Recent reading

[luzula]

In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan (2017)
For my fannish book club, obviously, why else would I be reading things that are unrelated to Flight of the Heron? This was page-turney YA fantasy, but the narrative voice grated on me after a while. It is also extremely slow-burn--it was obvious to me from the start who the main character would end up with, but he spends much of the book being mean to him, so I started feeling like maybe the love interest guy could do better...

Clanship, Commerce and the House of Stuart, 1603-1788 by Allan I. Macinnes (1996)
Ha ha, back to form. My research reading is getting ridiculous. *facepalm* This was a very good complement to other books I've been reading, though--it's about social and economic issues. I guess you could say that it's about the transition between two social systems, neither of which I would like to live in? The main thesis is that the clan elite abandoned their old social obligations to their clans as they were integrated more and more into the other British upper classes and into the proto-capitalist and colonial economy, with consequences like rent-raising and, later, the clearances.

Here are some random interesting points:
- I was reading about the Restoration of Charles II and wondering why exactly so many clans thought the Stuarts were so great, because they weren't really faring that well under most of his reign. And then along came James VII/II to be, who before getting on the throne spent four years in the Highlands being all 'let's cooperate with the clans to suppress banditry, instead of blaming the clans for it and repressing them with military force'. Oh, okay, I get it!
- From a modern religious tolerance POV, toppling a king because he thought it should be okay for people to be Catholic if they want to is rather mind-boggling. But as garonne pointed out, the issue was probably that Catholics are perceived as being loyal to a foreign interest (the Pope) and maybe not the actual religious differences.
- The role of poetry among the clans is interesting. There was an older form of Gaelic poetry with basically the purpose of extolling how great the chief was, by a poet under his patronage. But in the latter half of the 17th century there arose another genre (Gaelic vernacular poetry) that functioned as a public sphere of debate. A common subject was reproaching chiefs for raising rents and being absent and spending money in Edinburgh and London (I mean, it's not wholly their fault that they were absent, because the government often required them to be, obviously as a strategy to shift their priorities). Many of these poets were for the Jacobite risings.
- OMG, the Campbells. Uh, good job wrangling private gain from public offices, I guess?
- I like the word 'outwith'. Seems to be Scottish--I've seen it in several books now.

I also wrote out various stuff from this book in the comments here.

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

You put the “deep” in “deep dive”!

[luzula]

Ha ha, well, as long as I'm having fun!

[mergatrude]

I'm really interested in your response to In Other Lands. I'm enormously fond of the idiot narrator, and saw the slow burn as indicative of his emotional growth - he had to earn the "grown-up" relationship. But I can understand how others might find him irritating.

[luzula]

Maybe I was a bit hard on him! On the one hand, I did find the book to be very readable, but on the other hand, maybe I just wasn't in the mood for teenagers being teenagers?

[mergatrude]

maybe I just wasn't in the mood for teenagers being teenagers?

Absolutely valid, and something I myself experience frequently. ;-)

[regshoe]

Ooh, this book sounds like a good one!

I'd picked up bits and pieces of that 'absorption into the British upper classes' trend, e.g. the raising of the Highland regiments later on in the eighteenth century, so it'd be good to read a whole book about it! It seems to have been important in the rapid transformation of attitudes towards Jacobitism once the Jacobites had ceased to be a serious threat, and the whole thing is a fascinating story and kind of a horrible one if you think about it for too long.

That's very interesting about James VII/II, too. As well as the stuff about religious differences (also an important reason for supporting the Stuarts, of course)—I suppose the other thing there is that, historically, powerful religious groups generally weren't tolerant of others (I'm thinking of the flip-flopping of who got executed for heresy in Tudor England as the crown passed between monarchs of difference allegiances). So from a Protestant perspective it made sense to oppress the Catholics because they were afraid they'd be oppressed just as much if the Catholics gained power—and could point to plenty of historical examples to prove it. Although that argument works both ways round, of course!

[luzula]

It is a good book! Particularly in the beginning, there's a lot of great stuff about how the clans worked--I typed up a little of that in the comments that I linked to.

I can't quite work out the attitudes towards religion. Duffy tells me that '...in leading circles of society in the 18th century faith was at one of its lower ebbs,' and talks about 'the scorn which gentlemen of fine manners reserved for open displays of religious enthusiasm.' Which we seen in FotH, of course. And yet it was obviously also enormously important in politics.

How's your Broster read coming along? : )

[regshoe]

I suppose there's a difference between religion as in being an Episcopalian/Presbyterian/etc. as a social/cultural identity and religion as in personal faith. But yeah, definitely complicated!

I've not yet read Broster's next book, The Vision Splendid, as I have too many other things to read—I should get to it in a week or so! My brain keeps generating fic ideas that will probably rely on stuff from The Gleam in the North and The Dark Mile, so I do want to read those sometime, but it'll probably be several months if I try to do the whole thing in order. We shall see :)

[oursin]

I'm wondering whether or not you would like Naomi Mitchison's The Bull Calves (1947), which is very much her thing of writing female-centred historical novels set in the less dramatic bits of history - in this case, in Scotland some while after the Jacobite rising when things are sort of settling down but old allegiances can come up with damaging effects. One character is a former Jacobite rebel who went into exile in North American and lived among the Native Americans before returning. It's deeply embedded in her own knowledge of Scottish history and her Scottish nationalism, which was part of wider anti-colonialist views.

