Edinburgh sketches & memories

by David Masson

EDINBURGH THROUGH THE DUNDAS DESPOTISM[^[7]]

Will anybody give us a history of Scotland from the year 1745 onwards to the present time? It is not likely that anybody will. For it is precisely from the year 1745 that Scotland ceases to have that sort of history which, according to our ordinary ideas of history, it is easy or necessary to write.

Some forty years before that time, Scotland had parted with her independent autonomy by the Treaty of Union. There was an end of “an auld sang”; and the smaller country, though nominally only united to the larger, was virtually, for purposes of general history, incorporated with it. Scotsmen have recently been complaining that Literature has not even paid Scotland the poor compliment of remembering the fact of her union with England so far as to use the word “Britain,” then specially provided by law as the designation of the composite kingdom, but has gone on speaking of “England” and “English History,” as if the linking of the smaller country to the larger had produced no change of fact worth commemorating by a change of name. The practice is as unscholarly as it is unconstitutional, and is a recent and violent departure from the established usage of the best English writers of the eighteenth century and the earlier part of the present. But the continuity of English life was too little disturbed perhaps by the mere admission into the Parliament at Westminster of sixteen peers and forty-five members for counties and burghs from the other side of the Tweed, to make it reasonable to expect that all Englishmen would for ever thenceforth keep to the correct and legal usage, employing the words “England” and “English” only in their proper historical senses, but saying “Britain,” “British,” “Britannic,” etc., whenever the aggregate unity should be in view. It was actually proposed, in the first draft of an inscription to be engraved on a public memorial to a famous statesman recently deceased, to include among his mentioned distinctions that of his having been “twice Prime Minister of England”; and the absurdity had to be stopped by pointing out that for several ages there had been no such office or entity anywhere in the world. Even patriotic Scottish writers,—for example, Sir Archibald Alison,—have given way to the habit of using the word “England” for the conjunct community oftener than the legal word “Britain.” Apart, however, from all controversy in the matter of names, it is plain that from the date of the Union Scotsmen themselves have considered their national history, in all ordinary senses, as then concluded. Our text-books of Scottish History close at the year 1707. For about forty years after that date, indeed, Scotland contrived by vigorous exertions to make her separate existence still felt. The fierce flutter of the tartans in the two Rebellions of 1715 and 1745 drew the historians hurriedly back to her after they thought they had done with her; and so it is not uncommon in books of Scottish History to find the narrative continued, by way of appendix, as far as to 1745. But then the historian takes his final leave. With the furious Cumberland and the Government whom Cumberland served, he scatters the tartans for the last time; he breaks up the Highlands by forts and roads; he abolishes hereditary jurisdictions; he grubs up, so to speak, all the roots and relics of the old Scottish autonomy which since the Union had been left in the ground and had proved troublesome; and, when he turns his back on Scotland again, it is with an assurance that he will never be recalled, and that from that hour all on the north side of the Border will be, like cleared land, left quiet and fallow. Scotland is, then, thought of as but a part of Great Britain.

And yet, in another sense, what do we see? Why, that this very period of the historical non-existence of Scotland is the period of her most energetic, most peculiar, and most various life! What Scotland was in the world before 1745 is as nothing compared with what, even purely as Scotland, she has been in the world since 1745. Till 1745 she was cooped up within herself, a narrow nation leading a life of intense internal action; and the most thrilling facts of her history,—such as the Wars of Independence against England, and the Presbyterian Reformation under Knox,—were of a kind the contemporaneous interest of which was confined within her own bounds. Even after the Union of the Crowns in 1603, it was only indirectly and collaterally, as in the Scottish episodes of the Great Civil War and its sequel, that the influence of Scotland in general history became very notable. But since 1745 the Scottish element has visibly acquired a proportion in the general mass of things which it never had before. Not only since that period has Scotland still stood where it did, inhabited by the same race of men, living on according to their old habits, and the same in all respects, their lost autonomy excepted; not only, therefore, has there been a distinct history of Scottish society since that time, capable of being written by itself, if any one chose to take up the subject: but the circumstance that at that time Scotland burst its bounds has reacted on its history, so as vastly to increase its dimensions, and in many ways also to vary its character. Since 1745, Scotland has quadrupled her population. The commercial prosperity of Scotland, with all that this involves, dates from the same period. It is since that period that Scotland has sent forth most of that series of eminent men who have left their names memorable in the various walks of active and industrial life, at home and abroad. From that period, with some allowance for those numerous Scottish thinkers who taught philosophy in the European Universities in earlier centuries, dates the rise and development of what is known as the Scottish Philosophy. From that period, still more conspicuously, dates the manifestation of Scottish intellect, in any degree compelling attention beyond Scottish limits, in the departments of literature and art. Before 1745, if we except the poet Thomson (for only recently have English literary historians reverted with any adequate interest to the older poetry and other literature of the real Scottish vernacular), Scotland had not given birth to a single poet or other man of letters able to command distinct recognition by his English contemporaries. It was precisely about this time, however, that such men as Hume and Smollett, and Robertson and Adam Smith, and Blair and Kames,—all of them born after the Union, and most of them between the two Rebellions,—began that literary activity of the Scottish mind which, kept up by such of their immediate successors as Burns, Henry Mackenzie, and Dugald Stewart, has been continued, with ever-increasing effect, to our own time, by writers whose name is legion. In short, however we look at the matter, it is a remarkable fact that the most productive period of the History of Scotland is that which has elapsed since Cumberland tore the last relics of autonomy out of her soil, and left her, passive and Parliamentless, to the mere winds and meteors.

