How the Scots Invented the Modern World

by Arthur Herman

  The Scots, too, were furious. Any sensible person would have realized that the Darien venture was doomed from the start. As a modern historian, Patrick Riley, explains, “No one can really defend an attempt to establish a colony in a fever-ridden territory belonging to someone else.” Although Paterson and the other directors knew the enterprise would generate huge English resistance, they did nothing to try to head it off. Instead of seeking English cooperation and making concessions to get it, Paterson and Fletcher had started with an aggressive arrogance, determined to beat Parliament and the City of London at its own game. Now that it did fail, however, everyone knew whom to blame: the English.

  In late April 1705, an English ship that was rumored to have sunk one of the last Darien vessels put into Leith from the Firth of Forth. Scottish authorities ordered it seized and the captain and crew arrested for murder and piracy. A trial of sorts took place, in a lynch-mob atmosphere. The English captain and fourteen crewmen were found guilty and sentenced to death. This time, unlike the earlier Aikenhead case, the Crown intervened and pardoned the condemned men. However, the Scottish Privy Council, terrified by the howls of protest from the Edinburgh crowd, allowed the captain and two officers to be hanged. Vengeful Scots celebrated; indignant Englishmen raged; relations between the two countries sank to a new low.

  To wiser observers in Scotland, including many newly sobered former Darien investors, all this proved one thing: that Scotland could not succeed in getting into the new Atlantic trading economy without English help. Under current arrangements, as two separate sovereign-ties governed by a single monarch, that would not happen. Darien proved that if the king or queen had to choose between English and Scottish interests, he or she would always gravitate toward the richer, more populous southern kingdom. Scotland would always come in second, unless some new, larger interest could be created, which would look to satisfy both.

  Here the solution seemed to be the word more and more on the lips of the political classes of both nations: union. It had come up before in parliamentary debates and pamphlets; now, paradoxically, the bitterness over the Darien debacle turned it into a tangible issue. English political opinion was largely in favor of it. In fact, the Aliens Act of 1704 carried a provision calling for the naming of Scottish and English commissioners to negotiate “concerning the Union of the Two Kingdoms.” Whigs and Tories both saw it as a means of keeping the reins on any future Scottish enterprise like Darien, and of making sure Scotland remained in the English economic and political orbit.

  And from the English standpoint, there were now strong geopolitical reasons for union, as well. After James II had been stripped of his throne and his title in 1688, he had found a ready ally in England’s chief enemy, France’s Louis XIV. With French help, James had landed in Ireland and raised a Catholic army against English rule. At the Battle of the Boyne, in June 1690, William and his Irish Protestant allies had managed to crush the revolt. But pro-James or “Jacobite” sentiment was also strong in Scotland. Through union, English politicians believed, they could prevent Scotland from being used as a strategic base for any future Stuart countercoup.

  Scottish opinion was more mixed. Some, such as Andrew Fletcher, believed that the Darien venture proved that Scotland could never rely on any English help or cooperation. “There is no way left to make the Scots a happy people, but by separating from England and setting up a King of their own,” he told members of the Scottish Parliament in 1705. Pro-Jacobite Scots, such as George Lockhart of Carnwath, agreed with him. Of course the English were in favor of union, Lockhart wrote, “because it rivetted the Scots in perpetual slavery, depriving them of any legal method to redress themselves of the injuries they might receive from them.” He could have added that it also deprived James Stuart and his son of any claim to the crown, since by act of Parliament no Roman Catholic could sit on the throne of England—or, by extension, on the throne of an England-Scotland merger.

  So, improbably enough, within five years of the Darien debacle, union had become the hot new political issue in both England and Scotland. The Scottish Parliament even agreed in principle to formation of a commission to discuss and negotiate a possible treaty. Everyone understood that the current relationship between the two kingdoms was no longer working, and that a new one was needed. The key question was what kind.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A Trap of Their Own Making

  I

  In the autumn of 1707, all eyes turned to Edinburgh. There Scotland’s Parliament would assemble on October 3 to vote on a treaty of union between England and Scotland. Daniel Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe, was also a sometime government propagandist and spy for Queen Anne’s minister Lord Harley. He had come to Scotland to watch events and report back to his masters. He found the atmosphere tense, to say the least. As Defoe wandered through the dark, narrow streets and wynds (or alleys) of Edinburgh, all the talk was about “slavery to the English, running away with the Crown, taking away the Nation, and the like.” It was fortunate, Defoe figured, that London had not published the terms of the draft treaty before now. If the Scottish negotiators had then tried to return to Scotland, he said, “there was not many of them would dared to have gone home, without a guard to protect them.”

  The treaty had been negotiated and signed that previous spring in London by two teams of commissioners, one for Scotland, the other for England. Negotiated might not be the best word. Scotland’s Parliament had authorized a slate of treaty commissioners in 1705, but played no part in choosing them. In fact, both teams, English and Scottish, had been handpicked by the Crown. They had all been chosen for their willingness to endorse what was called “an incorporating union,” a merger that fully absorbed Scotland into the kingdom of England. That was what Queen Anne and her English advisers wanted, and it was what the Scottish commissioners were expected to provide. “You see that what we are to treat of is not in our choice,” wrote one of them to a friend. Perhaps for that reason, despite the document’s twenty-eight separate clauses and momentous significance, negotiations had taken only eighteen days. Now it only required ratification by the Scottish Parliament to become law. But no one supposed that was going to be easy.

