12

‘The year of the burnings’

The mass evictions of 1819 and their repercussions

On a Sunday at the start of May 1819, just days before James Loch’s long-planned clearances were due to begin, Donald Sage conducted a last service in Strathnaver. Sage had moved there four years previously to take up his first ecclesiastical post, as ‘missionary’ preacher at Achness where, on account of Strathnaver’s parish church being in faraway Bettyhill, a subsidiary church had been built to cater for people who would otherwise have found it impossible to get to a place of worship. This Achness church – at which Patrick Sellar had sought out William Chisholm immediately prior to the burning of Chisholm’s Badinloskin home – was, according to Sage, ‘woefully dilapidated’ on his arrival. Nor, despite some subsequent repairs, was it much improved in the course of Sage’s tenure. Loch was unwilling to sanction Sutherland Estate expenditure on a building that would, he observed in 1817, ‘become unnecessary’ when the population it served was moved to the coast. ‘The walls were built of stone and clay,’ Donald Sage wrote of Achness’s church, ‘the roof covered with divot [turf] and straw, and the seats were forms set at random . . . on the damp floor.’1

Despite those disadvantages, Sage, who completed his ministerial training when still a teenager and then drifted from one teaching or tutoring job to another, was pleased to be in Achness. The house provided for him was as rudimentary as his church. But he furnished it after a fashion with ‘a bed and bedding, a carpet and some chairs’ he bought when Sheriff Robert McKid – whose children Sage had taught – sold up at Kirkton. Other items were begged or borrowed from his father’s Kildonan manse; and in 1816 Sage and his older sister Elizabeth, who took on the role of the newly appointed minister’s housekeeper, set up home in a spot that commanded (as is evident from a present-day visit) extensive views of Strathnaver and its northward-flowing river.²

Here in 1818 Donald Sage – ‘in common with the rest of my people’, he commented – took delivery of one of the hundreds of removal notices then being distributed in the Sutherland interior. Sage did not await the arrival of an evicting party. Some months before the date set for his dispossession, he sold the cow that had provided him and Elizabeth with milk, and courtesy of a team of horses belonging to his father, moved his ‘few’ books and other belongings to Kildonan. This was no desertion of his post, however. Until the spring of 1819 Sage rode regularly into Strathnaver by way of the moorland separating Achness from the Strath of Kildonan’s upper reaches. He was thus able (for as long as he retained a congregation) to ‘continue the punctual discharge of [his] pastoral duties’, the final such duty being the pre-clearance service Donald Sage thought one of ‘the bitterest and most overwhelming experiences’ of his life.3

This service took place not at Achness but further down the strath at Langdale. It was there – Langdale, it seems, having been a long-established meeting place – that the 93rd Regiment had mustered 19 years earlier. As then, lots of people thronged a spot Sage described as ‘a beautiful green sward’ adjacent to ‘the still-flowing waters of the Naver’. But now there was none of the hustle and bustle of that previous occasion. Weighing on everyone present, as Sage’s account makes clear, was a bleak realisation that they were about to be deprived forcibly of their homes. Equally distressing was the knowledge that families who had neighboured for as long as they could recall would, on quitting Strathnaver, ‘never again . . . behold each other in the land of the living’. Some such families, to be sure, were shortly to find themselves in the same crofting settlements on Sutherland’s north coast. But ‘many’, Strathnaver’s subfactor John MacKay reported to Loch, had taken farms in Caithness, while others had chosen, MacKay added, to go ‘south’. ‘It was indeed the place of parting’, Sage wrote, ‘and the hour.’⁴

Seated ‘right opposite’ Donald Sage that morning at Langdale was a man in his nineties – a man Sage knew as ‘Old Achoul’. ‘As my eye fell upon his venerable countenance,’ the minister recalled, ‘I was deeply affected, and could scarcely articulate the psalm.’ That was not simply because Sage, over the preceding three or four years, had become close to his elderly* parishioner – though he had. In what was being done to Old Achoul in the name of what James Loch considered ‘improvement’ and Sage labelled a ‘system of oppression’, the young clergyman saw something emblematic of ‘the extinction’, as he wrote, ‘of the last remnant of the ancient Highland peasantry of the north’.5

In some accounts of the Sutherland clearances, and certainly in what was written about the clearances by their organisers, this peasantry – to stick with Donald Sage’s term – is presented as an undifferentiated collection of half-starved, moneyless, hopeless and nameless men and women. That is to misunderstand, in all sorts of ways, localities like pre-clearance Strathnaver. For not only did those localities contain (as already stressed) people who were by no means poor, they also possessed a social structure characterised by deeply felt distinctions deriving from a clan-based society that, until its surviving features were given the coup de grâce by clearance, had not wholly withered away. Hence the significance of Old Achoul. More than anyone else in Donald Sage’s congregation, his standing – a standing his fellow worshippers at Langdale would have been well aware of – was the product of a time far removed from the one that had conjured up the concept of ‘improvement’.

In clanship’s heyday, from the fourteenth century to the sixteenth, the dominant families in and around Strathnaver were MacKays. In the seventeenth century and subsequently, those families lost ground – in all senses of that phrase – to the Earls of Sutherland and their Gordon kinsfolk. But despite those reverses, something of the earlier ruling order’s status continued to cling to its surviving representatives. Prominent among this group was Old Achoul, otherwise William MacKay. His ancestry – in Gaelic his sloinneadh – was traceable, through 400 years, to his clan’s founder. The farm on which he lived for the greater part of his life – the farm that provided him with the territorial designation of Achoul – had been occupied by this same clan for just about as long. In 1807, however, that farm, on Loch Naver’s south-eastern shore, had been let by the Marquis and Marchioness of Stafford – along with most of the rest of the hill country between Loch Naver and Loch Shin – to Adam Atkinson and Anthony Marshall. When ordered out of Achoul to make way for Marshall and Atkinson’s sheep, William MacKay and his wife Janet had moved across Loch Naver to Grumbeg where their daughter and son-inlaw were among that township’s tenants. But now Grumbeg, along with all the other communities on Loch Naver’s western shore and on the west bank of the River Naver from the loch down to the sea, was also to be cleared, this time for Patrick Sellar’s benefit. At the Langdale service of April 1819, then, Donald Sage, on finding himself in close proximity to William MacKay, must surely have wondered what could sensibly be said to comfort a man who – for all his great age and for all his deep roots in Strathnaver – was about to lose his home for a second time. It is not surprising that, faced by such a circumstance, Sage was overcome by his emotions.6

On getting news of their impending removal, William MacKay, his daughter and son-in-law rejected – like lots more Strathnaver families – all thought of taking one of the diminutive crofts on offer from the Sutherland Estate. Instead they quit Sutherland entirely and rented a farm at Achairn, some six or seven miles on the inland side of the Caithness fishing port of Wick. By early nineteenth-century standards, it was a lengthy journey from Grumbeg to Achairn. This journey, however, was one that Janet MacKay, William of Achoul’s wife, was not called on to make, her death having occurred at some point in the run-up to her and her husband’s departure from Strathnaver. ‘Well Janet’, Achoul was heard to say as his wife’s coffin was lowered into the ground at the graveyard still to be seen beside the ruins of Donald Sage’s Achness church, ‘the Countess of Sutherland [as the marchioness was always known to her Highland tenantry] can never flit [move] you any more.’⁷

