Cuthbert conference
A symposium that explored the life of a Scot who played a key role in events leading up to the French Revolution
At the end of 2020, a special three-day symposium was held in France and online exploring the extraordinary but little-known life of Scotsman Cuthbert, or Colbert, of Castlehill.
first published details of the symposium in 2019 but, due to the challenges of researching and working through the coronavirus pandemic, it was postponed twice. Eventually the symposium moved wholly online – but, in fact, online working led to opportunities for collaborative working and involvement from afar, building on some unique research work.
The name Cuthbert of Castlehill might not be immediately familiar to readers. I am a writer, writing about history through biography with a particular interest in the north of Scotland – and yet, until I saw the callout for this symposium, I had never heard of
Seignelay Cuthbert of Castlehill. Often people talk about ‘an untold story’ or a ‘new discovery’, but this is genuinely one of the most unusual local histories I have come across, with implications that are far from local, with wideranging significance. According to the organisers of the symposium ‘it would certainly be no exaggeration to assert that no other Scot exercised as much influence on events in France in the second half of the 18th century’.This is due to the key role Cuthbert of Castlehill played in events leading to the French revolution.
But before looking at the symposium, let’s take a look at Cuthbert’s life and legacy, in order to understand both his role in French history and why he is little known in the land of his birth.
Who was Seignelay Cuthbert?
Seignelay Cuthbert of Castlehill was born in 1735, one of many sons in a lesser noble family in the highlands. Brought up on the family estate near Culloden, he was eleven years old at the time of the Jacobite ‘45 rising. His father was sheriff-substitute of Inverness, second in command to Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, the notorious ‘Old Fox’. As the Jacobites retreated northwards, Prince Charles Edward Stuart stayed with the Cuthberts at Castlehill House – although, like many families, the Cuthberts had a foot in both camps, Jacobite and government. On the Jacobite side, Seignelay Cuthbert’s uncle Lachlan fought at Culloden with the Royal Scots, a regiment of French exiles. Lachlan Cuthbert was captured at Drumossie Moor and transported to Marshalsea prison in London, but eventually freed into exile in France.
Meanwhile, immediately after the battle of Culloden,
government troops took over Castlehill House, ransacking the mansion, destroying much of the surrounding farmland, and cutting down a great number of trees for firewood. The tenants on Castlehill estate were harassed and left unable to pay rent, and the Cuthberts estimated their monetary losses at around £2,000.The Cuthberts already had problems with debt, and when, in 1748, Seignelay’s father died suddenly in a fall from a horse, the family were left in dire financial trouble. Local hearsay talked darkly of a curse, recalling that the Cuthberts had been involved in the brutal and unnecessary burning of two local women suspected as witches.
Fortunately for Seignelay Cuthbert, his formidable grandmother Jean Hay, the old Lady Castlehill, stepped in. Jean Hay was the daughter of the Right Reverend William Hay who had been bishop of Moray, but had lost his position after refusing to take an oath of fealty to William and Mary in 1689, retreating to his family at Castlehill. This strong Episcopal background might suggest why Seignelay and his family had some Jacobite sympathies and points to Seignelay’s future career. In around 1750, Jean Hay took Seignelay and his brother Lewis to family in London, hoping to find placements for the two brothers. She managed to find work for Lewis in Jamaica – and a place for Seignelay in France.
French connections
The Cuthberts had a longstanding link with France and two of Seignelay’s uncles lived there: not only Lachlan the Jacobite, but also Alexander, who was an Abbé in the French Church. The Cuthberts’ French connection had begun in the late 1600s, when a Frenchman called Jean-Baptiste Colbert was trying to prove that he had noble blood. ‘Le Grand Colbert’, as he is better known in France, came from a family of merchants but became the trusted and influential minister of finances to Louis XIV, the Sun King.
However, despite Jean-Baptiste’s power, influence and acquisition of the barony of Seignelay, he was still not considered to have the truly ‘noble’ credentials to fit in at court. A somewhat tenuous link with the Scottish Cuthbert family gave him the genealogy he needed.The Scottish Cuthberts were happy to go along with the connection, particularly as it immediately gave them an entrée into French society. They maintained the link, keeping ‘Seignelay’ as a birthname for their children and regularly sending younger siblings in the family to France.
