Such of our readers as are acquainted with the memoir of Lady
Glenorchy, must remember a deeply melancholy incident which occurred
in the history of this excellent woman, in connection with the noble
family of Sutherland. Her only sister had been married to William,
seventeenth Earl of Sutherland,--'the last of the good Earls;' 'a
nobleman,' says the Rev. Dr. Jones, in his Memoir, 'who to the finest
person united all the dignity and amenity of manners and character
which give lustre to greatness.' But his sun was destined soon to go
down. Five years after his marriage, which proved one of the happiest,
and was blessed with two children, the elder of the two, the young
Lady Catherine, a singularly engaging child, was taken from him by
death, in his old hereditary castle of Dunrobin. The event deeply
affected both parents, and preyed on their health and spirits. It had
taken place amid the gloom of a severe northern winter, and in the
solitude of the Highlands; and, acquiescing in the advice of friends,
the Earl and his lady quitted the family seat, where there was so much
to remind them of their bereavement, and sought relief in the more
cheerful atmosphere of Bath. But they were not to find it there.
Shortly after their arrival, the Earl was seized by a malignant fever,
with which, upheld by a powerful constitution, he struggled for
fifty-four days, and then expired. 'For the first twenty-one days and
nights of these,' says Dr. Jones, 'Lady Sutherland never left his
bedside; and then at last, overcome with fatigue, anxiety, and grief,
she sank an unavailing victim to an amiable but excessive attachment,
seventeen days before the death of her lord.' The period, though not
very remote, was one in which the intelligence of events travelled
slowly; and in this instance the distraction of the family must have
served to retard it beyond the ordinary time. Her Ladyship's mother,
when hastening from Edinburgh to her assistance, alighted one day from
her carriage at an inn, and, on seeing two hearses standing by the
wayside, inquired of an attendant whose remains they contained? The
remains, was the reply, of Lord and Lady Sutherland, on their way for
interment to the Royal Chapel of Holyrood House. And such was the
first intimation which the lady received of the death of her daughter
and son-in-law.
The event was pregnant with disaster to Sutherland, though many years
elapsed ere the ruin which it involved fell on that hapless county.
The sole survivor and heir of the family was a female infant of but a
year old. Her maternal grandmother, an ambitious, intriguing woman of
the world, had the chief share in her general training and education;
and she was brought up in the south of Scotland, of which her
grandmother was a native, far removed from the influence of those
genial sympathies with the people of her clan, for which the old lords
of Sutherland had been so remarkable, and, what was a sorer evil
still, from the influence of the vitalities of that religion which,
for five generations together, her fathers had illustrated and
adorned. The special mode in which the disaster told first, was
through the patronages of the county, the larger part of which are
vested in the family of Sutherland. Some of the old Earls had been
content, as we have seen, to place themselves on the level of the
Christian men of their parishes, and thus to unite with them in
calling to their churches the Christian ministers of their choice.
They knew,--what regenerate natures can alone know with the proper
emphasis,--that in Christ Jesus the vassal ranks with his lord, and
they conscientiously acted on the conviction. But matters were now
regulated differently. The presentation supplanted the call, and
ministers came to be placed in the parishes of Sutherland without the
consent and contrary to the will of the people. Churches, well filled
hitherto, were deserted by their congregations, just because a
respectable woman of the world, making free use of what she deemed her
own, had planted them with men of the world who were only tolerably
respectable; and in houses and barns the devout men of the district
learned to hold numerously-attended Sabbath meetings for reading the
Scriptures, and mutual exhortation and prayer, as a sort of substitute
for the public services, in which they found they could no longer join
with profit. The spirit awakened by the old Earls had survived
themselves, and ran directly counter to the policy of their
descendant. Strongly attached to the Establishment, the people, though
they thus forsook their old places of worship, still remained members
of the national Church, and travelled far in the summer season to
attend the better ministers of their own and the neighbouring
counties. We have been assured, too, from men whose judgment we
respect, that, under all their disadvantages, religion continued
peculiarly to flourish among them;--a deep-toned evangelism prevailed;
so that perhaps the visible Church throughout the world at the time
could furnish no more striking contrast than that which obtained
between the cold, bald, commonplace services of the pulpit in some of
these parishes, and the fervid prayers and exhortations which give
life and interest to these humble meetings of the people. What a pity
it is that differences such as these the Duke of Sutherland cannot
see!
The marriage of the young countess into a noble English family was
fraught with further disaster to the county. There are many Englishmen
quite intelligent enough to perceive the difference between a smoky
cottage of turf and a whitewashed cottage of stone, whose judgment on
their respective inhabitants would be of but little value.