One reason why, despite this interesting progress of Scottish society since 1745, the Scottish history of the intervening period has not been written is that, according to our common notions, only where there is autonomy can there be proper history. It is over parliaments, monarchs, and seats of government, with an occasional excursion after embassies or in the route of armies to great battle-fields, that the Muse of History hovers; where there is no parliament, monarch, or seat of government, and no embassy or march of armies to make up for the want, she finds it unnecessary to stay, and thinks it sufficient if she leaves other and minor muses as her substitutes. Hence, as we have said, the Muse of History left Scotland in 1707, and returned only hastily and on compulsion to attend to the Highland Rebellions. Whatever claim on her attention Scotland since that time has possessed she considers herself to have amply satisfied by hovering over the Parliament of Westminster, as the centre of British interests in general, or by following those trains of military and international action, emanating from that centre, in which Scotsmen have had part side by side with Englishmen and Irishmen. The task of recording purely Scottish events in their sequence during the last hundred and fifty years,—of taking note of all the flitting social phenomena of which during that period the land north of the Tweed has been the scene,—has accordingly devolved on the muse of individual biography, aided by the muse of economical dissertation and statistics; and it seems somewhat problematical, as has been said, whether the materials which these subordinate muses have gathered, in the shape of miscellaneous lives of remarkable Scotsmen since 1745, and miscellaneous sketches of Scottish life and society since then, will ever be organised into a regular History. To a writer capable of combining the scattered elements of interest lying in such materials the thing would certainly be possible.

Of the various recent works having anything of the character of contributions to a history of Scottish society during the period in question, the richest by far, both in fact and in suggestion, are the two which bear the name of the late Lord Cockburn. Rich enough in this respect was his Life of Jeffrey published in 1852; but richer still are the Memorials of his Time, now published posthumously.

Lord Cockburn was born in 1779, and died in 1854. Consequently, it is not over the whole of the period under notice, but only over seventy years of it, that his reminiscences could in any case have extended. In fact, however, the period over which they do extend is still more limited. The Memorials begin about the year 1787, when the author was a boy at school, and they do not come farther down than 1830. We think, too, that all readers of the volume will agree with us in regarding the earlier portion of it,—that which contains Lord Cockburn’s recollections of the time of his boyhood and youth,—as by far the most interesting. Nowhere else is there such a vivid and racy account of the state of Scottish society from about 1790 to about 1806. Fixing on the latter year, and remembering that Lord Cockburn’s recollections refer chiefly to Scottish society as it was represented in Edinburgh, we have in these “Memorials,” therefore, the best text possible for our present paper.

