From Rebel to Hero: The Image of the Highlander, 1745 - 1830

by Robert Clyde

From Rebel to Hero examines the transformation in attitudes towards Scottish Gaeldom after 1745, beginning with a study of anti-Jacobite propaganda and the Whig agenda for solving the "Highland Problem", through to the ideals of Improvement.

After the '45, the British Government sought to remodel the Highlands after the Lowland fashion, converting the Gaels from rebellious "barbarians" into loyal, Presbyterian, English-speaking British subjects; dismantling clanship and the Gaelic language and imposing cultural and economic values from outside.

Of the would-be reformers, Dr Samuel Johnson observed, "The state of the mountains and the islands is equally unknown from that of Borneo or Sumatra; of both they have only heard a little, and guess the rest. They are strangers to the language and the manners, to the advantages of the people whose life they would model, and whose evil they would remedy".

An analysis of travellers' accounts (revealing a shift away from the general condemnation of Gaelic culture to wistfulness for its eclipse) is followed by an examination of the romantic sheen which descended over popular impression of the Highlands after the demise of clanship. Once fear of them had subsided, the Gaels became a favoured subject of writers and artists ranging from Burns to Mendelssohn. This change arose not from concern with the Clearances or the destruction of Gaelic culture, but from the ideal of the Noble Savage, initiated by James Macpherson's controversial "translations" of Ossian and carried to completion by Sir Walter Scott.

Finally (and crucially), the role of the recruitment and service of Highland soldiers in the decades after Culloden is considered: the dangerous ruffians of the '45 are transformed in the future heroes of Waterloo.

From Rebel to Hero was first published in Britain in 1995, and reprinted in 1998, by Tuckwell Press Ltd, East Lothian, Scotland, and was published in North America in 1998 under license by the History Book Club of New York. Original ISBNs: 1898410216 (cased); 1862320276 (paperback); http://lccn.loc.gov/96143533

201 pages, Paperback

First published November 24, 1994

Reviews

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

"James Johnstone, aid-de-camp to Charles Edward Stuart during the Forty-Five, wrote in his memoirs that 'the fright of the English' at their presence 'was inconceivable, and to a degree that seemed as if their heads were turned altogether.' He went on to relate the horror of an Englishwoman upon learning that Donald Cameron of Lochiel was to be quartered in her house. According to Johnstone, the poor soul appealed to Lochiel, 'supplicating him with hands joined, and with a flood of tears, to take away her life, but to spare those of her little children.' The chief was understandably bewildered at the woman's plea, and demanded whether she was mad, and to explain herself. She replied that every one said that the Highlanders ate children, and made them their ordinary food. The hysteria in England was produced largely through Government propaganda, and as the people there knew nearly nothing of the Gaels, such rumours were taken at face value. In the Lowlands, however, hatred of the Gaels was well established and needed no encouragement from London."
- Robert Clyde, From Rebel to Hero: The Image of the Highlander, 1745-1830, pg 181

"In the garb of old Gaul, wi' the fire of old Rome,
From the heath cover'd mountains of Scotia we come,
Where the Roman endeavour'd our country to gain,
But our ancestors fought, and they fought not in vain.
Such our love of liberty, our country, and ancestors,
That, like our ancestors of old, we stand by Freedom's cause;
We'll bravely fight, like heroes bold, for honour and applause,
And defy the French, with all their art, to alter our Laws."
- Sir Harry Erskine, 'The Highlight Character'

Solid social-cultural history telling the story of how English cultural representations of Highland culture changed from that of savage, godless barbarians threatening Whiggish liberal order, to stalwart reactionary, romantic uber-warriors who could be recruited by the British Army to fight abroad and repress radical uprisings at home, whilst also providing cutesy tartan pageantry for romantic novels and artwork.

The book is sorted into six half-chronological, half-thematic chapters, investigating the changing British attitudes towards highland society in the 18th to early-19th centuries. This story covers the rise of Whig ideologies of 'improvement' in the Highlands; the educational and religious programs initiated to domesticate a frontier population; the subsequent English paranoia over Jacobitism after the 45' rebellion, followed by the weird, creepy and infantilizing Romanticization of Highland history and Scottish culture once this paranoia had passed; and the military exploitation of Scotland as a military recruitment centre of allegedly 'warlike' people who could be used by the British Empire.

