Two hundred and thirty-three years ago, in December 1792, Democrats in Scotland brought together a convention of the Societies of the Friends of the People. Branches had formed across Scotland during the summer of 1792 arguing for parliamentary reform. These had formed in the context of the increased radicalisation of the French Revolution and of the working-class and radical agitations across Scotland that summer.
The convention sought, by democratic means, to reform the British constitution – but even its milquetoast demands led to close surveillance by the British state. The movement ultimately fell to government repression, and its leadership were arrested, charged with sedition, and transported.
Much of the study on this period has focused on the agitations taking place across working-class communities in the Lowlands and on the conventions in Edinburgh. However, this has – as with much of the historical memory of the left – neglected the contributions made in the Highlands and by Highlanders. This article aims to address this failure of our collective memory and bring to light some of the Highlanders who fought for the democratic rights that the movement would eventually gain.
The Scottish Democratic Movement
“I have devoted myself to the cause of The People. It is a good cause – it shall ultimately prevail – it shall finally triumph.”
Thomas Muir – at his trial for sedition in 1793.
The coming of the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century had upturned the world. It brought about the greatest challenge to the economic and political power of the old monarchies of Europe and their colonial empires. While, in America, the democratic experiment was in its infancy, in Europe, the old monarchies were insulated from it by the Atlantic Ocean. But in just a short number of years, what had only previously been the academic dreams of philosophers and an experiment abroad burst to the fore and became not just a political ambition of radicals and democrats, but a political reality at the heart of aristocratic Europe.
The lure of radical republican democracy inspired support across much of Europe, including in Scotland. Here, it found its expression first in the democratic movement of the Society of the Friends of the People and then, after its repression by the British state, in the more clandestine United Scotsmen movement, finally culminating in the worker-led Radical Insurrection of 1820.
The Scottish republican left has many martyrs in its history, and the struggles of the 1790s brought forth the seeds of an independent Scottish republican tradition from which some of those first martyrs sprung. In Edinburgh, just below Calton Hill, stands the Political Martyrs’ Monument. On it, inscribed in stone, are five names: Thomas Muir, Thomas Fyshe Palmer, William Skirving, Maurice Margarot and Joseph Gerrald. Persecuted in 1793 and 1794 for campaigning for the democratic reform of the British political system, these men were transported to Australia for their beliefs. Only one would ever return to Britain.
But these men were not the only ones persecuted under the repressive Tory regime in Scotland, headed by Henry Dundas. The radical movement at all levels was viciously repressed by the government, and people across the country felt the weight of the state’s authoritarianism on their necks.
In 1787, the Calton Weavers’ strike was put down by government troops and the murdered weavers became Scotland’s first recorded working-class martyrs; in 1792, the Ross-shire insurrectionists – who were agitating against the disastrous introduction of large-scale sheep farming, which would destroy the livelihoods of the ordinary tenants of the Highlands and bring about their clearance – were attacked and repressed by the government; in 1797, the Dragoons indiscriminately massacred the people of Tranent as they bravely opposed the conscription of the Militia Act 1797; and, in 1798, the government began its crackdown on the last of the political radicals in the United Scotsmen.
The decade following the French Revolution was a tumultuous time in Scotland, with the threat of radical movements, real and imagined, haunting the establishment. The spectre of Thomas Paine and his writings stalked the minds of magistrates, politicians, lairds, and their lackeys. It was a time when the ordinary people of Scotland saw for the first time a new vision of society, a chance to shape the political world from which they were excluded, and a belief that a new world was possible.
The Scottish left has no shortage of political struggles from which to construct its collective memory, and the radical politics of the late 18th century are no exception to this. There are countless events throughout the period that we can draw inspiration from, and martyrs aplenty to be rightly commemorated and their struggle remembered. However, as always, the Scottish left still has a collective amnesia about the Highlands of Scotland. Regarding the Highlands at the end of the 18th century, we can perhaps be forgiven, as even in mainstream historiography outwith the left, the political memory of the Highlands in this period is left mostly to the Ross-shire Sheep Insurrection and resistance to the coming Clearances.
