It used to be thought that Highland clanship died on the fateful battlefield of Culloden Moor in April 1746 and was then buried by a combination of punitive legislation and state terror. But the demise of clan society was much more protracted than that. Indeed, the roots of decay can be traced back to the early decades of the seventeenth century and the more effective imposition of crown authority throughout the Highlands during the reign of James VI and I (1567–1625). The Scottish government and, after the Regal Union of 1603, the British monarchy, began to enforce its writ in Gaeldom with more determination and success then than at any time in the past. As state power started to guarantee law and order in the north and west, the kin-based networks of chiefs, clan gentry and followers, which had evolved over generations for the purposes of mutual defence and protection in times of chronic instability, were bound to come under pressure as the practical rationale of clanship was steadily undermined. Decline, however, was very slow, piecemeal and varied in extent between the more stable eastern and southern Lowland fringes and the traditionally more turbulent western mainland and the islands of the Inner and Outer Hebrides. Also, as the history of the ’45 Rising confirmed, even by the early eighteenth century the martial ethos of several clans, whether Hanoverian or Jacobite in sympathy, had not entirely died.
From the later sixteenth century, the government of James VI set out to impose more political and administrative control on the Highlands by employing the same tactics which were already delivering success in the Scottish Borders, that other recalcitrant region of feuding and lawlessness. New thinking was emerging within the counsels of the state that ‘civility’, stability and order should be established throughout the entire realm of Scotland. To this was added a concern that crown revenues from some of the semi-autonomous Highland districts were unacceptably low. At the same time, the old assumptions that the north was only a region of irredeemable poverty and devoid of resources were steadily being superseded by more optimistic ideas about the possibilities of unexploited potential for development from both the seas and the lands of Gaeldom. As a first step, from the 1580s, the crown demanded that some leading clan chiefs had to find sureties ranging from £2,000 to £20,000 Scots to guarantee the good behaviour of their clansmen. More-decisive initiatives were adopted after 1603, when James occupied the thrones of both Scotland and England. Now the western clans could be confronted by the full naval and military force of a unified and expansionist British state intent. The availability of English naval resources after 1603 was crucial because in the western Highlands it was the sea which united the bases of clan power and the land which usually divided them.
Equally critical in the drive for more control was the ruthlessly efficient annexation of native lands in six counties of the north of Ireland, which was then followed by the establishment of the Plantation of Ulster. This naked use of coercion and the forced displacement of the Catholic population brought home to the élites of the clans in the western Highlands, who had many kinship links with landed families in the north of Ireland, the present and future danger of resisting the authority of an increasingly aggressive and powerful British state. More directly, the conquest of Gaelic Ireland, associated with ‘The Flight of the Earls’ in 1607, after their earlier defeat at the Battle of Kinsale in 1601, finally eliminated the traditional opportunities for mercenary service in Ireland by the Highland buannachan, or household men. This specialist warrior class within clanship had long flourished on booty, plunder and violent employment across the Irish Sea. However, an Anglo-Saxon Protestant wedge had now been driven between the two territories of Gaelic/Catholic civilization. As a result, the old seaborne commercial and military ties between the northern counties of Ireland and A’Gaidhealtachd soon began to wither. Indeed, from the 1620s, the now redundant buannachan began to be shipped in large numbers by their own fine to Europe, where they first served in British expeditionary forces and then as mercenaries in Swedish and Dutch service during the Thirty Years War. Their fate was eloquent testimony to the fact that the militarized nature of Highland society was now in decay.
However, the government of James VI and I did not undertake the same draconian policy of wholesale territorial annexation in the Highlands of the kind which was imposed in Ireland. Instead, a range of strategies were adopted, including partial expropriation of the lands of those clans considered to be especially delinquent. The main targets for this approach were ClanDonald South, the ClanLeod of Lewis, the Maclains of Ardnamurchan and ClanGregor. A related policy of colonization was also designed to drive another cordon sanitaire between Gaelic Ireland and Scotland with plans to set up colonies of ‘answerable inland subjects’ (i.e. Lowland Protestants) in Lewis, Lochaber and Kintyre. Only the last of these settlements, however, was even partially successful. Much more effective was the launching of punitive expeditions along the western seaboard in 1596, 1599, 1605, 1607 and 1608. These violent incursions were paralleled by the award of judicial commissions to loyal lieutenants, drawn mainly from trusted magnate families on the Highland–Lowland frontier. The Gordons, earls of Huntly and the even more ambitiously imperialistic Campbells, earls of Argyll, were enjoined by the crown to extract surety for good conduct from neighbouring clans which were judged to be more prone to truculent disloyalty to the crown.
These were all conventional tactics long employed successfully in the unruly districts of the Borders. But the state also embarked on a novel attempt to produce a comprehensive solution to the Highland problem by tackling what were seen as the social roots of disorder. This was the policy of ‘planting civilitie’, which James himself had outlined in his book Basilikon Doran. It was first embodied in the Statutes of Iona of 1609 to which all major chiefs in the Hebrides had to give their consent. The Statutes ranged from the suppression of beggars and vagabonds, to the control of wine and whisky, from limits on the household retinues of the fine to the strengthening of the reformed church, from sending the heirs of men of substance to the Lowlands to be schooled to the prohibition of ordinary clansmen carrying arms. Not only were the chiefs bound to observe these rulings, but they were also ordered to appear personally before the Privy Council in Edinburgh at stated intervals as proof of their good conduct within the terms of the Iona agreements in the present and also in the future. The Statutes were indeed a comprehensive programme designed to impose Lowland values on the fine, promote their assimilation with the mores of the ‘civilized’ Lowlands and eliminate what was seen as the chronic excesses of clanship.
