One for all, and all for none

ON the morning of Saturday January 26, 1799, whistling against chill mists that rose from the River Oise, a postman walked his round in the town of Chantilly, passing beneath the chateau whence the aristocrats had been expelled by the French Revolution a few years before.

At one house a boy of 12 came out and told him there was a dead foreigner inside. News of a macchabee, a stiff, was something a French postman did not want to hear on a cold day. He finished his round before he spoke to a couple of pals, one a legal clerk. They said he must go to the mayor. This public official of the people's France nervously stood on ceremony. He insisted that he and the postman should before anything else return to the house to verify the death.

The sight awaiting them was not a pretty one, even allowing for the foreigner's defunct state. He had been a young man, tall and red-haired. One side of his face was podgy, but the other had at some time been all but shot away. An eye was gone, and the cruelly scarred flesh hung slack over cheek and chin with no bones inside.

Who was he? There were thousands of foreigners in Paris, 30 miles away, but none here in Chantilly, famous only for its whipped cream. The son of the lodging house could say nothing of the man, how old he had been or where from.

The clues yielded by his lonely garret were that he spent the dismal winter's days drinking and writing. There were many empty bottles and a reek of stale alcohol. There were piles of papers: books, journals, pamphlets, letters, most in English. The mayor noticed a bible at the

bedside. He opened it and saw the dedication, which he could not understand, ''To Thomas Muir from his Afflicted Parents''.

If the yokels of Chantilly knew nothing, the death was soon reported in Paris, where newspapers carried gushing obituaries: ''Thomas Muir the Scotsman so celebrated for his love of liberty, for his misfortunes, has just dies from wounds which he received about two years ago . . .'' At 33 he was laid in a pauper's grave - or a traitor's one, for while he lived he had been working to help France in an invasion of Scotland and conquest of Britain.

But the hopes of 1789 for the universal triumph of the Revolution were threadbare now, and its ideals ragged. The French roost was ruled by people doing well out of the fall of the ancien regime. At the head of affairs stood the Directory, five politicians mainly concerned with finances, usually their own finances rather than the public ones.

Still, thoughts remained free and paper cheap, so plans for world-improvement continued to pour out. Like all great imperial nations, the French assumed others were just like them, and their fresh sense of standing in the vanguard of humanity intensified their narcissism. They took it for granted that neighbouring peoples envied them the Revolution, would imitate it but for their reactionary kinds and could be helped to carry it through. In the minds of Parisian schemers, the dominions of George III were already carved up into separate Republics of Scotland, Ireland, and England. Each would naturally also want a Directory.

In January 1798 a British spy managed to learn which five men were designated for Scotland, and reported their names to the Foreign Office in London: Thomas Muir, the Earl of Lauderdale, Lord Sempill, Charles Sinclair, and Angus Cameron.

There is no reason to suppose that, apart from Muir, any of these was in contact with the French. Still, a Scottish Republic has only ever figured as a matter of discussion during three stages in our history - in this revolutionary era, after the First World War, and today. It may be instructive to look at the origins of the notion.

The leader of the first Scottish Republic would surely have been James Maitland, Lord Lauderdale, aged 39 in 1798. He had had as much education as anyone could wish, at

the universities of Edinburgh, Paris, Oxford, and Glasgow, and been called to both the English and Scots Bars. The greatest influence on him came from his Glaswegian mentor, John Millar, professor of civil law and the earliest thinker to see government as a reflection of the society beneath it.

Lauderdale went into politics himself, as a Whig MP then, after succeeding to his title, as a Scottish representative peer. He was a leader of the democratic movement, the Friends of the People, which sprang up in Britain among admirers of the French Revolution.

For this he was disowned by the political establishment to which he belonged.

But he used his leisure well to start writing about political economy. Millar had been a pupil of Adam Smith and passed on that legacy to his own students, yet Lauderdale was critical of it. He said that ''Dr Smith's work contained some absurd ideas'', especially in ignoring the possibilities of boosting demand.

Though economic historians have noted here the germ of ideas developed in our own era by John Maynard Keynes, in Lauderdale's case they led him to the Right. At length, after concluding that agriculture had to be protected, he moved not just to the Tory party but to its extreme wing, and ended a long life opposing reforms that would have struck him as timid in his youth. His friend Hugh, Lord Sempill, was a military officer, a square peg in a round hole, cashiered at the age of 40 for his liberal views. He demanded a court martial, but nobody took any notice. He spent his idleness running messages between Scottish and English reformers, but did nothing much else for the rest of his equally long life.

