Britain’s Last Frontier Page 24
An important part of William Roy’s map-making was undermined by forgery. While compiling surveys for his great work, Roy also drew excellent ground plans of surviving Roman camps, some of which would later be destroyed by deep ploughing. But, unfortunately, the army geographer based his understanding of Roman Britain on faulty history. In 1747, Charles Bertram, a writer and teacher of English, announced his discovery of ‘De Situ Britanniae’, ‘The Description of Britain’. Purporting to be an account written by a serving Roman general, it had been miraculously preserved in a manuscript copied by Richard of Cirencester, a 14th-century monk. It was especially imaginative in describing Roman Scotland, listing the name of (fictional) peoples and (fictional) places. Perhaps the most famous invented name is one that survives. Bertram’s (fictional) general wrote:
This province is divided into two equal parts by a chain of mountains called the Pennine Alps, which rising on the confines of the Iceni and Carnabii, near the river Trivona, extend towards the north in a continued series of fifty miles.
Taking its name from the Apennines, the mountain range that runs down the spine of Italy, the Pennines now appears on legitimate maps while Bertram’s forgery has been forgotten.
A great philosopher stood in the way of the charge of Dillon’s Irish Brigade that day and may have fought in the ranks of the Black Watch when they themselves had attacked the French. Adam Ferguson wrote the enormously influential An Essay on the History of Civil Society, published in 1767, and his influence on the European Enlightenment was definitive. Believing that civilisation is largely based on the acceptance of laws that restrict the independence of individuals but ensure that society enjoys the collective liberty underwritten by security and justice, he warned that social chaos usually led to despotism. Ferguson especially informed the thinking of Adam Smith and, as Professor of Natural Philosophy at Edinburgh University, he stood at the centre of progressive intellectual life.
Whatever his other great gifts, Adam Ferguson was possessed of tremendous physical courage. Born at Logierait in Highland Perthshire, he was a native Gaelic speaker. This facility and a certain amount of theological study at St Andrews University qualified him for his first paid appointment as chaplain to the Black Watch. Many regiments in the British army have a prayer they recite before battle and that of Ferguson’s regiment was one of the earliest. It is known as a Collect and their chaplain led the men of the Black Watch in a brief moment of worship before the guns boomed out over Fontenoy, a prayer that recalled their origins clearly:
O God, whose strength setteth fast the mountains,
Lord of the hills to whom we lift our eyes:
Grant us grace that we, of the Black Watch,
Once chosen to watch the mountains of an earthly kingdom,
May stand fast in the faith and be strong,
Until we come to the heavenly kingdom of Him,
Who has bidden us watch and pray,
Thy Son, our Saviour and Lord.
The Highlanders of the Black Watch respected their young chaplain profoundly. After the Collect was said and the ranks closed up, Ferguson then spoke briefly about what was expected. Their conduct as soldiers should encompass four cardinal virtues and the chaplain expressed them concisely in Gaelic – coir was what was proper, ceart was what was right, dligeach was what was necessary for a soldier to do and dileas was the need for unconditional loyalty. And these exhortations were no matter of theory for Ferguson. He aimed to practise them himself. The Highland historian, Robert Stewart of Garth, spoke to men who had been at Fontenoy and this is an incident that remained in their memories:
When the regiment was taking its ground on the morning of battle, Sir Robert Munro perceived the Chaplain in the ranks, and, with a friendly caution, told him that there was no necessity to expose himself to unnecessary danger, and that he should be out of the line of fire. Mr Ferguson thanked Sir Robert for his friendly advice, but added, on this occasion he had a duty which he was imperiously called upon to perform.
Accordingly he continued with the regiment for the whole of the action, in the hottest of the fire, praying with the dying, attending to the wounded, and directing them to be carried to a place of safety.
By his fearless zeal, his intrepidity, and his friendship towards the soldiers (several of whom had been his schoolfellows at Dunkeld), his amiable and cheerful manners, checking with severity when necessary, mixing among them with ease and familiarity, and being as ready as any of them with a poem or heroic tale, he acquired an unbounded ascendancy over them.
