In 1740 six independent companies of soldiers, established by General George Wade to police and watch disaffected areas of Jacobite loyalty in the Highlands, were regimented as the 43rd of Foot. The formation was soon renamed the 42nd of Foot, but became more celebrated in fame, myth and story as The Black Watch, Am Freiceadan Dubh, because of the dark colours of the regimental plaid which set the rank-and-file apart from the Saighdearan Dearg, the Red Soldiers, or Redcoats, of the rest of the British Army. It was an auspicious beginning to a saga of Highland militarism which helped to transform Gaeldom after the ’45 and shaped the military history of the British Empire until the late twentieth century.
The recruitment of Gaels into the military during the three great wars of the period 1756–1815 is now a familiar story thanks to the recent publication of important research on the topic. Less well known, however, are the connections which can be drawn between the widespread nature of recruiting in the Highlands and the impact of that process on the development of crofting, dispossession and subdivision of land holdings in the region.
The Black Watch was the first of many regiments recruited from the Highlands into the armed forces of the crown between the 1750s and the early nineteenth century. The numbers were so remarkable that the Highlands quickly became the most militarized region in Britain with a bellicose tradition even greater than in the last years of clanship. Boom time for the Highland regiments began during the Seven Years War of 1756–63 and lasted throughout the American War of Independence and for much of the Napoleonic Wars. Six regiments of the line were mobilized between 1753 and 1763, including Fraser’s and Montgomery’s Highlanders. A further ten were recruited during the American War. Around 12,000 men were involved in the Seven Years War, almost the same number as the Highland army of the biggest rising, in 1715, and more than twice that of Prince Charles Edward Stuart’s force of the ’45. It was indeed a great irony that as clanship went into its death throes, the Highlands became even more militarized than in the recent past. By the French Wars the number of recruits was unprecedented. The most recent estimate suggests totals ranging from 37,000 to 48,000 men in regular, fencible and volunteer units. This was an extraordinary figure, given that the population of the Highlands was only around 250,000–300,000 during the second half of the eighteenth century. Not only had the region become the most intensely recruited region of the United Kingdom, but Scotland had the highest density of those famous retired veterans, the Chelsea Pensioners, within the British Isles, and the Highland counties had the largest proportion of all.
It was abundantly clear that in some districts recruitment had reached truly massive levels. Between the years 1793 and 1805, 3,680 men were under arms from the Skye estates of Lord Macdonald, MacLeod of MacLeod, and MacLeod of Raasay. From 1792 that number included no fewer than twenty-one lieutenant-generals or major-generals, forty-eight lieutenant-colonels, 600 other officers and 120 pipers. The parish of Gairloch in Wester Ross had been nearly stripped of all its menfolk by 1799. A survey for the Lord Lieutenant of Ross-shire arrived at the conclusion that hardly any adult males could be found there, and for the most part the population consisted mainly of children, women and old men because of the sheer scale of recruitment. Another estimate suggested that within the immense territories of the Earl of Breadalbane, straddling Argyllshire and Perthshire, as many as three farm tenancies out of every five had experienced some level of recruitment in the 1790s. Fort George at Ardersier, east of Inverness, the most formidable bastion fortress in Europe, built to control the clans after Culloden, now changed function. By the time of the American War after 1775 it had become ‘the great drill square’ where the Highland levies were trained and prepared for war overseas.
Clanship had metamorphosed into imperial service with the Gaels pioneering a role in the British military later to be assumed by other subjugated peoples of the Empire with renowned martial traditions, such as the Gurkhas, Sikhs and Pathans in Nepal and India. But the dramatic expansion of Highland recruitment was essentially short-lived. By c.1800 the manpower resources of the region had become virtually exhausted, not only because of over-recruitment, but also as a result of death in battle, disease, discharges, natural attrition and, not least, emigration. Even the most prestigious regiments were therefore forced to extend the territorial range of their recruitment. At least a third of the Black Watch who fought at Waterloo were drawn from the Lowlands, the Border counties and even England. Later, some regiments were stripped of kilts and sporrans as their rank and file could no longer be considered authentically ‘Highland’ in social composition. By the late Victorian era, indeed, Highland regiments comprised only a minority of Highlanders as mass emigration took its toll on the region, especially after the potato famine of the 1840s, which preceded the Crimean War by only a few years.
