A History of Britain - Volume 2: The British Wars 1603-1776 by Simon Schama

Author:Simon Schama [Schama, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2012-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

BRITANNIA INCORPORATED

IN WILLIAMITE BRITAIN, showing up late could get you killed. William III came from a culture that set great store by good timing. In 1688, his own carefully maintained and calibrated political clock (as well as the luck of the Protestant winds) had made the difference between a throne and a débâcle. The Dutch king expected men, money, armies to move like clockwork, with reassuring predictability. Although the kingdom he now governed fell far short of those ideals of regular movement, the winding of a spring, the greasing of a wheel might yet make the machine keep proper time and motion.

There were some places within his new realms, though, that seemed regrettably indifferent to punctiliousness, nowhere more than the Scottish Highlands. There, where a third of Scotland’s population lived, loyalty seemed still to be governed by codes of honour and bonds of kinship that appeared timeless, impervious to the quickening of modernity. Although from Edinburgh or London such places, with their predilection for cattle stealing, evidently seemed backward, they could still muster crude force enough to do damage to the fragile machinery of power that William and his Scottish allies were putting in place. At the river gorge of Killiecrankie, in the southeast Grampians, on 27 July 1689, John Graham, first Viscount Dundee, obstinately and sentimentally loyal to King James, threw 2000 Highland warriors, some of them barefoot, down the hillside against 4000 musketeers and dragoons. In ten minutes 600 Highlanders, including Dundee, died under a hail of well-drilled fire. But in the same ten minutes they had sliced to pieces as many of the enemy, caught fumbling with the muzzles of their muskets as the claymores came brightly at their heads.

Ultimately, it would not matter. In the spring of 1689 James VII (James II of England), the last in the line of Stuart kings who had been on the throne of Scotland since 1371, was formally deposed. But William ruled securely only south of the Forth. The shock of Killiecrankie, and continuing resistance in the ungovernable Highlands, made William’s allies in Scotland, especially the Campbells, determined to bring the clans to heel. The means would be moderation where that worked, coercion and slaughter where that seemed to be needed. In the summer of 1690 a warship sent from Ulster sailed through the Hebrides, burning down Jacobite villages and killing those unlucky enough to be found there. On the island of Eigg, all the adult men were away fighting on the mainland, so the women were raped before being put to the sword.

In August 1691 the principal leader of the campaign, the Earl of Breadalbane, published an order stipulating 1 January 1692 as the deadline for making a formal act of submission to King William. Perhaps this was too much time to get the intended result. For while there were some clan chiefs who did indeed make a pledge of allegiance, urged on by the Governor of Fort William, Colonel Sir John Hill, there were others who held

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