In 1745, Bonnie Prince Charlie, as he came to be known, landed in Scotland, with the aim of seizing the throne that had once been held by his benighted forefathers, the Stuart Kings. He failed, not least because he was no more competent than Charles I or James II (James VII of Scotland), his great-grandfather and grandfather respectively. Defeated at the Battle of Culloden, to a great extent because he mishandled it so badly, he then fled (“over the sea to Skye” as the sorrowful song later claimed), instead of sticking around to fight again, even though the major part of his forces was still intact.
Bonnie Prince Charlie wasn’t beaten by the dastardly English (it’s likely there were more Scots fighting against him than with him) but by himself, and by the lack of enthusiasm across Britain for a return to the Stuarts.
What happened next, though, was very much down to the English and their allies in Scotland. The British Army went on a killing spree, a true attempt at ethnic cleansing, wiping out whole villages, burning the houses and even destroying their crops and cattle. Think Sudanese troops in Darfur or Burmese forces against the Rohingya for a modern analogy.
The first British colonial war was directed against the Scots, and it was as brutal as any in the long, sad history of that Empire.
As part of the drive to wipe out the old Highland Scots culture, the London Parliament banned of the traditional plaid. But there was one curious and significant exception to that ban: men serving in the British Army, who were positively encouraged to wear it. And tens of thousands over the next decades did. As so many Scotsmen also travelled through the Empire to assist in the colonial effort.
They’d fought the British Army. But now they were partners in the British Empire.
Those two sides of Scotland’s soul may explain how, nearly six years before Culloden, the Scottish poet James Thomson could have written the poem Rule, Britannia! Set to music by the Englishman Thomas Arne, it is one of the best known British patriotic songs. It celebrates British control of the Seas, in particular as the powerful protector of that most precious of British qualities, its liberty:
When Britain first, at Heaven’s command
Arose from out the azure main;
This was the charter of the land,
And guardian angels sang this strain:
"Rule, Britannia! rule the waves:
"Britons never will be slaves."
Of course, British sea power didn’t just defend British liberties at home, it helped ensure that Britain could make a gift of those same liberties to its proud and no doubt grateful dependencies in its huge overseas Empire.
Take Barbados, for example.
As Britain grew in strength, wealth and power, growing numbers of people became able to indulge their taste for certain luxuries. One of the greatest of those luxuries was sugar. In the past, honey had been the main sweetener used in Britain. But in the eighteenth century, sugar began to be far more readily available, and at far more accessible prices.
For a time, it was only provided by possessions of foreign powers, such as Spain and Portugal with their extensive tropical colonies. But then Britain realised that in its Caribbean possession, the island of Barbados, the conditions were just right for growing sugar cane and producing sugar from it.
Unfortunately, few Europeans could stand the conditions there, especially given the rhythm of the work required. When the cane is ready for harvesting, it has to be brought in quickly and sent immediately for processing, before the sugar begins to break down. But Englishmen, and even Native Americans, had trouble surviving work that hard in the heat of Barbados.
Fortunately, the Portuguese had found an ingenious solution to the problem, for their own plantations in Brazil. They had taken to importing slave labour from Africa. Not to be outdone, Britain set out to do the same. It worked a dream. Slaves could be worked as hard as one liked, even to death – there were plenty more where they came from and prices, for a long while, weren’t even that high – and they could cope with the conditions.
By the end of the century, Britain had some 70,000 slaves in Barbados, and another 400,000 in Jamaica.
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| Jamaican cutters in the late 19th century Post-slavery, but note the cutters are all black, the overseer white |
Still. The British weren’t always quite that cruel to their black slaves. Others, guilty of lesser crimes, might merely be hanged, or castrated, or mutilated in some other way. For really small offences, they might just be whipped and salt and pepper weren’t always rubbed into the wounds to make sure the lesson stuck.
Such was the civilising mission of the British Empire. With such sweet means did the British make sure they could indulge their sweet tooth at home. It may be true that Britons would never be slaves, as Rule Britannia! claimed, but that didn’t stop them being slaveholders.
It’s interesting, isn’t it? It strikes me that a nation that could regard a whole race as so little human that it could be treated this way, has more important issues to address than singing about ruling the waves. It needs to start by learning to rule itself, and to come to terms with its past.
But above all it has to come to terms with its present. Because those attitudes don’t vanish in a generation or two, or even ten or twenty. The disproportionate number of arrests among black people in Britain, and the disproportionate number of black people amongst victims of police violence, in some cases fatal, show that indifference to black lives is still with us today.
My preference is for ‘Black Lives Matter’ over ‘Rule Britannia’. Because ‘Black Lives Matter’ sums up the lesson that needs learning. A lesson particularly needed by anyone who replies ‘All Lives Matter’, since they clearly haven’t grasped the special level of aggression black people face.
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