The countess, however, retained – and in 1819 would exercise – the power to flit thousands of others. Among them were the hundreds who, on what Donald Sage remembered as an ‘unusually fine . . . Sabbath morning’, gathered around the temporary platform customarily put in place for ministers at occasions like Sage’s Langdale service. His ‘preparations for the pulpit’, Sage wrote, ‘always cost [him] much anxiety’. But the prospect of his having to cope with ‘this sore scene of parting’ brought him ‘pain almost beyond endurance’: ‘I selected a text which had a pointed reference to the peculiarity of our circumstances, but my difficulty was how to restrain my feelings until I should illustrate and enforce the great truths which it involved . . . I preached and the people listened, but every sentence uttered and heard was in opposition to the tide of our natural feelings which, setting in against us, mounted at every step of our progress higher and higher. At last all restraints were compelled to give way. The preacher ceased to speak, the people to listen. All lifted up their voices and wept.’⁸

‘People’, Donald Sage commented of the ejection process, ‘received the legal warning to leave forever the homes of their fathers with a sort of stupor . . . As they began, however, to awaken from the stunning effects of this first intimation, their feelings found vent, and I was much struck with the different ways in which they expressed their sentiments. The truly pious acknowledged the mighty hand of God in the matter. In their prayers and religious conferences not a solitary expression could be heard indicative of anger or vindictiveness, but in the sight of God they humbled themselves, and received the chastisement at His hand.’9

While clear as to the wickedness of what was being inflicted on Strathnaver’s population, then, Sage was also of the theological persuasion that held it to be one’s Christian duty to make no gesture of resistance to clearance. It was this sort of outlook – even when uncontaminated (as in Sage’s case) by self-interest – that so maddened the Rossal stonemason Donald MacLeod. The ‘anger’ and ‘vindictiveness’ deplored by Sage were, from MacLeod’s perspective, perfectly proper responses to the prospect of mass evictions. Nor, despite much clerical emphasis on ‘submission’, were such feelings ever absent from the pre-clearance scene. That is why James Loch, in a November 1818 circular to Sutherland’s ministers, instructed them to tell their parishioners ‘once more’ that evictions should in no way be opposed and that no one ‘should be so inconsiderate as to believe that the intentions with regard to [removals] are not to be carried strictly into effect’.¹⁰

The locality that both Loch and Francis Suther considered most likely to give trouble was Strathbrora. Some Strathnaver families, Loch commented, had ‘settled in their new lots [or crofts] at Strathy’, a coastal area to the east of Bettyhill, as early as May 1818. While it is improbable that the people concerned moved north, as Loch insisted, ‘with the utmost cheerfulness’, it was nevertheless the case that those families – perhaps because of their knowing what happened to the men who pressed most determinedly for Patrick Sellar to be tried – had accepted the inevitability of clearance. It was otherwise in Strathbrora. There it was not until March and April 1819, with the scheduled emptying of much of the strath no more than a month or two away, that Suther was able to report substantial numbers ‘coming forward to take lots’. This was not accompanied, however, by any significant movement to the crofts in question – most of them in newly laid-out crofting townships like the Doll. Having met with Suther and put their names down for particular holdings, most Strathbrora men at once rejoined their wives and children in inland townships that were, in consequence, still populated when, on Thursday 6 May 1819, evicting parties set to work.¹¹

‘I am informed there is an intention to resist the removings in Strathbrora,’ Francis Suther noted at the end of April. This was being encouraged, the factor went on, by Colonel Alexander Sutherland, earlier levered out of Culmaily to make way for Patrick Sellar. Following his loss of that farm, Sutherland had retreated, as it were, to Braegrudie, a much less desirable holding at the top end of Strathbrora. The now very elderly Sutherland, in Suther’s opinion, was ‘getting a little feebleminded’ – a ‘weakness . . . most apparent’, Suther thought, ‘in the childish grief’ Braegrudie’s tacksman showed when meeting with people about to be evicted. But feebleminded or not, Alexander Sutherland, or so the factor considered, remained capable of fomenting unrest. ‘The colonel is a decided enemy to the sheep system of farming’, Suther wrote, ‘and indeed to all improvements that are conducive to strip the interior of the country of its population.’ While it was unlikely, in the factor’s opinion, that either Alexander Sutherland or anyone else would mount a serious rebellion in Strathbrora, he had resolved, Suther told Loch, to accompany evicting parties into the strath ‘in case of force being in any instance necessary’.12

Despite Francis Suther’s presence, the Strathbrora evictions of May 1819 were formally conducted by Sutherland’s procurator fiscal James Brander. Employed at one stage by Patrick Sellar whose clerk or secretary he had been during Sellar’s factorship, Brander now combined the role of fiscal with that of a lawyer in private practice. This enabled him to act locally for the Marquis and Marchioness of Stafford while also, in his capacity as a supposedly independent prosecutor, putting alleged lawbreakers (some of them charged at Sutherland Estate instigation) on trial in Dornoch’s sheriff court. It was to this court Francis Suther had turned for the eviction warrants Brander had been given the job of enforcing on behalf of Sheriff Charles Ross in whose name, or that of Sheriff-Substitute John Law, those warrants had been issued. Formerly, such enforcement had been left to estate factors. But this had changed on account of James Loch (in a further instance of the extent to which the Sutherland justice system and Sutherland Estate management now overlapped) having instructed Ross (not long after the latter’s Loch-engineered appointment) to ensure that his court ‘execute [its] own warrants’ with a view to avoiding, Loch explained, ‘an invidious and improper duty [falling] on . . . [any Sutherland Estate] factor’.¹³

While meaningful to Loch, it is doubtful if distinctions of this sort registered in Strathbrora. There squads of sheriff-officers and constables, technically answerable to Brander, worked alongside men in Sutherland Estate employment. Among the second group was Andrew Ross, a Golspie joiner or carpenter whose task it was to place a value on the timber components of houses earmarked for destruction. Crucks or couples obtained from estate woodlands belonged in law to landlords. But smaller timbers, such as roof planking, doors and doorframes, were considered to be the property of a home’s tenant, and had, therefore, to be compensated for. Given the nature of his connection with the Sutherland Estate, Andrew Ross – who did the same job for Patrick Sellar at Rhiloisk in 1814 and who afterwards testified on Sellar’s behalf at the latter’s trial – is unlikely to have been generous when making the valuations that became the basis of compensation offers to evicted families. Nor were the sums he came up with paid in full. Since clearances were expensive – Brander, for instance, being entitled to a guinea a day and constables to four shillings – and since all such expenses were chargeable to the Sutherland Estate, Francis Suther felt himself entitled to deduct from the cash due to each dispossessed tenant an amount equivalent to the cost of carrying out that same tenant’s dispossession. By this means, as the press was shortly to point out, evicted families were left with no alternative but to pay, in effect, for their own eviction.14

Treatment of this sort added one more cause of resentment to a situation already replete with such causes. It is unsurprising therefore that, by Saturday 8 May, ‘a spirit of determined resistance’ was said to be evident in Strathbrora. That afternoon some ‘forty persons from the lower part of the strath’ – people whose homes had already been dismantled – gathered in the valley’s upper reaches. This crowd, according to Suther, was ‘resolutely bent on stopping the progress of the [evicting] party had they got . . . that length that evening’. In the event, a potentially explosive confrontation was avoided as a result of James Brander’s decision to suspend operations until Sunday – then a generally observed day of rest – had passed. But if that was a point in Brander’s favour, it was more than negated by the way he and Suther chose to deal with the non-violent, but highly effective, opposition they encountered from the moment of their starting to demolish the homes they had come to Strathbrora to destroy.¹⁵