  The terms were indeed drastic, especially for Scots who had hoped that union would mean a federation of the two kingdoms. As one supporter explained, this would have allowed two “Distinct, Free and Independent Kingdoms [to] unite their separate interests into one common interest, for the mutual benefit of both.” Instead, the treaty created a single new entity, Great Britain, governed by a single monarch and by a single British Parliament. The fine print, though, showed that the new government would be far more English than Scottish. The seat of government would be in London, nearly four hundred miles to the south. The Scottish Privy Council would lose all its power, while England’s would now assume direct control over everything that affected both nations, including taxes, custom and excise duties, and military and foreign affairs.

  The treaty did leave some concessions to Scottish pride. Scotland’s separate legal system and courts would remain, as would the independence of her towns or burghs. Even more important, Scottish merchants would now have access to England’s overseas markets, from America and the Caribbean to Africa and India. But nothing was said about the independence of the Kirk, or the powers of its General Assembly, under the new arrangement. This uncertainty disturbed every self-respecting Presbyterian, and seriously weakened pro-union sentiment in the Scottish heartland.

  One issue above all others, however, made passage of the treaty look very doubtful. The terms of union required the end of a separate Scottish Parliament. Scots would have 45 seats in the new British House of Commons—out of 558. Scottish nobles would have even less representation; only sixteen would be able to take seats in the new House of Peers. In effect, by signing the treaty of union, Scotland’s political class was committing suicide. Yet this was exactly what London, and the Scottish commissioners, expected them to do.

  The leade
r of the pro-union forces in Parliament was James Douglas, Marquis of Queensberry. His orders were simple: secure ratification of the treaty by any means necessary, up to and including buying the votes to do it. London had even provided him with a secret slush fund of twenty thousand pounds to help make its arguments persuasive. Contemporaries, and later historians, would make a great deal about how this secret money “bought” the Scottish Parliament. In the end, however, it was probably more than Queensberry and the Crown needed (Queensberry himself ended up pocketing more than twelve thousand pounds of it for his own expenses). Whatever their principles, Scotland’s nobles and lairds had fallen on hard times, especially after the Darien disaster. John Locke’s friend James Johnstone, for example, found himself pro-union out of necessity. He was desperate for money—“which I need more than I thought I should do,” he confessed, because without it, “my house should fall.” As Defoe remarked to Harley: “In short, money will do anything here.”

  The Court party was united by long subservience to royal command, and the need for royal favor. The opposition, on the other hand, was a hodgepodge of discontented groups and factions who all had something to lose from union, or thought they did. Lowland lairds allied themselves with Highland chiefs, along with Edinburgh and Glasgow burghers who worried about having to compete for markets with English merchants. Presbyterian hard-liners who feared a weakened Kirk found themselves joining hands with crypto-Catholic Jacobites, who believed (correctly) that a Scottish-English union would finish off any chance of a restoration of the Stuarts to their ancestral throne. The ostensible leader of opposition to the treaty was the fifth Duke of Hamilton, but its real spokesman was the former cofounder with William Paterson of the Darien Company, the wild and unpredictable Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun.

  Fletcher despised any and all authority, but particularly that of the Stuarts. He was born into an old East Lothian landowning family in Saltoun. His mother claimed to be a descendant of Robert the Bruce. Andrew had proved himself to be a political firebrand from his early twenties, and the bane of successive governments in Edinburgh. Someone described him as “a low, thin man, brown complexion, full of fire, with a stern, sour look.” The Earl of Darmouth knew him well: “He was very brave, and a man of great integrity, [but] he had strange chimerical notions of government, which were so unsettled, that he would be very angry next day for any body’s being of an opinion that he was himself the night before. . . .”

  Fletcher’s involvement in the Darien scheme was only one of a number of similar quixotic ventures. In 1685 he had thrown in his lot with the Earl of Argyll and the circle of hard-core anti-Catholic revolutionaries who had tried to preempt James II’s succession and to put Charles II’s bastard son, the Duke of Monmouth, in his place. Fletcher’s explosive temper helped to ruin the expedition but probably saved his life. He quarreled with the expedition’s chief guide over a horse, and shot him dead. Monmouth had wanted Fletcher to command his cavalry, but had to send him abroad instead. Monmouth proceeded to lose the battle of Sedgemoor, and was executed for treason along with Argyll. Fletcher, without wanting to be, was safe back in Holland. Instead, his punishment was limited to being sentenced to death in absentia and the confiscation of his Saltoun estates.

  It was during his exile in Holland that Fletcher met William of Orange, the future William III. They became friends, and Fletcher joined him on his expedition to England in 1688. But after the Glorious Revolution, Fletcher turned against William, as well, when he realized the new king was chiefly interested in using the Scots as allies in his wars in Europe, and not in setting Scotland free.

