When Bruce arrived in 1753 (he had by then become Bruce and left the James of his youth behind) London was on the very cusp of its most glorious years. The city was changing daily after the political upheavals of the forties. The process began that very year with the founding of the British Museum, initially to house Hans Sloane’s collection. Rivers were still crooked but were slowly being forced to straighten and become canals, industry was ripe for revolt and minds both in London and Edinburgh were yearning for Enlightenment. Samuel Johnson had published his dictionary but had not yet met his biographer, James Boswell. It would be another fifteen years before Sir Joshua Reynolds founded the Royal Academy. James Watt had yet to improve the steam engine, the burgeoning iron industry was still reliant on charcoal and the innovations which were to transform the country were still largely restricted to agriculture. The boom years of the 1760s, the canal mania of the 1780s and the mixture of intelligence and patronage that exploded into the Enlightenment all lay ahead. Bruce was one of the first of an extraordinary concentration of Scots who would transform the country and, with the outward looking attitude of which Bruce was a pioneer, the world.
In 1753 Great Britain was still a country unsure of itself. It had only been ratified by the Act of Union in 1707 and was still ruled by a German king who was more fond of his home town than his kingdom and was not entirely comfortable on his throne; he could scarcely speak English. Britain was an acknowledged power but it was still only great in name. Even among the electors of Hanover, our royal family was not in the forefront. Frederick the Great was the successful member of the family, not George II or his young grandson and eventual successor.
It was in this world of as yet unfulfilled promise that Bruce was introduced to the elegant and witty young Adriana Allan. They fell in love and on 3 February 1754 were married. For a few months they lived happily in London. All thoughts of India were discarded and Bruce settled down to learn about the wine trade; part of Adriana’s substantial dowry had been a partnership with her brother in the Allans’s successful wine importing business. Bruce threw himself into his new occupation with gusto but, just as when he studied law at Edinburgh, he soon became preoccupied with learning other, less profitable things. He was fascinated by different languages, countries and peoples and would spend hours studying subjects in which he was interested. His restless curiosity encouraged him to explore many diverse areas of learning: military architecture became a great interest at this point. The study of wine led him to a broader understanding of botany; astronomy led to geography and both became passions. Fast evolving into a man of the Enlightenment, his only lack of interest was in working for a living. What he really needed was a good private income. He was now paying the price of his father’s virility: his small inheritance was dwindling by the day. Indeed he had often been forced to plead with his father to increase his allowance, before the opportunity of becoming a wine merchant arose.
In September 1754 Adriana, now pregnant, set off with her mother for France. Bruce planned to meet them at Boulogne. Adriana was suffering from as yet undiagnosed tuberculosis, and they planned to spend the winter in Provence where Bruce would look at vineyards and Adriana would recover her health. They had spent much of the past few months taking the waters in Bath and Bristol (then a fashionable spa) in the vain expectation of curing Adriana’s consumption. Bruce hoped that a winter spent in the beneficial climate of Provence would effect a similar cure to the one which had strengthened him after leaving university. It was not to be. Healthy living and plenty of exercise was no cure for TB: Adriana died within a week of their arrival in Paris. It was a blow that fell particularly hard on the young Bruce. Motherless, he had spent years away from home while his father produced a new family; he had been sick and had found it hard to indulge his ambitions. At the age of twenty-four he had at last found some happiness and human warmth only to see it taken from him a few months later. Writing to his father in November, Bruce was feeling justifiably downcast.
If I could be susceptible of more grief, I should have been much concerned for my good friend Mr Hay [a recently deceased cousin]; but my distress at present does not admit of augmentation. Death has been very busy among my relations of late. My poor wife, my kind uncle [Counsellor Hamilton had died in March], who had always been a tender father to me, both gone in eight months! God almighty do with me as he sees best!
Adriana’s death had a gruesome aspect. The manner of her demise and the events following had been particularly appalling and had rekindled Bruce’s hatred of Catholics. As Adriana had coughed Gemellus-like in their Parisian rooms, the couple had been assailed by ‘Roman Catholic clergy hovering about the doors’. And when his pregnant love died, Bruce discovered that it was illegal to bury his Protestant wife in consecrated ground. He was only saved from resorting to common land by the intercession of Lord Albemarle, the British ambassador. Eventually Bruce was allowed to conduct the funeral at midnight in the embassy’s private plot.
For an Englishman to harbour a particular malevolence against Catholics in the eighteenth century, over and above that which was normal, was in itself remarkable. The vilification of Catholicism was at its height, helping to gather the country around the Protestant king, and was one of the founding principles of the still new Great Britain. Strangely, however, Adriana’s death did nothing to instil any anti-French feeling in Bruce’s Protestant bosom. Throughout the century and beyond, there was an aristocratic truce between warring nations. In the years to come, Bruce travelled all over Europe not so much as an Englishman but as an aristocrat (he was always known as le chevalier Bruce in France, Signor Cavaliere Bruce in Italy, even by those who understood the British class system and knew that he was a laird and not a knight). He corresponded with French friends, he used French agents, dressed à la mode Française, drank French wine and, like many of his peers, he spoke French with his friends. There were laws banning the import of French lace because it was so expensive that it affected the balance of payments, not because wearing it was unpatriotic. For those who could afford it, imported lace remained de rigueur until the 1850s. Despite his unhappy memories of Paris and indeed his later travels in the lace-making provinces of the Netherlands and Italy, Bruce wore French or Brussels lace when wishing to look smart and would do so all his life.
Immediately after Adriana’s funeral in the early morning of 11 October, Bruce left his mother-in-law in Paris and headed for the coast in a fit of sorrow:
From thence, almost frantic, against the advice of everybody, I got on horseback, having ordered the servant to have post horses ready, and set out in the most tempestuous night I ever saw, for Boulogne, where I arrived next day without stopping. There the riding, without a great coat, in the night time, in the rain, want of food, which, for a long time, I had not tasted, want of rest, fatigue and excessive concern, threw me into a fever.
He eventually arrived back in London a few days later, sick and miserable. ‘Thus ended my unfortunate journey, and with it my present prospect of happiness in this life.’
He had just cause for lapsing into depression. Almost everyone to whom he was close – his mother, uncle, brother and wife – had died and left him with a permanent sense of impending loss. In spite of or perhaps because of this he became profoundly self-sufficient and was genuinely content when on his own. As more of his close friends and relatives died in his twenties, he developed a kingly arrogance that would win him few friends but went a long way towards keeping him alive when he was travelling in parts of the world where unbounded self-confidence was a prerequisite for survival. Bruce developed a bravado in the face of danger which would often tip the balance in his favour at hostile foreign courts. Mungo Park, who was sent to discover the course of the Niger, directly as a result of Bruce’s journeys in search of the Nile’s source, suffered many dangers but combated them with a contrasting subservience:
Though this trough was none of the largest, and three cows were already drinking in it, I resolved to come in for my share [wrote Park in his first book] and kneeling down, thrust my head between two of the cows, and drank with great pleasure, until the water was nearly exhausted, and the cows began to contend