Free A People's History of Scotland by Chris Bambery Page A

the scaffold, ready to meet the martyr’s death he craved, and quoted Revelation 19 to the crowd: ‘Come and gather yourselvestogether unto the supper of the great God; that ye may eat the flesh of kings.’ He then called out, ‘Lord, I die in the faith that you will not leave Scotland. But that you will make the blood of your witnesses the seed of your Church, and return again and be glorious in our land. And now, Lord, I am ready.’ 23
    Later, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, radicals and socialists would hold up the Covenanters as fighters for equality and freedom of speech, and opponents of royalty and aristocracy. In Grey Granite , the final volume of the trilogy A Scots Quair , Lewis Grassic Gibbon, one of Scotland’s finest novelists, has Ewan Tavendale talk of those ‘funny chaps the Covenanters’, how ‘he had always liked them – the advance guard of the common folk in those days, their God and their Covenant just formulae they hid the social rebellion in’. 24 But for all their heroism and sacrifice they were fighting for a land ruled by the Presbyterian elect.
    The social upheaval of the age meant new forms of disorder involving the lower orders were also appearing. Noble control was beginning to weaken in Lowland Scotland. In 1682, a group of young men were press-ganged in Edinburgh for military service and marched to the port of Leith. A chronicler of the city wrote: ‘… some women called out to them: “pressed or not pressed?” They answered “Pressed” and so caused an excitement in the multitude. A woman who sat on the street selling pottery threw a few shards at the guard, and some other people, finding a supply of missiles at a house that was building, followed her example.’ 25 The soldiers fired on the rioters, killing nine and arresting three, but the local assize refused to find them guilty.
    In 1685, Charles II died and was succeeded by his brother James, a Catholic, who was also seen as an opponent of parliamentary rule. In 1688, the English parliamentary leaders invited the Dutch king, William of Orange, a Protestant married to James’s daughter Mary, to take the throne. As a Dutch army marched on London, James lost his nerve and fled to France.
    The ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 heralded parliamentary rule in which the new commercial class was dominant, but across the border in Scotland noble rule and feudalism was still in place. The existenceof two different systems within one island under the same Crown was not going to last for long. Among a section of the Scottish nobility and clan chiefs there was support for the return of James and his successors.
    Scotland was in for a tumultuous six decades.

FIVE
Enlightenment and Capitalism
    I n 1814, Walter Scott wrote in his first novel, Waverley , ‘There is no European nation which, within the course of half a century, or little more, has undergone so complete a change as this kingdom of Scotland.’ 1 Most Scots would have been aware of changes taking place around them. In 1700, just 5.3 percent of Scots lived in towns of more than 10,000 inhabitants, but by 1800 the figure was 17.3 percent, one of the fastest rates of urbanisation in Europe. Scotland transformed itself from a society more akin to Ireland or Poland to one on a level with England and Holland, an economic powerhouse with an economy centred on profit.
    Industrialisation also took place at breakneck speed, comparable to what happened in late twentieth-century China. Between the early 1770s and the late 1790s, exports from Scottish ports increased from £0.5 to £1.35 million. By 1814, they were worth more than £5 million. The rise of cotton was the most spectacular case of growth; at the beginning of the 1770s, 0.15 million pounds of raw cotton arrived on the Clyde; by 1801 the amount stood at 7.5 million tons. The agricultural revolution the country experienced enabled the