ABSTRACT
‘That damned Scotch packhorse’, Lord St Vincent called Sir Charles Middleton. 1 In eighteenth-century England, where thoroughbreds were admired and Scots despised, St Vincent could hardly have contrived a more scornful remark. Scots were clannish and pushy, his generation believed; they were personally unreliable and politically treacherous; they spoke an incomprehensible dialect; they were stingy. Worst of all, perhaps, Scots immigrants to England seemed successful out of all proportion to their numbers: ‘they were the top engineers, surgeons, and philandering biographers’. 2
