The Mob and the Union: The Malt Tax Riots of 1725 and the Porteous Riots of 1736

established claims rest on trial records, parliamentary proceedings, contemporary letters (such as those to the minister Robert Wodrow) and the work of historians including Christopher Whatley, Valerie Wallace and K. J. Logue. shared claims involve interpretation. traditional claims come from later tradition and from Scott's novel.

The weak points are these. Casualty figures vary widely: for Glasgow from nine to as many as twenty dead, and for the Grassmarket shootings from six to nine or more. The sum paid to Daniel Campbell is given variously as about £6,000, £6,400 and £9,000. Witnesses at Porteous's trial disagreed about whether he fired himself or ordered his men to fire. Many details of the lynching, including the disguises of its leaders and their supposed social rank, come from rumour and from Scott.

The malt tax and the Union

established The Treaty of Union promised Scotland exemption from the English malt tax for the duration of the war then being fought. In 1713 an attempt to extend it was abandoned after protests that nearly brought a Scottish motion to dissolve the Union. In 1725 Sir Robert Walpole's government imposed a tax on Scottish malt at half the English rate. Malt was the basis of ale, the everyday drink, and the tax was widely seen as a breach of the Union. The Lord Advocate, Robert Dundas, opposed it and was dismissed.

The Shawfield riot

established The tax was due on 23 June 1725. That evening and the next day a Glasgow crowd stopped excise officers from collecting it and attacked Shawfield Mansion, the town house of Daniel Campbell, MP for the Glasgow burghs, who was believed to have voted for the tax. Campbell and his family were away; he seems to have removed his valuables in advance. The crowd demolished the interior. Two companies of soldiers under Captain Bushell, quartered in the town, fired on a stone-throwing crowd; two were killed in the first volley, and more as the soldiers retreated, firing as they went. Nine people died and about seventeen were wounded. Bushell's men were forced out of Glasgow.

established The government sent General George Wade with infantry, dragoons and artillery. Duncan Forbes of Culloden, the new Lord Advocate, gathered evidence against the ringleaders; nineteen were jailed, and some were whipped through the streets or banished. The magistrates, accused of failing to act, were marched to Edinburgh under guard, but were quickly freed and returned to a welcome. Bushell was convicted for firing without authority, then pardoned and promoted. Campbell received thousands of pounds in compensation from the burgh, which he is said to have put towards buying the island of Islay.

shared Protests broke out across Scotland. In Edinburgh, the brewers stopped brewing in an illegal strike until legal pressure forced them back. The historian Valerie Wallace links the riots to a Presbyterian "moral economy" that saw unjust taxation as a breach of covenant and Union. The episode also persuaded the government to set up the Board of Trustees for Manufactures and Fisheries in 1727, using funds promised at the Union, to promote the linen industry.

Wilson, Robertson and the Grassmarket shootings

established Andrew Wilson, a baker from Pathhead, near Kirkcaldy, who had turned to smuggling, had had goods seized by the revenue officers. With George Robertson, William Hall and others he robbed a revenue collector at Pittenweem, apparently to recover his losses. They were caught and sentenced to death. On Sunday 11 April 1736, while they were taken to a service in the Tolbooth church, Wilson seized the guards so that Robertson could escape, which made Wilson a popular hero.

established At Wilson's hanging in the Grassmarket on 14 April, the crowd stoned the hangman and the guard. Captain John Porteous, commander of Edinburgh's City Guard, a former soldier known for his harshness, led his men in firing into the crowd. Accounts of the dead range from six to nine, with many wounded. Porteous was arrested, tried before the High Court of Justiciary in July and found guilty of murder, though sixteen witnesses said they had not seen him fire. He was sentenced to hang on 8 September.

The lynching

established Porteous had friends in government. With the king in Hanover, Queen Caroline, acting as regent, granted a six-week reprieve. Edinburgh suspected that a full pardon would follow. On the night of 7 September a crowd seized the city gates, disarmed the City Guard, burned the door of the Tolbooth, dragged Porteous out and hanged him from a dyer's pole in the Grassmarket. Contemporaries remarked on the crowd's order and discipline: tradition says it left money in payment for the rope. The government offered a reward of £200 for the ringleaders, but no one was ever convicted.

Westminster's revenge

established London saw the lynching as a defiance of royal authority. A bill was introduced to imprison and disqualify the Lord Provost, Alexander Wilson, abolish the City Guard and pull down the Netherbow Port. Scottish members and peers, led by the Duke of Argyll, fought it, and the final Act of 1737 only disqualified the Provost from office and fined the city £2,000 for Porteous's widow. An order that every minister read a proclamation against the murderers from the pulpit caused a further storm in the Church.

shared Historians see the riots as evidence of the popular resentment of the Union in its first decades and of the limited reach of government in Scotland. Historians of the eighteenth-century crowd stress that such crowds often had a strong sense of their own legitimacy and targeted specific offenders. Sir Walter Scott made the Porteous riot the opening of The Heart of Mid-Lothian (1818), which fixed the image of a disciplined, avenging Edinburgh mob in the public mind.

• Glasgow's MP Daniel Campbell is said to have used his compensation for the Shawfield riot to buy Islay.
• Captain Bushell, who ordered troops to fire on the Glasgow crowd, was convicted, pardoned and then promoted.
• Andrew Wilson became a hero when he held the guards in the Tolbooth church so that his fellow prisoner could escape.
• Porteous's original gravestone in Greyfriars Kirkyard bore only "P. 1736".
• The heart-shaped pattern in the cobbles near St Giles, the Heart of Midlothian, marks the site of the Tolbooth that the 1736 crowd broke into.

• Disputed: the death toll in each shooting. The sources disagree; there is no single, precise figure for either.
• Disputed: the sum paid to Daniel Campbell. Figures from about £6,000 to £9,000 appear.
• Not established: the lynching mob's disguises and gentlemanly leaders. These come largely from rumour and Scott.
• Myth: the riots were nationalist risings. They were protests against particular taxes and acts of injustice, though resentment of the Union fed them.