Two nations on a common island

an Englishman's view of the state of the nation

THE future author of Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe was sent up to Scotland in 1706 to win public support for an Active Union already agreed in principle by the statesmen and church leaders of both nations. His patron Robert Harley, later Lord Oxford, the Secretary of State with responsibility for bringing about the Union had recently sprung Defoe from Newgate Prison and used his services as a confidential agent and pro-government propagandist, through his thrice-weekly paper the Review. Although Harley sometimes protested that he knew no more of Scotland than of Japan, he got reports from the Marquis of Queensberry, the Earl of Seafield and the economist William Patterson, but valued Defoe as an English Presbyterian who might prove acceptable to the Church of Scotland Assembly.

During the years 1706-11 which he spent mostly in Scotland and once again after the Jacobite rising of 1715, Defoe constantly argued the case for a Britain united under a Protestant monarch. Whatever the twists and turns he made to earn a living, Defoe was true to the anti-Jacobite cause, for which he had taken up arms in 1685 and again in 1688, on behalf of his hero and friend William of Orange. Defoe's pride in the Union comes across in the three Scottish chapters of his masterpiece A Tour of the Whole Island of Great Britain published from 1724-7, and written largely from memory and imagination.

On the first of these journeys, Defoe followed the route he took on his first mission to Scotland in 1706, from Berwick-upon-Tweed to Edinburgh. Making the same trip by InterCity express I soon encountered some of the new problems affecting Anglo-Scottish relations. For those of us who had not booked in advance, there were no seats available in the carriages for second class passengers, or standard class customers as they are now called. Moreover on one of the hottest days of the year the airless coaches soon approached the condition of a boiler room on a freighter on the tropics. In order to get a seat in one of the air-conditioned first class carriages, I treated myself to lunch in the dining car, along with other refugees from standard class. My lunch companions were English, and quickly voiced the suspicion which had entered my head, that the British North-Eastern Railway might be using

ordeal by heat to push passengers into paying a supplementary fare. ''If only we had British Railways back,'' one woman said, which was startling since she was otherwise an outspoken admirer of Mrs Thatcher, who had privatised the transport system. Her irritation grew worse when she learned that as soon as the lunch was finished she would have to return to the sweltering standard class, as the restaurant car did not serve teas. When she was told by the waitress that BNER was owned by a US oil company she exclaimed in triumph: ''Ha! They're Americans! And that's why they don't serve afternoon teas.''

Absurd though it is, this kind of complaint and mutual suspicion can only increase if the trains between England and Scotland are run by two separate transport authorities, with two separate lots of politicians and bureaucrats expecting to travel first class between London and Edinburgh, not to mention wining and dining en route. Until a few years ago this was a cause of resentment between Britain and the Republic of Ireland, since all employees of the state airline Aer Lingus, and their families were entitled to free travel between the countries and even to ''bump'' fee-paying customers off the waiting list. This happened to me on two occasions. Similar quarrels over communications between the Republics of former Yugoslavia contributed to the break-up of the Federation and subsequent civil war. The matter is especially sensitive I suspect in Scotland, where many people I talked to still

resent the cuts in the transport system carried out in the 1960s by Lord Beeching, an Englishman. In vain I have tried to explain that many English people were equally annoyed but, nevertheless I got the impression everywhere from the Lothians and Galloway to the northern Highlands that Beeching was a figure who now ranks with ''Butcher'' Cumberland in demonology.

When the train stopped at Berwick-upon-Tweed, the mother of two hot, quarrelsome children tried to arouse their interest by talking about the battles that had been fought here between the English and Scots in the Middle Ages. ''Are we going to start fighting each other again?'' the elder boy asked, to which his mother replied that she thought the Scots no longer wanted Berwick. Was this my first encounter with the much talked about ''Braveheart'' effect? Although I had seen the film only in snatches on late-night TV, I cannot say that I found it insulting to English national pride, as some have done. Of course I found it absurd that a Norman nobleman like William Wallace should paint his face with woad, and I doubt if the Prince of Wales, the future Edward II was really so lacking in interest in the opposite sex, as his enemies contended. Anyway, we always expect that Hollywood will garble

British history, as it did in the 1930s when someone composed the clerihew:

''Cecil B De Mille

''By a mighty effort of will

''Kept Moses

''Out of the Wars of the Roses.''

