‘Law is one thing and humanity may be another’
Clearances resisted; English consequences of events in Sutherland
The elation experienced by Sutherland Estate managers in the wake of their Golspie victory over Thomas Dudgeon and his Trans-Atlantic Association was short-lived. Although the Seditious Meetings Act now made it possible both to bar Dudgeon from Sutherland and to prohibit further gatherings of the Golspie and Meikle Ferry sort, James Loch, Francis Suther and their colleagues remained anxious about the emergence of organised opposition to the new round of clearances scheduled for May 1820. Prior to the Golspie gathering of 4 January, Dudgeon’s ‘emissaries’ (mostly ex-soldiers) had organised a series of ‘kirk door meetings’ where ‘all the inhabitants of a parish [were] assembled’ with the objective, it was reported, ‘of considering the [best] way of resisting the [May] arrangements’ – arrangements that would involve the removal of a further 200 or more families from the Sutherland interior. It was with a view to countering this activity that Suther, with Loch’s strong encouragement, set up an intelligence network consisting of people who, in return for unspecified favours, were prepared to inform on any neighbours planning to defy eviction orders. ‘You should keep up some communication in the glens,’ Loch instructed the factor. ‘Take care’, he added, ‘you trust the people you confer with.’1
Reliable informants were soon in place. ‘I have my spies in all the parishes’, Suther told Loch in mid-January. Among them (as recounted earlier) was Strathbrora’s SSPCK schoolmaster, Gordon Ross. His reports are likely to have been especially valued by Suther. As in 1819, Strathbrora was reckoned the most likely focus of resistance to clearances. Ross, moreover, lived in the same Strathbrora township – Ascoilemore – as the former fur trader, Donald MacKay, whom Suther thought a leading advocate of such resistance.2
Francis Suther’s worries about the likelihood of serious trouble in places like Strathbrora were intensified, in February and March, by anti-clearance protests at Culrain. This was a Ross-shire locality some 15 miles north-west of Tain and separated from Sutherland only by the narrow, but tidal, waters of the Kyle of Sutherland, a westward extension of the Dornoch Firth. Its owner, Hugh Munro of Novar, customarily resident in London, had not long before taken full charge of properties – most of them further south – he had inherited when a child. On his deciding to let Culrain as a sheep farm and on the successful bidder being guaranteed vacant possession, it had become necessary to eject some 60 tenants, a number of them people who, prior to Hugh Munro reaching adulthood, had been permitted to set up home in Culrain in the wake of their being ordered out of their previous landholdings on the Sutherland Estate.3
The necessary removal notices were readily obtained from Tain Sheriff Court. Serving those notices on Culrain householders proved harder. In an echo of earlier exchanges in the Strath of Kildonan, Culrain residents reportedly informed Munro of Novar’s agents that ‘they would rather die’ than move elsewhere; one of those agents, a Tain lawyer named John MacKenzie, noted that, during the opening weeks of 1820, he had ‘heard from several quarters that [Culrain’s] deluded people were resolved on offering the most determined resistance to the execution of the removings’. The Tain-based sheriff-officers whose job it would be to deliver eviction notices in Culrain had received messages, MacKenzie added, ‘threatening to deprive them of their lives’ if they so much as approached the community.4
On Monday 31 January, one of those sheriff-officers, James Stewart, was instructed ‘to serve the different tenants and occupiers’ in Culrain ‘with citations of removal’. Because Stewart, as he said, ‘[had] some suspicion that [he] might meet with opposition’, he took three men with him for protection. One was Andrew Ross, a constable in Tain; the others were William Munro and Andrew Tallach from the nearby township of Morangie.5
Stewart spent Monday night in the inn at Ardgay, about three miles short of Culrain. Tallach, Munro and Ross, however, pressed on to Culrain itself. Although the sheriff-officer was later to swear that ‘he had given the most positive instructions to the three men . . . not to let any person know or understand what their objective was’, this had predictable results. Munro and Tallach, who bedded down in a Culrain dramshop, may have kept quiet. Ross certainly did not. His sister, who was married to one of Culrain’s tenants, lived locally, and the constable, naturally enough, spent the night in her home. On getting there, equally naturally, he was quizzed by his sister and brother-in-law, a man by the name of Urquhart, as to what had brought him and his companions from Tain. ‘I suppose’, Ross reported his interrogators as saying, ‘these are the people [meaning Tallach and Munro] that are come with the summonses for the tenants.’ In response, as the constable was afterward to admit, ‘[he] acknowledged that they were’. Not content with this, Ross also explained – maybe by way of distancing himself from a job he is unlikely to have welcomed – that James Stewart would shortly be arriving to take charge of operations.6
