Back in the Day: The story of one of strangest characters in Scottish history

Founder of an extreme religious sect called the Buchanites, Elspeth Buchan is one of the strangest characters in all Scottish history and has been given a damning verdict by both of our two greatest poets, Robert Burns and MacDiarmid.

As we shall see, she really was a true eccentric and deserves her place in MacDiarmid’s strange pantheon.

First of all, however, in response to a question emailed to me about MacDiarmid, I have no doubt that were he in his prime today, Hugh MacDiarmid would be a leading figure in the campaign for Yes, even though he would probably have fallen out with just about anybody and everybody in it. That was just part of his character, his nature, a subject of great fascination to MacDiarmid.

In 1936, while living in Shetland, MacDiarmid wrote Scottish Eccentrics as part of his musings on the Scottish psyche and if there were such a thing.

His publishers’ blurb describes his choice of the eccentrics and adds: “He supports these leading cases with apt material drawn from the lives of hundreds of Scots of every period in history and every walk of life, and in this way builds up a brilliant panoramic picture of Scottish psychology through the ages, singularly at variance with all generally accepted views of the national character.”

The man who wrote of himself that “I’ll ha’e nae hauf-way hoose, but aye be whaur Extremes meet” had a lifelong fascination with the duality of Scottish human nature which he often called the Caledonian antisyzygy – though he did not coin that description, as it belongs to Professor G Gregory Smith.

The Caledonian antisyzygy is defined by the Concise Scots Dictionary as follows: “The presence of duelling polarities within one entity, considered to be characteristic of the Scottish temperament sometimes shortened to antisyzygy”. MacDiarmid once gave a succinct example of how he himself was consumed by the antisyzygy:

“I write now in English and now in Scots

To the despair of friends who plead

For consistency; sometimes achieve the true lyric cry,

Next but chopped-up prose; and write whiles

In traditional forms, next in a mixture of styles.

So divided against myself, they ask:

How can I stand (or they understand) indeed?”

MacDiarmid never did find the exact answer to the question of his nature, or that of Scots generally, before he died in 1978, but back in 1936 in Scottish Eccentrics, he was also blasting out warnings about the future of Scotland.

He quotes Colin Walkinshaw, author of the 1935 work The Scots Tragedy: “Our generation must see either the end of Scotland or a new beginning. Can Scotland hope to survive? If she does not, the history of the process whereby the long centuries of her national life have been brought to nothing will be of the strongest intellectual interest. For the final and permanent destruction of a nation once fully established and conscious of itself will be something unique in the records of Western Christendom.”

Typically, MacDiarmid rises to the challenge: “If, to take up Mr Walkinshaw’s speculation, Scotland is to survive, where is the impetus to come from, what invisible reservoir secretes such a startling potentiality? No glimpse of anything of the sort is to be found in the conception of the Scottish character almost universally accepted to-day; certainly nothing seems to be further from the minds of the vast majority of Scots themselves.

‘SO far as they are concerned the long centuries of Scotland’s national life have long ago been brought to nothing; they are totally unaware of them. Their ‘race memory’ only goes back to the day before yesterday. It is strictly confined to those aspects of the past which have contributed to the present happy state of affairs and are commendable on that account.

“Every consideration is abjectly adjusted to that. It is agreed that ‘History had to happen’ and there is a general belief in progress – a general belief that everything is working together for good. Any harking back on elements in the past that seem to challenge that popular assumption – any insistence on the significance of elements customarily left out – any attempt to undermine the conventional acceptance of history and get down to fundamentals – is deprecated, resented, misrepresented, or laughed out of court in the extremely limited circle privy to such activities.”

That was written by MacDiarmid 84 years ago. It could have been written yesterday, for nowadays on a daily basis we see the attempts to re-write history to suit one Union narrative, while those of us who try to sustain Scottish history with facts are consigned to a dustbin marked delusional.

So Hugh was a “Yesser” but undoubtedly he would be an eccentric one, though nowhere near as off the wall as Elspeth Buchan.

She was of humble background, born in Fatmacken between Banff and Portsoy in 1738. Her parents kept an inn, and at a very young age she became a cowherd, before being packed off to domestic service in Glasgow. She met and married Robert Buchan with whom she had three children.

So far, so normal, but she was also developing her own version of Christianity that depended on a literal interpretation of the Bible.

