SCOTLAND IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY; THE UNION; RAMSAY'S
MARRIAGE--1707-12
An important stage in Allan Ramsay's life's journey had now been
reached. He was of age, he was a burgess of the town, he was a member,
or free, of one of the most influential of the Crafts, or Guilds, in the
capital, but, greatest step of all, he had started in business for
himself, and had flung himself, with a sort of fierce determination to
succeed, into that hand-to-hand fight with fortune for the sustenance of
life, from which each of us emerges either made or marred.
At a time when all the youthful Ramsay's faculties were beginning to be
strung to their utmost tension of achievement, strange would it have
been if that of observation were not as eagerly exercised.
Scotland in general, and Edinburgh in particular, were at this period in
the throes of a new political birth. The epoch of transition commenced
in 1707, and ended only when the dangers of the repeated rebellions of
1715 and 1745 showed the supercilious statesmen by the Thames--the
Harleys, the Walpoles, the Pelhams--that conciliation, not intimidation,
was the card to play in binding Scotland to her greater neighbour. A
patriotism that had burned clear and unwavering from the days of
Wallace and Bruce to those of the exiled and discredited Stuarts, was
not to be crushed out by a band of political wirepullers, by whom State
peculation was reduced to an art and parliamentary corruption to a
science.
Although the ultimate effects of the Union between England and Scotland
were in the highest degree beneficial upon the arts, the commerce, and
the literature of the latter, the proximate results were disastrous in
the extreme; yet the step was imperative. So strained had become the
relations between the two countries, consequent on the jealousy of
English merchants and English politicians, that only two alternatives
were possible--war, or the corporate union of the whole island. Yet in
Scotland the very mention of Union was sufficient to drive the people
into a paroxysm of rage. The religious animosity between the two
countries was as important a factor in producing this feeling as any
other.
English churchmen boasted that with any such Union would come the
restoration of Episcopacy north of the Tweed, and the abolition of the
Church of Scotland. The latter retaliated by pushing an Act of Security
through the Scottish Legislature, which demanded an oath to support the
Presbyterian Church in its integrity from every sovereign on his
accession. The Scottish Whigs and the Scottish Jacobites, despite
political differences wide as the poles, joined hands in resistance to
what they considered the funeral obsequies of Scottish nationality. For
a time the horizon looked so lowering that preparations actually were
begun in Scotland to accumulate munitions of war.
But the genius, the patience, and withal the firmness, of Lord Somers,
the great Whig Richelieu of his time, gradually overcame all
difficulties, though he was reduced to wholesale bribery of the Scottish
peers to effect his end. As Green puts it: 'The Scotch proposals of a
federative rather than a legislative Union were set aside by his
firmness: the commercial jealousies of the English traders were put by;
and the Act of Union, as finally passed in 1707, provided that the two
Kingdoms should be united into one under the name of Great Britain, and
that the succession to the crown of this United Kingdom should be ruled
by the provisions of the English Act of Settlement. The Scotch Church
and the Scotch Law were left untouched, but all rights of trade were
thrown open, and a uniform system of coinage adopted.'
Of all the negotiations for the consummation of the Union, Ramsay,
doubtless, was an interested spectator. Patriotic to his heart's core,
and sympathising as a Jacobite with the chivalrous feeling of his nation
for the dynasty they had given to England, and which, after only
eighty-six years of alternate loyalty and revolt, the Southrons had
driven into exile, the keenly observant lad would follow every detail in
the closing chapter of Scotland's history as an independent nation, with
a pathetic and sorrowful interest. Undoubtedly, while yet an apprentice,
with a few months of his time unexpired, he must have watched the last
observance of that ancient and picturesque spectacle, annually
recurring, but now to be abolished for ever--the 'Riding of the
Parliament,' or the procession of members to the opening of the sittings
in the old Parliament House. Perhaps he may even have secretly gained
admission to overhear the fiery debates on the Union in that ultimate
session of the Scottish legislature. Certainly he must have been one of
the thousands of spectators who day by day thronged the purlieus of the
hall where the national assembly met. Of the rage, brooding and deep, or
loud and outspoken, according to temperament, which prevailed amongst
the Edinburgh people at the mere idea of Union with the hated
'Southrons,' he must have been a witness. Nay, he may have been an
onlooker, if not a participant, in that riot which occurred after all
was over,--after Lord-Chancellor Seafield had uttered his brutal _mot_,
'There is the end o' an auld sang,' which gathered up for him the gall
of a nation's execration for a century to come; and after the
Commissioners of both nations had retired to sign the Treaty of Union.