Stewart, unaware that word of his mission was now spreading through Culrain, left Ardgay early on Tuesday 1 February, stopping off briefly at Invercarron, one of the communities he passed through, to recruit a further assistant. This was John MacDonald, ‘a man’, Stewart said, ‘who was acquainted [with Culrain] and knew the houses of the different individuals [there]’. Reaching the Culrain dramshop where he expected to find his other three aides, Stewart, to his fury, discovered only Tallach and Munro. Hearing from them that Ross had slept elsewhere, the sheriff-officer sent MacDonald to fetch him. At the Urquhart home, however, MacDonald found no trace of the missing constable. Instead he was told by Ross’s brother-in-law to give a message to Stewart. This was to the effect that the sheriff-officer, who ‘might go to the devil’ for all Urquhart cared, would ‘get a broken head’ before the day was done. Hurrying back to the dramshop, MacDonald did as instructed. According to James Stewart’s subsequent testimony, MacDonald also ‘told him [Stewart] he would not follow him any further as he saw the business was attended with danger . . . [because] women were collecting from all quarters’. At this, a now alarmed Stewart asked MacDonald to search further for Constable Ross. ‘He positively refused’, Stewart said of the Invercarron man, ‘and ran away back to his home.’7
Leaving Munro and Tallach (who had still been asleep when the sheriff-officer arrived) to struggle into their clothes, James Stewart stepped out of the Culrain dramshop to find himself ‘surrounded by a party of furious women to the amount he supposed of 150’. They ‘immediately laid hold of him’, Stewart said, ‘and commanded him to deliver up his papers’. He refused. But ‘they rifled his pockets and took every paper he had’ – papers amounting, in all, to 57 notices of removal.8
From the sheriff-officer’s perspective, matters now deteriorated rapidly. While he was kept under close guard by some of his assailants, Tallach and Munro, who had at last appeared, were ‘laid hold of . . . and forcibly detained’ by others. The women holding him and his colleagues, James Stewart said, ‘were armed with sticks or batons’; they had ‘handkerchiefs’ tied tightly across their faces by way of disguise; and, all the while, ‘they made use of the most threatening expressions’. He was convinced, Stewart insisted, that his captors ‘would not [have] hesitate[d] to take [the] lives’ of their prisoners. They certainly ‘spoke of throwing [him] . . . into the [Kyle of Sutherland]’.9
William Munro, Stewart said, had at one point ‘punched one of the women . . . who fell on her back’. She and her friends responded by urging each other to ‘knock the brains out of him’. This was not done, however. Instead Munro was permitted ‘to [run] away as fast as he could’, while being pelted, as he ran, with stones.10
His ‘papers’, Stewart explained, had meanwhile been carried off by one or two women who told him, as they left, that ‘they had as good scholars as he was to read them for them’. The seized documents, the sheriff-officer suspected, had been shown to men ‘concealed’ nearby. On its being confirmed (whether or not by Culrain’s menfolk) that every removal summons had been checked and destroyed, Stewart said, he and Andrew Tallach, ‘followed by the whole mob of women’, were jostled, pushed and driven out of Culrain ‘in a kind of mock triumph’. It was only then, Stewart added, that he at last fell in with the absent Ross. The constable, for his part, was to maintain that he had left his sister’s home early that morning and headed for Ardgay with the aim of meeting with James Stewart and warning him of what was likely to happen when the sheriff-officer reached his destination. But he had somehow, according to Ross’s own – and not very convincing – account, missed Stewart on the road.11
Was it the case, as asserted afterwards, that some of the ‘women’ involved in the events of 1 February were actually ‘men in women’s dress’? Almost certainly not. This claim was made only by Alexander Ross, who had seen little of what occurred in Culrain that Tuesday morning, and not by either James Stewart or William Munro, who had seen a great deal. Munro and Stewart, in fact, took care to distance themselves from all such allegations, which perhaps originated in Ross wanting to deflect mocking taunts (of a kind bound to have come his way) about his having fled Culrain rather than risk a confrontation with its womenfolk.12