Seignelay joined his uncles in France, and went to the Scots College in Paris, where he excelled in languages – unsurprisingly, since he already spoke English, Gaelic and French. Seignelay had been brought up a Presbyterian,
Seignelay’s vote came at a key tipping point in the French Revolution. The storming of the Bastille took place less than a month later
but his uncles Lachlan and Alexander had already converted to Catholicism, and Seignelay followed suit. Soon he was set for a career in the French Church.
Seignelay was apparently a very personable young man, ‘of a very becoming appearance… endowed with a solid judgement, and a remarkable good heart’, and he attracted a ‘patron’ in nobleman, clergyman and politician Lomenie de Brienne. Seignelay also frequented the salons of Paris, where he developed an interest in Enlightenment philosophy, meeting fellow Scot David Hume. The two men struck up a friendship, close enough to call each other ‘cousin’ in their correspondence.
Lomenie de Brienne named Seignelay as ‘Vicaire-Générale’ in Toulouse, but, although this took him away from the Paris salons, Seignelay maintained his connection with Hume. When Hume’s friend Adam Smith was visiting France, he too went to make Seignelay’s acquaintance. Adam Smith was tutoring the duke of Buccleuch, leading him on his ‘grand tour’ of Europe, and the duke and Smith stayed with Seignelay in the south of France. Seignelay wrote to Hume that he thought Smith was ‘a sublime man… his heart and mind are equally admirable’, and praised his writing. Adam Smith himself was less impressed, thinking that Seignelay Cuthbert was not really able to show them the ‘real’ Toulouse. Instead, Smith said
‘I have begun to write a book in order to pass away the time’. The book was to become The Wealth of Nations, Smith’s magnum opus and a fundamental text in economics, which earnt Smith the title ‘the father of capitalism’.
Seignelay Cuthbert was also writing and became the author of two books, including one on the project of a ‘treaty of perpetual and general peace’ between European Christian nations. He was also – very unusually for a foreigner – promoted even higher in the French church, becoming bishop of Rodez.
Seignelay Cuthbert was considered liberal amongst the clergy, a man in a slightly unusual position: he had used his French connections to find his initial place in the ministry, but had then been promoted due to his abilities. ‘The decisions he made’, argues historian Andrew Moore, ‘seem to have been reached mainly according to his own convictions, and these were profoundly affected by the “philosophes” with whom he mixed in his formative years’. Seignelay wanted to improve the society around him, and, when he was made bishop of Rodez, he encouraged the teaching and practice of new scientific theories – even sponsoring a balloon ascension – and tried to make improvements in areas as varied as agriculture, midwifery, education (including the education of women) and the state of the road network.
Seignelay’s improving zeal was matched with considerable gifts as an administrator. He was invited to serve on some of the most important committees of the day and elected to the estates general, which led to his presence at the crucial 1789 meeting of the estates general in Versailles. This meeting had been called by the king to address the economic crisis, but instead deputies drew up a long list of grievances and called for sweeping political and social reform.The clergy and nobility generally supported whatever the king wanted, but Seignelay unexpectedly split with the majority of his colleagues in the French Church to vote along with the ‘third estate’ (the general populace). Afterwards, he was carried around Versailles by a cheering crowd. Seignelay’s vote
According to the organisers of the symposium ‘it would certainly be no exaggeration to assert that no other Scot exercised as much influence on events in France in the second half of the 18th century’
came at a key tipping point in the French revolution.The storming of the Bastille took place less than a month later.
Although Seignelay strongly believed that reform was needed, events ultimately went too far and too fast for him. He wrote to his colleagues stressing ‘above all his desire to avoid any conflict or violence’. And, as the Revolutionary cry that ‘all men are born equal’ was taken up by slaves in the French colonies and contributed to the Haitian revolution, Seignelay Cuthbert’s support of the third estate brought him into conflict with his Scottish family: his brother Lewis, also sent abroad to make his fortune after Culloden, had become a slave owner and slave trader in Jamaica. At the same time that Seignelay Cuthbert was supporting change and greater equality in France, Lewis Cuthbert was arguing for the status quo, presenting evidence to a house of lords enquiry where he argued in favour of keeping the slave trade.
Despite this apparent conflict of views, family remained important for Seignelay, and in 1792 his brother Lewis visited him in Paris. Shortly afterwards Seignelay made the decision to leave France. It was a strange sort of exile: unlike other Frenchmen fleeing the revolution, Seignelay was actually returning to his home country and his welcoming family. Basing himself in London, he mixed not only with the exiled French clergy, but with high-ranking noble families, giving him access to very different worlds as he both worked with the schismatic ‘Petite Eglise’ which split from the main French Church, and made social visits to
various friends’ houses.
