Enterprising Scots

If you wish to see how Scotland changed in the century after the Act of Union (1707), you might visit and compare the two houses in Edinburgh that belong to the National Trust for Scotland. Gladstone’s Land, built for a wealthy merchant in the 17th century, is a six-storey tenement in the old town, a place rich with period ambience but narrow, confined and in its heyday unhygienic. It could hardly contrast more vividly with The Georgian House in the new town’s Charlotte Square, which has space and elegance and the architecture of Robert Adam.

If you would like to know why such a transformation took place, what opportunities the Union gave to enterprising Scots, a good start would be to read Emma Rothschild’s excellent book on the lives of the Johnstone siblings, seven brothers and four sisters who were born between 1723 and 1739. They were the children of an impecunious laird with a small estate in Dumfriesshire, tribal lair of the Johnstones, a clan formerly notorious for border reiving and feuds with clan Maxwell. Yet the creation of Great Britain enabled the siblings to break out, not just to England but thence to America, the Caribbean and the Bay of Bengal.

The brothers each had multiple careers. Five of them lived at times in north America, four became members of parliament in London, four served in the armed forces, three joined the East India Company, and six were owners of slaves — albeit sometimes reluctantly, through inheritance. One of the sisters was as adventurous as any of them, fighting for Bonnie Prince Charlie, and, after her capture, escaping from Edinburgh Castle to France. None of the girls was the ‘docile creature’ of the epoch’s stereotype, obedient in all things to the menfolk.