For much of the 18th century Scotland was a country divided in terms of politics and religion but also of language. The work of contemporary writers in the Gàidhealtachd has tended to receive less critical attention than their Scots’ and English counterparts, with the female writers faring worst, yet the songs composed by one poetess in particular attest amply to her contemporaries’ attitude towards the government, foreign policy and daily reality of Gaelic-speaking Scotland in the years following the inception of ‘Great Britain’ in 1707. Sìleas na Ceapaich’s ‘Song to King James’ was printed first by Patrick Turner in his Comhchruinneacha do Dh' Orain taghta, Ghaidhealach (1813, pp. 106-8), but its composition may be assumed, from its tone and content, to have occurred between October 1714 and the summer of the following year, shortly before the first mustering of pro-Jacobite forces at Braemar. On October 15 1714, the exiled James Francis Edward Stewart (1688-1766) announced his intention to contest the recent accession to the throne of George, Elector of Hanover, following the death of James’s sister Queen Anne on August 1. James stated that: -
“We are come to take our part in all Dangers and Difficulties to which every one of our subjects may be exposed on this important Occasion, to relieve our Subjects of Scotland, from the hardships they groan under on account the late unhappy Union, and to restore the Kingdom to its ancient free and independent state” (Tayler & Tayler 1934, pp. 172 ff.).
A member of two families well-known for their Jacobitism, word of James’s intention to set sail would probably have reached Sìleas fairly soon after his proclamation. Her claim in verse 1, however, that his voyage has begun already, is more likely to represent a certain dramatic licence, in hopes of hastening others’ response to her enthusiasm, than a genuine belief (cf. Ó Baoill 1972, 128) – in the end, James’s ‘fleet’ comprised only one ship, and did not leave for Scotland until December 1715, by which time the campaign was already in decline.
The song is couched ostensibly as a lullaby, addressed perhaps to one of Sìleas’s daughters, yet its imagery offers little comfort beyond her hopes for a better future for Scotland in the wake of James’s restoration. Overall, it paints a bleak picture of his native land, ‘poisoned’ by the Union’s advocates whose promises, Sìleas reminds her audience, have yet to be realised: ‘Since they gave you, instead of your gold,/ Your credit and your treasures, / Which are not in your pockets today’ (v.5) – these lines also confirm the poem’s propagandist bent, since no blame is placed on the Earl of Mar, ‘Bobbing John’, whose eventual leadership of the 1715 Rising belies his prominent role in promoting the Act of Union to the Scottish Parliament only eight years before. The poem’s most striking lines suggest the unpopularity of the new King George and his perceived ineptitude for leadership: ‘The old saying’s so certain/ That I’d guess that it is true: / That a pig in the saddle’s no rider’ (v. 4). Colm Ó Baoill’s commentary on this line in his definitive edition of Sìleas’s poetry (1972) notes that the phrase appears to be comparable to the proverb ‘A pig in the parlour is still a pig’, but also reflects a very similar analogy in an English-language ballad ‘The Riding Mare’, collected by James Hogg in his Jacobite Reliques (I, 1819, pp. 82-3).
“My daddy had a riding mare,
And she was ill to sit,
And by there came an unco’ loon,
And slipped in his fit.
He set his fit into the st’rup,
And gripped sickerly,
And aye sin syne, my dainty mare,
She flings and glooms at me.
This thief he fell and brain’d himsel,
And up gat couthy Anne;
She gripp’d the mare, the riding gear
And halter in her hand:
And on she rade, and fast she rade,
O’er necks o’ nations three;
Fient that she ride the aiver stiff,
Sin’ she has geck’d at me!
The Whigs they ga’e my auntie draps
That hasten’d her away,
And then they took a cursed oath
And drank it up like whey:
Then they sent for a bastard race,
Whilk I may sairly rue,
And for a horse they’ve got an ass,
And on it set a sow.
Then hey the ass, the dainty ass,
That cocks aboon them a’!
And hey the sow, the dainty sow,
That soon will get a fa’!
