In Lochaber in 1828, the Edinburgh Society for the Support of Gaelic Schools (ESSGS) founded a school to teach children how to read the Gaelic Bible. The local priest was outraged that protestant missionaries should impinge on his territory and forbade his people from attending.Footnote 1 The community discussed the issue, decided to defy their priest, and sent their children to the missionary teachers. Unlike their Lochaber colleague, the priests on the island of South Uist actively assisted Gaelic schools. When their bishop worried that protestant teachers were “tampering with the children,” the priests argued they were a positive good for Catholic children.Footnote 2 Why would Catholic Highlanders, even some priests, endorse the work of protestant schools? How did Catholics respond to evangelical missionaries? How did Catholic and protestant Highlanders negotiate a relationship in a period characterised by increasing political liberty for Catholics, yet also by the spread of evangelicalism and by heightening religious tensions in Scotland's cities? This article examines the key religious issue for Highland Catholics: how to respond to expansionist protestantism. The ESSGS, a society which used schools to encourage conversion to evangelical protestantism, epitomises this movement.Footnote 3 Letters from priests and the organisation's annual reports reveal how long-established and rural Catholic communities reacted pragmatically to missionary activity, utilizing the resources they found helpful and resisting or ignoring aspects which they did not. They also demonstrate how, as the evangelical missionary movement gathered momentum, they were willing to compromise with Catholics over matters of faith. This awkward coexistence in the Highlands challenges a national picture centred on the urban Lowlands where the main narrative thread of Catholic-protestant relations focuses on the consequences of Irish immigration. The case study nuances an international literature which, through focusing on the times and places of conflict which are more visible in the historical record and an understandable concern with oppression, tends to assume hostility.Footnote 4 As modelled by Andrew Stern for the American South, this article investigates how the specifics of social, economic and cultural circumstances affect relations between religious communities. Northwest Scotland's longer history of fractious religious co-existence equipped minority communities to deal positively with evangelical missionary enthusiasm.
Historians of religion, and this is very much the case in the Highland literature, have usually treated Catholics and protestants separately. John MacInnes, Douglas Ansdell, Allan McColl and David Paton mainly concern themselves with Presbyterians.Footnote 5 Alasdair Roberts, Rowan Strong and Donald Meek have brought other faith groups to the notice of historians, but only Clotilde Prunier has examined relations between them in a sustained way.Footnote 6 Her study deals extensively with the role of schools and she shares with Daniel Szechi, Christine Johnson and others a focus on the efforts of the British state to quell Jacobitism and Catholicism through legislation and education in the eighteenth century.Footnote 7 An expanding Lowland historiography, by Tom Gallagher, Martin Mitchell, Elaine McFarland and Geraldine Vaughan, has examined how that area became the centre of tension as protestants reacted to Irish working-class immigration.Footnote 8 Events in the south-west, however influential in the long term, were only part of changing Catholic-protestant relations in early nineteenth-century Scotland. Bernard Aspinwall recognised the Highlands were different, characterizing the area as having “local cohesive cultural Catholic communities . . . often with good relations with Protestant neighbours, if not their Protestant landlords. The central belt differed markedly, with social change, competition and xenophobia.”Footnote 9 Aspinwall's “Catholic communities” existed within a predominantly protestant Highland culture. Some were almost exclusively Roman Catholic, such as Knoydart and Morar. However, most parts of the so-called Catholic Highlands were really mixed-faith communities.Footnote 10 In the 1830s, Barra had 306 Catholic to sixty five protestant families; Catholics made up two thirds of South Uist's population, half of Kilmonivaig's, and a sixth of the parish of Laggan.Footnote 11 Aspinwall's comment on the religious cohesion of these areas is therefore overstated. However, Highland Catholics were cohesive in the sense that they had long-standing ties to places and people, in contrast to the immigrant population of Scotland's burgeoning cities. Recognizing this cohesion is not to downplay the upheaval experienced by rural Highlanders. Aspinwall's comment underestimates how the early nineteenth century was defined by wholesale socio-economic restructuring. Highland culture was also changing, partly because of the clearances and partly because the population experienced successive waves of evangelical revivalism. James Hunter has argued that crofters used this evangelical Presbyterianism to build a new sense of identity.Footnote 12 This contention, however convincing for protestant areas does not provide a sufficient narrative for Catholic regions. However, what is clear is that Highland Catholics were surrounded by a revitalised, indigenous and expansionist protestant culture. Although in many Highland regions Catholics and protestants lived beside each other, discussion as to how such mixed-faith communities operated is conspicuously understudied. The tensions and compromises experienced in communities split by this key social factor are exposed by how they interacted with the ESSGS.Footnote 13
Using elementary schooling as a tool for religious conversion was not a new idea when the ESSGS was founded in 1811. The strategy was used by protestants working in Ireland in the eighteenth century, and was adapted by missionaries across the British Empire in the nineteenth.Footnote 14 In Scotland the idea was implemented as early as the Reformation. The reformers’ grand plan of a school in every parish to win over the people had been ineffective due to Highland geography and overstretched resources. However the situation for Catholic schools in the Highlands, particularly after the Rising of 1745, was dire.Footnote 15 Educationally, the eighteenth-century Highlands were dominated by the Scottish Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SSPCK), founded in 1709. As did its English counterpart, the SSPCK had an explicitly ideological agenda which used schools to promote the Hanoverian regime, protestantism, the English language and a commercial ethos.Footnote 16 It considered Catholicism to be the antithesis of these values. Education was a key part of the politico-religious battleground. As Catholic relief was debated in the late eighteenth century, priests increasingly believed education was key to improving Catholics’ status in Britain.Footnote 17 Many parents shared this conviction. Concerned with the economic status of their children, they knew literacy was necessary to succeed in a changing economy, but few had access to Catholic schools. This scarcity did not significantly change in the Lowlands until the 1830s or in the Highlands until after 1872.Footnote 18 Parents and priests therefore used and even promoted protestant schools. Religious education providers, including the SSPCK, came to realize that some compromise on their part was necessary to be effective. This, and the collaborative attitude of school boards in urban Scotland, suggests that at the local level Catholics and protestants were capable of establishing common ground through their shared interest in educating children.Footnote 19 Is this what was happening in the early nineteenth-century Highlands as parents sent their children to protestant schools?
