legislative changes, and based the hopes of an improved economic state of the population on the prevalence of religious and moral principles. In its essence it was an attack upon the doctrines of the Manchester School, and as such was a defence of sound Conservatism. But with that singularly purblind vision which, at certain phases of its history, has characterised the Tory party, it was made the object of ridicule and sarcasm in the pages of the 'Quarterly Review.' There he was told that he was "incompetent to reason on the subject," and that his whole ^ Life, by Hauna, vol. iii. p. 405. CHALMERS AND POLITICAL PARTIES. 553 economical system was based on " a miserable sophism." The folly of journalistic controversy could scarcely have gone further than it did in this attack on one who was main- taining the very principles by which Whig theories might be most successfully destroyed. At the very moment that the attack was being delivered, Chalmers was being courted by the Whig Government with all the arts of flattery. His advice was sought, appointments were filled on his recom- mendation, a humble deference was paid to his opinion. He would have been more than human had not this homage produced a modification in his attitude towards those who had carried out Reform. But he still maintained his rigid attitude of resistance to political dictation. When, in the midst of the wild mob agitation, and of the frenzy of revo- lutionary zeal that was passing over Europe, a motion was made for a National Fast, he refused to make the Church a handmaid in what seemed a political move. In the next year (1832) he desired that the Church should itself appoint such a Fast, without waiting for Government dictation, on the occasion of the outbreak of the cholera epidemic. When in 1831 Government propounded a scheme of national education in Ireland which was to separate relig- ious from secular teaching, Chalmers was alarmed at what seemed an attack upon religion. He felt — as many have felt since — that the scheme was fundamentally mistaken in its attempt to disregard the elemental force of religious feeling. His opposition was mitigated only by the fact that the problem in Ireland seemed one of insoluble diffi- culty, and that any settlement seemed desirable which would prevent the recrudescence of religious disputes. Scot- land, he felt, was safe against the intrusion of any such principle, and the solution of the question in Ireland he was content to leave to politicians, so long as he had rea- son to be satisfied with the general rectitude of their aims. His mind was divided between the danger of advancing the influence of Roman Catholicism, and the equal danger of minimising the essential necessity of a religious element in education. In such a perplexity it was small wonder that he preferred to keep such a controversy out of Scottish interests. But a controversy of more direct interest for himself, and of far greater import for his country, was now enter- ing upon a very critical phase. This was the controversy that eventually broke the Established Church in two, that raised the broad issue of the limits of the civil and ecclesias- 554 1830 TO 1834. tical jurisdiction, and that in its results affected the national character more deeply than any other during the next gen- eration. To southern eyes this controversy appears, on the first glance — and they have rarely given it more — a tangled maze out of which it is vain for any but a Scottish mind to find an intelligible issue, buried as it is in a dense under- v^ood of doctrinal subtleties. It is perfectly true that eccle- siastical controversy, in every age and in every country, brings from its very complexity, and from the singular inter- mixture of parties, perplexity to any one who would trace its logical sequence. The Non-Intrusion controversy, as it was called — into which the whole intellectual and moral vigour of Scotland, in the middle part of the century, was thrown without stint or measure — certainly affords no excep- tion to this rule. But its main topics, the main features of the discussion, the main steps by which one phase of the controversy succeeded to another, are perfectly clear. They may possibly be held to have something more than alien and altruistic interest for England, now that England is likely to become the arena of a contest, as keenly and perhaps as bitterly waged, on topics which are in essence precisely the same, although their subject-matter and their surrounding circumstances are apparently very different. The occasion of this struggle was the operation of the rights of patronage, which had been restored by the Act of Queen Anne in 1711. That Act unquestionably placed in the hands of lay patrons a power which ever since the Reformation, except during the brief period when Episco- palianism was able to crush the national Presbyterianism of the country, had been exercised either by congregations or by those whose powers belong to them as representatives of the congregations. The Act had been bitterly resented by a large body in the Church; and from time to time it had brought about secessions from the Church, on the part of those who refused to admit this interference with what they held to be essentially an ecclesiastical function. For many years the Assembly had annually petitioned — although in a formal and perfunctory way — for the abolition of patron- age. But the actual pressure of the Act had been all the less felt, because patronage rights were for many years exercised with great leniency, and in such a way as to provoke little discussion. The annual protest was rather an assertion of the rights of the Church than a remonstrance against any tangible wrong; and these rights were further safeguarded by a somewhat illogical procedure which re- quired a formal "call" from the congregation to be a neces- THE RIGHT OF PATRONAGE. 555 sary adjunct of the patron's nomination before the induction of any incumbent. But as the Moderate party became stronger, they did not hesitate to insist with greater firmness and with stricter rigour upon the observance of the Act. Without denying the necessity of a "call" from the congregation, they dis- tinctly minimised the material importance of that call by holding it as little more than a formality which might be fulfilled by a single signature. There was no desire to thrust upon congregations persons unfit or distasteful to them ; and none protested against the abuse of patronage more strongly than did some of the leading Moderates. But they felt that even an occasional abuse of the right was a course less dangerous than the substitution for that right of a system which would make the Church independent of the civil power, but yet make her subject to the dictation of a blind and ignorant crowd of electors. It must be clearly re- membered that the object of those who opposed the abolition of patronage was not to defend a privilege or power which happened to belong to certain lay patrons, but to maintain in the first place what they conceived to be a sound sub- ordination of ecclesiastical to civil power, as the basis of real religious liberty; and, in the second place, what they were certain was likely to produce an educated and inde- pendent clergy, instead of one nominated by, and therefore dependent on, the mob. But as the Moderate party lost its power, and as its members too often were distinguished only by a cold and lukewarm indifference which aped philosophy and latitud- inarianism, the discordance between the nominee and the congregation became more and more marked. This discord- ance vastly increased as the new and more enthusiastic Evan- gelicalism once more asserted its hold over the Scottish people. One of the symptoms of their new religious spirit was a certain exaltation which exacted a heavy call upon the sympathies, and, perhaps, eluded any very clear intellectual statement. Differences of temperament led to objections to the presentees which might no doubt be sincerely felt, but which admitted of no logical explanation, and which lay patrons and their nominees naturally refused to consider as valid grounds for an interference with their unquestion- able rights under the law. The objections, however, were not less tenaciously held, because they were based on inade- quate grounds of logic or of argument; to those who held them, indeed, such minor defects appeared only to prove that they had a deeper foundation in religion and in con- 556 1830 TO 1834. science. The increasing irritation to which disputed settle- ments gave rise, forced the opponents of patronage to new and bolder theories. The rights of lay patrons might be given them by the law of the land, but those could be exercised only subject to what was held to be an essential principle of the Church, which affirmed that no minister could be forced upon an unwilling congregation. This was called the " Non- Intrusion " principle, ^ and upon this the battle between the Church and the State was to be waged. The choice of a battlefield was determined by circumstances which were Scottish only, and the steps by which the irrita- tion was stimulated into a rancorous controversy belong to the history of Scotland. But the broad issue involved was one which must necessarily be fought out wherever Church and State find their powers so closely balanced that they are forced to fight in order that one or other may assert a mastery. It was in 1832 that the patronage controversy seemed to come to an acute stage. The Evangelical party had now established its supremacy in the Church Courts. It was reflected in the feelings of the people, who were more than apt to doubt whether the patron's nominee was always im- bued with a sufficient unction of religious enthusiasm. But the political world had also changed, and its temper was ready to affect the mood in which ecclesiastical politics were judged. The ecclesiastical fight, perhaps, touched the Scottish national feeling more closely than the political ; but we must, side by side with it, trace the course of politics within these two years. Towards the close of the reign of George IV. the Ministry of the Duke of Wellington had got into serious difficulties, and had but a precarious tenure of power. The Whigs had supported Wellington in carrying the Catholic Emancipation Act, but they were bent on measures of reform from which the Duke held back, and their further support could no longer be counted on. The older Tory party were exasper- ated at the passing of Catholic Emancipation, and were ready in their anger to turn against the Duke. Meanwhile the air was full of agitation. In August the French Revolu- tion came, and extorted the sympathy even of the Tories.^ Thrones and crowns were toppling, and revolutions seemed to be the order of the day. The death of the king came in June 1830; the dissolution of Parliament in July; and the ensuing election gave the Ministry a scanty and pre- ^ " Confound those French Ministers ! " said Scott. " I can't forgive them for making a Jacobin of an old Tory like me." (Cockburn's 'Memorials,' p. 468). PARLIAMENTARY REFORM. 557 carious majority. Discontent and agitation prevailed through- out the population, and the newspapers were full of accounts of riot and incendiarism. The Duke declared, in uncom- promising words, against any project of Parliamentary Re- form, and in so doing sealed the fate of his Government. In December 1830 the Ministry of Lord Grey, pledged to Parliamentary Reform, assumed office, and to many it seemed as if the flood-gates of Revolution were to be set open. The prevailing opinion in Scotland was enthusiastically in favour of the new schemes; and even those who, like Chalmers, were opposed to that reform, were moving in a course that gave it increased influence, and brought them nearer and nearer to the Whigs, if they did not indeed go further even than the somewhat timid counsels of those who were the Scottish representatives of the Whig Minis- try. Jeffrey was now Lord Advocate and Henry Cock- burn Solicitor- General. Their task was no easy one. After having long belonged to a party which had for more than a generation attacked the Administration, they found themselves responsible for order, and pledged to carry out reforms which it was easy to advocate in opposition, but much more difficult to carry out in legislative form; and they found it hard to steer a course which would not shake society to its foundations, and yet would satisfy the extreme wing of their Radical friends. Jeffrey had claims upon the party which could not be ignored; but he was unfitted for the Parliamentary arena. He had come to it too late in life, and had not the practical skill, nor the quick and decisive judgment, necessary for one who was to carry out a great scheme of political change. He was tossed about on the waves of a great controversy, which he had not the true pilot skill to evade or to surmount. It was in Scotland, indeed, that the urgent need of some Parliamentary change was most clearly necessary. The abuses there scarcely admitted of a defence. In a population of 2,300,000 only some 3000 persons had a vote. The burgh franchise was in the hands of close and self-nominated cor- porations. The county franchise was held by a few propri- etors who increased their power by the creation of fictitious votes, distributed amongst their dependants, and in most counties these fictitious voters were the large majority of the electors. The distribution of representatives was equally absurd. Glasgow, with a population of nearly 150,000, shared a single member with three petty burghs. Many considerable towns had no representation whatever. Lord John Russell's first Reform Bill was introduced in 658 1830 TO 1834. March 1831. It was to give fifty members to Scotland instead of forty-five. In burghs the franchise of the cor- poration was to be abolished, and the £10 householders were to be the voters. In the counties all proprietors of £10 a- year, and all occupiers of £50 a-year, were to have a vote. It was estimated that 60,000 voters would thus be added to the register. Petitions poured in from Scotland in favour of the Bill. Some of the men of greatest weight, who could not be identified with any revolutionary schemes, declared that it was urgently called for by the united voice of Scotland. The second reading of the English Bill, however, was carried only by a single voice, and only thirteen Scottish members voted in its favour. The Government were defeated on a detail of the English Bill, and a dissolution immediately took place. The election that ensued turned solely upon the question of Parliamentary Reform, and it was carried out amid scenes of riot and agitation. At Edinburgh in particular, the Corporation were not allowed to carry out the election without threats of personal violence from the mob, and when Dundas was chosen instead of Jeffrey, who had been persuaded to seek the seat, the magistrates could not return from the Council Chambers without braving the excited violence of a mob who were prepared to lynch those who had declared for the Tory candidate. The violence of the day was succeeded by rioting at night, which was quelled only by calling in the aid of the military. The Ministry succeeded in so far changing the complexion of Scottish representation, even on an unreformed register, as to obtain a majority of three ; while in England they had a safe and secure majority. When Parliament met, the second Reform Bill was brought in, and its second reading was carried by a majority of 136. The Scottish Bill followed, but, greatly to the disappointment of the Whig party, it was found that Jeffrey had consented to make the franchise one of £15 instead of £10 as in England. The stalwart insistence of the Government supporters forced a change in this respect, and the number of Scottish members was in- creased from fifty to fifty-three. It was carried through the Commons, after fierce debate, by easy majorities. But in October the English Bill was thrown out by the House of Lords, and this was the signal for new and more fervent agitation throughout the country. The Government were at their wits' end to preserve the peace, and, in Scotland above all, serious rioting was expected, and would, it was feared, prove fatal to the scheme of Reform. The Govern- THE KEFORM BILLS PASS. 559 ment strengthened themselves, and gave confidence to their followers, by obtaining an easy vote of confidence from the Commons before proroguing Parliament. In December the English Bill was again brought in, and again pushed through its various stages by large majorities and sometimes without any division. In the Lords the second reading was carried by a majority of nine. The news was brought to Edinburgh on Sunday the 15th of April 1832, by an express coach, decorated with white ribbons and rosettes, which made the journey from London in the unprecedentedly short time of thirty-six hours. The tidings were received with unbounded enthusiasm on the one side; with despair, that foretold the rapid downfall of all existing institutions, on the other. It seemed to the frenzied imagination of men strung to the last pitch of excitement, as if revolution were imminent, and as if resistance were in vain. But the Bill had still pitfalls to pass. In committee in the House of Lords, the Ministry were defeated on one point, and they immediately resigned. The danger of a popular out- break was great. Each side accused the other of a criminal profligacy in their political conduct. The Scottish ministers were chiefly anxious that no outbreak of violence should occur. But there were not wanting those who thought they would find in such an outbreak the opportunity for yet wilder schemes. The Duke of Wellington attempted to form a Ministry, but failed; and after seven days the Whigs were replaced in office. The Duke now withdrew his opposition, and on the 4th of June the Bill became law. The Scottish Bill followed, and took no long time. It passed the third reading in the House of Lords on the I7th of July. The triumph was celebrated by a great trades procession in Edinburgh, when banners and triumphal arches proclaimed the dawn of a new epoch of political liberty. For a time there was a frenzy of enthusiasm for the new liberties ex- torted from a reluctant House of Lords, and to the superficial observer it might appear that the country was at one in its reception of the new order of things. The election took place in the late autumn, and it resulted in a sweeping victory for the Whigs. The Ministry had forty- four supporters in Scot- land, and only nine Tories were returned. Jeffrey and Aber- cromby were returned for Edinburgh by sweeping majorities of 4028 and 3855, against 1529 for the Tory candidate — where hitherto the Parliamentary constituency had consisted of thirty -three self -chosen councillors. Their triumph was 560 1830 TO 1834. celebrated by a procession in which the successful candidates were carried through the city in triumphal chairs "placed upon a flat car, and covered with blue merino and ornamented with buff fringings and tassels." " The whole equipage," we are told, "had a very gorgeous and attractive appearance." To be made ridiculous was perhaps not a higher price than Jeffrey was ready to pay for his success. But the election was not allowed to pass without disclosing the fact that the Whig party was not at one, and that the more moderate portion were not only suspected but disliked by those who desired to proceed further on the path in which they had made so promising a beginning. The Lord Advocate had now to preach moderation to those who had tasted blood, and he soon found himself stigmatised by many as a reactionary. So far we have Scotland at the work of Parliamentary Reform, in which she was closely associated with England, and where her course was virtually directed by that which Parliament adopted in regard to England. But we now have her employed, and to a large extent absorbed, in purely Scottish questions. The first of these was the question of Scottish administration. Under the Tory rule, it had been the habit to entrust Scottish affairs to one predominant hand — it might be the Lord Advocate, it might be some other minister whose Scottish connections were strong. This habit had been bitterly denounced by the Whigs, who had thought that the remedy was to be found in making the Government of Scotland more closely bound up with that of England, and minimising its essentially Scottish features. They soon found the error of this when responsibility became their own; but they had no very satisfactory alternative to propose. The fact was that they had no statesman of sufficient weight to take the place of Dundas, whose rule was still a living memory in Scotland. There was not amongst the Scottish Whigs any man who could at once make himself the representative of Scotland, and yet exercise a supreme force in Imperial politics, such as fell naturally to Dundas. Jeffrey was, and continued to be, an Edinburgh advocate who happened to be in the House of Commons. He had none of the aptitudes of a statesman, and he took to the work too late in life to acquire them. He found himself burdened with a mass of details which were irksome and distasteful to him. He sought help by having part of the Scottish business entrusted to a Scottish Lord of the Treasury; and for half a century that system continued. The Whig element in Parliament House ceased to decry the office of the Lord Advocate now that the ofiice was in their own hands ; they only lamented the variety of insig- WHIG RULE IN SCOTLAND. 561 nificant details that fell to his charge. But they failed to observe that these details were chiefly troublesome because the Lord Advocate sank to the position of a subordinate official — to whom Scottish affairs indeed might be entrusted — but who could not shape, or even materially affect, the general principles upon which the Government of the day was based, and who was compelled to subordinate his treatment of Scottish matters to these principles which he was power- less to modify or to shape. It was one of the evils of this system that Scottish questions were relegated to a second place, as matters which a subordinate official might settle, so long as he disturbed no principle convenient for application to England. The Lord Advocate could never hold Cabinet office, and his Parliamentary position was never strong enough to allow him an effective voice in the settlement of Imperial politics. Scottish affairs became inevitably, under such a system, a matter of secondary interest to Parliament — some- thing which might be tolerated so long as it was not unduly troublesome. Something of this was seen in the first purely Scottish busi- ness — the Bill for Burgh Reform. On this question the Lord Advocate — who could offer no opinion on his own initiative — was careful to ascertain the views of the Government, and expressed them to his constituents as the emissary of the Prime Minister. This was scarcely a position to which Dun- das would have submitted; but it was the most that could now be claimed by the minister who claimed to lead the Whig party in his country. In March 1833 the Bill was introduced, and, after second reading, it was submitted — by a bad, if not an unconstitutional, precedent — to a committee of all the Scottish burgh representatives. To a superficial observer this might appear to be a concession to national independence; in reality, it degraded Scottish business to a provincial level. Fortunately the plan worked very badly — and for no one worse than the Lord Advocate, who was driven to his wits' end by the contending inanities of every political quack and visionary who had schemes of his own, and who fancied that he was summoned to propound them. "The Scotch Burgh Committee," says Jeffi-ey, "goes on as ill as possible. . . . They chatter and wrangle and contradict and grow angry, and read letters and extracts from blockheads of town clerks and little fierce agitators ; and forgetting that they are members of a great Legislature, and (some of them) attached to a fair Ministry, go on speculating and suggesting and debating, more loosely, crudely, and interminably than a parcel of college youths in the first noviciate of disceptation." 