  Andrew Fletcher cared passionately about freedom, but it was a peculiar kind of freedom. In 1697 he had called for a compulsory universal militia, creating four camps, one in Scotland and three in England, where every young man, on beginning his twenty-second birthday, would receive military training of the most rigorous kind. “No woman should be suffered to come within the camp, and the crimes of abusing their own bodies any manner of way, punished with death.” The next year he proposed solving Scotland’s economic depression by in effect turning the Scottish peasantry into slaves, dividing up the indigent poor among the local landlords (such as himself), and giving the latter the power of life and death over their human herds.

  By instinct and temperment, Fletcher was an authoritarian anarchist. He liked to think of himself as a Scottish laird of the old school. In fact, he had lived abroad almost as long as he had lived in Scotland. Fletcher was a genuine intellectual and amazingly well read: he had what was reputed to be the best private library in Scotland. Treaty supporters such as the Earl of Mar dismissed Fletcher as a “violent, ingenious fanatic.” But he was also a hero to many, because in the Parliament of 1703 he had pushed through a bill guaranteeing a Protestant succession in Scotland (although Fletcher was no admirer of the Kirk or its ministers) and establishing the principle that any change in the royal succession required the consent of the Scottish Parliament.

  “I regard not names,” he wrote, “but things.” And for Fletcher, the thing that counted was land, as a place of employment for those who worked it and as a source of wealth for those who owned it. “For what end, then,” he wrote in 1703, “did God create such vast tracts of land, capable of producing so great variety and abundance?” He knew the value of commerce, as his involvement in the Darien Company showed: but he despised those who lived by it. “Can there be a greater disorder in human affairs,” he wrote, than having human beings jammed together in cities, earning their living by “the exercise of a sedentary and unmanly trade, to foment the luxury of a few”?

  Fletcher despised merchants as much as he despised human weakness and big government. In his mind, they were natural allies. And he saw all of them in a treaty of union. Fletcher saw the proposed treaty as a devil’s bargain: trading away Scotland’s independence in exchange for a share in England’s seaborne empire. But he also saw in it the specter of change, the rise of a new society organized around money and commercial enterprise, which he saw as profoundly unnatural and “unmanly.” If this was the future, Andrew Fletcher was determined not to give in to it without a fight.

  II

  The Scottish Parliament traditionally opened with a stunning if anachronistic display of medieval pageantry.2 The Lord High Constable would take his ritual place in an armchair at the door of Parliament House. Officers of state, in their magnificent robes of office, stood on each side. Then, at the appointed hour, the members of Parliament began their parade from Holyrood Palace up High Street to St. Giles Church and Parliament House, with two mounted trumpeters leading the cavalcade. First came the Estate of the Burghs or towns, also on horseback, arranged two by two. Then came the Estate of the Shires, representatives from the rural counties of Scotland, similarly mounted and in twos.

  The Lords Baron followed, gorgeously decked out in colorful robes and velvet surcoats bearing their coats of arms, each accompanied by a gentleman leading his horse and three servants wearing his lord’s heraldic badges. Then the earls, each with four servants; more trumpeters; then the Lord Lyon, King of Arms, followed by the royal regalia: the Sword of State, the Sceptre, the Purse, and the Crown. The Lord High Commissioner, Queensberry himself, rode along surrounded by servants, pages, and footmen; then dukes, marquises, and finally John Campbell, Duke of Argyll, with the Captain of the Horse Guards and the Royal Horse Guards bringing up the rear. “The Riding of Parliament” was a powerful visual reminder that Parliament was really the gathering of the kingdom’s traditional feudal order, a living tableau of the “bodie politicke” as it had been envisioned since the days of John Balliol and Robert the Bruce.

  This time the crowd of Edinburgh citizens gathered to cheer their heroes, the Duke of Hamilton and his ally Atholl, and heckle Queensberry, Mar, and the other commissioners. Mutters and curses of “no union” and “treaters-traitors” greeted them as they entered Parliament House. Daniel Defoe stood nearby and watched with amazement. “To find a nation b
ut a few months before, were earnestly crying out for a Union, and the nearer the better . . . now fly in the face of their masters, and upbraid the gentlemen, who managed it, with selling and betraying their country . . .”

  But pro-union forces had a strategy to circumvent their furious opponents. This was the treaty’s tantalizing promise of economic prosperity for Scotland, as trade barriers would come down and Scottish merchants would be able to enter English overseas markets. The Earl of Stair, Queensberry’s right-hand man, had from the beginning stressed the need to present the trade issue to Parliament first. Then, he told the queen and her advisers, questions about the loss of power to London, the abolition of Parliament, the succession, and the rest would take care of themselves.

  Here, Fletcher and Stair were in agreement. Union was indeed a devil’s bargain. Scots were being asked to exchange their political autonomy for economic growth, or, to put it more crudely, for money. But this raised a question. What was the real value of that much-vaunted autonomy, and independent legislation by Parliament, which they were being asked to give up?