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Archbishop Tait 
Enlightenment and Empire?
A talk given by George Harris on October 29th 1999
Ladies and gentlemen, it is very flattering to see so many of you here this evening. For the first time in my career it seems attractive to be paid as the first masters at the Academy were paid - by collecting fees direct from their pupils (with a substantial minimum, however, guaranteed by the Directors). This method, incidentally, was also used for lecturers at Edinburgh University. It was alleged that this payment by results explained the superiority of Edinburgh‘s lecturers over Oxford‘s. The Oxford men were paid a salary, and, it is said, gave poor value for it.
Although flattered, however, I am also apprehensive. One of the early pieces of advertising for this talk said it would be "relaxed". I am not sure who is supposed to be relaxed; certainly not the lecturer, though if you wish to doze off on the new chairs, please feel free. I shall excuse myself with what Sir Walter Scott said, excusing his protégé, Williams, from a charge of roughness brought by his detractors: "A schoolmaster has almost always something pedantic about him." Apart from the inevitable nervousness of a speaker faced by a large and distinguished audience, I am aware of one particular difficulty. You are, I have no doubt, mixed - not in ability, of course, but in knowledge and experience. To put it simply: some will have read "The Clacken and the Slate", some will possess a copy and not have read it; some will never have heard of "The Clacken and the Slate". I shall do my best to provide fresh food for thought for the first group whilst respecting the needs of the other two groups for some straightforward information.
What was really going on?
The question I am going to ask is the principal question for all historians: What was really going on? This is rarely an easy question to answer. For example, what was really going on in Paris when our founder, Henry Cockburn was a pupil at the High School? Was it a struggle by the bourgeoisie to take control of the state so as to increase their ability to make wealth? In order to overthrow the aristocracy they made the "sans culottes" their allies but, once in power, they subordinated the "sans culottes" to their bourgeois capitalist needs. Not at all, say more recent historians; the evidence does not point to a class struggle. What was really happening was.... And there are a dozen alternatives.
The Man of Law's Tale
But what was really going on in the Great Reform Act? Were Earl Grey and the Whigs trying to make the constitution more liberal, more democratic? No historian today would seriously argue such a thing. The general consensus is that the Whigs were trying, rather, to stop progress along the lines indicated by the French Revolution by bringing the prosperous middle classes within the system, excluding those members of the masses who chanced to have votes in some old constituencies and ensuring that the landed gentry and aristocracy dominated politics for the rest of the century. I repeat that the question ”What was really going on?" is not a straightforward one, and the French Revolution and the Great Reform Act give us an intriguing context for the foundation of the Academy. Did the prosperous middle classes of Europe, of Edinburgh in particular, see this as a time for reform so as to encourage what Robert Palmer called ”The World Revolution in the West" (including Thomas Jefferson, Napoleon, Tom Paine, Lord Byron and Henry Cockburn in one massive sweep)? Or did they see reform as a way of putting a stop to the dangerous tendencies unleashed by the Americans and the French with their revolutions and their Declarations of Rights and of Independence? Where, more particularly, did the fifteen original directors of the Academy stand? They were, famously, an alliance of Whigs and Tories. Did they perhaps have rival agendas? Was the founding of the Academy the product of their disputes? The rivalry between Whigs and Tories at that time was certainly very intense - far stronger than mere political disagreement. In the summer of 1822, only two years before the school was opened - Cockburn acted as a defence council for the Whig, James Stuart, who had killed Sir Alexander Boswell in a duel over some scurrilous Tory journalism. Indeed the unifying theme of Cockburn‘s ”Memorials" is the oppression of the Edinburgh Whigs by the narrow clique of Scotch Tories and their gradual emergence into the luxury of free expression and political activity. He describes the ”fearful times" of 1793, when to be a Whig was to risk transportation and, as he wrote ”the frightful thing was the personal bitterness." Of the 1800s he tells how ”even in private society a Whig was viewed somewhat as a Papist was in the days of Titus Oates," and in the legal world a Whig had no chance of promotion. After the French wars the situation eased for the Whigs, but the partisan hostility was still severe. He rejoices in the great reform meeting of December 1820, when a Whig petition secured 17,000 signatures and a hasty Tory effort to match it, in defence of Lord Castlereagh, got a mere 1,600 names. True the MP for Edinburgh was always a Tory, but he was chosen - elected is hardly the right word - by the 33 members of the city council. In 1831 Francis Jeffrey, Cockburn‘s great friend, founder of the Whiggish ”Edinburgh Review", stood and was inevitably defeated. In the ensuing riot a vast crowd threatened to hurl the Tory Lord Provost over the North Bridge. He saved himself by gripping one of the crowd and shouting ”If I go sir, you will go with me!" In such an atmosphere you might expect Cockburn to have founded a school that would reflect his political principles, and do down the Tories. But there is little sign of this. He took steps, right from the start, to involve Tories in the project, so as to broaden its appeal.