In fact I would not have minded Braveheart if it had not followed a number of rather sinister Hollywood films intended to whip up anti-British feeling over Ireland. What we might call the ''Braveheart'' effect was far more strong in 1706, when Defoe came to Scotland to try to cool the hostility between the two countries. Only two years earlier, the Edinburgh mob had obtained the judicial lynching of an English merchant captain on a trumped-up charge of piracy against a Scottish ship. At the start of Tour Defoe announced his intention not to boast of English medieval victories, while chiding the Scots for boasting of Wallace and Bruce: ''It is none of my business to give an account of battles and sieges, besides, the English being victors, I shall not mingle any of our trophies and triumphs with my account of Scotland, that would not be using the Scots fairly; I shall speak fairly of them

when they were victors, but not throw the English, as it were, in their face; that would be to act the very part which I blame the Scots writers for, namely to be always crying up my own country.''

Although he admired the military prowess of Edward I in having captured the Stone of Scone, Defoe deplored the same king's cruelty to the defenders of Berwick. But when it came to the more recent quarrels among the Scots themselves, especially the confrontation between John Knox and Queen Mary Stuart, Defoe was whole-heartedly on the side of Knox and the later Church of Scotland. As an English Presbyterian he had twice himself taken up arms against James II of England (and VII of Scotland) and written all his life against the Jacobites in any part of the British Isles. He never missed a chance to write ill of Mary. However, Defoe understood that even the most fanatical Scottish Calvinist detested the memory of their English co-religionist Oliver Cromwell. Here again Defoe was able to take a neutral stand for he himself adhered to the Presbyterian version of Calvinism preferred in Scotland,

rather than to Independent or Anabaptist zealotry of Cromwell's troopers. He can afford to stand aloof about the Battle of Dunbar in 1650 where ''Cromwell's army overthrew the army of the other side, killed 6000 and took 10,000 prisoners, to the surprise of the world. But that is a matter of history, and none of my business at present.

Like Dr Johnson 50 years later, Defoe complained of the want of trees on the moorland north of Berwick, but unlike Johnson, noticed the groves and plantations in the Lothians, which he attributed to ''the old Earl of Tweeddale, a favourite of King Charles II who took from the king the love of what we call forest trees''.

Defoe attributed to Tweeddale the later increase in trees in Scotland which many like Sir Walter Scott attributed to the taunts of Dr Johnson: ''As the success of his planting was a great encouragement to the nobility of Scotland to improve their estate by the same methods, so we find abundance of gentlemen of estates do fall into it and follow the example. And you hardly see a gentleman's house, as you pass the Lothians towards Edinburgh, but they are distinguished by groves and walks of fir trees about them, which show us that in a few years time, Scotland will not need to send to Norway for timber or deal.''

Like many visiting Englishmen, Defoe liked to lecture the Scots on the need to catch and eat more fish, especially salmon, and even scolded them in his poem Caledonia, published in Edinburgh in 1707:

''If they reject the bounty of the sea,

Bid them complain no more of poverty.

When Caledonians, when will you be wise

And search for certain wealth in native seas?''

Defoe praises Dunbar, ''a handsome well-built town'' for having established ''a great herring industry'', which now seems to have been diverted to catching lobsters, mussels, crabs, and white fish, mostly for sale to the market at Eyemouth down the coast. However the two seafood restaurants by the harbour at Dunbar serve better meals at lower price than any I have encountered in English coastal towns.

In several other ways, Dunbar strikes me as better off than comparably sized towns south of the border. Everybody I met spoke well of the local schools, especially now they are bringing back uniforms. Moreover the local family shops have not yet been killed off by one of the giant out-of-town ''malls'' that have done so much harm to the north of England, especially Tyneside.

A Yorkshireman living in Dunbar told me that English tourists especially liked the local Belhaven beer from one of the few independent breweries left in Scotland. This would have pleased Defoe, who often remarked that beer got better the further north he went from the Trent. Moreover he was a friend of the first Earl of Belhaven despite their differences of opinion. This Lord Belhaven was a staunch Presbyterian who had fought against the Jacobites at the Battle of Killiecrankie, but had later become a leading opponent of Union with England. One of Belhaven's speeches at the last Scottish Parliament, shortly before it voted to abolish itself, was typical of the high-flown sentiment then exciting the country: ''I think I see our ancient mother Caledonia, like Caesar sitting in the midst of a Senate, ruefully looking about her, covering herself with her royal garments attending the fatal blow

. . . I see our ancient mother Caledonia breathing out her last . . .'' Defoe laughed off this rhetoric with a comic ditty:

''Here's a Lord of the North

Near Edinburgh Firth

He's seen such a vision no moral can read it,

I challenge the clan of

Egyptians to match it.''