What is moving is Ferguson’s instinctive understanding that wounded or dying soldiers of the Black Watch wished to be spoken to in Gaelic, in the language of their mothers and families, the soft spoken tongue of the mountains and green glens of home. His bravery in battle was not that of earlier churchmen – the warlike bishops and abbots who led men on to the killing fields of Flodden or Bannockburn. It was different and perhaps more difficult to have the courage to ignore the din and chaos of fighting, the roar of the cannon and the snap of musketry and kneel down beside a fallen countryman and console him with a Gaelic prayer or help orderlies take him behind the lines.
Despite his origins in Highland Perthshire, Adam Ferguson was emphatically not a Jacobite. Intellectually and practically he could not support the restoration of a dynasty inclined to absolutism and whose kings had caused widespread and bitter civil war in Britain and Ireland. But he was a man of action and, as one of the greatest minds of the Scottish Enlightenment, not unusual in that. When Prince Charles and his Highland army approached Edinburgh on 15 September 1745, the city’s Defence Volunteers mustered at the Tolbooth in the High Street. Amongst the 400 men who formed up in ranks was David Hume, perhaps the greatest philosopher of the age. When they were ordered to man the city gates and confront the Highland hordes, the number of volunteers dwindled drastically to only 42. But one who did not slink off down a close was Hume. Like Adam Ferguson, he was prepared to act in defence of his principles as well as his city and risk his life if necessary.
James Macpherson saw Scotland and the Highlands in particular in a different light – a Celtic twilight. Born the son of a farmer in Ruthven, near Kingussie, he was a Gaelic speaker and, from the first, he was aware of the turns of the troubled history of Highland and Lowland. Macpherson grew up in the shadow of Ruthven Barracks, built after the 1715 Jacobite Rebellion and the site of one of the castles of the Wolf of Badenoch. In 1753, the young scholar matriculated at Aberdeen’s two universities, attending King’s College before moving to Marischal College. After a year teaching at the school in his native village, ambition stirred in James Macpherson. At Aberdeen, he was said to have written more than 4,000 lines of verse and, as the familiar comforts of home in Ruthven began to fade, the restless young man moved to Edinburgh in 1758 to pursue a life in letters.
‘The Highlander’, a heroic rendition of deeds done at the obscure Battle of Cullen (in Banffshire), was said to have been so bad that its author tried to suppress it. But some modern scholars are less damning and a recent study has revealed much about Macpherson’s method of working. Set in the 10th century, the poem borrowed heavily from John of Fordun’s Chronicle even to the extent of lifting phrases as well as names and events. Out of the medieval mixture of narrative, tradition and myth-history, Macpherson constructed a plausible plot. And some of the writing is better than the author’s own estimate. Here is his description of the clash of battle at Cullen as the Scots attack the Vikings, the Danes:
The full form’d columns in the midnight hour
Begin their silent journey t’wards the shore
Within the womb of night.
. . .
Confirm the troops and arm the youth for fight.
. . .
Onward they rush, and in a shout engage.
The swords thro’ air their gleaming journeys fly,
Crash on the helms and tremble in the sky.
Groan follows groan, and wound succeeds wound,
While dying bodies quiver on the ground.
. . .
The Danes beholding their commander die,
Start from their ranks and in confusion fly.
Later in the narrative comes a fascinating passage, a prophesy from a hermit.
See Scot and Saxon coalesc’d in one,
Support the glory of the common crown.
Britain no more shall shake with native storms
But o’er the trembling nations lift her arms.
Written only ten years after Culloden by a Gaelic speaker born in the heart of the Highlands, the poem and its prophesy are an affirmation of Britishness, the common crown being that on the head of George II, the native storms the Jacobite Rebellions and the trembling nations those waiting to be drawn into the burgeoning British Empire. And more than that, ‘The Highlander’ was the first step in Macpherson’s attempt to discover – and, if necessary, reconstruct – a national epic not for the Highlands or for Scotland but for a united Britain. Just as Imperial Rome had her Virgil to sing of heroic origins and mighty Greece had Homer, the British Empire would need its founding heroes. Macpherson’s first coherent literary effort also shows the young writer not as a forger but as a patriotic adaptor.
