The second main element in the government's strategy for defeating the challenge posed by radicalism in the 1790s, alongside the policy of giving instructions to local government representatives, was the use of the legal apparatus for what were essentially political ends. Prosecutions for political offences were not new in Scotland at this point, but there had been very few trials of the sort since the Act of Union, and in many respects Scots law had not been significantly ripened by practice in this area of jurisprudence and jurisdiction over the last century. When the government decided to bring those it perceived to be domestic enemies of the state before the law courts, charged with political crimes, it was therefore entering largely uncharted territory, and the political trials would– to an extent– prove to be a doubleedged sword for the authorities.

The political trials of the 1790s, both in Scotland and in England, have received considerable attention from historians, most recently in a comprehensive work by John Barrell, whose main focus is on the development of the government's argument on treason. But while these trials have been the subject of varied and extensive analyses, little attention has so far been paid to the question of sedition as a crime under Scots law, and the implications this had for the proceedings at the trials as well as the argument presented by the prosecution. Moreover, the negative reception the trials in Scotland have traditionally received– that they essentially amounted to a miscarriage of justice– may to some extent have been based on an insufficient understanding of, precisely, sedition in Scotland, and is therefore in need of some reassessment.

Since the proceedings and outcomes of the more central political trials held in Scotland are already well know, they will not be dealt with in great detail here. Instead, the emphasis has been placed on the question of sedition, on the courtroom debate on this issue, as well as the argument presented by the prosecution. A final section raises the more overall question of how effective these trials were as a political weapon for the government, as well as whether the defendants were given a fair trial.

One day in January 1794, a member of the reformist society of the ‘Friends of the People’ had stopped by a pub on his way home, and while there, had asked the landlady if she knew of any interesting news having passed that day. The landlady – who was well acquainted with the political affiliations of the gentleman – replied that she had one piece of news which she thought it would please him to hear. This, she stated, was that a group of the Friends of the People, numbering perhaps as many as a thousand, had stopped by the house earlier in the day on their way south. Excited by the news, the gentleman ran off southwards, stopping only after four or five miles at a turnpike gate to ask the keeper if he had seen the band, but the keeper could assure him that he had not met with such a group at any time during the day. Both men were bewildered by the whole affair, but after discussing the matter for some time, they realised that the Friends of the People in question had, in fact, been a ‘cart load of fresh herrings’. This story, true or not, was reported by the pro-government newspaper the Caledonian Mercury on 18 January, 1794. While referring to an individual incident, of arguably no particularly significance for the great events and developments of the final decade of the eighteenth century, it none the less gives us an invaluable glimpse into Scottish society at the time, and through that also into the great issues which were at stake back then: the omnipresence of politics relating to reform of the political system in Britain, and the influence of revolutionary ideas from France; the sharp division between so-called radicals and loyalists in the political debates of the time; and the – by 1794 – backdrop of the war against Revolutionary France, and the hardships which came with it. This was a time when politics and questions of political ideology permeated Scottish society to an extent that they perhaps had never done before. All this is, however, well known from the existing literature on Scotland in the 1790s, which began with Henry Meikle's seminal work Scotland and the French Revolution from 1912, so what is the need for another book on the decade now?

In January 1793, Henry Dundas received an anonymous letter where the author made a very specific complaint:

This brief but emotional statement made before Britain had entered the war against Revolutionary France can in some ways be seen to encapsulate an important aspect of the Scottish experience of the turbulent and dramatic 1790s as a whole. It was a time when many Scots had stood forward in defence of the British state, and had contributed to the war effort as best they could. They had embraced the British project in a conspicuous way at a time of crisis, so was it too much to ask of the English that they would do the same? Moreover, since the political radicals in Scotland had also stressed their pan-British approach– most obviously in the case of the British Convention held in Edinburgh in 1793– one could argue that the 1790s was a decade when belief in the Union permeated Scottish society. Political divisions or not, few seemed to question Scotland's place in Britain, a point which is further underlined by the consistency with which they referred to Scotland as ‘North Britain’. Whether concerning letters, articles, pamphlets, addresses, or resolutions, it is, in fact, hard to come by anyone referring to ‘Scotland’ only in the 1790s. Rather, the tendency was to use ‘North Britain’ (or simply ‘N.B.’), or ‘that part of Great Britain called Scotland’, or sometimes even ‘known as Scotland’. Yet, the statement also points in the direction of a degree of unease or ambivalence on the part of the Scots, about the relationship with their greater southern neighbour. For one thing, the English were not, of course, interested in referring to England as ‘South Britain’, and this caused some irritation among Scots. More importantly though, as the junior partner in the Union, the Scots would always have to raise their head to be seen, and while they may have been proud of the contributions to the war effort which they did in fact make, they were also sensitive to English criticism or interference.

