Mightier Than a Lord , livre ebook

Title Page

MIGHTIER THAN A LORD

The Struggle for the Scottish Crofters’ Act of 1886








by
Iain Fraser Grigor




Publisher Information

Copyright © 2012 Iain Fraser Grigor

Published in 2012 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

The characters and situations in this book are entirely imaginary and bear no relation to any real person or actual happening.

The right of Iain Fraser Grigor to be identified as author of this book has been asserted in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyrights Designs and Patents Act 1988.



Introduction

“The departure of the redundant part of the population is an indispensable preliminary to every kind of improvement”.
The Economist.

IN THE YEAR 1603 James VI of Scotland added to his titles that of James I of England; and the century was scarcely gone when the Parliaments of both countries were likewise voluntarily merged to provide an adequate governing instrument for the united and increasingly great kingdom of Britain.
For the Scottish Parliament, it was, as was said at the time, the “end of ane auld sang”, and for the English it was a fine success, a union, as was said later, suggestive of that which voluntarily unites a small boy with an apple; while for the rich and powerful, whether Scottish or English, is was merely another stepping-stone on the path to even greater riches and power. The Union brought together the landed and commercial interests of Scotland and England in the pursuit of a common interest: and the Union was to advance that interest in not a few ways – not least as a important factor in the emergence of what would come to be known as the British Empire.
In all of these developments the common people were not consulted, for the common people, as such, had no concerted voice with which to speak. Popular insurrections there had been over the centuries, but always in strictly local and limited contexts. In 1707, the forces which would later support the emergence of effective popular resistance to oppression, on a strategic and national scale, were still some way in the future.
And of no area of Britain was this more true than of the Highlands of Scotland. Indeed, the very concept of popular political concern was largely irrelevant to the Highlands of the time. For in addition to the general considerations already noted, the Highlands had inherited attitudes going back to the rigidly aristocratic clan society of earlier centuries. At the same time, however, though the ordinary Highlander observed a custom of loyalty and service to a local superior or clan chief (which made him an outstanding soldier in the British Army from the later eighteenth century onwards), he knew of no such tradition of subservience to a distant, impersonal authority like central Government. Moreover, a tradition of intermittent warfare, albeit on a small scale, was part of the not too distant past in most parts of the Highlands. Factors such as these had helped to create, in English and Lowland Scottish minds, an ill-defined but profound sense of unease about the Highlands – an insecurity which was both justified and reinforced by the Jacobite risings of 1715, 1719 and 1745.
In 1715, the cause of James, the Old Pretender, attracted the support of many Highland clans. The rising, however, failed: and thirty years later, when his son Charles essayed a similar venture, it too ended in failure, with the destruction of the Young Pretender’s army on the bleak moor of Culloden, near Inverness. Then, as Charles took to his heels and the hills, and soon enough to permanent exile on the mainland of Europe, the British Government set about neutralising for ever the insurrectionary potential of the Highlands, and cast about to find ways of undermining the cultural and social identity of the Highland people.
As a result, the next century and a half were witness to great changes in the Highlands. The remains of the clan system were finally shattered by a combination of political and economic forces. The despised Highlanders were now to be brought within the compass of southern authority, for a very powerful reason. A surplus of monetary wealth, generated by trade and industrialisation, was now available for investment throughout the world, thereby to create even greater wealth; but before this new era could safely be introduced to the drawing-rooms of Empire, it was necessary to ensure the quiescence of Britain’s Highland back-yard.
It thus became an object of Government policy to destroy any potential Highland threat to the new social order – to “extirpate Celtic barbarism” and “civilise” the Highlands, as that process was called. And if, as they underwent this civilising process, the Highland land or people could be made to contribute to the “common good”, so much the better: for no two principles combined so harmoniously, to that progressive age, as those of profit and order.
And so, in the years from the Jacobite defeat at Culloden until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the pursuit of profit and order were to underlie all change in the Highlands.
For the common people of the Highlands, of course, this policy and attitude had great and grave consequences, since they led directly to what are now known as the Highland Clearances – a time when, in the name of progress, and for the profit and pleasure of the few, men replaced Man with sheep and then (when the sheep in their turn became a liability) turned the sheep farms into deer forests.
In all this time, of course, the opinions of those most affected – the ordinary people of the Highlands – were not sought. And for a long time, any resistance on their part was inhibited by the strength of their own traditional attitudes, and by the supreme confidence with which the doctrine of ‘improvement’ was presented and applied to them by authority in all its forms.
And then, in the 1870s, when the Highlands were thought to have been long pacified, there arose a movement of a quite revolutionary character, which challenged not only the authority of the southern legislature, but also the credentials of the Highland landowning elite, by calling in question the then-sacred principle that it was the task of the poor man to create wealth and the task of the rich man to spend it: the lot of the small tenant-at-will (the crofter or the cottar) to work the land and that of the landlord to enjoy its fruits. This movement brought a new self-awareness, solidarity and confidence to ordinary people, and created an active association of the crofting population throughout the Highlands in a very short space of time.
This association, the Highland Land League, proposed changes which called in question the very basis of the Highland landlord – the right in law to own and dispose of land without reference to the interests of those who lived and worked upon it. In the course of this Highland land agitation, the law of the British state, and especially the law as it related to private landed property, was broken again and again. There were violent clashes between crofters and the landowning class and its law-officers; there were confrontations involving gunboats, marine task-forces and para-military occupations; but the popular will could not be thwarted, and in the end the landlords and their forces were compelled to retreat and at least partly capitulate, in what has since become known as the Crofters’ War.
This book tells the story of that war – of the land-war and class-war in the Highlands during the late nineteenth century, and of the manner in which the common people of the Highlands secured a signal victory against the power, wealth and authority of their landlords, and of the forces of the British state itself.




The Seeds of Revolt

“A population numerous, but accustomed to, and contented with, a low standard of living for themselves , and yielding no surplus for the support of others, gives place to a population smaller in amount, but enjoying a higher civilisation, and contributing in a corresponding degree to the general progress of the world”.
The Duke of Argyll.

FOR THE OLD Highland society the short and bloody contest on Culloden Moor in April 1746 was a cruel death blow. By the end of that eighteenth century great changes had made themselves felt in the Highlands. Profit and order, the ideals of the new Establishment, were now the standards by which good and bad were to be judged in the Highlands. The former Jacobite chiefs and their forces no longer effectively existed. For the sons and grandsons of the former elite the choice was now one of oblivion, or the service of the new order. For the Frasers of Lovat, and for many others, service in the armed forces of that new order was the route to survival.
And as the old Highland aristocracy found a new role to play in the army and the empire of the southern Establishment, so it was with the lesser men of the former clans. In 1813, for instance, Alex Morrison, the Kintail minister’s son, died in Java; and from Spain, it was reported that Lieutenant MacKenzie of Ross-shire had also fallen in the service of the Crown. On the bleak island of Heligoland, the tomb-stone of Lieutenant Gray from Inverness was under construction; Alexander Grant of Glenmoriston was dying in Canada, and on the last day of August John Ross from Ross-shi