Michael Elcock
Bad words
The Cafe
I would challenge the whole premise of John Milne’s piece (26 October)
It is back to front, but years of unionist conditioning has resulted in whole swathes of decent people in Scotland looking for answers to the wrong question.
Independence is the natural condition of nations, small and large.
The SNP has no obligation to explain why normal independence is a comfortable fiscal position for the 196 nations in this world. The case is self evident.
There is to my certain knowledge presently no independent nation looking for a union with a larger one, which would surely be the case if such was the normal or advantageous thing to do.
The real question actually is ‘What are the economics of dependence?’ or, perhaps, more accurately, ‘Are there any advantages in dependence?’.
So I would offer John Milne the opportunity to fully expand upon the benefits – economic and otherwise – of dependence.
David McEwan Hill
I enjoyed Alex Wood’s enthusiastic celebration of America (27 October). It reminded me of Auden – ‘God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich’.
My impression from reading reviews of books on the American revolution is that there is not quite the consensus on it being such a beautiful thing as there once was, however – for example, with regard to the treatment of the many Loyalists after the rebels took over.
Also, the revolutionaries don’t seem to have liked us Scots that much. The Loyalists were called the ‘Scotch faction’ and Jefferson had to be persuaded (by the Scot Witherspoon) to take a derogatory reference to the Scots out of the Declaration of Independence.
I am very glad to see that Alex is a fellow admirer of James Robertson – ‘Joseph Knight’ and ‘The Fanatic’ are in my view the two most important Scottish novels of our time. Astonishing to think how hidden in our story were the Scottish slave plantations in the West Indies before ‘Joseph Knight’ brought them back into our ‘public narrative’.
Edwin Moore
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Today’s banner
Photograph by
Islay McLeod
The acquittal of
Patrick Sellar: ‘a verdict
satisfactory to the court’
Barbara Millar‘s person of the week
Dornoch jail’s most notorious prisoner was only behind bars for a matter of days. On 31 May 1815 he was detained in the prison on the order of Sheriff-substitute Robert MacKid. On 6 June, he was released on bail, to appear before the circuit court in Inverness on 23 April 1816.
Despite the lengthy list of crimes for which he was indicted, the jury retired for just 15 minutes, before returning to give a unanimous verdict of not guilty, prompting judge Lord Pitmilly to observe that he was ‘happy to say they had paid the most patient attention to the case, and had returned a verdict satisfactory to the court’. Patrick Sellar was a free man.
Patrick Sellar was born in Moray in December 1780, the only son of solicitor Thomas Sellar and his wife, Jean Plenderleath, the daughter of an Edinburgh minister. He enjoyed the privileged childhood of one born into a wealthy family, and went on to study law at Edinburgh University, joining his father’s legal practice in 1803 and attaining the position of procurator fiscal of Moray.
In May 1809, together with farmer and improvement entrepreneur William Young, Sellar was engaged to advise Lady Stafford, the Countess of Sutherland, on plans for the improvement of her vast Highland estates. The countess, tired of years of child-bearing and the salons of London and Paris (where she had been a first-hand observer of the French Revolution), had, with her husband, the impressively-titled Most Noble George Granville Leveson-Gower, 2nd Marquess of Stafford, 3rd Earl Gower and Viscount Trentham, 4th Lord Gower of Sittenham in Yorkshire, 8th baronet of the same place and – for the last six months of his life – 1st Duke of Sutherland, decided to ‘improve’ her 1.5 million acre estate, the biggest private estate in Europe.
With the demise of the clan system, people who had formerly been regarded as an asset were now considered to be a financial liability – the estate offered what the Sutherlands believed to be a miserable rent accruing from its rapidly expanding population. They had already tried to address the problem of over-population by raising the 93rd Regiment of Foot, the Sutherland Highlanders, which mustered in 1800 before going to serve in the Napoleonic Wars. But this still left a huge resident population, so they determined to increase the land’s income by letting it to sheep farmers and moving people to the coast.
Ironically, Sellar originally disliked the idea of sheep but, arriving in Sutherland, he was quickly converted and approached his job with the zeal of the convert. There was already a precedent for the work he was to carry out. Lord Stafford had imposed a poll tax on all his tenants, whether they had a quarter of an acre or thousands. In 1807, those who could not pay were evicted.
Lord Stafford – who had inherited enormously valuable estates from his father, including the Bridgwater Canal, and who, when he died, was described as ‘a leviathan of wealth…the richest individual who ever died’ – never personally witnessed an eviction.
All his improvement plans were made from behind his desk in London or in Dunrobin, near Golspie, the Sutherland family seat.