2n 562 1830 TO 1834. It is a pleasant picture of a Reformed Parliament, and pre- sents no flattering view of the Scottish elements in that Parliament ! The Bill fared more hardly at the hands of friends than even at those of its enemies ; but after a rough- and-tumble struggle it passed ; and a few weeks later, Jeffrey ceased to be Lord Advocate, and was raised to the Bench in May 1834. Other Scottish questions were obtruding them- selves, and all his old Whig zeal was required to cope with the fertile crop which sprang up round him. Not the least important that arose just as he was quitting office was that of Church Patronage, on which a Parliamentary Committee was appointed on the motion of Sir George Sinclair. Let us see how that question had ripened within the last two years. In 1832, as we have seen, the controversy with regard to patronage had assumed a critical phase in the General As- sembly. Dr Chalmers was Moderator for that year, and was consequently debarred from participating in the debates. But he soon turned with ardour to the study of the question, and in 1833 he threw himself into the fray. The course of poli- tics, with its increasing development of the popular element, no doubt gave impulse to the claim of that element in the settlement of ministers, and swelled the wave rising against patronage. But Chalmers entered on the contest in no such spirit. He was opposed to Parliamentary Reform. He was Conservative in sympathy. The ultimate results of the struggle he did not foresee ; and there can be no doubt that what mainly determined Chalmers' attitude in the struggle was his desire to adhere to the traditions of Scotland (of which he thought the Evangelical party to be most repre- sentative), and to strengthen the hold which the Church had upon the affections of the people. Adverse cries were rising from the Radical party. Some desired the total abo- lition of patronage; for that Chalmers was not prepared. Others were advocating the principles of Voluntaryism, and a society had been formed which denounced the Establish- ment principle as unscriptural and degrading; for them Chalmers had nothing but uncompromising opposition. His aim at first was a simple and cautious one: to preserve the forms established by law, but to prevent their abuse. The first point for decision — and it was a very vital one — was whether the Church had in her armoury, without resort- ing to the Civil Legislature, weapons by which a solution of the difficulty might be reached. At first Chalmers and those who thought with him were inclined to the slow process of a series of judgments in particular cases which might vindi- cate the right of challenge in the congregation as opposed to THE VETO ACT. 563 the nomination o£ the patron. This was thought too slow, and it was resolved that an Act of the General Assembly, giving directions as to the course to be pursued by the inferior Church Courts, should be attempted. Chalmers still thought that this should be accompanied by an Act of the Legislature, which seemed to him to be required in order to confirm the decision of the Church. But this was opposed by the Whig politicians, who dreaded the introduction of such a topic into the debates of the Legislature, and who found perhaps small encouragement from English colleagues, to whom the whole subject seemed both arid and dangerous. Chalmers, in advising this course, proposed what was at once bold and logical; and he had ample reason to repent of having yielded to the views of the politicians in abandon- ing it. The form which it was determined that the Act of the Assembly should follow was that of securing to a majority of the congregation an absolute right of veto. Chalmers was selected as the protagonist, and he defended the measure by an appeal to the earlier traditions of the Church from the year 1578 onwards. He maintained that it would be unjust to an unlettered — but possibly conscientious — majority, to ask them to assign reasons for their opposition; and while all his sympathies prompted him to assert for the Church an ''independence on the conceits and follies, the wayward extravagance or humours of the populace," he yet found it needful to vindicate for the " cottage patriarch " the right to object without stating the reason why. It is hard to see the logic of this ; harder still was it for the lay patron and his nominee to see a right which was theirs by law annihilated by an unreasoning opposition which they were not to be allowed to combat, because it was not to base itself upon reason, but claimed the sanction of religious conviction. The proposal was defeated by a majority of twelve in the Assembly of 1833. But its supporters were powerful in the country, and they were restless and determined. The ensu- ing year was spent in a diligent organisation of their forces, and in 1834 the same proposal was passed by a majority of forty-six. In passing the Veto Act the Church undoubtedly strained to the utmost its constitutional power. The Church Courts were, indeed, possessed of high authority. They were estab- lished courts of the realm, and within their own sphere they were independent. But to maintain that they might, by their action, render nugatory an Act of the Civil Legislature — and this was really what the Veto Act implied — was to 564 1830 TO 1834. create an imperium in imperio, and to court a collision with the Civil Power. But for the time it looked as if this bold exercise of its prerogative might not be challenged. It had the support of the law officers of the day. It had the coun- tenance of the Lord Chancellor (Brougham). It coincided with the preponderant feeling both in the country and in the Church. It might easily be represented as not an inter- ference with the Patronage Act, but only a decision as to the conditions under which that Act was to be administered. A comparison of the whole series of enactments on the subject did undoubtedly give countenance to the view that there were two conditions precedent to a settlement — nomination by a patron and consent on the part of the congregation. The Veto Act might be held only to define and to give promin- ence to the recognised right of consent. It remained to be seen how it would work, and whether in practice it would bring about a collision between the civil and the ecclesiastical authority. The next episode which affected the Church was one which showed that Chalmers had in no degree abated the ardour of his support of the principle of religious establishment. The incomes of the ministers of Edinburgh had from the seven- teenth century been drawn from what was called the Annuity Tax, levied upon the occupiers of all inhabited houses. From this tax all members of the College of Justice — which meant practically all who belonged to any section of the legal pro- fession — were exempt. This exemption, and the fact that occupiers and not owners were subject to the impost, rendered all the more unpopular a tax which provoked of itself much opposition and presented the most irritating form of Church endowment. It became a favourite topic of denunciation amongst those who were hostile to all ecclesiastical endow- ments, a class whom the recent political upheaval had made more restless and more bold. An attempt in Parliament to abolish the exemption and to mitigate the pressure of the tax was made by Jeffrey in 1833, but it met with the most strenuous opposition as a temporising and timid measure for perpetuating a tax odious in any form. The agitation against it proceeded apace, and descended to the worst devices. The tax had been enforced with leniency, and both its amount and the number of those who paid it were suffered to fall below the scale permitted by the law. But refusal of payment came from those who had no excuse of poverty, and whose sole object was to attack the Church. To have condoned their contumacy would have been a confession of weakness. Undeterred by the odium it excited, the Church was obliged CHALMERS AND THE ANNUITY TAX. 565 to have recourse to the exaction of its rights by legal process ; and Chalmers in particular denounced the conduct of those who refused to permit a modification of the law, and yet disgraced themselves by resistance to a tax which was one of the recognised conditions of the occupancy of their houses. He did not mince his words. " There is not," he said, speak- ing of those who sought to escape from their obligation to pay a legal tax, "an honourable man who, if once made to view the matter in the light which I think to be the true one, would not spurn from him the burning infamy of such a transaction, and refuse all share in it." In the year 1833, so strong was the opposition that no fewer than 846 persons submitted to prosecution rather than pay. Imprisonment had to be resorted to, and when the defaulters were liberated processions of thousands accom- panied these self-made martyrs to their homes. On the part of the Town Council it was proposed that a fixed pay- ment should be accepted in lieu of the tax, and that the number of city ministers should be reduced from eighteen to thirteen. Against the proposal Chalmers protested with characteristic fervour. It was to clip the wings of the Church when her task was heaviest ; to rob the nation of her best agency for diminishing pauperism and crime, and to steal from the poor man the best part of his inheritance. " I have already professed myself," he said, " and will profess myself again, an unflinching, an out-and-out — and I maintain it, the only consistent Radical. The dearest object of my earthly existence is the elevation of the common people, humanised by Christianity. ... I trust the day is coming when the people will find out who are their best friends, and when the mock patriotism of the present day shall be unmasked by an act of robbery and spoliation on the part of those who would deprive the poor of their best and highest patrimony. ... I will resist even to the death that alienation which goes but to swell the luxury of the higher ranks at the expense of the Christianity of the lower orders." These were the words of the man who was to be the main agent in found- ing a Church the majority of which, only a generation after his death, and under the shadow of his great reputation, have been found ready to join in a crusade to sweep away all ecclesiastical endowments. There was something of chivalrous boldness in the scheme to which Chalmers and those most closely associated with him turned all their efforts in 1834, at the very time when the existing revenues of the Church were so bitterly attacked. The spread of Church accommodation had not 566 1830 TO 1834. kept pace with the growth of population, and in spite of the fragmentary efforts of the Dissenting sects there was in Scotland, especially in the larger cities, a great dearth of spiritual provision. Such a state of things could not satisfy a Church that was determined to play a leading part in social amelioration. Careless of the attacks of their opponents, Chalmers and his friends had set on foot a scheme for providing Glasgow with twenty additional churches — a scheme which their unresting efforts accomplished in the course of seven years. They procured from Parliament an Act which freed these new churches from the chance of falling into the patronage of those who had the right of presenting to the mother charge, and vested the right of appointment in the congregation. Chalmers now turned, when the Glasgow scheme was set on foot, to a similar scheme for Edinburgh; and far from shaping his policy in obedience to the tactics of his opponents, he carried the war into the enemy's camp by approaching the Government for a new grant. The request was favourably received ; and whether it would have been ultimately successful or not, it was fed by hopes until the fall of the Whig Ministry in November 1834. The accession of Peel to power in no way dispelled these hopes. But, alas ! they were doomed to disappointment. The virulence of the Voluntaries in- creased apace. The Parliamentary opposition became too strong for a Ministry whose tenure of power was weak, and whose period of office lasted only a few months. The Whig ministers who succeeded definitely abandoned the plan, and Chalmers' trust in political aid received a rebuff from which it never recovered. Henceforward he felt that the Church must rely on its own unaided efforts, and such a conviction necessarily lessened in his eyes the value of a submission to the Civil Power as the protecting ally of the Church. It deepened his distrust of the Whigs, which he had long felt, and which the nomination by Lord John Russell of an unsympathetic Commission to inquire into the affairs of the Church confirmed in the minds of all her friends. He was stirred to a fury of indignation and im- patience at the excuses which were pleaded against what he held to be a clamant need, urged on behalf of the helpless and the poor. "A restless, locomotive, clamorous minority" — this is the verdict with which he dismisses the question in a letter to Lord Melbourne — " by the noise they have raised, and by the help of men irreligious themselves, and therefore taking no interest, but the contrary, in the religious education of the people, had attained in the eyes A CHURCH COMMISSION. 567 of our rulers a magnitude and an importance which do not belong to them — while the bulk of the population, quiet because satisfied, are, by an overwhelming preponderance, on the side of the Establishment." The appointment of the Commission was looked upon, not only as a scouting of their claims, but as a menace to the independence of the Church, and as such it was characterised by the Dean of Faculty, Hope — the former Tory law officer. The visitation of the Church by the Crown or by Parliament was, in his opinion, utterly destructive of the principle and inde- pendence of Presbytery. It was from the Tory party, where it was least to be expected, that the Church received en- couragement in the battle which she was about to wage for her independence. Such a principle might have involved consequences which probably the Tory lawyer did not quite foresee, in establishing the independent authority of the Church. But it is odd that Chalmers, who was soon to assert that independence with more dogged insistence, hesitated to accept to the full the battle-cry with which Hope would fain have supplied him. The episode was one, however, of transient and minor importance compared with the larger contest that was now taking shape. 568 CHAPTER XXIL THE DISRUPTION. We have now to trace the course of a struggle, in some respects the most remarkable of the whole period which we have had under review. It shows the latest phase of a strife, the elements of which had been present for centuries in the life of Scotland, but the ultimate bearing of which had not been seen only because her history had exhibited so many striking and dramatic contrasts that nothing approaching a logical or constitutional settlement had been possible. Before the close of the seventeenth century, the extreme section of the Presbyterian party had obtained a complete triumph — and one in which the dominant political party had been ready for its own reasons to acquiesce, without careful consideration of the principles of ecclesiastical independence which it involved. That had been secured, apparently for all time, by the legislative enactments which dealt with the new settlement. We are not accustomed nowadays to consider that pledges, how- ever solemn, which are given by the legislation of one age with respect to the immutability of certain rights, can fetter the discretion of future generations. But of the intention there is no doubt; nor can there be any question of the solemnity of the words by which the independence of the Scottish Church was secured, both by the Act of Settlement in 1689, and by the Act of Union. The constitu- tion of the Church, so preserved by all the sanction which Parliamentary pledges could give, did certainly secure to it a very far-reaching independence of the Civil Courts and of the State; and the traditions of Scottish history gave the most abundant countenance and support to the most extensive interpretation of that independence. Time soon proved, however, how flimsy such pledges were, as by SLOW REVIVAL OF FORMER VIEWS. 569 their very nature they are bound to be. Only four years after tlie Act of Union, the statute restoring patronage was passed in 1711 ; and a far-reaching change was intro- duced into the order of the Scottish Church by the authority of a British Parliament. We may support the principles of that Act, and believe that it did good and not harm to the country. But it would be the merest perversity to deny that it was contrary to the whole theory of eccle- siastical independence which had been apparently secured by the most binding pledges. It is only too evident that the promoters of the Act had very little thought of the interests and wishes of Scotland in regard to the matter. Such interests and wishes would have weighed for very little with them; but Harley and St John, when they restored patronage in Scotland, undoubtedly showed that they were well advised as to the interests of their own party there. It would be absurd to pretend that they had any other object in view. The passing of the Act provoked no very wide-felt dis- content. An active and able party in the Scottish Church were strongly in its favour. The excess of ecclesiastical zeal which would, a few years before, have made it the ground of rebellion, had now waxed faint. For at least half a century it was administered cautiously, and only on rare and isolated occasions did it lead to acute diflBculty. A formal protest was, no doubt, annually renewed in the Assembly ; but even that was abandoned when the Moder- ate party gained complete ascendancy. The general feeling of the country, which was much more absorbed in other matters than in ecclesiastical disputes, or religious wrangling, contributed to the same end. The national taste for topics such as these was for the time lulled to rest. A spirit very strangely in contrast with the old virulence of theological disputation was abroad in Scotland during the eighteenth century; and so long as the rights of patronage were leniently exercised, or not flagrantly abused, the country seemed to acquiesce. The limits of civil and ecclesiastical authority were matters of occasional contest, but only in comparatively small circles. The country, as a whole, found no need to formulate them with any more specific accuracy. The disputes on the subject led, from time to time, from the days of the Erskines onwards, to the formation of new sects, each of which claimed to be the sole repository of pure and undefiled ecclesiastical orthodoxy. But the country at large was little stirred by them. 570 THE DISRUPTION. It was only when the rights of patronage began to be exercised with something more of what opponents called callousness, and what the owners called independence, that the withers of ecclesiastical fervour began to be wrung. Towards the close of the eighteenth century, and in the opening years of the nineteenth, there was not a little ground for the irritation aroused in the breasts of the devout Presbyterians by the mental and theological attitude of the average patron's nominee. A certain modish affecta- tion of worldliness became the fashion amongst many of the younger clergy. Their obtrusive latitudinarianism, and their aping of philosophical rationalism, were redeemed by none of the intellectual vigour which belonged to the party which they pretended to represent, and whose tra- ditions they meant to carry on. Occasionally the nominee was, it is feared, guilty of some laxity of conduct which the fervour of the more zealous religionists was not likely to extenuate. The Moderate party, who were the main defenders of patronage, lost their personal sway and their vigour in defence, at the very time when the Evangelicals made those advances in zeal and self - assertiveness which we have already described. Patronage became more and more irksome ; and the opposition which it aroused soon revived, in the most acute and virulent form, that struggle between the civil and the ecclesiastical authorities which is as old as government itself, and which again and again had found in Scotland a chosen battle-ground. The struggle, which may be said to close the epoch of which the narrative is here presented, is one which belongs chiefly to ecclesiastical history. It is only touched here because it forms the most powerful factor in Scottish history in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. We can, of course, dwell only on its main features, and on these, not as they are seen in the Church Courts, or in the personal con- tests of different parties in the Church, but as they affect the general history of the country, and the broad current of national opinion. The struggle has some aspects of singular interest. It shows how an old strife, of which the main issues were rooted in the Scottish mind by the history of centuries, could resuscitate, under the forms of party debate and polit- ical faction peculiar to the nineteenth century, the undying obstinacy which had marked the old and rougher contests of a former age. Its more vivid episodes seem to awaken the echoes that were slumbering amidst the valleys and the hill- sides where the Covenanters had prayed, and fought, and suffered — echoes that resounded at times with all the THE NON-INTRUSION CONTROVERSY. 571 dignity and dramatic fervour of biblical denunciation. The martyrdom of the nineteenth century seems, no doubt, to have about it a considerable element of financial calculation ; a good deal of fiscal strategy enters into the fight; and the fury of the contest seems often tempered by a shrewd regard for political tactics and for the finesse of party management. But when all is said in regard to the more humorous elements in the struggle, it remains a notable instance of a nation fighting a battle of old and essential principles which had left an indelible impress on its past history, and bringing that battle to a conclusion with no lack of spirit and of dignity. One thing at least may be said without hesitation. The importance of the issue as regards the political as well as the ecclesiastical position admitted of no doubt. But the battle was fought with singularly little effective assistance from either party in the State. When we look to their treatment of it, we can find very little of principle, and we search in vain for any display of real statesmanship. Of its ultimate effect upon the political position of Scotland it is difl&cult to speak decidedly; but this at least was an inevitable conse- quence, that Scotland was largely thrown back upon herself, and acquired, in regard to a vast body of religious and polit- ical opinion, a tradition of separation from, and even of opposition to, England. The question at issue was too often treated by English politicians with an impatient and con- temptuous arrogance, which both parties to the fight resented, but which helped the course of the Extremists much more than that of those who stood for the law of the realm. The struggle is interesting in another aspect. It shows us the predominant and magnetic influence of one man of great genius upon his nation; but it also shows us how he was himself led, in the heat of the battle and under the strain of strategical necessity, to adopt an attitude, and to take a share in measures, from which in the earlier stages he would have recoiled with horror. We have already seen how, in his efforts to obtain aid for Church extension, Chalmers had found that the support of either political party was a feeble reed on which to rest. But of the two he resented far most the treatment his Church had met with from the Whigs ; and he increased rather than lessened the closeness of his connection with the opposite party. Peel had not been unwilling to help, although his tenure of office in 1834 had been too short to allow him to fulfil his promise. The Whigs had shown less of sympathy ; and they had recently appointed an adverse Commission to inquire into the affairs of the Church. When at length that 572 THE DISRUPTION. Commission's report showed the need for an increase of the resources of the Church, the Government had no effective measures to propose. The Government of Lord Melbourne from 1835 to 1841 was a singularly weak one; and Chalmers did not hesitate to throw all the weight of his authority against it in Scotland. Their policy in regard to the Irish Church roused his fiercest opposition, as an attack upon the sacredness of religious endowments. Their connection with O'Connell was not likely to gain them support either from Chalmers or his countrymen; and from every aspect of the case his hopes were avowedly placed on the return of the Conservatives to power. In 1837 the death of William the Fourth led to a new election, and Chalmers had no hesitation as to the part he should play. The question of Church or no Church was, to use the words of the Duke of Wellington in 1838, the question of the hour; and on such a question Chalmers could not speak with an uncertain voice. It deepened his hatred for Reform when he saw the robbery of religious endowments threatened as a likely result of that Reform. The whole attitude of the Whig party and its leaders — more especially as the Radical element in that party became more pronounced — not only offended Chalmers in his religious feelings, but grated on all that was deepest in his nature. After the Queen's accession, Chalmers went to court as one of a deputation to present an Address on behalf of the Church. The scene and all it involved stirred all his chivalry and his romance; the only thing that offended him was the Whig surroundings of the throne. The "hard utilitarian face" of Joseph Hume irritated him; yet so much was this "the general aspect and physiognomy of the people round me, that I felt the atmosphere most uncongenial to all that is chival- rous and sentimental in loyalty." His Conservatism was not an opinion merely ; it was with him as it was with Scott, an impulse and a passion. The relations between him and Peel became more and more cordial ; and the flowing tide of Con- servatism, that was soon to submerge the feeble adminis- tration of Melbourne, seemed to him likely to bring new strength and prosperity to the Scottish Church. Such was the position when Chalmers consented to deliver in the spring of 1838, for a London society, a course of lectures on Church Establishments. The lectures were begun in April, in the Hanover Square Rooms in London; and partly owing to the interest which the question excited at the moment, partly to the established fame of the lecturer, they had enormous vogue. They gathered together an audience of unexampled influence, were followed with rapt CHALMERS LECTCJRES IN LONDON. 