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Chapter 18
Ten Little-Known Scottish People Who Are Worth Knowing About
In This Chapter
Identifying people who made a difference
Admiring people who stood up for human rights
Considering people who enriched our understanding of the world
The people covered in this chapter aren’t as famous as the usual suspects of Scottish history – William Wallace; Robert the Bruce; Mary, Queen of Scots; and so on – but they deserve their place in the national story. Who knows? When their contribution is put before the Scottish public, they may become as well known as these more illustrious figures!
Bridei, King of the Picts (616/628?–693)
We know very little about Bridei, but it appears that he became over-king of the Picts in 672 and reigned until his death in 693. He is believed to have been buried in Iona and was remembered as the man who freed his kingdom and for being a friend of Adomnán, the biographer of St Columba. For more on the Picts head to Chapters 2 and 3.
St Ninian
Most people see St Columba as the first apostle to the Scots, but today some historians are coming around to the view that St Ninian was more important or at least as important in bringing Christianity to Scotland. We don’t know a great deal about Ninian’s life, except that he was a bishop and a Briton by birth, who had studied in Rome. He came to Whithorn, Galloway, around 500 AD, where he built the famous Candida Casa (White House) in which he was later buried. He was said to have restored the sight of King Tudwal, who had become blind after harassing the saint.
Ninian’s fame was based on his bringing Christianity to the southern Picts. There is some doubt regarding that story, but one thing we know for sure is that his cult spread throughout Scotland and into the Northern Isles. Due to Ninian’s celebrity and cult following, Whithorn became a place of special pilgrimage for Scots. Among the more famous of countless pilgrims was Robert the Bruce, during his last illness, and after him, James IV. If you want to know more about the coming of Christianity to Scotland, dip into Chapter 3.
Andrew de Moray (?–1297)
Many people have heard of the exploits of William Wallace in his struggle to free Scotland from English domination, but equally important was the contribution of another hero and patriot, Andrew de Moray. De Moray was a descendant of a Flemish family that had been invited to Scotland in the mid-12th century by David I. His father, Andrew, was part of the Scottish aristocracy as the king’s chief law officer in northern Scotland; he also held lands near Inverness and the Black Isle. De Moray fought in support of King John Balliol and against English interference in Scotland. In 1296, he was captured and taken prisoner along with his father and uncle at the Battle of Dunbar.
In the winter of 1297, de Moray somehow managed to escape from captivity in Chester Castle and returned north to Morayshire. With his father still a prisoner in the Tower of London, de Moray led the northern rebellion against English rule in 1297. By the end of 1297, his guerrilla tactics had loosened English control in Morayshire, and his forces had taken possession of the principal castles of the region, including Elgin, Banff and Inverness.
Some of de Moray’s deeds were apparently appropriated by Blind Harry in his epic poem, ‘The Wallace’, and attributed to William Wallace. One example was Wallace’s alleged attack on the port of Aberdeen, in which, according to Blind Harry, he burned English ships moored in the harbour. There is no evidence that Wallace was ever in Aberdeen, which means that the action was probably the work of de Moray.
De Moray’s success in the north was matched by William Wallace in the south. In September 1297, the two joined forces and inflicted a crushing defeat on the English at Stirling Bridge. De Moray was named in letters along with Wallace as ‘the leaders of the army and of the realm of Scotland’. However, victory came at a price: de Moray was wounded at Stirling and died, it is believed, sometime in November 1297.
By the Battle of Stirling, English control of Scotland was in tatters. Some historians have argued that too much credit for this has gone to Wallace and that the successful campaign of 1297 owed more to de Moray than it did to his more celebrated contemporary. If you want to learn more about the wars of independence, turn to Chapter 7.
Patrick Hamilton (1504–1528)
Patrick Hamilton was Scotland’s first Protestant martyr and his execution by burning at the stake was one of the first signs that winds of change were blowing through the aisles of the churches north of the border.
There was nothing in Hamilton’s privileged childhood that would have indicated martyrdom in later life. He was the son of Sir Patrick Hamilton of Kincavel and Catherine Stewart, daughter of the duke of Albany, the second son of James II. At the age of 13, Patrick was titular abbot of Fearn Abbey, Ross-shire, and the income he received from it allowed him to study in Paris. Although he graduated in 1520, it was in Paris that young Patrick began to go astray, when he was introduced to the writings of the German reformer Martin Luther. After further study in Louvain, Holland, Hamilton became a student at the University of St Andrews and, later, a member of the teaching staff.