The ESSGS was formed at a moment when it was possible for protestant missionaries and Catholic families to work together. Highlanders were disposed towards education and anti-Catholicism had temporarily dimmed. Between 1779 and 1780, across the Atlantic world from Jamaica and New York to Dublin, Glasgow, and Sutherland, the possibility of Catholic relief had erupted in a “radical brand of Protestant patriotism” which defined itself against France and Catholicism.Footnote 20 The temperature somewhat cooled when overshadowed by the threat of the anti-religious French Revolution.Footnote 21 By the 1830s the growing self-confidence of priests and Presbyterian internecine crisis fanned the embers. From 1811 to the 1830s, numerous letters appear in the annual reports of the ESSGS from Catholic and mixed faith communities, written by teachers, ministers, priests and pupils. Occasional priests’ letters to their bishop provide a supplementary, sometimes alternative, view. This article first draws on an especially full series of letters and reports to explain how, over several decades, the ESSGS functioned within communities with a significant Catholic population. The case study of Eigg and Canna demonstrates how clergy, prominent locals and parents assisted and conflicted with the missionary teachers. In these islands were two priests, one who promoted the society and his successor who decidedly did not, emphasizing the importance of individual personalities in relationships between Catholics and evangelical protestants. The case of Eigg and Canna highlights three important elements of relations which are then examined using evidence from across the Highlands: first the response of Catholic parents to expansionist protestantism, then the response of priests to the same, and then the response of evangelical missionaries to Catholic communities. The article concludes with a brief discussion on the changing situation in the 1830s and 1840s. While primarily concerned with using the society to draw out how Catholic-protestant relations functioned, examining the ESSGS also responds to Francis Hagan and Robert Davis’ call for more research on Scottish Catholic education.Footnote 22
I. The Small Isles and the Edinburgh Society for the Support of Gaelic Schools
The ESSGS was a charitable organisation which, for missionary reasons, offered to supplement the chronic inadequacy of schools and churches in the Highlands. Eigg and Canna, small islands to the south of Skye, were fairly typical in the problems they experienced. The priest, like the minister, the catechist, the doctor and the schoolmaster lived on Eigg, visiting Canna and the other Small Isles when duty called.Footnote 23 Each was several miles apart by boat, “separated by boisterous seas, the navigations of which is difficult and dangerous.”Footnote 24 In October 1817 the doctor and the minister discovered this to their cost when their boat sank and they drowned.Footnote 25 Sharing resources between the islands was not only perilous but meant that educational and religious provision was never sufficient. Schools were rare and transient. There is evidence of a Catholic school on Canna as early as 1698 and an SSPCK one in the 1740s.Footnote 26 An ambulatory SSPCK school in Eigg was removed in 1792 and a permanent parochial school built at Sandaveg. However, it insisted on teaching in English despite the children being Gaelic speakers.Footnote 27 In 1812 the minister described the island as “most destitute of the means of instruction.”Footnote 28 Church facilities were similarly pathetic. Eigg had no protestant place of worship until 1793.Footnote 29 Canna had a catechist but no church and the minister only visited four times a year.Footnote 30 Eigg's Catholic islanders worshipped in a house in Sandavore until 1810 when Cleadale House was converted into a chapel and priest's residence.Footnote 31 Later Rev Donald MacKay complained it was “entirely unfit for celebrating the most tremendous mysteries of our religion. During divine service I am constantly distracted by pigs, hens, children etc.”Footnote 32 By 1814 Canna had also gained a chapel and the priest ventured across for a month at a time when he catechised, instructed and prepared the people for the sacraments.Footnote 33 By the 1830s the priest was training local people to be catechists.Footnote 34 Many overworked ministers and priests in extensive parishes like Small Isles were prepared to work with the ESSGS to gain the educational and religious assistance they offered.
The prospect of working with an evangelical missionary society was challenging for priests, as it was for many ministers, especially Moderates. The ESSGS had a decidedly ambivalent relationship with Roman Catholicism. The main aim of the society was to spread evangelical Christianity through teaching Gaelic speakers, especially children, to read the Bible in their native language.Footnote 35 This conversion method had been tried and abandoned by Anglicans in Ireland the previous century.Footnote 36 Unlike the Irish situation or the endeavours of the SSPCK, ESSGS education was not a method of fostering Presbyterian ascendency. The choice of Gaelic as the linguistic medium was not ideological but pragmatic. The notion that understanding Scripture would lead to conversion, and that this was best achieved through the vernacular, was deeply embedded in protestantism and manifested itself variously in missionary enterprises from the Highlands to India.Footnote 37 This faith meant they were content to ban preaching so as not to antagonise local clergy, protestant or Catholic.Footnote 38 In common with many early nineteenth-century evangelical organisations, the ESSGS was notably collaborative.Footnote 39 The society aimed to be “common ground on which all true Christians may meet.”Footnote 40 They were more concerned with conversion, biblical knowledge and a particular mode of living than in elevating any particular protestant denomination. Although the ESSGS involved protestants of various strands, it did not consider Catholics to be true Christians. The society worked happily with priests and treated Catholic believers considerately, but it was a protestant organization. They assumed that, by definition, Catholics could not be Christian, yet in the early years there was no explicit anti-Catholicism. This began to change in the late 1820s, perhaps not coincidently at the time of increased campaigning for full Catholic emancipation. In general, the society felt the entire Highland population was ripe for evangelistic outreach, whether people were nominally protestant or Catholic. For the first few decades they were equally enthusiastic about establishing their schools in Catholic and in protestant regions. An analysis of how the ESSGS operated in Eigg and Canna, two islands with substantial Catholic populations, indicates how people and clergy responded to the expansion of protestantism in the Gàidhealtachd.