Sutherland, as a country of _men_, stood higher at this period than
perhaps any other district in the British empire; but, as our
descriptions in the preceding chapter must have shown,--and we
indulged in them mainly with a view to this part of our subject,--it
by no means stood high as a country of farms and cottages. The
marriage of the Countess brought a new set of eyes upon it,--eyes
accustomed to quite a different face of things. It seemed a wild, rude
country, where all was wrong, and all had to be set right,--a sort of
Russia on a small scale, that had just got another Peter the Great to
civilise it,--or a sort of barbarous Egypt, with an energetic Ali
Pasha at its head. Even the vast wealth and great liberality of the
Stafford family militated against this hapless county: it enabled them
to treat it as the mere subject of an interesting experiment, in which
gain to themselves was really no object,--nearly as little so as if
they had resolved on dissecting a dog alive for the benefit of
science. It was a still further disadvantage, that they had to carry
on their experiment by the hands, and to watch its first effects with
the eyes, of others. The agonies of the dog might have had their
softening influence on a dissector who held the knife himself; but
there could be no such influence exerted over him, did he merely issue
orders to his footman that the dissection should be completed,
remaining himself, meanwhile, out of sight and out of hearing. The
plan of improvement sketched out by his English family was a plan
exceedingly easy of conception. Here is a vast tract of land,
furnished with two distinct sources of wealth. Its shores may be made
the seats of extensive fisheries, and the whole of its interior
parcelled out into productive sheep-farms. All is waste in its present
state: it has no fisheries, and two-thirds of its internal produce is
consumed by the inhabitants. It had contributed, for the use of the
community and the landlord, its large herds of black cattle; but the
English family saw, and, we believe, saw truly, that for every one
pound of beef which it produced, it could be made to produce two
pounds of mutton, and perhaps a pound of fish in addition. And it was
resolved, therefore, that the inhabitants of the central districts,
who, _as they were mere Celts_, could not be transformed, it was held,
into store-farmers, should be marched down to the sea-side, there to
convert themselves into fishermen, on the shortest possible notice,
and that a few farmers of capital, of the industrious Lowland race,
should be invited to occupy the new subdivisions of the interior.
And, pray, what objections can be urged against so liberal and
large-minded a scheme? The poor inhabitants of the interior had _very_
serious objections to urge against it. Their humble dwellings were of
their own rearing; it was they themselves who had broken in their
little fields from the waste; from time immemorial, far beyond the
reach of history, had they possessed their mountain holdings,--they
had defended them so well of old that the soil was still virgin
ground, in which the invader had found only a grave; and their young
men were now in foreign lands, fighting, at the command of their
chieftainess, the battles of their country, not in the character of
hired soldiers, but of men who regarded these very holdings as their
stake in the quarrel. To them, then, the scheme seemed fraught with
the most flagrant, the most monstrous injustice. Were it to be
suggested by some Chartist convention in a time of revolution, that
Sutherland might be still further improved--that it was really a piece
of great waste to suffer the revenues of so extensive a district to be
squandered by one individual--that it would be better to appropriate
them to the use of the community in general--that the community in
general might be still further benefited by the removal of the one
said individual from Dunrobin to a road-side, where he might be
profitably employed in breaking stones--and that this new arrangement
could not be entered on too soon--the noble Duke would not be a whit
more astonished, or rendered a whit more indignant, by the scheme,
than were the Highlanders of Sutherland by the scheme of his
predecessor.
The reader must keep in view, therefore, that if atrocities
unexampled in Britain for at least a century were perpetrated in the
_clearing_ of Sutherland, there was a species of at least passive
resistance on the part of the people (for active resistance there
was none), which in some degree provoked them. Had the Highlanders,
on receiving orders, marched down to the sea-coast, and become
fishermen, with the readiness with which a regiment deploys on review
day, the atrocities would, we doubt not, have been much fewer. But
though the orders were very distinct, the Highlanders were very
unwilling to obey; and the severities formed merely a part of the
means through which the necessary obedience was ultimately secured.
We shall instance a single case, as illustrative of the process. In
the month of March 1814, a large proportion of the Highlanders of
Farr and Kildonan, two parishes in Sutherland, were summoned to quit
their farms in the following May. In a few days after, the surrounding
heaths on which they pastured their cattle, and from which at that
season the sole supply of herbage is derived (for in those northern
districts the grass springs late, and the cattle-feeder in the spring
months depends chiefly on the heather), were set on fire and burnt up.
