Those in the transports suffered worst. A prisoner on the Alexander Alexander and James, and James, its hold crammed with prisoners being taken to London for trial and execution, remembered: "They"d take a rope and tye about the poor sicks west, then they would hawll them up by their tackle and plunge them into the sea, as they said to drown the vermine; but they took speciall care to drown both together. Then they"d hawll them up on deck and ty a stone about the leggs and overboard with them." He added, "I have seen six or seven examples of this in a day." its hold crammed with prisoners being taken to London for trial and execution, remembered: "They"d take a rope and tye about the poor sicks west, then they would hawll them up by their tackle and plunge them into the sea, as they said to drown the vermine; but they took speciall care to drown both together. Then they"d hawll them up on deck and ty a stone about the leggs and overboard with them." He added, "I have seen six or seven examples of this in a day."
At the same time, the rest of Scotland was returning to normal. When the city of Glasgow learned of the royal victory at Culloden, citizens rang church bells and built bonfires that blazed on through the night. The Lord Provost of Edinburgh, who had failed to defend the city against the prince"s troops, was arrested and thrown into prison. George Drummond replaced him, and the young volunteers whom people had earlier laughed at and mocked were now the heroes of the hour. Colin Maclaurin, who had supervised reinforcement of the city"s defense so diligently and to so little ultimate purpose, returned from his exile in York. But his health was gone, and before the summer was over he was dead. A popular and respected teacher, Maclaurin"s textbooks on mathematics had made Newton"s calculus standard practice across Britain. Enlightened Edinburgh mourned one of its own.
The bulk of c.u.mberland"s army returned to Flanders. His successor, the Earl of Albemarle, divided Scotland into four military districts, and said of the Highland Scots, "Nothing but fire and sword can cure their cursed, vicious ways of thinking." But except for patrols to look for remaining rebels or the unaccounted-for Prince Charles (who was still in hiding in the Great Glen), his troops spent most of their time completing the military fortifications and roads General Wade had started two decades before, including Fort George at Ardersier Point, near Inverness. A forbidding example of the most advanced eighteenth-century fortificatory technology, it was finally finished in 1769. It has never seen a shot fired in battle.
At the recommendation of soldiers and bureaucrats, Parliament pa.s.sed laws banning weapons (again), the tartan, and the kilt. This time the laws had teeth, and the threat of c.u.mberland"s dragoons, behind them. For a generation Highlanders had to dye their plaid clothing black or brown, and learn to sew their kilts together at the crotch. Warriors hid their swords and targes in the heath, hoping that they or their children would remember where they had buried them. Year by year, the clan battle cries and the tales of ancient cattle raids began to fade from the people"s memory.
Most of this, like the b.l.o.o.d.y reprisals in the Great Glen, did not touch the lives of Lowlanders. Scottish Whigs were either ignorant of, or indifferent to, what was happening. An exception was David Hume. He had acquaintances who had turned Jacobite, and he beseeched his cousin, Alexander Home of Eccles, who, as solicitor general, was prosecuting many of these cases: "Seek the Praise, my dear Sandy, of Humanity and Moderation."
Another was Duncan Forbes. He had returned to Culloden House to find the windows smashed, the furniture broken or stolen, his wine cellar drunk dry, and his tenants beaten and robbed by both sides. He also learned that twelve wounded Jacobites had sought shelter in the house after the battle, and that British soldiers had turned up and, on the pretext of taking them away to be treated for their wounds, dragged them into the forecourt and shot them. Later, when he met George II, the king asked him if the story was true. "I wish I could say no," Forbes said.
As Lord President, he presided over many trials of accused traitors that spring, and tried whenever possible to make sure that justice, rather than revenge, was served. When MacDonald of Kingsburgh was arrested because the fugitive prince had stayed at his house, Forbes offered to put up his bail himself. He warned the Earl of Albemarle, "Unnecessary severity creates pity." The ban on weapons was something Forbes had been pressing for years, but he thought the ban on the kilt both ridiculous and too severe. He called it "a chip in porridge" and worth "not one half penny." Instead, he urged the government to put the ban on the rebel clans instead of on everyone, regardless of loyalty. The London government, which was not in the mood to distinguish between good and bad Highlanders, ignored him. Having saved the government from its worst nightmare, a general uprising of the Highlands, Forbes never received any honor or reward, not even a knighthood.
Forbes did, however, have the satisfaction of seeing through a piece of legislation that he considered key to breaking the power of the chieftains. This abolished the ancient, hereditary jurisdictions of chieftains over their clansmen, including the so-called regalian rights, which made them virtual kings in their territories. At the same date, Lord Kames was writing his Essay Concerning British Antiquities, Essay Concerning British Antiquities, pointing out that the old Scottish law had been set up to keep tenants under the thumb of their feudal overlords. Now Forbes oversaw the creation of a new legal framework for the Highlands, shattering the age-old dependence of clansman and peasant on the will of his chief. It established a new principle, that the Highlander was a free individual, who could contract to work his own land and keep the proceeds for himself. pointing out that the old Scottish law had been set up to keep tenants under the thumb of their feudal overlords. Now Forbes oversaw the creation of a new legal framework for the Highlands, shattering the age-old dependence of clansman and peasant on the will of his chief. It established a new principle, that the Highlander was a free individual, who could contract to work his own land and keep the proceeds for himself.
Forbes even introduced a new system of written leases, which freed the tenant from compulsory services in kind to his landlord, including service with the sword. No Highland chieftain could ever again summon up a private army to fight his neighbors-or the British Crown. But the change was also supposed to benefit the tenant as well, by letting him work to pay his laird rather than fight for him. The fact that it did not quite work out that way was not entirely Forbes"s fault; the Highland Clearances were still a long way off, and something no one could have foreseen in 1748.
