Lessons of Argyll in facing today's tyrant

An ancestor's steadfastness offers inspiration. Maybe it is even passed down to us.

Memorial in St. Giles Cathedral to the 1st Marquess and 8th Earl of Argyll, Sir Archibald Campbell. (RS photo)

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You can’t get too haughty about highfalutin heredity, because whatever fine characteristics you might imagine a great ancestor has passed down have surely dissipated over the generations. Besides, you’re just one in a crowd: After a cousin discovered a few years back that our family had ancestors on the Mayflower, my jolt of pride was deflated when I learned that there are about 35 million of us worldwide who are descended from those 102 apparently lusty Pilgrims.¹ There would be fewer, of course, if the friendly Wampanoag who greeted my ancestors shared Donald Trump’s notions of hospitality for immigrants.

Still, I was curiously moved the other day while visiting Scotland’s great St. Giles’ Cathedral, as I stood before a monument to Sir Archibald Campbell. He was the First Marquess and Eighth Earl of Argyll, chief of the Clan of Campbell and de facto leader of Scotland’s government for a decade in the mid-17^th century. More important to me, I had learned just days before that Sir Archibald was also my 10^th great-grandfather. Beneath a soaring stained-glass window on an aisle in the cathedral, there lies a marble figure in repose that is said to be a good likeness of Grandpa Archie but for one detail: On the catafalque of the monument, the head of the Marquess is attached to the rest of him; in death, it was not.

Indeed, for three years after his 1651 execution, my forebear’s head remained on a pike outside the cathedral by order of King Charles II, apparently as warning to others who might be tempted to annoy the monarch. (Said head was finally reunited with the rest of the man in a grave in Kilmun, a remote village on the Holy Loch that was the seat of the Clan of Campbells.)

There’s no pragmatic reason that I should feel any more attachment to the First Marquess of Argyll, I suppose, than I might to any of my lesser-known or even now anonymous ancestors. After all, if you do the ancestral mathematics — adding two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, etc. — you’ll find that we each have 4,096 10^th great-grandparents. I probably have smugglers, grifters and charlatans in my family line, in addition to the preachers, teachers and farmers (and one journalist) of recent generations.

Yet I couldn’t help but be drawn to the story of that noteworthy ancestor, and wonder if in any way I’m more than quite remotely his biological heir. Scientists have long known that there’s a link between heredity and personality — that who we are is in part influenced by who came before us. Beyond a trace in the bloodline, is there some behavioral aspect of that ancient Scot in this aging American?

Sir Archibald lived in a time when his nation’s legislature was divided and its executive was using his authority with a degree of recklessness that alienated a good share of his countrymen. It seemed too clear an antecedant of today’s America for me to slough it all off as just ancient history. The fact that this ancestor is remembered even now and memorialized in stone while others in the family line are not is because of this: He stood up to authority on a matter of conscience. That is of timeless value, as we cannot forget.

Religion is often cited as the cause of conflicts throughout history, but truth usually belies such simple explanation. Notably, the distinction between secular and religious motives for war have often been blurred. The goals of church and state weren’t so clearly delineated in eras when monarchs claimed a divine mandate for their power, after all. And religious identities often have been used by political leaders to justify a fight and mobilize a population.

Let us pause for a moment here to sympathize with those poor souls whose lives were upended by politicians using religion as a cudgel and invoking God’s name to legitimize a partisan end. Imagine that.

In the countries clustered on islands off the coast of Europe — including Ireland, Wales, Scotland and England — the historic dominance of the Catholic Church was challenged at the dawn of the modern age by both the Reformation and the whims of monarchs. Most famously, of course, King Henry VIII in the 16^th century created the Church of England, with himself as its supreme head, after Pope Clement VII wouldn’t grant him an annulment so he could take a new queen, the second of his six wives. Henry, we should note, claimed that he had been selected by God for his role; many saw him as charismatic, but his tyrannical actions revealed him to be motivated largely by egotism, lust and paranoia.

We might pause again here, perhaps to ponder how such a figure could possibly gain power today, and what we might be able to do in such a circumstance. In fairness, let’s note that none of our leaders have taken six wives; it takes both the President and his “Secretary of War” to accumulate that number.

Even a century after Henry’s death in 1547, the currents he set in motion were causing bloody conflicts, often with religious delineations — between Anglicans and Catholics throughout England and, in Scotland particularly, involving Presbyterians. Today we might find it hard to imagine that theological divides would provoke people to lay down their lives — and in fact, the battles for thrones that were claimed to be waged in God’s name were mostly conflicts over power and wealth. But the independent-minded Scots embraced Presbyterianism more for its rejection of excess and appeal to humility than its theology, and also because it is a democratic religion: It is led not by a pope or a king claiming divine right, but by individual church “sessions” of laity, and by a “moderator” elected every year. If you know the lovely Scots, you’ll get why the country is the home of such doctrine.

In standing with his Presbyterian countrymen, Sir Archibald ran afoul of King Charles, who had gained his contested throne in no small part by claiming affinity with the Protestants. It was my Grandpa Archie who placed the crown of Scotland on Charles’ head in 1651, but in the following decade, with the king ruling Scotland from his throne in London, the two men grew suspicious of each other. The king believed that his authority was being undermined by the marquess, and Sir Archibald seethed as the king broke his promise not to push Catholicism on the land. The marquess’ insistence that Scots be free to choose their own religion made his execution for high treason inevitable.