The democratic movements of the 1790s in Scotland are still a much-understudied subject in Scottish historiography, and even its most famous martyrs, like Thomas Muir, are not as well remembered as they should be. Others are even more obscure, such as the Dundonian George Mealmaker, transported for his involvement with the United Scotsmen in 1798, whose life was wonderfully covered in Heckle by James Barrowman back in 2022.1 But, even more obscure than that is the history of the Highlanders and their relationship with the growing democratic movement.
In 1800, Scotland had a population of around 1.6 million people; of those, the people of the Highlands and Islands made up almost 20% of the population. The 1801 census reported around 298,000 speakers of Gàidhlig in the country, mainly concentrated in the Highlands and Islands, but many Highlanders were not Gàidhlig speakers.2 The Highlanders who participated and were active have been more or less forgotten in our collective memory of the Scottish Democratic Movement of the 1790s.
The Highland Friend of the People
“Methought I beheld the agents of corruption, after having sweeped away the barriers of the law, levelling with the dust the, already tottering edifice of British Liberty, and armed with vindictive fury, inflicting the most arbitrary punishments on those, who, by timely preparations wished to restore it to its pristine Strength and Beauty.”
James Calder of Cromarty – Calder, in his letter to William Skirving3
One of these early Highland radicals largely forgotten by historiography was a young man of Cromarty called James Calder. While Calder suffered a much more lenient punishment than the other political martyrs, it’s likely that the leniency shown to Calder was due to his youth and general likeable character.
Calder was reported to be an very intelligent and likeable man and was respected by even his political opponents; in particular, he reportedly had a good relationship with Macleod of Geanies, the Sheriff-Depute of Ross and Cromarty, whose personal intervention would save Calder from harsher punishment. His involvement in the Democratic movement can be glimpsed throughout the period, and what little written evidence we have shows him right at the centre of the movement and in the trials that followed.
Calder was born in Cromarty in the early 1770s. The son of a merchant in that town, he first attended school at Cromarty and then the military school at Fort George outside of Inverness. From there, he moved first to Aberdeen and then to Edinburgh, where he studied to become a lawyer. It was at Aberdeen that Calder was first exposed to the reform movement when he read the speeches of the reformer Charles Fox. Once in Edinburgh, Calder threw himself into the newly formed Society of the Friends of the People, involved in the “Cowgate No.3” branch in the city.4 Calder attended the Second Reform Convention of the Friends of the People in April 1793 as a delegate for the branch.
Calder had not been at the first convention held in December of 1792. This was the convention where Thomas Muir’s reading of an address from the United Irishmen would lead to his arrest and trial for sedition. Calder, however, was not idle, as he was busy back in the Highlands. In late 1792, as the leaders of the Ross-shire Insurrection languished in the Tolbooth in Inverness awaiting transportation, James Calder was back in Cromarty. According to Calder’s obituary, written on his death in 1847, when Calder heard of the daring escape of the insurrectionist leaders Hugh Breck Mackenzie and John Aird, he sprang into action in their defence.
It is reported that on learning of the attempts by the authorities to gain informants among the local population and the defamation of the men as “sheep-stealers”, Calder’s “indignation was aroused at the application of such a term, under the circumstances, to persons, many of whom, to his own personal knowledge, were otherwise worthy and religious people”. Calder took it upon himself to have “counter-placards privately posted, exhorting the inhabitants not to betray their countrymen”. While we cannot be sure of the effect these had on the people, we do know that the escapees were never caught and were said by local tradition to have been hidden by their fellow Highlanders.
Despite his absence from the First Convention, Calder was an active participant at the Second Convention, which took place in April in the wake of Muir’s arrest and ongoing persecution. From the report of a government spy who reported on the convention and from Calder’s witness statements during the trial of Maurice Margarot, we know that Calder was one of the delegates from the Cowgate No.3 branch and was involved in the proposal of two motions to the Convention.
Calder’s political manoeuvres were unsuccessful, with both motions being rejected. The first was a motion proposing the appointment of a committee for “granting to members of the association, leaving the country, certificates of their moral character and their attachment to the principles of liberty”. This motion was a clear move to try and provide proof for any political exiles who would most likely have to flee to the fledgling French Republic, and shows that, unlike the less radical members of the Convention, Calder was in favour of much closer links to the new French regime. The second motion proposed that the next planned Convention would sit in Glasgow instead of in Edinburgh. The Convention decided to reject this and remain in Edinburgh, scheduling the next Convention for the 29th of October 1793.