There has been considerable historical debate about the practical impact of these initiatives. But whatever their short-term effect, they did have a potent influence on the clan élites over time. One scholar has suggested that ‘central government’s main priority was to educate the fine about their responsibilities as members of the Scottish landed classes, not to denigrate their status’.1 Indeed as confirmation of their acknowledged social position, the clan gentry were permitted to carry arms and wear armour and also given monopoly licences to bring wines and spirits to the Western Isles. In return for these privileges, clan gentries were expected to become partners with the state in the maintenance of order and to be held to account for the conduct of their clansmen. This was to be ensured through the exaction of substantial sureties and the annual appearance of chiefs before the Privy Council in Edinburgh. These attendances were rigorously enforced until the outbreak of the Scottish Revolution in 1638.
Political control soon started to cause substantial changes within clanship. Severe financial burdens of surety were now imposed on the fine, varying in the 1610s from £3,000 to £18,000 Scots. The costs of regularly appearing before the Privy Council were also considerable and those who attended could often find themselves detained in the capital for up to six months at a time and even longer. Sir Rory MacLeod of Dunvegan complained to James VI in 1622 that his annual appearances meant that he was away from his estates for more than half the year, making it difficult for him to manage them effectively. Sojourns in Edinburgh would also lead to expenditure on legal fees, housing and the many pleasures of the capital. The accounts of seventeenth-century Highland families, such as the MacDonalds of Clanranald and the MacLeods of Dunvegan, show increasing outlays on expensive clothing, furnishings and exotic foods as they gradually became integrated into Scottish landed society with all the cost implications for the maintenance of personal status through material display which that implied.
The outbreak of civil war in Britain in 1638 brought these compulsory annual visitations to Edinburgh temporarily to an end. But that bitter conflict imposed even greater stresses through the devastation of lands and economic dislocation throughout the country. The bloodiest fighting took place during the Wars of the Covenanters in the central and south-western Highlands, especially after the incursions of Alasdair MacColla with his Irish-Catholic troops from Ulster in 1644. Entire districts were despoiled and numerous townships laid waste through the marching and counter-marching of royalist and Covenanting forces, all of whom lived off the land. One effect was to reinforce the militarism of the clans for a time and so postpone the decay of martial society. During the Cromwellian Union of 1652–60, further systematic destruction was inflicted on several districts, stretching from Lochaber to Wester Ross, by General George Monck during his suppression of the rebellion led by the Earl of Glencairn in 1653–4. The long-term economic impact of hostilities on some localities is vividly illustrated from the McLean estates in Mull, Morvern and Tiree. Sir Hector McLean of Duart fell with around 700 of his clansmen at the Battle of Inverkeithing in 1651. One thousand men had originally been raised and the losses were so great that the estate economy of the McLeans did not fully recover until several years afterwards. A rental of 1674 listed thirty-two out of 140 McLean townships still lying waste at that date, more than two decades after the slaughter which was suffered at the battle. The restoration of the Stuart monarchy of Charles II from 1660 brought little respite. The new fiscal regime which came into force then had an impact on landowners in the Highlands as well as the rest of Scotland. The excise (1661), the land tax (1665) and the cess (1667) were exacting burdens. Moreover, from 1661, chiefs were once again compelled to attend Edinburgh to account to the authorities for the conduct of their clansmen.
The fifty years after the Statutes of Iona saw a massive increase in the indebtedness of the Highland élites as a result of the combined forces of state action, absenteeism and conspicuous consumption. The debts of the MacLeods of Dunvegan rose to £66,700 Scots in 1649 and climbed again to £129,000 by 1663, while in 1700 an account of Clanranald’s debts to his kinsman MacDonald of Sleat stood at £64,000. Two decades before, fourteen leading members of the fine of that clan had put their names to a document, ‘The Oath of the Friends’, designed to protect the finances of their chief from inevitable ruin. In fact, indebtedness had become a structural problem and now plagued most of the ruling families of Gaeldom. Various responses to financial difficulties were adopted, including a huge increase in wadsetting (giving a pledge of lands, often to family members of the clan élite, in security for debt), growing dependence on Edinburgh and Glasgow merchants for bonded loans, and, not least, a more businesslike approach to the management of land in order to make estates yield more revenue. It was the last response which was likely to be of profound significance for the future of clanship. At some point, the new determination of chiefs and leading gentry to extract additional income from their tenants was likely to conflict directly with their patriarchal responsibilities to the clan. The long transition from tribal chiefs to commercial landlords was now in train, many decades before Bonnie Prince Charlie’s historic defeat on Culloden Moor.
It is significant, for instance, that the old traditions of feasting, heroic drinking and collective hospitality seem to have been falling away throughout the seventeenth century. By the 1690s, Martin Martin reported this to be the case even in the far Outer Hebrides.2 Rentals in kind, or ‘victual’ rents, were also gradually being converted to cash values, which meant that food rentals were now being increasingly marketed outside the Highlands for commercial gain. On the MacLeod estates in Harris and Skye, rents were mainly paid in kind until the 1640s. By the 1680s, however, money rents made up half the value of the total and by the 1740s over three quarters. The most lucrative export trade was the rearing of black cattle, which reflected the comparative advantage of the hill country economy for pastoral development. The beasts went to market on the hoof without any additional investment needed for transportation. Overheads in general were therefore relatively low. Tacksmen rounded up the cattle from the townships under their management, and once they had been taken to collection points on the mainland, the remaining costs were born by Lowland drovers and merchants until the droves were sold on at the trysts of Crieff and Falkirk. The needs of a massively expanded Royal Navy for salt beef during the Wars of the Spanish Succession, growing demand in the urban areas of Scotland, northern England and, especially, in London, the impact of the new common market between the two countries after 1707, and late-seventeenth-century prohibitions on cattle imports from Ireland were all significant factors in this golden age of the Highland cattle trade. By the 1720s it was reckoned that as many as 30,000 beasts were being driven south annually to the Lowlands. Estate incomes were also being augmented by sales of timber, fish, slate, linen and other produce as part of the drive to reduce debt and at the same time support the growing absenteeism and consumerism of the élites. The impact was especially marked in the southern and eastern fringes of the Highlands. Long before the era of clearances, the lands of great chiefs such as the Campbells of Argyll and Breadalbane and the Murrays, earls of Atholl, in Highland Perthshire were already locked into the demands of the Lowland economy.