Not, however, to any of the halls of Court did they retire, but to a
dingy cellar (still existing) of a house, 177 High Street, opposite the
Tron Church--being nearly torn limb from limb in getting there. Then the
mob, suddenly realising that now or never they must
'Awake, arise, or be for ever fallen,'
besieged the cellar, intending to execute Jeddart justice or Lynch law
on those they esteemed traitors to their country. Fortunately there was
another means of egress; the party hastily took flight to an arbour in
the garden of Moray House, where the remaining signatures were appended,
and whence all the Commissioners fled post-haste to England, bearing
with them the signed copy of the Treaty.
That stirring time, so pregnant with mighty issues, a time when the weal
or the woe of the future British Empire trembled in the balance,--for
what of achievement could England alone have accomplished, with
Scotland as a hostile neighbour dogging her heels?--must of itself have
been an education to young Ramsay. It both confirmed his patriotism and
widened his political outlook.
Yet when the play was over, the curtain rung down, and the lights gone
out, the lapse of time must to him, as to other observers of the period,
have driven home with stunning force the conviction that the Union
spelled ruin for Scotland as a nation and Edinburgh as a city. For five
decades to come a listless apathy, born of despair, strangled Scottish
enterprise in its birth. The immediate effect of the Union was a serious
diminution in the national trade and commerce. The jealousy of English
merchants, as it had frustrated the Darien Scheme in the previous
century, now closed every possible avenue of commercial activity for the
renumerative utilisation of Scottish capital. 'We are dying by inches,'
wrote James, Earl of Bute, to a friend. And the signs of the times did
not seem to belie the assertion.
In Edinburgh, also, the change was severely felt. The removal of the
Court to London, a hundred and four years before, had drawn a large
number of the Scottish nobility to the vortex of fashion. The money they
were wont to spend during their stay in Edinburgh, while the Court
_season_ lasted, was diverted into another channel. The town houses
which they had been forced to maintain in the Scottish metropolis, were
in many cases relinquished, and the place that so long had known them
knew them no more. At that time Scottish merchants and shopkeepers had
suffered severely, yet they had the satisfaction of knowing that the
seat of Scottish government remained north of the Tweed.
But now a change even more radical was inaugurated. The national
Parliament, whose sittings had always necessitated the attendance of a
considerable proportion of the nobility and gentry of the country,
during a certain part of the year, was merged in that of the larger
country. Those of the purely Scottish peerage, whom choice or political
duties had retained in Scotland, now found no need to maintain their
costly Edinburgh establishments. Many a noble ancestral home, that for
three or four hundred years had sheltered the household and retainers of
families, whose deeds were interwoven with the historic records of
Scotland's most glorious epochs, was now advertised for sale. An exodus
to London on a vast scale set in, and the capital of Scotland ere long
settled down, in the apathy of despair, to play the _role_ of a
provincial centre. Henceforward her 'paper lords,' otherwise Judges of
the Court of Session, were to represent her titled magnates.
The bitterness of spirit which such a course of action as this migration
inspired in the minds of the residents of the Scottish capital, Ramsay,
as a young journeyman, or as a master craftsman who had only newly
commenced business for himself, would fervently reciprocate. In two
places at least in his works he pathetically, yet vigorously, protests
against the cream of Scottish youth being sent away out of the country.
In one of the most suggestively beautiful of his minor pastorals, _Betty
and Kate_, he thus writes--
'Far, far, o'er far frae Spey an' Clyde,
Stands that great town o' Lud,
To whilk our best lads rin an' ride,
That's like to put us wud [mad];
For sindle times they e'er come back
Wha anes are heftit there;
Sure, Bess, thae hills are nae sae black,
Nor yet thir [these] howms sae bare.'
And in _The Gentle Shepherd_, after the discovery has been made of
Patie's noble birth, his fellow-herd, Roger, remarks--
'Is not our master an' yoursell to stay
Amang us here? or, are ye gawn away
To London Court, or ither far aff parts,
To leave your ain poor us wi' broken hearts?'