What typically happened, Suther reported, was that families delayed ‘tak[ing] their furniture out of their houses . . . [until] aware of the [evicting] party’s approach.’ Homes thus vacated ‘were then demolished to prevent their being taken possession of again’, their occupants having ‘hung on’, as Suther put it, with a view to doing just that. But no matter how comprehensively a house was taken apart, Suther explained, its key components were necessarily left where they fell. This meant that, especially during the hours of darkness, people were able to return to settlements that had theoretically been emptied and there begin the reconstruction of their homes. ‘This [Brander] put a to’, Suther commented, ‘by burning the empty houses.’ Had those ‘strong measures not been taken’, the factor went on, it would have been impossible to clear the straths in time to give sheep farmers the vacant possession they had been promised. ‘Burning the timber was a step rendered absolutely necessary by the apparent fixed determination of many not to move.’16

Such was people’s reluctance to quit their homes, Suther wrote, that they were seen on occasion to be ‘busy rebuilding’ with scraps of timber not ‘consumed’ when their homes were first set ablaze, a problem that appears to have been solved by a second round of conflagrations. Nor was it the case that cattle, despite evicted families’ assurances to the contrary, were got ‘off the ground’ scheduled for clearance. Instead cattle herds were ‘driven out of sight when the evicting party appeared’, being retrieved as soon as James Brander, his constables and sheriff-officers had moved on. In the Sciberscross area of Strathbrora, Suther added, by way of underlining why he and Brander considered themselves to have had no option but to act as they did, the ‘ground [had been] fairly cleared’ in advance of James Hall, the locality’s newly installed sheep farmer, taking possession. At Hall’s ‘own request’, however, houses at Sciberscross ‘were not burned but levelled’. ‘Many are again built, and [Hall] is burning them as he finds clemency in that respect will no longer do.’¹⁷

In London that May, James Loch was encouraged, to begin with, by the tenor of despatches from the north. Writing from Strathnaver, that district’s subfactor, John MacKay, reported that the ‘removal of the people’ had been ‘completed . . . in the quietest manner and with very little trouble’. Initial correspondence from Francis Suther was equally reassuring. Brander and his men had dealt with the Strathbrora ‘removings’ in under a week, the factor wrote. ‘They are [now] gone up the Blackwater [a River Brora tributary] to Kildonan.’ Matters there were expected to proceed smoothly. ‘The business may be said to be finished.’¹⁸

Loch ‘instantly carried’ those letters to the marquis and marchioness to whom he read their contents. It had given Lord and Lady Stafford ‘much pleasure’, Loch informed one of his Scottish contacts, that ‘extensive removals’ had been carried out in ‘so creditable’ a manner. ‘To me personally’, the Stafford commissioner continued, ‘[this] is a source of much satisfaction for . . . I hold myself responsible entirely for the measure.’¹⁹

Then came word as to what had actually occurred. ‘I learn with much regret’, Loch wrote to Suther, ‘that the constables . . . have burnt the people’s houses, a measure I thought would never have been acceded to after the well founded complaints which this conduct on the part of Mr Sellar created. I can see no necessity for such a measure having been resorted to . . . [I]t will give a character to the proceedings . . . of harshness and severity . . . It has, I understand, created an extensive and, I must confess, well founded animad-version.’ That was most certainly so.20

Returning to Strathnaver, days after the valley’s clearance, Donald Sage was appalled by what he saw. ‘The spectacle presented’, Sage wrote later, ‘was hideous and ghastly. The banks of the lake [meaning Loch Naver] and the river, formerly studded with cottages, now met the eye as a scene of desolation. On all the houses, the thatched roofs were gone; but the walls, built of alternate layers of turf and stone, remained. The flames of the preceding week still slumbered in the ruins, and sent up into the air spiral columns of smoke; whilst here a gable and there a long side wall, undermined by the fire, might be seen tumbling to the ground . . . The sooty rafters of the cottages, as they were being consumed, filled the air with a heavy and most offensive odour.’²¹

The Strathnaver evictions, Sage wrote, were the work of ‘a strong body of constables, sheriff-officers and others’ who had commenced ‘the campaign of burning’ at Grummore, a substantial township on Loch Naver’s western shore. This can be confirmed from Sutherland Estate sources. At Grummore, according to Francis Suther’s careful tallies, 27 families were turned out of their homes. They were followed by 12 families from Grumbeg, another lochside settlement a little further north and the place where William and Janet MacKay had settled when expelled from Achoul. Grumbeg was long-established: present-day archaeological investigations at Grumbeg have uncovered traces of Bronze Age habitation as well as the site of a graveyard containing a number of early Christian headstones. Now, in the space of just a few hours in May 1819, this community – occupying a spot where people had lived for at least 1,000 (and probably 2,000–3,000) years – was snuffed out. ‘Their plan of operations’, Donald Sage commented of the men responsible for the destruction of Grumbeg and Grummore, ‘was to clear the cottages of their inmates, giving them about half an hour to pack up and carry off their furniture . . . [prior to setting] the cottages on fire.’²²

Among members of his Achness congregation who thus lost their homes, Sage went on, was a widow, Henrietta or Henny Munro. When younger, as was then common practice, she had followed her soldier husband to war, accompanying his regiment (not the 93rd but some other unit) to Spain where British troops were first deployed against France’s occupying forces in 1808. Her husband (whose name is not recorded) having been killed in action or having died from disease, Henrietta had come home to Grumbeg where friends and neighbours had ‘built her a small cottage and [given] her a cow’. ‘She was a joyous, cheery old creature’, Donald Sage recalled of Henny Munro; much given to ‘unceasing’ talk of ‘orders and counter-orders . . . marchings and counter-marchings . . . pitched battles, retreats and advances’. Everyone who ‘got acquainted with old Henny Munro’, Sage wrote, ‘could only desire to do her a good turn were it merely for the warm . . . expressions of gratitude with which it was received.’ The men comprising the Strathnaver evicting party of May 1819, however, were not disposed to be kind, whether to this Grumbeg widow or anyone else.23

On realising that her home was about to be set on fire, ‘Henny’, or so Donald Sage was informed, ‘plead[ed] for her furniture – the coarsest and most valueless that could well be but still her earthly all. She first asked that, as her neighbours were so occupied with their own furniture, hers might be allowed to remain until they should be free to remove it for her. This request was curtly refused. She then besought [the evicting party] to allow a shepherd, who was present and offered his services for that purpose, to remove the furniture to his own residence on the opposite shore of [Loch Naver], to remain there till she could carry it away. This also was refused, and she was told with an oath that, if she did not take her trumpery off within half an hour, it would be burned. The poor widow [then] . . . address[ed] herself to the work of dragging her chests, beds, presses [or cupboards] and stools out at the door, and placing them at the gable of her cottage. No sooner was her task accomplished than the torch was applied. The widow’s hut, built of very combustible material, speedily ignited, and there rose up rapidly . . . a bright red flame. The wind unfortunately blew in the direction of [Henny’s] furniture, and the flame, lighting upon [the widow’s belongings] speedily reduced [them] to ashes.’²⁴

Would James Brander or Francis Suther have countenanced cruelty of the sort Donald Sage described? Possibly not. But they (being busy in Strathbrora and Kildonan) were not present in Strathnaver; and, not just at Grumbeg but more generally, there appears to have been a tendency, on the part of some individuals involved in enforcing evictions, to set aside everyday decencies and to take a depraved kind of pleasure in imposing gratuitous suffering. Firmly in this latter category, or so Sutherland’s population long insisted, was Donald Bannerman, the sheriff-officer and constable who had been much involved in efforts to crush the 1813 uprising in the Strath of Kildonan and who was equally to the fore throughout the 1819 clearances. In Gaelic, Bannerman came to be known as Domhnall Sgios, a designation implying that the destruction he caused was (literally) hellish in both scale and intensity. As late as the 1890s, even the 1950s, it would be possible to hear Sutherland people speak with loathing of the manner in which Bannerman and his ‘fire brigade’ torched house after house after house.25