On a visit to Moffat in Dumfriesshire, James Macpherson met John Home, a former minister of the Kirk who had, surprisingly, made a tremendous reputation as a playwright. In 1756, he wrote Douglas: A Tragedy. The plot began to form in his mind when Home heard a woman singing an ancient ballad known as ‘Gil Morrice’ and he wrote these lines to open the drama:
My name is Norval. On the Grampian Hills
My father feeds his flocks: a frugal swain,
Whose constant cares were to increase his store.
Verses much more alarming than anything written by James Macpherson, they nevertheless launched a hugely successful production in London. Sarah Siddons and David Garrick took leading parts and David Hume enthused, saying that Home possessed ‘the true theatric genius of Shakespeare’ but was even better. Thomas Gray, the famous author of ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, reckoned that the playwright ‘seemed to have retrieved the true language of the stage, which has been lost these hundred years’. And famously, one Scottish member of an ecstatic audience was said to have shouted, ‘Whaur’s yer Wullie Shakespeare noo?’ Such was the immense power of these romantic tales in the second half of the 18th century, a phenomenon that modern tastes find hard to fathom.
When James Macpherson met John Home in Moffat, he recited Gaelic poetry and showed him some manuscripts he said he had found in the Western Isles and the Highlands. Much encouraged by his listener (Did he have Gaelic? It’s unlikely since Home was born in Leith.) and perhaps impressed by the famous playwright’s dazzling success in London, Macpherson translated these and, in 1760, they were published in Edinburgh as Fragments of Ancient Poetry collected in the Highlands of Scotland and translated from the Gaelic or Erse Language. Hugh Blair, Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at Edinburgh University was a central figure in Scottish intellectual life and he not only endorsed Macpherson’s work but raised money for him to carry on recording poetry from the oral tradition in the north. In his expeditions into the interior, he was accompanied by a Captain Morrison and the Rev. Gallie. On a visit to Mull, Macpherson collected some early manuscripts.
Just as Walter Scott was to do in the Borders forty years later, Macpherson wrote down what he heard recited from memory. With rhyme schemes, repeating choruses and familiar conventions, poetry is designed for ease of recall and many women (they were usually the tradition bearers in many communities) could summon up dozens of lengthy compositions. In an age without commonly available printed books, aside from the Bible and other devotional literature, or indeed any other means of transmitting and telling stories, oral traditions in the Highlands – and in the Borders – were very rich. And, like Scott, Macpherson tended to edit and adapt what he heard and, where there were manuscripts, he would sometimes conflate material from different sources. But, in 1761, he took matters a stage further – and, for some, it was a stage too far.
James Macpherson claimed that he had rediscovered a lost epic poem by a bard he called Ossian. Complete and pristine, it told the heroic story of Fingal and its finder announced that he had translated it into English. A British epic poet to rival Homer and Virgil, Ossian’s great work was a sensation when it was revealed to the world. And it immediately became wildly and enduringly popular. More poems came to light and were translated and, in 1765, a collected edition, The Poems of Ossian, was published. Goethe translated parts of it into German, Napoleon carried a copy as he led the Grande Armée into Russia and great writers such as Blake, Thoreau, Byron, Scott and Arnold either praised or imitated Ossian, or both. Mendelssohn, Schubert and Brahms were inspired to compose music and the name Oscar (it appeared first in Ossian) was widely bestowed. In the USA, the city of Selma, Alabama, was named after Fingal’s palace. And of course, his remarkable cave is seen on Staffa by many thousands each year.
There were other reactions. Some literary figures were very suspicious. Dr Samuel Johnson called Macpherson ‘a mountebank, a liar and a fraud’. When calls for the ancient manuscripts of Ossian to be produced for examination were ignored, doubt intensified. The problem was that there was almost certainly no single manuscript – Macpherson had inflated and conflated what he had discovered as a sales ploy. David Hume remarked that ‘fifty bare-arsed Highlanders’ could not convince him. But Hugh Blair stood by the young author and wrote an introduction to the poems that supported their authenticity.