Be that as it may, Culrain’s wives and daughters, not its husbands and sons, were clearly at the forefront of the onslaught launched against Munro, Tallach and Stewart. To Francis Suther, the explanation was straightforward. Women played a major part in episodes of the Culrain sort, Suther told James Loch, because it was ‘generally believed’ in the Highlands ‘that a woman could do anything with impunity’. The reason for women’s leading role in the destruction of the Culrain removal notices, in other words, was entirely tactical – females being thought less likely than males to face arrest and imprisonment on charges arising from violent clashes with authority. This notion (as will be seen) may have had some foundation in fact. But irrespective of whether or not this was the case, the fact that Culrain’s males took little or nothing to do with the attack on James Stewart and his colleagues is not evidence, in itself, of that attack having somehow lacked their backing.13
Days or weeks in advance of the Culrain fracas of 1 February, the likelihood of some such confrontation had been widely rumoured in Easter Ross. This is a pointer to the seizure of the Culrain removal orders having been planned – by virtually the entire Culrain community – over a period. So is the well co-ordinated nature of what transpired on the day. Women might have been in the front line. But much of the rest of Culrain’s population was clearly involved. ‘[H]ard by’ the spot where he was held captive, James Stewart reportedly ‘observed what he conceived to be a large body of men stationed in a wood’. On the Sutherland side of the nearby Kyle, moreover, ‘a considerable stir of people’ could be seen – those people, it was thought, readying themselves to cross the intervening stretch of water should it have proved necessary to provide Culrain with reinforcements.14
On news of his tenantry’s actions reaching him in London where (in the manner of the Marquis of Stafford) he was to become a much-praised patron of the arts, Hugh Munro of Novar pronounced himself ‘sorry to hear that the Culrain people [had] been behaving in such an Ultra-Radical fashion’. Although Culrain’s Church of Scotland minister was afterwards to insist that ‘no such principles as those of radicalism are known here’, this was to detect – as was done widely – the hand of Thomas Dudgeon in what had occurred. ‘The rebellion is everywhere imputed to Dudgeon,’ Suther informed Loch. An anonymous contributor to the Inverness Courier was more specific. Shortly after the dispersal of January’s ‘radical convention at Golspie’, this writer alleged, Dudgeon ‘had been busy’ at Culrain where, as in Sutherland, he had taken advantage of, and misled, a ‘simple and credulous’ community. Those remarks, however, have to be set in the context of the stream of anti-Dudgeon material now finding its way into the Courier. Tain lawyer John MacKenzie is likely to have been nearer the mark when he commented that the Culrain people had taken the initiative in ‘apply[ing] to Mr Dudgeon for his countenance and direction’. This was in accord with what James Stewart heard in Culrain itself. It was in accord too with Thomas Dudgeon’s own account of what had occurred. Culrain tenants, Dudgeon acknowledged, had consulted him. He had advised them on how to respond to eviction threats. But he had urged them always – and indeed to have done otherwise would have been foolhardy – to keep within the law.15
This the Culrain people had self-evidently not done. On 1 February they had attacked, or deforced, a sheriff-officer. All such deforcements (as indicated previously) were regarded as a serious offence. They were certainly so regarded by Ross-shire’s veteran sheriff, Donald MacLeod, an Easter Ross laird who had held the post since 1774 and who, in 1792, had played a leading role in the military-backed suppression of an earlier spate of protests against the advance of sheep farming into the Highlands. This time round, however, MacLeod began by favouring a more conciliatory approach. In correspondence with Munro of Novar’s representatives, who wanted the army brought in as soon as feasible, the sheriff underlined his reluctance ‘to proceed to the extremity of applying for . . . military [aid] until’, as he put it, ‘I am satisfied in my own mind that the measures proposed [meaning the clearance of Culrain] cannot be carried into execution by milder means’. MacLeod accordingly sent ‘a private message’ to men he regarded as Culrain’s ‘most respectable tenants’, individuals whom the sheriff offered to meet in the hope of persuading them to desist from further direct action. This initiative having got nowhere, the sheriff, still intent on avoiding renewed conflict, appears to have asked Thomas Dudgeon to mediate between himself and the Culrain people, something Sutherland Estate managers, who had good cause to be wary of Dudgeon, thought ‘very foolish’.16