The spring of 1819, as it happened, had brought, in Francis Suther’s words, ‘a long continuance of cold, dry weather with [an] easterly wind’. Those conditions – common in the Highlands at that time of year – would have had the effect of rendering thatch highly flammable. Equally quick to ignite would have been the ‘bog fir’ boards holding roofs in place. Bog fir splinters burned so brightly that they were used customarily as candles. Heavier timbers of the same resin-soaked material, on being set ablaze, would thus have generated heat sufficiently intense to cause even turf walls – especially when dried out, as would have been the case, by sun and wind – to smoulder and smoke in the way Donald Sage reported. Nor would houses have been fired one at a time. At Grummore, the better part of 30 homes, together with all sorts of outbuildings, are likely to have had flames leaping more or less simultaneously from their roofs. The resulting spectacle – redolent of the sort of brute force normally given free rein only in times of war – must have been both terrifying and dispiriting.²⁶

Well over 200 families – comprising nearly 1,300 men, women and children – were driven from their Strathnaver homes in May 1819; and what people saw of those evictions would stay with them always. In 1883, a lifetime after the clearances, members of the royal commission then enquiring into crofting conditions took evidence from an Edinburgh resident, John MacKay, a man well into his eighties. MacKay, who left Sutherland when not much more than 20 and whose working life was spent laying cobbled roads and pavements in the Scottish capital, had been brought up in Dalhorrisgle, a small township in the lower part of Strathnaver. ‘I mind of my father’s house being burned’, John MacKay told the 1883 commission’s chairman Lord Napier, ‘and [the] four [other] houses that were in the place . . . I witnessed the five houses in flames, which really grieved me.’²⁷

If accounts of the 1819 clearances had circulated only in the Highlands, James Loch would not have been greatly concerned. What worried him was coverage of the Sutherland evictions in the southern press. There the story was confined initially to the Military Register, where Alexander Sutherland, alerted as early as mid-May to ‘the burning system being revived’, was soon informing readers that ‘the whole estate of Sutherland’ had become ‘a scene of extensive conflagration’. But the Register – ‘to our agreeable surprise’, its editor remarked – quickly found itself just one among many newspapers giving space to what an Observer headline called the ‘devastation of Sutherland’.28

When the Marquis and Marchioness of Stafford set out ‘to transform . . . [their] property in the county of Sutherland into one immense sheep farm’, the Observer reported on 2 August, ‘it became necessary to proceed to a kind of expatriation of the inhabitants . . . Many hundreds of dwellings were then committed to the flames’.²⁹

This was simply to follow where others, notably The Scotsman and The Times, had led. June and July stories, copied from one of those papers to the other, told of how ‘a posse of men . . . are parading the county of Sutherland and ejecting the poor Highlanders from the homes of their fathers. A valuation is put upon their property; a proportion of the expense is retained, the balance is paid over to the occupier; and his humble dwelling – in which he has gone through the various stages of life and which is endeared to him by a thousand ties and circumstances – is set fire to, and consumed to ashes, before the eyes of himself, his wife and helpless family . . . [Sutherland] is beginning to wear a depopulated and ruinous aspect.’³⁰

The Marchioness of Stafford, always sensitive to adverse press coverage of Sutherland Estate affairs, found comment of this kind upsetting. ‘We have lately been much attacked in the newspapers,’ she lamented in a letter to a friend. ‘What is stated is most perfectly unjust.’³¹

James Loch was, if anything, more distressed. ‘You have no idea the sensation the story of the burnings [has] made,’ Loch informed Francis Suther whom he held responsible for what had occurred. ‘The way I feel it personally is that, by one act of improvidence, we have reduced our management to a level with all those that have gone before it . . . [T]he impression is as bad as in Sellar’s time, and all the thought, arrangement and management which I have bestowed in the last two years . . . and which I had fondly hoped was to make my administration of Sutherland affairs valued by the public has been thus cast away.’³²

Neither from Loch nor from the Stafford camp more generally, however, was there any public admission of error or wrongdoing. In a series of letters to senior politicians, Loch condemned press accounts of Sutherland developments as ‘the grossest misrepresentations’. Sutherland Estate managers, he wrote, were ‘incapable of doing any deliberate act of harshness or unkindness’. The same point was made to journalists and to newspaper proprietors. One of Loch’s friends, a man close to Times owner John Walter, was asked to ‘assure [Walter] on the word of a gentleman’ that there was ‘not one word of truth’ in reports to the effect that the Stafford family’s Highland tenants had been maltreated. North of the border, Scotsman editor John Ramsay McCulloch was given similar assurances by William MacKenzie, the Staffords’ Edinburgh lawyer. McCulloch – whose ‘paper [had] behaved most indecently’ in James Loch’s opinion – was also pressed to reveal the identity of the person or persons providing him and his staff with information about the May clearances and their aftermath. McCulloch, MacKenzie reported, refused to reveal his sources, but he did concede a right of reply to Francis Suther, who duly took the opportunity to describe Scotsman coverage of ‘the late removals’ as ‘absolutely false and without foundation’.33

In London, meanwhile, Loch managed to have a ‘Statement Respecting Improvements in Sutherland’ carried by papers like The Times and Morning Chronicle. This rehearsed the now standard Loch argument that inhabitants of the Sutherland straths were being removed with a view to bettering their conditions – a contention repeated by Suther in a lengthy letter to the Caledonian Mercury. An overwhelming majority of evicted families had ‘of their own accord quitted their huts and [taken] away their goods’ in a wholly ‘peaceable manner’, Suther informed readers of this Edinburgh newspaper, a much more establishment-oriented publication than the then recently launched Scotsman. ‘As to the alleged acts of oppression committed by [Sutherland] officers in the execution of their duty,’ Suther wrote, ‘I distinctly assert such statements to be utterly untrue.’ Tales of people ‘being burnt out of their huts’ were ‘unfounded and malicious aspersions’.³⁴

But what could not be denied – because it had indubitably occurred – was that, on their being emptied, numerous homes had been set on fire. It was this that ensured that what Gaelic-speakers called bliadhna na losgaidh, the year of the burnings, would not readily be forgotten either in Sutherland or much further afield. The impact made by news of what had taken place on the Sutherland Estate in May 1819, Loch forecast, was ‘one never to be obliterated’. He was right.³⁵

Nor, more immediately, was there to be any silencing of the press. Despite the pressure brought to bear on Times proprietor John Walter, the paper’s editor, Thomas Barnes, remained unmuzzled. Loch’s protestations notwithstanding, Barnes – described by an admiring historian as ‘a powerful . . . voice for reform and justice’ – continued to publish stories about Sutherland. So did Barnes’s Morning Chronicle counterpart, John Black, whose paper was then England’s best-selling and arguably most influential daily. A Scot brought up by his mother after the death of his Berwickshire farm labourer father, Black was unremittingly hostile to clearances and their perpetrators. Hence this Morning Chronicle editorial: ‘There is something at which the heart sickens in the idea of turning out the inhabitants of a great division of country to make way for sheep [in order that] a greater profit might be derived by landlords. This approaches almost to a violation of the social union by which the property of the land is allowed to be permanently occupied by certain individuals as most advantageous for the interests of the community. Here the reason for this occupancy ceases to exist, as a turning out of a whole people cannot easily be reconciled with any ideas of general good.’36

Doing his best to ensure ongoing press interest in Sutherland throughout the summer of 1819 and into the following winter was a man who became for a time the most formidable – and, from a Stafford perspective, most threatening – critic and opponent of Sutherland Estate policy. This was Thomas Dudgeon who, around 1800, moved from East Lothian in the Scottish Lowlands to Easter Ross where his elder brother Archibald, whom Thomas came north to assist, had not long before acquired a farm tenancy at Ardboll. This locality, some six or seven miles east of Tain, is in the parish of Tarbat, with whose minister, William Forbes, Thomas was soon entangled in a protracted, and increasingly bitter, dispute.