Instead, like other Scottish Whigs, Forbes watched with relief the disarming of the Highlands and the disruption of clan life. They had just had a brush with disaster; no one wanted to see it repeated. Looking back, Alexander Carlyle said, "G.o.d forbid that Britain should ever again be in danger of being overrun by such a despicable enemy." According to John Clerk of Penicuik, news of Culloden "gave universal joy" not only to Whigs "but there were even Jacobites who were at least content at what had happened." Thanks to the rebellion, "all trade and business in this country were quite at a standstill." Now, Clerk noted with pleasure, "peace and quietness began to break in."
Scotland was ready for the next stage of its future.
III.
There are many aftermaths to Culloden and the Forty-five.
Prince Charles spent five months hiding from c.u.mberland"s troops. With a price of thirty thousand pounds on his head, he wandered hungry and sick from one sanctuary to another, endangering everyone who gave him shelter. At one point he traveled disguised as an Irish maidservant with Flora MacDonald, daughter of MacDonald of Milton, to her future father-in-law"s house at Kingsburgh, on the Isle of Skye. Escorted on foot to Elgol, he was able to catch a boat to the mainland, and on September 19, 1746, he made his rendezvous with the French privateer L"Heureux. He returned to France until 1748, when the terms of the peace treaty between France and Britain deported him to Italy. He lived the rest of his life in Rome a corpulent alcoholic, blaming the failure of the revolt on everyone except himself. When his father died in 1766, Charles became the Stuart claimant-but by then it was a meaningless claim. On January 31, 1788, the man who more than any other was responsible for bringing death and destruction to the Highlands expired, still admired by too many of the people whose lives he had ruined.
The notion that Culloden destroyed the Highland clans is a myth; the traditional ways had been dying for years. Long before, without realizing it, the chieftains and the Crown had conspired to obliterate the old system of loyalties and mutual dependence in order to consolidate their own power. The battle was the clans" last stand, just as the myth states. The glory was gone. But the sordid reality of that way of life lingered on for decades: the poverty, the bruising punishment of the weak and helpless, the sullen hopelessness.
More than a quarter-century after Culloden, Samuel Johnson and James Boswell made their famous visit to Scotland. From the western Highlands they traveled to the Isle of Skye, and from Skye to Raasay. Raasay, a narrow, barren island fifteen miles long and only three miles wide, was MacLeod land and the scene of some of the ugliest reprisals of the Forty-five (committed, we note in pa.s.sing, not by the English but by fellow Scots, including MacLeod clansmen from the loyalist side). By 1773, however, the bitterness of those years had faded. The captain of Boswell and Johnson"s boat to Raasay was Malcolm MacLeod, who had escorted the prince to Elgol. Now sixty-two, MacLeod struck Boswell as a perfect "representative of a Highland gentleman"-although he wore breeches and a plaid jacket instead of a kilt. Boswell found him "frank and polite, in the true sense of the word."
Boswell and Johnson even stopped in on Flora MacDonald, now a middle-aged married lady, and drank gin with her and her husband. Johnson slept on the same bed Prince Charles had used when he stayed there disguised as Betty Burke. Flora had even saved the sheets the prince had slept in (she would eventually be buried in one of them). Boswell stayed up to visit with his hosts, and was distressed to learn that they were "under a load of debt and intended to go to America." In 1774 they did as they promised and emigrated to the colonies, just in time to be caught up in another revolt against the British Crown.
During his stay, Johnson observed that "the clans retain little now of their original character." The people had lost their taste for war: "their contempt of government is subdued, and their reverence for the chiefs abated." In general, he noted with satisfaction, progress in Scotland has been "rapid and uniform." It was finally becoming a civilized country. "What remains to be done," he concluded, "they will quickly do, and then wonder, like me, why that which was so necessary and so easy was so long delayed."
Still, the fate of the Highlands and Highlanders bothered him. Before the Forty-five, "every man was a soldier, who partook of national confidence, and interested himself in national honor. To lose this spirit, is to lose what no small advantage will compensate." This led Johnson to wonder whether in fact any nation ought to become "totally commercial," or whether "it be necessary to preserve in some part of the empire the military spirit."
It was an acute and profound point. But in fact Scottish Whigs had been there a decade or two ahead of him. As they watched the new Scotland take shape around them-a nation that men such as John Home and William Robertson had risked their lives to see emerge from the shadows of the past-they would see much to celebrate and extol. But always a small doubt remained: a sense of loss, of something missing from the modern cultural universe they and their generation, more than any other, could take credit for creating. And for them as well as for Scots ever after, the symbol of that something would be the Highlanders who fought and died at Culloden.
CHAPTER SEVEN.
Profitable Ventures August, around, what Public Works I see!
Lo! Stately Street, lo! Squares that court the breeze!
See long Ca.n.a.ls and deepened Rivers join Each part with each, with the circling Main The whole enlivened Isle.
-James Thomson, Liberty, 1736
I.
Scottish Whigs had helped to defeat Jacobitism in order to give birth to a new enlightened Scotland. They got their wish- with a vengeance. The years after 1745 witnessed an explosion of cultural and economic activity all across Scotland, as if the collapse of the Jacobite and Highland threat had released a tremendous pent-up store of national energy. It was economic "takeoff" in the full modern sense.
Scots were not the first, or certainly the last, people to experience it. But they were the first to recognize it for what it was, and to realize how economic growth could suddenly transform an entire society for (on the whole) the better. As the century proceeded, merchants, scholars, clerics, and professional men-a Scottish middle cla.s.s-pushed themselves front and center. Progress was no longer just a question of creating a polite or even commercial society. Scots were engaged in creating the new capitalist future of the world, with its self-renewing productive growth and "economies of scale," and Adam Smith would be its prophet.
The epicenter of this transformation was Glasgow. It became the emporium of Scotland, a thriving international port city on the Atlantic, commanding the sea routes south and east. In 1707, Glasgow had fought hard against union, since it cost the city its independent political clout. Within a generation, however, Glaswegians carved out a place for themselves in Britain"s trade with the American colonies, particularly the trade in tobacco. The men who confronted Prince Charles with their sullen resistance, and raised a regiment of militia to oppose him, enjoyed a perspective on the world that extended to America, Scandinavia, and Russia. After 1745 they became cutthroat compet.i.tors for the market in tobacco with their English rivals.