Hamilton was bursting with enthusiasm to spread the so-called heretical ideas of Luther and other Protestant reformers. This brought him to the attention of the odious Archbishop James Beaton of St Andrews (also chancellor of Scotland), who decided to summon Hamilton in 1527 to stand trial on a charge of heresy. Not being eager to attain martyrdom at the age of 23, Hamilton escaped to Germany, where he enrolled as a student in the newly opened University of Marburg. But after a short stay, he returned to the family home in Kincavel in the autumn of that year. There he got married – we don’t know whom he married, but the marriage did produce a child, Isobel.
Marriage and a pregnant wife didn’t stop Patrick’s preaching. Beaton hatched a plot to incriminate the naive young abbot. He invited Hamilton to a conference in St Andrews, where for a month he was given free rein to preach and debate his ideas. This allowed Beaton and his spies to gather material that would later be used to accuse Hamilton of spreading heretical doctrines.
Hamilton was arrested during the night of 28 February 1528 and charged with13 counts of heresy. The following morning, he was tried before a council made up of 13 bishops and clergy. The trial was a sham – the verdict was already written before it began: guilty as charged! Under cross-examination, Hamilton stood by his beliefs, which made execution a certainty. Found guilty of being an ‘obstinate heretic’, he was handed over to the town council for sentence to be carried out in front of St Salvator’s Chapel. The burning at the stake took place as soon as the trial was over, which made a rescue attempt by his friends impossible. The weather was damp, and this drew out the execution for six hours – it was said he was roasted rather than burned. His last words were said to be, ‘Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.’ Hamilton’s daughter was born after his death.
Beaton’s pla
The memory of Hamilton lives on in a rather odd, superstitious way. Traditionally, during exam time St Andrews University students avoid standing on the monogram of Hamilton’s initials on the cobblestones outside St Salvator’s Chapel for fear of failing!
Sir William Paterson (1658–1719)
Scottish history is littered with countless knaves, rogues and scoundrels, who have taken advantage of situations and people, but very few of them have demonstrated the ability to con a whole nation – that is, with the exception of one William Paterson, banker and trader. So, this is a story about an exceptional, but delusional, visionary whose career was testament to J.M. Barrie’s view that, ‘There are few more impressive sights in the world than a Scotsman on the make.’
Born in 1658 in a farmhouse in Dumfries-shire, Paterson emigrated to the Bahamas at the age of 17. It was in the Bahamas that he first conceived the idea of establishing a colony on the Isthmus of Darien, Panama, which would be a centre for trade with the Far East. Paterson returned to England after the Revolution of 1688 and made a fortune in foreign trade, which gained him a reputation as a trader and financier of some standing in London.
The public first began to hear of him when, along with a group of London merchants, he set up the Bank of England in 1694. Fortunately for the bank, Paterson soon fell out with his fellow directors, sold his stock and left. Unfortunately for the Scots, it gave Paterson more time to concentrate on his plan to establish a colony in Panama, known as the Darien Scheme.
In 1695, he convinced the Scottish government to set up the Company of Scotland with the intention of sending a fleet and settlers to Panama. The Company’s aim was to raise finance from both English and Scottish merchants, but opposition in the English Parliament quashed any hope of investment from that area. The Scots had to go it alone. They raised £400,000 in a couple of weeks (roughly equivalent to £42million today). This was a quarter of the total amount of money in Scotland (think about that!), and it was lost along with the lives of the majority of settlers in two ill-fated expeditions. Paterson himself lost a great deal of money and his wife and child to disease.
The collapse of the Darien Scheme was one of the factors that led to the Union of Parliaments in 1707. If they voted for union, the investors were promised compensation for their losses through a scheme called the Equivalent (see Chapter 12 for more on the Darien Scheme and the Union of Parliaments). Paterson got his money back in 1715 but died soon after, in 1719, and is buried in Sweetheart Abbey, Kirkcudbright.
Thomas Muir the Younger of Huntershill (1765–1799)
Thomas Muir was a lawyer and political reformer who tried to change the corrupt political system in Britain and make it more representative of the people. Like many people of the day, he was inspired by the French Revolution of 1789. The ideas of liberty, fraternity and equality hit a nerve. Soon various societies were set up across Britain to campaign for democracy or the ‘rights of man’ (no one talked about women’s rights).