This conflict, a pointer to Thomas Dudgeon’s lifelong dislike of authority in all its manifestations, began in June 1803 when Forbes and his kirk elders were informed that Jean Purves, an unmarried housemaid employed by Archibald Dudgeon at Ardboll, was ‘with child’. Instructed to report to Forbes’s manse in order to account for her conduct, a heavily pregnant Jean turned up in the company of her employer’s brother who, it emerged, was the father of her child, born just a day or two later. Egged on it appears by Thomas, Jean – instead of repenting her sins as expected – called William Forbes ‘a dirty scoundrel’, proclaimed herself ‘free before God and man’ and, taking Thomas by the arm, strode off unadmonished. Nor was Jean’s lover any more accommodating. Ordered ‘to appear for three Lord’s Days before the [Tarbat] congregation to be publicly rebuked’, Thomas Dudgeon, on the first of the three Sundays in question, told Forbes’s parishioners – whose enthralled horror can readily be imagined – that ‘he did not consider [their minister] entitled to give him an admonition’. As for Tarbat’s kirk elders, Thomas Dudgeon added, they were ‘a parcel of thieves, liars, backbiters and hypocrites’.37

On his case being referred by William Forbes to the Presbytery of Tain, Dudgeon was promptly issued with an order ‘denying him all Christian privileges’ until he made amends for the ‘contempt’ in which he evidently held the church. No such amends being forthcoming, the offending farmer remained at odds with the clerical establishment until, in 1809, he asked if he might resume his church membership. Thomas, by this point, had quit Tarbat and was farming on his own account in the nearby parish of Fearn. But before being allowed to attend church there, it was made clear, he would have to undergo, back in Tarbat, the three public rebukings he had refused to accept six years before. The outcome was renewed protest on Thomas Dudgeon’s part. ‘He read a book during all the time of preaching’, runs a report of his conduct at the first of the Tarbat services he was told to attend, ‘and when he stood up to be rebuked the levity of his behaviour was very offensive.’ Although excommunicated all over again, Dudgeon did in the end abase himself sufficiently to enable him to have a succession of sons and daughters baptised in Fearn Parish Church. Their mother, however, was not Jean Purves* – whose pregnancy had led to Dudgeon’s original brush with the Revd William Forbes – but Jane MacLeod, whom Thomas appears to have married not long after the eventual restoration of his ‘Christian privileges’. Jane, it is probable, was responsible for Dudgeon’s reluctant recognition of clerical jurisdiction over him. However, she was also – even if indirectly – the cause of the first of her husband’s quarrels with the Sutherland Estate.³⁸

When Jane MacLeod married Thomas Dudgeon, Jane’s widowed mother was tenant of Morvich, the Sutherland Estate farm Patrick Sellar was to take over in 1818 and which had earlier been earmarked as the site of the Marquis and Marchioness of Stafford’s projected summer home. Prior to work on that home starting, it had been necessary to buy out the remaining portion of the Morvich lease held by Jane Dudgeon’s mother. From the estate management side, a sum of £300 was offered. That was refused by Morvich’s occupant who, as advised in 1810 by her newly acquired son-in-law, asked for double the suggested amount. This figure, according to William Young, then the Sutherland Estate’s principal factor, was ‘unreasonable’. But despite being obliged finally to settle for rather less than the £600 he wanted, Dudgeon – described at the time by a reluctantly admiring Patrick Sellar as a ‘man of considerable skill’ – nevertheless succeeded in getting much of what he had demanded. Prior to this point, however, Young had embroiled both Dudgeon and his mother-in-law in legal proceedings that, though eventually suspended, left the Fearn farmer with a deep and enduring dislike of Sutherland Estate management methods.39

What James Loch called Thomas Dudgeon’s ‘old grievances about Morvich’ may have been one reason for the farmer deciding, towards the end of May 1819, that he should set about helping the Sutherland Estate’s evicted tenants ‘to concentrate their interests and to act in unison’. But it was not the only such reason. Dudgeon, by his own account, both sympathised and was in contact with some of the urban groupings then pressing more and more aggressively for greater democracy, greater equality, greater social justice. His wish to aid clearance victims was bound up, then, with his politics. It owed something too, or so it can reasonably be guessed, to the devil-may-care disrespect for convention Dudgeon had shown when tangling with the Church of Scotland. He was to demonstrate again when, one evening in December 1819, he got fellow members of the ultra-respectable Ross-shire Farmers Club into such an advanced state of ‘intoxication’ that, staggering to their feet, they toasted, at Thomas Dudgeon’s urging, the then highly contentious cause of ‘reform’.⁴⁰

This led to Dudgeon’s expulsion from the club on the grounds that he was guilty of ‘introducing . . . dissension’ to its ranks. It is probable, however, that his disbarment had less to do with the stated cause, Dudgeon’s proposing of ‘political toasts’, than with his activities in Sutherland, where, during the preceding six months, he had succeeded in convening a succession of ever larger and, from a Sutherland Estate standpoint, ever more suspect gatherings.⁴¹

Those took place at Meikle Ferry, which owed its name to its being the northern terminus of the Dornoch Firth sea crossing that then had to be made by anyone looking to access Sutherland from Easter Ross. Attendance at the first such meeting, held on Saturday 12 June, was limited, consisting of what Francis Suther dismissed as ‘a rabble of about fifty persons’. Proceedings, however, were clearly more orderly than Suther implied. Because of the ‘hard situation’ confronting ‘tenants . . . removed from their farms on the Estate of Sutherland’, it was resolved at this initial gathering, those present considered that it might be necessary for themselves and others ‘to abandon their native country and to emigrate to [North] America’. To this end, they agreed to constitute a Sutherland and Trans-Atlantic Friendly Association, to elect Dudgeon as its president and – in order to provide the association with a modicum of funds – to subscribe, in accordance with their means, either sixpence or two shillings and sixpence apiece.42

Word of the new association spread quickly. Its next meeting, also at Meikle Ferry on 17 July, attracted, as Suther was obliged to acknowledge, around 1,000 people. A pre-prepared petition, on being put to the meeting, was signed by no less than 672 heads of family. Sent shortly afterwards to parliament in London, the petition began by making clear that the Trans-Atlantic Association, ‘embrac[ing] . . . tenants removed or about to be removed’ from the Sutherland Estate, would ideally like to have its members provided with landholdings elsewhere in the United Kingdom. Failing this, the association wanted the British government to grant members ‘such pecuniary or other aid as may enable them to emigrate to . . . British [North] America’.⁴³

Demands of this sort, not least because of their being publicised in the national press, put pressure on James Loch. Much as had happened in 1813 when Kildonan families had queued up for the Earl of Selkirk’s passages to Red River, Sutherland people’s apparent eagerness to take themselves overseas was conspicuously at odds with assertion after assertion, from estate management sources, that all was well in the crofting townships where evicted families had been, or were about to be, resettled.