A decade after the Act of Union, the first Glasgow-owned ship had made the seven-week voyage to the tobacco landings on the Chesapeake Bay. By 1727 there were fifty vessels making the trip every year. In 1741 Glasgow shippers dropped off 7 million pounds of tobacco on their wharves at Port Glasgow; in 1752, they were unloading 21 million, three times the volume of just eleven years earlier. From that point on, the rate of growth, as well as the total volume of trade, continued to accelerate, while the British Empire expanded. In 1758, the year after Robert Clive conquered India and the year before James Wolfe captured Quebec and Canada, Scottish tobacco imports from America were larger than those of London and all English ports combined.
Yet the biggest growth in the market was still to come. The true "golden age" of Glasgow and her wealthy tobacco importers, the so-called Tobacco Lords, came in the decade and a half before the American Revolution. In 1771 the trade rose to an incredible 41 million pounds; it totaled more than a third of all Scottish imports, and almost two-thirds of all the nation"s exports. Scottish merchants were a regular part of life in such ports as New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Alexandria, Virginia. Almost half of all American trade in tobacco was in Scottish hands. William Lee wrote his fellow planter Landon Carter in 1771, "I think it self-evident, that Glasgow has almost monopolized Virginia and its inhabitants." As the most recent historian of the Glasgow trade puts it, "By the 1780s, the city was a player on the world stage."
The men who made Glasgow a world player came from different backgrounds and circ.u.mstances. A few were sons of local artisans and clerics. One, Hugh Wylie, was a sea captain who saved enough money to buy a share in one of the big importing houses. Most, though, were well-to-do Lowlanders, including sons of landowning families. Others belonged to long-established Glaswegian families such as the Bogles, the Dunlops, and the Murdochs, who had been in the American trade since the seventeenth century. Almost all served time in Virginia or Maryland as tobacco warehouse managers (or factors) before returning to Glasgow.
The appellation Tobacco Lords was a tribute to their wealth and power, but also expressed a paradox. Business, rather than birth, had conferred on them an almost aristocratic status. As they walked along the Gallowgate with their scarlet cloaks, satin suits, and gold-tipped canes, awed citizens stepped off the pavement to let them pa.s.s. Their town houses and gardens were noted on Glasgow street maps with the same respect as the estates of great peers in county surveys. They were a ruling cla.s.s made entirely by money-money hard earned and, it must be said, money freely spent.
The Big Three were William Cunninghame, Alexander Spiers, and John Gla.s.sford. In the half-decade before the American Revolution, their three firms controlled over half the Glasgow tobacco trade. The rest of the market was divided among their lesser rivals: Bogles, Murdochs, Dunlops, Oswalds, Buchanans, and Ritchies.
William Cunninghame was born in 1715, and started his career working in a tobacco warehouse in Virginia. In 1775 he was rich enough to loan his brother-in-law Robert Dunlaw 150,000 pounds, perhaps $60 million in today"s money (albeit over ten years). His company owned fourteen warehouses just in Virginia, and his famous company ships such as the Patuxent Patuxent and the and the Cunninghame Cunninghame regularly set records on the seven-thousand-mile, three-month round trip to the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. The regularly set records on the seven-thousand-mile, three-month round trip to the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. The Cunninghame Cunninghame alone made the run fifteen times in seven years. Cunninghame built himself a magnificent town house in Glasgow that cost over 10,000 pounds, while Alexander Spiers"s mansion nearby ran to nearly 5,300 pounds. Spiers, Bowman, and Company had had a total capitalization of just over 16,000 pounds in 1744; in 1773 it was worth 152,280 pounds. Spiers"s personal fortune made him one of the richest men in Britain. alone made the run fifteen times in seven years. Cunninghame built himself a magnificent town house in Glasgow that cost over 10,000 pounds, while Alexander Spiers"s mansion nearby ran to nearly 5,300 pounds. Spiers, Bowman, and Company had had a total capitalization of just over 16,000 pounds in 1744; in 1773 it was worth 152,280 pounds. Spiers"s personal fortune made him one of the richest men in Britain.
How did they do it? Some pointed to Glasgow"s geography. Like the rest of western Scotland, its westerly projection into the Atlantic made it uniquely situated to benefit from American trade. A journey from Port Glasgow, the heart of Glaswegian shipping, to Charleston, South Carolina, or Annapolis, Maryland, could shave two to three weeks off the same trip from London or Bristol. Faster time meant lower costs, of course, and quicker return on investors" money. Many of those investors were also immediate family members. This was another feature of the big Glasgow firms: their reliance on a loyal circle of uncles and aunts, nephews and sons-in-law, to pool capital and lay off risk.
This "clannishness" of Scottish business firms, past and present, used to be supposed to be crucial to their success. This is a myth. Similarly, the economic advantage Glasgow enjoyed on the Atlantic end of the tobacco run was more than offset by the long trip to re-export it into the Mediterranean and the Baltic-which is where one could make real money. Instead, the secret of the Tobacco Lords" success lay in their balance sheets: their ability to summon up capital from a wide variety of sources, while ruthlessly cutting costs. Investment money for ships, warehouses, and inventories (since Scottish firms, unlike their English rivals, bought the tobacco from planters outright instead of selling it abroad on commission) came from a wide variety of sources, including banks set up to finance the trade. Between 1740 and 1770 no less than six banks were chartered in Glasgow for this purpose, including the Glasgow Ship Bank and the Thistle Bank.
In addition, partners were paid only 5 percent interest on their shares. The rest of their profits, an overwhelming sum of money in good times, had to be plowed back into the business. The result of all this was that the Glasgow tobacco trade was one of the most heavily capitalized industries in Britain, giving merchants the flexibility to expand when things went well, or sit out the storm when they did not.