Donald MacLeod, an uncle (as noted previously) of Joseph Gordon, might conceivably have been encouraged to contact Dudgeon by the anti-Stafford nexus to which both the Fearn farmer and Carrol’s ex-owner belonged. In the event, however, Dudgeon’s mediation efforts – if such they were – suffered much the same fate as the sheriff’s own overtures. And when, in mid-February, James Stewart was sent back to Culrain to tell people involved in the earlier disturbances that they were required to present themselves for interview at Tain Sheriff Court, he was ‘fully worse treated’, it was reported, than he had been a fortnight previously. He had again been hustled off the estate, Stewart told Sheriff MacLeod, ‘by a mob of women . . . [who] repeatedly declared that they defied all the lawyers and constables in the County of Ross to remove them’. Concluding, in the light of this development, that there was no longer any hope of his engineering a peaceful settlement of the Culrain dispute, MacLeod now applied to the lord advocate, William Rae, ‘for some troops to assist the civil power to execute the law’.17
No such troops were forthcoming, Rae, according to one of Munro of Novar’s agents, taking the line that Ross-shire already possessed enough resources to deal with disturbances the lord advocate apparently characterised as ‘the howling of a parcel of old women’. If that was the sole reason for Rae’s refusal to comply with Donald MacLeod’s request for military assistance, then the lord advocate was giving substance to the contention that lawbreaking women always got away with more than lawbreaking men. There are likely, however, to have been additional considerations behind Rae’s decision. In the political climate created by the Peterloo killings and their aftermath, the last thing the lord advocate would have wanted was to take responsibility for deploying the army against a new set of demonstrators. Hence Rae’s instruction to Donald MacLeod that the sheriff deal himself with the Culrain problem.18
The letter containing this directive reached MacLeod on Sunday 27 February. Setting off to Tain from his home at Geanies, some miles to the east, the sheriff promptly set about raising sufficient manpower – as he thought – to do as Rae had ordered. In the absence of the regular troops he had requested, MacLeod turned for help, as the lord advocate had suggested he should, to the Ross-shire militia. But perhaps fearing that its rank and file might be more in sympathy with the Culrain community than with Hugh Munro of Novar, MacLeod mobilised only officers, sergeants and corporals – about 30 men in all. A further six soldiers and an officer – members of a recruiting party that happened to be visiting Tain – were also pressed into service. Tain’s four sheriff-officers were joined by ten more sheriff-officers from Dingwall, Ross-shire’s county town. Fifty ‘stout young men’ were sworn in as special constables; and to the resulting force, already over 100 strong, Donald MacLeod added finally ‘about twenty gentlemen’. Drawn from local landowning families, they were described by the sheriff as ‘hearty in support of the king’s authority’ and thus eager to contribute to the crushing of Culrain’s rebellion.19
Militiamen, soldiers, sheriff-officers and constables – all of them on foot – set off from Tain for Culrain at about five o’clock on the morning of Thursday 2 March. MacLeod and his ‘gentlemen’ colleagues, who travelled on horseback or by carriage, left about two hours later. Their route lay along the southern shore of the Dornoch Firth, by way of Edderton, to Ardgay. Here the entire party halted for breakfast. At its conclusion, and prior to proceeding any further, MacLeod, by his own account, ‘drew up the constables and other unarmed men into four divisions and gave the command of each division to a gentleman on whose discretion and courage [he] had a perfect reliance’. Those four groupings were placed in the vanguard. The militia detachment, each of its members equipped with musket and bayonet, were kept to the rear but ordered ‘to be ready to come up when called on’.20
Since the Culrain rebels were known to have so-called ‘scouts’ in Tain, and since those scouts were bound to have kept Culrain people abreast of Donald MacLeod’s preparations, the sheriff would not have expected to take the place by surprise. By arriving in such strength, however, he may have hoped to convince the Culrain community of the futility of further resistance. If so, MacLeod was disappointed. On approaching Culrain, the sheriff wrote later, ‘we perceived a very considerable mob of women, with some young lads and boys amongst them, coming running . . . towards [us] . . . I immediately came out of my carriage . . . and, having called up the unarmed men, advanced with them . . . The mob took a position behind a stone dike . . . and, with the most horrible screams and yells, assailed us with showers of stones.’
