A People's History of Scotland (11 page)

When news of Burns's death, in 1796, reached Belfast, the
Northern Star
, newspaper of the republican United Irishmen, published ‘Scots Wha Hae'. Their rebellion would follow two years later. Unfortunately,
French help arrived too little and too late, and the British administration in Ireland had sufficient time to prepare. Although initially successful, the United Irishmen were eventually defeated and subject to merciless persecution.

‘Scots Wha Hae' would be sung by radical reformers and Chartists in the 1820s, '30s and '40s, not simply in Scotland but south of the border too, in tribute to the idea of freedom. In 1839, the Chartist leader Feargus O'Connor, touring Scortland, reported back from Kilmarnock that the ‘whole population' could sing the song in perfect harmony.
²⁷
Few of those who recite ‘Scots Wha Hae' at school or at a Burns Supper will be aware they are inciting revolution.

A
t the close of the eighteenth century, class warfare erupted into life in central Scotland. In 1787, Calton was a village on the outskirts of Glasgow and home to a burgeoning community of weavers, most of whom were members of the Clyde Valley General Weavers Association – a risky thing when unions were proscribed. In June of that year the weavers learned that the manufacturers planned to reduce their payments for weaving muslin. This came on top of other cuts, which in total would now mean a reduction in wages by a quarter.
¹

The weavers refused to work for the new rates and gathered on Glasgow Green for a mass meeting where they elected committees ‘to meet with the master, receive their ultimatums and report'. When negotiation failed, they seized the webs from the looms of three weavers who refused to stop work, and carried them in procession through the town.
²

Throughout that summer, Glasgow was gripped by tensions, with the authorities itching for a showdown. On 3 September the Lord Provost, along with the magistrates and city sheriff, tried to address a crowd of several hundred weavers, demanding they return to work. The authorities were met by a hail of missiles and retreated quickly, but that afternoon they returned with soldiers. When missiles were
again thrown the order was given to open fire. Three weavers were shot dead immediately and three others later died of their wounds. Some six thousand people attended the funeral of the first three.

The next day the city council issued a proclamation describing the shootings as a ‘disagreeable necessity', but warning they would ‘continue their utmost exertions to suppress these daring combinations, by every legal means within their power, whatever the consequences may be to the unfortunate individuals, who may suffer by these exertions'.
³

Despite their regrets, the council had rewarded the soldiers and bought their officers a dinner at the Tontine Tavern. They also pressed ahead with the prosecution of James Granger, charged with organising a union (‘combination') and assaulting two scabs. At his trial in Edinburgh he was found guilty, despite his vehement denials that he was involved in any violence, and sentenced to be whipped through the capital's streets by the common executioners before being transported to Australia for seven years.

Faced with all this, the strikers returned to work. After his exile Granger returned to Glasgow, where he died aged seventy-five and was buried alongside the three weavers who had been shot. Fifty years after the killings a monument was erected at the Abercromby Street Burial Ground in Bridgeton. The inscription on one stone read: ‘They are unworthy of freedom who expect it from other hands than their own.'
⁴

Two years after the weavers' strike, the French Revolution of 1789 impacted directly on a society where democracy was in short supply, with the country ruled by a landed oligarchy centred on the figure of Henry Dundas. It was calculated that in the 1796 general election Dundas controlled or influenced thirty-six out of Scotland's forty-five parliamentary seats. Dundas was also treasurer of the navy, and his secretary, Alexander Trotter of Dreghorn, was in the habit of walking across the road from the naval secretary's office, depositing a cheque for £100,000 in his personal account at his cousin's bank, Coutts, and sometime later paying back the amount but keeping the interest – a slice of which went to Dundas and some to improving the family home, Dreghorn Castle, outside Edinburgh.

In the aftermath of the eruption in Paris, May 1789 saw the government ban ‘seditious' meetings and pamphlets. On 4 June, King George III's birthday, rioting occurred in Edinburgh, lasting for three nights, with an effigy of ‘King Henry IX' (Dundas) being burned in the streets and the windows of his brother Robert, the lord advocate, being smashed. Troops were rushed in and gunfire used to quell the riot, killing one man and wounding six others. Three men were brought to trial for this, with two being found not guilty while another, Alexander Lochie, was sentenced to be transported for fourteen years. He was subsequently set free on remission. His lawyer was a young radical, Thomas Muir of Huntershill.