The eighteenth-century Glasgow tobacco trade was run by entrepreneurs in the cla.s.sic sense: men who took risks in order to make money, and who paid the price when their enterprises failed. One of the oldest partic.i.p.ants, the Bogle family firm, had to go into receivership in 1772 when it could no longer pay its debts. Established figures such as Hugh Wylie, George McCall, James Dunlop, and William French all went through the ordeal of bankruptcy. But, for every firm that went under, new syndicates of investors took its place. This was a constantly self-renewing industry, drawing on fresh outside blood and investors even as compet.i.tion compelled everyone to keep costs down and services at their deliverable best. Glasgow"s tobacco trade offered up an image of capitalism in its purest and most dynamic form.
It was by watching the city"s tobacco trade that Adam Smith, professor at the University of Glasgow from 1751 to 1764, made his first real acquaintance with large-scale business enterprise, and with the businessmen who ran it. Smith struck up a close acquaintance with John Gla.s.sford, who kept him informed of events in America and also took a keen interest in Smith"s progress with his Wealth of Nations. Wealth of Nations. Glasgow Provost Andrew Cochrane organized a Political Economy Club, whose members included Smith, Gla.s.sford, and another wealthy tobacco merchant, Richard Oswald. Cochrane even presided over a special session of the Glasgow Town Council on May 3, 1762, when Professor Smith was made an honorary burgess of the city. Glasgow Provost Andrew Cochrane organized a Political Economy Club, whose members included Smith, Gla.s.sford, and another wealthy tobacco merchant, Richard Oswald. Cochrane even presided over a special session of the Glasgow Town Council on May 3, 1762, when Professor Smith was made an honorary burgess of the city.
This sort of thing happened because the Glasgow merchant community, like other middle-cla.s.s Scots, ranked education almost, though not quite, as high as good business sense. Most merchants could read Greek and Latin as well as a ledger and balance sheet. The heirs of firms such as Gla.s.sford, Ingram regularly went for one or two years at the university. Several almost certainly sat in on Adam Smith"s lectures on philosophy and jurisprudence, just as their fathers had attended Francis Hutcheson"s cla.s.ses. Their numbers at the University of Glasgow grew as the century wore on. In fact, by one count fully one-half of the students enrolled by 1790 were sons of "industry and commerce." This compares with less than 8 percent at Cambridge University in the same period-indicating how much the Scots, and Glaswegians in particular, not only talked about the alliance between commerce and "politeness" or cultural excellence, but lived it as well.
"The connection between Commerce and the liberal arts is so well known," wrote Glaswegian John Mennons, "that such as cultivate the latter naturally seek the patronage of those who are the greatest friends to the latter." Education and the arts did find generous patrons among the Tobacco Lords. Affluence and long months between the departure and return of shipping fleets meant that Glasgow"s elite had plenty of time on their hands. Alexander Bogle alleged that "all the merchants in Glasgow . . . are quite idle for one half or two-thirds of the year" when their ships were at sea and so had to find other ways to keep themselves occupied. They joined the Literary Society of Glasgow, and the Sacred Music Inst.i.tution, and founded the Hodge Podge Club, which invited luminaries such as Adam Smith and Thomas Reid to speak. They gathered in the coffee room of the Tontine Hotel for polite conversation or a gla.s.s of rum punch, the drink of choice among the Tobacco Lords and Glasgow"s West Indian merchants.
It was tobacco merchant George Bogle who cast the deciding vote on the university board of regents enabling Francis Hutcheson"s friend William Leechman to become professor of theology, over the objections of Presbyterian hard-liners. And it was John Gla.s.sford and his partner Archibald Ingram who put up the initial funding for the most farsighted cultural project in the city"s history, the brainchild of the Glasgow Enlightenment"s most unusual and eccentric figure.
Francis Hutcheson first noticed him sitting in on his lectures in the 1730s. Although Robert Foulis was not a regular student, Hutcheson was so impressed with this "singular worthy soul," as he called him, that he offered to hire Foulis as his cla.s.sroom tutor. Foulis was working cla.s.s, the son of a maltman and apprenticed to become a barber. However, his thirst for learning had driven him into Hutcheson"s cla.s.sroom as well as that of professor of mathematics Robert Simson. Foulis became devoted to Hutcheson"s vision of education as a means of teaching human beings to be free and good. But because he had no university degree (although he read Greek and Latin fluently, as did his younger brother Andrew), a career in teaching was closed to him. The next best thing, he decided, was to open a bookshop, as a kind of import-export business in enlightened ideas and culture.
Like Allan Ramsay before him, Foulis used his bookshop as a vehicle for branching out into other cultural projects. He soon turned from just selling books to printing them. In 1741 he and his brother became the official "university printers," and since they both knew Latin and Greek, their editions of ancient cla.s.sical texts were far more accurate than those of any other Scottish or even English publisher. The Foulis brothers" meticulous attention to detail even extended down to designing new and clearer typefaces for Roman and Greek letters, with the help of the university"s type founder, Alexander Wilson. Their edition of Homer"s Iliad Iliad in 1756 defined the state of the art, and won a medal from the Edinburgh Society for Encouraging Arts, Sciences, Manufactures, and Agriculture-a rare tribute to a Glaswegian from a rival sister city. in 1756 defined the state of the art, and won a medal from the Edinburgh Society for Encouraging Arts, Sciences, Manufactures, and Agriculture-a rare tribute to a Glaswegian from a rival sister city.
The award, like the edition itself, went to the heart of what Foulis saw as his personal mission: to make the "practical" arts such as printing, engraving, and stencilmaking as important and significant to polite society as the "fine" arts, such as painting, sculpture, and music. It was to pursue this that in 1753 Foulis established his School for the Art of Design, with the help of Gla.s.sford and Ingram. The University of Glasgow gave its imprimatur to the school, making it an official appendage of the university, like Foulis"s press and bookshop. Adam Smith helped him find rooms for cla.s.ses and faculty, and Britain"s first academic school for design was launched.
