Simpson (eBook)

TWO

A Sense of Exclusion

The moving power in this species of government is of necessity Corruption.

Tom Paine

Plump, rosy and resplendent in his corduroy suit, Simpson set out for Edinburgh at the beginning of the new academic year in 1825. Edinburgh University had no residential colleges. The university’s governing body, the Town Council, had long since decided that it was to the advantage of both the town and the students that they should not be cloistered within the university but should live as members of the general population of Edinburgh. His family had arranged for the fourteen-year-old Simpson to share lodgings with an old school friend in Stockbridge, an ancient village on the Water of Leith that had become one of Edinburgh’s most handsome and fashionable suburbs, linked by way of Royal Crescent to the city’s elegant New Town.1 He arrived at 1 Adam Street, accompanied by a quantity of luggage and a generous supply of food, on the carrier’s cart that plied regularly between Bathgate and Edinburgh.

From the beginning his family made every effort to ensure that Simpson should live comfortably for as long as he chose to continue his studies at Edinburgh. He was kept generously funded by his brother Alexander, now both manager of the family business and an agent of the Royal Bank of Scotland, and by his brother John, now a lawyer and an agent of the new Standard Life Assurance Company. Simpson could therefore easily afford the three shillings he paid each week for his lodgings. The record that he kept of his expenditure shows that he could also afford such minor luxuries as cake, fruit and fresh fish, and even extravagances such as a plentiful supply of snuff. In his first days at Edinburgh he was able to buy not only the books that he required for his studies but also Byron’s Childe Harold, a volume of Milton’s poems, Paley’s Natural Theology, Adam’s Antiquities and Sir Walter Scott’s Fortunes of Nigel. Later that year, in preparation for his studies of anatomy, he was able to buy all four volumes of Fyfe’s Anatomy, Alexander Monro’s Elements of the Anatomy of the Human Body in its Sound State (both volumes), The Anatomy and Physiology of the Human Body by J. and C. Bell, The London Dissector: A System of Dissection Practised in the Hospitals and Lecture Rooms of the Metropolis and The Economy of Human Life by Robert Dodsley.

Simpson’s style of living might have been envied by many of the students at Edinburgh. Of the several thousands who enrolled for classes there, only 2,260 were matriculated students studying for degrees in Arts, Medicine or Divinity.2 The great majority had no plan to take a degree. They paid the required class fees directly to the professors whose classes they wished to attend but did not matriculate and become members of the university unless they wished to have access to the university library. Some of those who chose to matriculate were affluent young men who had travelled to Edinburgh to complete a liberal and polite European education at what was widely recognised as one of the leading centres of learning of the time; others were studying for a short time at Edinburgh before moving on to Oxford or Cambridge. A number were grammar or parish school boys who meant only to acquire the command of Latin, Greek, and mathematics and moral philosophy that was expected of those who wished to matriculate as students preparing for a career in one of the learned professions (medicine, the law or the church). But the great majority of the 8,000 or so non-matriculated students were boys or young men who hoped to acquire, in the shortest possible time and at the least possible expense, the knowledge of Latin, Greek and mathematics that the Church of Scotland required of candidates for its licence to teach at a parish school.3 Most were barely able to afford their class fees and, for their sustenance, they had only the sacks of oatmeal and whatever other supplies that they could carry with them when they walked to Edinburgh at the beginning of each term.

The friend that Simpson joined in lodgings in Stockbridge was John Reid, the son of a well-to-do cattle dealer and farmer at Bathgate. Like Simpson, he had been a pupil at the village school in Bathgate and there they had become close friends. Two years older than Simpson, John Reid had already completed his preliminary studies of Latin, Greek, moral philosophy and mathematics at Edinburgh and was now in his second year as a matriculated medical student. Their lodgings were in the top flat of a house owned by Dr Alexander MacArthur.

MacArthur had come first to Edinburgh as an impecunious student making his own way without financial help from his family. After his first year, he had left university for a time to earn enough to allow him to complete the remaining years of study required for a degree in medicine. He had become an assistant schoolmaster at Bathgate, and there he had taught both Simpson and John Reid. By 1825, he had taken his MD degree but was still supporting himself by teaching, now at a public school in Edinburgh. He had also been engaged by Simpson’s family to act as his personal tutor and mentor.

Simpson very quickly became profoundly influenced by MacArthur’s political views. Simpson was only fourteen years old and had grown up in a family and in a community in which the processes of government and the niceties of political allegiance seemed to have no relevance to everyday life. The impact of MacArthur’s convictions shaped Simpson’s years as a student and had a lasting influence in colouring his political allegiances. MacArthur was a committed Radical, fiercely opposed to the political system that had enabled a corrupt regime to keep a firm grip on power in Britain for over half a century. This system of ‘Old Corruption’, as it became known,4 had always been particularly strong in Scotland where, as Lord Cockburn recorded in his Memorials, it ‘engrossed almost the whole wealth, and rank and public office of the country’.5 In Edinburgh, it had subverted every one of the city’s great public institutions. In 1825, MacArthur resented it as an intolerable and shameful anachronism.

Edinburgh was now a modern city that had broken out from its ancient walls. The elegant squares and terraces in its New Town made Edinburgh one of the most admired cities in Europe. Its modern piped water supply now ensured high standards of cleanliness in public places. The existence of gas lighting in its streets and a police force6 created a new sense of safety and order. New roads connected Edinburgh with Scotland’s growing towns, and a new canal linked the capital with the heartland of the country’s flourishing industries in the west. Stage coaches still ran between Edinburgh and London, but most passengers now preferred to travel on the new steam packets that sailed regularly from Leith. Edinburgh had become a modern nineteenth-century city. But, in 1825, its institutions were still governed by a political system that belonged to a different age.

The system had been designed in the aftermath of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745. In a drive to destroy the Highlands as a source of military power, the clans had been disarmed and the hereditary jurisdictions, which supported the authority of the clan chiefs, had been withdrawn. Even the office of Secretary of State for Scotland had been abolished. In Scotland it was feared that the government in London might go even further and abolish the few remnants of independence that had been left to Scotland in the Treaty of Union in 1707. The political factions in Scotland7 now buried their differences and joined together to ensure the survival of Scotland’s national institutions – the Law, the Universities, the Royal Burghs and the Kirk8 – by demonstrating their loyalty to the crown and their readiness to conform to the demands of the government in London. This they achieved by acquiescing in a system of government in which patronage from above was traded for loyalty from below. At the heart of the system was the election of Scotland’s representatives at Westminster. Scottish peers had the power to elect sixteen of their number to the House of Lords, but before each election the government of the day issued a King’s List of the peers whose election would be most acceptable and a subservient peerage accepted that there was nothing to be gained by voting against the wishes of the government. Scotland’s towns sent fifteen members and the counties thirty members to the House of Commons. In the towns only the town councillors had the right to vote. In the counties only those landowners who held the feudal superiorities could vote, and in very many cases their votes could be influenced by the wishes of one or other of a very small number of great feudal magnates. Ultimately, only a small and manageable number of men determined who was to represent Scotland in Parliament, and their loyalty could be secured by the patronage of the Crown, the Treasury or other government-controlled institutions. And the government not only created a reliable body of support in Parliament, it also established its control of Scotland’s ‘independent’ public institutions by ensuring that only those whose loyalty could be relied on, or whose loyalty could be secured, were elected to office.

This corrupt system became fully effective in 1775, when the distribution of all government patronage in Scotland was delivered into the hands of the Lord Advocate, Henry Dundas. As he rose in the hierarchy of government in London – becoming...