A third member of this well-heeled clique, Charles Sinclair, was chosen as a stripling of 22 to be a delegate to a Scottish convention of the Friends of the People held in Edinburgh. He was arrested and accused of sedition, then suddenly discharged. Some said he had turned spy for the Government. More likely he owed his luck to his kinsman, Sir John Sinclair, MP for Caithness, tireless compiler of the Old Statistical Account and the most tedious man in Parliament. Probably he bored the authorities into letting off a rash youngster.

So three of these alleged republicans were in fact members of the landed gentry who anyway ran Scotland - if they had come to power in a Directory, it seems unlikely they would have followed the example of France and sent their families or friends to the guillotine. The masses, urban or rural, were throwing up no revolutionary leaders.

An exception to the rule was Angus Cameron. Born in Lochaber, he was by the 1790s living in Perthshire, where with fiery oratory he inflamed popular resistance to the formation of a militia raised in all the counties of Scotland against the threat of French invasion. The Duke of Atholl denounced him to the sheriff. That put him in big trouble, with a capital charge of treason laid against him. He fled and went into

hiding with reformers in London, which was probably how his name became known in paris. But then he disappeared from history.

Muir was another odd man out, if not to the same extent. He was a Glaswegian, son of a shopkeeper in the High Street who did well enough to buy a nice house with some land at Bishopbriggs. Muir senior proudly sent his boy to the university, also to sit at Millar's feet. But by the age of 20 the young man's career was already turning wrong: he joined student protests and, excluded from classes in Glasgow, had to go to Edinburgh instead. Still, he finished his studies and was called to the Bar.

He was not so much a tearaway as an over-earnest youth prodigal of his time spent in the, as yet, unrewarding cause of radicalism in Scotland. He figured among the founders of Glasgow's branch of the Friends of the People. He served as its delegate to the Scottish convention. There his wild speeches marked him out as a leader of its smaller, less moderate faction.

Scots radicals were not taken too seriously by the Government in London but Irish ones were, since their country seethed with barely repressed revolt. Muir made contact with a subversive movement, the United Irishmen, in particular with two of its founders, Archibald Hamilton Rowan, a flamboyant Anglo-Irish gentleman, and Dr William Drennan, a physician in Belfast.

At the convention in Edinburgh, Muir produced an address from the pair of them and insisted on reading it out despite protests from other delegates at its treasonable content. This was in fact innocuous by the standards of any later age, but the Irish blarney was capable of being misconstrued by the authorities. Two weeks after the convention ended, as Muir made his way to court in Glasgow for the first working day of 1793, he was arrested, taken to Edinburgh, and charged with sedition.

This was bad enough, but Muir made it worse. Released on bail, he went to London to consult English reformers. To cap that he decided to take a holiday in Paris, as thousands of other idealists were doing, to see the Revolution at first hand: ''Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, and to be young was very heaven,'' wrote another, William Wordsworth.

Muir had arranged with his solicitor to be informed when his trial came on. The date was fixed for

February 11. As he had still not

turned up a fortnight later he was outlawed. Even if he meant to return it would have been hard, for France had declared war on Britain on February 1.

Muir now found himself in a real mess. The situation in Paris deteriorated as the Terror started. Foreigners ran the risk of being interned and quite likely murdered. Somehow a letter got through from Muir senior telling his son to go to America, where they had relations.

He fled to Le Havre, booked a passage for New York, but was delayed by formalities for a couple of months. Suddenly he heard of another ship bound for Baltimore by way of Belfast. This was dangerous for him as an outlaw in Britain. But he had no choice: he jumped aboard and so escaped.

Still, Muir's insouciance remained amazing. From Belfast he took a trip to Dublin to meet the United Irishmen. As his ship set off again and passed through the North Channel, he transferred to a small boat which landed him at Portpatrick on July 30. A customs officer who had once worked as a solicitor's clerk in Edinburgh recognised him. Muir returned to the capital again, this time in chains.

His trial, opening on August 30, 1793, was one of the legal sensations of the century. Robert Dundas, the Lord Advocate, prosecuted him. Muir defended himself - another big mistake, because he gave way to the temptation to indulge in oratory rather than contest the relevant points of law, when the Crown's case was not strong.

Muir's closing speech, an impassioned but rambling affair three hours long, contained lines more likely to put the jurors off than win their sympathy: ''From my infancy to this moment, I have devoted myself to the cause of the people. I am careless and indifferent to my fate. I can look danger, and I can look death in the face, for I am shielded by the consciousness of my own rectitude.''

His rectitude did not impress Lord Braxfield, presiding over the court, who treated him with jesting contempt: ''I never was an admirer of the French,'' he began summing up, ''but I can now only consider them as monsters of human nature.''

