How the Scots Invented the Modern World (5 page)

At Glasgow the tuition fee of five pounds a year was one-tenth the cost of going to Cambridge or Oxford. This meant that students like the Edinburgh apothecary’s son Thomas Aikenhead were more the rule rather than the exception. A father in trade, commerce, or the professions was more typical than a working- or laboring-class one; but even this contrasted with the socially top-heavy landed gentry and aristocratic student bodies in the English universities. More than half of the students at the University of Glasgow between 1740 and 1830 came from middle-class backgrounds. Many, although probably not very many, of the rest came from lower down the social ladder.

In the eighteenth century, sons of artisans and shopkeepers and farmers, some as young as thirteen or fourteen, would scrape together enough money to pay their university fees, attending lectures alongside Frasers and Maxwells and Erskines, the sons of Scotland’s most aristocratic families. Robert Foulis, who was an apprentice barber and the son of a maltman, spent his spare time in the 1730s taking classes with the University of Glasgow’s most distinguished philosopher, Francis Hutcheson, as well as the mathematician Robert Simson. Hutcheson was so impressed by Foulis that he hired him as his classroom assistant. It was the sort of scene unimaginable at Oxford or Cambridge until very late in the Victorian era.

Nor were boys the only ones who benefited from this. Auditing university classes became a favorite hobby among Edinburgh and Aberdeen townspeople, just as professors regularly engaged in a “community out-reach” to offer classes to students outside the academic setting.

Robert Dick, at the University of Glasgow, taught natural philosophy to a lecture hall of townspeople, men and women, in the 1750s. In the early nineteenth century, University of Edinburgh chemistry professor Thomas Hope’s public lectures drew more than three hundred serious-minded ladies from the town. For middle-class Scots, education was more than just a means to professional credentials or social advancement. It became a way of life.

The Schools Act of 1696 had set off far-reaching changes the Kirk could never have foreseen—a good example of how social actions have unintended consequences, as Adam Smith and a later generation of Scottish thinkers so well understood. Smith observed, in his
Wealth of
Nations,
how Scotland’s parish school system taught “almost the whole common people to read, and a very great proportion of them to write and account.” Today we recognize that literacy and its mathematical counterpart, numeracy, are fundamental skills for living in a complex modern society. In that sense, no other society in Europe was as broadly prepared for “takeoff” into the modern age as was eighteenth-century Scotland.

This seems odd, because the obvious candidate for that lead position had always been England. The Scots themselves certainly thought so. Already by the 1690s, Scots were beginning to suffer from an inferiority complex regarding the kingdom to their south. They were taking several significant steps to remedy that problem—including, in a bizarre way, prosecuting the Aikenhead case, which Kirk hard-liners saw as a kind of preemptive strike against an encroaching English religious culture. But if the relationship between the two nations had never been easy, it had also not been so unbalanced until very recently.

England and Scotland had been joined together by history and geography since the fall of the Roman Empire. They were in effect twin kingdoms, born in the same era and from the same forces. Both were remote from the older traditional centers of European culture. Both had fought off the same foreign invaders—the Viking Norsemen—in the tenth and eleventh centuries.

Both had taken shape through the consolidation of power in the hands of feudal kings, who gave land to their powerful followers—in the case of Scotland, the heads of the clans—in exchange for obedience. Both spoke the same language, since the Scottish royal court had adopted English (or a dialect related to Middle English called Scots) back in the eleventh century, relegating Gaelic to the cultural backwater.

English and Scottish kings alike had not hesitated to take advantage of the other’s weakness to wage war, in order to grab territory and wealth. The result was a long and bitter enmity between the two peoples, each of whom viewed the other with suspicion and loathing. Scots are taught, of course, to see a figure such as William Wallace as the great Braveheart, who saved Scotland from English domination. But to the English, Wallace was a heartless murderer, who burned and ethnically cleansed entire regions of the north Border country in order to expand Scottish settlements. The Lanercost Chronicles celebrated Wallace’s gruesome execution in 1305:

Butcher of thousands, threefold death be thine:
So shall the English from thee gain relief.
Scotland, be wise, and choose a nobler chief.

