Read Map of a Nation for Free Online Page A

arms and French louis d’ors,’ he angrily pointed out. ‘We have not above 1,500 men [and] I cannot but wish for the return [of the army] without which I am certain we do not sleep in whole skins. Our danger is near and immediate, all our defence at a distance … I bewilder myself in scenes of misery to come, unless providentially prevented.’ So in autumn 1745 the British troops were finally recalled to fight the Jacobites on home territory and David Watson was among them.
    4 . Col. David Watson on the Survey of Scotland, 1748, by Paul Sandby.
     
    As the Jacobites retreated north, the King’s soldiers followed in pursuit. Watson’s commander, the Duke of Cumberland, offered him the role of Quartermaster General, which placed Watson in charge of army provisions . The winter of 1745 was bitterly cold and he was responsible for locating sufficient quantities of ‘warm Jackets’, adequate blankets, tents and new shoes for the rapidly moving troops. The Jacobite Rebellion convinced Watson that the rebels were aberrations, whose actions jeopardised ‘the happyness this poor Country enjoy’d before the late irruption of these Barbarians’. And in the wake of what he termed ‘our Interview with the Rebels upon Coloden Moor’, he became something of a Hanoverian hero, due to the ardour with which he rooted out Charles Edward Stuart’s surviving followers. Watson was a superficially charming man, at ease in his tallsoldier’s physique and possessed of a biting wit. His letters openly admitted the ‘temptations of pleasure or game’ that he found in the ‘hunt’ after the Jacobites, especially in pursuit of the prize prey of Lord Lovat and the Young Pretender. Watson engineered ‘the destruction of the Ancient Seat of the Glengarry’ clan and was sardonically confident that ‘the rest of the good people of Lochaber’ who witnessed that violence will ‘remember the Rebellion in the Year 46’. He was adamant that ‘the Highlanders [are] the most despicable enemy that ever Troops mett with’.
    Once the immediate brutality was over, Watson dedicated himself over the months that followed to ‘the sole motive of restoring quiet, by convincing the World that Rebellion and its Authors are to be come at in the most inaccessable parts of the Highlands’. He was among a number of government sympathisers who applied themselves to a long-term programme of Highland reform. Together with his brother-in-law Robert Dundas, and Dundas’s son Robin, Watson formulated strategies to systematically suppress Jacobite support, to destroy the loyalty that bound the clans together, to undermine Highland identity and to rebuild the region’s infrastructure, driven by the ambition of unifying a hitherto divided Scotland and eradicating Jacobitism once and for all. Like many, the three considered the Highlands to be ‘lawless’ and ‘barbaric’ regions, whose clan system kept individual citizens in thrall to their chiefs, cowed beneath robberies, assaults and threats from neighbouring clans. In 1707 the Anglo-Scottish Union had constitutionally united England and Scotland into ‘Great Britain’, but it had only really succeeded in cementing sympathies between Lowland Scotland and England. The Highlands, with its autonomous legal system, language and culture, continued to be almost a separate nation.
    Watson and the Dundases were not by any means the only ones who proposed practical strategies to ‘pacify’ the Highlands in the wake of the rebellion. Suggestions from others included the disarming of the clans, the establishment of soldiers to police the region, the building of better roads and the confiscation of Jacobite estates ‘for the purposes of civilizing, and promoting the happiness of the Inhabitants upon the said Estate … by promoting amongst them the Protestant Religion, good Government, good Husbandry, Industry and Manufactures’. Many considered that theHighland landscape was responsible for its