573 admiration, and fixed, perhaps, the high -water mark of Chalmers' eloquence. The language used of them reads at the present day as that of exaggeration and hyperbole ; but when all reasonable deductions are made, there can be no question that they kindled and intensified in a marked degree the ardour of loyalty to the Church. Day after day his words were followed by a crowd of the leading politicians of the day; and many of the bishops of the Anglican Establishment welcomed the defence of their Church by one who spoke only as a minister of an alien Communion, and who was soon to be the chief founder of a sect that felt itself obliged to disown any connection with the State. When printed, the lectures were received with the same unbounded admiration by a still wider audience. But it is necessary to observe what was the exact position which he claimed for the Church. It is sufficiently curious, because it reveals an odd inconsistency which was bound sooner or later to embarrass and encumber his position. The lectures were spoken on the invitation of, and were addressed to, the Evangelical or Low Church party. He reconciled his own position, as a Presbyterian clergyman defending an Episcopal Establishment, by making light of what he held to be smaller differences. He would have a comprehensive Church; he would have "the Church of England to come down from all that is transcendental or mysterious in her pretension"; she is to "quit the plea of her exclusive apostolical derivation"; she is to be "the rallying-post of Protestantism," and so on. We can imagine how such opinions would be received by the High Church party, who already formed the most active and most energetic, and who were soon to be the most influential, section of the Church of England. He struck at the very root of their theory of the Church — at those features of their creed for which they were ready, if need be, to sacrifice even establishment and endowment. But when he came to discuss the nature of the connection between Church and State, his position is essentially different. In fact, all he contended for was an organised provision for the Church and the clergy; any semblance of authority by the civil magistrate in ecclesiastical matters he expressly repudiated. He cited the example of the Scottish Church; and claimed for that Church an ecclesiastical authority absolutely illimitable. An Established Church it was the bounden duty of the State to maintain; but the doctrine and the laws of that Church were to be settled by none 674 THE DISRUPTION. but an ecclesiastical authority; nor was the power of the State to advance one step beyond that of giving or with- holding her tribute of maintenance. Both the making and the interpretation of her own laws were to belong to the Church alone; and this, he proudly asserted, was indubi- tably the case with his own Church. "The magistrate might withdraw his protection and she cease to be an Establishment any longer; but in all the high matters of sacred and spiritual jurisdiction, she would be the same as before." No champion of spiritual supremacy could assert claims more sweeping or more bold. The position is an odd and even a humorous one. The most orthodox and conservative party of the Church of England, those who conceived that the divine mission of that Church was to maintain a sort of intermediate terri- tory between Roman Catholicism on the one hand and the Protestant Dissenters on the other, invite a Presbyterian minister to discourse to them in support of their Establish- ment. If they felt any qualms about the inconsistency of doctrine between the lecturer and themselves, they probably soothed these by the recollection that he hailed from a country which held Roman Catholicism in abhorrence, and that as member of an Established Church he could not support Dissent. They listened without misgiving to his high claim of ecclesiastical prerogative. It did not occur to them that, in the case of their own Church at least, no such claim could have any historical foundation, unless the Reformation settlement were repudiated, however fairly such a claim might be made for the Church of Scotland, and might be based upon the clear wording of Acts of Parliament. But still less did it strike them that such a claim, on whatever ground it rested, involved consequences from which they would themselves have shrunk, and that it in essence coin- cided with the views of the High Church party, whose aim and attitude they regarded with even more horror than that of the Dissenters. They seem even to have failed to perceive that this claim involved a legislative power in convocation, and placed a veto on the decision of any Civil Court in ecclesiastical affairs. Had they been told that in the foundation of this claim the whole edifice of lay patronage might virtually be overthrown, they would have recoiled in horror from such a prospect. The situation proved, if proof were necessary, the slender understanding of Scottish affairs that was possible to an English audience. If the magnates who gathered in the Hanover Square Rooms to listen to a series of eloquent COLLISION BETWEEN CHUKCH AND STATE. 575 addresses in defence of their Church found that the defence was based upon grounds which involved consequences the very opposite of what they aimed at, they had only their own short-sighted and purblind vision to thank for it. The claims put forward by Chalmers might be impossible; but he was not inconsistent in making them. In the colour .of his Evangelicalism, and in the tenor of his religious views, he had a certain affinity with the Evangelical or Low Church party in the Church of England; and this was enough to induce them to call him to their aid. But in his ecclesi- astical principles he was not only divided from them : they could not even perceive the bearing of his views. According to these views there was no inconsistency in Chalmers' quoting with the highest approbation, as he did in the next General Assembly, the words of Bishop Phillpotts of Exeter. The inconsistency was only in those who accepted a certain similarity of religious tone and sentiment as a basis for an alliance which had no foundation in principle or in logic. The logic of religious partisanship is never very apparent to the lay mind; it becomes worse than ever when principles are pounded together in a confused medley in obedience to a supposed concurrence in religious sentiment. Before these lectures were delivered, the Church of Scotland was launched upon the fight. We have seen that in 1834 the Church had passed a Veto Act, which asserted in its fullest form — in a form, indeed, so full as almost to nullify the rights of patrons — the claim of congregations to object to a presentee. The law officers of the Whig Government of the day approved of the Act, and no collision between the Church and the State seemed likely to result from it. But the matter soon came to the test of law. The Earl of Kinnoul presented a Mr Young to the parish of Auch- terarder in Perthshire. With his personal qualifications — as with those of the other persons who figure in this and succeeding suits — we need not trouble ourselves, as they in no way affect the principle at stake. When the Presbytery proceeded to take steps for his settlement, it found that only two persons "signed the call," and that five-sixths of the communicants dissented from his appointment, as adverse to the spiritual interests of the parish. The Presbytery upheld the objections under the Veto Act, and the presentee not only appealed against the Presbytery to the Synod, or immediately superior Ecclesiastical Court, but — what was of far more serious import — to the Court of Session. The decision of that Court must obviously turn upon the legality 576 THE DISRUPTION. of the Veto Act, and as a consequence involved the whole question of the limits of the legislative power vested in the General Assembly. The case was heard before the whole Court, and in February 1838 a majority of the judges pro- nounced the opinion that in rejecting Mr Young on the sole ground that a majority of the communicants have dis- sented without any reason assigned, the Presbytery had acted illegally and in violation of their duty. The position was alarming enough. At the ensuing General Assembly a declaratory resolution was passed, up- holding the spiritual independence of the Church, while it admitted "the exclusive jurisdiction of the Civil Courts with regard to the civil rights and emoluments secured by law to the Church and the ministers thereof." This seemed to guard the position, and an appeal against the decision was carried to the House of Lords. That appeal was decided in May 1839, and the House of Lords not only upheld the decision, but most unequivocally disposed of any claim on the part of the Church Court to reject a presentee except on the ground of his lack of personal qualification, as to which the Church Court might judge. The question whether the absence of consent on the part of the majority of the communicants was a disqualification, was answered unequi- vocally in the negative. This decision placed the Church in a difiicult position, for which, however, she had only herself to thank. There can be no question that the objection of a majority of the in- habitants had frequently exercised weight on the judgment of the Church Courts, and that the principle had been adopted that " fitness for the situation to which they were appointed " — as attested by substantial acceptance on the part of the communicants — was a necessary " qualification." The change in the political atmosphere, and the increasing assertion of popular rights, might tend to make this element intrude itself more frequently and with more capricious motive. So far Chalmers, at least, was not in sympathy with any subserviency to popular caprice, however much his associa- tion with the Evangelical party might dispose him to attach weight to the element of unreasoning religious conviction, under the cloak of which personal animosity was not unlikely to shelter itself. The Church might have trusted itself to hold the balance, to do what was adequate to prevent un- suitable settlements, and so to avoid, as it had so long avoided, bringing to the hard arbitrament of the law-courts the old struggle between the limits of the ecclesiastical and civil jurisdiction. But by passing the Veto Act she distinctly THE CHURCH AND THE WHIG MINISTERS. 577 threw down the gauntlet, and prescribed a certain rule by which such matters were to be judged, careless whether that method conformed to the civil statutes or not. The highest court of the realm had now virtually pronounced that the Veto Act did not so conform, and it ignored altogether, as it was bound to ignore, the idea that the Veto Act could introduce a change into the statute law of the country. In the Assembly of 1839, immediately after the decision of the House of Lords, a motion proposed by the Moderates for the repeal of the Veto Act was rejected; the principle of " Non-Intrusion " was again asserted ; and it was resolved to appeal to the Government for the help of the Legislature in order to prevent collision between the civil and the eccle- siastical jurisdiction. The appeal was a bold, and, indeed, in some aspects, almost an unconstitutional one, but the Church had in her favour the circumstance that the Veto Act, which gave the occasion for the collision, had been passed with the full assent of the Whig Government in 1834, a government which was practically represented by that of 1839. As might be expected from a Government so weak as that of Lord Melbourne, they temporised with the question. " They felt its urgency ; " they " would give it their best considera- tion." Meanwhile they would exercise the Church patronage of the Crown in accordance with the law of the Church. Such feeble devices were least of all helpful to those whom they were meant to serve. Meanwhile other cases arose which made the matter month by month more urgent. In the case of Lethendy, the nominee of the Crown (to whom the patronage belonged) was vetoed by the congregation, and therefore rejected by the Presbytery. The Crown thereupon made a new presentation, but an in- terdict was served by the Court of Session, at the instance of the first nominee, upon the ordination of the second. On the orders of the Assembly, and in spite of the protests of the original presentee, the Presbytery ordained the second, and they were forthwith summoned to the bar of the Court of Session, and subjected to the censure of the Court, with a distinct threat that the sentence upon a similar action in future would be one of imprisonment. The issue was now fully joined, and it was hardly possible that any terms of settlement could now be arranged. Vir- tually the non-intrusionist party in the Church claimed a jurisdiction co-ordinate with that of the Civil Courts — a claim which was inconsistent with the principles upon which the law of the country rests. The attitude of the combatants 20 578 THE DISRUPTION. on each side became more and more clearly defined. The Moderates maintained that the Veto Act, condemned as it virtually was by the decision of the Courts, must be treated as non-existent. They denounced the pact by which the Government agreed to administer Crown patronage in terms of an Act of Assembly which was condemned by the Civil Courts. They refused to admit that the collision between the Church and the State was one which could be avoided by legislation until the constitutional supremacy of the Civil Courts was fully vindicated. To that vindication they looked for the maintenance both of civil and religious liberty, and they appealed to the constitutional sense of Englishmen to protect their country and their Church against what they held to be the dangerous policy of those who had acquired for the time the upper hand in the Ecclesiastical Courts. It is no wonder that in such an issue the combat waxed hot and fierce. A new and an even more dramatic incident now gave an even graver aspect to the conflict, and showed how far the leaders of the non-intrusionist party were prepared to carry their assertion of independence. A certain Mr Edwards had been presented to the parish of Marnock in 1837. He was dis- tasteful to the congregation, and only one signature was obtained to his call. On the instructions of the General Assembly the Presbytery of Strathbogie — a name that lent itself readily enough to the uses of a popular cry, and obtained a half -jocular currency for the next generation in consequence — rejected the presentee, and a new nomination was made by the patron. But before the Presbyteries pro- ceeded to act upon the new nomination an interdict was served upon them by the Court of Session, and in obedience thereto they resolved to stay proceedings. The matter was brought up at the General Assembly of 1839, and the Pres- bytery was instructed to suspend all proceedings until the Assembly of the following year. But immediately after- wards the original presentee obtained a judgment in his favour from the Court of Session, which declared that the Presbytery was bound to take him on trial. This edict the Presbytery of Strathbogie, like law-abiding citizens, pro- ceeded to obey, but the Commission of the Assembly, in the following December, commanded them to desist, and on their refusal passed sentence of suspension from their functions as ministers. It is almost amusing to find that the Commission accompanied this high-handed assertion of a jurisdiction, not only co-ordinate with, but superior to, that of the High Court, with much self-congratulation upon the forbearance which DEFIANCE OF THE CIVIL COURTS. 579 made the sentence one of suspension only and not of de- position. That any large section of the Established Church could have supposed that such action would be tolerated by the supreme Civil Court is hardly conceivable, if we do not recall the fact that the issue now being fought was one which roused feel- ings deeply rooted in the hearts of a large body of Scotsmen. The old assertion of ecclesiastical supremacy was buried beneath more than a century of altogether different feelings, during which it seemed to be little but a memory of the past, which no new generation would see revived. But the seed lay deep in the soil, and it was a proof of the tenacity of the Scottish character that the crop sprang up once more, with a vigour and force that took no account of constitutional considerations, or of the fact that its aspirations were incon- sistent with the ideas of the day. We may condemn action so high-handed, which visited with the severest ecclesiastical penalties those whose guilt consisted in obeying the law of the land ; but we cannot help respecting the boldness of the leaders, and the clear-sighted vigour with which they recog- nised the real issue. Even the question of patronage as against popular assent was seen to be of lesser account. " It is not the] Veto Law we are now considering," said Dr Candlish, who moved the sentence of suspension; "it is a thing greatly more radical, vital, and elementary, and of far more permanent and pervading importance to the Church than any single law on its statute-book. The veto is a bagatelle, and but dust in the balance, when compared with the proper independence of our Church in things ecclesias- tical." It is impossible to refuse a certain meed of admir- ation to so bold and unflinching a statement of the question at stake, and it might serve as a more instructive lesson to the Englishman who studies the great ecclesiastical fight of Scotland, and who may turn that lesson to account in a fight that may soon engage his own more immediate attention, if he grasped clearly the fact that the issue was only acci- dentally one regarding the settlement of ministers, and that its essence lay in the incompatible claims of civil and eccle- siastical jurisdiction. It was well that it should be thus fearlessly set forth. We may doubt whether civil or re- ligious liberty would have been of long endurance had the full measure of the claim of the dominant party in the Church been admitted ; but we cannot refuse to its leaders the credit of conscientious conviction, and of a bold statement of the authority they claimed. The sentence of suspension was followed by arrangements 580 THE DISRUPTION. under which the functions of the ministry were to be per- formed by others in place of the suspended ministers. The Court of Session protected these ministers in the use of the parish churches, and interdicted any interference with these. But it did not yet proceed to interdict the holding of services in the district by other ministers. The occasion was used to arouse the feelings of the Highland population by a series of those open-air services, which stirred their deepest memories, called forth their highest enthusiasm, and pledged them to a whole-hearted adherence to the cause. The appeal to religious enthusiasm met with a ready response, and it was only natural that those who believed themselves to be the representatives of the martyrs of a former generation should assume, as a part of their creed, a not altogether amiable aspect of superior fervour and loftier morality — an assump- tion which may easily be accompanied by something of Pharisaical hypocrisy. Their opponents, at least, did not hesitate to ascribe to them such traits, and not the least provocative element in the strife, to those who were main- taining the supremacy of the law, was that the average Englishman, so far as he attended to the dispute at all, took the party of resistance at their own valuation, and conceived that they, and they alone, were animated by motives of con- science and religious duty, and were ready to sacrifice all for their sake. It was only too easily overlooked or forgotten that adherence to constitutional principle had its martyrs also, although the sacrifices were less noisily proclaimed. But the incidents of the fight developed rapidly. Early in 1840 the Court of Session strengthened the terms of their interdict, and forbade altogether the ministration of the Assembly's representatives in the districts of the suspended ministers. The result was an absolute refusal to obey. " Let no ambiguity rest upon our conduct," said Dr Chalmers, when this second interdict had been issued. "If the Church com- mand, and the Court countermand, a spiritual service from any of our office-bearers, then it is the duty of all the ministers and all the members of the Church of Scotland to do precisely as they should have done though no interdict had come across their path." It was suggested that, as a pre- liminary to asking any alteration of the law from the Legis- lature, the Church should make submission to the Court. The reply was one of absolute defiance. To do so would be " degrading dereliction of principle." " Be it known to all men," said Chalmers in the Commission of Assembly, "that we shall not retrace one single footstep — we shall make no submission to the Court of Session — and that, not because of SUGGESTED LEGISLATION. 581 the disgrace, but because of the gross and grievous dereliction of principle that we should incur thereby. They may force the ejection of us from our places; they shall never, never force us to the surrender of our principles ; and if that honourable Court shall again so far mistake their functions as to repeat or renew the inroads they have already made, we trust they will ever meet with the same reception they have already gotten — to whom we shall give place by subjection, no, not for an hour — no, not by a hair's-breadth." The last interdict remained — as indeed it was inevitable that it should — a dead letter. The issue had now been clearly defined; to throw oil on the flames by the pro- secution of many of the leading clergymen because they held services in the proscribed districts would have been little short of madness. The interdict served only to show that by so doing, in the opinion of the Court, they were guilty of acting against the good order of the Church as established. But to visit them with the penalties due for such an offence did not belong to the function of a Civil Court, which would only have made itself ridiculous by trying to enforce them. The only hope of a settlement lay in some legislative pro- posal which might reconcile the reasonable claims of the Church with the prerogatives of the Civil Courts. The leaders of the non - intrusion party believed that they might dictate their own terms, and were ready to open negotiations with either party in the State. But it soon appeared that the Whig ministers, although they had encouraged the Veto Act as a plausible concession to popular rights, were unable or unwilling to propose any alteration of the law. The Dissenting influence, as was perhaps not altogether unnatural, were opposed to a con- cession which would give complete independence to a Church enjoying the material advantages of endowment and establishment. Whatever the reason, the answer of Lord John Russell was explicit: that in the present dis- agreement of opinion the Government declined to make itself responsible for any measure of relief. It was to the Conservatives — to whom the changed current of political feeling was fast bringing the certainty of power and office — that Chalmers and his friends now turned. The member of that party through whom the negotiations were chiefly conducted was Lord Aberdeen, and for a time it seemed as if the terms of a Bill might be arranged. The negotiations present an aspect of the crisis less dignified, perhaps we may add, less creditable to all 582 THE DISRUPTION. concerned, than the more dramatic incidents of the open fight. It would be tedious to discuss in detail the parley- ings and the correspondence, by means of which the non- intrusionist party in the Church sought some formula which would retain for them an independent power, and while prescribing a stated course of procedure, should leave one step therein so undefined as to allow them to be absolutely free; while the Conservative leaders sought to preserve in name the supremacy of the law, while conceding as much as possible to the claims of the Church. Neither side could afford to be very candid; least of all, perhaps, the Conservative politicians, who were not only attempting a task essentially opposed to the main principles of their political creed, and who, from party motives, were perhaps inclined to sacrifice the best interests of the Church, and to betray that party in the Church which might command comparatively little popular support, but were nevertheless bound by the principles upon which alone an Established Church can safely rest. The letters and conferences between both sides became more and more complicated. Charges of bad faith were inevitably made. It could hardly be other- wise when the subtleties of ecclesiastical distinctions were the matter of discussion between those, on the one hand, to whom each variation of expression meant a vital differ- ence of principle, and those, on the other, to whom the whole seemed a sophistical and unmeaning controversy. Step by step it became plain that the liberum arhitrium or unfettered discretion which the Church claimed would not be satisfied by a scheme which demanded that their rejection of a presentee should be based on reasons stated on behalf of the congregation. The Church must not only be free in its judgment: it must be free to suspend or abrogate its judgment if a majority of the congregation announced its dissent. The Presbytery must be free to reject merely on the dissent of the congregation ; that is to say, the right of the patron was to be at the mercy of any caprice that claimed to be founded on conscience, even if it failed to adduce a single reason for its existence. Between such a claim and any proposal which a responsible minister could propose there was an insurmountable barrier. The negotia- tions were fruitless, and they did not end without provoking feelings of distrust and irritation on both sides. Lord Aber- deen introduced a Bill which would certainly have given to the Presbytery ample power to give effect to any reason- able objection of the congregation. Beyond that he would not go, and when he withdrew the Bill in July 1840, it was ABANDONED AS HOPELESS. 