A Kirk minister from Irvine, the Rev Hugh Whyte, met her and within a short while she and he had set up their own sect in the Ayrshire town, with Buchan as the leader with her heretical views and Whyte acting as chief disciple. The Buchanites soon attracted dozens of adherents from all classes of society – almost 50 of them eventually – drawn mainly by Buchan’s confident expressions of a divinely-inspired future.

According to the writer Alexander Morton, “Friend Mother” Buchan and Whyte laid claim to visions and revelations, and lay for many hours in a dark room covered with a sheet in confident expectation of them.

Whyte was barred from preaching by the local Kirk presbytery, but would not leave Buchan, whose pronouncements became ever more bizarre, including her statement that she was a saint and would not die. As news of the cult spread, she had many detractors but also some supporters, even in the press.

In the Scots Magazine in November 1784, a correspondent who signed himself “Glasguensis Mercator” (merchant of Glasgow) wrote: “This writer spent two days in their company during the month of August and studied them closely in their daily walk and conversation ... I found the Buchanites a very temperate, civil, discreet and sensible people, very free in declaring their principles, when they were attended to; but most of their visitants behaved in a rude, wicked, and abandoned way, which improper behaviour they met and bore with surprising patience and propriety.”

ONE of those visitors gives a different version, no less a personage than Robert Burns. In a letter to his cousin James Burness of Montrose – the original spelling of the Bard’s name was probably Burness or Burnes – Rabbie lets rip about Elspeth in Irvine.

He says: “A Mrs Buchan from Glasgow came among them, and began to spread some fanatical notions of religion among them, till in spring last the Populace rose and mobbed the old leader Buchan and put her out of the town; on which all her followers voluntarily quit the place likewise,

and with such precipitation, that many of them never shut their doors behind them.”

That Buchan was flung out of town is not disputed as another contemporary source wrote: “One of these visions Mrs Buchan imprudently published, fixing the destruction of the town of Irvine to a particular short day. This exasperated the mob, who considered her a witch, and drove her and Mr Whyte from the town. The rest immediately followed their leaders.” They moved to a farm and set up a commune.

Burns had a very dim view of Buchan’s religiosity: “Their tenets are a strange jumble of enthusiastic jargon; among others she pretends to give them the Holy Ghost by breathing on them, which she does with postures and gestures that are scandalously indecent. They have likewise a community of goods, and live nearly an idle life, carrying on a great farce of pretended devotion in hams and woods, where they lodge and lie together, and hold likewise a community of women, as it is another of their tenets that they can commit no mortal sin.”

Burns added that he was “personally acquainted with most of them.” He was certainly acquainted with one Buchanite woman, Jean Gardner, and it may be that Burns’s acknowledged failure to notch her name on his bedpost may have coloured his biased view.

Burns was not alone in suggesting massive impropriety which may have included a cult of free love within the Buchanites, yet no solid evidence of sordid behaviour ever emerged.

Her prophecies were daft enough. Morton wrote: “Just before she died Mother Buchan told her disciples that she had one secret to communicate – that she was in reality the Virgin Mary, and mother of our Lord; that she was the same woman mentioned in the Revelations as being clothed with the sun, and who was driven into the wilderness; and that she had been wandering in the world ever since our Saviour’s days and only for some time past had sojourned in Scotland.”

Another account of her death on March 29, 1791, is fascinating: “Mother Buchan became really ill, but she would not lie down, and no-one realised that the end was approaching – it was a cardinal point in their creed that she would never die. When she felt death near, she told them that though she might appear to die, she was only going to Paradise to arrange for their coming and if their faith remained firm she would return at the end of six months and they would all fly to heaven together.

“If they had not faith she would not return till the end of 10 years,

and if they were then still unprepared she would not return till the end of fifty years; when her appearance would be the sign of the end of the world and the final judgment of the wicked. Thus she kept up the delusion to the last, for immediately after this extraordinary pronouncement she died.”

The legend was extended even after her death. What remained of the sect mostly emigrated to the USA, but some stayed and attended her secret grave to see if she would indeed rise from the dead. She didn’t, and after the 50th anniversary of her death the Buchanites were

no more.

In his long essay on Buchan, MacDiarmid states: “I cannot agree that this is in any way an astounding story of religious imposture and childish credulity. The credulity and the element of imposture, or, as I prefer to believe, delusion, seem to me to be essentially the same as are to be found in any and every religion at all time.”

For Buchanites, read modern day England and America where the cults of Johnson and Trump seem to defy all logic by surviving long past the point of incredulity. It would take the genius of a MacDiarmid to explain why, and even he might fail.