In the meantime, Calder returned to his native Cromarty. It is in Cromarty in August 1793 that Calder wrote a letter to William Skirving. Calder’s letter is the only extant source available from his own hand. It is a beautiful letter, filled with radical rhetoric, anguish at the situation of radicals in the country, and hope for a better future. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Calder – perhaps due to his youth – was unambiguous about the need for a confrontation with the British state. In one passage, after lamenting the situation of the movement, he produces a call for liberty!
Shall they, whose blood has often flowed in defense of their rights, ever suffer them to be, indignantly trampled upon? NO! “Britons never shall be slaves.” Liberty shall yet see her temple shining… with more than its former splendour… and a hecatomb of enemies shall be offered on her altar.5
Calder’s letter clearly proves him to be a resolute radical. He moves beyond the movement’s veneration and defence of the constitutional settlement of 1688 and clearly advocates for a constitution “with more than its former splendour”. This was clearly a direct call for the enshrining of new rights but also a call for retribution against the repressive forces that sought to thwart the movement for democracy.
Furthermore, Calder is clear in understanding the possibility of a direct confrontation with the state. Calder sought to reassure Skirving that his “fear from the standing army and Militia will be dissipated… If the Majority of the people were to act with unanimity… the opposition from the military would be but feebly”.6 With the retrospect of history, we can see from the government’s violent repression of the United Irishmen rebellion in 1798 and of the Radical Insurrection in Scotland in 1820, that Calder’s hope that the military would stand down in case of a rising was probably naïve.
It’s likely that Calder’s violent rhetoric is one of the main reasons that the letter has survived. Ironically, it was also probably damning for Skirving to be seen to be associating with such blatant radicals like Calder.
The British Convention
“I cannot at present enter into a full enumeration of all the various species of tyranny exercised over the people of the Highlands. I shall only mention a few of the hardships… Such are the practices publicly carried on in a part of Great Britain, which we are so frequently told, possess the best of all possible constitutions, and is the most free and happy country in the world.”
Archibald Wright – From Wright’s motion to the British Convention describing the oppression of the Highlands.
In October 1793, the Scottish Friends of the People held their third Convention. It was short and unproductive due to the Convention deciding to wait for delegates from England, Wales, and Ireland. The Convention ended in late October, but in November, with the arrival of delegates from the rest of these isles, a new Convention was called, which became known as the “British Convention”.
This new wider Convention, held in Edinburgh, adopted a much more radical agenda, establishing the French style with sections, and the reference to each other as “citizen”. One of the most controversial motions was presented by Alexander Callendar on the introduction of a “Convention Act” in Ireland, which had banned the forming of extra-parliamentary assemblies similar to those established in Scotland, seeking to struggle against the possibility of Parliament passing a motion covering Scotland.
The motion was deeply controversial at the Convention as many felt the government was seeking any excuse to repress the Convention, and Callendar’s motion was a direct critic of the Irish government’s anti-democratic policies and therefore seditious. Indeed, Callander’s motion would be subsequently used at the later State Trials to prove sedition in the eyes of the government. Those opposed to the motion ought to delay the debate, while those in favour argued that the ever-present threat of the British government repressing them in the same way proved the need for the Convention to make its position clear. For Calder’s part, he actively and positively engaged with the motion. He proposed that the motion should be voted on in three stages. Firstly, on its spirit; secondly, on its working; and finally considering an amendment from Margarot. He was successful, and all three stages were passed by the Convention.
Calder didn’t confine himself to debating other motions; he proposed an openly Paineite motion that “a committee be appointed to draw up a declaration of the natural, unalienable, and imprescriptible rights of man” to be added to an already agreed “address to the People of Britain”.7 Furthermore, Calder also proposed that the Convention publish the Irish Convention Act so that the people could decide for themselves about its content. Calder’s motions showed him as being on the more radical side of what was already an intensely radical convention.