In 1812, the secretary of the ESSGS wrote to the young minister of the Small Isles, Neil McLean, about establishing a school.Footnote 41 McLean responded with a detailed letter. Apart from geography, the biggest problem he perceived in his parish was that most islanders were Catholic. This included about half of the 442 inhabitants of Eigg and all the 392 Canna people, with the exception of seven or eight protestant families.Footnote 42 He felt Canna folk had minds “strongly biased by religious prejudices” and were “remarkably tenacious of their own opinions.”Footnote 43 He was cut from similar cloth to his father and predecessor who had regretted Catholic relief maintaining that it made islanders “liable to a seduction into a superstition, subversive of morality and of genuine piety.”Footnote 44 In 1812, the younger McLean considered them so seduced that he entertained “considerable doubts whether the introduction of any person of a different persuasion as a Teacher would be encouraged or countenanced.”Footnote 45 Indeed, a century earlier the Canna people had quickly seen off a protestant missionary and a few years after the 1745 Rising they hounded out the SSPCK teacher.Footnote 46 However McLean's perception was quite out of date as across the early nineteenth-century Gàidhealtachd there is considerable evidence of religious flexibility and pragmatism.Footnote 47
If, in response to his discouraging letter, Neil McLean expected the usual Presbyterian hand-wringing, he was surprised. The society decided Canna was a likely location and in July, 1813, one of its secretaries, Christopher Anderson, paid a visit.Footnote 48 Anderson encouraged the minister to “speak to the people, and prepare the way” and instructed him to “mention the subject . . . to the Catholic priest.”Footnote 49 Whatever MacLean's attitude to his opposite number, the ESSGS knew the support of priests was crucial. Indeed Small Isles priest, Anthony MacDonald, was a popular and energetic man.Footnote 50 MacDonald set upon the idea with more alacrity than his Presbyterian counterpart and encouraged old and young to attend the Canna school.Footnote 51
William Walker was appointed as teacher. He left Breadalbane on October 26 but did not arrive in Canna until December 1, being “retarded for five weeks on the way, owing to the bad weather . . . I was almost, along with the crew, lost too, our boat having been wrecked upon the coast of Ardnamurchan.”Footnote 52 Walker's first impressions of his new home were positive. He met with kindness from Mr McNeill, principal tenant on Canna, and from Anthony MacDonald who immediately visited the island. The priest and the teacher decided the school would meet in the chapel and the roll immediately increased from 12 to 88.Footnote 53 Walker overheard MacDonald telling the people “that he should be greatly displeased if they did not attend, ‘for (addressing them) you see, he came here not for his own interest but for yours.’”Footnote 54 Curiously, there seems already to have been a school in the chapel. About thirty boys were being taught to read English. Walker “often observed some of these boys running in among my scholars (unknown to their Teacher) to steal a lesson from them; and if, on discovery, they were asked what they were doing there they replied that they were learning to read what they understood.”Footnote 55 He did not find their religious persuasion affected their learning: they made “no scruple in learning anything I request—any portion of Scripture.”Footnote 56 MacDonald's support remained constant and when the teacher left, “he expressed his sorrow at my going away, and that it gave him great pleasure to see the progress my Scholars made in the Gaelic.”Footnote 57 While the Gaelic language teaching was clearly appealing, the early achievements of the Canna school were a direct result of the priest's efforts. He had influence over his congregation, he encouraged them to attend, he presumably suggested using the chapel, and his visit gave visible backing to the enterprise.
Despite Neil McLean's negativity, the sojourn of a protestant missionary school in an almost exclusively Catholic island was a success.Footnote 58 At its peak, the Canna school attracted 22% of the total population. This included adults as well as children. Walker reported that he “had thirty attendants last night, two of whom are married men. One of these did not know a single letter a few days ago, and has now got the Alphabet very rapidly.”Footnote 59 By November, 1814, attendance had declined.Footnote 60 This was common in ESSGS schools when the novelty wore thin. However, the children reportedly enjoyed their lessons, even clamouring for more homework. This initially sounds like rose-tinted propaganda but, as the missionary to Fort William pointed out, “the mental pleasures of the poor are few.”Footnote 61 Walker considered the school a success, explaining there “was not a Gaelic Bible in the Island when I came in December last . . . There were only three or four that could read any Gaelic, and these very imperfectly; now there are thirty that can, so as to be understood by the hearer.”Footnote 62 The islanders’ appreciation of education was apparent when the school closed in 1815 and, as was common, the community hired a boy to continue teaching them.Footnote 63 The teacher was creditable, but the school depended on Anthony MacDonald's strong support.