The symposium
Seignelay’s life and connections in London were the focus of one of the talks in the three-day symposium; this contribution from Dr Dominic Bellenger of the University of Cambridge. The online event was hosted in Seignelay’s French home town by the Institut Catholique de Toulouse, with contributors dialling in from several different universities and countries. Dr Hiroki Ueno, a research fellow and lecturer in intellectual history at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo specialising in the Scottish and French enlightenments, spoke of his discovery of Cuthbert during his research into Adam Smith’s time in Toulouse.
The Adam Smith connection was also the way in for lead organiser Emeritus Professor Alain Alcouffe of the University Toulouse-1-Capitole. Co-author of Adam Smith in Toulouse and Occitania: The Unknown Years, Alcouffe became fascinated by the unusual figure of Scot Cuthbert, his link to Enlightenment thinkers and his crucial role in the revolution. Alcouffe discovered that the only substantial work on Cuthbert was a 1988 thesis by Andrew Moore, a mature student from the University of Bristol. Moore, who has a lifelong fascination with Cuthbert, was another driving force behind the conference.
The summary in this article only skims the surface of Cuthbert’s full and strange life, and other sessions in the symposium went deep into topics as varied as Cuthbert’s part in a committee on begging, a comparison of his role in the revolution with the actions of more well-known figures, and a feminist reading of Cuthbert’s work on improving antenatal services for poor women. Up to 75 people connected to the online event throughout the threeday event, with only minimal technology problems, even for those unused to the format.
Sessions were chaired by Professor Bernard Callebat in
Toulouse, who also presented his own paper.
Unfortunately, the coronavirus lockdown had stopped Callebat’s further research in its tracks, and this was the case for many of the participants. Here in Scotland, archives, museums and libraries shut down in March 2020, and work only restarted slowly even after official permission to reopen was given. My local library in Inverness initially offered a click and collect service – but this did not extend to the reference section, which at the time of writing still remains closed.
Meanwhile, the Highland Archive Centre reopened with a strict booking and timetabling system, with masks worn inside the building, regular hand sanitisation, and quarantining of used documents. Even when the highlands moved down to tier 1 in the coronavirus scale, travelling to research remained difficult. Added to this, the burden of moving to online teaching and learning, and the supporting of worried – or even sick – students, colleagues, family and friends and it can be seen that organising such a conference during the pandemic was a significant achievement.
Researching in the ‘new normal’
Neverthelsss, the lockdown restrictions arguably opened up some new and potentially valuable ways to research, encouraging discussion and debate over different ways to progress stalled work. For example, the Highland Archive Centre, who made me an accredited researcher to support my work into Cuthbert of Castlehill, are not the only institution which have now digitised a large part of their catalogue, making items that were previously only searchable via an in-person visit now online.
In recent years many documents, particularly older texts that are out of copyright, have become available to view on the internet – with the added bonus that digitisation means they can be searchable by keyword.
However, what I found most helpful about the ‘new normal’ the coronavirus pandemic forced upon us was the increase in collaborative working. Unable to get to archives, and with the possibility of not being able to meet in person, I began to e-mail the French researchers on Cuthbert of Castlehill.There were discussions over translation from French, English and Gaelic; we shared local knowledge of Scotland and the highlands, and southern France and Toulouse. In a time when movement was restricted and we were locked down in our houses, the research into Seignelay Cuthbert became a lifeline to the outside – a small reminder that there was a whole world out there, that there were many people working in different places for the common goal of increased knowledge.
Meanwhile, Seignelay’s life, the bouleversant times of revolution that he lived through, were a reminder that people have survived and thrived through many trying times. For several weeks, e-mails went back and forth tracing how Seignelay had dealt with the ‘épizootie’ of 177476 – an animal disease pandemic, a deadly outbreak of cattle plague or rinderpest. Rinderpest remains one of the only two diseases (along with smallpox) which humans have wholly eradicated through vaccine.
The papers presented at the symposium will now be collected, with the aim of publication. The planned book will celebrate the life of this very unusual Scotsman Seignelay Cuthbert of Castlehill, who, after being forced to leave Scotland after Culloden, mixed with leading Enlightenment philosophers, advanced to an unusual degree in the French church and played a key role in the French revolution. www. jennifermoraghenderson.com.