Somewhat embarrassed, the Committee of the Highland Society began an enquiry. What became known as the Glenmasan manuscript eventually came to light. It was certainly old and it contained material resembling some of what was to be found in Ossian. And, crucially, the respected figure of Adam Ferguson realised that the poems were not a fabrication. As a Gaelic speaker whose ear was tuned to the oral tradition of the Highlands, he could discern genuine elements. Modern Gaelic scholars have agreed with Ferguson’s general assessment. The problem was that Macpherson over-claimed – there never was a manuscript but the work was full of genuine references. Many of the names had been anglicised or slightly changed. Fingal is from Fionn MacCumhaill, Temora is Tara, Dar-Thula is Deirdre of the Sorrows and so on. It seems clear that, in pursuit of a Homeric creator, Macpherson did a great deal of reorganisation and invention to create a coherent narrative.
Leaving aside the controversy, perhaps the most profound effect of the Ossian poems was to change perceptions radically. From being the redoubt of wild savagery and sedition, the Highlands very quickly became the fount of romance. Instead of the rainswept home of a rabble of cattle-stealing, Gaelic-speaking primitives, the mountains and glens had once seen noble kings, beautiful princesses and great and brave warriors and picturesque palaces. The shades of long-lost heroes loomed out of the mists swirling around the dark heads of the mountains. And, from the 1760s onwards, the Highlands began to fit the romance of its imagined past as the emigrations emptied the glens and straths and a working landscape slowly decayed into scenery, a vacant stage set for epic tales.
A generation after Ossian, Walter Scott accelerated the disconnection between reality and myth-history as he sat down to write the first of his long narrative poems. Drawing on his own work in collecting the oral traditions of Borders poetry and balladry and setting it in print in The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Scott brought many historical elements together in The Lay of the Last Minstrel. It told the tale of a Border feud and involved the poet’s own patrons, the Buccleuchs, and how they sheltered an old bard. Selling 27,000 copies in ten years, the poem was well reviewed and very lucrative. The public demanded more. Scott did not stray far for his next theme. Marmion focused on the Battle of Flodden of 1513 and, when it was published in 1808, the first edition of 2,000 copies sold out in two months even though the cover price was thought to be exorbitant. It sparkled with incident a
nd good writing. Stanza 17 in Canto VI contained a couplet that would become famous:
Yet Clare’s sharp questions must I shun
Must separate Constance from the nun.
Oh! What a tangled web we weave
When first we practise to deceive!
A Palmer too! No wonder why
I felt rebuked beneath his eye.
These were remarkable sales figures – the statistics of the first true best-sellers. Printers could scarcely keep up with demand as Scott’s popularity changed the publishing industry.
For his third major work, the great poet turned away from home and looked to the Highlands, to a location very close to the Highland Line. When Scott and his family took a holiday in the Trossachs, a series of small, beautiful, wooded glens between Loch Venachar and Loch Katrine, his imagination took flight and he began to work on what became The Lady of the Lake. A tale of chivalry and of enmity between Highland and Lowland, between the clans and the king, it did not shy away from recently incendiary issues. After resolving some difficulties with character and plot, Scott sent the poem for publication in 1810. It was a sensation. In only eight months, The Lady of the Lake sold 25,000 copies and was sent for sale all over the world. Scott became the most famous living author and was lionised from Paris to Washington. It seemed that The Lady of the Lake had ignited the romantic interest in the Highlands that had first been stirred by James Macpherson’s Ossian.
Franz Schubert set parts of Scott’s new poem to music and, in London, it was dramatised, without permission, with its songs set to music by James Sanderson. Versions were staged in the USA and one song, ‘The Boat Song’, achieved an unlikely pre-eminence. The music was played when President John Quincy Adams opened the Chesapeake Ohio Canal and again at the inauguration of President James K. Polk. After that, it was decided that the song should be heard every time the President of the United States appeared at a formal occasion. The opening line written by Scott was of course ‘Hail to the Chief’. The chief in the poem was Roderick Dhu, Black Rory, a warlike character who preferred to use force rather than rely on the rule of law.