Across Scotland, effigies of Dundas were burned in towns and villages, in the Borders, toll-bars were attacked and in Portsoy in Banffshire, a cannon was fired by ‘the mob' on the anniversary of the French Revolution as the discontent manifested itself in varied forms.
⁵
From Edinburgh a government spy, informing London regarding the success of Tom Paine's defence of the French Revolution,
The Rights of Man
, reported: ‘Paine's book, it is known, has been industriously circulated among the lower classes of our people, and its damnable doctrines eagerly embraced by them. Of liberty and equality they are constantly talking, and making laws, fixing prices on every necessity of life.'
⁶

In Edinburgh, on 4 June 1792, the celebrations of King George III's birthday took a novel turn. The city authorities knew prodemocracy handbills calling for protest had been circulating and stationed city constables and soldiers accordingly, but they were surprised by the thousands who took to the streets in protest. The city elite gathered in Parliament House to toast the king and to watch the customary fireworks. The mob outside tore down a sentry box on the High Street and carried it off to the Netherbow to be burned. The Sheriff Depute then read the Riot Act but was stoned by the crowd. Dragoons were then called from the castle and Musselburgh to clear the streets. Two nights of rioting followed. On the night of 5 June a crowd numbering 2,000 gathered in George Square to burn an effigy of Henry Dundas and afterwards to attack the house of his mother, Lady Arniston. After the Riot Act
was read again, the military fired on the crowd, killing one and wounding six.
⁷

The Scottish Friends of the People, formed in 1792, brought together eighty or so different clubs and societies, from Wigtown in the south to Thurso in the north. The societies charged members threepence a quarter, allowing skilled workers to join. Each society was in regular correspondence with revolutionaries in France, the Corresponding Societies in England and the United Irishmen.
⁸

Perth was one of the new grouping's strongholds, with the Friends of the People being formed on 14 August 1792 during a meeting at the Guildhall. The purpose of that society was to achieve ‘A free and Equal Representation of the People (and) A Short Duration of Parliaments'. Among its members were weavers, hatters and other workers and tradesmen. By October 1792 it could claim 1,200 members and send nine delegates to the first Scottish Convention in Edinburgh.
⁹

The Scottish Friends of the People was able to bring together 150 delegates at its first convention that December. Its leaders were solidly middle class, including Thomas Muir and a Fife farmer, William Skirving, but membership was open to all. During the convention Muir read out greetings from the United Irishmen, Ireland's first republican organisation centred on Presbyterian radicals in Belfast, which said: ‘We rejoice that you do not consider yourselves as merged or melted down into another country and that in the great national question you are still Scotland.' At the end the delegates rose from their seats, held up their right arms and swore the French oath, to ‘live free or die'.
¹⁰

News that the French Republic had defeated the invading army of Austria and Prussia at Valmy that August electrified the supporters of the revolution. When in November the French took Brussels, celebrations turned into virtual uprisings. In Perth it was reported that ‘several hundred of the lower class' burned Dundas in effigy, shouting ‘liberty, equality and no king!' The capture of Brussels by the revolutionary army was celebrated by the erection of a Tree of Liberty at Perth Cross, while church bells were rung from eight in the morning till six at night, and townspeople put lit candles in their windows.

Farther down the Tay, in Dundee, a few people assembled in the High Street, to erect a Tree of Liberty, which was pulled down by some
young gentlemen. In response, hundreds took to the streets in response, shouting ‘Liberty and Equality'. After smashing the town hall windows they returned to the High Street to re-erect the Tree of Liberty, bearing the scroll ‘Liberty, Equality and no Sinecures'. Only the arrival of troops on the following Monday ended the disturbances.
¹¹

The government tried to organise assemblies in support of Pitt and Dundas, but this tactic backfired because the radicals used them to initiate a debate, and at a second one in Perth, attended by 2,000 people in St John's Church, got a pro-reform resolution passed. Within the Perth Friends of the People the moderate, pro-Whig element denounced the demonstrations and riots, but the more radical wing corresponded with France and began collecting arms, though government spies kept the authorities informed of this.

Protests spread across the county, with an effigy of Dundas being put on trial in Crieff and being burned at the conclusion; in Scone his effigy was hanged on a gibbet; not to be outdone, Perth protesters blew his effigy up with gunpowder. In November 1792 there was a demonstration outside the Perth Hunt Ball, where the Duke of Atholl was greeted with calls for him to be guillotined.

