PANALBA

Gael Force

Scotland Magazine 07/05/2010 12:03 PM

IN 1685, aged fifty two, James Stuart was crowned King of Great Britain. His father, Charles I, believed that he had a divine right to rule as his fancy dictated. Parliament disagreed, and they went to war. The King lost and was decapitated. Oliver Cromwell became the Lord Protector of the Realm and that should have settled the matter, but the Stuarts were restored to the throne on Cromwell's death.

Charles II's great passions were good living and his mistresses. A subtle man, he avoided confrontation with his subjects but he died without a legitimate child and his brother James had the rigidity and self-righteousness of his father. Worse, he was a Roman Catholic, and the Protestant Faith was perceived as the cornerstone of British liberty.

James and his promotion of Catholicism was tolerated because his heir by his first wife was Mary. She was stoutly Protestant and married to the even more stoutly Protestant William of Orange who was involved in a desperate war with France. But in 1688, came disaster. After fifteen years of marriage, James's queen, Mary of Modena, his second wife, produced a son who would ensure a Catholic succession. William was invited to England to take the throne. James panicked and fled to France, dying there in 1701, and William, in the so-called Bloodless Revolution, was crowned King of Great Britain.

The ruling class was split into factions - Whigs and Tories. Many of the latter objected to this usurpation of the anointed King. Others were wary of the new power of William's supporters and wished for the Stuarts' return.

These were the Jacobites - taken from the Latin for James - and with support from the French, they would remain a threat to the State and governance of Britain for more than sixty years.

The Scots has already become unhappy with James between 1680 to 1682 when he was made Lord High Commissioner for Scotland by his brother Charles, so the parliament in Edinburgh was quick to acknowledge William of Orange as King. But John Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee travelled north and raised an army for the deposed King and in 1689, beat a Government force at the Battle of Killiecrankie. Unfortunately, Dundee himself was killed and the rebellion fizzled out. But it was a precursor of what was to come.

In 1775, Dr Samuel Johnson, compiler of the English Dictionary, could still write,"To the southern inhabitants of Scotland, the state of the mountains and the islands is equally unknown with that of Borneo or Sumatra, of both they have heard little and guess the rest."

The Highlands of Scotland held what has been described as the last tribal society in Europe, utterly different from the rest of Great Britain, its natives seen as savage barbarians. Beyond the sharply defined border of the Highland Line, people spoke Gaelic instead of English, wore plaids and tartan rather than trousers. Their music, culture, customs, and many of their laws were different. In the far north-west, Catholicism had not only held out against the Reformation but itself battled against paganism A mutual contempt was almost all the two societies had in common.

Little had changed since the days of the Romans. Tribes now called themselves Clans, but the King's writ held little force across the trackless moors, bogs and mountains. Control was devolved to the great Highland magnates who wielded absolute power within their domains and they had private armies to support their authority.

The dukes of Argyll and Atholl could field 3,000 fighting men each: Breadalbane, 1,000, the Mackenzies, 2,500, and so on down to lesser clans with a few score followers. If one of these mighty subjects became dangerously dominant, the King would encourage his neighbour to wage war upon him and thus preserve a balance. It was as if a modern Britain had Afghanistan in its northern extremities. In fact, in 1816, Sir Walter Scott wrote a Comparison between the Highland Clans and the Afghan Tribes.

The Highlands of Scotland were controlled by war lords, constantly involved in bloody squabbles for power and territory while their footsoldiers, with claymores rather than Kalashnikovs, indulged in cattle theft and brigandage against each other and the more peaceful Lowlands. In the remainder of Great Britain, most people were simple farmers. The Highlands held more than 30,000 trained warriors. These were a magnet for anyone wishing to raise an army against the Crown.

After the Battle of Killiecrankie, the Government in London had a good idea of the magnitude of the problem. In 1691, it forced the Clans to take oaths of allegiance to the new regime, earning opprobrium with a botched attempt at extirpating the unruly MacIan Macdonalds of Glencoe when they were late in doing so. King William died; Queen Ann, the second daughter of James, and the last Stuart monarch, came to the throne. Through bribes and inducements, and in the teeth of popular opposition, the Scots peers signed the Act of Union in 1707 which joined the two Parliaments. To many Scots, the English had not only removed their rightful king, but now they had stolen their Parliament and their independence.

In 1708, to counter the success of the Duke of Marlborough's campaign in continental Europe, the French sent an invasion fleet to the River Forth. Bad weather and faulty navigation thwarted their attempt to link up with their Scottish Jacobite allies. Scots resentment against English policy continued to build. Even the Presbyterian establishment which had been delighted to see the back of James became alienated when London actively encouraged the Episcopalian Faith north of the Border. On Ann's death in 1714, Westminster ignored a slew of closer heirs and picked Prince George of Hanover as the new King of Great Britain. The 11th Earl of Mar, disgruntled at being out-of-favour with the new regime, raised 10,000 men, mostly from the Highlands, and the Scots rose in rebellion.