By the early eighteenth century, therefore, the Highlands was a society in transition. The resolution of clan differences by force of arms had begun to die out. The last major clan battle, a bloody affair between elements of ClanChattan and ClanDonald South, was fought at Mulroy in the Braes of Lochaber in August 1688. The fact that the times were becoming more peaceful is one explanation for the horrified contemporary reaction to the infamous Massacre of Glencoe in 1692. Crown forces killed nearly thirty men, women and children of the MacDonalds of Glencoe, a small sept addicted to banditry and also loyal to the exiled House of Stuart. The episode has gone down through the ages in story, legend and song. Glencoe is remembered for several reasons, but partly because acts of collective violence which were commonplace in the sixteenth century and earlier had become exceptional a hundred years later.
In the same way, clans like the MacGregors were denounced as barbaric in the early eighteenth century for their thievery and cattle rieving. They now stood out as dangerous and threatening in a world that was moving on. For the most part cattle raiding and protection rackets were now confined to a few districts, such as the Highland/Lowland peripheries and the more inaccessible parts of the Lochaber region. The growing costs of warfare in the age of gunpowder also made chiefs less willing or less able to arm their clansmen properly with muskets, pistols and shot. Indeed, probably only a minority of those who fought under John Grahame of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee, in the Jacobite Rising of 1688–9 had seen action in the past. Before his famous victory at Killiecrankie, he was concerned how his mainly raw clansmen would perform under fire. Daniel Defoe, in his Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, in the early eighteenth century was impressed by the social changes which he saw for himself. While noting that the people of the central Highlands were considered in the past ‘a fierce, fighting and furious kind of men’, he added that they were also ‘by the good conduct of their chiefs and heads of clans, much more civilized than they were in former times’.3 The remarkable expansion of cattle droving, and the profits accruing to the fine from its success, tended to encourage most clans to act more within the law as banditry and cattle rustling were a threat to more lucrative peaceful commerce.
This argument, however, should not be taken too far. Military capability remained across the Highlands because many clan gentry and their rank and file often served as mercenaries in Dutch and French armies at the time. The presence of a pool of clan gentlemen who had held command rank in the European military explains why it was possible to regiment the clans as infantry formations during the later Jacobite risings. The establishment of the independent companies by the state in and after 1725 also allowed some chiefs to give their clansmen experience of modern military tactics even if inter-clan conflict itself was already a thing of the past before the Union of 1707.
The old social cohesion of the clans also came under stress as the new emphasis on economy imposed increasing strains. The bards lamented the habits of chiefs spending longer periods in Edinburgh and even London and criticized the upward spiral of rising debts which took place because of chronic absenteeism. For the people of the Highlands these were ominous signs. Rent rises started to become more common in some areas, especially in the southern and eastern Highlands. One laird, Archibald Campbell of Knockbuy in Argyll, for instance, raised his rental fourfold between 1728 and the 1780s on the profits from the booming cattle trade.
Firstly in Kintyre, about 1710, and then elsewhere on his properties in 1737, John Campbell, second Duke of Argyll, offered tenant leases to the highest bidder, thus substituting competition for clanship on the largest Highland estate. This was a radical strategy since it also involved the removal of the tacksmen, the fir-tacsa, from their centuries-old functions as military lieutenants in the clan structure and managers of the township economies. Land was now rented directly to tenants and the margins formerly creamed off by tacksmen went directly into the coffers of the Duke. Also under the new system of competitive bidding, rents were increased by averages of 60 per cent between 1720 and 1740 in the islands of Mull and Tiree, in part because inter-clan rivalry between incoming Campbells and subjugated McLeans for leases pushed them to higher levels. Even more dramatic changes were being enforced on the neighbouring and extensive estates of Argyll’s kinsman, John Campbell, second Earl of Breadalbane from the early 1700s. As well as rent increases, rigorous controls over subdivision of tenancies were put in place, as was the selective removal of tenants who were in arrears of rent. The Breadalbane estate papers confirm that some ‘warnings off’ or evictions were taking place on the Braes of Lorn and Netherlorn in the 1720s and 1730s, a generation or more before major clearances began elsewhere in the Highlands.
Not surprisingly, therefore, in the 1730s, there came the first significant emigrations in response to these new ways. Small parties left from Argyll, Sutherland and the central Highlands to Georgia and the Carolinas across the Atlantic. Around the same time Norman MacLeod of Dunvegan and Sir Alexander MacDonald of Sleat, the two most powerful chiefs in Skye, devised an extraordinary but ultimately unsuccessful scheme to deport some of their clansmen, wives and children to the American colonies, there to be sold as indentured labour for the plantations. In the resulting scandal both MacLeod and MacDonald were threatened with judicial prosecution. The notorious case seemed to confirm as no other could that for some chiefs at least the ethic of clanship was already being subordinated to the pursuit of profit.
