CHAPTER IV.
Such of our readers as are acquainted with the memoir of Lady Glenorchy, must remember a deeply melancholy incident which occurred in the history of this excellent woman, in connection with the noble family of Sutherland. Her only sister had been married to William, seventeenth Earl of Sutherland,––‘the last of the good Earls;’ ‘a nobleman,’ says the Rev. Dr. Jones, in his Memoir, ‘who to the finest person united all the dignity and amenity of manners and character which give lustre to greatness.’ But his sun was destined soon to go down. Five years after his marriage, which proved one of the happiest, and was blessed with two children, the elder of the two, the young Lady Catherine, a singularly engaging child, was taken from him by death, in his old hereditary castle of Dunrobin. The event deeply affected both parents, and preyed on their health and spirits. It had taken place amid the gloom of a severe northern winter, and in the solitude of the Highlands; and, acquiescing in the advice of friends, the Earl and his lady quitted the family seat, where there was so much to remind them of their bereavement, and sought relief in the more cheerful atmosphere of Bath. But they were not to find it there. Shortly after their arrival, the Earl was seized by a malignant fever, with which, upheld by a powerful constitution, he struggled for fifty-four days, and then expired. ‘For the first twenty-one days and nights of these,’ says Dr. Jones, ‘Lady Sutherland never left his bedside; and then at last, overcome with fatigue, anxiety, and grief, she sank an unavailing victim to an amiable but excessive attachment, seventeen days before the death of her 416 lord.’ The period, though not very remote, was one in which the intelligence of events travelled slowly; and in this instance the distraction of the family must have served to retard it beyond the ordinary time. Her Ladyship’s mother, when hastening from Edinburgh to her assistance, alighted one day from her carriage at an inn, and, on seeing two hearses standing by the wayside, inquired of an attendant whose remains they contained? The remains, was the reply, of Lord and Lady Sutherland, on their way for interment to the Royal Chapel of Holyrood House. And such was the first intimation which the lady received of the death of her daughter and son-in-law.
The event was pregnant with disaster to Sutherland, though many years elapsed ere the ruin which it involved fell on that hapless county. The sole survivor and heir of the family was a female infant of but a year old. Her maternal grandmother, an ambitious, intriguing woman of the world, had the chief share in her general training and education; and she was brought up in the south of Scotland, of which her grandmother was a native, far removed from the influence of those genial sympathies with the people of her clan, for which the old lords of Sutherland had been so remarkable, and, what was a sorer evil still, from the influence of the vitalities of that religion which, for five generations together, her fathers had illustrated and adorned. The special mode in which the disaster told first, was through the patronages of the county, the larger part of which are vested in the family of Sutherland. Some of the old Earls had been content, as we have seen, to place themselves on the level of the Christian men of their parishes, and thus to unite with them in calling to their churches the Christian ministers of their choice. They knew,––what regenerate natures can alone know with the proper emphasis,––that in Christ Jesus the vassal ranks with his lord, and they conscientiously acted on the conviction. But matters 417 were now regulated differently. The presentation supplanted the call, and ministers came to be placed in the parishes of Sutherland without the consent and contrary to the will of the people. Churches, well filled hitherto, were deserted by their congregations, just because a respectable woman of the world, making free use of what she deemed her own, had planted them with men of the world who were only tolerably respectable; and in houses and barns the devout men of the district learned to hold numerously-attended Sabbath meetings for reading the Scriptures, and mutual exhortation and prayer, as a sort of substitute for the public services, in which they found they could no longer join with profit. The spirit awakened by the old Earls had survived themselves, and ran directly counter to the policy of their descendant. Strongly attached to the Establishment, the people, though they thus forsook their old places of worship, still remained members of the national Church, and travelled far in the summer season to attend the better ministers of their own and the neighbouring counties. We have been assured, too, from men whose judgment we respect, that, under all their disadvantages, religion continued peculiarly to flourish among them;––a deep-toned evangelism prevailed; so that perhaps the visible Church throughout the world at the time could furnish no more striking contrast than that which obtained between the cold, bald, commonplace services of the pulpit in some of these parishes, and the fervid prayers and exhortations which give life and interest to these humble meetings of the people. What a pity it is that differences such as these the Duke of Sutherland cannot see!