First of all, the Memorials, taken in connection with the Life of Jeffrey, bring more distinctly before us than had ever been done previously, or, at all events, since the time of the Reform Bill agitation, the anomalous system of polity by which Scotland was governed not so very long ago. Such a system of polity, maintained so quietly and with such results, was probably never seen elsewhere under the sun. Nominally, Scotland was under a free representative government; but actually she was under the absolute rule of a single native. Ever since the Union of 1707, when the Scottish autonomy ended and Westminster became the seat of the one Imperial Government for England and Scotland together, that Government, except in a few instances when attempts were made to rule Scotland directly by English methods, and the attempts raised storm and whirlwind, had found it convenient to entrust the sole management of Scottish affairs to a single minister, who, by his Scottish birth and connections on the one hand, and his connections with the Cabinet and the Parliament at Westminster on the other, could act as a kind of responsible middleman. Knowing the character and habits of his countrymen, he could carry out the intentions of Government in Scotland far better than Government could do for itself; and, by his command of the Scottish votes in Parliament, he could serve the Cabinet in British and Imperial questions so effectively as to be able to dictate to it in all purely Scottish questions. This kind of depute-sovereignty, or rule by contract, was long exercised in Scotland by the powerful Whig family of Argyle. During the Whig and Tory alternations of the early part of the reign of George III., however, the sovereignty was shifted from the Argyle family to others, till at last, about the time of the formation of the ministry of the younger Pitt in 1783, it settled permanently in the Tory family of Dundas, whose patrimonial property as lairds, and whose professional craft as lawyers, connected them more immediately with Edinburgh.

For two centuries or more these “Dundases of Arniston,” as they were called and are still called, had been an important family in the politics and the jurisprudence of Scotland. Since the Restoration four of them in succession had been on the Scottish Bench, two of these in the supreme place on that Bench: viz. Robert Dundas, Lord President of the Court of Session from 1748 to 1753, and his eldest son, Robert Dundas, Lord President of the same from 1760 onwards. It was in a younger brother of this last that the family was to start up into its highest distinction. This was Henry Dundas, known afterwards as 1st Viscount Melville. Born in 1741, and educated at the University of Edinburgh, he had betaken himself, like so many of his ancestors, to the profession of the Law, and had already become eminent at the Scottish Bar, when, having been sent to the House of Commons as member for Edinburghshire, he began in 1774 his career of Parliament-man and party-politician. It was the time of the Tory administration of Lord North; and, having gradually fallen into rank with the supporters of that administration, he was appointed under it in 1775 to the office of Lord Advocate of Scotland. He had held this office through the remainder of Lord North’s administration, and also through the brief Rockingham and Shelburne ministries of 1782–83, latterly with the Treasurership of the Navy in addition, but had resigned office in April 1783 on the formation of the Coalition Ministry of North and Fox. He had been observing with admiration the steady conduct of the youthful Pitt through so many shiftings of the political scenery; the youthful Pitt had also been observing him; they had found an unusually strong bond of attachment to each other in their common fondness for port wine and their coequal powers of consuming it in large quantities; and so it happened that, on the break-up of the Coalition Ministry in December 1783, and the formation of a new and more lasting ministry under Pitt himself, it was to Dundas that Pitt looked chiefly for help and comradeship. Pitt was then but four and twenty years of age, while Dundas was in his forty-third year; but through all the future Premiership of the younger man, and indeed through all the rest of his life, Dundas was to be his most trusted colleague, his alter ego.

From 1783 to 1806 this Henry Dundas, the colleague of Pitt, was virtually King of Scotland. When the history of Scotland during that period shall come to be written, this will be recognised and he will be the central figure. All in all, though within a narrower field, he was as remarkable a man, as able a man, as either Pitt or Fox; and his life, from the absoluteness with which it was identified with the career of his native country during so long a period, possesses elements of biographical interest which theirs want. Both Lord Brougham and Lord Cockburn have sketched the character of this important man, of whom, in their youth, Scotsmen were continually speaking as subjects speak of their liege lord. In the House, says Lord Brougham, he could not be called an orator; he was “a plain, business-like speaker,” and “an admirable man of business.” Personally, Lord Brougham adds, he was of “engaging qualities”; “a steady and determined friend”; “an agreeable companion, from the joyous hilarity of his manners”; “void of all affectation, all pride, all pretension”; “a kind and affectionate man in the relations of private life”; “in his demeanour hearty and good-humoured to all.” Lord Cockburn, as became a nephew speaking of an uncle, is even more enthusiastic in his descriptions. “Handsome, gentlemanlike, frank, cheerful, and social,” says Lord Cockburn, “he was a favourite with most men, and with all women”; “too much a man of the world not to live well with his opponents when they would let him, and totally incapable of personal harshness or unkindness.” “He was,” continues Lord Cockburn, “the very man for Scotland at that time, and is a Scotchman of whom his country may be proud.” Such was the Henry Dundas in whom, partly because of those personal qualifications, the entire management of Scottish affairs was vested through the seventeen closing years of last century and the first five or six years of the present. This era of Scottish history may, in fact, be remembered by the name of The Dundas Despotism.