583 with expressions of sympathy for the suspended ministers of Strathbogie, and of severe condemnation of those leaders who seemed to be perverting the mind and hazarding the whole position of the Church. These words were echoed by Sir Robert Peel. He regretted that the Bill had not passed; he was willing to concede more of the principle of popular election in the choice of ministers ; but any further concession to the independence of ecclesiastical authority he would not give. "The spiritual authority now claimed by the Church of Scotland he believed to be illegal, and he would not for the purpose of conciliation give his support to it." It might have been well had this declaration been made earlier; perhaps not less well, even for the Church itself, had a lingering attachment to the policy of conciliation at the price of surrender of principle not remained as part of the stock-in-trade of the Conservative party. The negotiations being thus broken off, the fight was re- newed with all the greater bitterness, as each party recognised that it was to be war to the bitter end. The contest as to which section was to be dominant — because it became more evident day by day that the Extremists were only one section of the Church — waxed more bold. It had been suggested that they should give way. We have seen how the sugges- tion was received. They did not scruple now to claim that the surrender should be made by the law-courts. " It would be no impossible thing, surely," said Chalmers, in his heated reply to the calm words of Peel, " that law has for once in 150 years gone beyond its sphere. Which of the two rival elements, we ask, in all conscience and equity, ought to give way ? " So frenzied had he become in the assertion of an impossible claim that, with no thought of the danger to the whole structure of society, he does not hesitate to suggest that the law-courts should surrender the very principle on which they rest, and come in the humble attitude of repent- ant sinners to crave the pardon of an authority greater than that of law ! The offending Presbytery of Strathbogie, or the seven suspended ministers who constituted the majority, now pro- ceeded to carry out the order of the Court, to admit Mr Edwards to the charge which was legally his. The scene was one striking and picturesque enough. The enthusiastic mood of the Highland population of the lonely Banffshire village had been raised to the highest state of tension. On the 21st of January 1841, after a severe snowstorm had laid the roads far and near under impassable snow-drifts, the ceremony which they had been taught to believe a 584 THE DISRUPTION. sacrilegious profanation of the sacred office was per- formed. In spite of the difficulties, a crowd of some thousands had gathered, and densely filled the church. The legal agents on each side had a preliminary skirmish as to the manner of procedure. Formal protests were put in, and the ministers who were obeying the orders of the Supreme Court were plainly told that they could claim no spiritual allegiance from their people, and that they were about to perform an act involving "the most heinous guilt and fearful responsibility." Having made this protest, the congregation, with a dramatic effect all the more striking because it was unstudied, trooped in a body from the church which they were never to enter again. The scene was changed when the Assembly met in May of the same year. Then the outraged congregation were to have their revenge, and a dominant majority, who were now careless of the lengths to which rebellion might lead them, were determined to pass upon the offending ministers the severest ecclesiastical penalty. There was no hesitation as to the course to be pursued. The appeal that the ministers had acted according to their conscientious sense of duty was summarily brushed aside. Conscience was no excuse for stubborn contumacy or for proud and rebellious defiance. So spoke Chalmers on the eve of the most marked insult that could have been perpetrated on the first principles of the law. But for either side in such a contest to throw over- board the plea of conscience is a dangerous abandonment of what both may sometimes need as their excuse. The sitting was excited and prolonged, and only at three o'clock in the morning, after a dignified protest from the ministers accused, was sentence of deposition pronounced. It was, no doubt, a solemn and effective episode in the drama, and one which might well mark the stern issues of the contest; but the offending ministers in no way lost their status. Like the issue of another well-known curse, "nobody was one penny the worse." The minority in the Church — or at least those who, in the heated eagerness of men who knew no measure in their resistance to the law, appeared to be the minority — were now fully determined to reassert what they believed to be the constitutional order of their Church. They had felt no sympathy with the strained assertion of popular interference in the settlement of ministers. They believed that such interference was often mischievous, and not rarely capricious and ill-grounded. But they had declined the contest on the special point, which admitted of difference of opinion, and ECCLESIASTICAL REBELLION. 585 was, after all, a matter of degree. Now a larger question was at stake. The freedom and independence of every member of the Church could be maintained only so long as the majesty of the law was supreme above the fierce and unruly elements that intrude into ecclesiastical debates. A contest might have arisen at the moment, had a protest been lodged which the majority were prepared to refuse. To have provoked battle on that issue might not only have led to disruption, it might have forced the hands of the State, and led it to treat the whole Church as irreclaimably rebellious. At the moment when the fight was at its fiercest, a counter- stroke was dealt by the Court of Session. The Moderator announced that a messenger-at-arms was at the door to present an interdict against the deposition. The position was critical. To have refused to receive it would have brought every member of the Assembly within the reach of the law. The interdict was ordered to lie on the table, and a series of resolutions declared it to be a breach of the privileges of the Church. The Whig Government had now to deal with an un- exampled state of matters. The Prime Minister was questioned on the subject, and while declining to propose any alteration of the law, he declared that steps would be taken to enforce the law and to protect those who obeyed it. But no such steps were taken. The loudest and boldest party in the Church were likely to have the most influence at an election, and a tottering Government could not afford to alienate their support. Such temporising, however, won them no respect. The assertors of the Church's claims could with reason complain "that the Government had neither the candour to concede these claims nor the boldness to re- pudiate them." An attempt — which found some favour in the eyes of the Whigs — had again been made in the way of legislation. The Duke of Argyle had introduced a Bill in May, which conceded the veto, but fenced it only by providing that it could be set aside if it were proved to have been set in motion from factious or capricious motives. That Bill con- ceded so much that the extreme party in the Church were ready to give it their support. But it met with keen opposi- tion in the House of Lords, and before it proceeded further Sir Robert Peel had become Minister, and, in the election which ensued, became the head of a powerful majority. The opposite party in the Church now found their hopes raised, and appealed to the Government, with no uncertain voice, 586 THE DISRUPTION. to restore her discipline. " They are fully persuaded " — so their memorial ran — "that, because sufficient care has not been taken to gfuard aofainst the cherishine: of delusive and unconstitutional expectations, matters have reached in Scotland the fearful crisis to which they have now attained." They demanded from the Government a declaration which should admit of no dispute, which party in the Church was to be held by the legislature as constituting the Established Church. The lists were now clearly marked out. "The war of argument is now over," said Dr Chalmers at the Commission in August : " the strife of words must give place to the strife of opposing deeds and opposing purposes." "Be it known unto all men," he proceeded, "that we have no wish for a disruption, but neither stand we in overwhelming dread of it. We have no ambition, as has pleasantly been said of us, for martyrdoms of any sort, but neither will we shrink from the hour or the day of trial." It is plain that, long before these words could have been uttered, a " disruption " was contemplated as the probable issue of the fight. Already measures were in operation for covering the march to a separate camp. Much in the circum- stances favoured the plans of the seceders. The resources of the country had greatly increased. They were chiefly in the hands of the captains of commerce in the large cities, and the great majority of these were strongly under the influence of the leaders of the more restless and active party in the Church. Relatively to the wealth of the country, the endowments assigned to the Church had become more and more meagre. Of the landed classes, not a few, estranged by the attacks on their powers as patrons, and weary of continual strife, were showing sympathies with the Episco- palian Church. The standard of living traditional in the Scottish Church was not extravagant, and no unmeasured liberality was required to provide the scanty competence that would suffice to secure the outgoing ministers against actual starvation. None the less the determination to face the risk commands admiration and respect. It was not made without some hesitation. For a moment it seemed as if before the final plunge a settlement might still be reached, and negotiations were opened with the Government through the medium of Sir George Sinclair. They proved abortive, as the Government could not concede the terms that were demanded. The final scenes were hastening on. In the beginning of 1842 a new movement was begun. If no settlement between Church and State were possible, PROPOSAL TO ABOLISH PATRONAGE. 587 it might still be hoped that an actual change of the law, for the abolition of patronage, might sweep out of the way the whole foundation of the strife. This proposal was now- put forward with the support of Chalmers in the Presbytery of Edinburgh. It could hardly have been supposed that a Conservative Government could agree to such a proposal. To do so would have been to betray the party in the Church who had stood by the constitutional relation between Church and State, and would have delivered them over to a system against which they had striven in obedience to the law, and which they believed to be fraught with evil to the Church. The advocacy of the proposal involved a change of front on the part of those who had passed the Veto Act, and Chalmers himself could not escape the accusation of inconsistency. It unmasked — so opponents might well allege — the real object of those who had insisted upon a veto power in the congregation which was to be a check upon the evils of patronage, but not a substitution of popular election in its place. It was in marked opposition to the whole attitude which he had assumed as regards the limits of popular power, and shows how far he had departed from the spirit that made him the decided opponent of the Reform Bill. It was one thing to ask that patronage should not override religious scruples : it was quite another thing to say that the initiative in nominating ministers should pass entirely into the hands of an uneducated crowd. But ecclesiastical battling is a process through which few men pass without giving ground for a charge of inconsistency. No one would advance against Chalmers the accusation of conscious tergiversation ; but it is impossible not to admit that his progress along the dangerous path of resistance to the law had made him the supporter of much from which in earlier days he would have shrunk. It is not the business of a secular history to trace in minute detail each incident of the ecclesiastical struggle. The history of Strathbogie had its counterpart elsewhere; but the new instances added nothing material to the issues at stake. The Government held firmly — and wisely — to the position that the law must be maintained, and declined to introduce any legislative proposal. The time for concession was gone, and so clearly was the ultimate result foreseen that some of those who had adhered to the extreme party now separated themselves from it, and were willing to accept a measure on the lines of Lord Aberdeen's rejected Bill. To this the Government were not unwilling to listen, but the fear that defection from their party might increase only 588 THE DISRUPTION. precipitated the action of the extreme advocates of spiritual independence. They now determined to put forward a Claim of Right (which it was clear that neither the Government would for one moment consent, nor respect for the law admit), and to adopt this as the charter of their new Church. The Claim of Right was drawn up in anticipation of the Assembly of 1842, which was destined to be — and which it was indeed foreseen must be — the last of the unbroken Church. Never were the assertions of the supreme authority of the Church, within its own domain, put forward with more unhesitating boldness. It was soon evident that all half measures were discarded, and that the only aim was to add decision to the declarations of the Church, and to obtain for them the support of sweeping majorities. The exclusion of the deposed ministers of Strathbogie was up- held — in spite of an interdict from the Court of Session — by an overwhelming number of voices. The resolution for the abolition of patronage passed with as full assent. The Assembly took pride — perhaps those who contemplated the abandonment of their benefices found special satisfaction — in the proofs that could be adduced that the liberality of her adherents was never more generous than it had been in these years of excitement and strain. The chief topic, however, which threw all others into the shade, was the Claim of Rights. This asserted, in no dubious terms, the co-ordinate jurisdiction of the Church Courts, and traced it as founded upon her history, and as confirmed by her contract with the State. It was defended by Chalmers in words that left no ambiguity as to the position which was claimed — a position which might well rouse the enthusiasm of those who could disregard the paramount supremacy of the law as the fundamental basis of society, and who could see no danger to civil and religious liberty, of which that paramountcy is the sole efiectual guarantee. It was carried by a majority of more than two to one, and it was trans- mitted to the Crown as the final offer of an independent jurisdiction, deigning to treat with a usurping power, rather than as the appeal of subjects of the State to its sovereign authority. We may recognise its boldness, and the earnest enthusiasm of its supporters, even while we are convinced that its concession would have involved the confusion of every constitutional principle. Before the close of the year, and before the Claim of Right came to the arbitrament of Parliament, the party which now held itself to be the only true representative of the principles of the Church, met in Convocation at Edinburgh to arrange THE CLAIM OF RIGHT. 589 for the final steps in its plan of campaign. It was an occasion of great solemnity, and they did not fall below the dignity of the occasion. A spirit of stern resolution as well as of earnest devotion pervaded all their proceedings, and none knew better than Chalmers how to grace the solemn gathering with all the power of a convincing eloquence. But it was apparent also that the spirit of organisation was not lacking, and that abundant preparation had been made for arranging the material resources by which the campaign was to be main- tained. The completeness of the scheme for a provision which was to take the place of the surrendered benefices was well fitted to reassure the faint-hearted or the hesitating. The Convocation parted, secure of adequate support, not only from a large body of the clergy, but from at least a fair, if not a preponderating, proportion of the wealthier laymen of the country. It remained only that the Claim of Right should be sub- jected to the judgment of Parliament. It had already been dealt with in a letter from Sir James Graham as Home Secre- tary, in which he exposed the incompatibility of the Claim with the supremacy of the Civil Courts, and declined on the part of the Government to intervene. On the 7th of March 1843 Mr Fox Maule proposed the appointment of a com- mittee to inquire into the grievances of the Church. Many Scottish members supported the motion, and found nothing to object to in the claims put forward. But such was not the determination of Parliament. From both sides of the House — from Lord John Russell no less than from Sir Robert Peel — the demands were denounced as unconstitutional and incapable of being entertained. "My belief is," said Sir Robert Peel, " that such claims, if you were to concede them, would be unlimited in their extent. They could not be limited to the Church of Scotland. . . . My belief is that there is abroad, both in this country and in Scotland, and in other countries, after a long series of religious contentions and neglect of the duties of religion, a spirit founded upon just views in connection with the subject. But I hope that, in effecting this object, an attempt will not be made to estab- lish a spiritual or ecclesiastical supremacy above the other tribunals of the country, and that, in conjunction with in- creased attention to the duties of religion, the laws of the country will be maintained. If the House of Commons is prepared to depart from those principles on which the Re- formation was founded, and which principles are essential to the maintenance of the civil and religious liberties of the country, nothing but evil would result, the greatest evil of 590 THE DISRUPTION. which would be the establishment of religious domination, which would alike endanger the religion of the country and the civil rights of man." The motion was defeated by 241 votes to 76 ; but the Scottish members voted as two to one in its favour. The Church had now received the answer that she de- manded ; and it was of a character for which those who had recently commanded the majority in her Courts were fully prepared. Their course was now clear. A piecemeal resigna- tion, or one which would not have enabled them to assume the formal aspect of a deliberate separation of the great body of the Church from a State which had broken its side of the contract, would not have suited their purpose. But an oppor- tunity was soon to be given them for an exodus of another kind, and it was prepared with ample deliberation, and in a manner calculated to give it the most striking and dramatic effect. The General Assembly met in May 1843. Men's minds were in the keenest state of excitement ; and however solemn the occasion, excitement kept alive by a carefully studied scene, of which the incidents were planned beforehand, can- not fail to have its ludicrous side. The leaders were well aware of their power. They had secured pledges which could not be broken without sinking irrevocably the characters of those who had given them. In many parts of the country the pressure of the seceding party was irresistibly strong, and the ministers had often to choose between leaving their benefices, and thus securing a right to a share in the sustenta- tion which private liberality had promised, and holding their benefices against an overwhelming opinion in the district, which held that to do so would amount to a surrender of all religious principle — with the prospect, also, of ministering in churches without a congregation. Without lessening the credit due to conscientious conviction, we may well suppose that such pressure was not without its effect. The outgoing party was also sustained by wide sympathy from those be- yond the pale of the Church, and even beyond the limits of Scotland, who not unnaturally looked only at the obvious sacrifices that were faced, and gave generous credit to an heroic act of independence. There were others who took a less flattering view, and who were inclined to see as much of melodrama as of tragedy in the scene that was about to be enacted. There were many who saw in it a presage of great evil for Scotland, when a middle-class Puritanism, and a cove- nanting spirit adapted to the conditions of the nineteenth century, might kill out the blither and freer mood that THE SECESSION. 591 had reigned when the century was young, and might alienate much that Hnked Scotland with the highest intellectual efforts of the time, and made her, for a generation at least, the centre of poetry and romance. Some calmed their fears by pro- claiming that the exodus would be small ; and their falsified prophecies were afterwards recalled as influences which misled the Government. The last allegation may safely be dismissed. No Government could have satisfied claims which in their very essence were inconsistent with the supremacy of civil law. According to the usual custom, the meeting of the General Assembly was preceded by the levee at Holy rood Palace of the Lord High Commissioner, who attended the meetings as the representative of Her Majesty. The Marquis of Bute was the Lord High Commissioner for the year, and in anticipation of the coming scene, which was to make of this an historic occasion, the levee was unusually crowded. It was after- wards recalled as an odd and ominous incident, that while the levee proceeded, the portrait of William III. fell heavily to the floor, and caused a bystander to cry out, " There goes the Revolution Settlement." With his usual military escort, and all the pomp and display that made the day an annual holi- day, the Commissioner proceeded to the High Church, where the preliminary service was held, and there listened, with such edification as was in the circumstances possible, to a discourse from the retiring Moderator — a keen partisan of the seceding party, who did not fail to improve the opportunity which his occupation of the pulpit gave him. Meanwhile a vast crowd had packed the Assembly Hall since dawn, and had patiently awaited the scene which was about to be enacted, and the parts for which were cast with the same care as for a theatri- cal performance. After the usual opening prayer, and in an atmosphere charged with an electric current of curiosity, of anxiety, and of enthusiasm, the retiring Moderator, instead of " constituting " the Court and proceeding to the election of his successor, read a protest resisting the invasion of the Church's rights, and summoning all who were faithful to her cause to withdraw and meet elsewhere. Having finished, he left the hall, followed by more than four hundred ministers, who then severed their connection with the National Church. Falling into line, they formed a long procession, through the crowded street, to another hall that had been prepared for their recep- tion. The scene was one that could hardly have been wit- nessed without emotion, even by those who knew that it was carefully rehearsed, and who might suspect the perfect sin- cerity of the martyrdom, and might still more confidently condemn the principles upon which it rested. The seceding 592 THE DISRUPTION. ministers left amidst the cheers of the enthusiastic, amidst the tears of those who mourned the breach in the National Church, and amidst the smiles, it must be admitted, of not a few, whose laughter was, perhaps, stirred not by mere deri- sion, but by the solemn guise of enthusiastic heroism which religious contentions, conscientiously no doubt, but sometimes mistakenly, assume. In a hall at Canonmills which had been prepared for the occasion, another vast crowd was gathered to welcome the seceding ministers. A Moderator of the new Assembly had to be chosen, and for the office the new body had a splendid nomination open to them. By acclamation Dr Chalmers, whose genius had illustrated the whole progress of the con- troversy, whose unconquerable energy had given organisation to the new Church, and whose brilliant eloquence had im- pressed the cause upon the heart of the nation, was called to the chair. He opened the proceedings by prayer, and by selecting for praise one of those Psalms which in the metrical version have for ages moved the Scottish people : — " O send Thy Light forth and Thy Truth, Let them be guides to me : And bring me to Thine holy hill, Even where Thy dwellings be." Not even those who most doubted the wisdom of the Secession; not even those who condemned most severely the methods by which it had been brought about ; nay, not even those who might sneer at what they deemed to be the mock heroics of its martyrdom, could deny to the new Church the credit of a solemn, an enthusiastic, and a dignified open- ing scene. The exodus was indeed a great and memorable one, and under its shock the Church might well reel and stagger. Let it be remembered what her position was, before we admit that all the honour of courageous adherence to conscience lay on the side of those who now shook her dust from off their shoes. She had no imposing political influence. She had often experienced the deception born of trust in the landed aristocracy of Scotland, many of whom had grown rich upon her ancient possessions, and yet grudged her ministers a scanty pittance. Amidst the contentions of political factions her position as an Establishment might easily disappear, while the great and wealthy Anglican Establishment might look with indifference on the fate of a Church alien to herself in many points both of government and doctrine. She could not count upon anything but THE PLIGHT OF THE ESTABLISHED CHURCH. 