This is not a picture of a golden age, and Bailie Nicol Jarvie, in ‘Rob Roy,’ sums up this theory of what the age was really like. But, if we turn to Stewart of Garth,[187] we find the real condition of the Highlands in times past revealed in a rosy haze. Blackmail is only extorted from Lowlanders, as if Barisdale had Lowland neighbours![188] The game and fish were ‘free to all’—a palpable error as regards salmon, at all events, while one doubts if every clansman was made free of Cluny’s forest. We do not read of grouse and venison in cotters’ huts. ‘Cottagers and tradesmen were discouraged from marrying.’[189] Yet the surplus population was very large. A young amorous Highlander set himself up for marriage by ‘thigging’—that is, by begging among friends for cows, sheep, and seed-corn.[190] They did not discourage him. ‘The extinction of the respectable race of tacksmen ... is a serious loss to the people.’[191] Mr. Fraser Mackintosh, however, speaking of Skye, says, ‘large tacksmen ... could be relied on to assist (each other) or keep aloof, if the oppressed were below their class or set.’[192] The author of MS. 104 would reduce the power of tacksmen by making all tenants leaseholders for terms not under twenty years, and would pay off all wadsetts on forfeited estates, ‘because the gentlemen who had them were great oppressors of the Poor, and most of them, though they did not themselves take arms, were very active in forcing the people into the late Rebellion.’
An association had been made by Sutherland farmers in General Stewart’s time to suppress sheep-stealing. He objects to the new social state which made this association necessary. Previously ‘crimes had been so few that, from 1747 to 1810, there was only one capital conviction for theft.’ This may have been so in Sutherland, and the MS. Letter already cited makes it probable. ‘The Mackays of Lord Reay’s country,’ though previously reckoned ‘the wickedest clan,’ now ‘abhor thieving.’ But ‘the common people who dwell along the East Coast are next to the Caithness people for poverty, slavery, and dwarfish stature, while the people further up the country towards Strathnaver’ (where Franck found them bleeding their cattle for food) ‘live better.’ A third of the Earl of Sutherland’s levy ‘are mean, despicable creatures.’ Thus one county showed very different conditions: however, like the Mackenzies, the Sutherland men ‘abhor thieving.’ Elsewhere in the Highlands, hangings for theft occupy a good deal of the old Scots Magazine. Many pretty men ‘died for the law,’ as every one knows.
General Stewart, objecting to the new farmers’ association, seems not to have observed that blackmail and ‘Highland Watches’ were old-fashioned associations for protecting property.’ Complaints are made by him of ‘cutting down farms into lots,’ as if the old Chiefs had not infinitely subdivided the soil.[193] The old extreme poverty is left out of notice by General Stewart, with the old tippling, loafing, ‘sorning,’ thieving, ‘thigging’ habits. Much land could be and was cultivated, he says, which is now pasture, the harvest only failing ‘in cold and wet autumns.’[194] These not being unknown in the Highlands, but, on the other hand, very common, famines followed often, notably in 1782.
If the Lowlanders, the English, and the Anglified Highlanders, like Culloden, paint too gloomy a picture of the good old times, General Stewart may be regarded as erring in the opposite direction. His charge against the new Chiefs and landlords is the callous hurry with which they seized their pecuniary advantage, ‘which proved ruinous to their ancient tenants.’[195] This is also Scott’s opinion, in his Quarterly Review article of 1816. He, too, a Tory of the Tories, condemns the heartless greed of evicting landlords.[196] General Stewart records cases of delicate consideration and honourable sagacity on the side of the landlords. But often we find either a well-meaning hurry to make sweeping ‘improvements,’ and benefit people in a way they detest and do not understand (as by giving them leases), or a mere hasty desire to save such a ruined estate as war had left to Glengarry, by raising rents, causing, with the aid of frequent famine years, wholesale emigration. This policy was, indeed, far unlike what Burt reports: ‘the poverty of the tenants has rendered it customary for the Chief, or Laird, to free some of them every year from all arrears of rent; this is supposed, upon an average, to be about one year in five of the whole estate.’
These habits vanished with the change in the Highlands; the old ‘arts of popularity’ were no longer practised by the Chiefs: clan affection became clan hatred. If we may believe a tithe of our Whig or Lowland information, it should have done so long before 1745. Cattle, sheep, red-deer, grouse, now occupy the place of the swords of the North: the banker, brewer, or upholsterer shoots the Chiefs game, or misses it.
Truly money is the root of all evil. When specie was scarce in the North, a guinea a thing seldom seen, the fatal treasure of Loch Arkaig produced, or evoked, the moral consequences of hatred, malice, treachery and slander. Twenty years later the lack of money hardened the hearts of Chiefs (which had not been so very soft before). Clansmen had to emigrate, and they were wisest who sailed first from a land of famine. Their descendants, or some of them, dwell happily in a realm of forests, hills, and streams, deer and salmon, still retaining Highland courtesy, Highland speech, Highland courage, and Highland hospitality. They seem to have chosen the better part, and to be more fortunate than their cousins in the new times, or their fathers in the old days that were not really golden.
On the whole, a distressed Highlander need not, it seems, conceive that the old times were free from distress, or that Chiefs were really always humane. They acted in accordance with their immediate interests. They kept rents low when it paid to have a following, and they screwed rents up when money was more desirable than men. The two policies might be contemporary; this among Mackenzies, that among Macdonalds. Ensign Small reported[197] that, among the Macdonalds, ‘the gentry are fond of a rising, the commoners hate it.’ The author of MS. 104 represents the Macdonalds as ‘cursing their Prince and their Chiefs.’
The world, to its disadvantage, allows interest to override sentiment, which we only find here and there, as in the noble words of Lochiel. When he arrived with Prince Charles in France, in the autumn of 1746, he was, of course, very poor. The Prince, according to Young Glengarry, in a conversation with Bishop Forbes, was obliged to give Lochiel a full security for his estates before the Chief would raise his clan. Consequently Charles felt bound, said Glengarry, to secure a French regiment first of all for Lochiel. This, in Lochiel, would have been a singular piece of caution! But let us hear his own words, in a letter to King James.[198] ‘I told H.R.H. that Lord Ogilby or others might incline to make a figure in France, but my ambition was to serve the Crown, and serve my Country, or perish with itt. H.R.H. say’d he was doing all he could’ (to return with forces to Scotland), ‘but persisted in his resolution to procure me a Regiment. If it is obtained, I shall accept it out of respect to the Prince, but I hope Yr. M. will approve of the resolution I have taken to share in the fate of the people I have undone, and, if they must be sacrificed, to fall along with them. It is the only way I can free myself from the reproach of their blood, and shew the disinterested zeal with which I have lived, and shall dye, Your Majesty’s most humble, most Obedient, and most faithfull subject and servant,
‘Donald Cameron.[199]’
There speaks a man who makes real the ideal of the Clan system. But the ideal, though a hundred times illustrated in the conduct of the commons, has left less conspicuous examples in the behaviour of some Chiefs. ‘My brother-in-law, Major Grant, pretended that the man,’ (a recruit) ‘I sent from this country, I sold, which is false,’ says Old Lovat to Cluny.[200] Major Grant, his brother-in-law, knew Old Lovat. He, like Barisdale, was an example of the kind of chief who, till after 1745, was not impossible. He throve wickedly on the survival of a kind of society, the tribal society with its usages, which was in no sense exclusively Celtic, but originally prevalent all over Europe. In parts of the Highlands tribal society outlived its day, and gave to Lovat the opportunities which he abused.