In the final two chapters of this book we will address the issue of Scottish support for the government, and the extent to which the Scots were prepared to rally to the defence of the British state at this time of crisis. Support for the British state is divided into two separate categories, those of ‘demonstrations of loyalty’ and ‘loyalist ideology’, the first of which will be the focus of this chapter. To an extent, this is an artificial distinction since many demonstrations of loyalty to the state also included a loyalist argument or message, and thereby formed a part of loyalist ideology. But while there may be a degree of overlap between the two, it has none the less been deemed useful to single out the more direct contributions which were made to the political debate of the 1790s from the loyalist side in a separate chapter. Addressing the question of support for the state, however, invariably invokes the twin concepts of loyalism and patriotism as well as the question of what constitutes genuine loyalty or patriotism, and we will address this first. Moreover, before we go on to address the different ways in which Scots demonstrated loyalty to the British state, it is necessary to look briefly at the encouragement the government gave to its supporters, as well as the various events of the decade that led to demonstrations of support for the authorities. The first two sections of this chapter will deal with these issues, though the question of genuine loyalty– or not– is arguably one that runs through the whole of the analysis.

Loyalism– defining the concept

The two concepts of loyalism and patriotism have been widely used by historians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to describe and analyse support for the state in a wide sense. For Linda Colley, for example, a jointly British patriotism directed against France was a central part of the development of a British identity over the course of the eighteenth century. Yet, while the concepts are often discussed, they are not always clearly defined, or at least it is not usually made clear whether they should be seen as fully distinct, or whether there is a degree of overlap between them.

Wars have to be funded, and the financial arrangements whereby the war effort was sustained had arguably been as important for the many British victories in the previous wars of the eighteenth century as the military efforts of the British state. Moreover, Britain's wars had become progressively more expensive as the eighteenth century wore on, and with the Revolutionary Wars of the 1790s, the cost of war rose to an entirely new level yet again. When studying the contribution the Scots made to the British state and to the war effort in this period, it is therefore necessary to address the issue of the financial contribution the Scots made too. Doing so, however, raises a number of questions with respect to the calculation and assessment of this contribution, and we will look at these technical issues first.

The first point to make is that by contribution, we are not really thinking so much about the absolute financial contribution the Scots made, as about their relative contribution, that is, what they contributed when measured per capita. No one, be that either contemporaries or historians now, would have been in or are in any doubt that the Scottish contribution was small when measured in absolute terms, simply due to the much larger population of England. A related point, however, is what to measure? The most obvious category perhaps– which was also the one contemporaries focussed on– is that of taxation. What did Scotland contribute in terms of tax revenues to the Treasury? While such calculations can be made with a considerable degree of certainty and preciseness in present-day society, due to the well of statistical material we now produce and therefore have available, it is a far more difficult exercise to carry out for the 1790s, primarily because of the paucity of source material on taxation from this decade. This is a point we will be returning to below. The question of financial contribution, however, also touches upon less tangible and quantifiable issues relating to the concept of wealth. How is wealth created in a society, and can all aspects of wealth creation really be measured? And if not, does that mean that any attempt at calculating a relative contribution will always be uncertain and potentially controversial?

The previous chapter began by drawing up a distinction between loyalism and patriotism. In this chapter, we need to start by looking at what might reasonably be seen as a loyalist argument, and thus come under the heading of loyalist ideology.

Contrary to what one might perhaps think, this is not immediately obvious and, as Jennifer Mori has argued, loyalist ideology in the 1790s was less monolithic than it at first appears. Since most loyalist literature was not produced by the authorities themselves, but by independent loyalist writers, it followed that the government could not control the line of argument they adopted. As a consequence, Mori stated: ‘loyalism was an empowering movement that gave its followers a public presence and political voice with which to criticize the polity they sought to defend’. Or at least it could, if they chose to do so. Alternatively, loyalist writers could– in their eagerness to support the existing political regime– develop arguments which the authorities may have deemed ‘unsuitable’ for this purpose. Again, Mori has pointed out how some loyalist writers in the 1790s ended up flirting with absolutist ideas, when they were trying to develop an argument against a republican form of government. As we will see below, a few of the loyalist pamphlets published in Scotland in the 1790s came close to falling into this particular trap. Loyalist literature therefore presented the British government with much the same dilemma as the forming of loyalist associations did– were supporters you could not fully control, really a desirable thing? In face of the upsurge of popular radicalism in 1792, Pitt and his ministers decided that it was worth the risk.