Mar was no great leader, nor was King James' son, another James who became known as the Old Pretender, who arrived late from France, caught a cold, and depressed everyone he met. Two thousand and five hundred men were ordered south to link with English Jacobites. The latter were believed to be legion, but no more than a handful showed themselves in any of the Risings. The rebel invaders were besieged at Preston in Lancashire, and surrendered. An indecisive battle was fought at Sheriffmuir in Perthshire between Mar's men and a Government army under the 2nd Duke of Argyll. James returned home and the Rising collapsed.

Some rebels were executed, more were transported to the Colonies, and many of the leaders suffered heavy fines or had their estates confiscated. The Jacobites licked their wounds. Another abortive Rising took place in 1718 when a small Spanish force allied to the French landed on the West Coast opposite the Isle of Skye, but were defeated and surrendered with little fuss. For the next twenty five years, Jacobite supporters flitted between the exiled Stuart Court and London, hatching plots and counter-plots, all of which were reported by a myriad of spies on the Government's payroll.

Then came Bonnie Prince Charlie. Born in 1720, he was the eldest son of the Old Pretender. Ignoring all advice - a characteristic Stuart trait - he sailed from France in 1745 to land in the Western Isles with seven companions. The French were always in favour of Jacobite incursions that would drain British troops from fighting on the Continent, but were never convinced it was worth risking a serious force of their own men on so speculative an adventure as a Stuart uprising. On this occasion, Charles' companion ships were ambushed by the Royal Navy and never made it to Scotland.

The great majority of Scots, and perhaps half of the clans were against the Prince, but he appealed to the honour of those chiefs who had supported his father, and many mustered their tenants. It was said that if Charles had fallen asleep on landing in Scotland and left the fighting to his great general Lord George Murray, brother of the 2nd Duke of Atholl, he would have awoken King of Britain.

But Charles had all the characteristics of his family - courage, charm, arrogance and obstinacy. His little army captured Edinburgh, destroyed the Government forces in Scotland and marched south towards London. With 5,500 Highlanders, he got as far as Derby, 150 miles from the Capital. The Government, in a profound panic, brought troops back from Flanders. The King's son, the Duke of Cumberland, had 60,000 men, regulars and militia, to counter the rebels. The Jacobites retreated north. They beat another Redcoat army at Falkirk, but were routed on 16th April 1746 at Culloden Moor, near Inverness.

With a price of £30,000 on his head, Prince Charles secured his romantic reputation by spending five months being bundled around the Highlands by his supporters and dodging the Redcoats before finding a ship for France. He died, a drunk, in Rome in 1788.

The British Government believed that the anachronistic culture of the Gael would always be a source of trouble to the State, so they destroyed it. Troops went on the rampage, looting and murdering their way across the glens, unconcerned whether their victims were involved in the Rising or not. Weapons were confiscated, the kilt, tartan, and the plaid banned, bagpipes forbidden, the authority of the chiefs removed, the Gaelic language suppressed. Thousands were executed, transported, or died in prison hulks.

In this new world, landowners wanted cash, not armed followers, and sheep produced more money than the old tenants. Thousands left the Highlands for the Lowlands and the Colonies overseas. Many left voluntarily to escape poverty; others were forcibly ejected from their ancient lands. The contemptible Highlanders and their bizarre way of life seemed to have been expunged from history. This looked like being the legacy of the Jacobites.

But even as the old way of life was being destroyed, fashionable ladies in Edinburgh were donning tartan. Brutality, and even the eating of babies, had been expected of the Highlanders in England, but their behaviour had been exemplary. Mythology was already at work. Young Gaels were recruited into the Highland regiments of the British Army, and their courage, particularly in the Napoleonic Wars, attracted the admiration of the world.

James Macpherson produced a volume of poems purporting to be by the ancient Gaelic writer Ossian, and these took Europe by storm. The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau introduced the concept of the Noble Savage which fitted the Highlander admirably. The English lexicographer Dr Samuel Johnson met Flora Macdonald who had helped Prince Charles to escape, and published his account of the meeting and his tour of the Highlands in 1775. And with the culture no longer a threat, the great Scottish novelist Sir Walter Scott was able to romanticise it, and his work achieved huge popularity.

The Highland Society of London reinvented Gaeldom in Scott's image. In 1822, George IV visited Edinburgh and, in an astonishing pageant orchestrated by Scott, much of the nation dressed up in kilts and declared itself Highland. Later Queen Victoria bought Balmoral Castle in Aberdeenshire and the British Royal Family has decked itself out in tartan ever since.

Even before Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Risings, the ancient Gaelic culture was in decay and it would have totally collapsed under the impact of the Industrial Revolution but its ruthless destruction gave it a romance and resonance that still echoes down the years. In a remarkable twist of fate, the trappings of this once despised people gives Scotland the most identifiable national image of any nation on earth and sells a million tins of shortbread. And this is largely thanks to Bonnie Prince Charlie - and the Jacobites.