Scotland and the French Revolutionary War, 1792-1802

243 Pages·2015·1.019 MB·English

by  Atle Wold

S c o t t iS h h i S t o r i c a l r e v i e w M o n o g r a p h S c o t t iS h h i S t o r i c a l r e v i e w M o n o g r a p h
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Rosalind Carr provides an in-depth analysis of men’s 9c
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ritual of the duel. Women are important actors in this story 0
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too: the book presents an analysis of women’s important
contribution to Scottish Enlightenment culture, and it asks
why there were no Scottish Bluestockings.
Rosalind Carr is Lecturer in History at the University of
East London. She has published articles on women and
early modern Scottish political history, and on Scottish
masculinities.
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SCOTLAND AND THE FRENCH
REVOLUTIONARY WAR, 1792–1802
SCOTTISH HISTORICAL REVIEW
MONOGRAPHS SERIES
No. 24
Scottish Historical Review Monographs are major works of scholarly research covering
all aspects of Scottish history. They are selected and sponsored by the Scottish Historical
Review Trust Editorial Board.
The Trustees of the SHR Trust are: Dr Alex Woolf (Convenor); Dr Alison Cathcart
(Secretary); Dr E. V. Macleod (Minutes Secretary); Dr Catriona M. M. Macdonald;
Dr David Ditchburn; Mrs Patricia Whatley; Dr Karly Kehoe; Dr Jackson Armstrong;
Dr Martin Macgregor; Mr Brian Smith; Dr James E. Fraser; Dr Andrew Mackillop.
CURRENT AND FORTHCOMING VOLUMES
1 Helen M. Dingwall Physicians, Surgeons and Apothecaries: Medicine in
Seventeenth-Century Edinburgh
2 Ewen A. Cameron Land for the People? The British Government and the
Scottish Highlands, c. 1880–1923
3 Richard Anthony Herds and Hinds: Farm Labour in Lowland Scotland,
1900–1939
4 R. Andrew McDonald The Kingdom of the Isles: Scotland’s Western Seaboard,
c. 1100–1336
5 John R. McIntosh Church and Theology in Enlightenment Scotland: The
Evangelical Party, 1740–1800
6 Graeme Morton Unionist-Nationalism: Governing Urban Scotland,
1830–1860
7 Catriona M. M. Macdonald The Radical Thread: Political Change in Scotland. Paisley
Politics, 1885–1924
8 James L. MacLeod The Second Disruption: The Free Church in Victorian
Scotland and the Origins of the Free Presbyterian Church
9 John Finlay Men of Law in Pre-Reformation Scotland
10 William Kenefick ‘Rebellious and Contrary’: The Glasgow Dockers,
c. 1853–1932
11 J. J. Smyth Labour in Glasgow, 1896–1936, Socialism, Suffrage,
Sectarianism
12 Roland Tanner The Late Medieval Scottish Parliament: Politics and the
Three Estates, 1424–1488
13 Ginny Gardner ‘Shaken Together in the Bag of Affliction’: Scottish Exiles in
the Netherlands, 1660–1690
14 Allan W. MacColl Land, Faith and the Crofting Community: Christianity and
Social Criticism in the Highlands of Scotland, 1843–1893
15 Andrew G. Newby Ireland, Radicalism and the Scottish Highlands,
c. 1870–1912
16 Karen J. Cullen Famine in Scotland: The ‘Ill Years’ of the 1690s
17 Annemarie Hughes Gender and Political Identities in Scotland, 1919–1939
18 Annie Tindley The Sutherland Estate, 1850–1920: Aristocratic Decline,
Estate Management and Land Reform
19 Tanja Bueltmann Scottish Ethnicity and the Making of New Zealand Society,
1850–1930
20 Edda Frankot ‘Of Laws of Ships and Shipmen’: Medieval Maritime Law
and its Practice in Urban Northern Europe
21 Kyle Hughes The Scots in Victorian and Edwardian Belfast: A Study in
Elite Migration
22 Rosalind Carr Gender and Enlightenment Culture in Eighteenth-Century
Scotland
23 Brian Bonnyman The Third Duke of Buccleuch and Adam Smith: Estate
Management and Improvement in Enlightenment Scotland
24 Atle L. Wold Scotland and the French Revolutionary War, 1792–1802
www.euppublishing.com /series /shrm
SCOTLAND AND THE FRENCH
REVOLUTIONARY WAR, 1792–1802
ATLE L. WOLD
© Atle L. Wold, 2015
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
The Tun – Holyrood Road
12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry
Edinburgh EH8 8PJ
www.euppublishing.com
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and printed and bound in Great Britain by
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A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 4744 0331 3 (hardback)
ISBN 978 1 4744 0332 0 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 1 4744 0668 0 (epub PDF)
The right of Atle L. Wold to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the
Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).
Funding to cover the indexing costs of this book was kindly granted by the
Research Committee at the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European
Languages, University of Oslo.
Contents
List of Tables vi
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
1 The Government of Scotland in the 1790s 7
2 Political Trials 38
3 Military Recruitment 70
4 Financial Contributions 110
5 Demonstrations of Loyalty 131
6 Loyalist Ideology 177
Conclusion 207
Bibliography 214
Index 228
Tables
3.1 Age groups in the Edinburgh Militia 105
3.2 Professions in the Edinburgh Militia 106
4.1 British Customs and Excise revenues, 1791–7 125
4.2 The Scottish percentage of the British total 125
4.3 Proportion of revenues which was not submitted to the
Treasury 126
Acknowledgements
This book is based on my Edinburgh Ph.D. from 2003, and in the some-
what long-winded process it has been to convert the thesis into a book, a
number of people have been of great help and assistance. I am particularly
indebted to Professor Christopher Whatley for alerting my attention to the
Atholl Papers held at Blair Castle, and to the Blair Castle Trust and their
archivist Jane Anderson for giving me access to the collection. I should
also like to register my appreciation to the Duke of Buccleuch for granting
access to the family archive held by the National Archives of Scotland in
Edinburgh, as well as to all the members of staff at the libraries and archives
whose material I consulted while doing research for the Ph.D., and later.
My thanks thus go to the Bank of Scotland Archives, the British Library, the
Edinburgh Central Library, the Edinburgh University Special Collections,
the National Library of Scotland, and, as already mentioned, NAS.
Over the years, many people have commented on the Ph.D. itself, or on
aspects of it which I have presented in papers or in other contexts. This
feedback has been invaluable in terms of refining a number of the argu-
ments presented in the thesis, as well as developing new ones. The ques-
tion of how one should assess demonstrations of loyalty is one of the most
important in this respect, and I would therefore like to thank all those who
have provided commentary on this, or on other themes covered in the
book. I should further like to express my gratitude to my two supervisors
for the Ph.D., Professor Harry Dickinson and Dr Alexander Murdoch, for
their superb guidance during the work with the thesis and later assistance
with the book, as well as to Professor John W. Cairns whose help in my early
efforts to grapple with the political trials of 1793–4 led to a lasting interest
in the historical developments of Scots law.
Last, but not least, I am grateful to Dr Andrew Mackillop and the Scottish
Historical Review Trust for accepting my book for publication as a part of
their monograph series.