This pitched battle – as it soon became – took place at a spot where a hill burn, flowing out of the high ground to the south, enters the Kyle of Sutherland. Culrain’s homes were less than a mile distant. But if Donald MacLeod and his men were to get there, they were first going to have to force a passage through the women confronting them. This proved impossible.
To the sheriff’s right, between the road and the Kyle, was a marsh. To his left, on the other hand, the ground rose, immediately behind the burn, in a steep, escarpment-like bank some 50 feet high. From the top of this bank – where it is still possible to find handily-sized stones of the sort the sheriff described – Culrain’s defenders could easily rain missiles down on their attackers. The position, then, could scarcely have been better chosen by the women now blocking MacLeod’s further progress.
This, from the sheriff’s perspective, was bad enough. Still more alarming was the presence, ‘a few hundred yards’ behind the stone-throwing women and youths, of ‘a second line’ of people, who might at any point choose to reinforce MacLeod’s nearer-hand opponents. This reserve group, according to the sheriff, was ‘composed altogether of men . . . many (if not the whole) of them armed with muskets’. Those weapons, MacLeod explained afterwards to the lord advocate, had been obtained ‘from a ship wrecked some time [previously] on [Ross-shire’s] west coast’. At Culrain, or so the press was to contend, the guns in question were being wielded by ‘discharged military’ – ex-soldiers who, in the course of Britain’s long war with Napoleon, would have had plenty of opportunities to become familiar with the use of firearms.21
No doubt aware that to fire on the sheriff and his party would have been to invite all manner of subsequent reprisals, Culrain’s ex-soldiers – men who were to show, throughout what followed, much greater discipline than the sheriff’s motley force – neither loosed off any shots nor moved from where they stood. Their militia adversaries, in contrast, attempted to force both the burn and its adjacent escarpment at a spot well to the right of most of the 200 or so women facing them. This action – undertaken, Donald MacLeod stressed, ‘without any order from me’ – was intended to lead to ‘the mob’ behind the dyke being outflanked. Instead it exposed the militiamen, several of whom were knocked down by well-aimed stones, to renewed attack. This, in turn, led to a number of militiamen – in direct contravention of MacLeod’s instructions that they keep their muskets unloaded – firing on the crowd. ‘One woman was shot, it is supposed mortally,’ Francis Suther wrote three days later when briefing James Loch on those events. ‘Another was badly wounded in the mouth and eye by a bayonet.’22
Press claims to the same effect were disputed by Donald MacLeod. Only ‘two or three shots were fired’, he maintained. The militiamen responsible had loaded their muskets, moreover, with buckshot rather than with the heavy and more lethal bullets usually employed. Only ‘a young man and a girl’ had sustained gunshot wounds. As for such bayonet wounds as had been inflicted, the blame for those belonged entirely to the women who had suffered them: ‘They were . . . so infuriated that many of them ran [at] the soldiers [meaning members of the militia] and met with [injuries] inflicted by their own madness’.23
Those words were penned more than a week later. On the day itself, the sheriff was preoccupied with survival and escape: ‘I was well protected in the retreat by the constables covering me . . . and by that means got into my carriage with little injury . . . [But] many stones were thrown at my coachman . . . and even at my horses; one panel [on the carriage’s side] was broken, and the back window drove in . . . On reaching back to the inn at Ardgay [to which MacLeod’s entire force now withdrew], we found that [our] casualties amounted to thirteen; five of the militia were much hurt . . . and eight of the constables’.24
At Ardgay, in consultation with the now badly rattled ‘gentlemen’ accompanying him, Donald MacLeod prepared an emergency despatch for the lord advocate. ‘I am certain that lives must be lost before these . . . people are removed,’ the sheriff informed William Rae. What had taken place that morning at Culrain was nothing less than ‘an act of rebellion against the law and the government’. The sternest measures must immediately be taken against everyone involved. ‘[A] force of 500 regulars with two or three field pieces [meaning artillery] will be necessary to reduce them’.25
