How the Scots Invented the Modern World

by Arthur Herman

  Another Scottish lawyer who was sympathetic to Aikenhead’s cause, James Johnstone, kept Locke informed of the trial, including copies of the indictment, the student depositions, and Aikenhead’s appeal. Johnstone pointed out that all the witnesses against Aikenhead were barely out of their teens, and that “none of them pretend, nor is it laid in the Indictment, that Aikenhead made it his business to seduce any man.” He noted, “Laws long in desuetude should be gently put in Execution, and the first example made of one in circumstances that deserve no compassion, whereas here there is youth, levity, docility, and no design upon others.”

  Meanwhile, Aikenhead had petitioned Scotland’s leading judicial officer, the Lord Chancellor, and its governing body of royal officials, the Scottish Privy Council, for mercy. He restated his regrets and his desire to repent. “May it therefore please your Lordships,” he wrote, “for God’s sake, to consider and compassionate my deplorable circumstances.” Anstruther also stepped forward as the boy’s advocate, pleading mercy and saying that in his opinion Aikenhead would grow up to be an eminent Christian if his life was spared. But the Privy Council told him there was no chance of mercy unless the Kirk interceded for him. This it would not do. Instead, as Anstruther wrote, “the ministers out of a pious and ignorant zeal spoke and preached for cutting him off.”

  When the final vote came in the Privy Council on Aikenhead’s appeal, it was a tie. Then Lord Chancellor Polwarth cast the deciding vote for death.

  Only one possible source of rescue remained, and that was in London. The English Parliament and the Privy Council were of course powerless to do anything; this was Scotland and out of their jurisdiction. If, however, King William and Queen Mary, who resided at Whitehall Palace but who were also rulers of Scotland, got wind of the case, they could use their power to issue a pardon or at least a reprieve. This is what the Kirk now had to forestall. They sent a petition to William and Mary: “We cannot but lament the abounding impiety and profanity in this land, so we must acknowledge your Majesty’s Christian care in enacting good laws for suppressing the same, the rigorous execution of which we humbly beg.”

  Execution was right. On January 8, the Year of Our Lord 1697, at two o’clock in the afternoon, Thomas Aikenhead was taken to the gallows on the road between Edinburgh and Leith. Shivering in the cold wind, he delivered a final speech, the condemned man’s right by custom. “I can charge the world, if they can stain me, or lay any such thing on my charge, so that it was out of a pure love of truth, and my own happiness, that I acted,” he declared in a wavering voice. “It is a principle innate and co-natural to every man to have an insatiable inclination to truth,” he added, and to follow reason where it leads. This he had done, and now it would cost him his life.

  He then blasted the chief witness against him, Mungo Craig, “whom I have to reckon with God and his own conscience, if he was not as deeply concerned in those hellish notions (for which I am sentenced) as ever I was.” But then he forgave Craig, as he forgave all concerned in the trial, and wished that the Lord might forgive Craig likewise.

  He then uttered his last wish: “It is my earnest desire that my blood may give a stop to that raging spirit of Atheism which hath taken such footing in Britain.... And now, O Lord, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, in thy hands I recommend my spirit.” The hangman pulled away the ladder, the body swung, and Thomas Aikenhead, not quite nineteen, was dead.

  Such was Scotland as it stood at the end of the seventeenth century. A nation governed by a harshly repressive Kirk; a nation of an unforgiving and sometimes cruel Calvinist religious faith; of trials for blasphemy and witchcraft; of a cranky, even perverse contrariness in the face of an appeal to mercy or reason or even the facts.

  This was Scotland on the threshold of the modern world. Yet it would be misleading to call it “traditional Scotland.” It was in fact of relatively recent vintage. The men who persecuted Thomas Aikenhead belonged to a cultural world that had come into being a little more than one hundred years before, with the Scottish Reformation.