593 opposition from at least one great party in the State, and only feeble support from the other; and to many English- men it seemed as if, in an obscure and entangled ecclesiastical contest, into the merits of which they disdained to enter, the Church of Scotland had played the less heroic part. The stream of private liberality was flowing in the direction of the new Church; and those who remained within the pale of the Establishment might think they had done all that could be expected of them in adhering to her, and that a Church which had clung to its endowments required no liberal aid from voluntary resources. Her position had nothing to rouse popular sympathy or to kindle popular enthusiasm — indeed the topic on which the battle of civil and ecclesiastical jurisdiction had been fought, was one in which she had distinctly chosen the unpopular side. Yet we must be forgiven for believing that the courage and the steadfastness which kept the remnant faithful to the principle of Establishment, and accepted the only terms upon which Establishment was constitutionally possible, were qualities which deserved well of their country, and which proved in the result of inestimable advantage to her. Without that courage, Scotland must necessarily have become much more distinctly and widely separated from England than was actually the case. Had disestablishment come, not as the result of political changes, but as the result of an obstinate and perverse resistance to the only possible terms on which the State could suffer an Establishment to continue — then, without question, after the first burst of admiration for a stalwart resistance had spent itself, Scotland would have been regarded as divided by a wide gulf from the dominant con- stitutional views of the sister country. As it was, the Church had to see herself politically in a minority within her own borders. She had to see the rapid growth of a stern and repressive code of manners and of religious doctrine, which swayed a large part of the population, which judged severely those who fell short of a standard which they believed narrow, bigoted, and discouraging to some of the best instincts of the people, and which, combined with the tend- ency of concentration at the English metropolis, helped to destroy the high position which Scotland had won for herself as a literary centre. In the eyes of these more enthusiastic opponents, the adherents of the Church were deemed to be latitudinarian in doctrine, unduly lax in their conduct, over-occupied with secular pursuits, and too inclined to cultivate sympathy with the Anglican Estab- lishment. On the morrow of a great religious "trek" such 2p 594 THE DISRUPTION. things are very naturally suspected by those who are moved by the absorbing enthusiasm of the moment. Those against whom the accusations were brought might endure them, in the consciousness that they were maintaining an atti- tude which did in the end redound to the good of Scotland. About four hundred and fifty out of twelve hundred of her ministers had left the Church. It would be wrong to deny that to many this involved a severing of ties that were part of their lives, and that suffering and privation were the lot of some. As a solace to these afflictions they indulged to the full in the most bitter denunciation, and the most contemptuous ridicule of those who remained. The position of an Established Church minister was one which for years called for the exercise of much patience and much fortitude. To attend the parish church was, in many places, held to be a sign of lax conduct, and of open irreligion. On the other hand, the outgoers had the sympathy of many in all parts of the world. From America and from Ireland there came material help. The newly enriched commercial classes found their contribu- tions repaid by a rich tribute of admiration, influence, and respect, which did not improve their moral tone, and which gave to the ensuing generation a large and power- ful body in whose character attention to worldly pros- perity and to obtrusive religious professions were oddly blended. The Protestant Churches abroad, readily and without any very careful investigation, accepted the view that in the Free Church alone were to be found the repre- sentatives of Scottish independence and of Scottish religious feeling. " Apart from Christianity altogether," said Chalmers in his opening address, in words that, to a calm retrospect, appear to savour a little too much of self-congratulation, "there has been realised a joyfulness of heart, a proud swelling of conscious integrity, when a conquest has been effected by the higher over the inferior powers of our nature, and so amongst Christians, too, there is a legitimate glorying, as when the disciples of old gloried in the midst of their tribulation, and when the spirit of glory and of God rested on them, they were made partakers of the Divine nature, and escaped the corruption that is in the world." Whatever might be the lot of the humbler fol- lowers, the leaders of the new Church might add to this consciousness of self - righteousness, the fact that they at least were no losers, even in a worldly point of view, by the change. But, on the other hand, one point in the declaration THE SECESSIONISTS NOT VOLUNTARIES. 595 which was most emphatically insisted on by the Free Church was that they supported the principle of an Estab- lished Church as against that of voluntaryism. "The Voluntaries mistake us if they conceive us to be Volun- taries," said Dr Chalmers in his opening address in the Canonmills Hall. "Though we quit the Establishment, we go out on the Establishment principle; we quit a vitiated Establishment, we would rejoice in returning to a pure one. To express it otherwise — we are the advo- cates for a national recognition, and national support of religion — and we are not Voluntaries." No declaration could be more emphatic, more careful, or more distinct. It indicated, indeed, the great error of which those had been guilty who had brought about the breach. None had spoken words of more unreserved praise of Establishment than had Dr Chalmers, and his most eloquent pleas in its favour had been urged before an English audience, and in defence of the Anglican Estab- lishment, from which this element of popular election was far more completely banished, and where the principle of the civil supremacy was far more thoroughly recognised than would have tallied with the views of any party in the Church of Scotland. But step by step, he and others with him had advanced to a position from which they could not retreat, and in which they were almost forced to the extreme measure of secession. With all the success that attended the Sustentation Scheme, of which he was himself the chief organiser, Chalmers, during the four years that ensued before his death, continued to feel the same distrust of the voluntary principle. He did not cease to lament that the breach between his Church and the State had become inevitable ; he did not cease to feel that voluntaryism, however necessary to those who could not conscientiously accept the terms of the State, was but a poor substitute for the great benefit which a State Church might confer. The only terms on which he could accept that bond were those which pledged the State — not as a matter of expediency, but as a matter of publicly-avowed faith — to support the Church, not because it was the Church of the majority, or because it was the Church of history and tradition, but because it was implicitly believed to be the only true Church — to which it was ready to com- mit supreme power in all ecclesiastical matters. These terms were refused, but Chalmers nevertheless fell back upon voluntaryism as a sorry substitute. After all the triumphant success of the new Church, he could only say : 596 THE DISRUPTION. "My hopes of an extended Christianity from the efforts of voluntaryism alone have not been brightened by my experience since the Disruption." But the logic of facts was too strong for Chalmers and his followers. They were forced, as a means of strengthening their own position, to seek alliance with the dissenting bodies beyond the borders of Scotland, whose principles were voluntary. They found there a sympathy with the spirit in which they re- garded religion, and they found there also a social stratum more akin to their own. Bit by bit they moved into closer connection with the dissenting spirit, and a generation had scarcely passed before a large portion, and what soon be- came an overwhelming majority, of their number were to be found in the ranks of the Liberationists. Only a few years ago the emphatic words of Chalmers were depre- cated as a mere chance utterance, not worthy of attention, instead of the distinct enunciation of a principle, in support of which the main efforts of his life had been given. Such dereliction of tenets, once ardently held, can hardly escape condemnation, even under the pressure of a motive so strong as that presented by the hope of outnumbering the Establishment by union with the third great Presby- terian body in Scotland, whose principles had always been avowedly those of voluntaryism. The Church herself was destined to undergo a similar change. In the year 1874, when the heat of the struggle had passed away, when the spirit of animosity had largely died out, and when the sternness of the religious spirit which had at first characterised the Free Church had faded before the influences born in a new generation, an attempt was made to bring about a reconciliation by conceding the principle of popular election. The Free Church had found that the supremacy of the Civil Courts could assert itself even within the pale of a disestablished Church, and a lawsuit which stirred the bitterest feelings, and had seemed to involve an invasion of her dearly-pur- chased liberties, had proved that her contracts were subject to interpretation by the Civil Courts, and that her minis- ters could appeal to these Courts for redress of what they held to be wrongs, however much these wrongs were founded upon supposed religious sanction. Thus baffled in a new attempt to create an ecclesiastical independence, it was fancied that she might be willing to be brought, by a large concession, back to the pale of the Church. A Conservative Government did that for which in the earlier stages of the struggle even the Extreme party had not THE FKEE CHURCH AND POPULAR EDUCATION. 597 been prepared, and abolished patronage in the Church. Not only so, but by making disputed settlements matters to be determined only by the Courts of the Church, the statute seemed to bar the way against any collision between these and the Civil Courts. Whether a statute, so violently opposed to all the principles which the Conservative party in the Church had advocated for more than a century and a half, has been for the advantage of the Church, is a matter on which doubts are not only legitimate, but per- haps well-founded. Many may deem that the arts that please a popular electorate are scarcely those that dignify religion, or contribute to raise her ministers in popular esteem ; and some may even deem that an extension of the powers of Ecclesiastical Courts may place an undue and unwholesome power in the hands of the leaders of ecclesiastical parties. However that may be, there can be no question that this surrender on the part of the Con- servative party absolutely failed to bring about any healing of the breach, if it did not, indeed, lead to some recrudes- cence of animosity. It may be boldly asserted that if such a surrender had taken place at an earlier stage, it would have made of the Established Church, not that moderating influence which did so much for Scotland during thirty very crucial years, but would have con- verted it into a pale imitation of its rival. That it was delayed until such a fate became impossible was an ad- vantage, not a loss. The framers of that measure con- gratulated themselves that by its help the Church was saved. But the worth of that congratulation must be measured by the nearness of the danger which they deemed themselves to have averted; and as to this it is permissible to feel some doubts. One other matter which powerfully aiFected the future of the Free Church came into prominence before Chalmers' death in 1847. The Government of Sir Kobert Peel fell in June 1846, after the Conservative party had been rent by the repeal of the Corn Laws. The Whig Government which succeeded them at once made a step forward in the Education question, by producing minutes which offered grants for the maintenance of schools — those previously offered being only for school building. The condition on which grants were to be given was that the schools should be in connection with some religious denomination. Chalmers recoiled from a measure which he thought to savour more of indifference than of toleration, and* he would even have preferred an avowedly secular system. But he did not 598 THE DISRUPTION. think it wise for the Free Church to refuse participation in such grants; and acting on his advice the Free Church accepted these grants, which approached very closely to a State endowment of religion, and thus separated herself openly from the action of the Voluntaries in Scotland. That position she maintained down to the passing of the Education Act in 1872. 599 CHAPTEE XXIII. CONCLUSION. In the preceding chapter we have followed the main phases of this great ecclesiastical contest, which absorbed so much of the attention of Scotland during the second quarter of the century, and which, coinciding, as it did, with social and political changes of the most far-reaching kind, served so powerfully to determine her future position. Its full sig- nificance is seen only when we compute its influence as combined with these social and political changes. The course of politics in Scotland since the Reform Act of 1832 has been somewhat curious. That Act had not merely been a large step forward in political development : for good or for ill, it had revolutionised the country. From a small privileged class, nursed in traditions and encrusted with an impenetrable coating of prejudice, political influence suddenly passed to the middle class, the only class recognising its own importance in the balance of forces that were to shape the nation's future. As compared with its counterpart in England, that middle class was fairly educated, fairly intelligent, with more than competent appreciation of political principle. But it possessed, just as strongly as those who were higher in the social scale, the national characteristics of pertinacious adherence to its opinions, and of that inherent conservatism which refuses to be shaken from the mood and attitude of mind to which it has become accustomed. For more than a generation a con- viction of the necessity for drastic reform had been firmly maintained by a large body of opinion in Scotland, and that opinion had gradually spread until it obtained a firm hold upon the vast majority of middle-class Scotsmen. For at least two generations Scotsmen had inherited from their fathers a dogged determination to fight for that reform ; and they had become so imbued with it as the main object of national effort that they were not likely to be shaken 600 CONCLUSION. out of it by any sudden gust of reactionary opinion. The doctrines of Whiggism came, to the great mass of the nation, to wear the strength of a religious conviction inherited from their fathers, any dereliction of which would be a sort of national apostasy ; and more than three generations have not sufficed to break this deeply rooted impression. But the profound alteration in all existing traditions did not end with this deep and enduring conviction on the part of the great majority of the nation. It opened the flood of a much more revolutionary feeling that for the moment terrified the Whig party, and took away tlie breath of the small clique that had fancied itself the sole representative of the reforming spirit, and the chosen repository of political wisdom and political morality. A large part of the stock-in- trade of that clique had consisted of denunciation of those who had so long held it in subjection, and who had certainly laid themselves open to a fair charge of narrow-minded and bigoted Toryism. But the little party of the Whigs was hardly prepared to ride upon the crest of the popular wave. Jeffrey was an active, versatile, and sprightly controversialist. Long years of opposition — to all appearance hopeless — had not inured him or his party to the responsibilities of power, and had not taught them to measure the strength of the contending currents. In some respects they had acted with singular tactlessness. They had fancied themselves superior to the more marked peculiarities of the national temperament. They had affected a thin veneer of English sentiment, had sought to break down the barriers of Scottish idiosyncrasies, and had, even in the minor matters of dialect and of manner, striven to efface what they thought to be marks of pro- vincialism, only because these marks had been rigorously maintained by their political opponents. Jeffrey, according to the caustic critic already quoted, had "lost his broad Scotch and acquired narrow English," and the same affecta- tion was found in more than one of his associates — very distinctly in Andrew Rutherford, who became the Whig Lord Advocate a few years later, and whose solid abilities were somewhat disguised by this little peculiarity. An even more serious error was committed by that party when they fought against any distinct Scottish administration, and did their best to make it a mere branch of English official management. This error, it is true, they soon repented, and strove to undo ; but it was no easy task to recover that independence which had been surrendered, and they never succeeded in undoing the work of which, in blind opposition to political antagonists, they had made themselves the agents. If they ever hoped FAILURE OF WHIG ADMINISTRATION. 601 that, as a Whig party, they would gather into their hands such power and influence as had once been wielded by Henry Dundas, they were doomed to condign and well -deserved disappointment. But whatever was their influence or their power of becom- ing permanent leaders of a new and larger political party, it was to Jeflrey and his immediate associates that the task fell of carrying out the work of change which was the immediate and necessary result of the great shifting of poli- tical power in 1832. These immediate changes followed, as they were bound to follow, the course of English legislation. Parliamentary reform and burgh reform in Scotland were mere incidents in the changes wrought both in England and in Scotland by the downfall of the Tory supremacy, and no great credit was gained by the Whigs for the manner in which they were carried out. Jeffrey had not the talents which would have enabled him to acquire a great Parlia- mentary position, even had he not entered Parliament at a period of life too late to let him learn the tactics of a Parliamentary leader. When he retired from the arena, the guidance of the Whig party was left to Parliamentary hench- men such as Kennedy of Dunure, whose pragmatic reiteration of a few threadbare political principles — unillumined by eloquence, unenlivened by imagination, unenlightened by any width of sympathy or any largeness of grasp — might have fitted them in the English arena to fill at most the position of Parliamentary under-secretaries with respectable industry, and with unswerving devotion to routine. Such men accepted with submission the inferior part they had to play as the nominees of English ministers. They had no overweening ambitions, and it did not suggest itself to them that a bold line of Scottish policy might shape to Scottish needs and Scottish peculiarities the wave of advan- cing politics which was passing over the country. Great schemes of social amelioration had no meaning for them. Certain well -ascertained anomalies were to be denounced, largely because they were relics of the past, but chiefly because they afforded palpable proofs of Tory abuses. The chief article in their political creed was that which recognised no possible evil greater than that which could be covered by the name of Tory, but a scarcely less fundamental article was that which repudiated the dangerous and fantastic dreaming which was connoted by the name of Radical. It was not an inspiring, but it was a compact and comfortable compendium of political philosophy. All the rugged picturesqueness of national character, all that was romantic in the national 602 CONCLUSION. genius, all the storm and pressure of the national spirit, seemed to have vanished from the scene under the domina- tion of the little professional clique that managed to capture the spirit of Scottish middle-class ascendancy, and that be- queathed to it a dogged adherence to Whiggism that was to last beyond the end of the century. But with all their limitations this little clique showed marked skill in their business. They had no strong sym- pathy with the national spirit ; but they found the obstinate tenacity of the Scottish disposition an admirable safeguard against any sudden reversal of the political tendency of the day. They were separated by a great gulf from the old spirit of Scottish ecclesiasticism, but they were able to use for their own purposes the revival of the Covenanting spirit, in a middle-class dress, which preached a theory of ecclesiastical domination impossible in the nineteenth century, and which created out of that spirit a new sect in which the new elec- torate found its safest anchorage. In spirit and in tone it was absolutely estranged from the austere and repressive code of social ethics which that sect inculcated ; but yet the convivial habits of the Parliament House formed no bar to a satis- factory alliance between the Whig politicians and the fervid ecclesiasticism of the Free Church. Sarcasm will spare, if only because of the amusement it excites, the edifying faith which found a stoup of Free Church orthodoxy in Fox Maule, the force of whose expletives and the freedom of whose life from the restraints of asceticism remain as lively traditions amongst the older memories of Scotsmen who can still recall these days. The Whigs of the Parliament House found use- ful allies in the Free Church circles, from whose distinctive tenets they were widely divided ; and the Free Church leaders found useful patrons amongst men whose laxer code they could condone in return for their common opposition to the Church. If the pact suited both parties the outsider need not visit it with any severity of condemnation. A large class of laymen, enriched by the new commercial prosperity, and glad to find any counterpoise to the old aristocratic domination, found in the new Church a congenial field for the exercise of their patronage, and in the new political conditions a safe buttress of their freshly acquired influence. But it was only a natural result that under such a regime the wheel of legislative change did not move with any great celerity. After the Act for Burgh Reforms Scottish politics showed little advance, except in the direction of securing for the Whig clique the material advantages of political supremacy. When the swing of the pendulum once brought THE NEW POOR LAW. 603 back a Conservative majority to the Imperial Parliament the Scottish Liberal majority was affected in its size by the re- action, but it did not disappear; and the action of the Con- servative Government in relation to the Disruption completed the severance between that party and the middle class of Scotland. It is curious that the most important piece of legislation about the middle of the century — the Scottish Poor Law of 1845 — was accomplished by the Conservatives, and marked a break with traditional Scottish usage. That break was resented by none more than by Chalmers, who had all his life striven against a compulsory poor rate. It was in 1840 that the question began to assume a new aspect in Scotland. Hitherto the absence of a compulsory and universal assessment for the poor had been the pride of Scotland and the envy of England. Even now strong arguments could be adduced in its favour. The compulsory assessment had been adopted only in the most populous parishes. There were 236 assessed against 643 non-assessed parishes, but the population of the first was 1,178,280, that of the second only 1,137,646. But though the amount of population in each group was thus nearly balanced, the expenditure in the assessed parishes was £91,000, against £48,000 in the non - assessed. Chalmers still hoped, and hoped to the end, that by moral influences, by reviving the spirit of brotherhood, by stimulating Christian liberality through the Church, above all by so dividing districts as to create a new and more vigorous personal interest in the work, the necessity for the vast machinery of a stat- utory support of the poor might be avoided, and the proud independence of the Scottish spirit be maintained. He preached, he lectured, he wrote in its favour; he sought for sympathy and aid ; he strove to stem the wave of advancing opinion. Amongst others he addressed Carlyle, and received from him a cordial but a doubting letter, in which he hinted that the scheme was "a noble hoping against hope, a noble, strenuous determination to gather from the dry deciduous tree what the green alone could yield." "With a Chalmers in every parish much might be possible ! But alas ! — " Facts were too strong for him : a crowded population, an eager race for wealth, the pent- up miseries of towns crushed by the Juggernaut of keen competition, imperiously demanded remedies of a drastic kind, even if they tampered with old traditions and under- mined old independence. The change was rendered necessary, very much in consequence of the ecclesiastical severance in which he had been the predominant agent. Had the Church 604 CONCLUSION. remained united she might have retained the command of that Christian liberality which was so abundant at this time, and this might have helped her to cope with the greatest of social problems, and might have postponed for another generation the compulsory assessment from which he shrank, and which he deemed likely to sap the spirit of independence in the nation. But that the measure should have been forced upon the Conservative party shows how deeply the social change had worked. The powers of the Church were crippled, and the liberality which might have aided her in the task found other more immediate outlets for its exercise. Scotland was compelled to follow in the wake of England, and to admit a universal system of assessment which it had been her boast to have escaped when its abuses were most evident in England. The old days were gone, in which Chalmers less than twenty years before had been able single-handed to cope with the pauper- ism of a vast parish in Glasgow, where the conditions of life were at their hardest. But other influences told in the same direction besides the accident of the ecclesiastical breach. The social con- ditions of Scotland were undergoing a vast change, which worked altogether independently of the little political parties that seemed to themselves to guide the course of events. The population was beginning to increase by leaps and bounds. Manufactures and the wealth that they produced were advancing as they had never advanced before. The balance of influence was passing into the hands of the commercial class. Parliament House might still appear to rule, but only because the now influential class was occupied with other things. The next important piece of legislation — which lies beyond the period with which we are now dealing — the Rutherford Act of 1848, so called from the Lord Advocate of the day, marks a much more decided change in the system of land tenure, so far as hereditary rights were concerned, than any that had yet been made. We have already seen how entailed estates, upon which so much of the permanence of a landed aristocracy must depend, had first been recognised in Scottish law only in 1685 ; and how subsequent legislation in 1770 and again in 1824 had limited the restrictions upon entailed pro- prietors, and enabled them to burden the estate with debt for necessary improvements. But the restrictions which remained were felt to be a check upon the growth of agri- culture, and to fetter unduly the exchange of the largest and most stable commodity. That commodity must now GROWTH OF COMMERCE AND WEALTH. 