HUGH MILLER IN
EDINBURGH
His Part in the
Disruption
"In close fights a champion grim,
In camps a
leader sage."
SCOTT.
"WE have had," says Dr. Guthrie in a letter dated 6th
September 1839, "a meeting about our newspaper.(The Witness) Miller, I may say,
is engaged, and will be here, I expect, in the course of two or three weeks.
His salary is to begin with £200, and mount with the profits of the
paper. I think this too little, but I have no doubt to see it double that sum
in a year or two - Johnstone to be the publisher, we advancing £1000, and
he will need other two. I am down with Brown, Candlish, and Cunningham for
£25 each. A few individuals only have as yet been applied to, and already
£600 of the £1000 has been subscribed."
His household he left
behind him in Cromarty for the time, and he lodged in St. Patrick Square.
Fortunate was it for the people that at the right time its ear should have been
caught by such a writer, one whose voice in the arena was at once recognised by
the individuality of its tone. The Edinburgh press had long been held by the
Moderate party, and the belief had been that the conflict was a mere clerical
striving for power. It remained for Miller to educate the party, and to such
effect was this done that, while the non-intrusion petition to Parliament in
1839 from Edinburgh had borne but five thousand signatures, the number, says
Robert Chambers, mounted in the first year of The Witness to thirteen
thousand. It was clear to all Scotland that there was a new Richmond in the
field. It is the more necessary to insist on this, because the clerical mind,
which after Malebranche is too prone to see everything in itself and its own
surroundings, has never fully confessed the services to the country of the
layman. As Guthrie points out, a silence is maintained all through Buchanan's
Ten Years Conflict on Miller. This he regrets, not only on the ground
that it would be Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark, but also for its missing
the cardinal principle that at such a time the press and public meetings form
the most influential of factors. This such a kindred spirit and public orator
as Guthrie is quick to see, nor does he go beyond the facts of the case, or the
judgment now of the country, in maintaining that "Miller did more than any
dozen ecclesiastical leaders, and that, Chalmers excepted, he was the greatest
of all the men of the Ten Years' Conflict."
He certainly was no half
advocate or mere "able editor" in the Carlylean phrase. If Chalmers, Candlish,
and Cunningham were the leaders in the ecclesiastical courts, Murray Dunlop the
jurist, Miller was the penman of the party.
"His business," says Guthrie,
the orator of the movement, "was to fight. Fighting was Miller's delight. On
the eve of what was to prove a desperate conflict, I have seen him in a high
and happy state of eagerness and excitement. He was a scientific as well as an
ardent controversialist; not bringing forward, far less throwing away, his
whole force on the first assault, but keeping up the interest of the
controversy, and continuing to pound and crush his opponents by fresh matter in
every succeeding paper. When I used to discuss questions with him, under the
impression, perhaps, that he had said all he had got to say very powerful and
very pertinent to the question, nothing was more common than his remarking, in
nautical phrase, “Oh, I have got some shot in the locker yet - ready for
use, if it is needed”
And that it was needed, in his own and the
Church's interest, the pamphlets of abuse by which he was attacked, and which
would form a small library, would remain to show. Thus he was really, all the
more from his isolated position, as we shall see, indebted to what Professor
Masson, in an appreciation of him in Macmillan's Magazine for 1865,
describes as the Goethean "demonic element." He had a better knowledge, he
shows, of the country and its ecclesiastical history than was possessed by his
clerical colleagues, and along with this went what he calls "a tremendous
element of ferocity, more of the Scandinavian than the Celt, leaving his enemy
not only slain but battered, bruised and beaten out of shape."
This,
though in a sense exaggerated, is true to the extent that he entered the lists
not as a mere servant, but as a convinced defender of the liberties of the
people. To touch on anything that infringed upon the Presbyterian history of
the country - be it by the Duke of Buccleuch, the Duke of Sutherland, or other
site-refusing landlords of the day, or by some flippant alien and Episcopalian
pamphleteer among the briefless of the Parliament House, was certainly to court
a bout from which the unwary disputant emerged in a highly battered condition.
Yet his pugnacity was really foreign to the nature of the man. His surviving
daughter informs the writer he was "a very mild and gentle father, and his
whole attitude was one depressed with humility." It was, however, well for
site-refusers and factors riding on the top of their commission from absentee
landlords to feel that attacks upon their policy in The Witness were not
to be lightened by any hopes of an apology or by appeals to fear. "The
watchman," he writes in a letter before us, dated 9th October 1840, "IS crying
half-past twelve o"clock, and I have more than half a mile to walk out of town
between two rows of trees on a solitary road. Fine opportunity for
cudgel-beating factors I carry, however, with me a five-shilling stick, strong
enough to break heads of the ordinary thickness, and like quite as well to
appeal to an antagonist"s fears as to his mercy."
From "Hugh Miller" by Keith Leask
Edinburgh
1896