Scenes and legends of the north of Scotland

by Hugh Miller

OUR TOWN POLITICS.

In former times people knocked one another on the head for the sake of their masters—fellows whom they had made too great to care at all about them; in the present age they have become so much wiser, that they quarrel on their own behalf alone. An entire people might be regarded in the past as an immense engine, with perhaps a single mind for its moving power; we may now compare every petty district to a magazine, stored like the warehouse of a watchmaker with little detached machines, each one furnished with a moving power of its own. But though politics and party spirit change almost every ten years, human nature is always the same;—aspects vary, and circumstances alter, but the active principle, through all its windings and amid all its disguises, is ever consistent with itself.

The people of Cromarty who lived ninety years ago were quite as unskilled in politics as their neighbours, and thought as little for themselves. They were but the wheels and pinions of an immense engine; and regarding their governors as men sent into the world to rule—themselves, as men born to obey—they troubled their heads no more about the matter. Even the two Rebellions had failed of converting them into politicians; for, viewing these in only their connexion with religion, they exulted in the successes of Hanover as those of Protestantism, and identified the cause of the Stuarts with Popery and persecution. Their Whiggism was a Whiggism of the future world only; and the liberty of preparing themselves for heaven was the only liberty they deemed worth fighting for.

Principles such as these, and the dominancy of the Protestant interest, rendered the people of Cromarty, for two whole reigns, as quiet subjects as any in the kingdom. In latter times, too, there was a circumstance which thoroughly attached them to the Government, by shutting out from among them the Radicalism of modern times for well-nigh a whole age. The Scotch, early in the reign of George III., had risen high at court;—Earl Bute had become Premier, and Mansfield Lord Chief-Justice; and the English, who would as lief have witnessed the return of William and his Normans, grumbled exceedingly. The Premier managed his business like most other premiers;—the Chief-Justice conducted his rather better than most other chief-justices; but both gentlemen, says Smollett, “had the misfortune of being born natives of North Britain; and this circumstance was, in the opinion of the people, more than sufficient to counterbalance all the good qualities which human nature could possess.” Junius, and Wilkes, and Churchhill, and hundreds more, who, with as much ill-nature, but less wit, were forgotten as soon as the public ceased to be satisfied with ill-nature alone, opened in full cry against the King, the Ministry, and the Scotch. The hollo reached Cromarty, and the town’s-folk were told, with all the rest of their countrymen, that they were proud, and poor, and dirty, and not very honest, and that they had sold their King; all this, too, as if they hadn’t known the whole of it before. Now it so happened, naturally enough I suppose, that they could bear to be dirty, but not to be told of it, and poor, but not to be twitted with their poverty, and that they could be quite as angry as either Junius or Churchhill, though they could not write letters like the one, nor make verses like the other. And angry they were—desperately angry at Whiggism and the English, and devotedly attached to the King, poor man, who was suffering so much for his attachment to the Scotch. Nothing could come amiss to them from so thorough a friend of their country; and when, on any occasion, they could not wholly defend his measures, they contented themselves with calling him an honest man.

On came the ill-fated, ill-advised American War, and found the people of Cromarty as loyal as ever. Washington, they said, was a rascal; Franklin, an ill-bred mechanic; and the people of the United States, rebels to a man. There was a ballad, the composition of some provincial poet of this period, which narrated, in very rude verse, the tragical death of two brothers, natives of Ross-shire, who were killed unwittingly by their father, a soldier of the Republic; and this simple ballad did more for the cause of the King among the people of Cromarty, than all the arguments in Locke could have done for that of the Americans; there was not an old woman in either town or parish who did not thoroughly understand it. The unfortunate father, Donald Munro, had emigrated to America, says the ballad, many years before; leaving his two infant sons with his brother, a farmer of Ross-shire. The children had shot up into active young men, when the war broke out; and, unable to pay for their passage, had enlisted into a regiment destined for the colonies, in the hope of meeting with their father. They landed in America; and finding themselves one evening, after a long and harassing march, within a few miles of the place where he resided, they set out together to pay him a visit; but in passing through a wood on their way, they were shot at from among the trees, and with so fatal an aim that the one was killed, and the other mortally wounded. A stout elderly man, armed with a double-barrelled rifle, came pressing towards them through the bushes, as a fowler would to the game he had just knocked down. It was their father, Donald Munro; and the ballad concludes with the ravings of his horror and despair on ascertaining the nature of his connexion with his victims, blent with the wild expressions of his grief and remorse for having joined in so unnatural a rebellion.