The graith was ne’er in order yet,
The bridle wasna worth a doit;
And mony ane will get a bite,
Or cuddy gangs awa”.
It is difficult to assess the extent of dissemination of English-language balladry within the Gàidhealtachd, especially as much of it appears to have been popularised rather later than the time at which Sìleas wrote, but the image of the badly-steered and ‘over-ridden’ mare of England is prevalent during the following century and may well have pre-dated the earliest printed songs which depict it. Hogg’s own commentary supplies some further context for the image, as well as a characteristically snippy addendum on the ballad itself: -
“[‘The Riding Mare’] is another allegorical song, wherein the throne of Britain is pictured out by a riding mare, and the different sovereigns as the riders. The author, however, seems to have been extremely stupid, for in the antepenult verse he forgets that the throne is the riding mare, and takes the monarch in place of it, with a sow for his director, namely, the Countess of Darlington [one of George’s mistresses at the time]. The Jacobites must have considered the joke of the sow as an excellent one, [as] it has kept its ground through so many of their sarcastic effusions. This is altogether one of the most vulgar songs admitted [to the collection], but nothing like the hundreds that have been left out” (1819, p. 262).
Sìleas’s support for the Stewarts and her aversion to the Union certainly reflects the attitudes of the majority of her Gaelic contemporaries, notably Iain Lom (1624-1710), also a Keppoch MacDonald and formerly poet laureate to Charles II after his restoration to the throne in 1660. A prolific commentator on the politics and political figures of the later seventeenth century, chiefly after the advent of William of Orange in 1688, Iain Lom was also credited with the authorship of 'Oran an Aghaidh an Aonaidh' (‘A song against the Union’), whose vituperative stanzas ponder a similar image of the ‘poisoned meal’ of the offering served up by the Union’s sponsors, yet is generally inferior to the “witty bite” of Sìleas’s single verse (Ó Baoill 2007, p. 307; cf. idem. 1990 – the attribution of the song to Iain Lom is probably unsafe). Her lines ‘Hard it is for me that they brought ruin to you […] When they prepared your meal […] When they served a poisoned onion/ Sliced upon each plate’ (v. 6) plays upon the meaning of uinnein/ Uinein (‘onion’/ ‘Union’) – an alternative to the more common Aonadh – and also conveys neatly the extent of the meal’s effect (gach can be ‘every’ as well as ‘each’, suggesting the widespread resentment of the Scottish government’s transfer of power to Westminster).
With a corpus of at least twenty songs extant, Sìleas na Ceapaich is one of more accessible figures of the eighteenth-century portion of our project, and the importance of her testimony for assessing the role of politically-aware women during an especially turbulent period of Archipelagic history will be explored at greater length in a future post, alongside the place of her songs within the wider corpus of pro-Jacobite literature.
References
Hogg, J. 1819. Jacobite Reliques: Being the songs, airs, and legends, of the adherents to the house of Stuart (Vol. I). Edinburgh.
Mackenzie, A. (ed.) 1964. Orain Iain Lom: Songs of John MacDonald. Edinburgh.
Ó Baoill, C. (ed.) 1972. Bàrdachd Sìleas na Ceapaich: Poems and songs by Sìleas MacDonald, c. 1660-c. 1729. Edinburgh.
Ó Baoill. C. 1990. ‘Bàs Iain Luim’. Scottish Gaelic Studies XVI, 91-94.
Ó Baoill, C. 2007. ‘Sìleas na Ceapaich’, in The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature I: From Columba to the Union (until 1707), eds. Clancy, T.O. & Murray Pittock; 305-14. Edinburgh.
Tayler, Alistair & Henrietta. 1934. The Old Chevalier. London.
Turner, P. 1813. Comhchruinneacha do dh'òrain taghta, Ghàidhealach, nach robh riamh roimhe clò-bhuailte gus a nis, air an tional o mheodhair, air feadh gaidhealtachd a's eileine na h-Alba. Edinburgh.
Text of ‘Oran do RIGH SEUMUS’ from Turner 1813, pp. 106-8; translation KL Mathis, with thanks to Priscilla Scott.