A SCOT IN LONDON AND AN INTELLECTUAL HOME

In 1765, when William moved into his house in Great Pulteney Street, it was not altogether an easy time to be a Scot in London. Less than twenty years earlier a Jacobite army had threatened the capital, and the heads of two executed rebels were still impaled on Temple Bar. For some Londoners the Scots retained a lingering association with insurrection, Roman Catholicism and France. Only three years before, James Boswell, attending the opera at Covent Garden, had been enraged by the shouts of the mob in the gallery when two Highland officers came in: ‘No Scots! No Scots!’ His fellow countrymen were also openly discriminated against in some quarters. As late as 1777, General Alexander Mackay, from Strathtongue in Sutherland, who was the Governor of Tynemouth Castle, applied to command the forces of the East India Company, but he was turned down as the Company ‘objected to gentleman of North Britain for commands in chief’. Such treatment increased the tendency for the Scots in London to seek their own kind, as William’s new neighbour, the piano-maker John Broadwood, did in hiring his workforce. Even though William was identified as a Scot, in the way that the jocular newspaper snippet about his chieftainship of the Clan MacGregor had shown, he had almost certainly lost all trace of an accent. He is also very unlikely to have used Scots idioms in his speech (they are not at all evident in his writing) for these were considered a barrier to social and professional advancement. The London metropolitan norm held sway. Nevertheless, although it is clear that William was strongly for the King and for the Union – in the 1770s he habitually used the politically correct term ‘North Britain’, rather than Scotland – he never lost his interest in Scottish culture: his library contained more than a score of titles, mainly on the country’s history, which he continued to buy as late as 1789. He was, for instance, a subscriber to William Shaw’s Galic and English Dictionary (1780), the first full such treatment of Gaelic, and he was almost certainly one of those ‘gentlemen in London’, along with Robert Melville, who ‘with true patriotism in the republic of letters’ had established the scheme to finance its publication.