As always, Loch poured scorn on his opponents. Attendance at Thomas Dudgeon’s meetings, he wrote, was a consequence of ‘the extreme ignorance and credulity’ of ‘poor people’ who had expected Dudgeon to give them financial handouts but who were instead ‘induced’ to part with sixpences they could ill spare.⁴⁴

In Sutherland assaults of this kind served mainly to enhance the standing of the Trans-Atlantic Association, which by October 1819 was reported to have ‘upwards of eleven hundred’ members, together with a spreading network of active backers. Prominent among those from the outset were Andrew Thomson and Adam Gibson. Thomson, whose participation helps explain the Trans-Atlantic Association’s choice of meeting place, was innkeeper at Meikle Ferry. Gibson taught Latin and other languages at Tain Academy. Described by one of Loch’s Ross-shire informants as a man of ‘violent dispositions’, this Easter Ross teacher, who had come north from Forfar, appears to have shared Dudgeon’s pro-reform attitudes. He may also have had some contact with Alexander Sutherland who, despite his living in London, is known to have sent ‘three of [his] family’, as Sutherland put it, to Tain Academy some two years after the school’s opening in 1813. Sutherland, at all events, was quick to give support to the Trans-Atlantic Association, whose founder and president was duly described as ‘a man of great ability’ in the Military Register.45

The Military Register’s pro-Dudgeon stance – together with the attendance of Alexander Sutherland’s brother John, Sciberscross’s ousted tacksman, at one Meikle Ferry meeting – caused Loch, Suther and other members of the Stafford camp to suspect that, in Dudgeon and his associates, they were again confronting, albeit in a different guise, the gentry-led ‘combination’ which, in their estimation, had earlier been behind the campaign to bring Patrick Sellar to trial. This was very much Sellar’s own view. And despite its being the case that Dudgeon appears to have acted initially on his own initiative, Sellar, in detecting the hand of what he now called ‘the Carrol party’ in the latest outbreak of anti-clearance agitation, may have been on to something. It is certainly not difficult to establish connections between Joseph Gordon of Carrol – at loggerheads with the Marquis and Marchioness of Stafford ever since his 1812 sale to them of his Strathbrora estate – and a number of key players in the movement Thomas Dudgeon had so successfully launched in the grounds of Andrew Thomson’s inn.⁴⁶

While it may be neither here nor there that both Dudgeon and Joseph Gordon helped finance the school where Adam Gibson was employed, it is noteworthy that Gordon, as well as acting for Patrick Sellar’s near-nemesis Robert McKid, acted for Sutherland of Sciberscross. If not through McKid then through the Sciberscross tacksman, it seems likely, Joseph would have been in contact with the latter’s brother at the Military Register. Of more importance in relation to 1819 developments, however, were Joseph Gordon’s links with a new Stafford bête noire, Lachlan Mackintosh, proprietor since 1814 of the Inverness Journal, one of the two newspapers (the other being The Times) Thomas Dudgeon thought most supportive of the Trans-Atlantic Association. Mackintosh, although by no means in the same league as the Staffords, was a man of considerable wealth, his acquisition of the Journal, together with his purchase of a substantial property at Raigmore on the outskirts of Inverness, having been funded from a fortune made in India. There Lachlan, in partnership with his brother Aeneas, had founded Mackintosh and Company, a Calcutta* trading concern in which George Gordon, Joseph’s younger brother, was also a partner. This Mackintosh–Gordon entrepreneurial nexus was to be the source (as will be seen) of the cash that eventually enabled Joseph Gordon to bring about assisted emigration of the sort the Trans-Atlantic Association had been set up to promote. But of more immediate benefit to Thomas Dudgeon was the fact that – very possibly through Joseph Gordon’s good offices – his association acquired in the Inverness Journal an endlessly obliging outlet for material critical of the Sutherland Estate.47

A man of distinctly liberal sympathies, Lachlan Mackintosh saw in the Journal a means of exposing what he regarded as the excesses of entrenched authority. A favoured target was the little clique of businessmen, lawyers and others who had for ages dominated Inverness Town Council and whose fraudulent electoral practices Mackintosh was to challenge successfully in the courts. The Sutherland Estate, though more distant from Mackintosh’s viewpoint than the council faction he wanted driven from office, appears to have been regarded by the Inverness Journal’s owner as equally in need of having its powers curtailed. Hence the extent to which Thomas Dudgeon and the Trans-Atlantic Association were able to treat Lachlan Mackintosh’s paper as a sort of house magazine. ‘I have been told’, James Loch commented, ‘that the Inverness Journal inserts all the statements of the Association gratis, but not to give the appearance of gross partiality, they put them into the form of [paid for] advertisements.’⁴⁸

But if support of this kind helps account for the Trans-Atlantic Association’s runaway expansion, it is by no means the sole, or even the major, explanation for the organisation’s growth. More critical was the way in which Dudgeon won to his side a group of men with both the capacity and the motivation to recruit others. This group was made up of demobilised soldiers.

During the year or two following the close of a twentieth-century war, the one that ended in 1918, returning servicemen were to stake a claim to land in many parts of the Highlands and Hebrides by seizing and occupying farms illegally. In post-Waterloo circumstances, no similar attack could be mounted on a landowning class then far more dominant politically than it would be a century later. But in 1819, just as in 1919, men recently released from the military took the view, as James Loch acknowledged, that they should have ‘land granted to them’. That was how clan chiefs, or so people said, rewarded their fighting men; and on the part of soldiers who had come through ordeals such as the Battle of New Orleans, there was strong feeling that they should be treated similarly. ‘The fact is the 93rd [Regiment] consider the Estate of Sutherland as their property,’ Loch wrote. ‘They are the worst subjects the king has’, he remarked of army veterans more generally, ‘and by far the worst tenants any estate can be cursed with.’ Hence Loch’s insistence that former soldiers were not to have crofts: ‘Admit none of them as tenants,’ he ordered Francis Suther.49

Given the consequent refusal of Sutherland Estate managers to extend a helping hand to men the Marchioness of Stafford had once urged into the army, it is unsurprising that individuals in this category were among Thomas Dudgeon’s most enthusiastic assistants. With lots of them drawing (then substantial) pensions of between sixpence and two shillings a day, depending on the rank they had reached and the severity of such wounds as they might have sustained, those men gave impetus to Trans-Atlantic Association recruitment drives, travelling across Sutherland at their own expense, it seems, to bring news of proceedings at the association’s Meikle Ferry assemblies to localities like Strathnaver that might otherwise have heard little of those gatherings.⁵⁰

While his ex-soldier allies – according to panicky reports reaching Suther – were urging evicted families ‘to have blood for blood’, Dudgeon himself was concentrating on amassing evidence of Sutherland Estate ‘oppression’. At a Meikle Ferry meeting on 27 October, for example, he sought to counter press statements ‘from the agents of the Stafford family’, as he put it, by collecting affidavits – provided by ‘twenty-two respectable men from . . . different districts’ – with a view to establishing exactly how May’s evicting parties had conducted themselves. By no means every locality affected by clearance was represented on that occasion, Dudgeon conceded. But sworn testimony as to the burning of 271 separate dwellings had nevertheless been amassed. The Trans-Atlantic Association, it was thus demonstrated, had become – in its increasing professionalism as well as in its growing appeal – a force to be reckoned with.⁵¹

An accordingly alarmed James Loch responded by giving up on his earlier dismissiveness. The Trans-Atlantic Association, he now concluded, had to be neutralised or, better still, destroyed. This, Loch decided, would most effectively be accomplished by portraying the association as a Highland manifestation of the anti-establishment forces Lord Liverpool’s administration was looking to tackle by means of the repressive measures which, in the closing months of 1819, ministers were rushing through a parliament given over more and more to fear of revolution. Francis Suther and his colleagues were thus instructed to report to Loch on ‘the views of those persons who attend the Meikle Ferry meetings . . . [and] to watch their motions [sic] narrowly’. In particular they were ‘to trace any connection’ between the Trans-Atlantic Association members and what Loch called ‘the disturbed districts’.52

