On July 31st, 1703, Daniel Foe (who came to call himself Daniel DeFoe) was arrested for seditious libel and sentenced to stand in the pillory for three days. Queen Anne had just ascended to the throne as Queen of England and was intent upon rooting out Nonconformists e.g. Roman Catholics (among the most despised in England), and people like DeFoe, the son of Presbyterian Dissenters, who, although Protestant, nevertheless refused to acknowledge the primacy of the Church of England. DeFoe was acutely vulnerable to prosecution because he was a prolific pamphleteer with a gift for stinging satire. DeFoe was rescued from prison by Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford and Earl Mortimer, and many of his debts discharged on the condition that he serve as a spy for the Tories. He was to establish himself in Edinburgh as a London merchant (which he was) seeking trade with Scotland, meanwhile reporting to London on matters related to Union between Scotland and England and promoting the Union cause.
It is against this backdrop that Donald Smith crafts a tale of intrigue, weaving strands of historical, political and literary interest. Of particular interest, on all three counts, is a fellow lodger at a tenement near the Netherbow Gate on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. The woman is introduced as a widow, Lady O’Kelly from Ireland, fallen on difficult circumstances and come to settle the estate of her last remaining relation. However, she is not what she seems; she may be just as duplicitous as Daniel Foe/DeFoe. Certainly she exhibits a pragmatism that belies her role as grieving widow, conducting a love affair with a priest, disguising her appearance when it suits her, carrying a knife. Without making it explicit, Smith leaves us to presume that when events have played themselves out and DeFoe has returned to London to pen his famous novels, he will use Catharine O’Kelly (or whatever her real name might be) as the model for his Moll Flanders. We are reminded of Foe’s observation at the opening of the novel: “What, after all, are our own lives, except a kind of story?” And Smith leaves us wondering: What, after all, are our own stories, except a kind of life?
Donald Smith is director of the Scottish Storytelling Centre which, surprise, surprise, occupies space near the Netherbow Gate on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. I have written at length about it here. Smith is a proponent of the new Scottish Enlightenment, enlisting the power of story to give life to the local identity of Scots. In The English Spy, Smith finds themes of trade liberalization, political union, and identity that speak not only to current affairs in Scotland, but also to contemporary relations throughout the world (e.g. Québec in relation to the rest of Canada, Canada in relation to the United States, African countries in relation to the WTO). It is fitting that Smith would choose DeFoe as the vehicle for these concerns, a dissenting Presbyterian (like many Scots) but driven by practical exigencies into service of the “wrong” side of the affair.
Another such figure is the priest, Aeneas, who, like all Catholics in Scotland, is doubly marginalized. Orphaned as a young boy, Aeneas finds his identity shaped by circumstances beyond his ken. Smith offers a beautiful evocation of his early life in Dunkeld:
On Sundays, though, I was taken to the kirk. On every side were scattered ruins of a noble cathedral but one part was roofed and enclosed. We sat on hard wooden pews and heard the service read in English or more likely Scots. We used an Episcopal prayer book much resented by the Presbyterian zealots and yet delivered in the harsh tones of narrow Protestantism. Sermons were to be endured. Colour, pattern, and rhythm were absent. This was the public world to which we must conform. On other days I could run free through the green meadow between the river and the ruins. On Sundays my mother held me firmly by the hand and walked me from the village to the kirk.
If stern Bible readings failed to feed my imagination, it was nourished by village tales of ghosts, warrior clans, lost loves, old priests and monks, and of the great Comcille. When the Vikings burnt Iona Abbey, his sacred relics were brought to Dunkeld. I do not recall who taught me these things; they were rarely mentioned in the everyday world of our home at least. But they were in the landscape and the consciousness of the people. Occasionally a harper or a seanachaidh would arrive and we youngsters would squeeze into the chosen cottage, amidst the reek of peat, clay pipes and damp, steaming clothes. No more regarded than the dogs stretched beside us on the mud floor, we heard eulogies, laments for long-lost chiefs, tales of Finn Ossian and the Fian, and traditions of Columba Dove of the Church.
The dominant culture squeezes out the local. But Aeneas sidesteps the direct confrontation between cultures. As an orphan, he is drawn under the wings of Roman Catholics and diverted to a seminary where he encounters a whole new set of traditions.
I was drawn to the account of Dunkeld because it allowed me to weave threads beyond Smith’s story. After all, no story exists in isolation but belongs to a wider tapestry of culture. In this instance, I was reminded of Roo Borson’s collection of poetry, Rain; road; an open boat in which she writes about Dunkeld without naming it. In an afterword, she does her own weaving:
Mentioned in passing but not named … is the cathedral in Dunkeld, a smallish town in southern Scotland. The cathedral was built over several centuries, and largely destroyed in 1560 during the Reformation, when all things “Popish” were to be either actively expunged or confiscated, depending on their value and/or portability. In 1600, the chancel portion was repaired and re-roofed, restoring the church to its role as a functioning place of worship, but the nave portion was left in ruins. Since that time, through various battles and upheavals, it has been maintained in this state, one half for the living, one half, its grasses underfoot, unroofed and open to the sky.
If time, as many have claimed, is a river, then time I suppose must also assume, on occasion, the other shapes of water: snowflake, fog, the melting and reforming cliffs of the polar regions, whirlpools and waterfalls, a surging sea, the running brook in which a book speaks its mind, an oxbow lake. It so happens that the River Braan, at eleven miles in length, surely one of the shorter rivers in Scotland and a tributary of the River Tay, which runs scenically past Dunkeld with its half-ruined cathedral, traverses a property once owned by the successive Dukes of Atholl. In the eighteenth century a folly was built here, called Ossian’s Hall. Ossian was an invention of the literary mastermind James McPherson, whose “translations” from the work of the third-century Scots-Gaelic bard are often credited with inciting the Romantic movement in literature, thus showing not only that literature makes little distinction between the living and the invented, but that, like water, it must make its own way in response to the contours of its changing environs. The painter Turner and the poet Wordsworth are counted among those who visited here, Wordsworth studiously penning the lines
And, when the moment comes, to part
And vanish by mysterious arthalfway through his poem “Effusion,” which recounts his visit to the folly and the falls beyond.
The English Spy is published by Luath Press Ltd.