  To men such as the Reverend Thomas Hallyburton or Lord Advocate Stewart, the religious revolution John Knox had brought to Scotland in the sixteenth century had left a legacy of glory, but also of great bitterness. The True Faith had triumphed over Popery and corruption. But it had cost a century of almost uninterrupted violence and bloodshed, with Scotland torn apart by anarchy, civil war, foreign invasions, religious persecution, and repression. Throughout it all, the Scottish Kirk had had to fight a relentless battle against established political power. Securing the Presbyterian faith had led to the overthrow of one monarch (Mary Queen of Scots), rebellion against and then execution of another (Charles I), and the forcible removal of a third (James II).

  In 1696, memories of the struggle were still fresh. Scots gave the years of the Restoration, the 1660s and 1670s, a sardonic nickname: “the Killing Time.” In England, King Charles II is remembered as an easygoing, amiable rogue. In Scotland, however, his government used brutal armed force to stamp out the remnants of the National Covenant movement, which had rebelled against his father. Many of the Presbyterian ministers who asked William and Mary not to save Thomas Aikenhead could tell of having to go into hiding for their faith, pursued like animals across mountains and glens, and watching friends and neighbors murdered or transported into servitude across the Atlantic.

  Aikenhead’s prosecutor, James Stewart, had been forced to flee for his life abroad. Patrick Hume, Baron of Polwarth, who had cast the decisive vote for death, was no decadent bewigged Restoration aristocrat. He knew what it was to be a hunted man. When several prominent opponents of Charles II were arrested for plotting against his life (the so-called Rye House Plot of 1683), Hume, although not directly implicated, had been forced to hide in the family burial vault in the parish church in Polwarth. For one month he had remained there, surviving on food smuggled in by loyal servants, with no light except through a narrow slit in the stone. By that tiny beam he had read and reread a Latin translation of the Psalms to keep his spirits up, so that, at age eighty, he could still recite them by heart.

  Having received no mercy themselves, how likely was it that they would extend it to the likes of young Aikenhead the blasphemer?

  Yet in 1696 this old order was already on its last legs. The execution of Aikenhead was the last hurrah of Scotland’s Calvinist ayatollahs. There was already a new generation on the rise of ministers and university professors and lawyers like Anstruther and Johnstone, who were not immune to the more progressive attitudes percolating up from the south. Then in 1701 James Stewart himself pushed through Parliament an important legal reform, an act of habeas corpus that limited the Lord Advocate’s power of arbitrary arrest and imprisonment.

  There were other, more ominous changes in the offing. On the same day Aikenhead was executed, January 8, the Edinburgh city fathers asked the Scottish Privy Council to make provision for the multitudes of poor and indigent people begging in the streets “in this great dearth and time of scarcity.” The traditional economy of Scotland was dying, under the hammer blows of harvest failures and famine. Beginning in 1695, Scots suffered three failed harvests in a row. Two hundred years later a historian described what happened:

  The crops were blighted by easterly “haars” or mists, by sunless, drenching summers, by storms, and by early bitter frosts and late snow in autumn. For seven years this calamitous weather continued—the corn rarely ripening, and the green, withered grain being shorn in December amidst pouring rain or pelting snow-storms . . . The sheep and oxen died in the thousands, the prices of everything among a peasantry that had nothing went up to famine pitch, and a large proportion of the population in rural districts was destroyed by disease and want.

  No one knows how many died during the famine of the Lean Years of 1697–1703, but they probably numbered in the tens of thousands. Wrote Sir Robert Sibbald at the time, “Everyone may see Death in the Face of the poor.” For an already impoverished and sparsely populated country of fewer
than two million souls, the 1690s set a benchmark of collective misery and misfortune Scots never approached again, not even in the worst years of the Highland Clearances.

  The new century, then, marked the end of one way of life for Scotland and the beginning of another, simply because there was nowhere else to go. For the next generation of Lowlands Scots, the world of their fathers—of Covenanters, of the Killing Time, of famine and starvation, of pillories at the Tron, of the execution of witches and of Thomas Aikenhead—would become more and more a remote memory.