Foulis hoped that his cla.s.ses in sculpture, drawing, and printmaking would become as essential to the curriculum as philosophy, mathematics, or theology. "It is to be wished," he said, "that all Universities were also academies, in order that artists should never be without learning, nor learned men without a taste for those arts, that in all enlightened ages, have been deemed liberal and polite." He deliberately set up his printmaking cla.s.ses to appeal to local linen and cotton manufacturers, as a place to devise new patterns and designs for their cloths.
In Foulis"s mind, the practical was inseparable from the theoretical. There was no sense of the artist or the intellectual pursuing a "higher" or more spiritual goal than the craftsman or businessman. Everyone, the artist and the artisan, the philosopher and the mechanic, the scholar and the manufacturer, was engaged in the same project: creating a polite, humane, enlightened culture. This intermingling of the practical and the intellectual was in fact a keynote of the Glasgow Enlightenment. It explains why engineer James Watt, who helped build Scotland"s first dry dock at Port Glasgow in 1762, was just as highly regarded by university professors such as Adam Smith and Joseph Black as he was by Glasgow"s merchants, and why type maker Alexander Wilson could also be named Professor of Practical Astronomy in 1760.
After its promising start, Foulis"s academy faltered. "The fine arts do not ripen quickly," he wrote to anatomy professor William Hunter, "especially in a cold climate." The academy was forced to close its doors in 1775, and Foulis had to sell the pictures he had acc.u.mulated in the academy"s art gallery to cover his debts. His brother Andrew died at the same time. Depressed and financially ruined, Robert Foulis caught pneumonia and pa.s.sed away in November 1776.
His great dream had failed. But Foulis had put into play a basic principle of his teacher Francis Hutcheson"s view of art in relation to life. This was that G.o.d had made human virtue beautiful as well as useful, and that physical beauty, or "uniformity amidst variety," was, like the arts, essential to human happiness. It is the spirit of Scottish neocla.s.sicism, and would carry over in the works of two other Scots- Edinburgh men this time, not Glaswegians-Robert and James Adam.
In any case, Glasgow"s breakthrough was complete. The Foulis Press had sp.a.w.ned a host of imitators and offshoots. The number of books printed in Glasgow increased by 500 percent. By the 1770s the city could boast of fourteen booksellers, as well as three engravers, four architects, two marble cutters, an imported-carpet warehouse, two coach builders, fourteen saddlers, three fine jewelers, and twenty-three different cabinetmakers-not to mention twenty-six hairdressers and thirteen barbers. Service industries and consumer goods, or what the more old-fashioned still called luxuries, were now a fixed part of the Glasgow scene, as newly acquired wealth poured into desirable new channels like a river into a mult.i.tude of streams and tributaries. "Whenever capital predominates," Adam Smith noted, "industry prevails, which increases the real wealth and revenue of all its inhabitants." This "trickle down" economics turned overseas tobacco money into local jobs, just as the smart tobacco dynasties diversified their investments into the wine and sugar trade, marine insurance, linen and cotton textiles, and iron foundries. Mercantile Glasgow laid the foundations for industrial Glasgow in the nineteenth century. Even after the tobacco trade declined, the city"s capitalist base turned out to be self-perpetuating. Once started, economic growth was hard to shut down.
Economic growth proved to be the engine of change in other ways, as well. When the Glasgow Town Council decided to demolish the city"s old West Port in 1749, it opened up croft land west of Glasgow to development and purchase. Many leading tobacco lords bought parcels for their mansions, with gardens opening onto the new streets laid out north to south: Virginia Street, Havannah Street, Jamaica Street, Queen Street, Dunlop Street (named after the merchant family), Buchanan Street (ditto). The Buchanans themselves had built their residence, Virginia House, slightly east of these later residential developments, with an arrow-straight drive leading to the front door. The tide of urbanization soon swept on past them, however, dotting the vicinity with houses and shops, and their long drive became Virginia Street instead.
In 1740, 17,000 people lived in Glasgow. In 1780 the population had swelled to over 42,000. Developers had laid out thirteen new streets and squares in the new western district of Glasgow, in hopes of attracting merchants and other homebuilders to an affluent urban lifestyle very different from that of the crowded old inner city. Streets were wide (twenty-three meters across in the case of Jamaica Street), with flagstone sidewalks on either side, and urban planners banned unpleasant or noisome businesses, such as skinning or tanning factories, and tallow and soap works. Surveyor James Barrie laid out an entire residential suburb on the Ramshorn and Meadowflat Crofts, by extending Miller, Queen, and Buchanan Streets northward. Back Cow Loan, the rural dirt track Prince Charlie had used to enter Glasgow in December of 1745, became Ingram Street, in honor of tobacco merchant and financier Alexander Ingram.
As with Foulis"s academy of the arts, not everything went according to plan. Construction took time, lots sat empty for long periods, and conditions in the crowded old city remained a nuisance. But a new middle-cla.s.s urban community was taking physical, as well as economic, shape. Its inst.i.tutional emblem was Glasgow"s Chamber of Commerce, the first in Britain, formed on New Year"s Day, 1783, with a hefty round of rum toasts. Its more obvious and visible emblem was Barrie"s George Square, laid out in his Meadowflats development between Queen and Frederick Streets. Unfortunately, by the time building actually began at Meadowflats in 1787, Glasgow had been upstaged by another, even more successful design for the new urban lifestyle: Edinburgh"s New Town.
II.
"Look at those fields," George Drummond said to a young friend who was standing beside him at a window looking north of Edinburgh Castle. It was 1763. Drummond, the belated hero of the city"s failed resistance against the Jacobites, was approaching the end of his fourth consecutive, and last, term as Lord Provost. He was seventy-five and the most revered figure in Edinburgh. Certainly no one laughed at the commander of the Lawnmarket volunteers now.
Drummond was staring out across the North Loch, at the empty area beyond that residents knew by the charming name of Barefoot"s Park. He pointed and turned to his guest.
