Book reviews: The Liberty Tree | Revival

IN THE leafy surroundings of London’s Belgravia Square, just around the corner from that convivial stamping-ground for deracinated Scots, the Caledonian Club, stands a silent colloquium of South American political liberators. Statues of Simón Bolivar and José de San Martin look across the grass, frozen in stone.

IN THE leafy surroundings of London’s Belgravia Square, just around the corner from that convivial stamping-ground for deracinated Scots, the Caledonian Club, stands a silent colloquium of South American political liberators. Statues of Simón Bolivar and José de San Martin look across the grass, frozen in stone.

The Liberty Tree – The Stirring Story of Thomas Muir And Scotland’s First Fight For Democracy

Murray Armstrong

Word Power Books, £11.99

In 2010, the Scottish Parliament was presented with a petition calling for a sculpture to the Scottish political activist, democrat and agitator Thomas Muir to be erected in the vicinity of Holyrood. In the petition, Muir was described as the “founding father of modern Scottish Democracy”.

There is something of the glamour of a South American revolutionary about Muir. He was a contemporary of Robert Burns, a gifted student who graduated from Glasgow with an MA aged 17 and became a member of the Faculty of Advocates. Swept up in a radical democratic movement which reacted partly to Scotland’s domestic “management” by a corrupt political class, and drew its rhetoric and internationalism from revolution in France, he became a kind of international revolutionary, travelling to Dublin in support of the United Irishmen, being deported to Australia, escaping to America and finally dying in exile in France at the age of 33. Bold, young, radical: international reputations have been built on much less.

Scotland has made little of him: the nearest thing Edinburgh has to a statue is the 90-foot obelisk to the Scottish Martyrs that stands in the Old Calton Burial Ground on Calton Hill.

In preparation for a new monument, Sandy Stoddart the Sculptor in Ordinary to the Queen in Scotland has already made a bust of Muir, his left eye covered by a bandage, the bronze of which sits in Old Parliament House in Canberra.

In place of monuments of stone or marble, Muir has been commemorated in prose. Since the 1970s there have been biographical studies by the historian Michael Donnelly and Hector MacMillan. The songwriter Adam McNaughton wrote a song about Muir, recorded by Dick Gaughan, and recently Olly Wyatt has written a historical novel, The Democrat, about his life.

The Liberty Tree, by Murray Armstrong, is a historical novel about Muir which the author refers to, fairly, as a “reconstructed narrative”, which draws on Muir scholarship and imagination to tell the compelling story of Muir’s trajectory as radical, agitator and democratic hero.