It was perhaps surprising just a short time after Culloden that the British state determined to deploy Highlanders as a military spearhead of imperial expansion. Not only that, but the former rebels were to be regimented in distinctive and coherent units, officered by clan gentlemen, permitted to wear the banned Highland dress and encouraged to develop their own ethnic esprit de corps. These were privileges not afforded the Irish (who vastly outnumbered Scots in the military service of empire) or battalions drawn from the Scottish Lowlands. In fact, the martial value of the Highlander was already being recognized some time before the Young Pretender landed in the Hebrides to launch his ill-fated adventure. Just before the ’45, prominent Whig politicians in the Highlands, such as Duncan Forbes of Culloden and the Duke of Argyll, had suggested raising crown regiments from disaffected clans. Officer posts in the British army for the clan gentry would, it was argued, help to cure them of their loyalty to the Stuarts. Again, in 1739, one prophetic commentator had observed:
They [the Highlanders] are a numerous and prolifick People; and, if reformed in their Principles, and Manners, and usefully employ’d, might be made a considerable Accession of Power and Wealth to Great Britain. Some Clans of Highlanders, well instructed in the Arts of War, and well affected to the Government, would make as able and formidable a body for their Country’s Defence, as Great Britain, or Switzerland, or any part of Europe was able to produce.1
But vengeance, subjugation and punishment were at first the preferred responses after the failure of the ’45. The Duke of Cumberland spoke for most of the victorious Hanoverians when he urged mass transportation of the rebels to the colonies rather than recruitment of the disaffected to the crown. The early history of the Black Watch, which had been recruited from clans loyal to the British state, also suggested caution. True, the regiment had distinguished itself at the Battle of Fontenoy, fought a few weeks after Culloden in May 1745, in what is now Belgian territory, during the War of the Austrian Succession. But the decision was still taken not to garrison it in Scotland but in England south of the Thames, and afterwards in Ireland between 1749 and 1755. Clearly even loyal Gaels were not to be fully trusted until long after the ’45. But the idea of recruiting Highlanders did not fade away. The concept was advanced again in 1754 and 1755, only to falter against the express opposition of the King and Cumberland. However, attitudes then changed the following year. The arrival of a new Prime Minister, William Pitt, in 1756 signalled a more overt commitment to ‘a blue-water policy’ which advantaged colonial expansion over European commitment. An increased supply of fresh and reliable soldiers was thought vital, not least because of the outbreak of the Seven Years War with France in 1756, a conflict which more than any before was to be fought in the colonial theatre. The catastrophic defeat inflicted by the French and their Indian allies on the forces of General Edward Braddock on the Monongahela River in Pennsylvania, with the loss of two thirds of his command killed or wounded, did much to concentrate Pitt’s mind. The ‘Great War for Empire’ was now going very badly and the Prime Minister was also known for his resolute opposition to the use of foreign mercenaries to strengthen the British military. The only realistic alternative, therefore, was to raise more troops from domestic sources. By early 1757 even the Duke of Cumberland had agreed to the employment of Highland levies. Two additional battalions were sanctioned, commanded by Simon Fraser, son of the executed Jacobite Lord Lovat, and Archibald Montgomery, later Earl of Eglinton. By the end of the war ten more Highland regiments were ready for action. They were the first of many which served not only during the Seven Years War but later in the American and Napoleonic campaigns. In 1766 Pitt looked back on the practice he had introduced in a famous speech:
I sought for merit wherever it was to be found; it is my boast that I was the first minister who looked for it and found it in the mountains of the north. I called it forth and drew into your service a hardy and intrepid race of men, who, when left by your jealousy, became a prey to the artifice of your enemies, and had gone nigh to have overturned the state in the war before the last.