The marriage of the young countess into a noble English family was fraught with further disaster to the county. There are many Englishmen quite intelligent enough to perceive the difference between a smoky cottage of turf and a whitewashed cottage of stone, whose judgment on their 418 respective inhabitants would be of but little value. Sutherland, as a country of men, stood higher at this period than perhaps any other district in the British empire; but, as our descriptions in the preceding chapter must have shown,––and we indulged in them mainly with a view to this part of our subject,––it by no means stood high as a country of farms and cottages. The marriage of the Countess brought a new set of eyes upon it,––eyes accustomed to quite a different face of things. It seemed a wild, rude country, where all was wrong, and all had to be set right,––a sort of Russia on a small scale, that had just got another Peter the Great to civilise it,––or a sort of barbarous Egypt, with an energetic Ali Pasha at its head. Even the vast wealth and great liberality of the Stafford family militated against this hapless county: it enabled them to treat it as the mere subject of an interesting experiment, in which gain to themselves was really no object,––nearly as little so as if they had resolved on dissecting a dog alive for the benefit of science. It was a still further disadvantage, that they had to carry on their experiment by the hands, and to watch its first effects with the eyes, of others. The agonies of the dog might have had their softening influence on a dissector who held the knife himself; but there could be no such influence exerted over him, did he merely issue orders to his footman that the dissection should be completed, remaining himself, meanwhile, out of sight and out of hearing. The plan of improvement sketched out by his English family was a plan exceedingly easy of conception. Here is a vast tract of land, furnished with two distinct sources of wealth. Its shores may be made the seats of extensive fisheries, and the whole of its interior parcelled out into productive sheep-farms. All is waste in its present state: it has no fisheries, and two-thirds of its internal produce is consumed by the inhabitants. It had contributed, for the use of the community and the landlord, its large herds of black cattle; but 419 the English family saw, and, we believe, saw truly, that for every one pound of beef which it produced, it could be made to produce two pounds of mutton, and perhaps a pound of fish in addition. And it was resolved, therefore, that the inhabitants of the central districts, who, as they were mere Celts, could not be transformed, it was held, into store-farmers, should be marched down to the sea-side, there to convert themselves into fishermen, on the shortest possible notice, and that a few farmers of capital, of the industrious Lowland race, should be invited to occupy the new subdivisions of the interior.
And, pray, what objections can be urged against so liberal and large-minded a scheme? The poor inhabitants of the interior had very serious objections to urge against it. Their humble dwellings were of their own rearing; it was they themselves who had broken in their little fields from the waste; from time immemorial, far beyond the reach of history, had they possessed their mountain holdings,––they had defended them so well of old that the soil was still virgin ground, in which the invader had found only a grave; and their young men were now in foreign lands, fighting, at the command of their chieftainess, the battles of their country, not in the character of hired soldiers, but of men who regarded these very holdings as their stake in the quarrel. To them, then, the scheme seemed fraught with the most flagrant, the most monstrous injustice. Were it to be suggested by some Chartist convention in a time of revolution, that Sutherland might be still further improved––that it was really a piece of great waste to suffer the revenues of so extensive a district to be squandered by one individual––that it would be better to appropriate them to the use of the community in general––that the community in general might be still further benefited by the removal of the one said individual from Dunrobin to a road-side, where he might be profitably employed in breaking stones––and 420 that this new arrangement could not be entered on too soon––the noble Duke would not be a whit more astonished, or rendered a whit more indignant, by the scheme, than were the Highlanders of Sutherland by the scheme of his predecessor.
