Although the no camp seemed to win a decisive result in the referendum on Scottish independence, the event’s eerie aftermath has belonged utterly to the yes side. Somehow the nationalists have managed to recast the campaign as a straightforward struggle between left and right, between working-class Scots and a complacently entrenched bourgeoisie. Notwithstanding the role played by Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling and the dissident ex-Labour politician George Galloway in making a leftist case for the union, the mud has stuck. The defenders of the British welfare state are vilified as today’s Tory stooges. To be sure, the nationalists lost the referendum, but they won the narrative.
Indeed, the story the nationalists tell meshes all too neatly with one of the most influential myths that Scotland lives by: the notion that Scots are heirs to an impeccably radical past. Was not the medieval nation’s independence in the Braveheart era embodied in a daringly unfeudal doctrine of popular sovereignty? A couple of centuries later the Presbyterian Reformation of the late 16th century jettisoned the managerial pretensions of bishops as well as the authority of Rome. Thereafter, a succession of movements – from the 17th-century Covenanters to the Red Clydesiders of the Great War era – carried the torch for popular democracy.
Prominent among these movements were the Scottish radicals in the era of the French revolution. Murray Armstrong, a former Guardian journalist actively involved in the independence campaign, evokes the memory of Thomas Muir (1765-99) and his fellow Friends of the People, persecuted during the anti-reformist clampdown of the 1790s, when Britain, under the wartime administration of Pitt the Younger and his Scottish henchman, Henry Dundas, overreacted to the domestic threat posed by the revolution’s fellow travellers. Muir is Scotland’s Tom Paine, its foremost radical name, perpetuated today by the Thomas Muir Society; at one time, like Paine’s, it enjoyed an international renown.
Muir’s story is a gripping one, and Armstrong – rightly – is determined to recreate a living past, not simply exhume a heap of dry bones. Indeed, he attempts to combine industrious archival research with a novelistic approach to history. Purists might blanch at the sections where Armstrong’s sources fail him and he resorts to the imaginative arts of the historical novelist to fill unavoidable chasms in the written record. Elsewhere, his narrative is solidly grounded in extant speeches and court transcripts – though even with a rich body of endnotes it is sometimes difficult to be wholly certain where research stops and reconstruction begins.
Thomas Muir of Huntershill, who came from a modestly landed family in the Campsie Hills north of Glasgow, was a lawyer and – along with the agriculturalist William Skirving – a prime mover in the Scottish Friends of the People, an organisation set up in 1792 to press for a democratic franchise and annual parliaments. The SFP encouraged popular participation by tradesmen and artisans, which alarmed the authorities. Moreover, Muir himself had visited revolutionary France and attended the proceedings of the Convention (ironically, to try to prevent the execution of Louis XVI). Supporters of the reform movement needed to be taught a lesson. The reformist leaders were tried for sedition.
At the trials we encounter the most vivid of Armstrong’s characters, the sneeringly reactionary judge, Lord Braxfield – the prototype for the bleak father in Robert Louis Stevenson’s last novel, Weir of Hermiston. Braxfield was known for hamming up his Scots dialect on the bench to create an effect of coarse brutality. “Hang a thief when he’s young, and he’ll naw steal when he’s auld”, ran his callous motto. The claim of one of the tried radicals, Joseph Gerrald, that “even our Saviour himself” had been a reformer, elicited from Braxfield the wry blasphemy: “Muckle he made o’ that, he was hanget.”
The trials were brazenly mismanaged – in defiance of the feeble and ambiguous evidence – to yield convictions for sedition. Muir was sentenced to 14 years’ transportation to Australia, as were his fellow reformers Skirving, Gerrald and Maurice Margarot, while the Reverend Thomas Fyshe Palmer, a Unitarian minister, was transported for seven years.
Armstrong follows Muir on his taxing journey – via Brazil, where the ship was resupplied – to Australia. The ship’s captain, Patrick Campbell, was a capricious authoritarian, who took at face value allegations that some of his onboard reformers were set on fomenting mutiny. Landfall in Australia brought little relief. Gerrald, who came on a later voyage, died of tuberculosis; Skirving of dysentery. Amazingly, however, in February 1796, Muir contrived to make his escape from Botany Bay on an American ship, which took him north across the Pacific to Vancouver Island. There, he transferred to a Spanish vessel, and via Monterey sailed to Mexico, which he crossed overland before setting off on a voyage back to Europe from Cuba. Further adventures still lay ahead. Muir was grievously injured in a sea battle off Cádiz in April 1797, and narrowly avoided being seized by the British. A leather patch would conceal the wounds where his left eye and cheek had been. Eventually, in the autumn of 1797, “Citoyen” Muir was repatriated from Spain to France, where in the final year of his life he plotted an invasion of Scotland.
Armstrong excels in his depiction of black and whites, but his historical palette lacks a smoky grey. Reform in late-18th-century Britain was not a straightforward business. The Foxite Whigs favoured economical reform, an attempt to limit the executive’s influence on the legislature. During the 1780s the Pittites had supported reform of the parliamentary franchise, at least before their alarm at the threat posed by the French revolution. Nevertheless, their leaders, Pitt and Dundas, would continue to support the case for Catholic emancipation. Abolition of the slave trade was another cause that cut across conventional political divides, its champion William Wilberforce being a close friend of Pitt. Nor should we forget burgh reform, which Armstrong mentions, or the antifeudalist reforms favoured by Scotland’s agrarian improvers, which included a long-running campaign to abolish tailzies, the Scottish system of strict entail, in favour of a free market in land. The divisions of the late 18th century do not map easily on to 21st-century concerns. Its other faults notwithstanding, a post-feudal England represented a beacon of liberal hope for progressive-minded Scots.
Present-day assumptions about the anti-unionist direction of Scottish radicalism are belied by much of Armstrong’s own diligent research. While Muir, back in France at the end of his life, did embrace the idea of separate English, Scots and Irish republics, this was a product of shifting circumstances and the foreclosure of other options. Of course, he and his fellow radicals wished to see the back of an unreformed British state, but not because it was British. In general, as Armstrong knows, the Scots reformers of the 1790s agitated – strangely, just as much as their English counterparts – for the restoration of supposed Anglo-Saxon freedoms lost since the Norman conquest.
Braxfield’s biased conduct of the trials and the disproportionate sentences handed out had provoked consternation at Westminster. Samuel Whitbread described the legal system north of the border as “a law of tyranny and oppression”, and Lord Stanhope asserted that late-18th-century Scotland enjoyed “no more liberty than it had under the race of Stuarts”. Such sentiments reinforced existing perceptions that Scots law bore the stamp of entrenched feudalism and authoritarian heavyhandedness. The answer lay, as many Scots recognised, in closer assimilation to England, indeed in further anglicising reform of Scots law. A united Britain – strange as it may seem now to proponents of “radical independence” – was regarded as the solution, not the problem.
• To order The Liberty Tree: The Stirring Story of Thomas Muir and Scotland’s First Fight for Democracy go to word-power.co.uk.
