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Afterword: 'A Wrong-Resenting People': Writing Insurrectionary Scotland

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Afterword: 'A Wrong-Resenting People': Writing Insurrectionary Scotland Studies in Scottish Literature Volume 46 Issue 1 Article 10 8-2020 Afterword: 'A Wrong-Resenting People': Writing Insurrectionary Scotland Christopher A. Whatley University of Dundee Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons, and the Social History Commons Recommended Citation Whatley, Christopher A. (2020) "Afterword: 'A Wrong-Resenting People': Writing Insurrectionary Scotland," Studies in Scottish Literature: Vol. 46: Iss. 1, 58–73. Available at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl/vol46/iss1/10 This Symposium is brought to you by the Scottish Literature Collections at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Studies in Scottish Literature by an authorized editor of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. AFTERWORD “A WRONG-RESENTING PEOPLE”: WRITING INSURRECTIONARY SCOTLAND Christopher A. Whatley “The Edinburgh populace was noted, during many ages, for its readiness to rise in tumultuary fashion, whether under the prompting of religious zeal, or from inferior motives.” So said the writer and publisher Robert Chalmers in 1824, commenting that this sometimes armed “impromptu army” had been marshalled on several occasions over the course of the previous four centuries. These included the riots directed against the introduction of the service book in 1637; those in support of the Revolution of 1688—an event not unlike “Paris in our own times,” Chalmers judged; the “unexampled violence” of the Union “mobs”; and the Porteous disturbances of 1734.1 Had his scope not been restricted to Edinburgh, Chalmers could have included other insurrectionary episodes from Scotland’s history. The Reformation was a decade-long, Europe-wide “revolutionary upheaval.” In Scotland it severed the nation’s centuries-old relationship with Rome, and the Pope; it was also a revolt against the crown (represented by Mary Stuart, of Guise).2 Similar impetuses lay behind the “second” Reformation, which encompassed the Covenanters’ armed uprisings of 1666 and 1679 and their conventicling across much of Lowland Scotland. There were the near endemic attacks on customs and excise officers in the immediate post- 1707 decades, including Glasgow’s Malt Tax riots, that caused some contemporaries to declare Scotland ungovernable.3 The Jacobite insurgencies of 1708, 1715, 1719 and 1745 represented serious challenges 1 Robert Chambers, Traditions of Edinburgh (Edinburgh: W. & R. Chambers, 1869 ed.), 200-201. 2 Keith M. Brown, “Reformation to Union, 1560-1707,” in R.A. Houston and W.W.J. Knox, eds, The New Penguin History of Scotland From Earliest Times to the Present Day (London: Allen Lane, 2001), 182. 3 Christopher A. Whatley, “How Tame were the Scottish Lowlanders?,” in T.M. Devine, ed., Conflict and Stability in Scottish Society 1700-1850 (Edinburgh: John Donald,1990), 6-11. AFTERWORD: “A WRONG-RESENTING PEOPLE” 59 to the respective regimes, especially those of 1715 and 1745 when “the Jacobites were able to form armies with which to confront [with considerable success] the regular troops of the Crown” and threatened to overturn the new, far from secure Hanoverian establishment.4 Later came the radical risings of the 1790s and 1820 (to be discussed later); the militant trade unionism that followed; Chartism (perhaps) and the Crofters’ War. Historians of the twentieth century might point to the militancy of the women’s suffrage campaigning in the years prior to World War One, the Rent Strikes of 1915 in which, again, women were in the vanguard, the so-called Battle of George Square in 1919 (now the subject of revisionist investigation), the General Strike of 1926 (another subject in this symposium) and, possibly, the anti-Poll Tax riots of 1989.5 Few historians nowadays would agree—without substantial reservations—with Christopher Smout’s argument in his seminal History of the Scottish People that the “uninflammable character of the Scottish populace,” provides part of the explanation for what he and many others before him (and since) depicted as an exceptionally orderly, peaceable society.6 Religious fissures, political ideologies, dynastic and political divergences, working class and other movements, gender, protest, counter cultures and popular cultures have been all been explored in recent decades, revealing a much more troubled, divided and conflict-prone society than was once depicted. Yet we should not assume that every disorderly occasion involving large-ish groups of apparently irate, sometimes crudely armed people posed a threat to the existing order. There were riots that united communities against outsiders such as Roman Catholics or, as in 1915, German shopkeepers.7 During burgh elections rival mobs had the tacit if not the explicit approval of the competing candidates—usually men of elite standing. In early modern Edinburgh rioting was endemic, and multi- causal.8 In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries fierce sectarian battles 4 Jonathan D. Oates, The Jacobite Campaigns (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), 4-5. 