The Catholic Gael

Charles A. Coulombe remembers Ruaraidh Erskine of Mar

One of the more intriguing Catholic individuals in British culture and politics was Ruaraidh Erskine of Marr. He was born The Honourable Stuart Richard Joseph Erskine in Brighton, the third of four children born to William MacNaughton Erskine, 5th Baron Erskine, an army officer, and his wife, Caroline Alice Martha Grimble. The family were descendants of the Erskine Earls of Buchan and, as it happened, forbears as well –Ruaraidh’s nephew inherited the Earldom of Buchan in 1960, and the two lines were remerged.

In any case, Erskine learned to speak Scots Gaelic from his Harris-born nanny. His family were Recusants, but it is not clear if he was baptized into the Faith or converted later. But his background gave him three passions that would remain throughout his lifetime: the Catholic Church; the Jacobite cause and a strong Monarchy (which would be sufficient bond of union between the three kingdoms); and an intense love of Scotland, her native tongue, her culture, and her independence. He wanted to see Scots Gaelic raised to a high literary and cultural level and restored as the country’s major language.

The year 1888 saw the birth of the Neo-Jacobite Movement, with the founding of the Order of the White Rose by the Earl of Ashburnham and others. This fired young Erskine’s imagination. It was an amazing group. Filled with artists and writers, it bred both Celtic Nationalists, Catholic converts, and advocates of strong traditional Monarchy as the only rightful bond between what otherwise ought to be independent countries. Two years later, he and Herbert Vivian – who would become a long-term friend and ally – founded a weekly newspaper called The Whirlwind. It was Jacobite, frankly calling for the restoration of the Stuarts and a strong Monarchy binding the three kingdoms together. Nationalism, peace, free trade, Irish Home Rule, and opposition to female suffrage and socialism characterized its other positions. It lasted only a year.

The Order of the White Rose was hardly a political pressure group, attracting primarily artists and Romantics (including Boston’s Ralph Adams Cram and Isabella Gardner). Hungering for something more overtly activist, in 1891 Erskine, Vivian and Melville Henry Massue, the Marquis de Ruvigny, broke with the OWR, and founded the Legitimist Jacobite League of Great Britain and Ireland. The same year, Erskine stood for the North Buteshire constituency as a Scottish Tory Home Ruler – but he withdrew before the election. He was president of the LJL in 1893, 1894, and 1897.

He returned to journalism in 1901, with the launch of the Gaelic language newspaper, Am Bàrd. It folded after a year, but in 1904, he launched what would be his most successful publication, Guth na Blaidhna (“The Voice of the Year”). A quarterly, and at first bilingual, it was unabashedly Catholic, while –despite being bilingual in the beginning – extremely supportive of the Gaelic

Revival. It also advocated an alliance of the Celtic peoples – to include the Bretons – as a counterpoint to their respective dominant nations. It would last until 1925. During its run, the publication brought him into contact with William Gillies; together they formed the Scots National League (SNL) in 1920.

But this was far from his only such venture in those years. In 1908-1909, he published the weekly Gaelic language newspaper, Alba. Dealing with such cultural matters as land, crofting, fishing, Scottish Gaelic-medium education, early Scottish history, and Gaelic song. Five years after its failure, he revived The Scottish Review. This was a political journal, and here was Erskine’s brief flirtation with the Left. Contributors included the Aberdonian trade unionist William Diack, James Maxton of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), the author and poet Lewis Spence, and the Welsh Nationalist MP Edward Thomas John.

Erskine and Gillies brought the SNL into the National Party of Scotland in 1928, but soon parted ways with the political Scots Nationalists. He continued his political interest in Catholicism, becoming ever more a Distributist. As with Harri Edwards and Saunders Lewis in Wales, he felt that the ever-more leftward trend of what became the SNP was as much a betrayal of the real Scotland as the Protestant Revolt had been. In sum, Erskine’s vision – elaborated in his 1931 book, Changing Scotland – was of an independent, re-Catholicised, and re-Gaelicised nation, with its own politically effective King (shared with similarly rejuvenated Ireland, England, Wales, Cornwall, and Man, and perhaps Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, each ruled by His Majesty in his own right), as part of a re-Catholicised, Monarchical family of European nations. It might well be dismissed as utopian; but is there any better vision available to-day?