While loyalist ideology thus always had the potential– when seen from the point of view of the authorities at least– of containing ‘rogue elements’, and therefore could be unreliable, a main view presented in this chapter is that loyalist writers in Scotland followed a line of argument which must have been much to the liking of the authorities. This view, however, rests on a specific definition of loyalism, which again emanates from a debate which dominated loyalist thinking in 1792.

In the 1790s the British state arguably faced a crisis of unprecedented proportions. Not only was the British government fighting a war, which – for most of the decade – went badly for Britain, but the authorities also had to deal with a challenge to the political regime on the domestic front in the shape of political radicalism and popular disturbances. The perception among the authorities that Britain had an ‘enemy in the back’ so to speak, capable, perhaps, of fomenting revolution at home, at the same time as the state was involved in a desperate struggle with France, came to place its clear mark on the way the country was governed. Opposition to the political system and demands for reform were, of course, nothing new in Britain by the 1790s, nor were popular disturbances related to political issues. What was new, however, was the influence from abroad in the shape of French revolutionary principles. Nowhere was this more apparent than in Scotland where the sudden upsurge of popular disturbances in the troubled year of 1792 bore all the hallmarks of being inspired by revolutionary ideas, and by recent events in France. This influence of French principles was clearly present during the arguably most serious disturbances in Scotland in 1792: the King's Birthday riot in Edinburgh – which took place over three days beginning on 4 June (the King's Birthday), and during which the target of the crowds’ discontent was unmistakeably the leading Scottish politician Henry Dundas and other figures of authority in Edinburgh – and the riots in Perth and Dundee in the autumn, which became particularly serious after news of the French military victory at Jemappes on 6 November had arrived in Scotland. Both in Perth and Dundee, the crowds planted socalled ‘trees of liberty’, a symbol of the famous revolutionary principles of ‘liberty, equality, and fraternity’. The influence from France also played an important role in the emergence of new politically radical societies in Scotland, of which the more prominent one was the Scottish Friends of the People. And while popular disturbances with a political intent caused grave concern among the authorities, they were no less alarmed by the more peaceful activities of societies such as the Friends of the People.

Britain's entry into the war on 1 February, 1793 presented the British government with the usual eighteenth-century problem of having rapidly to augment its armed forces from their low peacetime numbers, since– in peacetime– Britain maintained a very small military establishment by the standards of most contemporary European powers. In 1792, the strength of the British Army was in the region of 45,000 men, and there were fewer than 31,000 militiamen in England and Wales. No militia force existed in Scotland, and the Irish militia had been allowed to lapse. The Royal Navy was in better shape, having enjoyed substantial spending on ships-of-theline by the Pitt government following the American War of Independence and, although the majority of battleships were not in commission, the navy could be mobilised to full strength at relatively short notice. In addition to all the usual rigours of bringing the armed forces up to strength, however, the outbreak of war in 1793 also presented the British state with the new phenomenon of mass arming and a mass army, in the form of the introduction of conscription in France in the late summer of 1792, and the subsequent levée en masse in the autumn of the same year. Supposedly consisting of soldiers fighting for themselves and in their own interest, the new French mass armies which repulsed the allied counter-offensive in November 1792 opened up a whole new scenario of warfare where the old professional and relatively small armies of the eighteenth century would soon be rendered obsolete. The response of the British government was eventually to create– or at least to attempt to create– what J. E. Cookson has labelled an ‘armed nation’, in which the whole population would be drawn upon for defensive purposes. This strategy was not without its risks. As Linda Colley has argued: ‘to beat the French, the British had been required to imitate the French, and the challenge this presented to its old order was potentially corrosive’. Was copying the French the right way to defeat the French? The question facing the British authorities was in other words whether they could safely arm a large proportion of the British population, without running the risk of potentially creating an armed opposition. As we will see, the dire needs of war meant that they took the chance, and performed what Austin Gee has denoted a ‘leap in the dark’.