At the time of the failed Jacobite landing and rebellion of 1708, Lord Belhaven was one of the ''usual suspects'' rounded up by the government as a preventative measure. At Belhaven's request, Defoe went to visit him in Edinburgh Castle and no doubt passed on his complaints to Lord Treasurer Godolphin, who was his new employer.

Poor Lord Belhaven was especially indignant because he had been a prisoner in the same place 27-years earlier for opposing James II and had ''assisted to keep him out at the hazard of his life, having commanded the cavalry at the Battle of Killiecrankie''. The shock of imprisonment must have broken Lord Belhaven's spirits and health, for Defoe wrote his obituary in the Review of July 10, 1708:

''And let no man wonder that this should come from me, who perhaps as warmly as anybody thwarted this noble person in the opposition he made to the Union, and perhaps used him with freedom enough; but let such people understand from this noble person, that it is easy for men of honour to distinguish between difference in argument and personal difference, and I count it my honour to say, that though in debating these matters I never slacked my hand in opposing his Lordship's opinion, yet his Lordship knew how to differ in opinion without personal resentment.''

Defoe then quotes from his first letter from Lord Belhaven: ''I confess I thought you gave yourself too much liberty in bantering me and my speech in your writings . . . yet by what I have seen of your other writing, you are of the same sentiments with me as to government except in the matter of the Union, you are a man after my own heart. And I am so well pleased with some of your later Reviews with relation to the affairs of Scotland that I freely forgive you all your sins of ignorance.''

In a pub in Dunbar I fell into conversation with two veteran members of the Communist Party of Great Britain, one of whom was about to go as a tourist to Cuba to see the last remaining Marxist Leninist state. They were both staunch anti-imperialists who rejoiced at Britain's withdrawal from Africa, Hong Kong, and (they hoped) Northern Ireland. This encounter took place when newspapers were full of reports on the gloom surrounding the fiftieth anniversary of the now divided India and Pakistan.

The main argument used by Defoe to persuade the Scots to agree to Union was the opportunity it gave to join in England's ever-expanding overseas trade. He was himself an ardent imperialist who wanted Britain to take over the Spanish/American territories and trade. Indeed, his most famous book Robinson Crusoe can be understood as a plea for Britain acquiring what is now Venezuela as well as the traffic in slaves to Brazil. Crusoe himself is shipwrecked while on his way to Africa to purchase a cargo of what he euphemistically calls ''servants''.

In the Tour, Defoe once more reminds the Scots of the benefits of empire: ''Scotland was before considered as a nation, now she appears no more but as a province, or at least a dominion; she has not lost her name as a place; but as a state she may be said to have lost it; and that she is now no more than a part of Great Britain, in common with the parts of it, of which England itself is now no more; I might enlarge here upon the honour it is to Scotland to be a part of the British empire and to be incorporated into so powerful a people under the crown of so great a monarch, their being united in name as one, Britain, and their enjoying all the privileges of and in common with, a nation who have the greatest privilege, and enjoy the most liberty of any people in the world. But I should be told, and perhaps justly, that this was talking like an Englishman rather than like a Briton.''

Defoe wrote hundreds of thousands of words to try to explain that in Scotland the Presbyterians were the established church and the Episcopalians were the dissenters. He also argued that the Episcopalian Scots were for the most part Jacobites and therefore not to be trusted. When I attended an Episcopalian service at Dunbar I was surprised to find it more Scottish than English in character, with emphasis on the psalms, and Communion taken standing up rather than kneeling or sitting. Since the Episcopalian Church was banned in Dunbar till the nineteenth century, there was a sensation of joining a clandestine organisation. But I see from a leaflet given me by the rector that the Episcopalians, now admit to the charges made by Defoe: ''We espoused the Jacobite cause and suffered the consequences. Though we have long since relinquished our Jacobite dreams, we sadly remain separate from our sister

Church of Scotland, though relationships with one another are happily cordial. We also pray and yearn the breach with Rome may be healed.''