605 be made to conform more closely to the laws which regu- lated other sources of wealth. The principal provision of the Rutherford Act was that which enabled the entailed proprietor to disentail his land with the consent of one or more of the next heirs of entail. Subsequent legislation, in 1875 and 1882, has further extended this principle; and an entailed proprietor may now disentail upon paying to the next heirs the estimated value of their expectancies. Whatever the intention of the Act, there can be no doubt as to its inevitable effect in preventing the permanent identifica- tion of landed property with an hereditary aristocracy. But however important might be the effect of political and legislative changes in the shifting of influence, far greater was that which came from the actual growth of commerce and manufactures about the middle of the century. It was then that the foundations were laid upon which the solid wealth of the country has been built. A century and a half before, Scotland had been a miserably poor country. Her currency did not in all amount to a million pounds sterling. Her population scarcely exceeded a million. Her manufactures were insignificant; and she had almost no share in the commerce of the world. Prices were low; but even when we make full allowance for low prices, it is plain that the general standard of living was simple even to the extent of penury. The name of Scotsman was synonymous with that of a needy adventurer, under-fed, starving, and ground down to the mere necessities of life. Step by step the ideas of life advanced ; but the growth of luxury was seen only in a few chosen and favoured spots, and the general standard was such as would have been considered mean and sordid by the humblest artisan of the present day. The incomes, not of the minister and schoolmaster only, but of every grade of professional life, would not have satisfied, at their lowest scale, the humbler clerk of our own day, and even at their highest would not have satisfied the ambition even of the mediocre member of their class according to present ideas. A landlord was rich with £500 a year ; a lawyer in the highest practice, after a large part of the eighteenth century had run its course, would have been fully satisfied if his income occasionally touched four figures. Even in the first quarter of the century thrift was so much a necessity that it per- vaded all classes; and beyond the aristocratic circle — and that a very small one — which annually gathered in the Scottish metropolis, the general standard of life was cast on a humble scale. It was only as the century ran into 606 CONCLUSION. its third and fourth decade that commerce on an extended scale began to pervade the larger towns. A century before Glasgow had been a neat and picturesque little town, nest- ling about the banks of a humble stream navigable only by boats of small draft and scanty tonnage. An attempt had been made to find a port for her growing commerce near the estuary of the Clyde, some twenty miles away. But now the ideas of her citizens took a bolder and a wider scope. They began the dredging of their river, and on either bank the first manufacturing establishments, far different from their present gigantic scale, were gradually gathering. Her shipbuilding yards were beginning to send forth ocean-going steamers — the successors of the first tiny craft which had essayed only a few years before to navigate her waters by steam power. In 1800 the whole shipping of Scotland had amounted to 2415 ships ; in 1840 she had 3479. But the difference in the number of ships offers a poor idea of the growth of her commercial fleet. In the first year the tonnage amounted only to 171,000 tons; in 1840, to 429,000. Already the start had been taken in that race of vigorous energy, which at the close of the century has multiplied that tonnage by six times. Between 1840 and 1850 she took her full share in the vast enter- prise of railroad extension, and the shriek of the locomotive was heard in tracts of country which almost within the memory of living men had been the home of an alien race, and had been the scene of wild escapades, read of in old ballads, or told as the half -credited tales of adventurous travellers. The glamour, the romance, the pristine habits that had seemed to carry the imagination back to the Middle Ages had been rudely scattered. The railways in England broke up many a rustic scene, and brought the noise and smoke and bustle of the factory into regions given up to rural quiet; in Scotland they brought the spirit of modern times by one quick bound into the midst of medisevalism. During that decade the great railway companies of the northern country all took their start. It was on a limited scale. The capital that is now more than a hundred millions, could then be counted by the score of millions. But the contrast between 1800 and 1850 was nevertheless far greater than that between 1850 and the closing years of the century. Carry the view backwards for half a century more, and the contrast between 1750 and 1850 is not that between small beginnings and a fair advance ; it is that between modern life and all the antique picturesqueness of a primitive community. MINERAL DEVELOPMENT. 607 So it was with the development of her natural wealth. A century and a half before, coal had scarcely been known, and was regarded with a horror and dislike to which perhaps those who have suffered by its modern devastation may accord a heartfelt, although a resigned, sympathy. In the eighteenth century it had become something of a staple of merchandise, as such staples were then counted. It employed as its servants a great army of human beings who were slaves in the fullest sense, and who lived under conditions which public feeling would not now tolerate in the case of animals. In 1775, as we have already seen, that hereditary bondage had been broken ; but down to 1845 a vast system of degraded toil, which crushed the life out of women and young children, was still permitted to stain that civilisation which cloaked its hideousness by the boast of expanding wealth. It was only then that the public conscience was aroused, and aroused far more by English example, and by the perseverance of English philanthropists, than by any purely Scottish impulse. But while it crushed and degraded a large part of the population in its advance, that vast in- dustry, which now takes its place as one of the chief sources of Scottish wealth, was steadily assuming its huge importance. The possibilities were fully realised; it re- mained to the last half century only to develop these on the lines which the pioneers had discerned. So it was with the iron industry which now defaces some of what were once the wildest and most picturesque tracts of Scottish scenery, but which has built up in large part the fabric of Scottish wealth. The Carron Works — for long the only important enterprise of the kind — were begun only in 1760. In 1788 they turned out about 1500 tons a year. Step by step the output advanced, until in 1845 it amounted to half a million tons. From that safe platform to the development of the last half century, when the output counts by millions, was the work only of deliberate endeavour. To make the industry as great as it became in 1845, required enterprise and discernment; to ripen it to the fulness of 1900 required no more than discipline and perseverance. But these treasures of the soil were not the only mines of wealth which Scotland, once she awakened to the need of taking her place amongst the advancing races of the world in the pursuits which now absorbed all energies, was to work with profit and success. The woollen trade had grown slowly in Scotland — checked for long by the conviction that her interest lay rather in the linen manu- 608 CONCLUSION. facture, and that she could never take her place as the rival of England in the more highly developed woollen manufacture. But before the eighteenth century was half run it had already got a secure footing. The speculations and schemes of one man — David Loch — had done much for the trade by pertinaciously urging improvement in the breed of sheep, chiefly as a means of raising the Highlands from the slough of poverty and starvation to which nature seemed to have condemned them. Here and there in the northern counties his schemes had some success; but it was in the lowlands chiefly that the manufacture advanced with a steady progress. The great tweed manufactures secured a position and a name for a purely Scottish industry in all the markets of the world ; and it is a curious circum- stance, as associating the romance and the growing wealth of Scotland, that the technical name of "Tweel," which properly belonged to the cloth, was transformed by a care- less clerk to Tweed, and then by a happy thought perma- nently adopted from the fame which the genius of Scott had brought to a comparatively obscure border stream. It was thought much when the turnover in 1830 amounted to £26,000 in the year. The enterprise that brought that measure of success was a more powerful agent in national development than the perseverance that carried it to a value of millions annually. It was only another phase of that national vigour that was working to such good purpose in the middle of the century. The foundations of her wealth, and the lines on which it was to advance, were thus being laid on sure lines. What had been petty boroughs grew into vast emporiums. In the eager race for wealth, Scotland lost something that is attrac- tive to history, and that imparted romance and interest to the story of her past. Nothing is more denationalising than wealth, and it was inevitable that some distinctive features of the national character should, with its accumulation, and the monotony of work which it engendered, fade into the past. It was only the indomitable perseverance of the race that seemed to remain as the chief sign of its individuality. But while the century was no more than half run there still lingered some traits of the former generation. Within the memory of those yet living the vernacular still held its own, and the broad Scotch dialect was still to be heard, not in the blurred and degraded form in which it lingers in the streets and amongst the vulgar, but with all its racy and expres- sive idioms, repeating the pristine forms of the Anglo-Saxon tongue. Its retention was most characteristic perhaps of the AFFECTED VERNACULARISM. 609 landed aristocracy ; and amongst them some of the strongest and most pervading personalities gave to it the prestige and the dignity of their own habitual practice. In 1845, too, although the standard of comfort was greatly raised, the habit of thrift still remained, and even amongst the wealthy — if they did not count their wealth by years but by genera- tions — the custom of lavish display was rigorously eschewed. The newly- enriched Midas of the commercial type was not a character who found the mid-century air of Scotland a con- genial or sympathetic one. Much comfort, much easy hospit- ality, abundant dignity of life, and much employment of life's chief external ornaments there were. But they were accom- panied by a certain staid and disciplined moderation. They aimed much more at the substantial than the florid accom- paniments of wealth. A certain spirit of asceticism curtailed even the harmless graces which good taste might permit to luxury. The character and disposition of the people, the temper and tradition of their religious feeling — even the pride which bade them pitch the measure of display below that of their resources — all these preserved this tendency. To what extent it has since passed away, and how far Scot- land is to be congratulated on its disappearance, must be matter for the illustration and comment of any one who may essay the history of the last half of the nineteenth century. These later j^ears have shown us a curious and, as some think, not altogether a very wholesome symptom. A fashion has arisen, and has been carried to what we may be forgiven for thinking a rather absurd extent, of depicting phases of Scottish manners with an exaggeration of what professes to be indigenous sentiment, and with a lavish use of what is supposed to be Scottish vernacular. The affectation of anti- quity is always a little ridiculous, and like the lumber stored in the saleroom of the dealer in antiques is apt to provoke suspicions of its genuineness. The language in which such depictors of Scottish characteristics drape their narrative may doubtless find its counterpart in one or another corner of a Scottish town, or in some little village clique. But it is certain that it shows no affinity to the classic dialect to which the pages of Burns and Scott have accustomed us, and which greeted our ears as spoken by some master of the pure ver- nacular, in years that are not so long gone by. It may even be open to doubt whether the patchiness of the language does not infect to some extent the sincerity of that overlaboured sentiment which it has pleased the last decade to identify with all that is most characteristic of the Scottish tempera- 2q 610 CONCLUSION. ment. But much may be forgiven to the desire to cherish the memory of types which have faded into the past. Whatever the loss of romance and of interest, there is no gainsaying the advances made by Scotland, at the period when this narrative closes, in material prosperity and in wealth. The middle class benefited enormously by the political changes of the day, and by the new fiscal regula- tions which gave a new opening to commerce. They acted their part with enterprise and energy, and we must admit that in the tenacity of their adherence to certain opinions, and in the stubborn force with which they defended them, they repeated worthy traditions of a time when Scotland had been represented by a smaller, a more exclusive, and a more privileged class. The lower population increased enormously in number ; they had vast opportunities of employment before unknown; and they had their share in the new prosperity, even though we may doubt whether that prosperity added to their substantial comfort, and whether it was not dearly bought at the price of the strain and pressure of overcrowded cities and of fluctuating trade; and whether the intellectual calibre of the poorer Scotsman had not degenerated to some extent, and was not destined to degenerate still more, from that of his covenanting forbears. However that may be, there can be no doubt that the social transformation did produce one serious loss to Scotland. Edinburgh ceased to be a literary capital. To some extent this was the inevit- able consequence of the migration of intellect to the southern metropolis, of which the causes were not far to seek. But the loss was more far-reaching than this. The distinctively Scot- tish strain almost completely disappeared from literature. Scottish philosophy, in the sense in which it had flourished in the previous century, ceased to be. Her universities con- tinued to be notable and distinguished institutions, but their teachers were drawn to a very large extent from the English universities. Her most eminent professors of philosophy intro- duced a strain of thought which had far more affinity with the German than with the Scottish type. Her scientific and medical schools were famous and respected, but their repre- sentatives no longer stood out as distinctively national pro- ducts, and the more cosmopolitan spirit drew them more and more across the Scottish border, or supplied their places by those who had received an English training. The dignity of her Court remained, and the exponents of her law occupied no mean position amongst the jurists of the empire; but they no longer swayed the nation as they did only a cen- tury before, and the quick growth of statute law inevitably THE PARISH SCHOOLS. 611 tended to obliterate some of the distinctive marks of Scottish procedure. One of the most important elements in the making of the Scottish nation had been her parish schools. They repre- sented a national and statutory system which had existed for centuries before such a thing had been thought of in England. The Act which consolidated rather than estab- lished the system was that of 1696, which required the heritors of each parish to pay a salary of at least one hundred merks Scots (£5, lis. Id.), or not more than two hundred merks, for the schoolmaster. If the heritors failed in this duty, they might be compelled to do so by the Com- missioners of Supply of the county, at the instance of the Presbytery of the bounds. The provision was scanty enough, even when eked out by fees (often paid in kind) and by some small parish offices. But the position had its advantages. The teacher was an institution of the country, and had the firm position of a freeholder, buttressed by statute. During the eighteenth century various attempts had been made to raise the income, and a sum of £30 a-year was the maximum which it was hoped might be attained. The teachers had a secure tenure, and the value of their work was sufficiently well recognised to enable them to push their claims with considerable force. They remained an ill-paid but none the less a respected class. It was one of the peculiarities of Scottish life that no very wide barrier separated the various grades of professional status. The schoolmaster was often a licentiate of the Church ; he was not seldom the assistant of the parish minister, and might himself hope to attain that position. Just in the same way the parish minister might hope to end his days in the much-envied seat of a Scottish professor; and thus each grade felt that it was divided by no insuperable line from that above it. The schoolmaster entwined himself with the very heart of Scottish life, and formed an inseparable part of it. His horizon was not un- duly circumscribed, and in all the concerns of the country, in all its aims, in all the diversity of its social interests, he had his recognised place, and had associated himself even with its poetry and its romance. Under his care the parish school achieved a work which it is hard for any one not acquainted with Scottish life to comprehend. It was a part of a wide- spreading missionary effort, which brought the various parts of the country closer together, and did more than any other agency to redeem from almost savage ignorance, and to bring within the pale of civilisation and of loyalty, the vast tracts of the Highlands, whose inhabitants had for centuries lived 612 CONCLUSION. an alien life, divided by every diversity of law and custom. It was by the influence of the parish school that the problem of bringing these regions under the sway of the law was far more successfully achieved than by the ruthless cruelty which stamped out the rebellion, and strove to plant southern sway by means of the terror inspired by military despotism and by indiscriminate punishments. It was the parish school that brought together all classes, and accustomed the children of the laird to receive their earliest instruction on the same benches with the tenant's son. It was not confined to the bare elements of education, for poverty did not prevent the teacher from being often a man of culture and of scholarship, and finding his solace and ambition in training the aspirant to the university and professional life. It was the parish school that fitted the young Scotsman with that adaptable equipment that enabled him to take his place with credit in foreign enterprise, and gave him the rough intelligence that marked him as strongly as his national idiosyncrasies. Its atmosphere was one of independence and of equality, and although its range might be narrower than that of the richly- endowed grammar schools of the south, it was a far better nurse of energy and self-confidence than these sleepy corners which lethargy overspread like mildew. It is hard to exag- gerate the debt of Scotland to her parish schools. With the opening of the new century the need of some increased liberality to a class of such national importance was widely felt. The nation was quickened not by its tradi- tions only, but by the imperious necessities of its situation, to recognise the advantages of education, and to feel that better provision must be made for it. It was in 1803 that a new Act was passed which made three hundred merks Scots (about £16) the minimum, and four hundred merks the maximum salary of the schoolmaster, with a power of revision after every five-and-twenty years, besides insisting upon the provision of a house. But even here the character- istic greed of the landed class was seen. The scanty increase was sorely grudged by them, and it was thought to be an extravagant provision which required that the house should consist of "not more than two apartments including the kitchen," and that there should be attached to it a garden of " at least one-fourth of a Scots acre." But, paltry as the provision was, it gave a new stimulus to the parish school. No investment ever repaid a country better than did the money which a conscience-stricken legislature extorted from the pockets of heritors who were drawing greatly increased rents from a soil which they had often acquired by very ADVANCE IN EDUCATION. 613 questionable means. It preserved all the distinctive features of the old system — the settled status and the independence which came from the teacher being an established institution of the land. On this footing the educational system of the country achieved new successes. In the larger towns the Grammar Schools formed centres, which maintained a high standard of education, and which opened their doors at a fee which scarcely debarred the poorest.