Growing up in a household full of books on Scottish history, I've tended to absorb a lot of this stuff fairly passively, but its only recently that I've started to take an active interest in the contradictions of this historiography. Scotland is an odd example of a country whose official image is heavily dependent on marketing itself to English rural fantasies. Haggis, tartan, bagpipes, glens, stags, shaggy cattle and shortbread - Scottish tourism today is booming like never before, but it's rare that you find tourists who actually acknowledge the unsanitised nastiness of Scotland's Highland and Lowland history: a story full of multi-ethnic and kinda genocidal polities, squabbling minor kingdoms, religious uprisings, civil wars, dominion of and by English power-centres, Enlightenment innovations, piracy, collapsed colonial ventures, disaster, and invasion, before the late 18th century harbours a time of widespread dispossession, feudal hypocrisy, and monomaniacal capitalist greed. There's always something weirdly shallow and creepy in the way it gets romanticised into bagpipers and Braveheart, with Victorian fantasies recycled and regurgitated with increasing incoherence until you get tourists trooping in such numbers to Culloden to throw flowers at the Clan Fraser grave that they've actually damaged the site... all in memorial of a fictional Diana Gabaldon character, James Fraser, that was named after a Dr Who companion!

Which finally gets me to the point, I suppose. After some parental badgering, I finally watched the TV series 'Outlander' and yes it's all very functional and exciting as Historical Romances go, but midway through one of the innumerable instances of intermingled sex and violence I suddenly found myself disturbed by the uncomfortable feeling that what I was watching was just Scottish orientalism.

We tend to think of Orientalism as a gaze that looks eastwards, that turns prospective colonial territories into a crude canvas for European sexual fantasies, political anxieties, and cultural taboos as a way of downplaying the prosaic realities of our imperial activities and interests there. But internal colonisation has always been a thing, and here we had a story featuring an educated, 'civilised' English protagonist entering into a lawless world of shaggy, hyper-masculine barbarians whose brutish vitalism offers her an escape from the conventional social codes of her own time. You have red-headed otters and big mustachioed bears flexing their sexual and rapacious machismo with a sadistic, domineering and debauched forwardness that allows her to exercise a newfound erotic freedom outside of her own cultural panopticon. In a landscape of rugged beauty, spontaneous violence, and femme-friendly mysticism, the country is reduced to a playground for American appropriations of English colonial fantasies, especially as the highly incoherent ideology of Jacobitism gets translated into a crude prefiguration of 19th century Nationalism and 20th-century decolonial independence movements.

This is, of course, quite funny. I tried to explain what Jacobitism was to a co-worker this week when they saw me reading this book, and realised that it's surprisingly difficult to precis because we always want to translate historical conflicts into modern terminology. But the conflicts of the past often emerge from such alien thought-worlds and political environments from our own that you can only do that by ignoring the words that people used to talk about their grievances in order to crudely translate it as 'actually' being about class-conflict, or religious conflict, or whatever. And sure, that's half true, but the reality also lies crossways to a lot of that and entangles half a dozen other factors we'd hardly consider as serious concerns today. If you want to imagine Jacobitism in modern terms, you have to think of something closer to the anti-liberal, religiously-eclectic magical thinking of modern-day MAGA-ism than anything else. Not because MAGA is actually a modern parallel, but because the two movements are defined by their mutual vagueness, with every follower thinking that it represents something idiosyncratic to their own contemporary grievances about a changing socio-economic world. Jacobitism meant a dozen different things depending on the class of person who supported it, but a French and Russian-backed half-Catholic, half-feudal conspiracy to shove an entitled Stuart princeling back onto the English throne was never going to be about Scottish Nationalism.

This thought about 'Scottish Orientalism' has been niggling at me ever since, and was hardly lessened by my concurrent experience this week listening to the jaw-droppingly offensive Lady Macbeth which depicts the entirety of Medieval Scotland as a land of one-note hulking, misogynistic, blood-drinking rapists; the kind of story that a 17th-century English army officer might have delighted in, and which the sensitivity readers of modern publishing houses would never have let loose on the market had the story been set in 17th-century North America, or India, or Africa. I get the impression that a lot of contemporary liberals have forgotten how ubiquitous racism and bigotry actually are throughout history, and that there was once a time when Scottish Gaels were considered an inferior race to Anglo-Saxon stock, so they've reused those tropes and considered them entirely inoffensive since it doesn't occur to them that Scots were themselves once framed as a racial Other by a growing mercantilist empire that sold them as slaves.