"You, Mr. Somerville," he said, "are a young man and may probably live, though I will not, to see all these fields covered with houses, forming a splendid and magnificent city." Drummond explained how this could be done, by draining the North Loch and building a causeway linking it to the old town. "I have never lost sight of this object since the year 1725," he confessed, "when I was first elected provost." Now Drummond"s dream was about to come true.
Everyone recognized that as modern cities went, Edinburgh left much to be desired. It was "that most picturesque (at a distance) and nastiest (when near) of all capital cities," according to the poet Thomas Gray. Cl.u.s.tered at the foot of Edinburgh Castle, the city earned its nickname "Auld Reekie" from the forest of chimneys belching smoke from fires that burned coal at the rate of five hundred tons a day, choking residents and visitors alike. Its central avenue, the so-called Royal Mile, was a dark, narrow canyon of rickety buildings, some stacked ten or even twelve stories high, thronging with people, vehicles, animals, and refuse.
To visualize what Edinburgh was like in 1763, one has to imagine a network of shadowy, twisting streets, each branching out into a bewildering labyrinth of wynds (or through alleys) and dead-end courts and closes, all lined with blackened, narrow-faced houses and tenements. The typical tenement saw several families jammed together on each floor, all sharing a common stairway-the servants and lower cla.s.ses occupying the lowest and highest stories, and the upper and middle cla.s.s-including n.o.bles and supreme court justices like Kames and Auchinleck-ensconced in the middle. Daniel Defoe said, "I believe that in no city in the world so many people have so little room." Sanitation was nonexistent. Pigs, sheep, and the occasional cow wandered the pavement. A familiar figure in the neighborhood was the "Wha" wants me?" man, who carried a portable toilet (with small, discreet black curtain) for the use of pa.s.sersby. For residents, a cry of "Gardy loo!" (from the French: "Prenez garde a l"eau!" "Prenez garde a l"eau!") from an overhead window was the only warning before a chamber pot was emptied on the heads of anyone in the street or courtyard.
When Defoe visited, Edinburgh still had a population of less than thirty thousand. By 1755 it had grown to almost sixty thousand, all crowded into the same tight, medieval urban s.p.a.ce. To relieve the congestion, citizens had constructed some new buildings and carried out renovations of others. After a disastrous fire, Parliament House had been extensively rebuilt. The Royal Infirmary had gone up in 1727, and the Edinburgh Exchange in 1753 (both involved architects from the Adam family). There was even an attempt to create a couple of model residential developments, one at James"s Court in the late 1720s and the other at George Court. One of the first homeowners there was Sir Walter Scott"s father. But the truth was that there was simply no room for any extensive building in the confines of the old city, which was also, thanks to overcrowding, a natural breeding ground for disease and epidemics.
Now, in the flush of confidence following the defeat of the Forty-five, the Edinburgh Town Council, under Drummond"s prodding, decided to do something about the congestion. It proposed buying up enough land north of the city to permit the construction of what would eventually be an entirely new city, to be called the New Town. Its goal was "to enlarge and improve this city, to adorn it with public buildings," to celebrate Edinburgh"s growth of "husbandry, manufacturers, general commerce, and the increase of useful people." The proposal concluded with this stirring exhortation to loyal Scotsmen: What greater object can be presented to their view, that of enlarging, beautifying, and improving the capital of their native country? What can redound more to their honour? What prove more beneficial to SCOTLAND and by consequence to UNITED BRITAIN?
With this in view, in March 1766 the city fathers sponsored a compet.i.tion for developing the one hundred or so acres of land above the North Loch as a single residential area. Architects and builders could submit whatever kinds of plans they wished. The only requirements were that there had to be room for two churches, and that each house had to be a maximum height of three stories totaling forty-eight feet from bas.e.m.e.nt to wall-head, to give the New Town an even skyline.
Three months later the award went to a twenty-one-year-old mason named James Craig. The choice seems odd. He was certainly no rising star as an architect; his only other claim to fame, then or later, was that he was the nephew of poet James Thomson. Yet personal connections-the standard "it"s not what you do, but whom you know"-seem to have played no part in the decision.
Craig"s plan was simple, almost mechanically so. It consisted of a gridiron of three princ.i.p.al longitudinal avenues intersected by a series of north-south streets, with two large open squares at either end. Its real virtue, however, was that Craig had grasped at once the political agenda behind the New Town proposal. It showed in his choice of street names-George Street, Hanover Street, Princes Street (after the Prince of Wales and his brother the Duke of York) and Queen Street-and the names he gave to the two open squares: St. Georges Square, after the patron saint of England, and St. Andrews Square, after the patron saint of his native Scotland. Two east-west streets were named after the national flower of each kingdom, Rose Street and Thistle Street. Craig capped it all by laying out the streets and avenues in the shape of a Union Jack (the town council finally decided that was going too far and modified the design into its present shape).
Nevertheless, the point was made. The New Town would commemorate the new Whig Scotland, a modern commercial society that was to be the equal partner of its neighbor to the south, with Edinburgh its modern capital.
When Craig learned he had won the compet.i.tion, he printed up a copy of the plan for the public to see, and put at the top a pa.s.sage from his uncle"s poem "Liberty": August, around, what Public Works I see!
Lo! Stately Street, lo! Squares that court the breeze!
See long Ca.n.a.ls and deepened Rivers join Each part with each, with the circling Main The whole enlivened Isle.
When Thomson had composed the poem in 1736, the only place in "the whole enlivened Isle" of Britain to find "stately Streets" and elegant squares had been in England. Now, Craig and the Edinburgh Town Council were saying, it was Scotland"s turn.
Development got under way almost at once. The first building, the Theatre Royal, went up in 1768-a monument to refined taste and polite culture, and a rebuke to the old Presbyterian culture that had condemned and banned "the lies of the theatre." In 1772 the North Bridge connecting the New Town with the Old Town was finished, launching another spurt of development that did not let up until the American Revolution. Once peace returned in 1783, the rest of the development filled in fast, until only the far western quadrant remained.