Likewise, English history views King Edward I (1277–1307) as one of the Middle Ages’ most effective monarchs, who consolidated control over Wales and the north, creating the core of what would become the Kingdom of Great Britain. Scots, on the other hand, see him as a villain of the first rank, a treacherous tyrant who ravaged Edinburgh and stole Scotland’s holy Stone of Scone, on which her kings had been crowned for centuries.

Even the Reformation, when both kingdoms abandoned the Catholic Church for slightly differing versions of Calvinist Protestantism, failed to heal the hatred between Scottish Presbyterian and English Episcopalian. Each persecuted the other whenever he could. But then, in 1603, dynastic accident intervened. Elizabeth, the last Tudor, died unwed and childless, and the throne of England passed to her cousin, the son of her hated rival Mary Queen of Scots, James VI of Scotland, and now James I of England. For the next hundred years both kingdoms would be ruled by a single royal family, the Stuarts.

It was not a pleasant experience. Control of Scottish affairs was turned over to royal appointees who ran things according to the demands of the king’s advisers at Court. “With my pen I govern Scotland,” said King James with complacent self-satisfaction from his palace at Whitehall. He kept Scotland’s aristocratic families on a short leash, schooling them in the advantages of subservience to royal will and favor, and in the disadvantages of self-assertion.

He forced her ministers to accept the rule of bishops and to teach their congregations to kneel at the Holy Sacrament. Scottish noblemen who flocked to James’s court in London earned a reputation as needy and greedy spongers and parasites. It left a negative impression about Scots that lasted all the way down to the era of the American Revolution—the distant origin of the stereotype of the grasping, tightfisted Scot that still persists today.

Meanwhile, the high-handed policies of James I and then his son Charles I managed to offend both kingdoms so thoroughly that they rose up in arms. The English Civil War was as much a Scottish war as an English one; and when Charles I lost his fight against his English subjects in 1647, he offered the Scots religious freedom and state support of their Kirk if they would help him retake his southern crown. With astonishing shortsightedness and ineptitude, they accepted, only to be defeated at the battle of Preston by Oliver Cromwell. The result was that Charles lost not only his northern kingdom but his head as well, and the Scots their independence. Scotland underwent the full rigors of English military occupation and martial law over the Lowlands and Highlands for nearly a decade.

In fact, Oliver Cromwell managed to do what no monarch had done in over a thousand years of trying. He had unified not only England and Scotland under a single regime, but Ireland as well, after his brutal, cold-blooded massacre of the inhabitants of Drogheda in 1652 terrified that island into submission. The only thing this remarkable achievement earned him, however, was the undying enmity of posterity in all three nations. If there is one historical figure whom Irishmen, Englishmen, and Scotsmen can all agree to hate even today, it is Oliver Cromwell.

It was Scotland, not England, that first recognized Charles II as its king. His return to London in May 1660 ought to have signaled a new era of reconciliation between the northern and southern kingdoms. But Charles was determined to bend the Scots to his will, and on the one issue guaranteed to arouse the most intense opposition: that of religion. He was as committed to impose an Episcopalian establishment on Scotland as his father had been. His chosen instrument was his Secretary for Scotland, the Duke of Lauderdale, who ruled Scotland as virtual dictator from 1667 to 1680. These were the years of the Killing Time. In the words of John Hill Burton, “never was Eastern despot blessed with the minister of his will more obedient, docile, and sedulous.” Lauderdale used military occupation, torture, execution, and penal servitude in the West Indies to pound opponents into obedience. The Killing Time taught Scottish Calvinists to hate governance from London, the Episcopal Church, and Englishmen in general—and Highlanders as well, since Lauderdale liked to deploy regiments drawn from the pro-Stuart Highland clans (dubbed the “Highland Host”) for his military forays into the Covenant-ing southwest Lowlands.