Surely it would he reasonable to suppose that one of the things that was really going on when the Academy was founded was the expression in the form of a school of that elusive abstraction ”The Scottish Enlightenment". The previous twenty years had seen enormous reforms in education on the Continent. Napoleon had overhauled the French system. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Humboldt had done the same for Prussia. This was the age of Johann Pestalozzi, the Swiss educationalist. One recent history of education states, accurately but unhelpfully for my purposes, that ”the educational effects of the Enlightenment are notoriously difficult to assess." However, all three reformers so far mentioned were clear that education should play a part in the modernisation of society, enabling rational man to join in rational progress. As far as Scotland is concerned one can point to some articles on education that appeared in Jeffrey‘s ”Edinburgh Review". They launch - probably from the pen of Sydney Smith - a vigorous attack on the traditional methods and curricula of the famous English public schools and universities. They call for ”modern languages, modern history, experimental philosophy, geography, chronology and a considerable share of Mathematics." Leonard Horner, who stood with Cockburn on the Pentlands when they first had the vision of a new school in the New Town, was indeed a radical educational reformer in this mold. Himself a chemist and geologist, in 1821 he had set up the first Mechanics Institute in Britain - that later developed into Heriot-Watt University. He went on to be first Warden of the new University College, London, modern in curriculum, which had not one Oxford graduate among its first professors. But the Academy reflected little if anything of this reforming zeal. Horner‘s monument, as far as secondary education goes, is University College School in Hampstead, which he helped to found in 1828. There Latin, French, German, English, Mathematics, Physics, Botany, Chemistry, Physical Geography and Social Science were all available. No subject was compulsory - not even Latin - and religious education was absolutely forbidden. That was modern education in the 1820s. That was not what was going on at the Edinburgh Academy. Another suggestion one hears of what was going on when the Academy was founded is a deliberate imitation of the great English public schools. This idea is a misunderstanding of the desire that did exist to prevent the sons of Scots worthies going south for their schooling. For the English public schools at that time were by no means great, and were not fit models for imitation. Eton was in the grip of that legendary flogger, Dr Keate. Eton floggings were described thus in the ”Edinburgh Review ”An operation performed on the naked back by the headmaster himself, who is always a gentleman of great abilities and acquirements and sometimes of high dignity in the Church." Of the Head Master of Harrow School it has recently been written: ”Relief greeted George Butler‘s resignation. The school was in near-constant riot every evening." Roy Porter may be overstating the case when he describes the public schools of the 1820s as providing ”a diet of birch, boorishness, buggery and the bottle" but the Academy‘s first fifteen Directors had more sense than to imitate them. Quite apart from anything else, their numbers were falling. Rugby slumped from 300 pupils in 1821 to 123 in 1827. Charterhouse fell even faster, from 489 pupils in 1825 to 137 in 1832. Eton‘s numbers fell by 30% in the same period and, as for Harrow, by the time George Butler‘s next successor, Dr Wordsworth, had finished with it, numbers were down to less than seventy boys and grass grew in the middle of the High Street. So what was really going on when the Academy was founded? Not much, or at least very little, of Whig projects for reforming Scotland. Nothing of Horner‘s radical ideas. Not much, very sensibly, in imitation of the famous but appalling English public schools. But I do not think there is much doubt that there was something going on. The new school was not merely an overspill for the overcrowded High School and a matter of convenience for those who lived in the New Town - though there were those in 1824 who thought this. In the first place it became what James Scotland in his ”History of Scottish Education" (1969) called ”certainly the best school in Scotland in the middle years of the nineteenth century." That superlative must be more than just a happy accident for an over-spill school. Secondly the founders of the school - the proprietors - made a considerable financial sacrifice to get the place going. Those £50 shares, the £9,000 that was rapidly raised by 160 subscribers. It is hard to translate monetary values from one age to another, but the original classical masters were guaranteed £200 a year. So those shares were three months of a well-paid teacher‘s salary. There must have been something significant going on to be worth so much. No one who gave money to the Academy ever got a penny of it back. The Founders