These men in the last war were brought to combat on your side; they served with fidelity, as they fought with valour and conquered for you in every part of the world.2
Pitt had made the final executive decision but the mass recruitment of Highlanders was not his own idea. The Secretary of War, Lord Barrington, had already told Parliament in 1751 that he was all for having ‘as many Scottish soldiers as possible in the army’ and ‘of all the Scottish soldiers I should choose to have and keep in our army as many Highlanders as possible’.3 A sea-change had taken place in government thinking, in part because the destruction of the Jacobite threat was now recognized to be so complete that the menace of Stuart counter-revolution had been removed once and for all. The Highlands, unlike Ireland, no longer posed an internal security threat and mass recruitment into the forces of the crown could therefore proceed with all speed. At the same time, however, the old ingrained fear of disaffection took time to wholly dissipate, and so Highland troops were not to be allowed to linger long in Scotland after training but were rapidly despatched overseas. Thus it was that the Highlanders soon came to be publicly acknowledged as the crack troops of imperial warfare, with experience of battle in North America, the West Indies and India, enduring long and arduous tours of duty in foreign climes lasting over several years from which many never returned, either dying in service or settling the expanding Empire in order to avoid the threat of rent racking and clearance in the homeland.
English perception of the ’45 was crucial to an understanding of the high levels of recruitment eventually achieved. Highlanders had first impressed themselves on the British state as warriors, and formidable ones at that. The terrifying charge and slashing broadswords which routed Sir John Cope’s regulars at Prestonpans in less than thirty minutes were not easily forgotten. Even in the carnage of Culloden the following year it was acknowledged by officers of the crown that the rebel army had performed with remarkable fortitude and almost suicidal tenacity. Over time, therefore, a myth developed and hardened. Jacobite clansmen had indeed followed the wrong cause but they had done so only at the behest of their chiefs. Throughout they had displayed not only heroism in battle but undying loyalty. In bestselling publications like Young Juba: or the History of the Young Chevalier and Ascanius, or the Young Adventurer, the story of the ‘Prince in the Heather’ enchanted a growing readership throughout the British Isles. They told how, after Culloden, Bonnie Prince Charlie was never betrayed by his followers despite the high price on his head. Government came to believe that these virtues of loyalty and courage were founded on the ethic of clanship, of a martial society which had long ago vanished from the rest of Britain. For this reason the government tried to keep Gaels together in ‘Highland regiments’ under their ‘natural’ leaders, the chiefs and fir-tacsa. Fraser’s Highlanders (71st of Foot) had no fewer than six chiefs of clans among its officers, as well as several clan gentry. Paradoxically, therefore, while the British government was wholly bent on destroying clanship on the ground as a menace to the state, it was also at the same time trying to reinforce clan allegiances through recruitment to clan-based Highland regiments. The intriguing feature was that clanship was almost dead by the 1750s, through a cycle of decline which was soon to accelerate in the later eighteenth century because of enhanced commercialization of estates and clearance of their people. But the government continued to hold fast to the belief that the Highlander was a natural warrior, an assumption also constantly reinforced by Highland landowners who milked the glamorous and famed image of clanship in order to win profitable contracts from government for recruitment into their family regiments.
One of the reasons why Lowland and Border magnates were so much less successful in the business of eighteenth-century military entrepreneurship was that they lacked this key marketing advantage of clan reputation in the competitive bidding process. Another was that in the 1750s at least they did not benefit from the government’s policy of using military patronage to draw the teeth of residual Jacobite disaffection. During the Seven Years War some of this was targeted on recalcitrant Highland families. Thus Fraser’s Regiment was not only headed by the son of an executed Jacobite but also included several kinfolk of notorious rebels among the officers. One of them was the brother of Ewen Macpherson of Cluny, who had famously hidden in a specially designed cage on Ben Alder in Badenoch for seven years after Culloden. He had set up the first private casino in Gaeldom, before finally escaping into permanent exile in France. Indeed, some supporters of the ‘old cause’ were able to successfully rehabilitate themselves in the eyes of the crown by their loyal service in imperial war. While it would be wrong to exaggerate the number of former Jacobites in the new kilted battalions, the presence even of a few of them did give an ironic twist to the colonial campaigns in America. Several of the line regiments which had fought against Highlanders during the ’45 now found themselves as comrades of the former rebels in the war against the French. Lascelle’s 47th Foot had been shattered by the charge of the clans at Prestonpans. But on the Plains of Abraham, outside Quebec, they joined with Fraser’s Highlanders to pursue the fleeing French in the decisive battle which won Canada for the British. General James Wolfe, the commander of the army that day, had himself faced the Jacobite clans on Culloden Moor as a junior officer in April 1746. He served in Barrell’s Regiment, which was later known as Duroure’s 4th Foot, and it had suffered the most intense and violent Highland charge on the left flank of the Hanoverian line at Culloden. During the Seven Years War, however, it combined with Highland levies to great effect in the Caribbean campaigns.
