Handful of Rogues: Thomas Muir’s Enemies of the People (review)

The life of Thomas Muir undoubtedly holds great attractions for dramatists and, indeed, provided fodder for an opera, Friend of the People, in 1999. In Handful of Rogues the playwright Hector MacMillan charts Muir’s extraordinary trajectory: from the Scottish radical movement of the 1790s to his exile in Australia; his tribulations in Spanish America as he tried to reach the United States; his wounding at sea on a Spanish frigate; to his final role as a lobbyist for the Scottish radical movement in the France of the Directory.

The best existing biography of Muir is Christina Bewley’s Muir of Huntershill, published in 1981 and MacMillan’s account largely rests on the same fragmentary sources: the State Trials and Home Office records; contemporary newspapers and printed matter such as the memoirs of Captain François Peron; a smattering of manuscript material; and the sources assembled by the late George Pratt Insh. As might be expected this material cannot be made to yield any arresting new conclusions and most of what appears in MacMillan’s account can be found in Bewley’s earlier work. Certain arguments from these sources, such as the uncomplicated identification of the chief government spy in Scotland ‘J.B.’ as Robert Watt (p. 32), are assertions rather than proven facts. Indeed, where MacMillan’s biography significantly differs is in his use of ‘dramatic if not poetic licence’ (p. 11). This ensures that MacMillan is at his best in relating the compelling drama of Muir’s trial in chapters four and five. To this pivotal moment he brings a keen understanding of the theatrical nature of the courtroom, citing large chunks of the exchanges that took place during the trial and rendering all of the phlegmatic Lord Braxfield’s pronouncements in broad Scots. Another singular feature of MacMillan’s approach – the great humour with which the narrative proceeds – also helps to make it very readable.

Dramatic licence becomes more of a problem when the author moves from the narration of events to historical interpretation. This is a politically engaged biography and its politics are not worn lightly. In this sense it is very similar to Peter B. Ellis and Seumas Mac a’Ghobhainn’s controversial The Scottish Insurrection of 1820 (London, 1970), which offered a left-wing and nationalist interpretation of a later phase of radical agitation. Unfortunately for the historian, MacMillan’s work has repeated some of the more egregious sins of this earlier work, most notably a sparseness of referencing that makes it impossible to chase up the sources for some of his more contentious assertions. The similarity to The Scottish Insurrection does not, however, end there. MacMillan’s is a starkly black-and-white narrative, in which radicals do battle with hellish legions of a consistently italicised ‘Authority’. ‘Authority’ in MacMillan’s rendering is not, of course, Scottish and government supporters in the 1790s are instead ‘North Britons’ who act against the nation. It is in trotting out these nationalist pieties that MacMillan’s biography is at its least impressive, leaving to ‘future research’, for example, the responsibility of providing evidence to support his assertion that ‘a large number of leading Scots were at heart Republican Nationalists’ (pp. 19–20). Current and future research (notably by Bob Harris) seems likely to prove no such thing but this kind of endeavour can be comfortably, indeed contemptuously, dismissed by MacMillan as history of ‘the North British Tendency’ (p. 219).

A few final words on the appearance of this book are needed. Though the style is lively and conversational throughout, at times it does become clumsy and rather confusing. Perhaps worse is the high incidence of small errors including (but not restricted to) numerous typographical mistakes and some cavalier use of the apostrophe, an inaccurate title for the work of Constantin François de Volney (p. 72) and Joseph Gerrald appearing as Gerrard (p. 242). In spite of this, MacMillan’s biography makes for entertaining reading in...