Who moved in? Most of the buyers of building lots, or feus feus as they were called, were members of Edinburgh"s commercial cla.s.s. Only one great aristocrat, Sir Laurence Dundas, built himself a mansion in the New Town facing St. Andrews Square (today it houses the Royal Bank of Scotland). Otherwise, unlike similar residential developments in London or in France, the New Town left no room for large, aristocratic residences or private parks. Its residents were by and large representatives of the new Scotland: merchants (including many members of the Town Council itself), bankers, well-to-do master craftsmen, professional men, clerics, and professors from the university. as they were called, were members of Edinburgh"s commercial cla.s.s. Only one great aristocrat, Sir Laurence Dundas, built himself a mansion in the New Town facing St. Andrews Square (today it houses the Royal Bank of Scotland). Otherwise, unlike similar residential developments in London or in France, the New Town left no room for large, aristocratic residences or private parks. Its residents were by and large representatives of the new Scotland: merchants (including many members of the Town Council itself), bankers, well-to-do master craftsmen, professional men, clerics, and professors from the university.
Purchasing the grounds and building a house of the acceptable height and in the New Town"s standard yellow-gray sandstone was expensive-around two thousand pounds-but not prohibitively so in the affluent Edinburgh of the 1770s and 1780s. Coach builder John Home (no relation to the writer) bought his lot on the south side of Princes Street; wright John Young, who was also a member of the Town Council, initially bought on George Street, although the city had to buy the lot back from him in order to build St. Andrews Church. The church"s architect, William Pirnie, liked the neighborhood so much that he, too, bought and built in the New Town. Upholsterer John Brough was another resident; so was the philosopher David Hume.
Hume decided to move out of his home in James Court because it had become too small. He bought a lot on the northwest corner of St. Andrews Square, one block north of Princes Street. He liked the spot because of the view: like Queen Street to the north, Princes Street had houses on only one side of the street, so that residents looked onto gardens and the picturesque (at least at a distance) view of Edinburgh proper, now dubbed the Old Town. Hume planned for himself a house, coach-shed, and stables, and set to work finding a builder. "I am engaged in building a house," he wrote to a friend, "which is the second great operation of human life." The first, he explained, was marriage (Hume was a bachelor). What finally arose was a tidy and confortable urban town house-"a small house," he used to say, although "a large house for an author." Hume let his old place to James Boswell, and happily settled into life in his fashionable new neighborhood. "Our New Town," he wrote enthusiastically to a correspondent, "exceeds anything you have in any part of the world."
Edinburgh"s New Town was, and still is, a model of successful urban planning (although, interestingly, it took almost twenty years before it began to break even). It is the model, one might almost say the ideal, of all middle-cla.s.s residential suburbs and "planned communities," from Milton Keynes and Hampstead in England to Scarsdale (New York) and Reston (Virginia). It combined elegant urban living with beautiful natural views, charming, flower-lined parks, and discreetly convenient shops, taverns, and oyster houses cl.u.s.tered around Shakespeare Square. It formed a coherent, visually harmonious community, yet was open to all.
Two groups, and two only, were left out. The first were aristocrats, since there was no s.p.a.ce allotted for their usual mansions and parks. Although some did eventually buy and build, particularly in later stages of the development, the New Town"s rule required that their houses could look no different from, or any larger than, those of their middle-cla.s.s "tradesmen" neighbors.
The second group was the laboring ma.s.ses and working poor. Increasingly, the Old Town became their preserve, as more and more wealthy people left its narrow, teeming streets to find a place in the wide-open s.p.a.ces north of the city. Cla.s.s division in Edinburgh was no longer vertical (servants and laborers in the attic, well-to-do in the middle, artisans and shopkeepers at street level) but horizontal. A distance, physical as well as cultural, had opened up between those who were affluent enough to escape the dirty and unpleasant "inner city" and escape to the suburbs, and those who were not. To us, it is a familiar story, even depressingly so. Without knowing it, Edinburgh"s New Town had opened a new chapter in modern urban history, the social and cultural costs of which we are still struggling to overcome.
In the 1780s, however, this cla.s.s segregation was one of the things that made moving to the New Town so appealing. Demand for lots was running high when the city fathers prepared to develop the last and westernmost section of Craig"s original plan, Charlotte Square. That development would make the New Town even more famous, by linking it to the single most important architect in Britain: Robert Adam.
III.
Robert Adam transformed the art of building in the modern world, and it is worth taking time to understand how and why.
His father, William Adam, born and bred in Kirkcaldy in Fife, "had established himself the universal architect of his county." He was Master Mason of North Britain for the Board of Ordnance, and had executed famous commissions across the country, including the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh and the Glasgow University Library. But William Adam"s interests extended beyond just architecture. He invested his money in the Pinkie coalfields, the manufacturing of Dutch pantiles, and a brewery, as well as a large landed estate, which he named Blair Adam, near Fife. He belonged to that first generation of Scottish "improving" landlords who were remaking the face of the rural Lowlands. From their father, Robert Adam and his brothers learned a very important lesson. It was not enough for an architect to make beautiful or visionary buildings; he must also make a lot of money.
William Adam"s own reputation rested on his connection to the new, sophisticated architectural style coming up from London, the style called Palladian after the Renaissance Italian architect Andrea Palladio. Although its best-known exponents were aristocratic English amateurs such as Lord Burlington, many of the finest examples of the style came from the brains and drawing tables of Scotsmen working in England, such as James Gibbs (a former student of Christopher Wren, and builder of London"s St. Martin-in-the-Field) and Colen Campbell.17 Campbell had even put together a popular and influential book of plates highlighting the trend, called Campbell had even put together a popular and influential book of plates highlighting the trend, called Vitruvius Britannicus. Vitruvius Britannicus. It showed how British builders of large houses and public buildings were moving away from French and Italian models to create a new cla.s.sical architecture that was also distinctly "British"-hence the book"s t.i.tle. The book"s success was yet another example of how Scottish intellectual discipline and energy could take an English idea or insight and turn it into a powerful instrument for remaking the intellectual, social, political, or in this case visual, landscape. It showed how British builders of large houses and public buildings were moving away from French and Italian models to create a new cla.s.sical architecture that was also distinctly "British"-hence the book"s t.i.tle. The book"s success was yet another example of how Scottish intellectual discipline and energy could take an English idea or insight and turn it into a powerful instrument for remaking the intellectual, social, political, or in this case visual, landscape.