It is normal for such groups to value and defend their exclusive position, and such an accusation could be made in this case. ”Providing something like 85% of the advocates, and all the judges," writes Stana Nenadic in ”The Rise of the Urban Middle Class", ”the Scottish landowning class used the legal system to extend the privileges and rights of their class against the great nobility and against outsiders." And there were some Edinburgh citizens who made precisely this accusation against the first Directors: that they were founding a school in order to enhance their social status by charging fees higher than those of the High School and so keeping mere tradesmen at arms length. One of the most memorable characters to emerge from the first three chapters of ”The Clacken and the Slate" is Old Baillie Blackwood, who successfully persuaded the city council to have nothing to do with the new school. It ran clean contrary, he argued, to the democratic tradition of Scottish education. The charge becomes even more plausible if one reflects that these Edinburgh legal gentry were not just a special group - the historiographically fashionable ”cultural grouping" is a more appropriate description than the old fashioned ”social class" - but they were also at a moment of crisis. The threat that the Treaty of Union would make Edinburgh a mere provincial city had been long in coming to pass. Two generations of Jacobite civil wars had kept Edinburgh busy, to say the least. The construction of the New Town had then given a massive focus for civic pride. Then the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars had effectively closed Europe to travellers, and Edinburgh had thus been massively stimulated by English visitors and students. But now the Grand Tour had recommenced. Paris beckoned, with Rome beyond. Worse, the Scottish aristocracy was deserting the capital. Once they had roosted in the Old Town, cheek by jowl with the rest of the citizens, from advocates to caddies. Then they had taken spacious mansions in the New Town. But now they were moving out. |
The Athens of the North
They were also, like all good parents, determined to do their best for their own children. When the original masters led their original classes to the opening ceremony, there sat twelve-year-old James Skene, ten-year-old Alexander Russell, young John Mackenzie and little James Cockburn. (He was only eight). Eight Directors had sons in school on that first day and two more had youngsters soon to join them. The Academy was set up as the school to which the first Directors wanted to send their own children - a powerful motivation indeed. And what they wanted was an improved version of the old High School at which they themselves had been educated. One improvement was to be a reduction in corporal punishment. Cockburn recalls his own schooldays where ”out of the whole four years of my attendance there were probably not ten days in which I was not flogged at least once." He wanted nothing like that for little James and his friends. Then there was to be an English class with an English Master. Cockburn again: ”I doubt if I read a single book, or even fifty pages, voluntarily, when I was at the High School." Class libraries, by contrast, soon became a feature of the new Academy. Finally there was to be the most intensive teaching of the classics - Greek as well as Latin. The early Classics masters were scholars of some eminence. Apart from Rector Williams, George Ferguson went on to be a Professor of Humanity at Aberdeen and Patrick Macdougal to be Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh. Carmichael and Mitchell both published books on Greek language. For them and for a tiny percentage of their pupils the hours devoted to ancient languages were valuable for their own sake. For Archibald Tait, who joined ”Taffy" William‘s very first class and went, via first class degrees and prizes at Glasgow and Oxford Universities, to be headmaster of Rugby and Queen