On a late spring day in 1661, as he faced death on “The Maiden” — an early beheading machine that inspired the French guillotine — Sir Archibald was unrepentant, sure that his stand for Scottish freedom was right. His last words are inscribed on the monument in the cathedral: “I had the honour to set the crown on the King’s head, and now he hastens me to a better Crown than his own.” It was a display of bravery that contemporary societies don’t typically demand of their citizens.²

Of course, our national leaders don’t have the authority to impose the death penalty on their political foes. But today’s perils aren’t minor: Professional execution and character assassination have become tools of choice in American politics over the past decade. That development coincides with the political career of Donald Trump, who uses religion to motivate his followers and claims he was brought back to the White House by divine intervention. Those who stand in the way of our egotistical and paranoid leader and his increasingly tyrannical rule — does any of this sound familiar? — include principled prosecutors, determined scientists, dedicated bureaucrats, honorable officials, thoughtful educators. They now often find themselves out of work, fighting prosecution or worrying that they may be targets of violence.

They need our unswerving support, just as we must energetically stand up for the institutions and traditions that Trump threatens. This is not a time for good people to give up, however crushing the daily onslaught of bad news may seem. We need fight back, and one aid may be in summoning the wisdom and strength that we have inherited from the brave people who fought tyranny and ignorance in generations past.

My link to the First Marquess of Argyll comes on my father’s side of the family. Sir Archibald had a great-great granddaughter who by marriage became an Anderson, and she, in turn, had a great-great granddaughter who was my great-grandmother, Melissa Anderson Smith Smith. She lived into the 1950s, and remains legendary in our family in part because of her pride in being a part of it.

Melissa carried the double surname because she twice married a Smith, the second husband being the brother of the first, whose death had left her a young widow with a daughter, but who would then bear her former brother-in-law two sons, one of them my grandfather. It’s said that one day Melissa Anderson Smith Smith looked out the window of her home in southern Indiana and sighted with pride my dad and his big brother — who, to be clear, were both her great-nephews and her grandsons. She remarked that they were quite special, which she could tell simply by watching them on the street. “They just look smarter, don’t they?” she supposedly said.³

Throughout my childhood, then, I was led to believe that my family line was somehow different, perhaps recognizable by a confidence that seemed to seep out as we moved. I wasn’t taught that I was better than other people, though I came to realize that I was surely more fortunate simply by being born a white male in mid-20^th-century America. But I’ve come to realize that in asserting that our folk were innately and visibly confident, my parents helped make me so. Expectations can create such reality.

It is intriguing, though, to consider the genetic component of who we all are, and whether that might also give us a reserve to draw upon in the face of today’s crisis.

Last year, researchers at Yale School of Medicine published a new study identifying a number of genetic sites associated with the so-called “Big Five” personality traits, namely, agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism and openness. There’s nothing conclusive in their studies – that’s the nature of science, right? – but the scientists suggested that what they found could help us better understand which genetic variants are truly related to those personality traits. It’s the kind of research that you might imagine could be powered forward by artificial intelligence.⁴

There’s surely more to be grasped, as well, from epigenetics — the study of how environmental factors can modify our DNA and be passed along to future generations. We’re just beginning to identify how trauma, diet and lifestyle can cause chemical changes in our DNA, which might be passed along to future generations. This helps us to understand why, for example, an escape from generations of debilitating poverty is more than a matter of will, and why positive factors in life can likewise make us and our offspring stronger.

By the very fact of our history, then, it seems that we are not powerless in the face of the emerging tyranny of Donald Trump and the clearly intentional cruelty of his acolytes — realities that would be neither surprising nor daunting, it seems, to generations before ours. That is, as descendants of people who confronted even more brutal leaders and harsh conditions, and as survivors ourselves of the challenges that life presents, we have gained resources and resolve that we might not yet realize.

Maybe I’m just imagining that the DNA of the man who stood up to a king remains a force inside me, or that the belief one of his descendants had in our clan’s capacity did more than put some confidence in a kid’s head. But in that Scottish cathedral, just yards from where my ancestor displayed strength of character that is remembered three and a half centuries later, I felt a swell of energy that has helped me recommit in even these awful days to being steadfast in opposition to tyranny and in support of freedom in our time. Maybe it can help you, too.

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1. https://themayflowersociety.org/passenger-profiles/ Actually, only 51 of the original 102 Mayflower passengers had descendants. But families had a lot of children in the ensuing generations.

2. https://www.christianheritageedinburgh.org.uk/2024/03/14/the-killing-time-archibald-campbell-the-marquis-of-argyll/ I’ve done a fair bit of reading about this period, but this is a good quick overview of the First Marquess of Argyll’s role.

3. I find it hard to label as pure coincidence the fact that my father and his brother, and their father, all became Presbyterian ministers. But what else could it be? There’s no direct line of Presbyterianism back to our Scottish ancestors — indeed, all three men began as clergy in a sect of Methodism that was popular with American German immigrants, the United Brethren Church. But the resurgence of the Presbyterianism of our heritage is a lovely addition to this story.

4. https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/how-genes-shape-personality-traits-new-links-are-discovered/

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St. Giles’ Cathedral, Edinburgh, one evening last week. The First Marquess of Argyll was executed near this spot. (RS photo)

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FINAL WORDS

AN OPPORTUNITY TO BE HEARD

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ENDNOTE

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