The subjugation of the Highlands

French and Spanish support for the Jacobites meant that it no longer mattered that subjugating the Highlands would not pay for itself: it was now politically imperative, and the cost, compared with the resources of the British state, was easily affordable. In 1724 General Wade was commissioned to build a network of all-weather roads through the Highlands to facilitate troop movements, and garrisons were established in forts at Ruthven, Inverness, Fort Augustus, Fort William and other strategic points. These proved ineffective during the ’45 - in fact the roads were more used by the Jacobites than by government troops, while the isolated garrisons were easily neutralised. In the aftermath of the ’45, the system of military roads was greatly extended and new forts were built, the most impressive of which was Fort George, near Inverness, a huge artillery fort that could be supplied by sea. The Highlands remained garrisoned until after the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, long after any real Jacobite threat had ended. By this time, the main duty of the garrisons was trying, without any great success, to suppress illegal whisky stills. The military occupation was backed up by a raft of oppressive legislation (the Disarming and Heritablejurisdiction Acts of 1746-7), which abolished the clan chiefs’ heritable private jurisdictions and their private armies. Other measures included bans on playing bagpipes, speaking Gaelic and wearing Highland

Dress, but these proved unenforceable and were soon abandoned. Far more destructive of Gaelic culture than government legislation were the economic changes and clearances (see pp. 194ff) that followed the ’45 and depopulated vast areas of the Highlands. Quite apart from their human impact, these changes completely altered the Highland landscape. Before the clearances moved the population to crofts and villages on the coast (if not out of the Highlands altogether) to make way for sheep, every glen had its hamlets, tilled fields and hay meadows. The deserted ‘natural’ wilderness that the visitor to the Highlands sees today has been denuded of its native trees by lumbering and overstocking and is, therefore, as much the product of human economic activity as any other in the British Isles.

Would it have made any difference to the fate of the Highland clans if Charles Edward Stuart had been victorious in 1745, or if the Act of Union had never happened? The answer is probably no. The economic depression that followed the civil wars in Scotland had already begun to change the attitude of clan chiefs to their lands, which they began to manage more commercially. This was the period when cattle droving to the Lowlands really took off. The agricultural and industrial ‘revolutions’ of the eighteenth century would sooner or later have provided an Edinburgh-based government with the resources to impose its authority throughout the Highlands. Once this had happened, clan chiefs would have taken a long hard look at their estates and asked themselves if they really needed so many tenants. As for a Stuart restoration, the Stuarts were at heart royal absolutists and, though gratitude may perhaps have stayed Charles Edward’s hand, they would surely have found the autonomy of the Highlands as unacceptable as their predecessors had done. As kings of Great Britain - for a dissolution of the union was never on the cards - the restored Stuarts would have had ample means, as the Hanoverians had, to subjugate the Highlands. Whatever happened, by 1700 the essentially medieval society of the Highland clans was living on borrowed time. Yet even while the last embers of independent Celtdom were being stamped out, new cultural forces were being born that would give the Celts a second lease of life.