Fighting for a rebel's cause INTERVIEW INTERVIEW It has taken Hector

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Nov 6, 2005 | by Alan Taylor

HISTORY has not been kind to Thomas Muir. There is no mention of him, for instance, in the Oxford Companion To Scottish History. Elsewhere, he is remembered - if he is remembered at all - for his trial in 1793, a travesty of justice "made infamous", noted Tom Devine in The Scottish Nation, "by the notorious partiality of the presiding judge, Lord Braxfield".

Found guilty of sedition, Muir was sentenced to 14 years transportation to Botany Bay. Consequently, as Devine wrote, "Muir's trial has entered Scottish folk tradition".

But why have so celebrated a character and so biased a trial been allowed to slip from the collective memory? It is a question addressed by Hector MacMillan in Handful Of Rogues: Thomas Muir's Enemies Of The People. MacMillan, the celebrated author of plays such as The Sash and The Rising, has been conscious of Muir and the injustice he suffered most of his adult life, thanks largely to his father, Robert MacMillan: socialist, nationalist, republican and buddy of Chris Grieve, aka Hugh MacDiarmid.

To men like MacMillan's father and Grieve, Muir was a working- class hero, revered for his defiant stance against the establishment.

Towards the end of the 18th century, Scotland was a country ruled from London. The electorate comprised 3000 landowners who voted for the 30 MPs. The remaining 15 MPs were chosen by self-elected and often corrupt councillors. Thus, notes MacMillan, "the country was nominally in the hands of an unrepresentative 0.3% of the population". Nominally, because in reality most of this number could be relied upon as subservient North Britons when called to vote at Westminster or to record - in the name of the nation - their peculiarly skewed versions of political events."

MacMillan, who is 76, is talking in his small, spartanly furnished, rented flat on a shooting estate on the outskirts of Auchterarder which, earlier this year, was the locus of the kind of mass, popular protest of which Muir would surely have approved.

The Ochil Hills, autumnally seductive, are on the doorstep, providing MacMillan with plenty opportunities for ruminative walks.

Most days, he says, he manages an energetic hour or two. Age notwithstanding, he has the physique of Seb Coe in his pomp.

How he came to write about Muir is a long and tortuous story. First, he heard that there was a biography of him in manuscript, written by one Dr George Pratt Insh. Tracing it, however, proved difficult.

Eventually, he found one half in Blackpool; the other half turned out to be under Chris Grieve's chair in his cottage at Brownsbank in Lanarkshire. MacMillan then tried to find a publisher for it but without success.

Meanwhile, in 1981, Christina Bewley's Muir Of Huntershill appeared, much to MacMillan's chagrin. "When I read it I couldn't believe how many errors there were in it, " he says. "And the slant of it! I don't think she intended it but it came across as a hatchet job."

So he decided to try again to insinuate Pratt Insh's work into print but with no luck.

Learning that yet another biography was in the offing, he embarked on a novel about Muir, out of which research came the ideas for several plays, including The Rising and The Royal Visit. But when the biography failed to materialise he decided he had no option but to write his own. All of which has occupied the best part of 40 years, during which MacMillan's own fortunes - artistic, domestic and economic - waxed and waned.

Yet even after he had written his book there was little enthusiasm for it from publishers.

Had not Derek Rodger of Argyll Publishing taken it on, he says, he would have invested part of his pension to publish it himself.

Thomas Muir was born in Glasgow, where he began his university education at the not unusually young age of 12. His father, a shopkeeper, owned a 40-acre estate to the north of the city at Huntershill.

Growing up in the aftermath of the 1745 rebellion, he was naturally interested in politics. Indeed, he left Glasgow University after being involved in a student protest against the new rector, Edmund Burke.

Muir went on to complete his studies at Edinburgh University and was admitted to the Faculty of Advocates in 1787.

Two years later came the French Revolution, encouraging others to harbour similar ambitions. Muir was among them.

"Whether reformation or revolution was the ultimate aim, " writes MacMillan, "it is clear that at this time, Muir and his closest associates had two immediate priorities; political education of the Scottish working class and the closest possible political alliance with Ireland." Whichever it was, neither was likely to be ignored by the authorities. When Muir read out a fraternal address from the Society of United Irishmen he was arrested. His trial, lasting just one day, made a mockery of Scottish justice. Among the key witnesses against Muir was Robert Watt, a government spy who, ironically, was later executed for planning an insurrection. The judge, the notorious Lord Braxfield, is best remembered for his quip: "Ye'll be nane the waur o' a hingin."