Victoria‘s favourite Archbishop of Canterbury. But it is utterly fantastic to suppose that the bulk of the huge classes - sixty or seventy boys - saw the hours of Greek and Latin grammar in that light. The fact was that Classics was regarded as the necessary badge of gentility - whether you were destined for the army, for estate management or for trading with the Dominions. Never mind Sidney Smith‘s articles in the ”Edinburgh Review" that called for ”usefulness" as the criterion for judging education and talked of the ”safe and elegant imbecility of classical learning." The model followed by the Academy was the eighteenth century writer Thomas Gaisford: ”The advantages of a classical education are two-fold. It enables us to look down with contempt on those who have not shared its advantages, and it also fits us for places of emolument, not only in this world but in that which is to come." Maybe Greek was an essential passport to the ancient English universities, but of the Rector‘s first class of seventy-one pupils only six made that journey. One wonders for how many of the other sixty-five was the three and a half daily hours of Greek and Latin the best education. Why the New Town?This desire to do what was best for their sons, and for the sons of friends, also led the early Directors to attempt to shield them from the Mr Hyde who lurked then, and lurks still, within Edinburgh‘s Dr Jekyll. Moving their school from the Old Town to the New Town had more to do with this than with convenience. As A.J. Youngson wrote in ”The Making of Classical Edinburgh": ”The lawyers might continue to work in the Old Town but they no longer belonged to it." And Robert Chambers, writing around the time the Academy was founded, lamented that ”the fine gentlemen who daily exhibit their foreign dresses and fine manners in Princes Street have no idea of the race of people who roost in the tall houses of the Lawnmarket and the West Bow." One of Cockburn‘s most remarkable achievements in court was to win a ”not proven" verdict for Burke‘s woman, Helen Macdougal, after Hare had turned King‘s evidence. But he did not wish his children to mingle in the street with such people. The gates of the school were kept shut and the peddler of ”unwholesome articles", with his coarse language, was moved away by the police. The way in which the insistence on an English master with an English accent fits into this picture is interesting and ambiguous. The leaders of the Edinburgh legal establishment seem to have been unable to make up their own minds where they stood. Certainly David Hume, as long previous as 1757, had remarked that ”we are unhappy in our accent and our pronunciation, and speak a very corrupt dialect of the tongue which we make use of." True Cockburn urged his daughter, when down south, to ”observe their sweet and gentle English tongues, and try to take one of them out of their heads and put it into your own." True also that part of his Whiggery was a belief in strengthening the Union, so as to see that Scotland shared in England‘s constitutional and social progress. True that the Directors made their stipulation that Charles Baker, the first English Master, must have an English accent. But on the other hand the disadvantages of losing a Scots accent were also acknowledged. Jeffrey was said by Lord Holland ”to have lost broad Scotch at Oxford but he had only gained the narrow English." And he spoke in a flat, unappealing tone as a result. Cockburn himself took great pleasure in speaking broad. So did the majority of the Academy masters. Cockburn in 1844 declared of the Scots accent: ”In losing it we lose ourselves." And poor Charles Baker was fairly hounded out within a year, his inability to keep discipline worsened by his English tongue. The real row over pronunciation concerned dead not living languages. This blew up in 1827. Scott lay awake all night worrying about it. The anguish is fully chronicled by Magnus Magnusson in Chapter VI of ”The Clacken and the Slate." The problem was whether to stick to the Scots pronunciation of Latin - which was not only traditional but more in line with best European practice - or to adopt the English pronunciation, which was naturally favoured by the Oxford-trained Rector Williams. Should boys say amo or emo, curahtor or curaytor. The clinching argument seems to have been that Academicals in London would be open to ridicule if their Latin tags had a Doric inflexion. Provincial quaintness was exactly the image that the Edinburgh legal establishment wished to avoid.