If my frustration is any indication, this book plays quite sweetly on my sympathies, which is really just another way of saying that it validates my biases. It is important to note that this is a history of Anglo-cultural representations of Highlanders, not a history of the Highlanders themselves. This means that you get a lot of discussion of how myths were invented to repurpose their history without Clyde really explaining what a less romanticised history might have been outside of dispossession, dispossession and, uhh, more dispossession.

Nevertheless, I particularly appreciated one point he made about about popular descriptions of the Black Watch. This Scottish military division was allowed to wear traditional highland garb and serve under Scottish leaders, and became a famous feature of the British Army's self image, the same way the Gurkhas and Sikhs were repeatedly fetishised as 'warlike' races conquered and incorporated into the Empire's arsenal. These jingoistic descriptions tended to praise the Black Watch as having a uniquely fierce and reactionary disposition that made them loyal to the British Empire because of their background in a 'feudal' social system of clan loyalty, which officials reckoned made them resistant to radical ideas of democracy and equality. In reality, the Black Watch's reliability (one particularly famous mutiny notwithstanding) was less to do with their actual culture and more to do with (a) them being sent to attack other ethnic groups in the empire, particularly the Irish, as part of 'Divide and Rule' doctrine; and (b) the increasing immiseration of their homeland meant that entering into a military career became one of their only paths to a secure livelihood. And as we all know, once you're in the military, it has a hundred ways to bind your loyalties further, no matter who you thought you were before you went in. One statistic about the British army 'recruiting' 48,300 men from the Highlands between 1756-1815 is mortifying when he then points out that the overall population of the entire region from 1755-1830 only rose from 250,000 to 350,000. The image of such a greedy hoovering up bodies for expansionist imperial conquest leaves a rather nasty pit in my stomach, and Clyde emphasise the devastation this left behind in their home communities, which chest-thumping Black Watch military histories typically overlook.

Curiously, where many cultural histories of Scotland (e.g. Scott-land: The Man Who Invented a Nation) tend to see Walter Scott as responsible for the Tartan pageantry of Victorian romanticism, Clyde argues that the half-invented/half-adapted Ossian mythology of James MacPherson as the real turning point in the invention of a new Scottish colonial identity. For Clyde, this gave Scots a central focal point to imagine an ancient, shared national culture, whilst the wider empire benefitted from the popularity of this mythology (even as English scholars like Samuel Johnson fatuously disbelieved that Scottish people and the Gaelic language were capable of literary creativity).

There's other interesting titbits throughout, though Clyde does get a little carried away with some sarcastic asides during his chapters on the grimly patronising fantasies of Romantic writers and early tourists of the highlands. Then again, if I had to write a chapter about the spoilt prats LARPing about on country estates writing sunny letters about how cute Ossian Highlander culture was whilst never even mentioning the hundreds or thousands of peasants being violently kicked off the land just outside their windows, I'd probably have difficulty biting my tongue too. I also think the narrow focus on Highlanders ends up leaving his analysis of Highland/Lowland cultural divisions rather thin, especially since the Lowland clearances don't seem to factor into his narrative at all. The lack of art history in the text also feels like an oversight, since I would have thought that Highlander romance, with all its tartans and wild warriors, is a very visual affair that only really seems to be covered by one brief mention of Alexander Runciman's lost Halls of Ossian painting.

Nevertheless, my primary takeaway is that I came away from this book more confident in the validity of my original question: is Scottish-Orientalism a real phenomena, and if so, is it still alive today? I think that it is, and this book makes a fine stab at identifying the various forces that went into constructing its central themes. My main regret is that the time period being covered cuts off too early to discuss Kidnapped, which would have made for a fine case study wrapping its disparate elements together.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me awhile to get through this one for such a slim volume. I have an understanding of altering perceptions, economic forces, fears, pitting one group of Gaels against another as a matter of state policy, how America got populated so quickly and why most of my ancestors can at some point be traced back to this whole process. This served as a big piece of the 18th century historical jigsaw puzzle for me. The chapter about the Highland regiments was very illuminating in particular- as well as the power of literature and rhetoric to actually create a reality and promote an agenda. I don't know what made me pick this but it was very informative in so many ways- I was glad I did finish it.

[Margaret Pinard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just what I was looking for, this book had several thick chapters about the different cross-cutting cleavages that changed between 1750 and 1830: religion, economics, militarism, Whiggism, travel accounts, and the Romantics. Really great quality information, and well-cited, providing other sources to explore. Glad I happened to see this in Powell's!