Forfar Burghs

The five Forfar burghs were all located in Forfarshire, to the north of the Firth of Tay, but they differed markedly in character. The largest was Dundee, which had a population of around 12,000 in 1639, and was about the same size as the cities of Aberdeen and Glasgow. According to the customs official, Thomas Tucker, in 1656 Dundee was a shadow of its former self, but was still accounted ‘a pretty considerable place’, and ‘though not glorious, yet not contemptible’, with a merchant fleet of ten large vessels, and trade which still brought imports from Norway, the Baltic, Holland and France, and exports of salmon and cloth. The next largest burgh, Montrose, with a pre-war population of around 5,000, had escaped the economic collapse of its larger neighbour, and was described by Tucker as ‘a pretty town, with a safe harbour’, importing salt and exporting salmon, cloth and corn. The coastal burgh of Arbroath had been in economic decline since the dissolution of its abbey nearly a century before. By 1639 it was a settlement of around 1,200 people, and this number may have declined further by 1656, when it was ‘a small town without any trade’. Forfar and Brechin were inland market towns, each with a modest population of 1,350 before the wars, and Brechin, which had become a royal burgh only in 1641, was under the ‘constabulary and justiciary’ of the earl of Panmure, who held the right to choose one of the two bailies for the burgh. I.D. Whyte, ‘Urbanisation in Early-Modern Scotland: a Preliminary Analysis’, Sc. Econ. Soc. Hist. ix. 24; Misc. Sc. Burgh Rec. Soc. (Edinburgh, 1881), 22-3; NRS, GD45/12/331-2. The scale of the difference between Dundee and the other four burghs can best be seen in the assessments each was expected to bear. In the general assessment of 1657, Dundee was rated at nearly £70, Montrose at almost £20, but the other three were deemed to be far poorer: Brechin was to pay £6 14s 6d, Arbroath £4 10s, and Forfar only £2 1s 1d. A. and O. This was the government’s calculation of the burghs’ economic worth, and it is unlikely that Dundee, at least, was able to pay its dues in full. At the end of 1653 it was reported that the burgh would ‘pay little or nothing at all, though their cess in the book of rates is considerable’. Scot. and Commonwealth ed. Firth, 287n.

Dundee’s economic collapse had been sudden, and catastrophic. During the 1640s the burgh had retained its economic prosperity, and it had suffered little material damage as a result of the fighting, but its support for Charles Stuart in 1650-1 proved to be a costly mistake. While John Lambert* and Oliver Cromwell* shadowed the Scottish army on its march south towards Worcester in August 1651, George Monck* advanced towards Dundee from Stirling, and on the refusal of his summons, he invested the burgh, and after a brief bombardment by his ‘great guns’, took it by storm on 1 September. In the ensuing fighting, as many as 800 royalist soldiers and townspeople perished, the military governor was ‘killed in cold blood’, and the English troops were given the right to plunder undisturbed for 24 hours. Dundee was accounted ‘a very large prize’ as the wealth of the burgh itself was enhanced by that of Edinburgh and other towns, whose citizens had sent ‘their ware and gear’ there for safe-keeping. It took a fortnight, and repeated warnings and court-martials, before Monck and the other senior officers could get their men back under control. Scot. and Commonwealth ed. Firth, 7, 9, 11-15; Dow, Cromwellian Scot. 14, 16; Gentles, New Model Army, 410; Ludlow, Mems. i. 282-3. The economic effect of the assault and subsequent looting is difficult to gauge, although the later claim that many ships had been lost, the harbour area effectively destroyed and over £8,000 of damage inflicted, may not have been exaggerated. Charters of Dundee (Dundee, 1880), 94-5. The extent of the crisis is reflected in the low yield of the assessments in 1653, and by the decision of the gildbrethren in February 1654, ‘taking into consideration the great dearth of men and trade within this burgh’ to encourage ‘travellers and strangers to come to this town and make their abode and residence’. Burgh Laws of Dundee ed. A.J. Warden (1872), 139. Such an open invitation was extremely unusual, as royal burghs invariably guarded their rights and privileges against outsiders with tenacity. The other Forfar burghs did not put up any resistance to the English in 1651, and did not share Dundee’s fate. Montrose was occupied on 4 September, after rumours that royalist forces were concentrating there; by the end of the month attempts had been made to fortify the ruins of Arbroath abbey; and Montrose, Brechin and Forfar were chosen as quarters for horse troops ‘in order to observe the enemy’s motion’ while plans were made to capture Aberdeen. Scot. and Commonwealth ed. Firth, 14, 17, 326.