Yet care should be taken not to exaggerate the scale and extent of social change in the Highlands at this stage. Commercial values were indeed developing but were not yet dominant. Tenancies on most estates were still allocated on the basis of long kin connection and traditional affiliation. Significant agrarian improvements were still largely confined to the estates of the Argyll and Breadalbane Campbells and a few other lairds in the southern and eastern Highlands. Ironically, the new cultural, economic and political connections with the south, while influencing the decay of clanship in the long run, may have delayed the final demise of the old order in the short run because from the time of the Civil Wars in the 1640s the military capabilities of the clans became recognized by opposing forces in the Lowlands. The Revolution of 1688–9 and the exile of the royal House of Stuart led from that time to five attempts at counter-revolution by Jacobite loyalists over the following fifty years in 1689–90, 1708, 1715, 1719 and 1745. In all these episodes the fighting prowess of the clans was a major factor in the Jacobite and, to a lesser extent, anti-Jacobite forces. This factor served to perpetuate clan cohesion to some extent and for a time probably tempered the forces of commercialization. But the need for more cash resources did indeed powerfully influence the clan gentry before the ’45, which explains their rapid and energetic exploitation of even greater economic opportunities after that final Rising was crushed. But though the process of conversion to commercial landlordism may have been advanced before 1750 among the fine, the commons of the clans were still by and large insulated from the transition. It was the tacksmen and the clan gentry rather than ordinary clansmen who undertook most of the business of selling cattle and other produce to Lowland markets. It seems clear, therefore, that while the élites were indeed undergoing a profound metamorphosis, most of their followers maintained traditionalist expectations. These values were not yet directly or generally challenged, however, because the nature of commercialization before the 1760s meant most chiefs were still able to extract more income from the land without entirely compromising their hereditary functions as protectors and guardians of the people. That uneasy equilibrium was unlikely to last for much longer.
It is against this background that the significance of Jacobitism for Highland society can be considered. In a sense, military force drawn from the Highlands became almost as important as diplomatic support from France for the cause of the exiled Stuart dynasty after 1688. The clan regiments provided the cutting edge of the Jacobite armies and were employed as the front-line troops in all major battles of each Rising from 1688 until the final disaster of 1746. In the early eighteenth century it was reckoned that a great host of 30,000 clansmen could potentially be raised for the Stuarts, though nothing like that number ever took the field. Charles Edward Stuart reached Derby in 1745 with fewer than 5,000 followers, not all of whom were Gaels. But only in the Highlands by the early eighteenth century in Britain could a force of lightly armed irregulars be quickly mobilized for military action. Indeed, given the absence of a large standing army in Britain and the recurrent need to despatch regular troops to the European theatre, even a small and determined force could have a dramatic domestic impact in the short term. This was evidenced during the ’45. In a bloody affair lasting only around fifteen minutes at Prestonpans, south of Edinburgh, the Jacobite force, numbering a few thousand men, crushed Sir John Cope’s Hanoverian army of regulars and instantly became the military masters of Scotland. As the Earl of Islay, future Duke of Argyll, wrote early in the Rising, the clans:
are the only source of any real danger that can attend the disaffection of the Enemies to the Protestant Succession. Several thousand men armed and used to arms, ready upon a few weeks call is what might disturb any government. The Captain of Clanranald … has not £500 a year and yet has 600 men with him.4
English officers were less complimentary, contemptuously dismissing the Highlanders as a barbaric rabble exclusively bent on plunder. But that view underestimated the martial élan of the lightly armed clansmen who were able to endure greater hardship and were more mobile than troops of the line, especially in the kind of rough terrains where many had grown up and lived most of their lives. The better-armed clan gentry were usually in the vanguard of an attack and in the right conditions the famous Highland Charge could pulverize the opposition if launched effectively from hillsides with firearms followed up by close-quarter intense violence with broadsword, axe, dagger and targe. As already noted, the clan hosts were also organized into regiments and officered by gentlemen, some of whom were veterans of service in the armies of France, the Holy Roman Empire and Russia and were well acquainted with modern military technique. Lord George Murray, a younger brother of the Duke of Atholl and the leading commander of the Jacobite forces in the ’45, was acknowledged to be one of the outstanding military tacticians of his day, but eventually fell foul of the inept amateur Bonnie Prince Charlie, and his role was marginalized in the weeks before Culloden. However, with Murray in command, his army won virtually every skirmish and battle against regular troops in 1745–6 except, of course, for the final resounding defeat in 1746 when his place was taken by Charles Edward Stuart as field commander. Indeed one reason for the decision to stand and fight south of Inverness on that day in April 1746 was Charles’s belief in the invincibility of his clansmen when opposing regular forces. The ensuing disaster was largely caused by the incompetence of his leadership, the unsuitable nature of the ground for the traditional assault of the clans and the hungry and exhausted condition of the Jacobite forces, most of whom had taken part in a failed pre-emptive strike during the previous night on the camp of the Hanoverian army at Nairn a few miles to the south.
The support of many Highland clans for Jacobitism therefore gave the cause a degree of military credibility in the same way that the French connection boosted its political and diplomatic standing. Not all clans were Jacobite in sympathy, especially in those areas where Presbyterianism had made a deep impact by the eighteenth century, as in the counties of Argyll, Sutherland and Caithness, and in Wester Ross. It was said that Presbyterianism in A’ Gaidhealtachd was essentially nothing other than the Whig/Hanoverian interest at prayer. Most of the Campbells, MacKays, Munros, Rosses and Gunns were usually likely to favour the established order. The Mackenzies, earls of Seaforth, were also loyal Hanoverians. But ‘government clans’ were always a small minority, probably less than ten of the fifty principal clans, and their main effect was to divide family allegiances and encourage those of wavering Jacobite loyalty not to come out in the Risings.