^ However grudging to the teachers, the heritors must be allowed the credit of often paying the fees for the poor but promising boy. Education was valued : and it may safely be said that it lay within the reach of every class. No religious difficulty intervened to enhance the difficulties of the work. The division of sects in Scotland did not lead to any difference in the religious creed or formula ; and except for the Roman Catholics (whose consciences the General Assembly specially enjoined the teachers to respect), and the scanty handful of Episcopalians, all were content with the same religious teaching. The Church was the close guardian and protectoress of the schools, and the school system was part and parcel of the national establishment. But as population increased the difficulties became greater. The parish system worked ill in the larger towns. The burden of education became too heavy for the heritors, and if it were to cope with advancing needs new resources were imperatively necessary. Scotland had the right to claim, and had full necessity for requiring, a share in that imperial aid for education which the absence of any national system rendered imperative in England. It was in 1832 that the first imperial grants were given : scanty in amount, and restricted in their aim. The whole amount entered in the estimates for England and Scotland was only £20,000, and the share that could fall to Scotland was but a trifling help in a great national work. It was to be applied only in assisting in the provision of schools : there was as yet no thought of the co-operation of the State in testing the efficiency of schools or in aiding to maintain that efficiency. The supervision of the schools rested with the Presbytery alone. By slow steps this imperial aid was extended. In 1839 ^ Far on in the present century the school fee in the High School of Glasgow, where the sons of the richest citizens received their education, was only 15s. a quarter, or £3 a year. It is fortunate that her sources of income now promise to make the cost almost as moderate for a far wider and more varied curriculum. 614 CONCLUSION. it had grown to £30,000, and in 1846 the first minutes providing for aid in the maintenance of schools was granted. The State had now intervened at many points. It had helped to build schools ; it trained teachers and granted to them certificates of efficiency; and it offered inspection as a condition upon which annual grants might be made. Of the vast consequences which had sprung from these beginnings this is not the place to speak; we have only to trace the effect upon Scottish education to the middle of the century. Only a few years before that date the total annual expenditure upon popular education — including the heritor's compulsory contributions, as well as the scanty dole of the State — was certainly considerably less than £50,000 a year. When the State began its annual grants, the Free Church had just started on its course, and after some slight hesitation about entering into a new concordat with the State, that Church resolved to accept the grants now offered, and with their aid to establish schools of her own which would divide the ground with the parish schools where the Established Church reigned supreme. A large addition was thus made to the nominal school provision of the country; but it may be questioned whether its supply was not dictated rather by motives of ecclesiastical rivalry than by strict attention to the necessities of each locality. The chief difficulty lay in the wide -stretching tracts of the Highlands, where a single parish school was often the only supply for a parish which might be forty miles long. Even within the nineteenth century it was calculated that in Argyleshire alone there were 26,000 children out of a total of 27,600 who were beyond the reach of a parish school. Sectarian zeal could find little to attract it in such a region; and indeed to cope with such a difficulty was beyond the power of a sect that had to trust to the somewhat doubtful resources of volun- tary supply. The Church made what efforts it could, and with something of missionary zeal endeavoured to supple- ment the statutory supply. By an Act of 1839 provision was made for side schools where the parish school was manifestly below the requirements of the district; but in spite of such timid additions to the statutory duty the arrears of the task of national education were not over- taken. In the larger towns also the parish school was obviously insufficient. The only additional provision came from the sessional schools, established by the voluntary effort of different congregations. Where such effort was stimulated by the vigour of an active incumbent, and was THE EDUCATION ACT OF 1872. 615 wisely directed, it achieved much; but the requirements increased in much more rapid proportion than the volun- tary efforts. Had it not been for the help of the State the work would have been wellnigh hopeless. But none the less Scotland clung to her parish schools system, and for many years after the grants for maintenance were in- troduced, her jealousy of any interference with that system was proved by the fact that grants were not claimed for many of the parish schools. The parochial schoolmaster preferred his independence and grinding poverty rather than an enhanced income, gained at the expense of Govern- ment inspection and what appeared a harassing and trouble- some interference with his work. Fifteen years after the grants in aid were established by the Minutes of 1846, the Scottish parish school system obtained a new extension by the Act of 1861 ; and in 1862 Scotland successfully resisted what it held to be the galling fetters of Mr Lowe's Revised Code, which weighed educational effort by an elaborately adjusted scheme of payment upon individual results ; and down to the Education Act of 1872, which swept away the whole parish school system, much of Scottish education, in spite of all pecuniary temptations, had retained its in- dependence of all State control. In England State aid came first ; a statutory system only followed a generation later, in order to force localities to do their duty and to organise the system. In Scotland the statutory system was the inheritance of generations, and existed long before the State paid one penny of the cost. The tempting bait of State assistance did not suffice for a whole generation to bring that statutory system within State control, or to induce Scotland to relinquish her independence. It was only when the task became too great for local effort, and when the supremacy of the Church in the parish school was assailed by the claims of rival sects, and by the cur- rent of the prevailing political opinion, that the parish school system was swept away. But it did not pass until it had impressed itself powerfully, not on history only, but on the national character of Scotland; and even a new educational system, resting upon different foundations, guided by different forces, kept alive by different resources, must hope for much of its success by retaining some features of the parish school system, and carefully adjusting these as far as possible to the needs of a changed society. The educational history of the last half century is tjrpical of the general progress of Scotland during the same period in many other features. Before the middle of the century 616 CONCLUSION. the germs of national effort were at work. But it was the day of small things. In 1840 Scotland was still a poor country. The whole of her educational expenditure must have been, as we have said, well within £50,000 a year; at the close of the century that annual expenditure is considerably above the capital sum of which £50,000 repre- sents the annual interest. During the sixty years which followed there was spent on education in Scotland a sum of certainly not less than forty millions, and the opening years of the new century have seen an immense increase. We have thus followed the history of Scotland from the period when she was first joined by legislative union with England, and when there still lay before her the last struggle of a decayed system against the forces of modern constitutionalism, down to a period within the memory of those now living. We have seen how, if much of the stress and strain which she had to endure was the inheritance of her own stormy history, it was also, in no small degree, the result of the heedless injustice, the careless apathy, and the purblind neglect of successive English governments. We have seen how, out of varied and often antagonistic elements, she managed to form and to preserve a very strong and vivid sense of nationality, which was not lessened, but distinctly increased and fostered, by the Jacobite movement — a movement which became stronger in Scotland just as it faded away in England. We have seen how she provoked the jealousy of, and met with indifference and contempt an almost in- sane outburst of abuse from, her southern neighbour. We have seen how, preserving much that was most picturesque and romantic in her national traditions, she shook herself free from the trammels and bondage of mediae valism, and achieved notable results in thought and literature, which gave her a proud place not only in the Empire, but abroad. We have seen how she helped to consolidate and strengthen the Empire, and how she bore her part in the most critical struggle which that Empire has yet seen. We have seen how her enterprise developed and how she became absorbed in the eager competition for wealth. We have watched how the older and more exclusive forces gradually grew more weak, and how Scotland took her part in the great Reform movements which changed the face of society. We have seen a new class gaining political supremacy, and holding with a tenacity distinctive of the nation to the new opinions which they had come to form, and clinging to them as sternly as to a religion or an ethical code. We LATEST DEVELOPMENTS. 617 have seen how these convictions were clinched by the fierceness of a great ecclesiastical struggle, the bitter memories of which very slowly passed away. During that struggle a close alliance was struck between religious opinions which were opposed to the dominant latitudin- arianism of the previous century, and the middle class which had thriven on commercial prosperity, and had no sympathy with the older social traditions. Only as the century closes has the stubbornness of these convictions relaxed, and a great change of political principle taken place. Its weight and its meaning will be differently explained by different men. To trace its causes, and to estimate its results, must be the business of another generation. INDEX. Aberdeen Act, 331. Aberdeen, population of, at time of the Union, 84— Sir John Cope at, 132— Duke of Cumberland with Hanoverian army at, 182 — Thomas Reid at Univer- sity of, 452 — Beattie made Professor of Philosophy at University of, 462. Act of Security, 19 — refused Queen Anne's sanction, ih. — sanctioned, 20 Agnew, Sir Andrew, English commander, defeated at Bridge of Bruar, 184, 185. Alberoni, Cardinal, chief Minister of Spain, 64 — equipped Spanish force against England, ib. — fall of, 65. Alemoor, Lord, Lord of Session, allied to Moderates in Church of Scotland, 261 — helped to promote right reading and speaking of the English language, 313. Anne, Queen, accession of, 18 — gave hopes to Jacobites, ih. — her secret sympathies, 49— her death, 52. Argyle, Duke of, made Commissioner, 20 — on Queensberry's side, 24 — became a leader of Scottish party, 44— supported repeal of the Union, 49 — commander of Hanoverian forces in Scotland, 57— saved Edinburgh from Mar, ih. — fought battle of Sheriffmuir, 58 — exerted his influence to mitigate the punishment of rebels, 59 — main guidance of Scottish affairs in hands of the, 72 — alienated by Walpole, ih. — stoutly opposed Hard- wicke's bill, 80 — allied to Lord Lovat, 92— character as statesman, 104 — took oflBce on Walpole's fall and was nomin- ated commander in Flanders, 106, 107 — threw up office and continued to oppose Court, 107— death of. 111. Argyle, Duke of (previously Lord Islay), at Rosneath when Prince Charles Stuart landed, 124 — government of Scotland placed in the hands of, 242 — conducted on lines laid down by Walpole, ih. — not exponent of Scottish feeling, 244 — alliance with Moderate party in the Church of Scotland, 261 — kept hold over Scottish affairs till his death, 283 — on the side of innovators in the Church of Scotland, 288 — character of his administration, 301, 302 — his opinion of Lord Bute, 306— death of, 310 Athole, Duke of, J acobite leader in Scot- land, 19 — enemy of Lord Lovat, 93 Atterbury, Bishop, 52 Auchterarder, test of the Veto Act at, 575. Augustus, Fort, English garrison at, 88 — soldiers taken prisoners when marching from, 124 — captured for Prince Charles Stuart, 181. Baird, Thomas, trial and sentence of, 503, 504-506. Balmerino, Lord, trial and execution of, 205-208 — character of his loyalty to Stuarts, 209. Bankruptcy Law, improvement of, 326. Banks, established in Scotland, 85, 321- 326— Bank of Scotland, 321-323— Royal Bank, 323— Ayr Company, 325, 326— prosperity of Bank of Scotland, 397, 398 — bankruptcies and suspension of payment by the, 428— the struggle for currency reform, 542-544. Bath, Lord, attempt to form Government by, 175 Beattie, 341 — Professor of Philosophy at Aberdeen University, account of, 462, 463 — 'Essay on Truth,' 462 — success in England, ih. — poverty of reasoning, ih., 463. 'Blackwood's Magazine,' 489 — literary struggle brilliantly maintained with the 'Edinburgh Review,' 494— Tory rally- ing-point, 513. Blair Castle, Jacobite siege of, 184, 185. Blair, Robert, Lord President, 493— death of, ih. Board of Manufactures, 285. Bolingbroke, Lord. See St John. Braemar gathering, 55. Braxfield, Lord, adherent of Henry Dundas, character of, 360, 361 — Lord Justice-Clerk in 1793, 415— his judicial character, ih. — his action in Muir's trial for sedition, 418, 419. 620 INDEX. Brodie, Deacon, 479. Brougham, Henry, member of young Whig party, 481, 482. Bruar, Bridge of, Jacobite success at, 184. Bruce, Lady Sarah, old Jacobite lady, 240. Bruce, Michael, 341. Buchan, Earl of, 475. Buchanan, one of Prince Charles Stuart's seven companions at his landing, 122. Burghers and Antiburghers, 272. Burke, 374— in Rockingham's Ministry, 375, 376. Burns, Robert, 340— in Edinburgh, 399, 400 — influenced by Henry Erskine, 479. Bute, Earl of, George III.'s Minister, English popular hatred of, 306, 307— succeeded to Scottish administration on the death of Duke of Argyle, 310 — took small share in it, ih. Bute, the Marquis of, Lord High Com- missioner for General Assembly of 1843, 591 — crowded levee, ib. Byng, Sir George, 38. Cameron, Donald, of Lochiel, account of, 95, 96 — entered into Jacobite associ- ation, 112 — joined Prince Charles Stuart, 122, 123— at Glenfinnan, 125— his pipes at Prestonpans, 145 — on the night-march to Nairn, 188 — escape to France with Prince Charles Stuart, 191. Cameron, Ewan, grandfather of Lochiel, 95. Campbell, Daniel, of Shawfield, attacked by Glasgow rioters, 70. Campbell, Sir Hay, of Succoth, Lord President in 1793, 415. Campbell, Sir James, of Auchinbreck, entered into Jacobite association, 112. Campbell, the Rev. Macleod, 548. Canal, the Forth and Clyde, 320, 321. Canning, in Lord Liverpool's Government, 516 — made administration in Scotland possible, 518 — became Prime Minister on Liverpool's death, 520 — commanded support of all that was best in Scotland, 521— his death, 545. Canonmills Hall, where first Assembly of the Free Church took place, 592. Carlisle, taken by Prince Charles Stuart, 158— re-entered and garrisoned, 165 — taken by Cumberland, 166. Carlyle, Alexander, as volunteer at Cope's camp, 141 — has left account, ih.—on morning of battle, 145 — comment on victory, 147 — became one of the younger Moderate leaders in the Church of Scot- land, 260— his ' Reminiscences,' 271 — in favour of theatrical performances, 289 — libelled and mildly rebuked, ih. — ap- pointed Moderator of Church of Scot- land, 317 — helped to establish the legal exemption of the clergy from the window-tax, ih. — advocacy of Scottish militia by, 393, 394— his remarks on Professor Hutcheson and Professor Stevenson, 438, 440. Carmichael, Gerschom, Professor of Moral Philosophy in Glasgow, 433. Caroline, Queen, as Regent, 79, 81— character of, 102. Carteret, Lord, denunciation of Scottish riots, 79 — character as statesman, 104 — made Secretary of State, 106— treated administration as a jest, 109 — conduct of foreign aflTairs in his hands, 110 — accompanied the king to Flanders on new campaign, ih. — his triumph after Dettingen, 111 — the king's regard for, ih. — Pitt's hostility to, ih. — became Earl Granville, 115 — struggle with foes acute, ih. — his fall, ih., 116 — contempt for rising of 1745, 172 — failure of in- trigue to overthrow Newcastle, 175 — married to Lord Tweeddale's daughter, 242. Castlereagh, master-spirit of Liverpool's earlier Government, 501 — bad influence of, ih., 502 — improvement after death of, 516. Chalmers, Thomas, birth, family, and character, 524, 525 — love of mathe- matics and teaching at St Andrews, 525 — suspicion of Moderatism, ih. — clerical and professional posts, 526 — attachment to the Church of Scotland, innate conservatism ih., 527 — his aim for the Church, 527 — his eloquence, 528, 529 — his work in the cause of poor relief, 529-534 — his aim in strengthening the parochial system, 534— its failure, ih., 535 — his rupture with the Moder- ates, 535 — his political independence, ih., 536— as Professor of Moral Philo- sophy at St Andrews, 536— his sym- pathy with the Evangelical party in the Church, 537, 538-540— as Professor of Divinity in Edinburgh, 539— sup- ported Catholic Relief Bill, 540— brought new spirit into national view, ih. — became leader of Evangelical party, 550 — retained his conservatism, 551 — his treatise on political economy, 552 — courted by the Whig Government, 553 — his opposition to scheme for secular education, ih. — non -intrusion controversy, 553-556 — Moderator of General Assembly in 1832, 562— the "Veto Act, 563, 564— Chalmers its pro- tagonist, 563 — his opposition to Lord John Russell's Commission, 566, 567 — the Patronage Act, and growing dis- content against it, 568-571 — Report of the Commission, 572 — Chalmers in opposition to Melbourne's Government, ih. — as a member of the deputation sent to Court by the Church of Scot- land, ih. — his cordial relations with Peel, ih. — his lectures in London on Church Establishments, 572-574— the Veto Act tested and found illegal, 575, 576— Civil and Church jurisdiction in INDEX. 621 conflict, 577 — Lethendy case, ih. — Strathbogie case, 578 — the Church's claim, 579 — Chalmers defied the Court of Session, 580, 581 — no hope from Whigs, turned to Conservatives, 581, 582 — negotiations broken off, 583 — protest of the people at Strathbogie Church, ib., 584 — the minister deposed by General Assembly, 584 — Court of Session's interdict, 585— declared breach of privilege of the Church, ih. — weak- ness of Government, ib. — Dr Chalmers on Disruption, 586 — his demand for abolition of Patronage, 587 — the Claim of Right, 588-590 — General Assembly of 1843, 590-592— the Disruption, 591- 600 — Canonmills Hall, 592 — Dr Chalmers called to be Moderator, ih. — his opening address, 595 — his attitude up to death, 596-598. Charles VT., the Emperor, 63. Charles XII, of Sweden, inclined to support Stuarts, 63 — his death, 64. Chesterfield, Lord, on the Hanoverians, 104 — as debater, ih. Church of Scotland, the, loyalty to Hanoverian line, 195 — its ministers refused to act as informers against Jaco- bites, ih. — sarcastic reply to Cumber- land, its courage after 1745, 246 — doctrinal disputes in, 247-250 — Marrow controversy, 249, 250 — secession from, 250-252— the Moderates in, 252-268 — older leaders of Moderates, 258, 259, 263— younger leaders, 260, 265-267— dominance of, 282 — innovations, 287- 291— struggle with dissent, 315, 316— Moderate supremacy in the, 316, 317 — claims of, 318 — for schoolmasters, ib. — Pennant's opinion of clergy of, 344 — con- troversial spirit growing less bitter, 350, 351 — Catholic Emancipation struggle, 364-368 — Moderates in favour of repeal. Highfliers against, 363, 364, 365, 366 — rancour left, 368 — amendment to General Assembly's Address to the Crown against Lord North, 387 — Moderates and Erastianism, 387-389 — struggle with the Highfliers, 389, 390— influence of the Church in the High- lands, 391 — the Church and dissent, 398 — question of Church Patronage again, 403, 404 — religious revival begun in, 523— Highflying party under Andrew Thomson, ih. — Thomas Chalmers chief influence of the new generation in the, 524 — account of Thomas Chalmers and his work, 524-540 — greater zeal in the, 547 — growing strength of the Evan- gelical party, ih. , 584 — Mr Macleod Campbell of Row, representative of Universalism, 548 — Dr Chalmers and the Church, 549 — a devout adherent of Evangelical party, 550 — eff"ect on Church of struggle, ih. — non-intru- sion controversy, 553 - 556 — touched Scottish national feeling, 556 — the Patronage controversy 562 — the General Assembly's Veto Act, 563, 564 —the Annuity Tax, 564, 565 — Lord John Russell's Commission to inquire into the affairs of, 565, 566— its report, 571— the Veto Act tested and found illegal by Court of Session, 575, 576 — the Civil and Church Courts in conflict, 577— Lethendy and Strathbogie cases, 577-579, 583, 584— no hope from either Whig or Tory Government, 581-583, 584, 585 — demand for abolition of Patronage, 587— the Claim of Right, 588- 690— General Assembly of 1843, 590- 592 — the Disruption, 591-595 — position of those who remained in the Church, 594— Patronage abolished, 597. Church, Scottish Episcopalian, fallen on evil fortune, 195 — account of its position in Scotland, 196-203 — its nominal supremacy at the Restoration, 196 — blow dealt by the Revolution, 197 — its dislike of the Union, ih. — identified with Jacobitism, ih., 198 — Patronage and Toleration Acts, 199— proscription of Episcopacy, ih. — the " Usagers," 200, 201— want of prudence, 201— the Oaths Act, 202— further pro- scription, ih. — vengeance taken on Episcopalians after Culloden, 203— gradual improvement of position, 350, 392— pledged to use prayers for King George, i&.— Toleration Bill, 393. Civil War of seventeenth century, 3. Claverhouse, the leader of the opposition to the Revolution, 6, 7. Clerk, John, counsel for Maclaren and Baird, 505. Clerk, Sir John, of Penicuik, on the success of Prince Charles Stuart, 149, 150— a type of the cultured scholar, 238. Cockburn, Henry, Solicitor- General in Lord Grey's Ministry, 557. Colquhoun, Archibald of Killermont, Lord Advocate for eleven years, 493. Commission appointed to inquire into Massacre of Glencoe, 14, 15. Commission, the, to inquire into forfeited estates, 66, 67. Cope, Sir John, English commander in Scotland at time of Prince Charles Stuart's landing, 128 — avoided battle, ih. — hurried south from Inverness, 132 — landed at Dunbar, 139 — placed his army in position at Tranent, 141 — chose the worst position, 142 — fought and lost the battle of Prestonpans, 142- 147— fled to Berwick-on-Tweed, 146. Court, influence of the English, on Scottish nobles, 2 — held at Holyrood by Prince Charles Stuart, 151. Craigie, Robert, Lord Advocate, 242 — deprived of ofiice, ih. Cromarty, Earl of, in command of part of Jacobite forces in 1745, 182 — seized Dunrobin Castle, ih. — summoned to Inverness, 185 — prisoner in Dunrobin 622 INDEX. Castle, trial of, 205, 206— pardon of, 207. Culloden, battle of, 190, 191— effects of, 191-195. Cumberland, Duke of, defeated at Fou- tenoy by Marshal Saxe, 116 — summoned home to take command of army at Lich- field, against Prince Charles Stuart, 161, 162 — in pursuit of Prince, 164 — reduced garrison at Carlisle, 166 — re- called to London to command against French invasion, 167 — sent north after battle of Falkirk, 177 — advanced on Stirling, 178 — after the Prince's retreat, stopped at Perth, 179 — landing of Hessians, 181 — council of war in Edin- burgh, ih. — slow advance determined, 182 — at Aberdeen, ib. — posted on the Spey to watch the Prince's force, 183 — advanced to Nairn, 186 — English forces, 186, 187 — the Duke's birthday and Lord George Murray's proposed attack, 187, 188-battle of Culloden, 190, 191 — defeat of Prince Charles Stuart, 190 — his ruthless and savage revenge on Jacobites, 193-195 — Lovat's letter to, 213 — his meeting with Duncan Forbes of Culloden, 220 — his unspeakable cruelty after Culloden, ib. Cumin, Dr Patrick, leader of Moderate party in Church of Scotland, 263 — opposition to theatrical performances, 288— lost leadership of Moderates, 289. Dalrymple, Master of Stair, 11 — character of family, iS.