The 2 March clash at Culrain was of concern to James Loch not least because, much to the Stafford commissioner’s irritation, it had the immediate effect of renewing English press interest in clearances and their consequences. Commenting on Munro of Novar’s treatment of Culrain’s inhabitants, the Morning Chronicle, for instance, was scathing: ‘There can be no doubt that by the law of this country . . . Mr Munro is entitled, if his tenants have no [legally enforceable] claim to his land, to turn out whatever number of them he pleases . . . But law is one thing and humanity may be another . . . [W]e would ask how the turning out of a number of individuals from their possessions, and it appears to starve, can be possibly reconciled to humanity?’ With the next set of evictions in the Sutherland straths less than two months away, this was not the sort of question either Loch or the Staffords wanted posed. Still more unwelcome was the link the Chronicle made between Highland dispossessions and what its leader-writer called ‘recent occurrences in Staffordshire’. Those occurrences, in the paper’s view, showed that a ‘penalty for Highland management may be demanded . . . in England’.26
This was a reference to the startling outcome in Staffordshire of the general election then going on across the United Kingdom. The favoured candidate for the Staffordshire county constituency, at the contest’s commencement, was Earl Gower, the Marquis of Stafford’s eldest son. His family had represented Staffordshire continuously in parliament since the early eighteenth century. He himself had been one of the county’s MPs since 1815. Towards the end of a noisy and sometimes rowdy campaign, however, Gower – not a man with stomach for a fight – had withdrawn suddenly from the poll and, by so doing, conceded what had been his seat to his challenger, Sir John Boughey.
All sorts of local factors were of course at play in Staffordshire, not least Boughey’s much appreciated role in exposing the price-fixing arrangements that had long enabled the Staffords to inflate profits from their coalmines. But the previous May’s clearances in Sutherland also played a part. ‘Remember when the cries of the houseless orphans resounded from the bleak hills of Brora to the rocky shores of the Orkneys,’ one circular advised Staffordshire’s electors. While that production’s anonymous authors may have been hazy as to the details of Highland geography, their sentiments were clear. So were those of an audience addressed by the earl just days before his abandonment of his parliamentary ambitions. He hoped to have their votes, a Times reporter heard Gower tell his listeners. ‘You cannot have ’em!’ someone yelled, going on, with others, to shout, ‘Fire! Scotland!’ This, James Loch noted, had become Staffordshire’s standard response to Gower’s electoral efforts. Wherever the earl appeared, Loch wrote, ‘the people cried “Fire!”’. ‘[A] vast and serious outcry was raised on the subject’, Loch told Francis Suther.27
Loch was as contemptuous of the generality of Staffordshire’s inhabitants as he was of Highlanders. Staffordshire folk, he informed his good friend Henry Brougham, were ‘of the most dissolute habits, idle and improvident’. This disdain for people living on the Marquis of Stafford’s Midland estates perhaps contributed to Loch’s failure to foresee that those same people might take an interest in, and feel some sense of solidarity with, the marquis’s Highland tenants. But if he was surprised by the manner in which English voters could be influenced by reports of evictions and burnings in faraway Sutherland, Loch was equally taken aback by the nature of the political response in Scotland to what he called ‘the late riot in Ross-shire’.28
From Edinburgh it was made brutally apparent to Sheriff Donald MacLeod that William Rae would not be providing either the 500 troops or the three field guns MacLeod had requested. Nor was the lord advocate, a politician as capable as any other of drawing lessons from Gower’s fate in Staffordshire, at all agreeable to prosecuting anyone in connection with what had transpired at Culrain. In fact Rae, as Loch was soon to learn, wished nothing more than to have the entire Culrain episode settled as quietly and uncontentiously as possible. ‘I learned last night’, a horrified Loch wrote to Suther on 1 April, ‘that the lord advocate has written to Mr Munro begging of him to let the Culrain people remain’. ‘You will admit with me’, Loch commented when informing Sutherland’s sheriff, Charles Ross, of the same development, ‘that it puts every Highland proprietor in a very awkward situation.’ After all, if Rae wanted Culrain’s clearance put on hold, why should he not take a similar stance with regard to the more extensive removals planned for Sutherland? To delay the final emptying of the Sutherland straths, Loch raged, would be to ‘throw away the labour of years’.29
