Rorke, Mary Gordon (2017) a Full, Particular and True Account of the Rebellion in the Years 1745-6 by Dougal Graham
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Rorke, Mary Gordon (2017) A Full, Particular and True Account of the Rebellion in the Years 1745-6 by Dougal Graham. The man, the myth and the modus operandi. MLitt(R) thesis. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/7954/ Copyright and moral rights for this work are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This work cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Glasgow Theses Service http://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] A Full, Particular and True Account of the Rebellion in the Years 1745-6, by Dougal Graham. The Man, the Myth and the Modus Operandi Mary Gordon Rorke Thesis submitted for the degree of MLitt, October 2016 University of Glasgow, School of Critical Studies © Mary Gordon Rorke, October 2016 Author’s declaration I declare this thesis has been composed by me, and the research on which it is based is my own work. Mary Gordon Rorke Molly Rorke, MLitt 2016 Dougal Graham: The Man, the Myth and the Modus Operandi Page 2 of 206 Abstract Dougal Graham’s Full, Particular and True Account of the Rebellion in the Years 1745-46 is a ‘forgotten’ text of considerable historical and cultural significance. Between Christmas and Candlemas of 1745/1746 the West Central Lowlands experienced the presence of the Jacobite army, with those retreating from Derby reinforced by new recruits from the north east and French and Irish forces – about 80,000 in all. Quartered round Stirling in the depths of winter, this put considerable strain on local resources. With money and supplies from Glasgow, the rebels occupied Stirling, besieged the Castle, and fought off a British army at Falkirk, but then had to retreat north of the Forth, ultimately to face annihilation at the hands of the Duke of Cumberland. The Account was composed by an inhabitant of Stirlingshire and published in Glasgow six months after Culloden. It seems to be the earliest connected narrative of the 1745 Rebellion produced in Scotland. The text shows clear evidence that the target audience was not a literary, or even necessarily literate elite, but the ‘meaner sort’ in the Glasgow hinterland, routinely supplied by chapmen with such cheap ‘sma’ books’. The Account reads almost like a special supplement for a 1746 tabloid. Unashamedly populist, it provides acceptably accurate information, entertainment, and a degree of sectarian triumphalism. It is journalistic, racy and fast moving with most of the editorial comment (in the form of supplementary poems) added at the end so as not to impede the action. The language is a somewhat archaic demotic Scots, written in the form of octosyllabic couplets, as used by Blind Harry and David Lyndsay, apparently the preferred reading matter of potential customers. This thesis will argue that since Dougal Graham’s Account can reasonably be regarded as reflecting the views of its projected clientele, the common people of the western Lowlands, it is scarcely feasible to achieve a full picture of Scotland in the aftermath of the rising without considering the text. It is therefore unfortunate that it was regarded as lost throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and ignored in the twentieth. This thesis presents the first modern edition of Graham’s Account, in the form of a glossed and annotated transcript of the 1746 edition. The introductory essay considers myths about the author that developed in the subsequent century, and which are entirely at odds with a reading of the material. It looks at the way the book was promoted, both in contemporary advertising and in the prefatory material within the text, and goes on to consider the projected audience and potential customer base. Finally the circumstances surrounding the publication of the second edition are investigated, throwing further light on the situation in Scotland seven years after Culloden. Molly Rorke, MLitt 2016 Dougal Graham: The Man, the Myth and the Modus Operandi Page 3 of 206 Contents Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................... 5 1. Dougal Graham – The Making of a Myth ..................................................................... 6 2. The promotion of Graham’s Account of the Rebellion .............................................. 19 2.1. The Glasgow Courant Advertisement ...................................................................... 19 2.2 Promotion within the Book: Cover and Prefatory Material ....................................... 43 a. Front Cover and Title ............................................................................................... 43 b. Price, Tune and Location ......................................................................................... 49 c. The Prefatory Material – Dedication, Autobiography.............................................. 60 3. The Second Edition ........................................................................................................ 67 4. A Full Particular and True Account of the Rebellion of 1745-46 .............................. 75 4.1 A Note on the Text. .................................................................................................... 75 4 2 Text of the Account of the Rebellion, glossed and annotated .................................... 77 Appendices ........................................................................................................................ 188 Appendix I: Elegy on the death of Dougal Graham ....................................................... 188 Appendix II: Address to the Jacobites (extracts) ........................................................... 191 Appendix III: Second Edition, Front Cover ................................................................... 192 Appendix IV: Dedication, Second Edition, 1752........................................................... 193 Bibliography ..................................................................................................................... 194 Molly Rorke, MLitt 2016 Dougal Graham: The Man, the Myth and the Modus Operandi Page 4 of 206 Acknowledgements Acknowledgements are due to The Mitchell Library, Glasgow, for giving permission to use the unique material deposited with them, with especial thanks to Enda Ryan, and to the staff of theNational Library of Scotland for their unfailing assistance, especially Ralph Maclean. My supervisors, Professor Gerard Carruthers and Professor Murray Pittock, provided invaluable, unstinting and enjoyable advice and support, as, indeed, did the whole Department of Scottish Literature. Some years ago, when Professor Ted Cowan first inspired the topic, Professor John Corbett suggested how it might be realised, and in the intervening period and friends and fellow members of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland – Linda Riddell,Stuart McHardy, David Caldwell, Naomi Tarrant and Cliodhna Dempsey – have been generous with help throughout. Above all, I should like to acknowledge with affection and sincere gratitude the assistance and encouragement of Dr Jen Harrison and Dr Martin Rorke, of the University of Sydney, without whom this project would have been impossible to realise. Molly Rorke, MLitt 2016 Dougal Graham: The Man, the Myth and the Modus Operandi Page 5 of 206 1. Dougal Graham – The Making of a Myth Work on the poet Dougal Graham has always been bedevilled by the lack of hard evidence about the man, leading Edward J. Cowan to describe him as ‘something of a phantom’.1 Documented evidence seems to show only that he was baptised in St Ninians Parish just outside Stirling in 1721, and admitted to the Chapman’s Guild of Stirling and Clackmannanshire in 1749. On the other hand, none of the prose chapbooks attributed to him were acknowledged by the author as his work, leading the late John Morris of the National Library of Scotland to opine that it was very unlikely that Dougal Graham had written any of them.2 What passes for Graham’s ‘biography’ is almost completely speculative, particularly such of it as was written before 1907, when the first edition of his Full, Particular and True Account of the Rebellion in the Years 1745-46 was gifted to the Mitchell Library. It had been published in 1746, contained some autobiographical information, and could have easily been consulted, but chapbook experts left it virtually unheeded for nearly a century, and instead chose to reiterate a couple of lines that occur in the preface to the many editions of Graham’s later work from 1774, The Impartial History of the Rise, Progress and Extinction of the late Rebellion in Britain, creatively expanding them to fill the vacuum. Graham’s claim to eyewitness status in 1774 gave scholars and journalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth century license to fabricate a version of his life which suited their own romanticised, pro-Jacobite preconceptions. As Willmott Willmott Dixon lamented in 1874: even sober students [...] have found themselves converted against their will from historians into romancers. They have seen every person and every circumstance connected with this episode through a glowing atmosphere of romance, and traditions which would, under