These strategic objectives dominated British foreign policy in the years after the Glorious Revolution and, no less important, British public opinion. This helps to explain why the people and Parliament of Britain were ready to acquiesce in the sacrifices of war on a scale hitherto unimaginable. The land wars in Europe in which England had been engaged over the previous two centuries had been small in scale, had lasted for only short periods and had involved only a few thousand troops. James II’s army of 30,000 in 1688 was regarded as a dangerous threat to the liberties of the nation. In 1690, however, William threw 40,000 men into the Irish theatre alone. During the Nine Years’ War, the army in the European theatres averaged 76,000 servicemen and 40,000 sailors every year. During the Spanish succession war, the army averaged no fewer than 90,000 and the navy 43,000 a year. Indeed, by the end of the war, combined army and navy personnel exceeded 150,000. This is even more remarkable when it is remembered that the adult male population of England and Wales was less than a million and a half!
More important still, this transformation became irreversible once the power of the press had been unleashed after the lapsing of the Licensing Act in 1695. The genie of Protestant public opinion – especially once it had tasted the blood of military victory – could not be put back into the bottle. Although the Whigs had been very uneasy at several aspects of William’s anti-French strategy during the 1690s, the party never actually endangered the implementation of his policy. By 1701 the Whigs were proclaiming the need to oppose France on the grounds of her support for the Old Pretender as well as her threatened domination of Europe. Tories in opposition might deplore the expense of the policy, and the unprecedented centralization of government which it involved, but there is little sign that they would have acted very differently in office, at least in the early years of the war.28
MAP 3: The War of the Spanish Succession and the Peace of Utrecht.
Britain’s entry into the Nine Years’ War was precipitated by William’s crusade against France. In the early years, most Englishmen would have focused less on long-term commercial and strategic considerations than on the need to prevent a Stuart restoration and on the necessity of bringing Ireland back securely within the English orbit. At first in 1689, indeed, Ireland was the major theatre of war for the British. To contemporaries, the Glorious Revolution must have seemed dangerously insecure until the victory of the Williamite armies at the battle of Limerick in October 1691 and the defeat of the French navy at La Hogue in June 1692. Indeed, while William was in Ireland in 1690, the French enjoyed naval command of the English Channel, a serious threat to British security and a warning that was never to be forgotten. During the rest of the war, the deployment of British sea power in order to establish naval supremacy in European waters became a vital strategic priority in the struggle to defend Europe against Louis XIV. The war on land, meanwhile, became something of a deadlock. Louis XIV enjoyed immense military success between 1690 and 1693 in Italy and Spain, but in the Low Countries, William’s coalition was able to frustrate prospects of a final French victory. The Treaty of Ryswick which ended the war in 1697 was little more than a temporary halt. Most captured territories were restored. Louis XIV gave formal, if insincere, recognition to William and his successors.
The treaty, however, did not resolve the future of the Spanish empire. British trade with Spain and the Mediterranean had expanded greatly since 1660 and her merchants were already making serious incursions into the Spanish New World. The death of Charles II, King of Spain, in 1700 brought the underlying issues to a head. Louis XIV put his Bourbon grandson on the Spanish throne in 1701 to take over not only the declining power of Spain in Europe but also her extensive commercial and land empire in the New World. In England, public opinion, which between 1697 and 1701 had been against a renewal of the war, now accepted the need to defend and, if possible, to enlarge its commercial power and possessions. In May 1702, England and Scotland declared war on Spain. The War of the Spanish Succession had begun.
British objectives in the war were clear: to prevent the union of the French and Spanish thrones,29 to destroy French support for the Jacobite cause, to maintain the freedom of the Netherlands from French dominion and to challenge Bourbon commercial and imperial power overseas. Indeed, colonial acquisition, in the Mediterranean, in the Caribbean and even further afield, now became one of the principal objectives of the war. When the French struck at the heart of the European alliance by moving on Vienna in 1704, the war in Europe came to a head. Marlborough’s army was diverted from the Austrian Netherlands to link with that of Prince Eugene of Savoy. In the subsequent engagement, the French army was destroyed at Blenheim. Marlborough proceeded to make himself master of the north-west of Europe with further victories at Ramillies in 1706 and at Oudenarde in 1708. Peace may have come earlier than 1713 had the allied war effort in Spain been as successful as it was elsewhere. Military reverses, especially at Almanza in 1707, prolonged the war. So did the diplomatic blunders of the Whig government. Its excessive demands obliged the French to fight on. After 1710 the Tory government of Harley was anxious for peace; it dismissed Marlborough and, ultimately, ‘perfidious Albion’ made peace with France at Utrecht in 1713.