After the trauma of invasion and occupation, in the spring of 1652 the Forfar burghs fell over themselves to assent to the tender of union. All five subscribed the general assent organised by Edinburgh on 27 February, and their ‘desires’ were suitably restrained, focusing on the retention of burgh privileges, the promotion of trade and industry and the lifting of assessments until the burghs could recover from the wars. Cromwellian Union ed. Terry, 46, 55. It is doubtful that these requests made any impact on the new regime, but later in the decade there were some concessions made by the government. In October 1653 the assessments from Arbroath were waived to allow the repair of the harbour, and in December the assessments extracted from Dundee were kept at a level lower than the published rate. Worcester Coll. Oxf. Clarke xlv, unfol.: 29 Oct., 26 Dec. 1653. All five burghs were heavily garrisoned in the mid-1650s, with even the small settlements of Forfar and Arbroath hosting troops of horse, while Dundee had to accommodate a whole regiment of foot. Worcester Coll. Oxf. Clarke xliii, f. 66. The burden of this was considerable: a fact recognised by the government, which, after various earlier promises, finally removed the Dundee garrison altogether in November 1657, on condition that the burgh defences were demolished to deny it to any royalist insurgents. Clarke Pprs. ed. Firth, iii. 48; Charters of Dundee, 94. By this time, the other Forfar burghs seem to have returned to an approximation of normal life, as Tucker’s 1656 report on the prosperous coastal town of Montrose suggests. From the autumn of 1655 the Brechin council was holding regular civic elections, which once again recognised the right of the earl of Panmure to select his own ‘bailie and justiciar’ from a list of three nominated by the burgh. NRS, GD45/12/331-2. The burgh assessment commissions appointed in June 1657 were entirely manned by locals, with the English officers named in 1655 being quietly omitted. A. and O.; Acts Parl. Scot. vi, pt. 2, p. 840.

The parliamentary elections for the burghs also seem to show a slow return to stability in the Forfar burghs by the mid-1650s. Under the ordinance on the distribution of Scottish seats, the five burghs were to return one MP, with the election being held at Dundee. A. and O. Little is known of the 1654 election, although the choice of the Dundee town clerk, Sir Alexander Wedderburn (who was also the assessment collector for Forfarshire), may reflect the burghs’ desire to improve their position with the Scottish executive. The survival of the 1656 indenture gives a fuller picture. As with other burghs across Scotland, the Forfar burghs sent individual commissioners to Dundee, who then met on 15 August under the watchful eye of the sheriff – in this case the governor of Dundee, Colonel Ralph Cobbett – and re-elected Wedderburn as their MP. The identity of the five commissioners suggests that the traditional oligarchy in each of the burghs had survived intact from the 1640s. Four of them were current or former bailies (the fifth was an Arbroath merchant), and those from Dundee, Forfar and Brechin had all been commissioners for their burghs in the Scottish Parliaments before 1651. C219/45, unfol.; Young, Parliaments of Scot. i. 179-80; ii. 656, 740. The Brechin commissioner, George Steel, had been the earl of Panmure’s choice as bailie and justiciar in the burgh in October 1655. NRS, GD45/12/331. The 1659 elections were presumably conducted in the same way, with commissioners from each burgh making the final decision. But there was a further complication, as Secretary John Thurloe* had sent the commander-in-chief in Scotland, George Monck, a list of court candidates who were to be found Scottish seats, including his own friend (and probable kinsman), Lawrence Oxburgh. TSP vii. 584, 772. The return of Oxburgh for Forfar Burghs, on the nomination of Thurloe and order of Monck, shows the ability of the government to impose its will on the electors meeting at Dundee, even without pressure from a resident garrison; but Oxburgh’s return may also reveal the extent to which the burghs were willing to curry favour with the regime by giving way to such demands, in the hope of extracting further concessions at a later date.

Unlike the dramatic start to English rule in 1651, the restoration of the Stuarts in 1660 had little impact on the Forfar Burghs. Dundee was quick to get its charter ratified in 1661 (not least because the earlier version had been ‘burnt and destroyed’ by the English troops ten years earlier), and also sought compensation for its sufferings in the service of the Stuarts. Charters of Dundee, 85, 94-5. Even in the absence of council records for this period, it can be surmised that the other burghs followed Dundee in making the most of the change of regime without recriminations. The elections for the Scottish Parliament of 1661 saw three of the burghs return commissioners who had served throughout the upheavals of the 1640s and 1650s. Arbroath chose John Auchterlony, who had been a parliamentary commissioner between 1643 and 1648, and was appointed to the Cromwellian assessment commission in 1655. Young, Parliaments of Scot. ii. 769; Acts Parl. Scot. vi. pt. 2, p. 840. Brechin elected George Steel, who had sat for the burgh in the 1640s, and was their commissioner to the election of 1656. Young, Parliaments of Scot. ii. 770; C219/45, unfol. Dundee elected the former Westminster MP for Forfar Burghs in 1654 and 1656, Sir Alexander Wedderburn of Blackness. Young, Parliaments of Scot. ii. 774.