The foundation therefore had been laid for greater expansion of Highland recruitment between 1775 and 1783 and again, and in even greater numbers, in the French wars between 1793 and 1815. The higher echelons of the British military now became influenced by German military dogma which suggested that people of mountainous regions were especially suited to the martial life. David Stewart of Garth’s Sketches of the Character, Manners, and Present State of the Highlanders of Scotland, with Details of the Military Service of the Highland Regiments, first published in 1822, was the most influential text on the Highland soldier in Victorian times. Stewart of Garth contended that the perfect warrior had been formed by ‘nature’ in Highland Scotland:
Nursed in poverty he acquired a hardihood which enabled him to sustain severe privations. As the simplicity of his life gave vigour to his body, so it fortified his mind. Possessing a frame and constitution thus hardened he was taught to consider courage as the most honourable virtue, cowardice the most disgraceful failing.4
Enlightenment ideas further fortified beliefs. The ‘stage’ theory of the development of human civilization, propounded by such Scottish intellectuals as Adam Ferguson and John Miller, fitted perfectly with the stereotype of the Highlander as an outstanding soldier. It was contended that the Highlands remained fixed in a period long ago when militarism was a way of life. Ferguson, for instance, argued that the Gaels were not interested in the ‘commercial arts’ but by their very nature were more disposed to making war. A parallel notion also soon became popular. Highlanders could be easily spared from ordinary manual labour for the duties of soldiering because their economy was so impoverished compared with the rest of the British Isles that the loss in terms of resources to the state was minimal.
There was more than enough actual evidence during ‘the Great War for Empire’ to justify beliefs like these. Statesmen who were accustomed to the slow, hard slog of army and navy recruitment were astonished at the speed with which the first Highland regiments were formed. Simon Fraser obtained his commission to raise a new battalion in January 1757. By March of that year he had already recruited over 1,100 men under arms and during the war itself the new formation performed with great distinction. In another alliance Major Hector Munro won the Battle of Buxar in India in October 1764 with the help of detachments of the 89th Regiment. This was the victory which effectively completed the British conquest of Bengal. Munro was no stranger to the Highlands, having once hunted Cluny Macpherson as a fugitive after Culloden. The Black Watch played a major role against the Indian nations in the brutal campaign known as Pontiac’s War in America in 1763. Among other Highland battle honours were the capture of the great French fortress at Louisburg on Cape Breton, the key to the St Lawrence river, and Wolfe’s even more decisive victory over the French.
By 1757 the number of Highlanders had reached 4,200 out of a total of 24,000 British regulars in North America. Despite only being a sixth of the whole, they were able to maintain a high profile. Colonial warfare was different from the formalized rituals of the European theatre. Guerrilla actions were much more common and raids, retreats and ambushes were the stock-in-trade of the Cherokees, Micmacs and other tribal allies of the French in the wilderness. The Highlanders were not only among the most adept British troops at responding to these tactics but were also some of the most ruthless in crushing the Indian enemy. By its nature wilderness warfare was ferocious, with prisoners and wounded liable to be tomahawked, scalped and disembowelled. Gaels used the same techniques of total war employed by ‘Butcher’ Cumberland’s men after Culloden in genocidal campaigns against the Indian nations between 1760 and 1764.