In Eigg the ESSGS was a longer-lasting feature of island life, but was less popular than in Canna. The first school opened in 1814 at Cleadale in the north of the island, practically in the backyard of Anthony MacDonald's house and chapel. McLean was now helping drive the bandwagon and “afforded every facility to the Teacher, and gave public notice of the School from the pulpit.”Footnote 64 However, the school was not initially popular. The “people seemed backward, when the school was opened, to come themselves, or to send their children.”Footnote 65 It was specifically the Catholic parents who were reluctant and they sent their children only after the priest urged them.Footnote 66 By 1817 John MacIntyre was teaching forty-two males and seven females ranging in age from seven to twenty-four.Footnote 67 By 1820 the teacher was Alex Cameron. That September the new minister, Donald McLean, and the priest delivered a glowing school inspection.Footnote 68 The latter commended the novel teaching methods, Cameron's attention to the students, and their attainment.Footnote 69 He also noted that “several of the Catholic parents . . . wished me to express their grateful acknowledgement to your Society for the benefit.”Footnote 70 As was customary, after a few years Cameron was moved. The new school was at Sandavore, perhaps in the same building as a later Gaelic school: a “low dingy cottage of turf and stone.”Footnote 71 There was then a break in provision during which a petition for a new school was apparently signed by both protestants and Catholics.Footnote 72 The Cleadale school reopened in 1832, attracting over thirty students.Footnote 73 After a sojourn in Sandavore, in 1842 it returned to Cleadale. By then Anthony MacDonald's failing health had incapacitated him and the priest's active work was done by his assistant, the rather difficult and complaining Donald MacKay from South Uist. MacKay's hostility may have influenced the people, as the teacher noted with annoyance that the Catholic parents had not made good on their promises to provide accommodation. After being “twenty two weeks in a miserable hut with the scholars,” Cameron returned to his former station.Footnote 74 The wavering attitude of Eigg's Catholic islanders suggests their perception of the schools lay somewhere between MacDonald's enthusiasm and MacKay's dislike.
Before the introduction of evangelicalism there were unspoken rules which governed protestant-Catholic co-existence. As it became a significant force, evangelicals sometimes overstepped these cultural boundaries. As ordinary Catholics had little power they engaged in the ‘everyday resistance’ conceptualised by James C. Scott in his study of south east Asia and noted in South Uist, an island only a day's sail from Eigg.Footnote 75 Hector MacKinnon of Hulin had adopted the protestant practice of “family prayers” which involved singing, Bible reading and prayer, led by the household head and attended by family and servants.Footnote 76 In 1835 several of MacKinnon's Catholic employees were coerced into attending. One man had refused and was dismissed. Others resigned. MacKinnon enforced
presbyterian evening Sunday reading . . . held by the Gaelic schoolmaster [Archibald Campbell] in his dining room every Sunday evening . . . [O]ne of them was by Hector McKinnon sent away from service for not yielding to attend this reading . . . There is only one of my hearers at present in Hector's service.Footnote 77 The rest have left him . . . As to John [MacDonald of Keill] the reading is held by himself in his kitchen twice every Sunday in the afternoon and evening.Footnote 78 My hearers . . . together with his other presbyterian servants are compelled to attend it promiscuously and regularly.Footnote 79
The tension resulted not from Archibald Campbell's school lessons, but from how local tacksmen, a landholding middling or gentry class, had implemented the religious culture promoted by the ESSGS. The breakdown in employer-employee relations may not have been exclusively religious. After all, MacKinnon lived in a fashionable house financed by profits from sheep-farming, an occupation which depended on removing land from subtenants and cottars, and from kelp which relied on exploiting their labour.Footnote 80 The promotion of evangelicalism intensified social, religious and possibly economic tensions in Eigg. Catholics were prepared to use the schools, especially when encouraged by their priests, but there were limits as to how far they would accommodate the new strand of protestantism.
The Canna school was an unqualified short term success and the ESSGS became a steady, if rather low-key and contested, feature of the social and cultural life of Eigg. The situation in the Small Isles suggests how interdenominational relations were negotiated locally as evangelical protestantism expanded. The responses of prominent individuals to missionary activity were influential and varied, and the actions and attitudes of ordinary Catholics depended on local conditions. The evidence concerning the Small Isles points towards localised and ongoing negotiations between Catholics and protestants. What it does not do is explain why many Catholics responded so positively to ESSGS activities. Why did a missionary school with an explicitly evangelical protestant curriculum gain such wholehearted and long-lasting support from a priest like MacDonald? Why did parents decide to send or withhold their child from a school? To explore how Catholic priests and parents responded to the evangelical movement, it is necessary to consider how they made decisions about religion and education elsewhere in the Gàidhealtachd: first from parents’ viewpoint, then priests’, and finally by examining how the ESSGS adapted its methods and curriculum to the demands of Catholics.
II. A Mixed Reception: Parents, Priests and the ESSGS
In the annual reports, the voices of ordinary Catholics are rare and precious. Often their opinions only appear through their actions: in Strathlochie, Kilmallie, the population was “partly composed of Catholics, many of whom send their children to school.”Footnote 81 Usually their attitudes were interpreted by others: in Invercannich, Strathglass, Catholic parents appeared “very anxious to get their Children taught to read.”Footnote 82 When their voices can be heard, albeit mediated by the letter writer and by their unequal relationship with the organisation, Catholics appear happy their children could learn to read. The entirely Catholic population of Sandray seemed “highly delighted at the idea of their children being soon able to read,” promising to build a schoolhouse and send twenty-five to thirty pupils.Footnote 83 The householders of Glenuig, Moidart, signed a letter, each with a cross, expressing their pleasure with the teacher. The next year their Catholic proprietor and scribe, Alexander Chisholm of Samalaman, translated their words: “May the great God of grace give you payment as we cannot which will be our constant prayer.”Footnote 84 As in the Small Isles, families weighed the spiritual dangers of the schools against the economic advantages of literacy. Many decided to compromise on religion to improve their children's chances in the commercializing economy.