Again, even if there was latent sympathy, active support for the Risings in the Highlands varied very significantly over time and space and within clanship. Some families were split on points of political and religious principle and few clans were committed to either side in their entirety, if only because it was prudent to keep a foot in both camps to try to ensure that family lands would remain secure whatever the final outcome might be. Thus, the first Duke of Atholl was a staunch supporter of the revolution of 1688–9 but three of his sons fought for the Jacobites under the Earl of Mar in 1715. Over time militant Jacobitism in the Highlands came to focus mainly on the Grampian region and parts of western Inverness-shire; the clans of the inner and outer Hebrides played little part in the ’45 on either side. The refusal of the chiefs of the MacDonalds and MacLeods in Skye to take part was a particularly bitter blow for the Stuarts, but the insular clans were likely to be cautious as it was they who would have to face the formidable firepower of marauding squadrons of the British navy.
Indeed, the grave risk of coming out in the ’45 made even some committed Jacobites opt for prudent neutrality. Charles had landed in the Outer Hebrides in the summer of that year with only seven companions, some arms and 4,000 French gold coins. The Jacobite leadership in Scotland reckoned that he needed to bring with him a war chest of 30,000 French gold pieces, supplies for 10,000 men and a force of 6,000 French soldiers if he was to have any reasonable chance of military success. Not surprisingly, therefore, many found it difficult to reconcile Jacobite allegiance with hard political realities. The uncertainties also explain why several families had members of kin on both sides. One extraordinary illustration of this was the experience of the Chisholms. The youngest son of Roderick Chisholm of Chisholm led the clan for Prince Charles and perished at Culloden. His father stayed at home and had two other sons fighting in the Royal Scots Fusiliers on the Hanoverian side in the same battle. Entire clans were also divided. William Mackintosh of that Ilk tried to raise his men for the government, but all except nine deserted to join the 600 clansmen recruited by his wife, Lady Anne Mackintosh, for the Jacobites. Ewen MacPherson of Cluny, one of the most gifted Jacobite regimental commanders of the ’45, was unable to bring out his entire clan in 1745 as its most powerful cadet branch, the MacPhersons of Invereshie, remained neutral throughout the Rising. In addition, but particularly in the ’45, some chiefs had to resort to threats and strong-arm tactics to force out their clansmen. Sending around the ‘fiery cross’, the traditional call to arms, was no longer always enough.
However, the complex nature of shifting loyalties and divided responses does not answer the key question why so many clans remained loyal to the Stuarts and supported their restoration from the Revolution of 1688 until the 1750s. To some extent their allegiance was a dynastic extension of clan commitment to the concept of kinship:
The royal house of Stuart was the rightful trustee of Scotland in the same way that clan chiefs were the customary protectors of their followers. Dynastic legitimacy was seen as the source of justice, the basis of government. But the lawful exercise of government and the maintenance of justice were imperilled by the sundering of genealogical continuity, first by the replacement of James VII and II by his son-in-law William of Orange in 1689, and then by the succession of the House of Hanover under George I in 1714.5
The religious factor was also fundamental. The victory of vengeful Presbyterianism in the revolution of 1688 swung Episcopalians and Roman Catholics in favour of the Catholic Stuarts in the Highlands and north-east Lowlands. Only through the removal of the revolutionary regime of 1688 and, after 1714, the House of Hanover could the full rights of the ‘non-jurors’ (those refusing to take the oath of allegiance to the new monarchy of William and Mary and their successors) be restored. Episcopalian clans like the Camerons and Stewarts of Appin were therefore Jacobite by nature, as were the small Catholic populations of Barra, South Uist, Morvern, Moidart, Arisaig, Morar and Knoydart. The tiny Catholic enclave on the western mainland was not only loyal, but remoteness also left it virtually immune from Hanoverian depredation until after the failure of the ’45. It was no coincidence that it was here at Loch nan Uamh, between Arisaig and Moidart, that the Young Pretender (or claimant to the throne) made his first landing on the Scottish mainland at the start of his ill-fated expedition in the summer of 1745.
Catholics, denied full citizenship under the penal laws, usually owed allegiance without equivocation to their co-religionaries, the Stuarts. But they made up no more than a fifth of the fighting men in all the Risings. The overwhelming majority, around 75 per cent, were in fact Protestant but Episcopalian (from the Latin episcopus, bishop), whose commitment to the rule of hierarchy in the church was in direct conflict with the Presbyterian regime of kirk session and church elders established after 1688. Indeed, the refusal of the vast majority of Episcopalians, despite offers of toleration, to take the oath of allegiance to William and Mary and their successors and abjure the House of Stuart meant they, as ‘non-jurors’, were subjected to the penal laws in the same way as those of the Catholic faith. But the religious factor was not always decisive. The Protestant Mackenzies came out on the Jacobite side during the 1715 rebellion, as did the Campbells of Glenorchy and the Earl of Breadalbane. In that rising there were plenty of Protestant Campbells in the Jacobite camp. Religious faith did not always ensure clan unity, as the example of the Chisholms, a nominally Catholic clan discussed above, illustrates.