Especially in Britain’s emerging industrial centres, there was at this point no lack of such localities. In depression-hit manufacturing towns throughout the North of England and the Scottish Central Belt, economic discontents and pro-democracy feeling had for some time been jointly fuelling demands for a range of social and political reforms. With no such reforms on offer from Lord Liverpool’s government, protest had taken widely to the streets. Resulting confrontations between demonstrators and the authorities had culminated, at St Peter’s Field, Manchester, in August 1819, in cavalry charging a thousands-strong crowd, killing a number of people and injuring hundreds more. Dubbed ‘Peterloo’, by way of ironic comparison with the army’s 1815 triumph over Napoleon, this Manchester episode had the effect of convincing more radically inclined reformers that worthwhile change could be brought about only by French-style overthrow of the entire ruling order. Throughout the autumn of 1819, therefore, places like Manchester and Glasgow (the ‘disturbed districts’ of Loch’s correspondence) were convulsed by rumours – some well founded, others not – of imminent insurrection. By ministers and their backers, it followed, social and political dissent of any kind was regarded with the profoundest suspicion. That is what made it good tactics, on James Loch’s part, to insist on the ‘decidedly radical’ nature of the Trans-Atlantic Association.⁵³

Thomas Dudgeon had all along been alive to this danger. Although personally supportive of reform, he was at pains to stress that the Trans-Atlantic Association ‘disclaim[ed] . . . everything connected with party and politics and only humbly implore[d] the consideration of those able and willing to assist the indigent’. This, however, was disingenuous. Despite its name, the association had never confined itself to helping prospective emigrants find the cash they needed to finance their departure. Past clearances had been denounced. Opposition to further clearances had been mobilised. The whole basis of the Sutherland Estate’s ‘improvement’ strategy – a strategy reliant on the notion that removals were a necessary prelude to general advancement – had been thrown starkly into question. This being the case, Loch had no great difficulty in persuading parliamentarians – few of whom were then inclined to undermine landowning interests – that both Thomas Dudgeon and the organisation he headed ought to be treated as subversive.⁵⁴

One convert to Loch’s interpretation of events in Sutherland was William Rae who, in the summer of 1819, had become lord advocate in succession to Alexander Maconochie. In a speech supportive of moves to crush extra-parliamentary opposition to the government, Rae told the House of Commons in December ‘that Scotland was in an unpleasant and alarming state which rendered [such] measures . . . absolutely necessary’. The ‘march of the radicals onwards to their purpose’ was plainest, Rae continued, in Glasgow, Paisley and other urban locations. ‘[But] even the Highlands . . . had not been exempted from the infection. Taking advantage of the discontent arising from the system . . . of converting farms into sheep-walks, turbulent persons were now endeavouring to excite disaffection in the minds of the brave, gallant and loyal Highlanders, and to promote an unnatural union between them and the miserable radical reformers.’55

Gratified by the manner in which the lord advocate had thus ‘denounced Dudgeon’s proceedings’, James Loch turned his attention to two more MPs, William Wilberforce and Henry Brougham. The former, though a Tory and thus a supporter of the Liverpool regime, was the independent-minded and justly famed leader of a succession of campaigns against slavery and the slave trade. He was also known to be deeply concerned about the spread, nearer home, of poverty and destitution. It was in this connection that Thomas Dudgeon had written to him about the plight of Sutherland’s evicted families. Wilberforce, according to Dudgeon, had ‘taken a kind interest’ in the contents of this letter, to which the MP had replied, the Trans-Atlantic Association’s president added, ‘in the most cheering and friendly terms’. But Wilberforce, his anti-slavery stance notwithstanding, was profoundly conservative by instinct. Lobbied over a Westminster breakfast by Loch and George MacPherson Grant, a man forever anxious to do his bit for his Stafford patrons, Wilberforce – in the course of what Loch called ‘a most satisfactory interview’ – was easily persuaded to break off all contact with people whom Loch and MacPherson Grant doubtless described as dangerous extremists.⁵⁶

Much the same pitch was made by Loch to Henry Brougham. Then beginning to attract attention as one of the ‘coming men’ among Whig opponents of Liverpool’s Tory ministry, Brougham was a vociferous critic of repression in all its forms. Hence Loch’s anxiety when the MP requested a meeting in order to discuss, in Brougham’s words, ‘your Northern Rebellion of which I am in the way of hearing frequent mention’. Brougham’s semi-humorous tone reflected the fact that he and Loch had known each other since both had studied law at Edinburgh University. Well aware, however, that he could not rely on their friendship to prevent Brougham from making capital from Highland unrest, Loch promptly set about discrediting everything said or published in the name of the Trans-Atlantic Association. Sutherland ‘never was so quiet, so happy or so wealthy’; the association’s accounts of the previous May’s removals were ‘devoid of even [a] vestige of truth’; the organisation was run by ‘persons unconnected with and resident out of’ Sutherland; ‘nine-tenths’ of the people who had signed its petition to parliament ‘did not understand English’; those people’s ‘ignorance’ made them ‘credulous’.57

Following a convivial dinner with the Stafford commissioner, Brougham was reassuring. ‘My doubts are removed,’ he told Loch. ‘I hope an opportunity may occur of [my] vindicating your measures either in parliament or elsewhere . . . You know I would not even for your sake do any such thing if I had my doubts, but I really think Lord and Lady Stafford have been ill-treated.’⁵⁸

With Brougham, Wilberforce and Rae on side, Loch felt it safe to assault the Trans-Atlantic Association more directly. He was aided, as 1819 drew to a close, by parliament’s adoption of the Seditious Meetings Act – latest of the several pieces of legislation Liverpool’s home secretary, Lord Sidmouth, had drafted with a view to curtailing public protest. Nothing if not draconian in scope, the Act laid down that ‘no meeting of any description of persons exceeding the number of fifty . . . shall be holden for the purpose of deliberating upon any public grievance or upon . . . [any]thing relating . . . to any matter in church or state’. Penalties for non-compliance with those rulings were severe. In the case of gatherings held with a view to ‘considering, proposing or agreeing to any petition, complaint . . . or address’, sheriffs and Justices of the Peace were empowered to order participants in such gatherings to disperse – anyone failing to do so being liable to transportation to Botany Bay. In those provisions, Loch realised, were the means of bringing Thomas Dudgeon’s activities to a halt.⁵⁹

Dudgeon, as it happened, had made arrangements for a further Trans-Atlantic Association meeting on Tuesday 4 January 1820. Significantly, this was to take place not at Meikle Ferry as before but at Golspie where the Sutherland Estate’s headquarters were located and where, seven years before, the Kildonan rebels had forced Francis Suther’s predecessors to take refuge in Dunrobin Castle. Perhaps fearing that Dudgeon – though insistent in public on his ‘firm attachment’ to the law – aimed to stage a repetition of that episode, James Loch decided that, under the terms of the Seditious Meetings Act, the Golspie assembly should be declared illegal.⁶⁰