My own understanding of Mathematics and Physics could be written on a fairly small piece of paper, but the explanation of this phenomenon can be summed up in one word - ”Gloag." It was skilful head-hunting that produced Rector Williams, but it seems to have been good fortune that brought James Gloag to the school. He taught Mathematics on the opening day, and for the next forty years. There is an excellent section on him in Magnusson which I urge you to read, if only to be horrified by teaching methods that would have a man arrested today. But there is no doubt that he swept the ablest Mathematicians onwards and upwards, and the Gloag Medal is still the school‘s main Mathematics prize. The Directors dreamed of a great classical school and accidentally founded a great mathematical one. PerorationMy title raised the double question ”Enlightenment and Empire?" Lord Cockburn‘s biographer, Karl Millar, has no doubts about what was really going on when the Academy was founded. It was ”to enable Scots boys to compete with English public school boys for the more important posts in the Empire." Certainly the careers of the sons of the first fifteen Directors seem to bear out this judgment. James Skene became a magistrate on Corfu and married Rhalou, daughter of Prince Jacques-Rizo-Rangabe, Grand Postelnic of Wallachia. John Wood was a Surgeon-Major at the Battle of Balaclava whilst William Russell and Benjamin Kinnear became merchants in the Far East. George Cockburn joined the East India Company. And as for Charles Mackenzie: he went from being one of Gloag‘s brilliant mathematicians to being Bishop of the Native Tribes near Lake Nyassa in Central Africa. A trawl through the Register confirms this strong imperial connection. (The Academy was not exceptional in this within Scotland, however.) William Cumming received the thanks of the Indian Government for his services in the Mutiny whilst, also in the Mutiny, John Gordon had a horse shot under him. Alexander Bruce of the Hong-Kong and Shanghai Bank received the Pekin Relief Medal after the Boxer Rebellion, whilst Melville Wright, having been the Scottish Hundred Yards Champion became Colonial Surgeon in the Gold Coast, West Africa. James Innes was Treasurer to the Rajah of Sarawak. The anecdotes are endless and they are borne out by a preliminary statistical survey. Of that first cohort of 521 boys, 22% went into imperial service of some sort. One hundred consecutive names from the register of the 1850s produced 34% in imperial service - slightly more than one in three - and another hundred names from the 1890s produced 28%. The question mark in my title had better remain next to ”Enlightenment" but it can be removed from ”Empire." Of course I have looked at this question of ”What was really going on?" from the point of view of ”What was really going on in the minds of the first Directors?" The story of the Academy, like the story of all institutions, is several histories intertwined. One might consider the story of the teachers, tackling pupils so undisciplined and so badly brought up that Rector Sheepshanks was bluntly told by Leonard Horner that he would do well to change his name. The gentle scholar did not, and was driven out within a year. No wonder the survivors in this bear pit interpreted the discouragement of corporal punishment as not including discouragement of the use of the tawse. Here is a document that has an echo of the 1990s about it: ”The Schoolmaster, in Scotland at least, still occupies his former humble and unhonoured position, unnoticed by the great, and regarded as inferior by the middle classes. He alone has not participated in the general prosperity [of recent years]." This is an extract from the circular letter that invited teachers to the first meeting that became the founding assembly of the Educational Institute of Scotland. It was written, in 1846, by George Ferguson, Classical Master at the Edinburgh Academy since its foundation (”regarded as inferior by the middle classes"), and first Corresponding Secretary of the E.I.S. And the first committee of the E.I.S., charged with drumming up membership, included James Gloag, Dr Maclure of the Edinburgh Academy and the Venerable Archdeacon Williams. There might also be the story of the people of Stockbridge and