  For this was the culturally and materially backward nation that forward-thinking Scotsmen worked to change. In doing so, they would also change the world. Before the eighteenth century was over, Scotland would generate the basic institutions, ideas, attitudes, and habits of mind that characterize the modern age. Scotland and the Scots would go on to blaze a trail across the global landscape in both a literal and a figurative sense, and open a new era in human history. In fact, the very notion of “human history” is itself, as we shall see, a largely Scottish invention.

  Fundamental to the Scottish notion of history is the idea of progress. The Scots argued that societies, like individuals, grow and improve over time. They acquire new skills, new attitudes, and a new understanding of what individuals can do and what they should be free to do. The Scots would teach the world that one of the crucial ways we measure progress is by how far we have come from what we were before. The present judges the past, not the other way around. And for the modern Scot, for Adam Smith or David Hume or Henry Brougham or Sir Walter Scott or any of the other heroes of this book, that past was the Scotland that had tried and executed Thomas Aikenhead.

  Yet that same fundamentalist Calvinist Kirk had actually laid the foundations for modern Scotland, in surprising and striking ways. In fact, without an appreciation of Scotland’s Presbyterian legacy, the story of the Scots’ place in modern civilization would be incomplete.

  PART ONE

  Epiphany

  Is it not strange that at a time when we have lost our Princes, our Parliaments, our independent government, even the Presence of our chief Nobility, are unhappy in our accent and pronunciation, speak a very corrupt Dialect of the Tongue which we make use of, is it not strange, I say, that in these Circumstances, we shou’d really be the People most distinguished for Literature in Europe?

  —David Hume, 1757

  The constant influx of information and of liberality from abroad, which was thus kept up in Scotland in consequence of the ancient habits and manners of the people, may help to account for the sudden burst of genius, which to a foreigner must seem have sprung up in this country by a sort of enchantment, soon after the Rebellion of 1745.

  —Dugald Stewart

  CHAPTER ONE

  The New Jerusalem

  I

  Just as the German Reformation was largely the work of a single individual, Martin Luther, so the Scottish Reformation was the achievement of one man of heroic will and tireless energy: John Knox.

  Like Luther, Knox left an indelible mark on his national culture. Uncompromising, dogmatic, and driven, John Knox was a prolific writer and a preacher of truly terrifying power. His early years as a Protestant firebrand had been spent in exile, imprisonment, and even penal servitude chained to a rowing bench in the king’s galleys. The harsh trials toughened him physically and spiritually for what was to come. He became John Knox, “he who feared the face of no man.” Beginning in 1559, Knox single-handedly inspired, intimidated, and bullied Scotland’s nobility and urban classes into overthrowing the Catholic Church of their forebears and adopting the religious creed of Geneva’s John Calvin. Its austere and harsh dogmas—that the Bible was the literal Word of God, that the God of that Bible was a stern and jealous God, filled with wrath at all sinners and blasphemers, and that the individual soul was by God’s grace predestined to heaven or hell regardless of any good works or charitable intentions—were themselves natural extensions of Knox’s own personality. Calvinism seemed as natural to him as breathing, and he taught a generation of Scotsmen to believe the same thing themselves.

  Above all, John Knox wanted to turn the Scots into God’s chosen people, and Scotland into the New Jerusalem. To do this, Knox was willing to sweep away everything about Scotland’s past that linked it to the Catholic Church. As one admirer said, “Others snipped at the branches of Popery; but he strikes at the roots, to destroy the whole.” He and his followers scoured away not only Scottish Catholicism but all its physical manifestations, from monasteries and bishops and clerical vestments to holy relics and market-square crosses. They smashed stained-glass windows and saints’ statues, ripped out choir stalls and roodscreens, and overturned altars. All these symbols of a centuries-old tradition of religious culture, which we would call great works of art, were for Knox marks of “idolatry” and “the synagogue of Satan,” as he called the Roman Catholic Church. In any case, the idols disappeared from southern Scotland, and the Scottish Kirk rose up to take their place.