As almost all commentators agree, Britain achieved her objectives, and more besides in 1713: the Protestant succession was secured almost beyond challenge, France renounced her support for the Jacobites, the balance of power in Europe had been upheld, the thrones of France and Spain were to remain separate and the Netherlands were to remain independent. In addition, Britain acquired two key naval bases in the Mediterranean, Gibraltar and Minorca. Furthermore, her supremacy in North America was confirmed by gains in the Caribbean (St Kitts), in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia and by the valuable Asiento, the right to trade with the Spanish colonies for thirty years, an open door to further commercial penetration of South America. The Treaty of Utrecht thus clearly recognized Britain’s rise to eminence in Europe. Fifty years later, the Treaty of Paris in 1763 was to signal her status as a world power.
MAP 4: The counties of Scotland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
THE GLORIOUS REVOLUTION AND THE UNITY OF BRITAIN, 1689–1714
The Glorious Revolution, inevitably, was to be an event of decisive significance in the internal development of the United Kingdom, a momentous step in the extension of English control over the Gaelic peoples of Scotland and Ireland and in the acquisition of an external empire. Although the violent disruption which it caused in relations between England, on the one hand, and Scotland and Ireland, on the other, was of relatively short duration, it was of momentous importance for the future. The Jacobite cause, with its implications of civil uprising and French intervention, acted as a catalyst for a powerful assertion of Scottish national feeling. Jacobitism in Ireland provoked an upsurge of Catholic sentiment and anti-English feeling which could only be dealt with by force of arms. In the long term, however, the Glorious Revolution paved the way for English domination of the British Isles through the military suppression of Irish resistance and the more peaceful negotiation of Union with Scotland in 1707. During the 1720s, a united kingdom had emerged which was much more closely united than it had been in the seventeenth century. Indeed, the only alternative to a more united Britain was the fragmentation and disorder which might have accompanied a Jacobite restoration.
The Glorious Revolution in England was followed by a Glorious Revolution in Scotland, but the latter was not masterminded from London. Indeed, Scotland might have chosen to retain James as her king until his flight to France in December 1688 had consequences which were just as damaging for his cause in Scotland as they were for his cause in England. The vacuum of authority created by James’s absence was filled by supporters of William. But William was in no position to dictate to the Scottish Presbyterians, his main, indeed his only, supporters there. He summoned the Convention of Estates which met in Edinburgh in March 1689. The convention declared William and Mary joint sovereigns; but in the Cla
im of Right, the Scottish equivalent of the Declaration of Rights, voted in the following month, it asserted the constitutional right of the estates to depose a monarch. No pretence was made that James had ‘abdicated’. With only five Dissenting votes, it was decided that he had ‘forfaulted’ his right to the crown by his misgovernment and by his violations of the laws. William’s acceptance of the crown of Scotland in May 1689 implied his agreement to the Claim of Right. Consequently, the monarchy was deemed to be Protestant, its prerogatives dependent upon the rule of law and its resources resting upon the consent of Parliament. In this way, the effect of the Glorious Revolution in Scotland was to leave the Scottish Parliament exceptionally free from royal interference. It could now discuss any subject it liked and it could pass any law it wished. It proceeded to enact nothing less than a religious revolution. It disestablished the Episcopal Church, abolished lay patronage and established the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. Any subsequent attempts to create a unitary British state would have to incorporate the principles and practices of religious pluralism. In this way, the wholesale restructuring of the polity in church and state in Scotland was more radical than anything attempted in England. One important consequence was that it proved impossible to establish any sort of consensus. Some, at least, of those who missed out were to find themselves driven into the arms of the Jacobites.
Perhaps the revolution in Scotland would have been less Whiggish, indeed less radical, had it not been accompanied by news of the early and promising success of the Jacobite cause in Ireland and by its early manifestations in Scotland. Enthused by the news from Ireland, James’s supporters in Scotland rallied the Jacobites, and at the Battle of Killiecrankie on 27 July 1689, they won a famous victory. They were incapable, however, of taking advantage of their success, and after their defeat at Dunkeld a month later, their cause quickly collapsed. It is possible that a period of good government, stability and prosperity might have reconciled the mass of the Scots to English rule. Sadly, this was not to occur. William offered an indemnity to all those who took the oath of allegiance before 1 January 1692. By that date, most of the Highland chiefs had sworn their allegiance to him. William issued a further general order for the execution of vengeance on those who had not sworn. The accidental failure of the MacDonalds of Glencoe to do so led to their massacre at Glencoe on 13 February 1692, an event that was to poison relations between the two countries for decades.
