Another system was that of ‘wadsets.’ A chief simply pawned a farm to a clansman, say Glengarry to Lochgarry, for a certain period, and for a certain sum of money. When he repaid the money, he recovered the farm. The wadsetter might build and improve, but no money was returned on redemption. The wadsetter sublet to tenants of either class, and either he or the Chief might make the better thing of the bargain. There were many poor wadsetters on a small scale. Colonel Trapaud accuses Glengarry of bullying his small wadsetters in Knoydart out of their wadsetts, and making them ‘accept of common interest.’[164] ‘The principal wadsetters refused, on which he ordered them out of his presence.’
Such was the system of a Highland estate; of its working more will be said later. On Glengarry’s death, his heir was his nephew, Duncan, a minor: Glengarry and the boy’s mother had been on the worst terms. In actual money, Glengarry’s rents, at the day of his death, were but 330l. yearly. The rent ‘uplifted’ by his wadsetters was larger. There were heavy debts, both on the estate and personal: the amount of the claims of Government I have nowhere found stated. Trustees ruled for the heir, who, however, must have been of age when Morar was sold to the Master of Lovat (Simon of the Forty-five) in 1768. This cleared the personal debts. In 1772, the new Glengarry wedded Miss Marjory Grant, eldest daughter of Sir Ludovick Grant of Dalvey. Mr. Fraser Mackintosh says that ‘regardless of sufferings, she strove with success to clear off the debts, to raise the rents, and generally to aggrandise the position of the Glengarry family.’
The wadsetts were paid off: the wadsetters must now be tenants, on increased rents, or go. Most of them emigrated to the New England States. Bad years came: the small tenants fell into arrears. In 1782, a year of famine, arrived the first sheep farmer from the Border. In 1785, fifty-five tenants were warned and removed, ‘say 300 souls.’ In 1786, 500 people emigrated under their priest, a Macdonnell of the Scothouse or Scotos family. They settled in Canada. They had fled from famine, as much as from increased rents.
Duncan Macdonnell died in 1788; his son was Sir Walter Scott’s Glengarry, ‘the last of the Chiefs,’ in costume and demeanour, but, it seems, a great evictor. The French war made Highland recruits desirable, and emigration slackened, but there was an exodus in 1802, the settlers peopling Glengarry County in Ontario; sentiment apart, a very happy change.
We have seen Alastair’s free rent in 1761; it was 330l. in money. In 1802 the rental was 5,090l.! The eccentric history of Scott’s friend, Glengarry (for whom he wrote a Death Song) is well known. He was accidentally killed in 1828, and Glengarry was sold some years later. It has changed hands twice, since the first sale, and, says Mr. Fraser Mackintosh, ‘It is a fact not less painful than preposterous that at the present day (1894), some dozen crofters (all remaining) cannot get sufficient land out of the tens of thousands of acres at Knoydart, to maintain them, without the intervention of the Crofters Commission.’[165] Yet in 1753, Lochgarry, perhaps in a sanguine way, reckoned the Macdonald claymores, ‘by Young Glengarry’s concurrence only,’ at 2,600.[166]
This is a typical specimen of the fortunes of a large Highland estate, compromised in the Rising of 1745. There are, of course, happier examples; but, in this instance, we see every stage of the revolutionary changes in the condition of the Highland people.
Now an Englishman, or a Lowlander, asks himself, did the good old times contain the germs of these social maladies, exhibiting themselves in other forms, under other conditions? To this conclusion we appear to be forced by the evidence. If Chiefs were callous and selfish after the Forty-five, if the land could not, or did not, support the people properly after Culloden, these misfortunes, moral and material, existed before the starving and ill-arrayed clansmen died on the English bayonets. There had been no reason to expect better treatment than the Clans have actually received, from several of the powerful families. Extreme destitution had prevailed; evictions had occurred, and had sometimes been bitterly avenged. There had been ‘Agrarian outrages’ before Culloden, attacks on men, and mutilation of cattle.
Our evidence, as to the state of the Highlands, comes from various sources. We have Lowland, English, and Anglified witnesses. The Duke of Argyll cites a Highlander, Forbes of Culloden, but he was a Whig, and President of the Court of Session. Yet there was no juster, more fair, or more wise and tolerant man in the North. We have Captain Burt, author of ‘Letters from Scotland,’ written between the Rebellions of 1715 and 1745. Some modern Highlanders call him their foe: he certainly looks with English eyes, but he tries to be fair, and is far from unsympathetic. His tenderness for the poor is remarkable. We have the Gartmore MSS. (circ. 1748), which is Whiggish, and ‘MS. 104,’ in the King’s Library. It is, apparently, of 1749-50. All these witnesses agree as to the oppression of the people, their involuntary idleness, their dependence on tacksmen, chamberlains and factors, their destitution, while their liability to raised rents and evictions are, by some of these witnesses, insisted upon. But all are writing from the Whig point of view; their desire to improve the popular condition is part of their desire to reduce the power of the Jacobite Chiefs.
On the other side is General Stewart of Garth, enthusiastically Highland, anxious to keep up population for military purposes, as well as from honourable sympathy, and decidedly inclined to overlook the poverty, plundering, enforced idleness, tippling, and blackmail of the good old times. We have also Mr. Fraser Mackintosh, who, while he delights to tell a story against Cluny, for example, maintains that there were no evictions before 1745. Unluckily, we have no authoritative treatise from the Jacobite and ‘old times’ side, written between 1747 and 1790. The best evidence might be found in Gaelic poetry, which, in general, proves one important point.