In the early nineteenth century, northwest Highlanders were being shifted from the jointly tenanted subsistence farms of the type typical across pre-industrial northern Europe, to undersized crofts.Footnote 85 Crofting depended not only on agriculture but on wages from fishing, trades, or temporary work in the Lowlands. Families relied on the contribution of all members. Children, especially girls, were frequently kept at home to work rather than attend school.Footnote 86 Jane McDermid has shown how this practice also impeded the education of Catholics in urban areas.Footnote 87 West coast families became dependent on cash earned from the unpleasant task of gathering and burning kelp, but when kelp and cattle prices plummeted after 1815 many fell into hopeless arrears and the number of landless cottars increased.Footnote 88 In Arisaig the children's education faced “many necessary interruptions . . . [because of] assisting their poor parents in carrying seaware on their backs, cutting peats or fuel for the year, making sea-ware into kelp, and bringing meat twice every workday to the older branches of the family, who were labouring for a day's wages.”Footnote 89 Any school which was to appeal to parents had to be cheap, useful and flexible. Parents would only send children if a school were close by and if they felt the education were worth the time and money spent and the loss of labour entailed.
The ESSGS genuinely endeavoured to meet the needs of crofters and cottars. They opened schools in townships far from the parish school or church, charged no fees, taught in Gaelic, concentrated on basic literacy, and operated during months of agricultural underemployment.Footnote 90 The society also endeavoured to be culturally appropriate, focusing on vernacular literacy and memorisation which fitted with the oral culture of the region. Many parents felt the education was sufficiently useful that it was worth sacrificing for. In Daliburgh, South Uist, many of the Catholics
unite with the Protestants in earnestly wishing for a Gaelic school, and have cheerfully agreed to assist in building a house for the school and the accommodation of the teacher. So anxious are they to learn Gaelic reading, that I am informed they were in treaty with a person, of whose character I [the priest] do not approve, for the purpose of engaging him as a teacher of this language.Footnote 91
These parents were prepared either to build an ESSGS school and house, costing labour and materials, or pay for a tutor. Such tutors were usually boys with limited education, so the opportunity to go to a school where children could learn systematically and accurately was attractive.Footnote 92 Cost was important to crofters and cottars who lived an increasingly marginal existence. Few people in Benbecula took advantage of the SSPCK school and the one taught by a Catholic because they required fees.Footnote 93 Ranald Rankine, priest in Moidart, built schools at Scardoise and Langal which attracted over forty children each. He had hoped for sixty but “the parents are miserably poor and cannot pay.”Footnote 94 All schools had some cost attached, whether fees or the need to construct a building.Footnote 95 ESSGS schools were attractive because they provided the type of education demanded by parents for rock bottom cost. Parents rarely had a choice so they were prepared to be flexible with regards to religion if schools were affordable, accessible and if the teaching met their basic requirements.
On the surface ordinary Catholics had little power in the face of their poverty, the influence of their clergy, the galloping advance of evangelicalism, and the organisational prowess of the ESSGS and other agencies. However people who “liked to engage in argument” with their SSPCK schoolmaster and who “held a conclave” to reject the command of their priest, could clearly act on their own priorities about religion and education.Footnote 96 While they could not provide for their own needs for formal education and religion, they could respond creatively to what was presented to them, by resisting as did MacKinnon's employees, or by selective use. The figures published by the ESSGS tell a more nuanced story about relations between the schools and Catholic parents than do the selection of letters in their reports. Eighteenth-century Catholic parents objected to protestant teaching by refusing to send their children to schools.Footnote 97 During the later nineteenth century, McDermid found that Highland and Irish working-class parents used this strategy to object to the curriculum.Footnote 98 Such resistance may explain the poor attendance in Canna in the initial days of the ESSGS; in Strathglass where, despite it being a predominantly Catholic region, only a few Catholic children attended; and it might explain the tardiness of parents in Cleadale, Eigg, in providing a building.Footnote 99 A gendered analysis of attendance at Gaelic schools suggests Catholic parents used Gaelic schools when the teaching fulfilled their own perceived needs.Footnote 100 Most types of school attracted an overwhelming majority of boys, the ESSGS being the notable exception. Between 1796 and 1821 there were at least two boys to every girl at SSPCK schools.Footnote 101 Across the Highlands in 1823, however, 55.4% of ESSGS pupils were male and 44.6% female.Footnote 102 Both Charles Withers and Victor Durkacz have noted this exception, but what has gone unnoticed is that equal attendance was only the case in protestant, not Catholic, regions.Footnote 103 In 1823, 81% of South Uist's pupils were male.Footnote 104 By 1833 ratios were slightly more balanced but still stood at 68% male. This was in contrast to the ESSGS average that year of 50.6% male.Footnote 105 Of the four years where information on sex is available, the average number of girls in South Uist's school was 21%.Footnote 106 Parents in neighbouring Barra had a similarly dismal record of sending girls, averaging 31%. In Eigg, female enrolment was 35%. In the Catholic parts of Glenelg district (Samadalan, Redarch and Carnach) average female enrolment was 30%.Footnote 107 There is a difference between how Catholic and protestant parents used Gaelic schools. It would appear Catholics tended to use the ESSGS as they did other schools by prioritizing boys’ education. Learning to read Gaelic was a first step towards reading English so it was a method of equipping sons to make the most of economic opportunities in the Lowlands or in the British Empire.Footnote 108 Catholic crofters and cottars had decades of experience of manipulating the parish school system and the SSPCK through the selective use of schools and by non-participation.Footnote 109 They put this to good use with the ESSGS, utilizing services for their own purposes and rejected those they deemed not to be useful.
Tactical use and passive resistance helps reconcile the positive view of Catholic-protestant relations in the annual reports with the apparently contradictory evidence of some priests’ letters in the 1830s which claim parents opposed protestant teaching. Of course Catholics were not homogenous in their views. In Kyles, Moidart, some parents encouraged children to attend but others had “stolen to the School unknown to their parents, or against their will.”Footnote 110 A teacher or minister was likely to encounter parents eager about the schools and would report accordingly to the society. Parents who objected would tend to complain to the priest, and these views were recorded in letters to the bishop. People may have also strategically adjusted their opinions depending on who was asking and why. Opinion among Catholics was divided on the merits of using protestant schools, but for most the priority was gaining literacy. Religious content was secondary. For schools to be successful they had to provide what the community needed, which was learning to read at minimal cost. The ESSGS fitted the criteria. Despite poverty and religious discrimination, Catholic parents were not controlled by clergy, teachers or philanthropic organisations.