At the Convention, Calder was also elected as one of two Highlanders on a committee tasked with “propagating constitutional knowledge in the Highlands”. A task Calder, if stories are to be believed, attempted to enact in his hometown of Cromarty.
The Cromarty Tree of Liberty
“There was a young man of the place, the son of a shopkeeper, who had been marked from his earliest boyhood by a singular precocity of intellect, and the boldness of his opinions… He was one of those persons who, like the stormy petrel of the tropics, come abroad only when the seas begin to rise, and the heavens to darken ; and who find their proper element in a wild mixture of all the four elements jumbled into one… No one could say he was disobliging or ill tempered, on the contrary, he was a favourite with, at least, his humbler townsmen for being much the reverse of both.”
Hugh Miller – Miller’s description of the “Young Democrat” James Calder8
One of the greatest sources we have for Calder comes from the stories of Hugh Miller, the famed Cromarty geologist. Miller’s Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland, in its twenty-third chapter, examines the politics of the town during the period from the American War of Independence to the French Revolution and the changing political attitudes of the town towards Whigism. Within this chapter, Miller describes a character called “The Young Democrat”.
The Young Democrat is presented by Miller as a shrewd, fast-talking, and principled radical. He runs rings around his political opponents, who rely on the oppressive machinery of the state to prosecute him. In his book, Miller, in his classic lyrical fashion, makes clear his intention to hide the identity of “The Young Democrat”: “his name, (for I must not forget that, to borrow one of Johnson’s figures, I am walking over ashes the fires of which are not yet extinguished,) I shall conceal.”9
Ironically, given Miller’s clear attempts to hide his identity, we only know that Miller’s “Young Democrat” is Calder because in 1837 Calder sued Miller for libel due to the chapter. Miller’s letters to his lawyers lament the fall of the Young Democrat from a young radical to someone who “must either have been converted into a rancorous Tory, or an old Dotard”.10 Calder’s conversion to Toryism is unlikely, as in the years after the movement, he was a prominent editor in the reform press.
One of the most interesting aspects of the story Miller weaves is the tale of the Cromarty Tree of Liberty. Miller’s description of “The Young Democrat” aligns with the few other sources we have for Calder’s life, especially his obituary. He had “a singular precocity of intellect, and the boldness of his opinions… He read the newspapers, and, it was said, wrote for them; he corresponded, too, with the Jacobin clubs of the south, and strove to form similar clubs at home”.11 In the story, Miller describes a radical procession through the town and in his particularly entertaining writing style, he relates how “excited by the newspaper accounts of the superb processions of their south country friends… they resolved on having a procession of their own.”
The radicals marched through Cromarty with “a long pole with a Kilmarnock Cap fixed on the one end… which they termed the cap of liberty, and a large square cotton stripped blue, white and red… in the middle… the words Liberty and Equality ; and a stuffed cormorant intended to represent an eagle…the procession moved on… it reached a eminence directly above the links, and drawing up beside an immense pile of brushwood, and a few empty tar barrels, planted the tree of liberty amid shouts, and music, and the shotting of muskets, on the very spot on which the town gallows had been planted about two centuries before”.12
Calder was the ringleader of the radicals, and according to both Miller’s account and Calder’s obituary, he came into the view of the authorities. He was arrested and charged with sedition by a court quickly established in the town. According to Miller, he danced around his accusers, intellectually outpacing them, the only evidence of his sedition being an old Jacobite poem that hadn’t been technically seditious for years. Despite this, he was transported to Tain gaol. According to Calder’s obituary, he was led by newly-recruited soldiers of the Sutherland militia. Calder willingly and enthusiastically accepted his fate as a martyr for the movement.
According to his obituary, he spent the time proselytising to the soldiers to such an extent that they “abandoned all desire to be instrumental in his detention, and, reckless of the risk they themselves would have incurred had been found guilty of a breach of duty… actually sauntered apart from the prisoner, to afford an opportunity for his escape”. However, “Calder evinced no anxiety to avail himself of this chance of liberty ; and the hot-blooded Highland corporal, provoked at his seeming obtuseness, even ventured so far, in the height of his magnanimity, as to run hastily up to him, exclaiming in Gaelic – ‘Can’t you run, man! Can’t you run!’”