Silvermills and Canonmills, who had the new school dumped in their back yard and whose sons soon began open warfare against the middle class boys and made them fight their way each afternoon up Stinky Lane to the safe havens of Great King Street and Heriot Row. And, of course, there is the history of the boys themselves, on whose behalf all this trouble was taken. Lord Cockburn had remembered his schooldays as a grim, joyless time: ”I was driven stupid.....The beauty of no Roman word or thought or action never occurred to me; nor did I ever fancy that Latin was of any use except to torture boys." But there is good evidence that the school he founded was, for a long time, very little different. John Hay Macdonald was one of the Academy‘s many successes - just the sort of pupil the founding fathers had had in mind. Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, Lord Justice-Clerk, MP for Edinburgh and St Andrews Universities and Ensign General of the Royal Company of Archers. He also became a Director of the Academy and an enthusiastic member of the original Academical Football Club. (”I bear the marks yet", he wrote affectionately in his memoirs.) So he cannot be regarded as a hostile witness, and yet of the lessons he endured, at the end of Rector William‘s reign, he tells us: ”Smart, clever and more studious boys formed a set by themselves, and a long string further down constituted what the huntsman would call a "rubbishing tail”, ministration to whom was a weariness to the flesh and a waste of energy. Time did not permit that he should really instruct such a number.....Boys were gaining a loose smattering of the classics but in nine out of ten cases receiving no real cultivation.....I can use the words of Lord Cockburn to describe the situation. He states that he "was driven stupid”.....There is a cruelty in the forced feeding of young boys on literature that is sweet to the palate of the Oxford graduate who is set to teach, and who loses his temper over their blunders, and stamps with rage at a false quantity.....In some cases I can remember displays of temper that can only be described as being of most evil example to young boys.....And the arrangements were, from the hygienic point of view, so bad as to be unspeakable. Some of them I will refrain from describing." He does, however, describe the arrangements for drinking water - one pail, topped up by the Janitor‘s wife, and two tin mugs, never washed. I think I will end on J.H.A Macdonald, later Lord Kingsburgh. From this unpropitious start he went on - was it because of, or despite, that dull, brutal grinding in the class room? - to enormous distinction. Amongst other things he introduced the use of the post card into Great Britain. Apart from his professional successes as a lawyer he had once flourished under Gloag, and became an amateur inventor. His publications include: ”The Simplification of Infantry Drill", ”A Treatise on the Criminal Law of Scotland," ”Electricity in the Household" and ”The Past and Future of Power Traction on Roads." The Edinburgh legal establishment in the nineteenth century was a very remarkable body of men, and so it is no surprise to find that the school they set up for their children was a very remarkable one also. |
The explanation I favour at the moment is that what was really going on was dozens of second-rate lawyers grasping after power. The first rate lawyers already had jobs under the old regime. The third-raters stayed in the provinces. But the second rank - Danton, Robespierre and company - had the cleverness to stir up the people but lacked the wisdom to lead them. The most important source for the background to the founding of the Academy is Cockburn‘s ”Memorials of His Own Time". Chapter Two begins with the French Revolution: "Everything," he wrote, ”not this thing or that thing but literally everything was soaked in this one event." Was the founding of the Academy, which he set in motion, soaked in this event? His "Memorials" end on the eve of the Great Reform Act of 1832. He writes excitedly about the prospects for Scotland. ”I close this page by saying that Jeffrey has been made Lord Advocate, and I Solicitor-General, under the ministry of Earl Grey. We have come on the public stage in a splendid but perilous scene." 