Although ordinary people were capable of making independent decisions, the ESSGS understood that success required the support of Catholic clergy and gentry. Aware of how even the explicitly anti-Catholic SSPCK had realised a degree of uneasy co-operation was necessary, the society involved them in inspecting schools, early and consistently.Footnote 111 The support of priests, like Anthony MacDonald, for protestant schools was not unprecedented. Under the penal laws when Catholics were forbidden from teaching, protestant schools were used, including for the early education of priests.Footnote 112 Priests were aware of the religious risks involved and tried to protect the children through various strategies, such as bribery.Footnote 113 As parochial schools became more secular in the late eighteenth century and as priests and people increasingly believed education to be beneficial to the Catholic community, using protestant schools became less problematic.Footnote 114 Those years of heart-searching and strategic compromises, mainly by Catholics but also by the SSPCK, paved the path towards the commendation of the ESSGS by Ranald MacDonald, Bishop of the Highland District, in 1821. He encouraged his priests to assist the “laudable institution” which he hoped would “extend the benefit of these schools.”Footnote 115 After such lofty approbation it was unlikely that letters from priests expressing reservations would have been published or even sent. Nonetheless there is significant evidence in the annual reports suggesting that many Catholic clergymen actively shared MacDonald's positive opinion. In Invergusarn, Knoydart, in 1813 the priest “admonish[ed] the people, from the pulpit, to pay attention to [the] School.”Footnote 116 Moidart cleric Norman MacDonald, allowed Kyles Gaelic School to convene in the Catholic meeting house, as did the Canna school.Footnote 117 In 1826 the ESSGS asked for a collection to support the schools. Over £3 was raised by Arisaig Catholics, no small amount for a poor region.Footnote 118 The collection was organised by their priest who then requested the school remain another year.Footnote 119 In South Uist, John Chisholm encouraged his congregation to donate. They gave potatoes and other produce which were exchanged for money by a local landowner. In friendly competition, the Presbyterian congregation tried to raise more money than the Catholics.Footnote 120 Having learned from the experience of the SSPCK, the ESSGS deliberately wooed Catholic clergy from its inception, and its directors maintained good relations by sending teachers who would not fan smouldering anti-Catholicism.
The ESSGS carefully selected the teachers they sent to Catholic communities. The minister of Laggan commended it for sending a schoolmaster to Sherramore who “behaved himself with that prudence and circumspection which has secured the esteem of both protestants and Papists.”Footnote 121 Some Catholic clergy agreed. Norman MacDonald wrote from Moidart regarding Peter McEwen stating “the difference of our creed, I understand, makes no difference in the universal benevolence you shew towards all mankind.”Footnote 122 Barra's Angus MacDonald was equally approving: “The happy result of his assiduity and attention in the discharge of his professional duty, endears him to every body in that part of this parish wherein he taught [Kilbar], and especially to me, who am in duty bound to take interest in their spiritual welfare.”Footnote 123 One South Uist teacher was described by the minister as having “very conciliatory manners and has thereby brought many of the Catholics to have a relish for reading the Scriptures.”Footnote 124 The relationship went both ways: the teacher appreciated the “continued and cordial cooperation of the Catholic clergymen” in South Uist.Footnote 125 Conciliatory teachers were key in making Gaelic schools acceptable in Catholic areas.
Tending to be drawn from the gentry, priests shared the attitudes of their class, believing that schools were important in instilling values such as regularity, discipline and even cleanliness. In Eigg, Anthony MacDonald was pleased to perceive “a wonderful change . . . on the habits of the people; their improvement in morals is most visible and striking . . . the vices to which they were in former times grossly addicted are gradually disappearing.”Footnote 126 Angus MacDonald credited “the Schoolmaster's exertions and endeavours in checking vice and immorality . . . the happy consequence of which is, that cursing and swearing are almost banished from that part of the country.”Footnote 127 Priests were in agreement with the types of middle-class benefactors who donated to the ESSGS and who increasingly expected the subjects of their charity to adjust their behaviour in such ways.Footnote 128 Rev MacDonald was also one of the few who used his report to hope the schools might help conserving Gaelic.Footnote 129 Other early nineteenth-century priests were less exercised by cultural matters than by more immediate concerns. They shared the wishes of the poet in Air Foghlum nan Gaidheal that education would lead to the “moral, spiritual and temporal regeneration” of the Highlands, and the belief expressed to the Argyll Commission that elementary education would make the people less vulnerable to exploitation and more open to progress.Footnote 130 So the changes in behaviour as well as the skills brought by evangelical schools were perceived by many priests to be necessary for the betterment of Highlanders.
The involvement of Catholic gentry and clergy in operating the schools; the carefully selected teachers; and the perceived educational and social benefit of schools clarifies why many priests supported the work of a protestant missionary society. However, one key issue remains unexplained. The purpose of the ESSGS was unabashedly evangelistic. The society's highest aim was to convert Highlanders, whether nominally protestant or Catholic, to evangelicalism. Once in the classroom, how did teachers, priests, parents and pupils weave a compromise acceptable to all?