Despite this, Calder, so convinced of his status as a wannabe martyr, refused to escape. Calder apparently used to relay that it took him some effort to convince his captors that he sincerely intended to be taken to jail.
It’s a good story, and highly likely to be flattery on the part of Calder’s friends. However, Miller’s story corroborated at least some of the details. It gave a much greater description of the “Young Democrat’s” trial. Calder’s family property was raided, and his papers were seized, and a trial was held in the courthouse of Cromarty. Calder outsmarted his adversaries during his Cromarty trial; no matter what evidence they could bring, Calder was able to evade it and run rings around his accuser. But despite the lack of evidence, the magistrates had already made their decision and he was sent to Tain gaol.
Interestingly, Calder was quickly released by the authorities, most likely due to a good personal relationship with the local magistrate, Macleod of Geanies. The exact date of these events, if they occurred at all, is lost to history. The local Justice of the Peace records are lost, but Calder was at least able to make it down to Edinburgh for the British Convention and its aftermath.
Calder at the State Trials
“The greater part of a night was spent in the work of destruction; and when the domiciliary visits were paid, as paid they were, the proofs of the connexion with Associations obnoxious to the Government had ceased to exist!”
James Calder’s obituary – Reporting on his actions during the state trials.
The British Convention proved a convention too far for the British establishment. When the Convention proposed creating a secret revolutionary committee of “ways and means”, the authorities quickly moved in, and the Convention was broken up. Calder was apparently one of those given the responsibility of seeking out alternative accommodations for the continuance of the Convention and was present when Edinburgh’s finest arrested Skirving, Margarot and Gerrald in a lodge on the Canongate while they were on bail.
Calder would play a supporting role during the State Trials of the Scottish political martyrs. Calder was a witness at the trial of Maurice Margarot. He was requested by Margarot as an exculpatory witness and is recorded as having given evidence at the trial, where he drew the ire of the Lord Advocate and gained the patronising epithet “the boy Calder”.13 Interestingly, Calder’s obituary only briefly references his involvement in defending Margarot. This may have been due to the general suspicion that later radicals held Margarot due to allegations that he helped to thwart the attempted mutiny on the Surprize.14 The mutiny was allegedly planned by Palmer, Skirving and the ship’s chief mate, Hugh Macpherson.15
Instead, Calder’s obituary focuses on Calder’s defence of Gerrald. Calder reportedly “sat at the bar with Joseph Gerrald… arranging his papers, and privately administering… small doses of lavender combined with laudanum”.16 He is also said to have “passed with Gerrald the night previous to the latter being sent away; and even within the precincts of the prison, the song come, Sons of Freedom! No more let us mourn was raised on the occasion”.17
Calder, in the lead-up to the trials, did his part to shield his friends:
“collecting letters and papers emanating from different societies, which he took the precaution of destroying at his own lodgings. The greater part of a night was spent in the work of destruction; and when the domiciliary visits were paid, as paid they were, the proofs of the connexion with Associations obnoxious to the Government had ceased to exist!”
Ultimately, Calder’s attempts to aid his friends were in vain. The authorities had already made up their mind, and the grossly unfair trials of the Political Martyrs had only one inevitable conclusion: conviction and transportation.
Calder’s association with the Friends of the People would have other consequences. He was barred from joining the Faculty of Advocates, ending a promising legal career before it could even begin. Calder, in his later life, became involved in the British Liberal press and, on his death in December 1846, he was noted as a “proprietor” of the Globe newspaper and was one of the few veterans of the 1790s movement to “witness the many recent triumphs of that liberal policy from which he had never swerved”.18
Our collective memory of the past
“Let us then endeavour to enlighten our brethren in the Highlands : let us inform them of the principles on which we act, and disseminate among them a knowledge of their rights, they will bow no longer to the yoke: They will cease to be at the disposal of their tyrannical masters”
Archibald Wright – From his motion for diffusing political knowledge in the Highlands of Scotland
In times when the left is so fractured and disorganised, we will often turn to the stories of the past to bring us hope and inspiration. History is a vital tool in our collective memory. We remember and learn from the political movements of the past, so that we can win the struggles of today. These stories are part of our collective memory – they bring us hope even when times are dark. But so often the stories we tell are incomplete.
