The controversial Scot who drew 100k mourners to his funeral

Those who, on each side of deep waters, remember the Scotland of old, the Scotland of Stewarts and Jacobites, often want to know little or nothing about a new Scotland of democracy and industry. Scots can be hard to understand. Some of the neighbours say, in that case, why bother?

A telling example of one proud Scot who was hard to understand was a fierce conservative in Victorian Glasgow, Sheriff Archibald Alison. Despite strong public interests, he never managed to organise any sort of serious political career for himself, even though he embraced a potent belief that nothing else was worthy of him.

In 1853 he announced he had joined the National Association for the Vindication of Scottish Rights. It was taking up a range of grievances – some of them still familiar. The agitation was not yet, admittedly, a fierce one.

Yet Alison and his friends quickly resigned from the association when they discovered “elements of a dangerous character beginning to work in it.

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“We soon found that other more ardent and hot-headed patriots not obscurely aimed at a dissolution of the Union.”

His own writings offer further clues why he found a transition to national politics so difficult.

Alison’s home was at Possil Park just to the north of Glasgow, which he treated as his country seat. He liked to ride down to deal in person with unrest in the city’s streets. Thanks to him, workers ready for trouble were likely to end the day behind bars.

A nostalgic memoir of Possil records that even as Victorian industry boomed, this green spot had the feel of being far from the madding crowd, free of noise and smoke, nestling among fine old trees.

After Alison’s death in 1867, no new tenant chose to take over an estate first recorded in 1242. The observer reasoned that such reminders of local history could surely not be sacrificed to indifference: “With its beautiful gardens, its grassy slopes, and its clear lake, Possil formed as delightful and retired a country residence as any in the county.”

Yet the place would see in a few years more change than in the previous 600: “Only a fragment of the stables now remains to tell that a fine country seat once was there”, wrote somebody else in 1878.

By this time, 100 acres, including the mansion house and pleasure grounds, had been feued to Walter M’Farlane & Co, iron founders.

The new owners knocked down the residence, felled the trees, erected a deafening workshop and laid out the rest of the estate in streets and tenements.

We can thank heaven for old Alison that he never had to see any of this. In 1832 the house had been his salvation when, though just 40, he lost his position as an official lawyer. He had got the job because he was a Tory, but now came the first Reform Act when all the available patronage was switched over to the Whigs.

With his income vanished he turned to writing for money, especially in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, where with a suitable volume of hack work the hard-up Tories could try to keep going.

But for Alison there was more to it. He declared it his life’s work “to oppose the erroneous opinions which, since the French Revolution and in consequence of it, had, as I conceived, overspread the world, in political, economical and social concerns”.

The great failure that he identified in pre-revolutionary France, as in his present-day Britain, was a reluctance to stand up to popular intimidation. Britain might have been spared the same fate as France, but had no grounds for complacency. Whig governments were practically treasonable, and the 19th century looked likely to turn out an era not just of democracy but also into anarchy.

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Despite the heavy political baggage, Alison’s work helped to give the magazine a thriving circulation. He offered the first survey of the French Revolution to readers who knew no foreign languages. Some numbers of Blackwood’s ran up huge sales on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, with translations into French, German and even Arabic.

The purple prose did lighten the usual cumbersome apparatus of Scottish philosophical history, with its long citations of authorities. Benjamin Disraeli pilloried Alison in a novel as Mr Wordy, who “proves that Providence is on the side of the Tories”.

Alison did think a Tory interpretation of Scottish history might yet be constructed out of the strict but kindly spirit seen at work in the northern nation’s schools, poorhouses and law courts. In an article, “The Old Scottish Parliament”, he even defended that object of derision for Anglicising Whigs because it “gave a full and fair representation to the whole property of the nation, and entirely excluded that selfish and partial legislation which never fails to follow the ascendancy of mere numbers”.

He rejected the view that “the original institutions of Scotland were the height of human absurdity, a compound of feudal tyranny and savage violence, and that all the prosperity which now distinguishes its surface is to be ascribed to the Union with England”. Since 1832 there remained “not one vestige of the ancient Scottish constitution”.

In other words, he was looking for the remnants of a conservative Scotland on which to rebuild.

Against Alison’s severe views on organised labour can be set against his distress at the callousness of contemporary capitalism, which he also wished to correct once he was able to return to legal practice.

His brother, William Pulteney Alison, pioneer of the reform of public health in Scotland, proposed that relief should be extended to the offspring of the able-bodied unemployed (contrary to the Scottish poor law, which had nothing for children).

Archibald agreed and tried to give effect to the idea by his own judgments in test cases. But the Court of Session overturned them in 1852.

For all his hair-raising opinions, Alison was a witty, spirited man, his sense of humour giving him an even temper not always at once apparent. While he seems to have taken his eternal forecasts of disaster seriously, they merely endeared him to a wide circle of friends and the public at large. To many of his brother Scots, his proud patriotism made up for other foibles.

Alison remained active to the end of his life. He noted on September 9, 1863, that at the age of 70 he had walked 20 miles in five hours without fatigue. He attended to his judicial functions on May 19, 1867, was taken ill next day and died on May 23 at Possil House. A crowd of 100,000 Glaswegians attended a lavish public funeral a week later.