Religion gave a stiffening and a sense of moral purpose to Highland Jacobitism, but its roots also lay in the political and economic realities of seventeenth-century Scotland. It is possible to trace the identification of some clans with the House of Stuart back to the 1640s, when they had fought under Alasdair MacColla and the Marquess of Montrose on the King’s side against the Presbyterian Covenanters during the civil wars. This was a connection which was also in large part based on the hostility of many western clans to the threatening expansion of the notoriously imperialistic ClanCampbell, which during that conflict was bitterly hostile to the Stuart king, Charles I, and his successor, Charles II. These were alliances and hostilities which were to become an integral part of the later struggle between Jacobites and Hanoverians but were already in place from a much earlier time. As one scholar has put it: ‘If Highland Jacobitism was born in the 1680s it had been conceived in the 1640s.’6
At one level, the appeal of the cause for the clans may also have been because, as already argued, they could readily identify with the values of kinship and hereditary right which were shared in the traditions of both monarchy and clanship. James VII, when Duke of York in the 1670s, did much to enhance this relationship and build a bridge between the older Stuart policy of repression and a fresh strategy of co-operation with the clan chiefs. What almost certainly endeared James even more to clans such as the Camerons, McLeans and some branches of ClanDonald was that, during his short period of rule in Scotland, Archibald Campbell, the ninth Earl of Argyll and chief of ClanCampbell, was executed in 1685 for treason after his abortive rebellion against the monarchy, leaving his family’s previously dominant position temporarily in complete disarray. The monarchy generally, and James and the Stuarts in particular, therefore came to be seen as the most effective checks on the rampant expansionism of ClanCampbell. Those clans along the western seaboard and in the islands who were steadily losing both lands and feudal superiorities to the earls of Argyll had often little choice but to support the crown because only it had the legitimacy and resources to counter Campbell power. As the Marquis of Hamilton remarked to Charles I in 1638, the western Gaels were likely to join the royalist forces during the civil war, ‘not for anie greatt affection they cyrie to your Majestie bot because of ther splene to Lorne (i.e. Campbell) and will dou if they durst just contrarie to whatt his men doueth’.7
Inevitably in 1688–9 the removal of the Stuarts was quickly followed by the restoration of the Campbells to full power. Indeed, the tenth Earl of Argyll personally administered the coronation oath to William and Mary at Westminster and his family was soon rewarded with a dukedom for his faithful service to the new regime. In the western Highlands the revolution of 1688–9 became associated with the renewal of Campbell hegemony and so support for the exiled Stuarts was the only realistic response to the threat which that presented in the region. The link between Jacobitism and anti-Campbell sentiment became powerful and enduring. However, even here there was complexity. The huge Campbell empire itself contained political diversity and its Breadalbane and Glenlyon branches, for instance, had been sympathetic to the Stuarts in the Rising of 1715. Marital relationships between Cameron and Campbell and MacDonald and Campbell existed alongside clan and political divisions. But, overall, the enthusiastic support of the earls of Argyll for the Protestant succession in 1688, and later, for the house of Hanover, helped to swing their traditional rivals and mortal enemies in favour of Stuart counter-revolution.
The economic origins of Highland Jacobitism are more difficult to determine. Some writers have suggested that the risings were at root an epic conflict between the forces of ancient tribalism and the dynamic of modern capitalism. In this view, the archaic clan society of Gaeldom was confronted by the commercial vibrancy of the Lowlands in a long-drawn-out struggle which ended with Gaelic society defeated in the ’45 and finally crushed in its punitive aftermath. There are, however, several objections to this superficially seductive thesis. For a start, Jacobite sympathies traversed the Highland/Lowland frontier. The Stuarts attracted support from most areas, both Lowland and Highland, north of the River Tay, including several towns in that region, which could not be considered as ‘tribal’ in any sense. In addition, throughout Gaeldom, though Jacobite clans were in a majority, others were loyal to the Hanoverians. More fundamentally, the image of a backward region, mainly insulated from commercial forces, is in conflict with the evidence presented earlier in the chapter of growing tensions within clanship as a result of trade developments taking place in the seventeenth century and early eighteenth. The expansion of droving was one of the most important growth points in the early modern Scottish economy and could not have lifted off if there had not been pools of enterprise within clanship. Some Jacobite chiefs were also noted for their entrepreneurial activities and were more than the tribal patriarchs or warrior leaders of popular legend. The fine of ClanCameron, one of the most committed to Jacobitism, had growing interests in American land, timber exportation, Caribbean plantations and the Edinburgh money market. MacDonnell of Glengarry was heavily involved in the provision of timber from his estate for charcoal for the production of iron. On his Lowland estates, the Earl of Mar, the incompetent leader of the 1715 rising, had a range of industrial investments, including coal-mining and glass manufacture. Robertson of Struan ran an extensive commercial forestry operation and timber from his estate around Loch Rannoch was floated down to the rivers Tummel and Tay and from there to Lowland markets. The Duke of Perth, who was prominent in the ’45, was a noted early improver who was actively engaged in agricultural innovation on his estate in Highland Perthshire in the early 1740s.
At the same time, however, there was indeed some evidence of a close correlation between political disaffection and financial difficulty. During the ’45 it was estimated that twenty-two clans were ‘out’ for the Stuarts and only eight for the government. However, overall, the Hanoverians had the more prosperous clans on their side. Three Jacobite clans, the MacDonnells of Keppoch, the MacGregors, and the MacDonalds of Glencoe, either were landless or possessed only marginal property. They mainly made ends meet by cattle ‘lifting’ and the running of protection rackets. A number of other chiefs who committed themselves to Prince Charles in 1745 were in acute financial difficulty, much of it as a result of the attempt to live in the style of eighteenth-century gentlemen on the meagre revenues of a Highland estate. One contemporary, doubtless of Hanoverian sympathy, claimed in the Caledonian Mercury that the annual total income of the clans which fought in the Jacobite army did not exceed £1,500, which if divided equally among the estimated 4,000 rebels came to only 7s 6d a year each and less than a farthing a day!
