The Heart of Scotland

by A. R. Hope Moncrieff

For long after Scotland had developed into a vertebrate organism, its heart beat in the geographical centre. Its kings were crowned at Scone, Charles II. the last of them, when indeed the immemorial sanctity of that Pictish palace had fallen into some disesteem. The adjacent city of Perth, with its Castle, its Cathedral, and its four monasteries, was the Winchester of Scotland, as Scone the Westminster. The early Parliaments met at Perth more often than at other towns that might suit the convenience of kings who had to be much on the move through their agitated dominion. During the English intrusion, Perth was garrisoned by the Edwards’ lieutenants, and suffered repeated attacks from Wallace and Bruce, who found concealment and rallying-place in the wild woods within a few miles of the city walls. The honour of being the capital was not definitely taken from Perth till the murder of James I. showed it too near the stormy Highlands, while the Dunedin citadel seemed no longer in close peril from the English side.

Before the seat of government came to be fixed at Edinburgh, king and parliament are often found at Stirling, with Linlithgow for the Versailles of Scottish Royalty. Perth still held a high place, recognised by a decree of James VI. as second in the kingdom. Down to the end of his reign, its Provosts were as often as not the great lords of the neighbourhood. It had a leading voice in national opinion. Some of the earliest martyrs suffered here; then here broke out the first tumult of the Reformation. Later on, it became a hot focus of Presbyterian and Covenanting zeal; and after the popular worship had been firmly established, it was around Perth that sprang up several of its sectarian offshoots.

Accident of situation rather than its own choice again made Perth a centre of affairs, when Mar’s melting army lay here through the winter of 1715, watching King George’s force at Stirling; and the forlorn Old Pretender reached Scone in time to chill the spirits of his partisans, already too near freezing-point. Prince Charlie made a more dashing appearance at Perth for a few days; but when he had marched on, the douce burghers let it be seen that their hearts did not go with him. They more warmly received the Duke of Cumberland, as representing the orderly settlement that was good for trade. The wild Highlandman, with his uncanny weapons and his unbusiness-like sentiments, was here looked on as suspiciously as the Red Indian warrior in a border city of America, who in New York or Philadelphia would draw more sympathy or staring curiosity. The Fair City, while willing to keep friends with the Tory lairds whose names have been familiar to her for centuries, cast her douce vote for prosperity and progress. In the Georgian age she gained some such reputation as Norwich in England, cultivating arts and letters as well as trade, and becoming known, in a modest way, by her printing presses, of which the Encyclopædia Perthensis was the most notable production.

Meanwhile, the blending of once hostile races had gone on faster in the centre of Scotland than at its extremities. Where first a national government had come into being, a higher organisation of tribal life was evolved. Here, as elsewhere, civilisation proceeded by steps over which civilised philanthropy shakes its head. The Perthshire Highlands, not to speak of Strathmore, contained fertile straths and valleys that offered themselves as cheap reward for the followers and favourites of Scottish kings. Norman, Saxon, and still farther-fetched adventurers got charters to make good by the sword against the sons of the soil. Its lords, native or fremd, lost and won at taking a hand in the general game of Scottish history, as when the abetters of Bruce turned out to have played on the right card, or again, when the murderers of James I. paid dearly for their crime, to the profit of those who hunted them down. But, in the main, plaids did not hold out against coats of mail, so that for centuries the great lords of Perthshire have been of Lowland origin. Like doughty Hal Smith of the

Wynd, the sons of the plain in old times had claws as sharp as the mountain cats’; it was only when cultivators and craftsmen had ceased to handle arms, unless for holiday sport, that a spate of Highland war could burst through the passes, even then soon to scatter and spend itself in the face of disciplined resistance.

But while those strangers rose to power and wealth upon the heather, they fell captive to its spirit, taking on the manners, sentiments, and dress of the dispossessed clans. The Stewarts from England, the Campbells from Ireland, was it? the Drummonds from Hungary or where? among other names of chivalrous antecedents, bloomed out as clans, with new tartans, feuds, and legends, to complicate the native pattern of flesh and blood; and in no long time they became more Highland than the Highlanders themselves. Most remarkable is the adoption of what has come to be called the Scottish national dress, which, according to some modern critics, ought rather to be the mackintosh. There was a time when Stewart or Murray looked on the plaid as badge of a savage foeman; there would be a time when the imported Highlanders grew as proud of kilt and bagpipes as if these had come down to them straight from Adam. All over the world have gone those badges of a race that gave them to its conquerors in exchange for its proudest blood. The cult of the tartan, revived in our own age by romantic literature and royal patronage, is an old story. One of the early emigrants to the Southern States of America is said to have rigged out all his negroes in kilts and such-like, teaching them also to speak Gaelic and to pipe and reel among cotton fields and cane swamps. But when one of those blackamoor retainers, liveried in a kilt, was sent to meet a practically-minded countryman landing from Scotland, the effect of so transmogrified a figure proved appalling. “Hae ye been long oot?” stammered the newcomer, and took his passage back by the next ship.

Away from Scotland, all true Scots carry over the world an outfit of which the colours, the trimmings, and the gewgaws come from the Highlands, while the hard-wearing qualities of the stuff are rather of Lowland manufacture. Both spinning and dyeing, I maintain, have best been done in Perthshire, a county of varied aspects, which set me the example of passing to a change of metaphor. It is in this central region that a right proportion of the Saxon dough and the Celtic yeast, baked for centuries by fires of love and war, have risen into the most crusty loaf of Scottish character. In the damp western Highlands and the cold north the baking may have been less effectual, producing a more spongy mass, not so full of nutriment, but more relished by some as a change from the stodginess of modern life. In some parts of the Lowlands, again, the dough turns out more dour and sour, not enough leavened by fermentations that leave it too leathery for all teeth. While all over Scotland there has been going on a more or less thorough interaction and coalescence of once repellent bodies, in Perthshire, I assert, the amalgamation has been most complete. “Hae ye been happy in yer jeels?” is a civil question I have heard one old wife ask of another. Here nature seems to have been happy in a due mixture of sweet and acid, shredded and stirred, boiled and moulded, with the success of Dundee marmalade.

The same fusion as between Highlander and Lowlander, between Norman and Saxon, it has been the work of time to bring about between Northerner and Southerner, the process there hindered by a fixed border-line of hostile memories, of variant creeds, customs, and laws, going to keep up natural antipathies. But such fences are now so much fallen down that there is little to stop different breeds from straggling on to one another’s fields, the movement indeed being mostly one way, since the leaner flock is more tempted from hill-sides eaten bare to the green pastures of the south. What is as yet a mechanical mixture tends to become a chemical one, as these wandering atoms find affinities in a fresh environment; then the substance of national life should be enriched, as every generation goes on incorporating the coarse good-humour and practical temper of the plainsman, with the generous affections and mettlesome hardihood of the mountaineer. The result as yet may be best seen in London, that crucible of blood and manners, where there are Englishmen who would fain affect to be Scots, and Scots who have forgotten all but their pride in Scotland. I met one such the other day in a train, who had his boy arrayed in a kilt, but neither of them knew what tartan it was. Where a Campbell wears the colours of a Cameron with indifference, he unconsciously continues what was begun by a Graham or a Gordon inventing a tartan for himself, and may end in plaid and tweed taking their turn of fashion with serge and broadcloth, when Tros Tyriusque are indistinguishably mixed in one name and nature.