This was procedurally dubious in that, as Thomas Dudgeon would have known, the Act did not actually take effect in Scotland until the day following the meeting Loch wanted banned. In correspondence with Loch, however, William MacKenzie, in his capacity as the Stafford family’s principal adviser on Scots law, reckoned that it would be legitimate, even in advance of the new legislation coming into force, for Sutherland’s sheriff-substitute and JPs to sign ‘a notice’ that, on Sunday 2 January, would be ‘affix[ed] . . . on the doors’ of Sutherland’s parish churches, this notice to advise non-attendance at Golspie on the ensuing Tuesday. ‘[I]t will be proper’, MacKenzie went on, ‘that the magistrates who sign [the] notice should attend [at Golspie] . . . so as to be ready to disperse [any meeting] in case of tumult [or in case of] seditious language being used.’61

So it was arranged. On New Year’s Day 1820, Robert Nimmo, who had not long before replaced John Law as Sutherland’s sheriff-substitute, met with no fewer than 14 JPs – Francis Suther prominent among them – to agree the wording of the ‘notice’ MacKenzie had suggested. New Year’s Day having fallen that year on a Saturday, copies of the resulting document were then rushed to as many Sutherland clergymen as could be reached in under 24 hours. As always, they fell into line. Even Kildonan’s Alexander Sage, the minister Suther thought least likely to co-operate, was happy on this occasion to do the factor’s bidding. That perhaps owed something to the fact that Jane Sage, one of Alexander’s daughters, had married Tarbat’s minister, William Forbes, from whom Sage is likely to have heard all about Thomas Dudgeon’s earlier clashes with the church. Sage, at all events, shared with Suther the opinion that the Trans-Atlantic Association’s president was a ‘radical demagogue’ who ought to be prevented from getting any kind of hearing.⁶²

The notice circulated by Nimmo and his colleagues – its substance conveyed in Gaelic to their congregations by Alexander Sage and other ministers – was more uncompromising than William MacKenzie had advised. Dudgeon and other leading members of the Trans-Atlantic Association, it asserted, were ‘men of doubtful principles’ whose Golspie meeting was ‘illegal’. ‘We therefore consider it our duty as magistrates of this county’, Sutherland’s JPs and sheriff-substitute made known, ‘to warn the loyal and peaceable inhabitants of this jurisdiction of the impropriety of their being participatious [sic] in such a meeting.’⁶³

Nimmo, Suther and their colleagues were aided in their efforts by the weather. Because ‘the county [was] so covered in snow’, Suther reported to Loch on 2 January, travel was everywhere difficult: ‘It has snowed daily for the last ten days. The mails are carried on horseback. All [mail and other] coaches are [stuck] fast in different parts of the road between Inverness and Wick’. In conditions such as those, Suther thought, it was unlikely that big numbers of people, even if inclined to disregard the warnings passed on to them by their ministers, would be able to get to Golspie on 4 January.⁶⁴

The factor was in no mood to take chances, however. Robert Nimmo, who had been summoned to Suther’s home at Rhives on Golspie’s outskirts on 1 January, stayed with Suther into the next week. At Golspie, on the morning of the day members of the Trans-Atlantic Association were due to gather there, the two men presided over a further ‘general meeting’ of JPs, one of whom, Patrick Sellar, would have well remembered how, in February 1813, men from Kildonan had both taken over the village and defied all attempts to remove them. With a view to ensuring that, this time, the Sutherland Estate retained control of the situation, Sellar, Suther and their fellow JPs mobilised such constables as could readily reach Golspie and, in addition, swore in another 12 men – most of them estate employees – as temporary additions to this force. Those members of the Trans-Atlantic Association who made it as far as Golspie’s cold and snowy main street consequently found themselves monitored closely by more than 20 regular and ‘special’ constables, all of them under orders ‘to perambulate the village’ and to report to their superiors when or if ‘any assemblage of people [took] place’.65

Steps were also taken to warn Thomas Dudgeon, who had left his Mains of Fearn farm on Monday 3 January and spent the following night in Dornoch, that should he press on north to Golspie, he would face arrest. This was plausible. The Seditious Meetings Act made it illegal for a resident of one county (Ross-shire in Dudgeon’s case) to attend a meeting (like the one planned for Golspie) in another; and Suther, Nimmo and their colleagues, it was clear, were intent on doing on Tuesday what the Act would anyway entitle them to do on Wednesday. Dudgeon, therefore, went home to Fearn. In Golspie meanwhile, those of his followers – at least 100 and possibly more – brave enough to put in an appearance were threatened in much the same way as Dudgeon had already been. In the name of their ‘sovereign lord the king’, runs the pre-prepared text from which a constable now read aloud, everyone present was ‘charge[d] and commande[d] . . . to depart’. What reply, if any, was made to this proclamation by the constable’s hearers is not known. What is clear is that, marshalled by two pipers and marching in military formation, they shortly afterwards withdrew from Golspie as instructed.⁶⁶

A delighted James Loch, on being informed of what had transpired, now arranged for Thomas Dudgeon to be subjected to one of the character-blackening onslaughts Loch invariably mounted against the Sutherland Estate’s enemies. Loch’s chosen vehicle was the Inverness Courier. This was a pro-establishment weekly – ‘the organ of the oppressors of Sutherlandshire’ according Strathnaver stonemason Donald MacLeod – that had not long before been set up in opposition to Lachlan Mackintosh’s Inverness Journal. Through a ‘person acquainted with the [Courier’s] editor’, Francis Suther informed a warmly approving Loch, he had ‘furnish[ed]’ the paper with what the factor called ‘some facts’ about Dudgeon. The result, towards the end of January, was the publication in the Courier of articles in which Thomas Dudgeon was accused of having turned the Trans-Atlantic Association into ‘an engine of physical force’ which might ‘have done infinite mischief’ if its adherents – ‘inflamed by potations of whisky and the harangues of a radical reformer’ – had been permitted free rein in Golspie. Nor were Dudgeon’s professions of concern for Sutherland, it was implied, in any way sincere. Dudgeon was ‘an East Lothian farmer whose only pretence of connexion with Sutherland [was] . . . residence in the neighbouring county of Ross’. He had set out, deliberately and with malice, ‘to estrange the affections’ of Sutherland’s population from the Marquis of Stafford, ‘a princely landlord’ and ‘a generous and noble-minded man’. He had done so, moreover, from wholly self-interested motives, Dudgeon’s ‘twopenny association’ having been, from the outset, no more than a means of enriching its ‘self-elected’ president who, the Courier insinuated, had ‘jobbed’ or embezzled association funds.67

What Thomas Dudgeon called ‘groundless charges’ were initially treated by him, he wrote, ‘with the contempt they merit[ed]’. Later he gave ground to the extent of publishing a set of Trans-Atlantic Association accounts intended to show that no part of the association’s subscription income – amounting to just under £60 – had found its way into his pockets. By that point, however, it was clear to Dudgeon – who eventually emigrated with his family to the USA – that, in the circumstances created by the Seditious Meetings Act and associated legislation, there was no chance of the Trans-Atlantic Association recovering from its Golspie defeat. Not for another 60 years or more would any similar attempt be made to provide Highlanders with a subscription-based organisation capable of standing up to their landlords. Then the Highland Land League – sustained by thousands of members and operating in a less hostile political climate than the one confronting Thomas Dudgeon and his allies – would succeed in winning the legal and other protections that made further clearance impossible. But for the moment, with the Trans-Atlantic Association broken, James Loch, Francis Suther and their Stafford employers were free to proceed with a new round of clearances. This they did.⁶⁸

* In the published version of Sage’s account of the Langdale service, Achoul is said to have lived through ‘eighty-seven winters’. But this is at odds both with Sage’s comment, a few pages earlier, that Achoul had been 18 at the time of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745–46 and with a newspaper obituary that gives Achoul’s age, at the time of his death in 1822, as 99.

* What happened to Jean Purves and her child is not known.

* Present-day Kolkata.