In addition, in the years between the failure of the ’15 Rising and the ’45 the state had effectively created a power vacuum in Gaeldom. For the most part, the rebels of 1715 had been treated relatively leniently, even if some forfeitures of property did take place. This was mainly on the grounds that Jacobitism in Scotland at the time was far too common for draconian action to be taken across the board against those disaffected to the state. The Disarming Act of 1725, passed after the abortive rising of 1719 and rumours of further clandestine plotting, may have indeed have had more impact on the government clans than on the Jacobites. Around the same time, General George Wade came north to supervise an ambitious programme of road, bridge and fort construction to reduce the inaccessibility of the clans and assist the movement of crown forces in the event of another rising. Between 1725 and his departure from Scotland in 1740 he claimed to have built 250 miles of road to facilitate the marches of government troops throughout the disaffected districts. These were also designed to link Fort William, Fort Augustus and small garrisons at Bernera and Ruthven which were to act as the government’s eyes and ears in the Jacobite districts. The whole basis of Wade’s strategy, however, was undermined from the later 1730s, when the government stripped the forts of adequate forces in order to increase the supply of troops for European service. Wade’s roads did eventually prove to be useful, but only in expediting the march south of the Young Pretender’s army in 1745.
The early phase of the ’45 culminating in the victory at Prestonpans was followed by the invasion of England which on the face of it was a remarkable triumph for the small Jacobite force of a few thousand men. To a significant extent, however, Charles’s early success not only reflected the martial élan of the clans but also the weaknesses of the Scottish state and its virtual paralysis in the summer of 1745. After the Union, the abolition of the Scottish Privy Council in 1708 had removed the only effective government executive as well as the main agency for intelligence gathering. When the Stuart standard was raised at Glenfinnan at the head of Loch Sheil in August 1745, the government commander in Scotland, Sir John Cope, had a mere 3,000 troops at his disposal throughout the entire country. Even ClanCampbell, traditionally the crucial military bulwark of the Hanoverian state in the western Highlands, had been weakened as a fighting formation by the second Duke of Argyll’s estate reforms after 1737 described earlier in the chapter. They had not only eroded the position of the fir-tacsa, a key link in the chain of military command in the clan structure, but also made competition rather than clan loyalty the main factor in the granting of tenancies.
Yet the very potency of the threat posed by the advancing Jacobites ensured that the British state soon responded with determination and vigour as battle-hardened regiments were speedily withdrawn home from the European theatre. The retreat of the Prince’s army from Derby was a reaction of Charles’s Council of War to the intelligence that the Brigade of Guards now stood between them and London and that three Hanoverian armies were also massing to advance. There was also a recognition that the Rising had failed to attract any significant support in the north of England, thus making the retreat home the most prudent option. The return to Scotland, outnumbered by the enemy and marching through hostile territory, was itself an outstanding exploit. However, after a further partial victory at Falkirk, the Jacobite forces retreated again into the Highlands, so ensuring that they were no longer able to extract funds through levies and taxation on the richer Lowland counties and towns. Indeed, the central, and especially the western, Lowlands, the economic heart of Scotland, had always been vehemently hostile. The Presbyterian church wielded more power and had greater influence in the parishes of Scotland than a distant national authority and had always been stridently opposed to Jacobitism as the satanic ideology of a threatened Papist counter-revolution.
Sources of revenue now inevitably dried up, a problem compounded by the failure of the French treasure ships, especially Le Prince Charles, to make it through Scottish waters with vital financial support. The Young Pretender decided to turn and fight at Culloden on ground which favoured regular infantry and artillery and put the clan regiments at acute disadvantage, because his cause was by then, quite literally, bankrupt. It was not only fatigue, after the abortive night attack on the Duke of Cumberland’s army at Nairn, which weakened the Jacobites on that fateful day in April 1746. Hunger also played an important part. A significant proportion of the army was away foraging for food and took no part in the battle.
The rout of the Jacobites on Culloden Moor became the prelude to a massive military, judicial and political assault on clan society which the government assumed had spawned subversion. The rock-solid belief of the state was that the martial nature of clanship was at the heart of the problem of chronic disaffection. The fact that Lowland formations from the north-east counties fought in the Jacobite army and that several important clans remained loyal to the Hanoverian state seems to have been of little consequence to London. The relative leniency shown the rebels after the 1715 rising was not to be repeated since there were two key differences from the aftermath of the ’15. First, a great regular army, supported by naval units, had been drawn into the very heart of the Highlands and could be employed there in effective combination to wage a campaign of terror and destruction against the clans. Second, the ’45 had come too dangerously close to final success and so the social system which was thought to have incubated disaffection had to be totally rooted out.