— hatred of Macdonalds, 12— treachery and crime of, 12-14 — remission of, 14 — on Queensberry's side, 24. Darien Scheme, the, 15, 16 — ruin of, 16. Derby reached by Prince Charles Stuart, 161. Derwentwater, Earl of, execution of the, 58. Disruption, the, 568-596 — growing discon- tent against Patronage Act, 569, 570 — the predominant influence of Chalmers in the struggle, 571 — the Commission's report, 572 — uselessness of political parties in the matter, ib. — Chalmers' lectures on Church Establishments, 572-574— the Veto Act tested, 575— found illegal by Court of Session, .576 — Civil and Church courts in conflict, 577 — Lethendy case, ib. — Strathbogie case, 578, 583, 584 — Court of Session defied by Dr Chalmers, 580, 581— Whig and Tory Governments alike hopeless, 581-583 — Ministers of Strathbogie de- posed by General Assembly, 584— Court of Session's interdict, 585 — the Claim of Right, 588-590 — General Assembly of 1843, 590-592— the Disruption, 591-600 — Canonmills Hall and the first Moderator, 592, 595. Douglas lawsuit, the, 342, 343 — popular fury at decision, 343 — reversal by Lords of decision, ih. Douglas, the Rev. Neil, tried and ac- quitted, 506, 507. Drummond, Lady Rachel, Jacobite lady, 366. Drummond, Lord John, entered into Jacobite association, 112 — battle of Falkirk, 168 — captured Fort Augustus, 181— besieged Fort William, 183. Drummore, Lord, allied to Moderate party in Church of Scotland, 261. Dumfries, anti-Jacobite in 1745, 165 — levies raised by Prince Charles Stuart from, 166. Dundas, Henry (Lord Melville), brother of the President, made Lord Advocate, 357 — his power in the Administration, ih. — appearance, character, and in- fluence of, 358, 359 — his adherents, 359 - 361 — his necessary inconsistency during ministerial changes, 377, 378 — virtually King of Scotland, 378— loval to Pitt, 379, 380— secret of his influence, 381-386 — his love for Scotland and popularity in Edinburgh, 384-386— Acts of Conciliation for the Highlands secured by, 391, 392— early advocate of Parlia- mentary reform, 394 — willing to listen to reform of burgh administration, 402 — hindered by faction in Opposition, ib. — his action with regard to Warren Hastings, 404 — virulent attack upon, 490, 491— impeachment of, 491 — ac- quittal, ib. — restored to power in Scot- land, 492— death of, 493. Dundas, Robert, deprived of office, 70 — joined opposition, 71 — Lord Advocate, 288 — opposed to theatrical perform- ances, ib. — President, 382 — an upright judge, ih. — unpopular, ib. Dundas, Robert (the younger), made Dean of Faculty, 426. Dundee at the time of the Union, 84 — anti-Jacobite in 1745, 158. Dunning, Mr, motion on the power of the Crown by, 351, 362. Edinburgh, at the time of the Union, 83 — state at the time of Prince Charles Stuart's march from the North, 130, 131 — its fortification and forces, 131, 132 — enrolment of citizens for defence, 132 — Provost Stuart summoned to surrender the city to Prince Charles, 135, 136 — Edinburgh captured by Locbiel, 137 — the Prince's entry, 137, 138 — the Prince's residence in, 148-157 — Edinburgh Castle held by Hano- verians, 151 — departure of the Prince from, 157 — resumed its submission to Hanoverian government, 158 — Duke of Cumberland and council of war at, 181 — literary society after 1745 in, 267-275 — character of that society, 275 — ' Edinburgh Review ' started, 284 — Royal Society of, ih. — Infirmary, 285— Board of Manufactures, ib. — embellish- ment of, ib. — entertainments in, 287 — INDEX. 623 production of John Home's "Douglas," ib. — Mrs Siddons in, 289 — the city during the half-century after 1745, 296- 298 — extension and development of, 319, 320— poor relief in, 329— rejection of proposed assessment for relief of poor in, ib., 330 — Gaelic church opened in, 334— the Douglas lawsuit, 342, 343— a true capital of Scotland in the days of Dundas, 355, 356 — Society for the Relief of the Honest and Industrious Poor, 355, 356 — progress of improve- ments in, 361 — new High School founded, ih. — struggle between Trade Guilds and Town Council, 362 — concen- tration of national life in, 371-373 — Jacobitism, an element of its social and literary romance, 372 — politics uninteresting to society in, 373 — its main axioms, 374 — great change in building and population, 394 — stage- coaches to London from, ib. — improved market and hotels, 395 — growth of intellectual activity in, 399 — political economy and philosophy, ib. — Burns in Edinburgh, ib., 400 — its inspiring social atmosphere, 400, 401 — "the Friends of the People," 410-414 — the riots, 413, 414 — Tom Paine's 'Rights of Man,' 413— trials for sedition, 416- 421 — student riot in theatre, 421 — trials for treason, 422, 423 — Comte d'Artois and family exiled at Holyrood, 427 — combination of shoemakers to raise wages, 428— commercial troubles, ib. — attachment to older traditions in, 470 — its central and dominant social position, 471, 472 — Shelley's impres- sions of, 472, 473 — changes in character of society, 473, 474 — Lord Buchan in, 475, 476 — Henry Erskine in, 241 et seq. — Whig and Tory parties, 480 et seq. — 'The Edinburgh Review,' 486-489— ' Blackwood's Magazine, ' 489 — Alex- ander Maconochie, Lord Advocate, 502 — arrests and trials for inciting to violence, 503-508— George IV. 's quarrel with the Queen, excited Whigs against Lord Liverpool's Government, 512, 513 —Whig public meeting, 512— 'The Scotsman ' established, 513 — Tory attacks on Mr Stuart of Dunearn, ib. — duel with Boswell of Aachinleck, 514 — Stuart's acquittal a Whig triumph, ib. — feeble action of Government, ib. — attacks upon the Lord Advocate, 515 — great change in personnel of Govern- ment, ib., 516 — bitterness between Whigs and Tories in Parliament House, 521 — element of professional jealousy in feeling, ib. — reaction, softening of differences, and movement towards re- forms, 522, 523— Thomas Chalmers, a great citizen of, 524, 597— the Patronage controversy in the Church and the Dis- ruption, 562 et seq. — the General As- sembly of 1843, 590-592 — Canonmills Hall and the first Moderator of the Free Church, 592, 595— ceased to be a distinct literary capital of Scottish character, 610, Edinburgh, the University of, 432 — moral philosophy at, 439, 440 — philo- sophy outside the University, 440-447 — Adam Ferguson as Professor of Moral Philosophy at, 458-461— Dugald Stew- art as Professor of Moral Philosophy at, 461, 463-467— John Wilson in Chair of Moral Philosophy at, 467— Sir William Hamilton in Chair of Logic at, ib. — Dr Chalmers, Professor of Divinity in, 539. Education, Scottish national, 233, 611-617 — parish schools and schoolmasters, 611, 612 — increased salaries for school- masters, 612 — difficulties when popula- tion increased, 613 — first imperial grants, ib. — extension of State grants, ib. — diffi- culties in the Highlands, 614 — vitality of parish schools, 615 — resistance to Mr Lowe's Revised Code, ib. — parish schools swept away, ib. Edwards, Mr, presented to the parish of Strathbogie, 578 — the Court of Session and the Presbytery, ib. , 583. El don, great Scottish lawyer in England, 350. Elliot, Sir Gilbert, left Whig party, 483. Englishman's, the, conception of Scotland during George III.'s reign, 346, 347 — hatred of Scottish nation, 348 — atti- tude of Scotland towards, 349. Entail, law of, 330, 331— Montgomery Act, 331 — Aberdeen Act, ib. — further modified, 604 — subsequent legislation, 605. Episcopacy in Scotland, 5, 7 — proscrip- tion of, 8. Erskine, Dr, led "Highfliers" against repeal of Catholic disabilities, 364, 365. Erskine, Ebenezer, with his brother, raised the campaign against Patronage, 250, 251 — led the Secession from Church of Scotland, 251, 252. Erskine, great Scottish lawyer in England, 350. Erskine, Henry, made Lord Advocate instead of Dundas, 387 — became leader of the younger Whigs, 425 — his attain- ments and position, ib. — Dean of Faculty, ib — his re-election opposed, ib. — Robert Dundas made Dean of Faculty, 426 — defended journeymen shoemakers while ignoring their right to combine, 428 — leader of the party opposed to Dundas, 476 — his character, influence, inconsistencies, and political career, 476-479 — his patronage of Mrs Siddons and of Robert Burns, 479 — his client. Deacon Brodie, ih., 480 — his denuncia- tion of the Acts against sedition, 480 — the young Whig party, ih. , 481 — led by Erskine, 481 — the leading spirits of the party, ib. et seq. — struggle with Tories, 483 et seq. — 'The Edinburgh Review,' 624 INDEX. 486-489— Lord Advocate in "AU the Talents Ministry," 491 — his brother Lord Chancellor, ib., 492 — failed to gain Parliamentary reputation, 492— treachery of Whig party towards, 493. Erskine Solicitor- General for Scotland, opposed Hardwicke's Bill, 82 — Lovat's letter to, 213. Eskgrove, Lord, Lord of Session, 415— his son, Sir William Kae, made Lord Ad- vocate, 608. Falconer, Scottish poet, 340. Ferguson, Adam, account of, 456-461— his love of the Highlands, 456 — chaplain to the Black Watch, ib. — at Fontenoy, 457 — resigned chaplaincy, 458 — ad- vocated representation of Home's "Douglas," — appointed Professor of Natural Philosophy in Edinburgh University, exchanged for Chair of Moral Philosophy, ib. — " Essay on the History of Civil Society," ib. — his ethical teaching, 459 — tutor to Lord Chesterfield, 460 — in France and America, ib. — 'History of the Koman Republic,' ib. — ' Principles of Moral and Political Science,' ib. — character and appearance, 461 — Burns and Scott at his house, ib. Fergusson, Robert, Scottish poet, 340— Fife, the county of, character of popula- tion in, 332. Fisher, Edward, author of ' The Marrow of Modern Divinity,' 249 — cause of " Marrow Controversy," ib., 250. Fletcher, Andrew, See Milton. Fletcher of Saltoun, 15 — his detestation of English tyranny, 18 — his proposal that £200 a-year should be the highest income in Scotland, 235. Forbes, Duncan, of Culloden, made Lord Advocate, 70— marched Glasgow magis- trates to Edinburgh Tolbooth, 71— great influence in Scottish affairs, 72 — Wal- pole's neglect of, ib. — opposed Hard- wicke's bill, 82— account of, 97, 98— plan for employing fighting power of Highlands made by, 105 — warned Sir John Cope of Prince Charles Stuart's landing, 123 — wrote to Pelham about the rumoured landing, 124 — Lovat corresponding with, 127 — the mainstay of the Government in Scotland during the rising, 157, 158 — began to suspect Lovat, 211— his meeting with the Duke of Cumberland, 220 — death and char- acter of, 226, 227. Forbin, Comte de, 37. Fox, 374 — in Rockingham's Ministry, 376 — coalition with Lord North, ib. —Secre- tary of State, ib. — his India Bill dis- liked in Scotland, 387. Free Church, the, begun in May 1843, 592 — joined by large numbers, 594 — the Sustentation Fund organised by Dr Chalmers, 595 — grew into sympathy with dissent, ib., 596 — not brought back to the Established Church by abolition of Patronage, ib. — accepted education grants from Whig Govern- ment, 598. Gardenstone, Lord, zeal for reform of burgh administration tainted by his character, 403, 415. Gardiner, Colonel, at Prestonpans, 142, 143, 145. George, Fort, English garrison at, 88 — captured for Prince Charles Stuart, 181. George II., King, character of, 102 — vexation at Walpole's resignation, 106 — continued to consult him, 107 — his personal courage at Dettingen, 110, 111 — regardfor Carteret, 111, 112 — intrigue to displace Duke of Newcastle, 175 — received deputation of Scottish clergy from the Assembly, 256. George 111., King, his accession, 303 — growth of Scottish loyalty towards, 303, 304 — troubles shortly after accession, 306-309 — Scotland's transition during first part of reign of, 334 et seq. — Scottish loyalty and attachment to, 352— first cloud of insanity, 406— Pitt's courageous defence of the king, ib., 407 — recovery, 406. George IV., quarrel with the Queen, 511 — estranged popular feeling, ib., 612. Gerald, Joseph, tried for sedition, 421. Gillespie, Mr, of Carnock, opponent of Patronage, 261 — founder of the Relief sect, 272. Glasgow, malt-tax riots in, 69-71 — state of, at the time of the Union, 84 — anti- Jacobite in 1745, 158 — levies raised by Prince Charles Stuart from, 166— muni- cipal administration in, 298, 299 — Defoe's opinion of, 299— Captain Burt's opinion of, ib. — Pococke's opinion of, i6.— scheme for the Forth and Clyde Canal, 320,{321— dispute with Edinburgh about fixing the price of imported corn, 363 — Glasgow traders opposed to American War, 364 — anti-Catholic riots in, 366 — growing commercial import- ance of, 397 — extraordinary increase in population and wealth of, 499 — dis- content amongst artisans of, ib. — combi- nation of weavers for demanding higher wages, 502 — Habeas Corpus Act sus- pended and arrests and trials, 503-508 — secret Radical societies in, 509, 510 — outbreak on April 5, 1820, 510 — troops called out and ringleaders seized, ib. — trials and severe sentences, 511 — 'The Sentinel' established, 513 — its attacks on prominent Whigs, ib. — Dr Chalmers minister of the Tron Church in, 526 — transferred to St John's in, ib. — his work at relief of the poor in, 529-534 — his pa- rochial system of poor relief, 534 — the growth of, 606— the shipbuilding of, ib. INDEX. 625 Glasgow, University of, professors of phil- osophy at the, 433-439— Adam Smith, professor at the, 447, 448— Thomas Reid, professor at the, 453-455. Glenfinnan, the Stuart standard raised at, 125. Gleushiel, battle of, 65. Godolphin, plans of, in Scotland, 18, 20— fall of, 41, 42. Gordon, Lord George, riots in London led by, 369 — trial and verdict, ib. Gordon, Lord Lewis, joined Prince Charles Stuart with body of adherents, 160. Gortz, Baron, 63. Graham, Sir James, as Home Secretary, letter on the Claim of Right from, 589. Granville, Lord. See Carteret. Grey, Lord, Reform Parliament of, 557. Hailes, Lord, a member of the "Select Society," 284, 416. Hamilton, of Bangor, 238. Hamilton, Duke of, Jacobite leader in Scotland, 19 — proposal for federal Union, 25— his betrayal of Jacobites, 26 — Hooke's negotiations with, 36 — influence with Whigs of, 38 — voted against Sacheverell's conviction, 42 — death of, 44. Hamilton, Lady, of Rosehall, old Jacobite lady, 239. Hamilton, Sir William, Professor of Logic in the University of Edinburgh, 467, 468. Hanoverian line, accession of the, 52 — hatred in England and Scotland of the, 53 — patriotic suspicion of the, 104 — loyalty of the Church of Scotland to, 195 — growth of loyalty in Scotland to, 291. Hardwicke, Lord, Lord Chancellor, intro- duced bill to disable authority of Edin- burgh magistrates, &c., 80 — mutilated in discussion, 82 — passed, ib. — remained Lord Chancellor after Walpole's resig- nation, 106 — held aloof from intrigue, 109— constituted High Steward of Great Britain to preside over trials of Lords Kilmarnock, Cromarty, and Balmerino, 205 — his destruction of the clan system in the Highlands, 221-226— opposed by Duncan Forbes, 225. Harley, rise of, 42 — his ministry, 43 — its character, ib. , 44 et seq. — bad faith towards Scottish party, 46-48 — his fear of repeal of the Union, 48, 49 — made Earl of Oxford, 48. Hastings, Warren, trial of, 404-406— Pitt's attitude towards, 405, 406— Scot- tish opinion of, 406. Hawley, General, replaced Cumberland in command of forces pursuing Prince Charles, 167 — hectoring bully, ib. — at Falkirk, 168 — outwitted and defeated by Lord George Murray, 168-170— retreated to Edinburgh, 170. 2 Hepburn, James, of Keith, at Holyrood, on Prince Charles Stuart's entry, 138 — at Prestonpans, 143. Hermand, Lord, judge in trial of Maclaren and Baird, 505. Hervey, Lord, Walpole's confidante, 104. Highland clans after Revolution, 10, 11 — system abolished, 224. Highlands, the character of, 86-91— sur- render of arms after 1815 in, 91 — restoration of the companies in, ib. — Government folly and neglect in, 117, 119 —administration of General Wade in the, 117-119— Jacobite influence and emissaries in, 119 — Duncan Forbes' influence in, 153— disarmament of, 221 — use of Highland dress forbidden, ib., 222 — confiscation of estates in, 222, 223 — Act of Indemnity rather an Act of Proscription, 223 — break up of the clan system in, 224 — Lord Hardwicke's policy in, 225 — conciliation of, 285 — attachment and traditions in, 300 — Poems of Ossian, ib. — military roads in, 321— efforts to improve, 332-334— agri- culture in, 335 — sheep-farms intro- duced, ib. — effect on population, ib., 337 — influence of Church of Scotland in, 391— Acts of Conciliation secured by Dundas for, ib., 392 — sheep and cattle in, 397 — the commercial success of sheep-farming in, 498— social wisdom not so certain, ib. — depopulation of, ib. — heavy duties on salt and barilla, 499 — kelp industry, ib. — distress in, ib. — partial rise from poverty of, 608 — education difficult in, 614 — sessional schools in addition to parish schools, ib. Holyrood, entry of Prince Charles Stuart into, 137-139— ball at, 139— the Prince's Court and Council at, 148-157 — after 1745, 296— Comte d'Artois and family in exile at, 427 — the Lord High Com- missioner's levee in 1843 at, 591. Home, John, author of "Douglas," a member of the "Select Society," 284 — " Douglas " represented on stage in Edinburgh, 287 — opposition from "Highflying" party in Church, 288-290 — retired from ministry, 289. Hooke, agent of Louis XIV., King of France, 35, 36. Hume, David, one of the literary circle of Edinburgh after 1745, 269— his charac- ter and social charm, 269-271 — as a philosopher, 440-444— his ' Treatise on Human Nature,' 442 — his historical work, 443 — Adam Smith's opinion of him, 444, 451. Huske, General, second in command at Battle of Falkirk, 168, 170. Hutcheson, Francis, Professor of Moral Philosophy in Glasgow, account of, 433, 434— his early books, 434— his school of thought, ib., 435 — its limit- ations and advantages, ib., 436 — his work in Glasgow, 436-438 — respect of R 626 INDEX. both parties in the Church for him, 438 —his death in 1746, 439. Infirmary, the Edinburgh, started, 285. Inverness, James VIII. proclaimed at, 55 — Sir John Cope's retreat to, 129 — Prince Charles Stuart's retreat to, 178 — Loudoun's force cooped up at, 180 — seized by Jacobites, 181 — Jacobite leaders summoned to, 185 — Lord Lovat a prisoner at, 212. Islay, Lord, his influence in Scottish affairs, 71 — Newcastle's jealousy of, 79 — attempt to cripple his power, 79-89 — favoured Duncan Forbes' plan for employing Highland fighting power, 105 — became Duke of Argyle on brother's death. See Argyle, Duke of. J acobite opposition to the Act of Union, 25 — failure of opposition, 26-29— the narrow margin on which failure turned, 32. Jacobites, the, their creed in Scotland living long after its decay in England, 32, 33 — armed resistance their only re- source, 34, 35 — expectations from King Louis of France, 35 et seq. — disappoint- ment, 38, 39 — support of Harley against Godolphin, 43 — shifty treat- ment received from Harley, 43-49 — Queen Anne's secret sympathy with, 49 — prospects darkened at Queen's death, 52-rebellion of 1715, 53-59— their loyalty gradually strengthened by the changes taking place in Scot- land, 59-63 — at the lowest ebb of fortune, 63 — encouraged by errors of English Government, 66-73 — hatred of Walpole's administration, 109 — hopes from the French after Dettingen, 112 — Cardinal Tencin their champion in France, ib. — Prince Charles Stuart invited to Paris, 114 — plans after his landing at Moidart, 124 — at his court in Holyrood, 152, 153 — their hopes of French sup- port, 153 — Duncan Forbes' influence with Highland chiefs, 153 — weak points of, 155, 156 — few in England joined Prince Charles Stuart, 161, 162— his retreat from Derby destroyed effective force of Jacobitism, 164— collapse of their cause in Sutherland, 185 — their defeat at Culloden, 190 — secret hopes, 192— reprisals taken by Government on, 193-195 — trials of prominent Jaco- bites, 204-220 — their opposition to de- struction of the clan system in the Highlands, 226 — their memories helped to preserve the national individuality of Scotland, 228 — helped to widen the gulf between England and Scotland, 231, 232— Jacobite ladies in Scotland, 239, 240 — survival of Jacobitism in society, 275, 281, 283, 291, 293-295— change in its character, 404 — gradual disappearance of active Jacobitism, 349 — their creed an element of social and literary romance in Edinburgh, 372. Jacobitism, rise of, in Scotland, 9 et seq. — stimulus given by Glencoe mas- sacre to, 15 — by fanaticism amongst the Presbyterians, 17 — Act of Security gained by adherents of, 19 — opposition to Act of Union by, 25-29. Jeffrej"^, Francis, account of, 481, 482 — 'The Edinburgh Review.' 486-489— his eloquent defence of Maclaren and Baird, 505, 506— counsel for the Rev. Neil Douglas, 506, 507 — present a public meeting against Ministry, 512 — elected Dean of Faculty, 546 — ceased to edit 'Edinburgh Review,' t6.— made Lord Advocate, 557 — unfitted for Parlia- mentary arena, ib. — riots at election, 558 — Jeffrey's victory, 559 — celebra- tion, 560 — disliked Parliamentary business, ib. — new Scottish administra- tion, 560 — his picture of the reformed Parliament debating the Scottish Burgh Reform Bill, 661— ceased to be Lord Advocate, 562 — raised to the Bench, ib. — his attempt in Parliament to miti- gate the pressure of the Annuity Tax, 564 — his mistakes and those of his party, 600 — Whig supremacy left him to guide the work of change after the Reform Act, 601. Johnson, Dr, on Scotland and Scots- men, 308 — journal of 'Tour in Scot- land,' 344, 345— its power and insight, 345. Jones, John Paul, Leith threatened by, 363. Judicial Bench of Scotland, 414-416. Justice-Clerk, Lord, the ofiice of, 414, 415 — presided over Second Division of remodelled Court of Session, 494. Kames, Lord, a member of the " Select Society," 284 — Lord of Session and quasi-philosopher, 445-447. Kelly, one of Prince Charles Stuart's seven companions at his landing, 122. Kenmure, Viscount, execution of, 58. Kilmarnock, Lord, joined Prince Charles Stuart, 150 — his wife and Hawley, 168 — trial and execution of, 205-207. Kinnoul, Earl of, presentation of Mr Young to the parish of Auchterarder by, 576. Labour conditions, 327, 328. Lansdowne, Lord, opponent of Pitt's Government, 413 — Home Secretary in Canning's Government, 520 — Scottish business entrusted to him, Lord Minto, &c., ib., 521. Lauderdale, Earl of, opponent of Govern- ment, his character and treachery, 412, 413. Leechman, Professor, Moderate leader in Church of Scotland after 1745, 258— INDEX. 627 biographer of Professor Hutcheson, 433, 438. Leven, the Earl of, 38. Literature, revival of, in Scotland, 338-341 — poets, 339-341 — influence of romance in, 341. Liverpool, Lord, Government of, 501, 502, 512— change of personnel in the, 515, 516, 518 — best minds in Scotland in sympathy with new statesmanship, 519 —death of, 520. Loch, David, first to suggest stocking Highland pastures with sheep, 335, 336, 608. Lockhart, Alexander, of Covington, ad- herent of Henry Dundas, 359, 360. Lockhart, George, of Carnwath, head of Scottish party in Parliament, 40, 41 — his attempt to get the Treaty of Union repealed, 48, 49 — his failure due to shifty conduct of Harley and Boling- broke, 50 — his plans wrecked by Mar's sudden rising, 56 — on Walpole, 68-70. Logan, 341. Loudoun, Lord, with Hanoverian forces and Highlanders at Inverness, 180 — cooped up by Jacobite chiefs, ib. — de- feated by Lord Lewis Gordon earlier, ih. — failure of attempt to capture the Prince, 181 — fled beyond Cromarty Firth, ih. — driven from northern shires into the island of Skye, 182. Loughborough, great Scottish lawyer in England, 350. Louis XIV., King of France, inquiry into prospects of Jacobitism in Scot- land by, 35-37 — expedition on behalf of James sent by, 37 — its failure, 38 —death of, 56. Lovat, Lord, Simon Eraser, used as tool by Godolphin and Queensberry, 19 — account of, 91-95 — joined Jacobite association, 112 — sent emissary to Prince Charles Stuart at Auchnacarry, 127 — intrigued with both sides at once, 153, 154 — sent help to Prince too late, 154 — trial and execution of, 211-220 — after Culloden, 211 — a prisoner, 212 — in the Tower, 213— his trial, 213-216— evidence of Murray of Broughton, 215 — his conduct before execution, 216, 217, his execution, 217, 218— his char- acter, 219, 220. Lowlands, the, character of, 86 — twofold influence after 1745 in, 299, 300— Border social types in, 331 — increase of wealth in, 336. sale of land in, ih. — English methods of farming in, 337, 338— effects of war in, 338 — woollen trade and mineral discoveries in, 397. Macdonald, .. Tullidelph, Principal, of St Andrews, Moderate leader in Church of Scot- land, 259, 263. Tweeddale, Marquis of, leader of Third party in Scotland, 19 — made Com- missioner, 20 — as Scottish Secretary, INDEX. 633 242— deprived of office, ib.— his ad- ministration, 301. Union of Parliament, 18. Union, the, of 1603, 1, 2— state of Scot- land before, 1, 2. Union, the Treaty of, completed, 29 — slow growth of benefits of, 30-32 — attempt to repeal, 48-50. Universities, the Scottish, regenting system at, 431, 432 — four chief subjects of curriculum at, 432 — disappearance of regenting system, ib. — replaced by professoriate, ib., 433 — loss of national influence, 466. Utrecht, Peace of, 56. Wade, Marshal, and Clan Mackenzie, 67 — at Glasgow suppressing riots, 71 — roads made in Highlands by, 88 — his administration of the Highlands, 117, 118 — description of his roads, 118 — his work destroyed by folly of the Government, 119 — concentrated British and Dutch troops at Newcastle, 150— Charles Stuart too quick for him, 157, 159. Wallace, Dr "Robert, mathematician and opponent of Hume, 274. Walpole, Horace, slanders of Scotland by, S09, 310. Walpole, Sir Robert, financial creed of, 68, 69 — his taxation of beer in Scot- land, 69 — opportunity for Jacobites, ib. — forced to change plan of taxation, ib., 70 — riots caused, 70, 71 — mistaken policy, 72 — aroused faction, 79, 80 — personality, influence and character of, 99-106— his fall, 106— announced re- signation to King George, ib. — created Earl of Orford, iS. —failure of attempted prosecution against, 107, 108 — death of, 116. Webster, Dr Alexander, leader of High- flying party in Church of Scotland, 258 — character and influence of, 272- 274— opposition of, to theatrical per- formances, 288. Wellington, the Duke of, administration of, 556 — the Church question the ques- tion of the hour, 572. Wigan opened to Prince Charles Stuart, 161. Wilkes, John, on Scotland and the Scotch, 308— challenged by Forbes, 309 — dis- like in Scotland of, 317. Wilkie, a member of the ''Select Society," 284— author of ' The Epigoniad,' 341. William III., 6-8 — misery of Scotland during the reign of, 9-17 — guilt in Massacre of Glencoe shared by, 14, 15. William, Fort, English garrison at, 88. Wilmington, first Lord of the Treasury, 106— died. 111. Wilson, John, succeeded Dugald Stewart in the Chair of Moral Philosophy, 467 — his intellectual character, ib. Wishart, the brothers, Scottish divines, 274 275. Wolfe, at Battle of Falkirk, 169 — at Culloden, 193. 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