  Knox and his lieutenants also imposed the new rules of the Calvinist Sabbath on Scottish society: no working (people could be arrested for plucking a chicken on Sunday), no dancing, and no playing of the pipes. Gambling, cardplaying, and the theater were banned. No one could move out of a parish without written permission of the minister. The Kirk wiped out all traditional forms of collective fun, such as Carnival, Maytime celebrations, mumming, and Passion plays. Fornication brought punishment and exile; adultery meant death. The church courts, or kirk-sessions, enforced the law with scourges, pillories, branks (a padlocked iron helmet that forced an iron plate into the mouth of a convicted liar or blasphemer), ducking-stools, banishment, and, in the case of witches or those possessed by the devil, burning at the stake.

  The faithful received one single compensation for this harsh authoritarian regime, and it was a powerful one: direct access to God. The right of communion, receiving the body and blood of Christ in the form of wine and bread, now belonged to everyone, rich and poor, young and old, men and women. In the Catholic Church, the Bible had been literally a closed book. Now anyone who could read, or listen to someone else read, could absorb the Word of God. On Sundays the church rafters rang with the singing of psalms and recitations from the Gospel. The Lord’s Supper became a community festival, with quantities, sometimes plentiful, of red wine and shortcake (John Knox presided over one Sunday communion where the congregation consumed eight and a half gallons of claret).

  The congregation was the center of everything. It elected its own board of elders or presbyters; it even chose its minister. The congregation’s board of elders, the consistory, cared for the poor and the sick; it fed and clothed the community’s orphans. Girls who were too poor to have a dowry to tempt a prospective husband got one from the consistory. It was more than just fear of the ducking-stool or the stake that bound the Kirk together. It was a community united by its commitment to God and its sense of chosenness. “God loveth us,” John Knox had written, “because we are His own handiwork.”

  To a large extent Knox’s mission to create the New Jerusalem in Scotland succeeded. The Reformation laid down strong roots in the Scottish Lowlands, that belt of fertile land and river valleys running from the Firth of Clyde and Glasgow in the extreme west to just north of Carlisle and Hadrian’s Wall across to Edinburgh and Berwick-on-Tweed in the east. North of this in the beautiful but barren and sparsely populated Highlands, its record was more spotty. But in all the areas that came under his influence, the Kirk created a new society in the image of Knox’s utopian ideal. It had turned its back not only on Scotland’s past, but on all purely secular values, no matter what the source. Knox made his view clear in one of his last letters before he died in November 1572. “All worldlie strength, yea even in things spiritual, decays, and yet shall never the work of God decay.”

  One of those pillars of “worldlie strength” that Knox despised was political authority, or more precisely the power of monarchs. Perhaps becaus
e Knox’s closest allies were Scottish nobles who wanted to see the Scottish monarchy tamed, or because nearly every monarch he dealt with was either a child or a woman (the boy king Edward VI of England, Mary Queen of Scots, the Scottish Regent Mary of Guise, and English queens Mary Tudor and Elizabeth I), he treated them all with impatience and contempt. Yet neither Mary of Guise nor Mary Queen of Scots could do without him. Even though they were Catholics, Knox represented a spiritual authority they needed to legitimize their own. When Queen Mary announced her plans to marry her worthless cousin Lord Darnley, Knox gave her such a fierce public scolding that she burst into tears in full view of her court. She made the mistake of marrying Darnley anyway, and set in motion the series of scandals that would finally push her off the throne. By 1570, Knox recognized that Mary no longer had any part to play in making the New Jerusalem and he swept her aside, like a useless piece from the game board. Her infant son James VI was installed in her place, with George Buchanan, Scotland’s leading humanist, as his tutor, so that the boy could be raised in the Presbyterian faith.