The ESSGS's ability to be culturally appropriate did not stop with their teaching methods, staff selection, or their involvement of priests, but extended into the curriculum. With the possible exception of private adventure schools, all Highland schools taught religion and taught it from a protestant perspective. Children read and recited the Bible, school often opened and closed with prayer, and pupils memorised the catechism. The Shorter Catechism explicitly taught protestant theology. As parish and SSPCK schools were part of the Church of Scotland's infrastructure the religious orientation was understandable but it put Catholics in a difficult position. Priests, like William McIntosh in Arisaig, were deeply concerned with the content of the teaching. McIntosh was a strong proponent of education for religious reasons: he wanted children to be able to read their own catechism and prayerbook in Gaelic.Footnote 131 He was especially worried that the parish schoolmaster not only taught the Shorter Catechism but commented on it from a Protestant perspective.Footnote 132 He therefore put himself to considerable effort to try and get a Catholic teacher.Footnote 133 However, in ESSGS schools the catechism and theology did not appear to be points of conflict. The ESSGS was aware of concerns and took a deliberately conciliatory approach. This was not unprecedented. Despite the reputation of the SSPCK as militantly protestant, culturally insensitive and coercive, by the 1780s it was modifying its approach. In 1788, for example, the SSPCK removed a teacher in Glenlivet who insisted on Catholic children memorizing the Shorter Catechism. A compromise was worked out between the bishop and the SSPCK board whereby the children were guided to relevant Bible passages to help them answer the catechism's questions.Footnote 134 This promoted biblical knowledge while avoiding a theological slant. The ESSGS used a similar model. In schools where many pupils were Catholic they excluded the catechism altogether and used spelling books and Bibles “without note or comment . . . such as every Christian . . . can approve and support.”Footnote 135 Banning religious books or discussion entirely was a way for some Catholic schools in the American South to accommodate the sensibilities of protestant children.Footnote 136 Yet, setting aside the catechism was a step further than the, ostensibly non-denominational, Board Schools were prepared to take in mixed-faith parts of urban Scotland much later in the century.Footnote 137 Barra's Angus MacDonald thanked “the Society for their liberality of sentiment, set forth in their instructions to their Teachers, in confining their instructions to teaching alone, abstracting from controversial points . . . at same time affording equal advantage of education.”Footnote 138 Although this seems counterintuitive for an evangelistic society, a core part of evangelicalism is a belief that God can speak directly through scripture. Unlike the decades of tense debate and negotiation over this issue experienced by the SSPCK in the eighteenth century, this conviction, plus the precedent of SSPCK schools, meant that dropping the catechism was a price worth paying to teach Catholic children to read the Bible.Footnote 139
The compromise worked for many years but by 1838 religion and education were back in the spotlight. A number of Catholic leaders, including Andrew Scott, Bishop of the Western District feared that the proposed Schools (Scotland) Bill might lead to the educational powers of the established church being expanded.Footnote 140 Although earlier in his career Scott had zealously promoted religious co-operation in schooling, in 1838 he sent a letter to his priests probing for evidence of problems.Footnote 141 One of his most trusted priests, John Chisholm of South Uist, defended the island's ESSGS and General Assembly schools.Footnote 142 His letter first discussed the teaching materials, explaining that while the schools used a version of the protestant Bible with a preface which disparaged Catholicism, he did not find it too offensive and the “Catholic children are not obliged to learn any of these psalms by heart [or] . . . any part of the Protestant Catechism . . . The other books used in these schools I consider perfectly harmless.”Footnote 143 He then explained how the schools operated, highlighting the understanding between priests and most teachers. Opening and closing the school day with prayer
is so little attended to by the Teachers themselves that, unless there happens to be a zealot among them, nothing more is done in the way of prayers than saying a few words or repeating the Lord's Prayer . . . Neither my colleagues or I have ever considered it worth while to interfere in these matters. Were we to take any notice of it I am satisfied it would not be insisted upon that our children should be present. Perhaps we have done wrong in acting thus; but we consider peace a great blessing and we would not wish to be thought illiberal if we could be otherwise with a safe conscience.Footnote 144
Cultural appropriateness was partly the policy of the organisation, partly due to individual teachers and partly due to priests’ willingness to pick their battles. Chisholm explained to Scott that
the teachers are particularly instructed by their employers not to interfere in any manner or way with the religious principles of the Catholic children under their charge farther than the parents of the children and their pastor think fit. The one on the assembly scheme has this in writing and the other verbally.Footnote 145
On the other hand, in some schools in neighbouring Benbecula an attempt had been made to “compel the Catholic children to learn the Presbyterian catechism.”Footnote 146 Chisholm was convinced that the offending teachers acted on their own initiative. He and his colleague discussed matters with the minister who put a stop to it.Footnote 147 Scott was less tolerant than his predecessor Bishop Ranald MacDonald. He commended Chisholm's peacekeeping but continued to see the schools as a potential threat, insisting on the necessity of legal protection to “prevent these Protestant Teachers from tampering with the children.”Footnote 148 Nineteenth-century missionary organisations, especially the ESSGS, appreciated the need for compromise in the religious content and format of their schools. This type of adaptation continued up to the Education (Scotland) Act of 1872.Footnote 149 Success in Catholic areas depended on the goodwill of organisations and individuals, especially the priest, the teacher and sometimes the minister.
The compromises on curriculum provided an additional reason for some priests to support Gaelic schools. The beneficial religious impact of education neutralised of its protestantism had been noted the previous century by priests.Footnote 150 The ESSGS’s willingness to refrain from promoting protestant theology, combined with its language strategy which meant students understood what they read in their Bibles, or indeed in any materials their priests gave them, meant ESSGS education was as likely to complement the children's Catholicism as to drive them into the arms of the protestants. Anthony MacDonald was pleased at the religious effect inspired by the ESSGS. The Cleadale people in Eigg had apparently previously “devoted the Sabbath entirely to idle conversation or frivolous amusements, as they had nothing of a serious nature to engage their attention, but now they regularly attend Divine Worship, and read the Scriptures in their private Families.”Footnote 151 Although the school in Canna had been short-lived, the literacy it provided was useful to MacDonald's successor. In 1838 Donald MacKay sent spiritual books in Gaelic to sustain the Canna people between his infrequent visits.Footnote 152 Although he would not have acknowledged the advantage, had it not been for the Gaelic literacy taught through the ESSGS twenty five years earlier MacKay's ability to guide the faith of his people at a distance would have been more limited. Priests were often actively involved in educating their congregation.Footnote 153 Schools like the ESSGS could save them time in teaching the basics. Any protestant doctrine which slipped through could be spotted and counteracted fairly easily by the priest. MacDonald of Small Isles and Chisholm of South Uist were the most enthusiastic clerical supporters of the ESSGS, articulating the possibility that, with careful usage, this protestant society could bring not only social and educational advantage, but even have a beneficial religious effect on their Catholic flocks.