The hallmarks of this British Palladian style were clean lines (lots of smooth stone walls and friezes shorn of excess frills or decoration) and monumentality: ma.s.sive porticos with large cla.s.sical pillars or pilasters, topped by gleaming white round domes in the manner of Rome"s Pantheon, and flanked by row upon row of marble steps. Everything was designed to impress the onlooker with the grandeur of the building as well as the importance of its wealthy owner. Scotsmen Campbell and Gibbs used it to great effect in England, but it was William Adam who made it the fashionable style in Scotland as well, beginning with his renovations in the late 1720s of Hopetoun House, the country residence of the well-connected Hope family.
William remained loyal to the Palladian canon all his life. Porticos and domes, deeply cut lines and decorative motifs, heavy window surrounds with double flanked giant pilasters on either side-whether public building or private residence, it did not matter. Everything had to impress, and everything had to conform to the cla.s.sical order as defined by Palladio in his books on architecture. Yet it was precisely this fashionable and successful style that his sons would rebel against, beginning with Robert.
Robert Adam was born on July 3, 1728. He was, according to an early biographer, "from his infancy of a feeble const.i.tution, which frequently seems the attendant of genius and refined taste." He went to the Edinburgh High School at age six to learn his Latin, and then to the University of Edinburgh. There he studied mathematics with Colin Maclaurin and soon fell in with that same crowd of young, intellectually alert Whig students: John Home, Alexander Carlyle, William Wilkie, and William Robertson, who also happened to be Robert Adam"s first cousin. It is even possible that he may have joined their ill-fated company of volunteers, although he would have been barely seventeen. He certainly helped Maclaurin with his rebuilding of Edinburgh"s walls and defenses.
His real education began, however, when he left the university to apprentice for his father. Since William Adam was Master Mason for the Board of Ordnance, part of that work included construction of Fort George for the British Army. Adam turned out to be quite adept at military architecture, perhaps in part from his exposure to the late Colin Maclaurin"s visionary plans (or perhaps in spite of them). In any case, his work designing and supervising the building of parapets, glacis, and reinforced trenches made him financially independent-indeed, he is said to have made over ten thousand pounds. His father"s death in 1748 also left him with a small estate, Dowhill, whose most prominent visual feature was a semiruined medieval tower-something that would inspire some of his later experiments with the neo-Gothic.
But Robert Adam had bigger plans than just building forts. His father"s business had gone to his older brother John. If he was going to achieve fame and money as an architect, he would have to do it on his own. In 1749 Robert made his first visit to London to see the English Palladian style for himself. That experience "first began to curb the exuberance of his fancy and polish his taste," as a friend later wrote. He then decided he needed to go to Italy, not just for a brief visit but for an extended stay, in order to build up a visual data bank of cla.s.sical designs and motifs-cornices, friezes, figures, bas-reliefs, vases, altars, columns, windows, and doorways-which he could use for his own designs. He joined forces with his younger sibling James, and together they decided Robert should go to Italy for four years to do nothing but see and draw. They sc.r.a.ped together five thousand pounds to pay his expenses, and in the spring of 1754 he set off. It was in both their minds an investment in their joint future, which would, if they did it right, pay them back many times over.
The visit to Rome, Naples, Venice, Vicenza, and other famous sites revealed to Robert Adam just how far from the original cla.s.sical perfection and proportion of the ancients later modern imitators, including Andrea Palladio himself, had fallen. Brother James agreed: when he did his own Italian tour in 176063, he found the villas Palladio had designed for wealthy Venetian patrons "ill-adjusted both in their plans and elevations." In Robert"s judgment, thanks to the Italians, "all Europe has been misled, and has been servilely groaning under their load for three centuries past."
They had been misled above all by the heavy, ponderous scale of Roman buildings such as the Pantheon and the Colosseum. It was true that on the outside, ancient temples and palaces showed "the strength, magnitude, and height of the building." But, as Robert noted, "on the inside of their edifices the Ancients were extremely careful to proportion both the size and depth of their components and panels." If their public buildings paid attention to proportion and the human scale, their domestic ones did so even more. "And with regard to the decoration of their private and bathing apartments, they were all delicacy, gaiety, grace, and beauty."
This point was effectively demonstrated by Robert"s trip to Spalato (modern-day Split) to see the remains of the retirement residence of the Roman emperor Diocletian. Robert spent five weeks there, surveying and drawing. The palaces"s light, elegant colonnades and surrounding gardens with views of the mountains and the sea confirmed everything Robert believed about the true cla.s.sical style: the builders" goal had been not to overawe or weigh down the viewer, but to please and delight. The result was "not only picturesque but magnificent."
The term picturesque picturesque captured the new architectural style that was taking shape in Robert"s mind, and that would eventually set off a revolution in modern building and design. The architect, Adam decided, had to learn to compose the elements of his building in much the way an artist composes the elements of a painting: the setting, foreground and background objects, points of perspective, even the lighting, all had to be taken into consideration before construction could even start. Just as a picture should provide the spectator with a new view of his world, so should a building. captured the new architectural style that was taking shape in Robert"s mind, and that would eventually set off a revolution in modern building and design. The architect, Adam decided, had to learn to compose the elements of his building in much the way an artist composes the elements of a painting: the setting, foreground and background objects, points of perspective, even the lighting, all had to be taken into consideration before construction could even start. Just as a picture should provide the spectator with a new view of his world, so should a building.