Her interwar novels set in classical antiquity include what are moderately explicit for the period (at least, not denying a physicial component) m/m relationships, which made her v popular with Forster, Auden, etc.

[luzula]

Thanks for the rec! I have read and enjoyed it already, although it was a couple of years ago--I knew very little about the time period then, which may be illustrated by this quote from my review: 'Note to self: Jacobites =/= Jacobins'. Heh.

Anyway, I do intend to reread it soon, because I'm sure I'll enjoy and understand it much more now. I remember when I read it I was fascinated by how many Scandinavian words there were in the Scottish language, such as 'greet' = 'gråta', 'well-kent' = 'välkänt', 'thole' = 'tåla', etc.

[hyarrowen]

Jumping in to add "haar" to that list - I heard irl on my last trip to Scotland.

[luzula]

That one I haven't encountered! *looks it up*

Can't find a Scandinavian connection, but there appears to be a Dutch one.

[hyarrowen]

Oohh, I totally assumed it was Scandinavian, especially given that I heard it in Inverness! It's a good word, anyway - very descriptive.

[hyarrowen]

The FutureLearn course on the Jacobites says that there were riots in Edinburgh when James VII and II took the throne. They really didn't want him as king. Scotland was, hm, a deeply divided society.

[luzula]

Interesting--I wonder if he did something to piss the people in Edinburgh off while he was up there making the clans happy. Or maybe it was just general political differences...

[luzula]

Okay, I've read more about him now, and yeah, he seems to have been an inept politician with a talent for pissing people off, so that there was very little support for him in Scotland in 1688. I seem to have given him too much credit on the issue of religion--it seems that he didn't just want religious toleration, but to convert everybody to Catholicism. And he pissed off the towns in Scotland especially, by reducing their self-governance. Strange that for once he managed to do the right thing in the Highlands before getting on the throne, then!

There's actually a letter from Charles Edward to his father which basically goes: 'Remember all the times we have talked at length about the mistakes my grandfather made and how we're not going to do that again...'

[hyarrowen]

seems to have been an inept politician with a talent for pissing people off

That sums up a lot of the Stuarts to be honest! It's possible that he was trying to build a power base in the Highlands, I suppose, since the chiefs' mode of rule agreed so closely with his own. But you wouldn't think this was the guy who went out with Charles II and help fight the Great Fire of London. It's weird.

I didn't know about that letter! That's pretty interesting. James XIII and III and BPC seem to have absorbed the lessons without putting them into practice...

[luzula]

Well, I guess they never had much chance to put anything into practice, so it's hard to know how it would have gone. Here's the actual quote:

' ...[their enemies would] no doubt endeavour to revive all the errors and excesses of my grandfather's unhappy reign, and impute them to Your Majesty and me, who had no hand in them, and suffered most by them [ha ha, probably not /editorial comment]... Can anything be more unreasonable than to suppose that Your Majesty, who is so sensible of, and has so often considered the fatal errors of your father, would with open eyes go and repeat them again?'

They had also retreated from absolutism ('guaranteed a free Parliament') and guaranteed the established Church of England, in a declaration in May 1745. This, together with the fact that the leading Jacobites in the Rising had commercial and colonial interests just as much as the Whigs did (a point made in the book I reviewed above), makes me wonder how much would really have changed. I really wonder why BPC didn't convert to Anglicanism in 1745, when he actually did it later, in 1750! It would probably have helped him a lot.

Maybe the main changes would have been: 1) in foreign policy and alliances, 2) in the chains of patronage and which people were in power, and 3) in religious issues (I can't imagine the Scottish Kirk would have remained Presbyterian). But there's probably other stuff I'm not seeing as well.

It's unclear what their intentions towards the Union was--the Jacobite Manifesto of October 1745 says '...the King cannot possibly ratify [the Union]...' and '...whatever may be hereafter devised for the joint benefit of both nations, the King will most readily comply with the request of his Parliaments to establish.' Note the plural of 'Parliaments', though, since the Scottish Parliament was dissolved in 1707!

My source for most of this is the expanded Duffy book, btw. And is very relevant to my current fic, of course...

[garonne]

> And then along came James VII/II to be, who before getting on the throne spent four years in the Highlands being all 'let's cooperate with the clans to suppress banditry, instead of blaming the clans for it and repressing them with military force'.

Aha. I feel like this is one of the key puzzle pieces that I've been missing, trying to figure out why on earth various people did or didn't support the Stuarts.

[luzula]

Yes! I felt like that was a puzzle piece falling into place, as well.

Although he seems to have done rather a poor job wrt Scotland in 1688, ha. It seems the two pretenders to the Scottish throne both wrote Scotland a letter, and while William of Orange's was bland and conciliating and basically promised/threatened nothing, James VII/II was all pissed off and demanding. He seems to have had his faults as a politician...