The legends of Glencoe have distracted attention from the fact that the resistance to William’s armies was more resolute than English historians are often prepared to acknowledge. After all, the war continued for two years even after Dunkeld. Nor was resistance confined to Jacobites. Many of those involved detested the new Presbyterian church.30 Even if there remained any possibility that the Scots might have been reconciled to the Williamite regime, the actual machinery of government would have made it difficult to accomplish. The victory of the revolution in Scotland had weakened the power of the English executive over the Scottish Parliament; indeed, it threatened the union of crowns and created political tensions in Anglo-Scottish relations which – as William concluded before the end of his reign – could only be resolved through a parliamentary Union between the two countries. A long-term military solution was too expensive and likely to be of limited effectiveness. Preoccupied as he was with the war in Europe, the king was soon frustrated and angry with what he took to be the obstructionism of the Scottish ruling class. He was not able to root out the power of the semi-feudal magnates, who continued to command enormous political influence. Nor was he able to break the loyalty of a large number of Scottish nobles towards James. Reared in the Episcopal Kirk, they still clung to traditions of divine right, passive obedience and, not least, indefeasible hereditary succession. Professor Black has noted ‘the massive crisis of confidence in the new regime amongst almost all thinking members of the Scottish ruling class, whether Williamite, moderate, Jacobite or uncommitted’.31 Even worse, William had not been able to reconcile Scottish public opinion to the regime. For this failure, English political insensitivity and incompetence, together with Scottish resentment at the economic distress occasioned by the Nine Years’ War, must be held responsible. By the end of William’s reign, English political failure in Scotland had effectively regenerated the Jacobite cause.
These deep-seated political problems were sharpened by powerful economic differences. The Navigation Acts applied to Scotland and caused serious distress as well as damage to the trade in cattle and linen. Scottish involvement in the Nine Years’ War was unpopular in the northern kingdom, an unpopularity that became positively xenophobic after the failure of the Darien Scheme. In 1695 the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies was established. Its enthusiasm for founding a Scottish colony in Darien in Central America endangered William’s relations with Spain. There was little enthusiasm in England for the scheme, and it was left to the Scots themselves to raise the money required. In a fine display of national enthusiasm, over 1,300 individuals volunteered to finance the scheme. In the end, the Darien Scheme failed. By 1,700 no fewer than 2,000 lives had been lost and perhaps a quarter of all of Scotland’s capital resources squandered. Whether English indifference was more to be blamed than Scottish incompetence is not easy to determine. What cannot be doubted is the persisting resentment that the incident aroused between Scotland and England, especially in the concurrent bitter years of harvest failure between 1696 and 1698. Darien became almost as potent a symbol of discord between the two countries as Glencoe.
These tensions were reflected in the proceedings of the Scottish Parliament. In 1701 it declared that the Act of Settlement did not apply to Scotland – indeed, Scotland had not even been consulted over its terms – thus opening up the possibility that on Anne’s death Scotland might determine its own dynastic succession. The prospect of Scotland pursuing an independent foreign policy horrified the English. A Catholic, pro-French succession in Scotland could not be tolerated; the possibility not only of civil war in Scotland but also the likelihood of an English invasion of Scotland in the event of a Jacobite succession in the northern kingdom began to loom. Early in the reign of Anne, the worst fears of the English were aroused. The new Scottish Parliament which met in May 1703 was even more hostile to rule from London than its predecessor. In the 1703–4 session, it passed an Act of Security and Succession, which claimed the exclusive right of the Scottish Parliament to determine the succession of Scotland, and an Act anent Peace and War, which asserted the right of the Scottish Parliament on the death of Anne to resume the power to declare war and to make peace. The prospect of a major crisis in Anglo-Scottish relations in the middle of the War of the Spanish Succession was unacceptable to the English. The problem of Scottish separatism had to be tackled once and for all. It was at this point that the parties in England began seriously to consider a new structure of political association within Britain, one that would confront Scottish resistance to English rule but yet satisfy reasonable Scottish aspirations while respecting England’s need for external security. As opinion hostile to Scotland was beginning to mount within the English Parliament, Godolphin measured his response and determined to attempt a negotiated settlement. Consequently, the Alien Act of 1705 required the queen to appoint commissioners to negotiate a Treaty of Union with the Scots. In order to persuade the Scots to take the initiative seriously, Godolphin threatened to close English markets to Scottish goods and to treat the property of non-resident Scots in England as alien property.
The Long Eighteenth Century Page 12