Calder was not the only Highlander involved in the movement, but was one of the most prominent. Others included the revolutionary Archibald Wright, a weaver in Edinburgh from the Highlands; the Rev Neil Douglas, a native of Cowal, a Gàidhlig speaker, a Relief Church minister and anti-slavery activist; and the members of the few attempts to form reform Societies of the Friends of the People in Caithness, Moray and the Grampians. These Highlanders have been left to obscurity in the collective memory of the Democratic Movement.
Just as it is the duty of the historian to unearth the stories of the past no matter where they hide, it is our duty as socialists to read, understand and educate ourselves about the past in all its forms. The radical history of the 1790s remains a relatively elusive topic even amongst historians. Its failures and triumphs are lessons to be learned. But you cannot educate from an empty page, so I hope that this piece has at least done some justice to those forgotten by historiography and our collective memories.
Main photo: The Political Martyrs’ Monument in Edinburgh. (Credit: Chabe01 / Wikimedia, Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 4.0)
Footnotes
1 https://heckle.scot/2022/10/george-mealmaker-liberty-tree/
2 D. MacAulay, The Celtic Languages, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 141
3 NRS, High Court of Justice Papers, Trial Papers relating to William Skirving for the Crime of sedition, Calder to Skirving, 4 September 1793, JC26/1794/29
4 H. W. Meikle, Scotland and the French Revolution, Appendix B, in the spy’s report for the April 1793, convention, pp. 274-275
5 NRS, High Court of Justice Papers, Trial Papers relating to William Skirving for the Crime of sedition, Calder to Skirving, 4 September 1793, JC26/1794/29
6 NRS, High Court of Justice Papers, Trial Papers relating to William Skirving for the Crime of sedition, Calder to Skirving, 4 September 1793, JC26/1794/29
7 ‘Proceedings on the Trial of William Skirving, for Sedition, A.D 1794’, in T. B. Howell & T. J. Howell (eds), State Trials XXIII, p. 434
8 H. Miller, Scenes and Legends, pp. 395-396
9 H. Miller, Scenes and Legends, pp. 395-396
10 Edinburgh University Library (hereafter EUL), Hugh Miller’s Letter Book, Letter 179, Cromarty 16 February 1837, MS MIL 1.
11 H. Miller, Scenes and Legends, pp. 395-396
12 H. Miller, Scenes and Legends, p. 397
13 ‘Proceedings on the Trial of Maurice Margarot’, in T. B. Howell & T. J. Howell (eds), State Trials XXIII, pp. 674-677, 697, 709;NRS, High Court of Justice Papers, Trial papers relating to Maurice Margarot for the crime of sedition, Letter by M. Margarot to Mr Norris, no date, JC26/1794/24
14 I. Burnside, ‘Thomas Muir: Radicalism, Loyalism and Internationalism in the 1790s’, Scottish Affairs, Vol. 31 (1) (2011), p. 124
15 I. Burnside, ‘Thomas Muir’, p. 124; NRS, Seafield Papers, Correspondence of Sir James Grant, ‘Letter John Grant to Sir James Grant, 9th July 1794’, GD248/687/2/1/1; Interestingly it is likely that Hugh Macpherson the rebellious Ships mate and John Grant the reporter were Highlanders, Furthermore, the plan was apparently organised in ‘The Irish language’, which Grant was able to understand. If this was the case, then it means that Skirving and Palmer were Gaelic or Irish speakers.
16 ‘The Late James Calder’, in W. Tait (ed), Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 14, p. 271
17 ‘The Late James Calder’, in W. Tait (ed), Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 14, p. 271
18 Liverpool Mercury, 1st January 1847, p. 7
Contributor
Feargus Murray is a socialist historian from the Highlands of Scotland. Working in the heritage sector in Inverness for close to a decade, he holds a Master's degree in the History of the Highlands and Islands from UHI, having graduated with distinction in 2024. He is a member of the Republican Socialist Platform and the Heckle editorial board.
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