Introduction
One day in January 1794, a member of the reformist society of the
‘Friends of the People’ had stopped by a pub on his way home, and
while there, had asked the landlady if she knew of any interesting news
having passed that day. The landlady – who was well acquainted with the
political affiliations of the gentleman – replied that she had one piece of
news which she thought it would please him to hear. This, she stated, was
that a group of the Friends of the People, numbering perhaps as many
as a thousand, had stopped by the house earlier in the day on their way
south. Excited by the news, the gentleman ran off southwards, stopping
only after four or five miles at a turnpike gate to ask the keeper if he
had seen the band, but the keeper could assure him that he had not met
with such a group at any time during the day. Both men were bewildered
by the whole affair, but after discussing the matter for some time, they
realised that the Friends of the People in question had, in fact, been a
‘cart load of fresh herrings’. This story, true or not, was reported by the
pro-government newspaper the Caledonian Mercury on 18 January, 1794.
While referring to an individual incident, of arguably no particularly
significance for the great events and developments of the final decade
of the eighteenth century, it none the less gives us an invaluable glimpse
into Scottish society at the time, and through that also into the great
issues which were at stake back then: the omnipresence of politics relat-
ing to reform of the political system in Britain, and the influence of
revolutionary ideas from France; the sharp division between so-called
radicals and loyalists in the political debates of the time; and the – by
1794 – backdrop of the war against Revolutionary France, and the hard-
ships which came with it. This was a time when politics and questions
of political ideology permeated Scottish society to an extent that they
perhaps had never done before. All this is, however, well known from
the existing literature on Scotland in the 1790s, which began with Henry
Meikle’s seminal work Scotland and the French Revolution from 1912, so
what is the need for another book on the decade now? Two main reasons
seem to stand out. Much of the considerable work which has been done
on Scotland in the 1790s since Meikle has been focussed on individual
issues or aspects of Scottish society such as popular disturbances, mili-
tary recruitment, or the prosecution of political radicals before the law
courts. What is missing is a work taking a more comprehensive approach.
The other reason is that radicalism has traditionally attracted greater