Munro of Novar, however, was prepared to consider compromise of a kind that would never have been so much as contemplated on the Sutherland Estate. In this he was helped by the fact that, less than a week after Culrain’s women had put Donald MacLeod to flight, several of that locality’s ‘heads of families’, as they described themselves, sent a letter to Munro of Novar’s Tain agent. This letter suggested that its signatories and others meet with a sheriff-officer at Ardgay Inn. That meeting took place on Tuesday 14 March. In the course of it, and in the days immediately following, all Culrain’s tenants agreed to take delivery of removal notices. This, Sheriff MacLeod claimed, was a consequence of his having urged military intervention, the prospect of such intervention having ‘terrif[ied] the [Culrain] people into a sense of the very improper conduct they had hitherto pursued’. Alexander MacBean, Culrain’s Church of Scotland minister, begged to differ. MacBean deplored clearances – a ‘system of extermination’, he called them. Like his clerical colleagues in Sutherland, however, he was unyielding on its being everyone’s Christian duty to submit to the will of their landlords. On his having made their obligations clear to them, the minister insisted, Culrain’s people had been ‘prevailed upon . . . to receive their summonses’.30
While minister and sheriff quarrelled openly – in the columns of the Highland and national press – as to who could most convincingly claim credit for restoring peace to Culrain, the township’s occupants were negotiating with Munro of Novar’s representatives. The outcome was very much the sort of deal the lord advocate had called for. The sheep farmer due to take possession of Culrain in May would do so. But this would be on the basis that – in return, presumably, for an appropriate rent reduction – he would permit Culrain’s established occupiers to remain where they were. This arrangement was not one that endured indefinitely. But the Culrain uprising – which resulted (perhaps because of this also being integral to the dispute’s settlement) in not one prosecution – was nevertheless a victory of sorts.31
Strathbrora’s equivalent of Alexander MacBean was Walter Ross, Clyne’s parish minister and one of the two men who had sat with Patrick Sellar in the High Court’s ‘panel box’ in 1816. Ross, being in no way critical of clearance, was even more insistent than Culrain’s minister on the iniquity of refusing to do a landlord’s bidding. Hence the minister’s displeasure on learning how his parishioners had treated Francis Suther when, on a Thursday in mid-February, just as the Culrain troubles were at their height, the factor had arranged – as he thought – to meet with a group of Strathbrora tenants at one of the coastal locations where they were to be resettled. ‘[U]nder a heavy rain,’ Suther reported to James Loch, he had waited there for several hours in the hope of being able ‘to point out . . . their lots [or crofts]’ to the tenants in question. But ‘not a soul made their appearance’. He had notified Walter Ross of the missing men’s names, Suther went on, and the minister had ‘promised to reprimand them all’ from his pulpit the following Sunday.32
Having the clergy onside with ‘improvement’ in this manner may have eased Loch’s nervousness about the possibility of the Culrain outbreak sparking similar defiance elsewhere. But Loch, as he told Suther in March, remained ‘very anxious in every way’ about Culrain-type unrest breaking out on the Sutherland Estate. ‘I find the Ross-shire gentlemen here [in London]’, Loch added of his conversations with Easter Ross landlords then overwintering in the south, ‘are . . . saying that the [Culrain] mob was much composed of Sutherland men’. Although ‘women’ rather than ‘men’ would have been a more appropriate term, there would certainly have been Sutherland participation in the Culrain protests, if only because the locality (as already noted) had attracted a number of the Sutherland Estate’s displaced families. Still more disturbing from Loch’s point of view were indications that people still in Sutherland (and perhaps scheduled for eviction in May) had contemplated – or more than contemplated – the possibility of joining Culrain’s fight. On 1 February, when he and William Munro were being kicked (more or less literally) out of Culrain, James Stewart had been told that the Culrain rebels ‘could command’ assistance from ‘the people of five parishes in Sutherland’. A month later, when it was the turn of Sheriff Donald MacLeod and his men to be beaten back from Culrain, the sheriff had seen at least some signs of the truth of that claim. ‘There were . . . observed many men running down the hill on the Sutherland side [of the Kyle of Sutherland],’ the sheriff reported. This, he continued, was ‘with the apparent design of crossing [the Kyle] to assist their neighbours’. That did nothing to ease James Loch’s mounting apprehensions about the outcome of May’s clearances.33