As for the politics of the case, ''Mr Muir went about among ignorant country people and among the lower classes, making them leave off their work, and inducing them to believe that a reform is absolutely necessary for their liberty, which, had it not been for him, they would never have suspected was in danger.

''What right have they to representation? Government in this country is made up of the landed interest, which alone has a right to be represented. As for the rabble, who have nothing but personal property, what hold has the nation of them? What security for the payment of their taxes? They may pack up all their property on their backs and leave the country in the twinkling of an eye.''

Braxfield mused aloud what punishment was right, and settled on 14 years' transportation to Botany Bay. Everyone else thought this monstrously harsh, yet in the end it was confirmed. The arguments lasted more than a year, so it was November 1794, before Muir left on his long journey.

A heart-rending scene took place on the quay at Leith. Muir's parents were old and knew they could not outlive his sentence. Pious Presbyterians, they saw before them their dreams for their clever son shattered. They handed him the Bible which would be found by his deathbed at Chantilly. As he was rowed out to his ship, he pointed to heaven where they would meet again.

Australia, a decade or so after the arrival of the first fleet, was about as remote and inhospitable as the moon appears to us. Muir and three companions were the first political prisoners sent to the penal colony. They had nothing in common with anyone else, the convicts or the soldiers guarding them. They were not forced to labour, but neither were they entitled to free food or supplies. Everything was incredibly expensive. Muir and his friends could either live off money sent from home, grow their own crops, or else find paid employment of some kind.

Muir wrote his one surviving letter from Botany Bay on December 13, 1795: ''I am perfectly well; pleased with my situation as much as a person can be who is forever separated from all they loved and respected. I have a neat little house here, and another two miles distant, at a farm across the water.'' He begged above all for sugar, tobacco, and rum - ''a constant supply by every vessel''.

But he did not have to stand it long. Ships of other nations were starting to ply the South Seas, and early in 1796 an American one called in for provisions. It had sailed from Boston via Cape Town and from Botany Bay it would make for what is now British Columbia, to buy furs off the Red Indians and take them for trade in China before returning home with exotic goods.

Convicts often got away on these passing merchants' ships, for there were not enough guards to stop them. One night in February 1796, Muir pushed out in a small boat on which he waited offshore till the next day. Then the Americans kept the rendezvous he had arranged and picked him up.

The voyage was to take Muir right round the world. Once he had reached North America he made his way down to California, through Mexico and across to Cuba, sometimes staying with exiled Scots he met along the route. Occasional reports of his progress reached home.

From Havana he sailed for Cadiz, where more misfortune awaited him. Spain was an ally of France in the war, and the port lay under blockade by the Royal Navy. The commander had got wind that the fugitive was coming and attacked his ship. Just as it surrendered, Muir was hit in the face by splinters form an exploding cannon-ball. British sailors came aboard to search for him. But the Spanish crew said he was dead, and he had been too horribly disfigured to be recognised. He was sent ashore with other prisoners.

At last, towards the end of 1797, Muir arrived back in France, where he was greeted as a revolutionary hero. In Paris he mixed with United Irishmen planning the great rebellion that was to break out in their country the next year. He persuaded them to bring Scotland into their strategy. Wolfe Tone wrote in a report to the Directory: ''We can disembark 15,000 men just as easily at Leith as in Ireland. These are more than enough to gain control of all the country between Edinburgh and Glasgow, where at the moment there are no troops.''

But like all exiled plotters, cut off from home and reliant on their hosts, they easily fell out. Muir supported himself by articles for the press which Tone thought ''very foolish''; he went with other Irishmen to ask him not to write any more. Afterwards Tone said: ''Of all the vain, obstinate blockheads that ever I met, I never saw his equal. Muir told us roundly that he knew as much of our country as we did.''

Muir's adventures, or his reception in France, had gone to his head. It was his own immature personality that steadily cut him off from anyone who might have befriended or helped him. It seems he grew lonely and miserable, embarrassed by the huge eyepatch he wore to cover his ugliness and by the way he had to slobber his food. In the end he could only crawl away to a small town and drink and die. His projects were by then empty. The Irish had revolted, got French aid, and still been crushed; Tone cut his throat to escape the hangman. There was no chance of the Directory trying again in Scotland.

Instead, Muir's brother Scots played a huge part in the war against revolutionary France that continued almost unabated from 1793 to 1815. Those from the enlightened elite who at first showed sympathy with French ideas soon rallied round the Union Flag. Common men also flocked to the king's colours, their will to fight the foe undaunted by the social strains of wartime. The way led on not to a Scottish Republic but to deeper loyalty to Britain and the Empire.

n The next instalment of Michael Fry's Millennium Project will appear on Thursday, June 4.