The five intercalary years between Ramsay's commencing in business on
his own account and his marriage, were those which may properly be
designated his intellectual seedtime. That he was exercised over any of
the deeper and more complex problems of life, death and futurity; that
he was hagridden by doubt, or appalled by the vision of man's motelike
finitude when viewed against the deep background of infinity and
eternity, we have no reason to suppose. Never at any epoch of his life a
'thinker,' in the true sense of the word, he was inclined, with the
genial insouciant Hedonism always characteristic of him, to slip
contentedly into the Pantheism of Pope, to regard humanity and the world
without as
----'but parts of a stupendous whole
Whose body nature is, and God the soul,
--the superficial, ethical principle permeating which is summed up in
the dictum, _Whatever is, is right_. Though he had no sympathy with the
Puritanic austerity of Presbyterianism, albeit a regular attendant on
the ministrations of Dr. Webster of the Tolbooth Church, one of the
sections whereinto the magnificent cathedral of St. Giles was of old
divided, he was tinctured neither with French scepticism nor with the
fashionable doubts which the earlier deistical writers of the century,
Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Shaftesbury, Toland, and Blount, were sowing
broadcast over Great Britain. In his _Gentle Shepherd_ he makes Jenny,
when Glaud, her father, had remarked, with respect to the prevailing
disregard of religion and morality among the youth of the better
classes,
----'I've heard mysell
Some o' them laugh at doomsday, sin, and hell,'
make the following reply, which savours strongly of the slippered
orthodoxy of _The Essay on Man_--
'Watch o'er us, father! hech, that's very odd;
Sure, him that doubts a doomsday, doubts a God.'
But though he appears to have given a wide berth to the ponderous
theology, the narrow ethics, and the hair-splitting metaphysics of the
time, his whole nature seems to have been stirred and awakened more
deeply than ever by his study of the elder poets in English literature.
Not that their music tended to make him discontented with his lot, or
unhinged the lid of his resolution to become a thoroughly efficient man
of business. Ramsay, unlike many of his brethren of the lyre, was of an
eminently practical temperament. Rumour says that in earlier boyhood he
cherished a desire of becoming an artist. But his stepfather not
possessing the means to furnish him with the necessary training, he
wisely sloughed all such unreasonable dreams, and aimed at independence
through wig-making.
Wisdom as commendable was displayed now. Though his studies must have
kindled poetic emulation in him; though the vague unexpressed longings
of a richly-gifted nature were doubtless daily present with him, no
thought ever seems to have entered his mind of relinquishing trade for
poetry. On his ambition, also, he kept a steady curb, determining to
publish nothing but what his more matured judgment would approve. Not to
him in after years would the regret come that he had cursed his fame by
immaturity.
From 1707 until 1711, during the dreary depression of the time
immediately succeeding the Union, when Scotsmen preferred apathy to
action, Ramsay sought surcease from his pangs of wounded patriotism by
plunging into studies of various kinds, but principally of English
poetry. In a letter, hitherto unpublished, addressed to his friend
Andrew Gibb, who appears to have resided at or near West Linton, he
remarks: 'I have rowth of good reading to wile my heart from grieving
o'er what cannot be mended now,--the sale o' our unhappy country to the
Southron alliance by a wheen traitors, who thought more o' Lord Somers'
gold than Scotland's rights. In Willie Shakspeare's melodious numbers I
forget the dark days for trade, and in auld Chaucer's Tales, and
Spenser's 'Queen,' in John Milton's majestic flow, in Giles and Phineas
Fletcher, in rare Ben and our ain Drummond, I tine the sorrows o' the
day in the glories o' the days that are past.'
That we may accept Ramsay's account of the studies of Patie, the Gentle
Shepherd, as a type of his own is warranted by something more than
tradition. The internal evidence of his works throws a strong colour of
probability over the theory. When Sir William Worthy, who as a Royalist
had been compelled to flee into exile during the times of the
Commonwealth, inquires what were the books his son, whom he had
committed to the care of Symon, his shepherd, to be reared as his own
child, was in the habit of reading, the honest old servant replies--
'When'er he drives our sheep to Edinburgh port,
He buys some books o' hist'ry, sangs, or sport;
Nor does he want o' them a rowth at will,
And carries aye a poochfu' to the hill.
Aboot ane Shakspeare--an' a famous Ben,
He aften speaks, an' ca's them best o' men.
How sweetly Hawthornden an' Stirling sing,
An' ane ca'd Cowley, loyal to his king,
He kens fu' weel, an' gars their verses ring.
I sometimes thought he made owre great a phrase
About fine poems, histories, and plays.
When I reproved him ance, a book he brings,
"Wi' this," quoth he, "on braes I crack wi' kings."'
By the side-light thrown on Ramsay's life from this passage we gain some
idea of his own studies during those years of germination. To the poets
more exclusively Scottish, whether writing in the current literary
medium of the day or in the vernacular of the country; to Robert
Sempill's _Life and Death of the Piper of Kilbarchan_; to William
Cleland's _Highland Host_--in addition to Drummond and the Earl of
Stirling, mentioned in the passage quoted above; to William Hamilton of
Gilbertfield's verses, _The Dying Words of Bonnie Heck_, and to others
of less note, he seems to have devoted keen and enthusiastic attention.