On reaching Edinburgh during the Festival, I find that an English liberal newspaper praises the city for having produced the film Trainspotting and also describes it as ''the Aids capital of Europe''.

At about the same time the Episcopalian Bishop of Edinburgh called for the recognition of homosexual marriages. As the author of A Journal of the Plague Year, Defoe would have taken an interest in the Aids epidemic, but he did not condone the practices by which it is spread.

Daniel Defoe was one of the few English visitors to Edinburgh in the eighteenth century who did not make sneering remarks about the habit of emptying slops from the high-rise buildings into the street. He pointed out that the city fathers had been obliged by the need for defence to build on the slopes of a steep hill: ''By this means the city suffers infinite disadvantages, and lives under such scandalous inconveniences that are by its enemies made a subject of scorn and reproach; as if the people were not as willing to live sweet and clean as other nations, but delighted in stench and nastiness; whereas were any other people to live under the same unhappiness thronged in buildings from seven to 12 storeys high, and a scarcity of water and that difficult to be had, we should find a London or Bristol as dirty as Edinburgh.'' The truth of Defoe's comment is clear to see in the condition of

highrise council flats in England.

Some protagonist of an independent Scotland blame English domination for what they describe as a Scottish tendency to ''cringe''. Defoe used this curious word in writing of Edinburgh but in a quite different context: ''They have also one very good custom as to their behaviour in church, which I wish were practised here (in England) namely that after the sermon is over, and the blessing given, they all look round upon their friends and make civilities and bows as we do here, for by the way the Scots do not want manners. But if come in when the worship is begun, he takes notice of nobody nor anybody of him; whereas here we make our bows and our cringes in the middle of our very prayers.''

Edinburgh still has its medieval high-rise buildings and most of its citizens retain their politeness and rather formal manners but otherwise it has fallen into decline. There are beggars in Princes Street as well as a drugged and dangerous under-class, generally blamed for a recent outbreak of muggings, rapes, and even murders. Nor is the violence confined to members of rival criminal gangs as it used to be in the razor-slashing era of Glasgow before the Second World War.

The transformation of Edinburgh into Sodom and Gomorrah, or at any rate New York and San Francisco is partly a result of those festivals 20 years ago when avant-garde writers like Norman Mailer, William Burroughs extolled the benefits of the permissive society and freedom from censorship. I heard one wise old writer Rebecca West warn an Edinburgh literary conference how the decadence and pornography in 1920s Germany had led to the rise of Hitler. Rebecca West died before she saw the beginning of the Aids epidemic.

Defoe would have been interested in the disease, having himself written A Journal of the Plague Year. But he did not approve of the practice which helps to spread Aids. In an article in the Review published in Edinburgh on November 27, 1707, he declared that sodomites should be tried and executed as secretly as possible for ''the public prosecution and punishment of these hellish creatures makes it but too public that there are such monsters among us.''

Defoe always admired the puritanical side of the Scots which many Englishmen disliked. In another Review he praises the Scots because they hang people for three other crimes besides treason, murder, piracy, felony, burglary, rape, sodomy, clipping (of coins) ''or any of the sorts for which men are usually put to death in our country.''

After telling his English readers that the Scots still execute forgers, adulterers and atheists, he exclaims: ''Oh necessary severity.'' He goes on to explain how in 1693 an obstinate atheist called Akenhead went to the gallows, ''a terrible spectacle and example to all the wretched crew of miserable people who say in their hearts there is no God.'' A few years after the execution of Akenhead: ''Two men and a woman made their exit by the halter at the cross of Edinburgh for the most fashionable crime of adultery.''

While praising Scotland, Defoe complains that in England: ''Men may deny God, insult their neighbour, debauch the virtuous, delude the simple and rage in unrestrained lusts, while the silent law puts neither fetters upon the crime nor upon the criminal.'' Here he harks back to Oliver Cromwell's rule, when adultery was punishable by death, in England as well as in Scotland. However, it has to be pointed out that if the law had persisted, Defoe's two most popular heroines, Moll Flanders and Roxanna, could not have survived for 50 pages.

n Richard West has travelled widely as a journalist and author, having written four books on Africa, three on Vietnam, and one book An English Journey. His latest book, published by HarperCollins at #20, is The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Daniel Defoe.