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The new monarchs’ first act was to convene Parliament and issue a Bill of Rights for the English, which established a constitutional monarchy and declared that no Catholic could be king or queen or hold any official post.
But the Scots couldn’t claim that James had abdicated because he hadn’t been present in Scotland when the crisis broke. Thus, the Scots put forward a different constitutional argument: by ru
The solution was to call, at the request of William of Orange, a Convention of the Scottish Estates on 16 March 1689 to consider the rival claims of the two candidates for the crown of Scotland. The claim of James VII was set out in a letter hastily written on board a ship at Brest, as was William’s, but it was considered so extreme and stupid, with no guarantees for the Protestant faith, that it proved a major factor in making up the Convention’s mind to offer the crown to William II. Only five of those present voted in favour of James.
Depriving James of the crown was followed on 11 and 13 April by two momentous documents – the Claim of Right and the Articles of Grievance. The content of them can be summarised in five key points:
No Catholic could be monarch or bear office.
No Royal Prerogative could override the law.
Parliament was to meet frequently and be free to debate.
The consent of Parliament was necessary to raise
supply
(funds for war).
There would be no bishops.
This was the basis on which William accepted the throne of Scotland on 11 May 1689. These actions provoked the first Jacobite rebellion.
The Jacobite Rebellion of 1689
The rebellion of 1689 was the first of a number of attempts to put the Stewarts back on the throne (see Chapter 12). Claverhouse, now Viscount Dundee (or ‘Bo
On 27 July, he defeated a formidable government force under the command of General George MacKay at the Pass of Killiecrankie, Perthshire. The battle was short, as a contemporary account makes clear:
It was past seven o’clock, Dundee gave the word. The Highlanders dropped their plaids. It was long remembered in Lochaber that Lochiel took off what was possibly was the only pair of shoes in his clan, and charged barefoot at the head of his men… . In two minutes the battle was won and lost.
The Highland charge proved successful at Killiecrankie, as it had on many previous occasions. Mackay was less complimentary about his men, calling them ‘the vilest cowards in nature’. But although short, Killiecrankie was an extremely bloody battle. More than 30 per cent of Dundee’s 2,500 men were killed, as were around 60 per cent of Mackay’s force of 4,000. The way was open to set the Highlands alight with the spirit of rebellion, but there was a problem: the charismatic Viscount Dundee was killed in battle by a stray bullet. Nevertheless the Jacobites continued the fight, and the army grew to somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 men.
Another problem arose: the Cameronians. The Jacobites were fierce, but the Cameronians were fierce and ‘madd’ as one government officer put it. These religious fanatics who had been hunted down by Claverhouse had a chance to even up the score. Eight hundred Cameronians, led by 20-year-old William Cleland, met a far superior Jacobite force at Dunkeld, Perthshire, on 21 August 1689 and held out in a four-hour siege of the town.
The siege led the Highland army to withdraw, both sides claiming an inconclusive victory. After Dunkeld, the rising lost impetus and was finally defeated at Cromdale, near Grantown-on-Spey, on 1 May 1690. With the Jacobite threat neutralised, at least for the time being, William turned his attention to Ireland. James’s Irish army was crushed by William at the Battle of the Boyne on 12 July 1690.
On the back of the defeat of the Jacobites, the Presbyterian Church was re-established in June 1690 and the abolition of patronage and the Act of Supremacy followed in July. Over the next few years, some 182 ministers were ejected from their charges for refusing to say prayers in public for William and Mary; in the period 1689 to 1702, the total reached 664. However, the purges signified that after all the blood that had been spilled and the thousands who had died, once and for all, Scotland was to be a Presbyterian state.
Everyday Life in 17th-Century Scotland
Seventeenth-century Scotland has long been thought of as a country of abject poverty, religious fanaticism, lawlessness and violent disorder. While all this is true, to some extent, it’s also something of an unfair characterisation.
Scotland was not uniquely poor – plenty of places around the world saw poverty. Scotland can only be judged to have been economically backward when compared to the most advanced economies of the time.
As to violence, the continuation of clan warfare into the 17th century and the existence of blood feuds did make the country seem disorderly compared with much of western Europe, and royal power admittedly was relatively weak. But incidences of private violence were uncommon. Yes, rebellions took place, but they were few and far between.