Lieutenant Hamilton it was (as Ramsay admits in the poetical
correspondence maintained between them) who first awakened within him
the desire to write in the dialect of his country--
'When I begoud first to cun verse,
And could your "Ardry Whins" rehearse,
Where Bonny Heck ran fast and fierce,
It warm'd my breast;
Then emulation did me pierce,
Whilk since ne'er ceast.'
There was, however, another influence at work, quite as potent,
stimulating his poetic fancy. Amid the beauties of the 'Queen of Cities'
he lived, and the charms of his surroundings sank deep into his
impressionable nature. In whatever direction he looked, from the ridgy
heights of the Castlehill, a glorious natural picture met his eye. If to
the north, his gaze caught the gleam of the silvery estuary of the
Forth, with fertile reaches of green pasture-land intervening, and the
little villages of Picardy, Broughton, and Canonmills peeping out from
embosoming foliage, while beyond the silver streak, beautified by the
azure enchantment of distance, glowed in the sunshine the heath-clad
Lomonds and the yellow wealth of the fields of Fife. Did the youthful
poet turn eastward, from yonder favourite lounge of his on Arthur Seat,
the mouth of the noble Firth, dotted with sail, was full in view, with
the shadowy outlines of the May Island, peeping out like a spirit from
the depth of distance, and nearer, the conical elevation of North
Berwick Law and the black-topped precipitous mass of the Bass; while
seemingly lying, in comparison, almost at his feet, was the magnificent
semicircular sweep of Aberlady Bay, with its shore-fringe of whitewashed
villages gleaming like a string of glittering pearls, behind which
stretched the fertile carse of East Lothian, rolling in gently
undulating uplands back to the green Lammermoors. Or if he gazed
southward, did his eye not catch the fair expanse of Midlothian, as
richly cultivated as it was richly wooded, extending before him like a
matchless picture, dotted with homesteads, hamlets, and villages, past
Dalkeith--'which all the virtues love,' past Lasswade, past Roslin's
castled rock, past Dryden's groves of oak, past caverned Hawthornden,
until earth and sky seemed to meet in the misty horizon line of the
Moorfoots? And westward, was not the eye guided by the grassy grandeur
of the Pentland Range, until beauty was merged in indefiniteness across
the wide strath lying like a painted scroll from Edinburgh to
Linlithgow?
Fairer scene never nurtured poet in 'the fine frenzy of his art'; and in
long excursions during his spare hours, amidst the silent glens and
frowning _cleughs_ of the Pentlands, amidst the romantic scenery
clothing the banks of both the Esks, by Almond's gentle flow, and by the
wimpling waters of the Water of Leith, our Caledonian Theocritus fed his
germing genius on food that was destined to render him at once the
greatest and the most breezily objective of British pastoral poets.
From 1707 to 1711 thus did Allan Ramsay 'live and learn,'--a youth whose
nature, fired by the memories of Scotland's greatness in years gone by,
already longed to add something of value to the cairn of his country's
literature. Such, too, were the facts of which, at his request, the
worthy lawyer, Mr. James Ross, was placed in possession when he was
called on to decide whether his friend, the 'poetically-minded
wigmaker,' should be regarded as a _persona grata_ from the point of
view of a prospective son-in-law. That the 'pedigree' of the young
aspirant was accepted as satisfactory may be regarded as certain from
the fact that the marriage of Allan Ramsay and Christian Ross was
celebrated during the New Year festivities of 1712. A woman, at once of
considerable personal attractions, sound common sense and practical
knowledge of the world, a capital housewife withal, and though not
devoid of a certain modicum of literary appreciation, by no means a
blue-stocking, such, in brief, was the lady who for thirty years was to
be the faithful partner of Ramsay's fortunes, rejoicing with him in
success, sympathising with him in reverse--one who merited to the full
the glowing lines wherein he described her. The song of 'Bonny Chirsty'
was written after nearly seven years of wedded life. The sentiments
therein expressed speak better than comment as to the happiness of
Ramsay's marriage. One verse of it may be quoted--
'How sweetly smells the simmer green!
Sweet taste the peach and cherry;
Painting and order please our een,
And claret makes us merry:
But finest colours, fruits, and flowers,
And wine, though I be thirsty,
Lose a' their charms and weaker powers,
Compared wi' those of Chirsty.'
About a year before his marriage, Ramsay had left the shop in the
Grassmarket, where he had commenced business in 1707, and had
established himself in the High Street in premises already described,
and which exist to this day. There, under his sign of the 'Flying
Mercury,' he toiled and sang, and chatted and cracked jokes with all and
sundry, from sunrise to sunset, his wit and his humour, and, as time
rolled on, his poetic genius, bringing many customers to his shop.
Verily, a sunny-souled man, in whom 'life with its carking cares' could
never extinguish his cheery _bonhomie_ and self-confidence.