The reader must keep in view, therefore, that if atrocities unexampled in Britain for at least a century were perpetrated in the clearing of Sutherland, there was a species of at least passive resistance on the part of the people (for active resistance there was none), which in some degree provoked them. Had the Highlanders, on receiving orders, marched down to the sea-coast, and become fishermen, with the readiness with which a regiment deploys on review day, the atrocities would, we doubt not, have been much fewer. But though the orders were very distinct, the Highlanders were very unwilling to obey; and the severities formed merely a part of the means through which the necessary obedience was ultimately secured. We shall instance a single case, as illustrative of the process. In the month of March 1814, a large proportion of the Highlanders of Farr and Kildonan, two parishes in Sutherland, were summoned to quit their farms in the following May. In a few days after, the surrounding heaths on which they pastured their cattle, and from which at that season the sole supply of herbage is derived (for in those northern districts the grass springs late, and the cattle-feeder in the spring months depends chiefly on the heather), were set on fire and burnt up. There was that sort of policy in the stroke which men deem allowable in a state of war. The starving cattle went roaming over the burnt pastures, and found nothing to eat. Many of them perished, and the greater part of what remained, though in miserable condition, the Highlanders had to sell perforce. Most of the able-bodied men were engaged in this latter business at a distance from home, when the dreaded term-day came on. The pasturage had 421 been destroyed before the legal term, and while, in even the eye of the law, it was still the property of the poor Highlanders; but ere disturbing them in their dwellings, term-day was suffered to pass. The work of demolition then began. A numerous party of men, with a factor at their head, entered the district, and commenced pulling down the houses over the heads of the inhabitants. In an extensive tract of country not a human dwelling was left standing, and then, the more effectually to prevent their temporary re-erection, the destroyers set fire to the wreck. In one day were the people deprived of home and shelter, and left exposed to the elements. Many deaths are said to have ensued from alarm, fatigue, and cold. Pregnant women were taken with premature labour in the open air. There were old men who took to the woods and rocks in a state of partial insanity. An aged bedridden man, named Macbeath, had his house unroofed over his head, and was left exposed to wind and rain till death put a period to his sufferings. Another man lying ill of a fever met with no tenderer treatment, but in his case the die turned up life. A bedridden woman, nearly a hundred years of age, had her house fired over her head, and ere she could be extricated from the burning wreck, the sheets in which she was carried were on fire. She survived but for five days after. In a critique on the work of Sismondi, which appeared a few months since in the Westminster Review, the writer tells us, ‘it has even been said that an old man, having refused to quit his cabin, perished in the flames.’ But such was not the case. The constituted authorities interfered; a precognition was taken by the Sheriff-substitute of the county, and the case tried before the Justiciary Court at Inverness; but the trial terminated in the acquittal of the pannels. There was no punishable crime proven to attach to the agents of the proprietor.
Their acquittal was followed by scenes of a similar 422 character with the scene described, and of even greater atrocity. But we must borrow the description of one of these from the historian of the clearing of Sutherland,––Donald M’Leod, a native of the county, and himself a sufferer in the experimental process to which it was subjected:––
‘The work of devastation was begun by setting fire to the houses of the small tenants in extensive districts––Farr, Rogart, Golspie, and the whole parish of Kildonan. I was an eye-witness of the scene. The calamity came on the people quite unexpectedly. Strong parties for each district, furnished with faggots and other combustibles, rushed on the dwellings of the devoted people, and immediately commenced setting fire to them, proceeding in their work with the greatest rapidity, till about three hundred houses were in flames. Little or no time was given for the removal of persons or property––the consternation and confusion were extreme––the people striving to remove the sick and helpless before the fire should reach them––next struggling to save the most valuable of their effects––the cries of the women and children––the roaring of the affrighted cattle, hunted by the dogs of the shepherds amid the smoke and the fire––altogether composed a scene that completely baffles description. A dense cloud of smoke enveloped the whole country by day, and even extended far on the sea. At night, an awfully grand but terrific scene presented itself––all the houses in an extensive district in flames at once. I myself ascended a height about eleven o’clock in the evening, and counted two hundred and fifty blazing houses, many of the owners of which were my relations, and all of whom I personally knew, but whose present condition I could not tell. The conflagration lasted six days, till the whole of the dwellings were reduced to ashes or smoking ruins. During one of these days, a boat lost her way in the dense smoke as she approached the shore, but at night she 423 was enabled to reach a landing-place by the light of the flames.’
But, to employ the language of Southey,
‘Things such as these, we know, must be
At every famous victory.’
And in this instance the victory of the lord of the soil over the children of the soil was signal and complete. In little more than nine years a population of fifteen thousand individuals were removed from the interior of Sutherland to its sea-coasts, or had emigrated to America. The inland districts were converted into deserts, through which the traveller may take a long day’s journey, amid ruins that still bear the scathe of fire, and grassy patches betraying, when the evening sun casts aslant its long deep shadows, the half-effaced lines of the plough. The writer of the singularly striking passage we have just quoted, revisited his native place (Kildonan) in the year 1828, and attended divine service in the parish church. A numerous and devout congregation had once worshipped there: the congregation now consisted of eight shepherds and their dogs. In a neighbouring district––the barony of Strathnaver, a portion of the parish of Farr––the church, no longer found necessary, was razed to the ground. The timber was carried away to be used in the erection of an inn, and the minister’s house converted into the dwelling of a fox-hunter. ‘A woman well known in the parish,’ says M’Leod, ‘happening to traverse the Strath the year after the burning, was asked, on her return, What news? “Oh,” said she, “sgeul bronach, sgeul bronach! sad news, sad news! I have seen the timber of our kirk covering the inn at Altnaharran; I have seen the kirkyard, where our friends are mouldering, filled with tarry sheep, and Mr. Sage’s study-room a kennel for Robert Gun’s dogs.’” 424