But it was not all a series of uninterrupted triumphs. Those battalions posted to Guadeloupe and Havana lost countless men to yellow fever and malaria. The habit of using Highlanders as shock troops in battles of attrition could also sometimes have devastating consequences. At Ticonderoga on 7 July 1758, the Black Watch, which formed part of the British force, lost 8 officers, 9 sergeants and 299 other ranks killed, and 17 other officers, 10 sergeants and 306 other ranks wounded. Yet, by these bloody sacrifices the Gaels not only finally sealed their loyalty to the House of Hanover but ensured that the Highlands became the government’s favourite recruiting ground in the imperial wars of the future. The Highland levies had come to be regarded as the expendable cannon fodder of the Empire with feared reputations among the enemies of Britain. Stewart of Garth recalled that to the French they were the ‘Sauvages d’Écosse’:
they believed that they would neither take nor give quarter, … and that no man had a chance against their broadswords; and that with a ferocity natural to savages, they made no prisoners, and spared neither man, woman nor child … they were always in the front of every action in which they were engaged.5
A long tradition based largely on innumerable regimental histories has it that the Highland battalions of the later eighteenth century were the direct heirs of the clans. Their values were also said to be those of clanship: courage, loyalty, endurance and, above all, an innate capacity for making violent war. Yet any resemblance between the old clans and the regiments was at best superficial, which was hardly surprising since recruitment boomed at the very time when Highland society was in the process of fundamental change from tribalism to capitalism. Indeed, the mania for raising family regiments does not fit into a model of neo-clanship but rather one of rampant commercialism. Landowners were now military entrepreneurs rather than patriarchal chieftains. They harvested the population of their estates for the army in order to make money, in the same way as they established sheep walks, cattle ranches and kelp shores. But such profiteering had to be managed behind the façade of clan loyalties and martial enthusiasms because it was these very attributes which gave the Highlands a competitive edge in the military labour market in the eyes of government during the later eighteenth century. Even sophisticated and cynical politicians like Henry Dundas were taken in. During the Napoleonic Wars he exuded praise for the clansmen and their ‘chiefs’, enthusiastically approved of the great scheme to embody even more of them in 1797, and applauded the Highland warriors for their hostility to the pernicious ‘levelling and dangerous principles’ of the urban radicals of the time.6
In fact, recruitment to the army provided many benefits for the Highland élites. Raising a regiment promised lucrative commissions not only for a landlord but also for his kinsmen and associates. It also conferred influence and patronage in the neighbourhood among other impoverished minor gentry who desperately sought regimental officerships and the secure incomes and pensions which came with them. Local power and standing were increased while military service also consolidated close connections with government. The rewards could be substantial. Sir James Grant, whose estates were heavily encumbered with debt, won a sinecure worth £3,000 a year and the lord lieutenancy of Inverness in 1794. Mackenzie of Seaforth, who like most Highland landowners suffered from acute and perennial financial difficulties, did even better. In quick succession he became Lord Lieutenant of Ross in 1794, Lord Seaforth in the English peerage in the same year, and, in 1800, Governor of Barbados. But there were also more direct and equally desirable advantages. Dividing up lands for soldiers could provide an estate with more regular rentals than were likely to accrue from the small tenantry whose payments were notoriously volatile because of partial harvest failure and market fluctuation. The military had a secure income not only when on active service but also as half-pay officers in peacetime and from pensions when they retired. There is evidence, therefore, that several proprietors showed a clear preference for securing these ‘martial’ tenants for their estates.
The Warrants or Beating Orders issued by the Secretary of War, allowing the raising of a new corps, authorized the recruitment of officers and men, the numbers involved and the bounties to be paid to recruits when they joined. The cost of bounties rose dramatically in the later eighteenth century as the army’s needs for more and more rank and file seemed unending. Average bounty levels for Highland recruits were £3 per man in 1757 but had climbed to £21–£30 by 1794. Landlords in the north of Scotland pocketed bounties, but rather than paying them in full to recruits used land on their estates as a substitute reward to those who were prepared to join up. Tenants were also expected to supply a family member or, if not, a ‘purchased man’, whose bounty was paid by the tenant himself. Through this mechanism, landlords made huge profits which during wartime equalled and sometimes even surpassed the income from their agricultural earnings. Recruitment was indeed ‘More Fruitful than the Soil’.7 There was also an expectation by landowners that those who lived on their estates would accept recruitment. When this did not happen willingly, systematic coercion was employed. Estate records teem with examples. Alexander Macdonnel of Glengarry ordered his agent to ‘warn out’ a list of small tenants from his Knoydart property, they ‘having refused to serve me’. Similarly, MacLean of Lochbuie, on the island of Mull, threatened to remove seventy-one tenants, cottars and their families in 1795 because they had not been prepared to provide sons for service. On several estates, the tradition of ‘land for sons’ became commonplace. In the papers of Lord Macdonald covering his extensive lands on Skye, a document is headed ‘List of Tenants who have been promised Lands and an exchange of lands for their sons’. These contracts were often very specific, outlining the length of leases and the tenurial arrangements related to sons being traded for land. In the long run, however, they generated angry controversy. Many recruits never returned and were buried in foreign graves after falling in battle or, more commonly, dying from disease. To the families, therefore, their holdings had often been acquired or secured, quite literally, by the blood of their kinfolk. When these obligations were cast aside, for whatever reason, the people were likely to feel that a gross breach of trust had been committed. Lands for sons added an emotional edge to Highland history which was entirely missing from that of the rural Lowlands during improvement. This was another factor helping to explain the different emotional responses in each region to dispossession.