THE FIRST WHIG.

Even in this age, however, as if to show that there can be nothing completely perfect that has human nature in it, Cromarty had its one Whig;—a person who affirmed that Franklin was a philosopher, and Washington a good man, and that the Americans were very much in the right. Could anything be more preposterous? The town’s-folk lacked patience to reason with a fellow so amazingly absurd. He was a slater, and his name was John Holm;—a name which became so proverbial in the place for folly, that, when any one talked very great nonsense, it was said of him that he talked like John Holm. The very children, who had carried the phrase with them to the playground and the school, used to cut short the fudge of a comrade, or, at times, even some unpopular remark of the master, with a “Ho! ho! John Holm!” John, however, held stiffly to his opinions, and the defence of Washington; and some of the graver town’s-men, chafed by his pertinacity, were ill-natured enough to say that he was little better than Washington himself. Curious as it may appear, he was, notwithstanding the modern tone of his politics, a rare and singular piece of antiquity;—one of that extinct class of mechanics described by Coleridge, “to whom every trade was an allegory, and had its own guardian saint.” He was a connecting link between two different worlds—the worlds of popular opinion and of popular mystery; and, strange as it may seem, both a herald of the Reform Bill, and a last relic of the age “in which” (to use the language of the writer just quoted) “the detail of each art was ennobled in the eyes of its professors, by being spiritually improved into symbols and mementos of all doctrines and all duties.” John had, besides, a strong turn for military architecture, and used to draw plans and construct models. He was one evening descanting to an old campaigner on the admirable works at Fort George (a very recent erection at that time), and illustrating his descriptions with his stick on a hearth-stone strewed over with ashes, when by came the cat, and with one sweep of her tail demolished the entire plan. “Och, Donald!” said John, “it’s all in vain;” a remark which, simple as it may seem, passed into a proverb. When an adventure proved unsuccessful, or an effort unavailing, it was said to be “All in vain, like John Holm’s plan of the fort.” But John’s day was at hand.—We, the people, are excellent fellows in our way, but I must confess not very consistent. I have seen the principles which we would hang a man for entertaining at the beginning of one year, becoming quite our own before the end of the next.

THE REVOLUTION.

The American War was followed by the French Revolution, and the crash of a falling throne awakened opinion all over Europe. The young inquired whether men are not born equal; the old shook their heads, and asked what was to come next? There were gentlemen of the place who began to remark that the tradesfolk no longer doffed to them their bonnets, and tradesfolk that the gentlemen no longer sent them their newspapers. But the people got newspapers for themselves;—these, too, of a very different stamp from the ones they had been accustomed to; and a crop of young Whigs began to shoot up all over the place, like nettles in spring. They could not break into the meanings of all the new, hard-shelled words they were meeting with—words ending in acy and archy; but no people could understand better that a king is only a kind of justice of the peace, who may be cashiered for misconduct just like any other magistrate; that all men are naturally equal; and that one whose grandfather had mended shoes, was every whit as well-born as one whose grandfather was the bastard of an emperor. And seldom were there people more zealous or less selfish in their devotion than the new-made politicians of Cromarty. Their own concerns gave place, as they ought, to the more important business of the state; and they actually hurt their own heads, and sometimes, when the ale was bad, their own bellies, in drinking healths to the French. Light after light gleamed upon them, like star after star in a frosty evening. First of all, Paine’s Rights of Man shone upon them through the medium of the newspapers, with the glitter of fifty constellations; then the Resolutions of the Liberty and Equality clubs of the south looked down upon them with the effulgence of fifty more; at length, up rose the scheme for the division of property, like the moon at full, and, flaring with portentous splendour, cast all the others into comparative obscurity. The people looked round them at the parks which the modern scheme of agriculture had so conveniently fenced in with dikes and hedges; and spoke of the high price of potato-land and the coming Revolution.—A countryman went into one of the shops about this time, craving change for a pound-note. “A pound-note!” exclaimed the shopkeeper, snapping his fingers;—“a pound-note!—Man, I widna gie you tippence for’t.”

THE DEMOCRACY.