There was that sort of policy in the stroke which men deem allowable
in a state of war. The starving cattle went roaming over the burnt
pastures, and found nothing to eat. Many of them perished, and the
greater part of what remained, though in miserable condition, the
Highlanders had to sell perforce. Most of the able-bodied men were
engaged in this latter business at a distance from home, when the
dreaded term-day came on. The pasturage had been destroyed before
the legal term, and while, in even the eye of the law, it was still
the property of the poor Highlanders; but ere disturbing them in their
dwellings, term-day was suffered to pass. The work of demolition then
began. A numerous party of men, with a factor at their head, entered
the district, and commenced pulling down the houses over the heads
of the inhabitants. In an extensive tract of country not a human
dwelling was left standing, and then, the more effectually to
prevent their temporary re-erection, the destroyers set fire to
the wreck. In one day were the people deprived of home and shelter,
and left exposed to the elements. Many deaths are said to have ensued
from alarm, fatigue, and cold. Pregnant women were taken with
premature labour in the open air. There were old men who took to the
woods and rocks in a state of partial insanity. An aged bedridden
man, named Macbeath, had his house unroofed over his head, and was
left exposed to wind and rain till death put a period to his
sufferings. Another man lying ill of a fever met with no tenderer
treatment, but in his case the die turned up life. A bedridden woman,
nearly a hundred years of age, had her house fired over her head,
and ere she could be extricated from the burning wreck, the sheets in
which she was carried were on fire. She survived but for five days
after. In a critique on the work of Sismondi, which appeared a few
months since in the _Westminster Review_, the writer tells us, 'it
has even been said that an old man, having refused to quit his
cabin, perished in the flames.' But such was not the case. The
constituted authorities interfered; a precognition was taken by the
Sheriff-substitute of the county, and the case tried before the
Justiciary Court at Inverness; but the trial terminated in the
acquittal of the pannels. There was no punishable crime proven to
attach to the agents of the proprietor.
Their acquittal was followed by scenes of a similar character with
the scene described, and of even greater atrocity. But we must borrow
the description of one of these from the historian of the _clearing_
of Sutherland,--Donald M'Leod, a native of the county, and himself a
sufferer in the experimental process to which it was subjected:--
'The work of devastation was begun by setting fire to the houses of
the small tenants in extensive districts--Farr, Rogart, Golspie,
and the whole parish of Kildonan. I was an eye-witness of the
scene. The calamity came on the people quite unexpectedly. Strong
parties for each district, furnished with faggots and other
combustibles, rushed on the dwellings of the devoted people, and
immediately commenced setting fire to them, proceeding in their
work with the greatest rapidity, till about three hundred houses
were in flames. Little or no time was given for the removal of persons
or property--the consternation and confusion were extreme--the
people striving to remove the sick and helpless before the fire
should reach them--next struggling to save the most valuable of
their effects--the cries of the women and children--the roaring of
the affrighted cattle, hunted by the dogs of the shepherds amid the
smoke and the fire--altogether composed a scene that completely
baffles description. A dense cloud of smoke enveloped the whole
country by day, and even extended far on the sea. At night, an awfully
grand but terrific scene presented itself--all the houses in an
extensive district in flames at once. I myself ascended a height
about eleven o'clock in the evening, and counted two hundred and fifty
blazing houses, many of the owners of which were my relations, and
all of whom I personally knew, but whose present condition I could not
tell. The conflagration lasted six days, till the whole of the
dwellings were reduced to ashes or smoking ruins. During one of these
days, a boat lost her way in the dense smoke as she approached the
shore, but at night she was enabled to reach a landing-place by
the light of the flames.'
But, to employ the language of Southey,
'Things such as these, we know, must be
At every famous victory.'
And in this instance the victory of the lord of the soil over the
children of the soil was signal and complete. In little more than nine
years a population of fifteen thousand individuals were removed from
the interior of Sutherland to its sea-coasts, or had emigrated to
America. The inland districts were converted into deserts, through
which the traveller may take a long day's journey, amid ruins that
still bear the scathe of fire, and grassy patches betraying, when the
evening sun casts aslant its long deep shadows, the half-effaced lines
of the plough. The writer of the singularly striking passage we have
just quoted, revisited his native place (Kildonan) in the year 1828,
and attended divine service in the parish church. A numerous and
devout congregation had once worshipped there: the congregation now
consisted of eight shepherds and their _dogs_. In a neighbouring
district--the barony of Strathnaver, a portion of the parish of
Farr--the church, no longer found necessary, was razed to the ground.
The timber was carried away to be used in the erection of an inn, and
the minister's house converted into the dwelling of a fox-hunter. 'A
woman well known in the parish,' says M'Leod, 'happening to traverse
the Strath the year after the burning, was asked, on her return, What
news? "Oh," said she, "_sgeul bronach, sgeul bronach!_ sad news, sad
news! I have seen the timber of our kirk covering the inn at
Altnaharran; I have seen the kirkyard, where our friends are
mouldering, filled with tarry sheep, and Mr. Sage's study-room a
kennel for Robert Gun's dogs.'"