Donald MacLeod’s Gloomy Memories in the Highlands of Scotland was just one of several polemics to draw attention in angry and emotive prose to this aspect of recruitment and which must have made a powerful impression on his Victorian readership. He declared: ‘The children and nearest relations of those who sustained the honour of the British name in many a bloody field – the heroes of Egypt, Toulouse, Salamanca and Waterloo – were ruined, trampled upon, dispersed and compelled to seek an asylum across the Atlantic.’8 Alexander Mackenzie, in his bestselling The History of the Highland Clearances (1883), also launched a bitter attack on those proprietors who had perpetuated crimes of betrayal against the nation’s finest soldiers:
in their names, the fathers, mothers, brothers, wives, of the invincible ‘78th’ [a regiment raised on the estate of the Duke of Sutherland] had been remorselessly driven from their native soil … were Britain some twenty years hence to have the misfortune to be plunged into such a crisis as the present, there will be few such men as the Highlanders of the 78th to fight her battles if another policy towards the Highlands is not adopted, that sheep and deer, ptarmigan and grouse, can do but little to save it in such a calamity.9
It should be remembered also that when Mackenzie published his powerful condemnation of landlordism in the 1880s, the Highland regiments were at the very pinnacle of their fame. One historian has noted that ‘Highlanders were the most fêted of all Victorian soldiers’, while another described how there was a ‘Victorian cult of the Highlanders’.10 So potent was their appeal at the time that the Scottish military in general became Highlandized when Lowland regiments were ordered to be dressed in doublets and tartan trews.
Military entrepreneurship brought considerable short-term profit to proprietors but could also lead to long-term loss of public reputation for some of their descendants. Moreover, the earnings from the military economy only lasted for a relatively short time from the 1750s to the later 1790s. By that decade the numbers being recruited in the Highlands were in dramatic decline. Yet, over the period of good earnings, this ephemeral stream of estate income had boosted the consumerist culture of many landlords and so aggravated their long-term crisis of indebtedness.
Promises of land to recruits were also fraught with long-term danger. Without them recruitment could not have taken place on such an immense scale as the only alternative was to pay money bounties to each soldier. But that would have been intolerably costly, sometimes averaging expenditure up to a third or more of the rental income of a large estate, to recruit a single formation of regimental size. Also, in order not to remove the rent-paying tenants from work on the land, proprietors mainly tended to recruit semi-landless cottars who paid nothing in rent into the coffers of the estate. But cottar families then expected to be rewarded with some land in return for the service of their menfolk. The only way to satisfy these obligations was to break up larger holdings into crofts, or divide crofts into even smaller lots. On the Duke of Argyll’s estate on the Ross of Mull in 1806, a number of those pressing for land were soldiers and their families. As a result, approval was given to divide up some of the medium-sized farms. Again, in Sleat on Skye and in Lewis, several townships were also crofted to accommodate veterans and their dependants. By anchoring an increasing part of the population in such semi-economic smallholdings, landlords reduced the possibility of building up more substantial and resilient farms. It was the very antithesis of the policy of land consolidation pursued throughout most of the Lowlands.
The subdivision of scarce land was soon made even worse by population growth which left large numbers of almost destitute smallholders relying on the potato crop when bi-employments, including military recruitment, went into decline or vanished altogether after 1815. These poor communities, however, did not, unlike those surveyed in the next chapter, have the resources to emigrate and so they clung on to their patches of land despite growing difficulties. Eventually, many landlords came to the conclusion that they had no alternative but to force them out, if they were to avoid having to assume responsibility for their welfare, which might in turn bring financial ruin to themselves and their own families.