Francis Suther was less concerned. Thanks to Alexander MacBean having taken a hand in the matter, he informed Loch on 19 March, the Culrain people had ‘given up all their wild [and] illegal ideas’. This was having a pacifying effect on Sutherland, the factor believed: ‘I am certain we shall have no trouble . . . I went through all the places [still to be cleared] in Strathbrora on Thursday last to ascertain what effect the knowledge of the resistance in Ross-shire had made in their minds. It gives me pleasure to say that though the people expressed an anxious wish to remain in their present situations, yet when I explained to them [this] was impossible they readily acknowledged they must submit.’34
Ever since Suther had disregarded his orders by permitting the numerous house burnings of the previous spring, however, James Loch had been less convinced than previously that his Sutherland subordinate was wholly reliable. In November 1819, with a view to ensuring that the May 1820 clearances in Sutherland gave no additional ‘cause for clamour’, as he put it, Loch had supplied Suther with 12 closely written pages of instructions as to how exactly those clearances were to be conducted. Renewed ‘burning’, Loch made clear, was ‘perfectly out of the question’. Now, in the wake both of the Culrain episode and of the Stafford family’s humiliation at the hands of an electorate stirred up by endless shouts of ‘Fire!’, Loch – once more fearful that parliamentarians might start enquiring into Sutherland Estate affairs – stressed again the need to have everything go off quietly in May. ‘[I]f it does not’, Loch told Suther in March, ‘you will cause a flame here [in England] we will have much difficulty in allaying.’
‘I must again beg of you’, runs a further March letter to Suther from Loch, ‘to attend most vigilantly that neither any person acting under your orders, nor under the direction of the [sheep] farmers, permit fire to be used in any way whatever or at any time . . . Pray caution Sellar well about this.’35
That last directive stemmed from a number of May’s scheduled evictions being Patrick Sellar’s responsibility, not the Sutherland Estate’s – because they involved people who, at some point in the preceding six or so years, had become Sellar’s subtenants. But this circumstance, though important in law, was not sufficient, as Loch appreciated, to shield the Marquis or Marchioness of Stafford from blame in the event of houses going up in flames on one or other of Sellar’s farms. As shown by the way the press had dealt with the 1814 burning of William Chisholm’s home at Badinloskin, distinctions between this or that type of tenure – Chisholm (as mentioned earlier) having been technically a subtenant of some of Sellar’s subtenants – were of no interest to journalists or the public. In newspapers, all evictions on the Sutherland Estate were treated, understandably, as the direct responsibility of its owners. Hence the need to get Patrick Sellar, who had personally taken a hand in some of the preceding year’s burnings in Strathnaver, to proceed more circumspectly in 1820.
This Sellar did. So did the evicting parties responsible for ejecting the bulk of the 240 or so families evicted that May. Home after home was unroofed and demolished. But no houses were burned; and nor were there any overt acts of resistance. ‘Madam,’ Suther reported directly to the Marchioness of Stafford on 27 May, ‘The removals are now complete and they have all been effected in the most peaceable and easy manner.’ The marchioness and her husband, as is evident from James Loch’s account of how his employers received this news, were as relieved as they were delighted. ‘I am desired by Lord and Lady Stafford’, Loch informed Suther in early June, ‘to convey to you their complete and entire satisfaction and approbation at your having accomplished this most delicate but necessary arrangement . . . which the practices of the [Trans-Atlantic] Association and the example of Culrain made still more difficult to manage.’36