5 On George Square 1919, see Gordon J. Barclay, “‘Duties in Aid of the Civil Power’: The Deployment of the Army in Glasgow, 31 January to 17 February 1919,” Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, 38.2 (2019): 261-92. 6 Christopher A. Whatley, “An Uninflammable People?,” in Ian Donnachie and Christopher A. Whatley, eds, The Manufacture of Scottish History (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1992), 51-71. 7 Catriona M.M. Macdonald, “May 1915: Race, Riot and Representations of War,” in Catriona M.M. Macdonald and E.W. McFarland, eds, Scotland and the Great War (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1999), 145-72. 8 Rab Houston, Social Change in the Age of Enlightenment: Edinburgh 1660-1760 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 290-331. 60 Christopher A. Whatley represented deep divisions within several central Lowland towns.9 Even so, those historians who have been inclined to present Scottish society as relatively stable concede that the “people below” were far from apathetic or naturally submissive to established authority.10 Telling too is that those in positions of power—in London, Edinburgh, the counties and larger towns—were sufficiently convinced of the insurrectionary potential of the major outbreaks of crowd violence in Scotland from the Union to the 1770s that they requested the help of the [British] army to restore order.11 This was true even of some of the many less well-known disturbances that took place over the same period, local insurrections that terrified the otherwise defenceless burgh magistrates. Individual landowners were often subject to the same challenges. Lowland landlord terror probably peaked during the so-called Levellers Revolt in the south-west in 1724, when the dykes around large cattle enclosures built by Jacobite-supporting land- owners were pulled down by well-drilled, armed resisters who overwhelmed what forces the local heritors could raise, necessitating the intervention of the Earl of Stair’s Dragoons.12 Indeed to all intents and purposes, Scotland prior to, during and in the aftermath of the 1707 union and then through to and beyond the Jacobite risings, was a militarised zone.13 The regime-changing Revolution of 1688- 90 was in every sense an insurrection. Led by far from reluctant Presbyterian radicals, it involved the rabbling by angry mobs of curates of the Episcopalian church establishment and, before long, widespread armed conflict. It was a seminal moment in Scotland’s history. Those Whigs or “true blue” Revolution men and women who adhered to its principles (socially levelling democracy within the Presbyterian church, opposition to Roman Catholicism and divinely-appointed kingship and, in their stead, a limited form of constitutional monarchy, and economic modernity), continued to staunchly defend it on the battlefield, in the pews and on paper through the following century and beyond.14 9 See Elaine McFarland, Protestants First: Orangeism in 19th Century Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990). 10 T.M. Devine, The Scottish Nation 1700-2000 (London: Allen Lane, 1999), 199. 11 Christopher A. Whatley, Scottish Society 1707-1830: Beyond Jacobitism, towards industrialisation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 162. 12 Alistair Livingston, “The Galloway Levellers—A Study of the Origins, Events and Consequences of their Actions” (unpublished MPhil dissertation, University of Glasgow, 2009). 13 “Occupation”’ is the term Murray Pittock uses—justifiably—for the period from 1746, in his Culloden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 99-116. 14 See Jeffrey Stephen, Defending the Revolution: The Church of Scotland 1689- 1716 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013); Christopher A. Whatley, “Reformed Religion, Regime Change, Scottish Whigs and the Struggle for the ‘Soul’ of Scotland, AFTERWORD: “A WRONG-RESENTING PEOPLE” 61 It was over the portrayal of the Covenanters that John Galt and less nuanced writers of the time such as the widely-read Rev Thomas M’Crie reacted against and responded to Sir Walter Scott’s Old Mortality (1816).15 Amongst other objections, Galt had taken umbrage at the levity with which Scott had treated the Presbyterians.16 And in part responding to M’Crie’s criticism of Scott for not paying sufficient attention to the oppressive conditions in which Covenanting militancy had developed, Galt has his central character narrate his tale autobiographically. Thereby he was able to reveal—not by trying to write history but rather by Ringan’s “bearing witness”—the press
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