The Duke of Cumberland, the Hanoverian commander, contended that there had been a missed opportunity after the ’15 to destroy clanship. He was determined that error was not to be repeated in 1746. Underpinning the eventual ferocity of the government’s response was the belief that the Gaels were akin to a deadly poison threatening the body politic which only radical surgery could remove. Six years before the Rising, the following had appeared in a London magazine:
In this great Extent of Country [the Highlands], Ignorance and Superstition greatly prevail; In some Places the Remains even of Paganism are still to be found, and in many others the Reformation from Popery has never yet obtained. The Parishes where Ministers are settled, are commonly of very great Extent, some 30, 40, 50 Miles long, and generally divided by unpassable Mountains and Lakes; so that most of the Inhabitants being destitute of all Means of Knowledge, and without any Schools to educate their Children, are entirely ignorant of the Principles of Religion and Virtue, live in Idleness and Poverty, have no Notion of Industry, or Sense of Liberty, are subject to the Will and Command of their Popish disaffected Chieftains, who have always opposed the propagating of Christian Knowledge, and the English Tongue, that they might with less difficulty keep their miserable Vassals in a slavish Dependance. The poorer sort have only the Irish Tongue, and little Correspondence with the civilized arts of the Nation, and only come among them to pillage the more industrious Inhabitants; they are brought up in Principles of Tyranny and Arbitrary Government, depend upon foreign Papists as their main Support, and the native Irish as their best Correspondents and Allies. This has been the Source of all the Rebellions and Insurrections, in the Country, since the Revolution.8
The onslaught began with the systematic pillage of western mainland Inverness-shire and the adjacent islands by Hanoverian forces before they marched across much of the rest of Gaeldom. Even Highland communities loyal to the crown during the ’45 were not spared by the avenging juggernaut. This was a direct consequence of the prevailing Scotophobia in London government circles where Scotland as a whole was judged to be a disloyal country despite the majority opposition to Jacobitism north of the border. The terrorism of the state caused extensive depredations, the burning and laying waste of numerous townships, and the rounding up of cattle, the essential capital assets of the clansmen, for sale on government account in the markets of Fort Augustus, Inverness and elsewhere. In due course, the military road system was considerably extended until by 1767 over a thousand miles had been built. Between 1748 and 1769 one of the greatest bastion artillery fortresses in Europe was constructed at Ardersier, east of Inverness, and named Fort George. It was a permanent physical demonstration of the absolute determination of the British state that the clans would never again rise in arms to menace the Protestant Succession.
Through the passage of a series of Acts of Parliament, a comprehensive attack was also launched on the culture of the Gael and the system of clanship: tartans and kilts were proscribed as the sartorial symbols of rebel militarism; heritable jurisdictions, the private courts of landowners, were abolished; the carrying of weapons was forbidden; and rebel estates were declared forfeit to the crown. Forty-one properties were taken but significantly, in the light of earlier discussion about the financial pressures which fuelled disaffection, the vast majority had to be sold off by the Barons of Exchequer to pay off creditors. Thirteen, however, were inalienably annexed and managed by the crown between 1752 and 1784 through a Commission to promote ‘the Protestant Religion, good Government, Industry and Manufactures, and the Principles of Duty and Loyalty to His Majesty’. The thinking was that Protestantism would induce ideological conformity while prosperity might draw the teeth of the causes of disaffection.
It is tempting to view this huge military and legislative programme as a major turning point in Highland history, especially since the second half of the eighteenth century did indeed see the rapid collapse of clanship. But the idea of a clear cause-and-effect relationship between the two developments should be resisted. As one historian has put it: ‘The fact that there never was another Jacobite after 1745 owed more to a disinclination to rebel than to the government’s repressive measures’.9 The savagery of the Hanoverian forces seems to have shocked but then inspired stubborn defiance in a population long inured to hard times. Indeed, in the short run, there were more disturbances than usual in the Jacobite areas. William Anne Keppel, the second Earl of Albemarle, and Cumberland’s successor, became so frustrated by the lawlessness that he came round to the view that the only effective way to ensure permanent stability was to utterly devastate the recalcitrant districts and then deport all their inhabitants to the colonies. Equally significantly, his intelligence reports ominously suggested that despite brutal suppression there was still the hope and expectation that the long-hoped-for French invasion might yet come about and provide some succour to the embattled Jacobite Gaels.
The proscription of wardship, or military land tenures, and heritable jurisdictions would probably have had little effect on clan loyalties because these were founded on beliefs in the emotional ties of blood and kin rather than legal regulation. Military land tenures in the Highlands had also already been rendered obsolete due to the commercial developments of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries already surveyed. The Commission for Annexed and Forfeited Estates strove to improve agriculture, establish industry and develop communications in territories it managed. Not all the effort was in vain. Significant improvement was made in communications, but there was no evidence that a social and economic revolution of the kind planned to inculcate Hanoverian loyalty or assimilation to the mores of the rest of Britain was achieved. The profound constraints of poor land endowment, distance from markets and hostility of the people proved hard to overcome. One Commissioner, Lord Kames, a distinguished figure of the Scottish Enlightenment and pioneering agricultural ‘improver’ on his Lowland estate, admitted that the resources poured into the Highlands had been ‘no better than water spilt on the ground’.10
But Gaeldom unquestionably did change profoundly in the decades after Culloden. Samuel Johnson, during his tour of the Western Isles in 1773, famously proclaimed the last rites of clanship: ‘the clans retain little now of their original character. Their ferocity of temper is softened, their military ardour is extinguished, their dignity of independence is depressed, their contempt for government subdued, and their reverence for their chiefs abated’.11 But whether all this was due, as Johnson asserted, to ‘the late conquest and subsequent laws’ is unclear. Highland society had been in the throes of a long transition from clanship to commercialism many decades before the ’45. More and more, the gentry of the clans were exhibiting the characteristics of landlords rather than chieftains. The traditions of duthchas, that the fine were obliged by the centuries-old duties of protection and guardianship, lived on among the people of their lands. The ‘pacification’ of Gaeldom by the forces of the crown was the final factor encouraging many of the élite entirely to throw off this historic responsibility in favour of the material advantages of proprietorship, so completing the transformation to landlordism.