In particular Walter Scott, the most famous man in Europe since Napoleon‘s enforced exile, was persuaded to join in. Scott was a romantic Tory of a most sentimental sort who saw Edinburgh Whiggery as corruption and once shouted at Jeffrey after a political meeting ”Little by little you will destroy and undermine, till nothing of what makes Scotland Scotland shall remain." He certainly feared that the school might be corrupted by Whig scheming. In 1823 he wrote to a friend about the choice of Rector for the new school: ”We are rather afraid that the others, who are always very active, mean to palm a Whig upon us. I know these gentry pretty well and have good experience how loud they can sound their horns when they have a mind to sell their own fish, but I should be sorry were a Whig to be fairly crammed down our throats." There is much that is pathetic about Scott‘s last years. Two years after the school was founded his devastating bankruptcy struck. In 1831, as he went to vote in Jedburgh (the same election as found the Lord Provost of Edinburgh fighting for his life on the North Bridge) his carriage was stoned and he - notorious reactionary - was spat upon from a window. And there is something pathetic about his snuffling out Whig plots amongst his fellow directors. But, and it is a huge qualification, the Academy owes a great debt to Scott for his patronage of John Williams.
Williams had coached Scott‘s son Charles whilst he - Williams - had been Vicar of Lampeter in Wales. (Charles Scott had been part of that flow south of the Border for education that the founding of the Academy was intended to stop.) Williams, who had had a brief and unhappy experience of teaching at Winchester, made a big hit with the Scott family: ”Charles, who was idle, conceited and impracticable while at home is now a steady hard reading student and passionately fond of his teacher." And there is no question, from all accounts, that Williams was the man more responsible than any other individual, for the Academy‘s early success as a centre of training in the classics. The Academy was not the product of tense in-fighting between political rivals, but Scott‘s erroneous perception that it might be, led him to promote and fight for the Rector who first mashed the school into shape.
It is time to look closer at the fifteen men who powered and steered the ship, the first Directors. For all their political divisions they belonged emphatically to one special social group at an important moment in its history - the Edinburgh legal establishment. If they were not advocates or Writers to the Signet, they were their close associates. And so were the first pupils at their school. Of the first 521 names in the Academy Register - roughly speaking the first cohort of pupils - 143 (27%) either were the sons of lawyers or went on to become lawyers themselves. I described the Edinburgh legal establishment as a special social group. Their social status in contemporary eyes is shown by the fact that an Edinburgh directory of the 1770s lists the advocates first, then the Writers to the Signet, then the nobility, then the landed gentry and finally the rest of the middle classes. These lawyers were completely intertwined with the aristocracy and gentry of Mid and East Lothian. Of all the Writers to the Signet who qualified between 1790 and 1829, 30% were the sons of lawyers and 25% were the sons of landowners - very much a self-perpetuating local aristocracy.
By the 1820s the Earl of Wemyss and the Earl of Caithness were the only peers left with houses in the city. In 1825 Robert Mudie wrote a survey called ”The Modern Athens". He put the point bluntly. ”Wherever the executive and legislative powers of the state are allocated, it is there that the gay and rich will throng; and notwithstanding all the boasted elegance and taste of Edinburgh, no Scottish nobleman, or even squire, spends his winter here if he can afford to spend it in London. Hence Edinburgh is not only destitute of the source whence fashion flows, but she is also left without the means by which it could be supported: she is second rate in her very nature, and also in those who form her leading society." The first Directors may not have agreed with this view of their social set, but they will have been uneasily aware of it. Cockburn hinted at it when we wrote: ”By about the year 1820 the old [brilliancy] of Edinburgh was much worn out, and there was no new thing..... to continue or replace it." The massive effort of time, energy and money made by those first Directors makes sense within this context - uneasily aware of their social status under threat and striving to preserve it.
But there are some things about the early Academy that do not fit this picture - or rather some boys. For the Academy produced far more than its fair share of outstanding Mathematicians and scientists in the mid-nineteenth century - six Cambridge Senior Wranglers in a seven year period - and it produced James Clerk Maxwell, whose portrait hung alongside Isaac Newton‘s and Michael Faraday‘s on the wall of Einstein‘s study.
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