In constructing such a picture of Scottish society, there seems to be an English bias. English rebellions against the arbitrary power of the monarch in the 17th century are depicted as a part of a respectable constitutional struggle to bring about representative government with a parliament limiting royal power. But when the Scots rebel, this is interpreted as a symptom of the almost i
Living conditions
Life in the 17th century was frequently nasty, brutish and short for the majority of Scots. Housing conditions were pretty primitive, underlined by the fact that no examples of ordinary homes survive from this period (suggesting that the homes were of poor quality). Houses were usually of the one-room type, and humans shared them with farm animals in the winter – hygiene was not an issue!
The common people had a monotonous diet – generally oatmeal in various varieties, from porridge to cakes (giving Scotland the nickname ‘land of the cakes’). Kale or cabbage dishes were also common. Bread was made from peas – only the rich could afford wheat. The diet was primarily vegetarian with occasional bits of fish and meat.
Famines were accepted as a way of life, manifestations of the will of God. But they could have a devastating effect on death rates (see Chapter 12 for the impact of the 1695 famine). Plagues, likewise, could kill thousands. In 1644, it was estimated that 9,000 people died of the plague in Edinburgh alone; three years later, plague wiped out about a quarter of Aberdeen’s population of 9,000.
Worst off were those who, even in good years, lacked the means to survive, having neither land nor craft to support them. Wandering beggars were a major problem in Scotland, as they were in all European countries at this time. The naturalist John Ray visited Dumfries in 1662 and remarked that the countryside abounded ‘with poor people and beggars’.
The attitude of the authorities was to punish rather than help those beggars they considered to be able-bodied (that is, able to work but for whatever reason not doing so), and to help those they considered deserving (that is, women, orphans, the old and the infirm). The able-bodied were subject to branding and whipping.
The number of beggars could swell by the thousands during harvest failures as men, women and children left home in search of food. The movements of people we see in the developing world in places like Ethiopia and Somalia during famines is similar to what it was like in the 17th century for the hungry.
Emigration: Let’s get out of here!
Large numbers of Scots left for greener pastures in the 17th century. The total may have reached a quarter of a million by 1700. Around 50,000 settled in Ireland, but many went farther afield. Poland attracted a great many Scottish merchants, soldiers and pedlars with an estimated exile community of between 30,000 and 40,000.The loss of population to England is unknown, but it must also have been substantial.
These are only guesses, but one thing we do know for certain is that between 1625 and 1642 the Privy Council sanctioned the enlistment of more than 47,000 young men, about one in five of that age group, to fight as mercenaries for foreign powers. The Munro clan alone had 3 generals, 8 colonels, 5 lieutenant-colonels and 30 captains fighting in the Swedish army of Gustav Adolph.
The social structure
The social structure in rural Scotland differed from the social structure in urban Scotland. In this section, I explain the differences between the two.
Rural Scotland
Scotland, like other European states, was a hierarchical society where the authority of the big landlords could be all-pervasive. The landlords dispensed justice – they had the right to try all crimes except treason, until the establishment of the High Court of Justiciary in 1672. Obeying your landlord was wise, even if he ordered you to defy royal authority, because the king and his government were remote and seldom in a position to punish disobedience. Even if the king could, he punished the landlord and not his men.
So, the power wielded by the landlords was awesome. But did that mean that tenants had no rights? Yes and no. Most of the land leases were unwritten, so tenants were at the mercy of landlords and could be evicted at any time. But there were common-sense and traditional limits to the exercise of power. A landlord wanted – and needed – more than just rent money from his tenants. He needed their loyalty to serve him in battle; that in it put a brake on how much he could screw out of them in rent and to what extent he could use eviction as a means of intimidation.
Many tenants claimed that they had a hereditary or ‘kindly’ right to their land, and sensible landlords recognised this. The concept of kinship was strong in Scotland, and it created a social bond between the tenant and the landlord. As head of the kin group, the landlord expected the unquestioning loyalty of his kin group, but in return, he had certain obligations to his tenants to respect their rights and to look after them, particularly in time of trouble or distress. One example might be the McNeil chief on Barra, who took it upon himself to find wives and husbands for widowers and widows, replace cattle of tenants lost in bad weather and maintain old people in his own home.
Urban Scotland
In 17th-century Scotland, very few people – only about 3.5 per cent of the total population – lived in towns. By 1700, this figure had increased to a little more than 5 per cent, still well below England and Wales.