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Breadalbane & Lairds

From 'Reminiscences and Reflections of an Octogenarian Highlander' by Duncan Campbell

Inverness: The Northern Counties Newspaper and Printing and Publishing Company, Limited. 1910

In 1782 when John Campbell of Carwhin suceeeded his kinsman as Fourth Earl of Breadalbane, he found himself surrounded by a 1arge provincial court or assembly of landed kinsmen and allies, and his tenant communities, in winter-towns and shealings, living under the land settlement system of James, which Black Sir Duncan had revived and vastly improved.

This Fourth Ear1 was a truly kindly and thoroughly Highland-hearted man, and a patriot who raised three fencible regiments during the war with France. He resided very constantly at Taymouth, was a Whig and a Presbyterian, and spent much money on woodplanting and other improvements. He was made a Marquis in 1831.

During his longer than half a century of sway he saw, as if stricken by a strange fatality, his house council satellites diminishing rapidly to the vanishing point. Although he kept a hospitable house, was a free hand giver, and added to and improved his vast property, from living so much at home among his people he accumulated much wealth, which he divided among his three children, to wit, his son and successor, and his two daughters, Lady Elizabeth Pringle and the Duchess of Buckingham.

He was not, like his son, a Manchester-school political-economist, and in sheer kind-heartedness he committed the blunder of making holdings, which the changed conditions of farming and the contracting value of domestic industries had made already too small more-congested still by finding "rooms" for such of his fencible men as were not the eldest sons of tenants. Had the circle of smaller lairds attached to his house not ceased before then to exercise the functions of informal yet very practical family council, he would surely have heen advised by them to leave Black Duncan's land-settlement alone, or if he meddled with it at all, as opportunities offered to increase instead of diminishing the size of the holdings.

The old Marquis lived and died as a great and much-honoured Highland magnate. His son was in personal conduct as good a man as his father, and admittedly the abler man o£ the two, but he never was the man for Gaeldom. Tn 1842 he made a brave and, for the moment, a successful show of being that man, and years afterwards, at the first review of Volunteers in Edinburgh, he did, at the head of his Breadalbane Volunteers, appear to be a great Chief to people who did not know what an isolated magnate he was in his own country, and how he had alienated the affections of his own folk. It was no fault of his, indeed, that very few - four or five at most - representatives of the thirty or forty cadet lairds of his house, and affinity lairds of other surnames who surrounded his father in 1782, were about him to receive the Queen in 1842.

The disappearance of these landed families, some by natural extinction, and some by having got into money troubles which compelled selling out, may, however, be taken to account in some measure for the line of estate management he deliberately adopted. He believed in the new political economy principles, and consistently carried them out until he died a lonely man and sad, although rich beyond the dream of ordinary avarice, at Lausanne in 1862.

To the heads of noble houses, the small lairds of their name and lineage, and those who were connected with them by affinity or feudal ties, were bodyguards or crios-leine (literally shirt girdles). They were then the connecting links with the common people, and their advisers in the matters which concerned the well-being of the whole community within the bounds of their lords' and their own possessions. The magnate only gained mere isolation when he acquired estates by honest purohase of small estates which old bodyguard adherents of his family found themselves compelled to sell. Factors could not, and those of them who oould, would not, inform him so fully about matters he ought to know, as the lairds who were in close touch with the peopie, spoke their language, and thoroughly understood their circumstances and feelings.

On the other hand the magnates used their influence and patronage to open careers in the Army, Navy, and Civil Serviee, and in the Church, and legal and medical professions, to the sons of the small lairds, and the sons of their own tenants, crofters, and cottars. The unruly spirits among the sons of the mansion-houses, who while sowing their early wild oats at home, caused vexation to parents and strict ecclesiastical disciplinarians, in many instances, blossomed out into sturdy warriors and pioneeis of empire abroad, or by turning over new leaves at home, and setting theselves resolutely and douccely to useful pursuits.

The lairds and their families made life in the country attractive to the magnates and their families by furnishing them with a far less pleasure jaded society than they were accustomed to in London. The lairds were the acting Justices of the Peace, and in some large parts of the Highlands, as far as the common people were concerned, almost the sole representatives of civil power, while ministers and kirk sessions represented the spiritual power.

For fifty years after the restoration of the forfieited estates these two powers, working amicably together, preserved good order at small cost, and reduced crimes which had to be dealt with by Sheriff and Assize Courts to a minimum. Most of the then Highland lairds were Presbyterians, and not a few of them elders of the Church of Scotland. Only a few old Jacobite families stuck to Episcopalianism as the pathetic badge, of a lost cause. Highland nobles, who were Church of England people in England, when at home in their Highland castles worshipped contentedly in canopied pews in their parish churches.

Political and caste causes which, after the passing of the Reform Bill, spoiled the previous harmony by degrees, had yet to arise, and, practically, Highland depopulation and the annual invasion of English sportsmen and buying out of Highland proprietors had almost yet to begin. Despite the invasion of Lowland sheep, shepherds and renters of shealing grazings, and disforested old deer forests, the general situation to the superficial observer remained unchanged, say up to 1832.

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