Sellar was convinced that what he was being asked to do was perfectly acceptable, writing: ‘Lord and Lady Stafford were pleased to order the new arrangements of this country. That the interior be possessed by Cheviot shepherds, and the people brought down to the coast and placed in lots of less than three acres, sufficient for the maintenance of an industrious family, pinched enough to cause them to turn their attention to the fishing. A most benevolent action, to put these barbarous Highlanders in a position where they could better associate together, apply themselves to industry, educate their children, and advance in civilisation’.
The jury at Sellar’s trial consisted of 15 men: eight were local landowners or proprietors, two were merchants, two were tacksmen and one was a lawyer – most were magistrates or justices of the peace.
He was to commit many ruthless acts in the name of his employers but nothing to compare with the events of 1814, the year of the burnings. In June that year, when most of the men were away in the hills retrieving their cattle, Sellar arrived in Strathnaver, which runs for 17 miles along the River Naver, with four officers and 20 men. On the Sunday he attended a church service, at which the Rev David MacKenzie threatened the local people with hellfire if they showed any disobedience. The next day the torches were lit.
Donald MacLeod, a native of Strathnaver, was an eye-witness. ‘A dense cloud of smoke enveloped the whole country by day, and even extended far out to sea,’ he said. ‘At night an awfully grand but terrific scene presented itself – all the houses in an extensive district in flames at once. I myself ascended a height about 11 o’clock in the evening, and counted 250 burning houses, many of the owners of which I personally knew, but whose present condition – whether in or out of the flames – I could not tell. The conflagration lasted six days, till the whole of the dwellings were reduced to ashes or smoking ruins.
Little or no time was given for the removal of persons or property; the people trying to remove the sick and the helpless before the fire should reach them, struggling to save the most valuable of their effects. The cries of the women and children, the roaring of the affrighted cattle…altogether presented a scene that completely baffles description. It required to be seen to be believed.’
One house, belonging to a man called William Chisholm, a tinker, was especially singled out. In the house was Chisholm’s mother-in-law, 90-year-old Margaret MacKay, who was bedridden. The roof of the cottage was set on fire and, when Sellar was told she could not be moved, he said, allegedly: ‘Damn her, the old witch. She has lived too long. Let her burn’. By the time Mrs MacKay was pulled out, the blankets in which she was wrapped were alight. She was taken to a nearby shed and died five days later.
When Sellar was finally indicted for his crimes there were other similar cases on the charge sheet: Donald MacKay ‘a feeble old man of the age of four-score years or thereby…who lay for several days and nights in the woods in the vicinity, without cover or shelter, to his great distress and the danger of his life’; Barbara MacKay, pregnant and confined to her bed after being injured following a fall, was turned out after Sellar said he would ‘have the house pulled down around her ears’, her husband having to carry her nearly a mile to safety; Donald Munro, ‘a young lad, sick in his bed at the time’; Donald MacBeath, whose house was unroofed and largely pulled down ‘where he lay in his bed, exposed to the weather, without cover or shelter’, dying eight days later. It went on and on – but to all of these charges Sellar pleaded not guilty.
The jury at Sellar’s trial consisted of 15 men: eight were local landowners or proprietors, two were merchants, two were tacksmen and one was a lawyer – most were magistrates or justices of the peace. The charge against him was culpable homicide, and acts of gross inhumanity but, when Lord Pitmilly came to sum up, he instructed the jury to bear in mind the character of the tinker, Chisholm, versus the character of the accused.
After his acquittal, Sellar continued to evict, but was more careful to burn houses after the people had gone. He retired from Stafford’s services in 1818, by which time 15,000 people had been evicted from Sutherland lands and he himself had become one of the greatest sheep farmers in the Highlands, widely respected as an agricultural adviser and sheep expert, and influential in establishing wool and sheep markets.
He married Ann Craig in 1819 and together they had nine children: one Alexander Craig Sellar, becoming a lawyer and Liberal MP, another, William Young Sellar, becoming a professor of Latin at Edinburgh University. A grandson, William Carruthers Sellar, was the Scottish humorist who wrote, among other works, ‘1066 and All That’.
Between 1838 and 1844 Sellar bought two estates in Morvern, evicting over 2,000 tenants. He died in October 1851 – 160 years ago – after a long illness, and is buried in Elgin Cathedral. Several people have subsequently claimed that the picture of Sellar resorting to force was unproven and at odds with his known character. But the Countess of Sutherland herself wrote, privately: ‘The more I see and hear of Sellar, the more I am convinced he is not fit to be trusted further than he is at present. He is so greedy and exceedingly harsh with the people’. And after his acquittal, her commissioner James Loch wrote that Sellar ‘was really guilty of many very oppressive and cruel acts’.
Barbara Millar is a tour guide and freelance journalist
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