The ESSGS evidence from the 1810s, 1820s and into the 1830s indicating generally good relations with Catholic communities coincides with the thirty year period in Scotland, identified by Ian Muirhead, in which anti-Romanism was dormant.Footnote 154 The ESSGS built on the increasing willingness of the SSPCK and Catholic clergy in the latter decades of the eighteenth century to compromise, however distrustfully. The truce did not last. While co-operation had been promoted by a shared fear of the French Revolution, resurgent religious intolerance was fed by the mounting “No Popery” movement, the rhetoric of opinion-makers, and was exacerbated by an “increasingly embittered relationship” between protestant denominations.Footnote 155 Anti-Catholicism became more evident in ESSGS annual reports. From the late 1820s fewer letters from Catholic communities were printed and there is less evidence of priests’ inclusion in the schools’ operation. In 1829, the editor nailed his colours to the mast, claiming that “next to the Reformation from Popery, the Institution of the Gaelic School Society is the most important blessing which God has been pleased to grant to the Highlands.”Footnote 156 There is little evidence that ordinary Highlanders’ attitudes altered. Relatively unaffected by the growing anti-Catholicism in the Lowlands and desperate for advantage for their children, many parents were prepared to continue taking the religious risk. Highland priests varied. The change in atmosphere, or perhaps new confidence engendered by the Roman Catholic Relief Act in 1829 which removed any legal threat, allowed some to become more assertive. In 1838 Coll MacColl's response to the proprietor distributing Gaelic Bibles in Morar was to encourage people to burn or return them.Footnote 157 Conciliation and toleration were not the watchwords of the 1830s. After the complete breakdown between the two parties within the Church of Scotland at the 1843 Disruption, evangelicalism became hegemonic within Highland culture and there was no longer space for the adaptation and cooperation which had previously defined ESSGS activities in the Catholic Gàidhealtachd. By the 1850s inflammatory language, equating Catholicism with “deadly error” and “the man of Sin” was acceptable in ESSGS editorials and the organisation supported very few schools in Catholic areas.Footnote 158 The ecumenical cooperation which marked the society's birth was gone.
III. Conclusion
The period from the founding of the ESSGS in 1811 to the Disruption of 1843 was one of extraordinary evangelical dynamism which reshaped social relationships and culture not only across northern Scotland but internationally. Unlike the Orientalist missionaries of India, many of whom were Scots, the ESSGS did not study local religious culture.Footnote 159 However, in common with them, and indeed most missionaries, especially protestants, the society was determined that people should read the Bible in their native language.Footnote 160 Facilitating this was their main conversion strategy, and their only one in Catholic areas. Highland Catholics were therefore one of innumerable people groups across the globe who had to formulate a response to evangelical energy. These increasingly impoverished communities made pragmatic decisions about the limited resources at their disposal. Priests and people accepted missionary schools because of the skills they could offer, even if the welcome was more qualified than ESSGS donors believed. In order to support education, and perhaps to keep an eye on the schools, many Catholic clergy accepted invitations to be involved and created little opposition.Footnote 161 These priests considered the ESSGS a useful organisation which did not undermine their authority and could even complement their own objectives. Catholics drew on their long experience as a disempowered minority by using schools selectively and on their own terms rather than by active opposition to them. To achieve their main aim of teaching Gaelic speakers to read the Bible, the ESSGS was willing to work with priests, to select amenable teachers, and to modify the curriculum. Many Catholics and evangelicals thus developed a modus vivendi through their common interest in educating children. The Gaelic Schools, an organisation which did not carry the ideological baggage of the SSPCK or the imperial baggage of some late nineteenth-century missions in the Empire, built on the uneven foundation of protestant-Catholic co-operation which had emerged in the late eighteenth-century Highlands. In the 1810s and 1820s they modelled the possibilities of good inter-denominational relations before strain began to show. This challenges both the traditional Catholic and evangelical narratives of Highland history: the former which assumes continual repression, especially from evangelicals and by protestant schools; and the latter which describes the development of Highland evangelicalism as an uncompromising and unchanging doctrine whose triumphal march eventually possessed the whole region. The tight denominational boundaries that have produced parallel religious historiographies disappear when the lens is refocused on how people enacted their beliefs and how they interacted with their neighbours in their local circumstances. As Stern found in the antebellum American South, despite high profile incidents of animosity, everyday relations between Catholics and protestants were characterised more by co-operation than conflict. While in both the US and in Britain national attitudes hardened due to immigration, particularly of Irish people, such national overviews tend to draw their narrative from regions experiencing conflict.Footnote 162 To understand how communities function in ordinary moments, it is vital to consider the mundanity of daily compromise between groups. The relatively positive relationship between the ESSGS and Catholic Highlanders demonstrates there are at least two regional narratives to account for in Scotland's experience of Catholic-protestant relations in the early nineteenth century. The mental and spiritual worlds of missionaries, like the ESSGS teachers, and of the targets of missionary work, like Highland Catholics, were as full of compromise, contradiction and change as they were of conviction and conflict.
