Thomas Pringle in Cape Town

Abstract

This chapter describes the migration of Thomas Pringle (1789–1834), a poet from the Scottish Borders, to the Cape Colony in 1820. Pringle claimed that Governor Charles Somerset was an autocrat who persecuted dissenters and restricted freedom of speech. Pringle had a close relationship with the Rev. Thomas M’Crie whose defence of covenanting principles helped to popularise the covenanting idiom: rhetoric which emphasised that the Scottish Covenanters had died to secure for future generations their religious freedom and civil liberties. Pringle’s early poetry, this chapter reveals, inspired M’Crie’s famous review of Walter Scott’s novel Old Mortality (1816)—one of the publications in which M’Crie expressed his politicised narrative of the Scottish past. M’Crie’s review, in turn, influenced later editions of Pringle’s African poetry. Whig-liberal discourse imagined the Cape as a new site of conflict in Scotland’s long battle for civil and religious liberty.