Prussia and Austria, financed by the government of William Pitt the Younger in London, had invaded revolutionary France in July 1793. Pitt, Dundas and company decided to crack down on supporters of the revolution and, on 2 January 1793, James Tytler, editor of the
Historical Register
, was summonsed for advocating non-payment of taxes without universal suffrage, but took flight to America. The lawyer Thomas Muir was arrested on his way to defend Tytler but was released on bail. Three Edinburgh printers, John Morton, James Anderson and Malcolm Craig, were sentenced to nine months' hard labour for making a toast ‘to George the Third and last, and damnation to all other crowned heads'.
¹²

Muir knew time was running out, and in January 1793 decided to make a ‘flying trip' to Paris to argue against the execution of the king on the grounds that it would provoke war. Dundas had declared that he was ‘resolved to lay him by the heels on a charge of high treason.' The Lord Justice Clerk, Lord Braxfield, declared Muir an outlaw.
¹³

The execution in Paris of Louis XVI, on 21 January 1793, led to
the outbreak of war between Britain and revolutionary France on 1 February. It was opposed by the Perth Friends of the People, who three days earlier had held a protest meeting in the Guildhall and published a pamphlet,
A Solemn Protestation Against War
. But war brought a government-orchestrated witch-hunt against the radicals and increased state repression. In October only one delegate went from Perth to the All-British Convention in Edinburgh.

Louis's execution and the subsequent outbreak of war meant Muir faced difficulties returning, eventually doing so via Ireland. On his landing at Portpatrick he was arrested and sent for trial before Braxfield, accused, amongst other charges, of making ‘a most inflammatory and seditious [speech] falsely and insidiously representing the Irish and Scottish nations as in a state of oppression and exciting the people to rise up and oppose the government'.
¹⁴

The jury was specially picked, consisting of nine landlords, one bookseller, two bankers and three Edinburgh merchants; when one of these merchants, John Horner, was passing the bench, Lord Braxfield addressed him thus: ‘Come awa, Maister Horner, come awa, and help us to hang ane o' thae damned scoundrels.'
¹⁵
The verdict was never in doubt. When there was a challenge to a member of the jury who said he would condemn any member of the British Convention, Braxfield dismissed it, saying: ‘I hope there is not a gentleman of the jury, or any man in this court, who has not expressed the same sentiment.'
¹⁶

Before sentencing, Muir told the court:

As for me, I am careless and indifferent to my fate. I can look danger, and I can look death in the face; for I am shielded by the consciousness of my own rectitude. I may be condemned to languish in the recesses of a dungeon. I may be doomed to ascend the scaffold. Nothing can deprive me of the recollection of the past; nothing can destroy my inward peace of mind, arising from the remembrance of having discharged my duty.
¹⁷

Braxfield's concluding remarks had no such dignity. They bristled with hatred: ‘A government of every country should be just like a corporation, and in this country, it is made up of the landed interest,
which alone has a right to be represented'.
¹⁸
Muir was sentenced to be transported to the penal colony of Botany Bay in Australia for fourteen years.
¹⁹

He eventually managed to secure his escape from Australia on board an American ship, switched to a Spanish ship to avoid the Royal Navy and landed in Mexico only to be arrested because Spain was now at war with Britain. Transferred to Cuba, he was then sent in a convoy to Spain. The convoy was intercepted by the Royal Navy and Muir took part in the fighting, having his cheek blown off. When his ship was captured a crewman revealed his presence but the captain said he had been killed and so badly disfigured that his corpse could not be recognised. Muir himself was sent ashore with the wounded to Cadiz, and after much wrangling, the French secured his release. Back in Paris, Thomas Muir worked with other Irish, Scottish and English exiles until his sudden death on 26 January 1799.
²⁰

Back in Scotland, despite Muir's conviction, Skirving pressed on with plans for a further Convention of the Friends of the People in Edinburgh, in November 1793, inviting the United Irishmen and radical democrats from England. Dundas was determined to stop this, and warrants were issued for three of the six English delegates, Maurice Margarot, Joseph Gerrald and Charles Sinclair, as well as Skirving and Alexander Scott, the editor of the radical
Edinburgh Gazetteer
.