The dismal sequence of religious persecution and popular resistance persisted after Lauderdale’s recall in 1680, and reached a crescendo when Charles’s Catholic brother James became James II. Scottish nobles such as the Earl of Argyll joined conspiracies with English anti-Catholics to overthrow James, and, like Argyll, paid for their failure with their lives.

So in the end the Scottish political nation greeted the events of 1688 with relief, when James II was driven from his throne and his Protestant daughter Mary, with her husband, William of Orange, took his place. As in England, the Glorious Revolution brought a loosening of old tensions and conflicts. The Kirk regained its independence. William and Mary abolished the hated Lords of the Articles, whom the Stuarts had used to dominate Scotland’s Parliament. But elsewhere a new split began to show. Some Highland clans, such as the Camerons, the Appin Stewarts, the MacLeods, and the MacDonalds of Glencoe, had prospered under the old regime. They were more than willing to see James II back on the throne. They resented the new regime’s focus on events on the Continent, where William was fighting a war with Louis XIV and the French. These were the first stirrings of Jacobitism, inspired perhaps less by loyalty to the fickle Stuarts than by resistance to the shift of the center of power from Edinburgh to London.

By 1689, little had changed, at least on the surface. The two kingdoms were still ruled by a single crown, with separate capitals and separate parliaments. But the balance between the two kingdoms had shifted. Economics, rather than religion, was becoming the new issue of contention. England had acquired an empire, reaching across the Atlantic to the New World, and extending south and east to Asia. From 1660 to 1688 the total tonnage of goods carried in English ships doubled. London and Bristol merchants had learned to shift their activities from woolen cloth exports, the staple of English trade since the Middle Ages, to re-exporting goods from America and Asia to the rest of Europe: sugar, tobacco, pepper, molasses, and cotton. Costs fell, demand grew, London boomed, and Parliament passed laws called the Navigation Acts, securing English merchants’ control over their Atlantic and Asian markets. The navy expanded into the largest in the world to protect the trade links with America and Asia, which would soon include India, and the slave trade with Africa. A new cluster of institutions—the Bank of England, the Royal Exchange, and the Board of Trade—turned the growing wealth of English business into the wealth of the nation at large, and of government. Richer, more populous, and more politically stable than Scotland, England was emerging as Europe’s new superpower.

Scotland’s traditional economy, by contrast, had reached its limits. Both Lowlands and Highlands still depended on the ancient ties between laird and tenant to work the land and produce enough food to feed her one million people. Her diet was monotonous even in the best of times. Ordinary Scots relied heavily on whole grains such as oatmeal and barley, with very little meat beyond the occasional piece of fish or a bit of lean pork. Probably nutritionists today would consider it a healthier diet than the typical fat-laden, sugar-sweetened, alcohol- and tobacco-ridden meals of the English and Scottish ruling classes. But it was not a meal anyone sat down to with relish. And that was when there was enough to eat. After 1695, when the first of a series of bad harvests hit, there would not be.

The English, like the Dutch before them, had learned how to import food when they needed it, in exchange for profitable manufactured goods. Scotland did have her overseas trade, but it rested on shipping unprocessed primary goods such as grain, cattle, wool, fish, coal, and lead ore: the sort of low-value exports of today’s poorest Third World countries. To make matters worse, the wars of King William and then Queen Anne on the Continent disrupted relations with her principal trading partner, France, while the Navigation Acts denied her access to the booming English markets and colonies. Scotland and the Scots were stuck in the mean and unproductive patterns of the past, and they knew it.

By 1695 the Scottish ruling class assembled in Parliament in Edinburgh decided to do something about it. Their plan was simple and straightforward. Scotland would compete at the English level by doing as the English had done: creating a new economy by legislation. The same Parliament that passed the Blasphemy Act and the School Act also established a Bank of Scotland, closely modeled on the highly successful Bank of England, founded the year before (although it was much smaller, with a starting capital of only 100,000 pounds sterling, compared to the Bank of England’s almost 600,000 pounds). Then, the next year, Parliament authorized a public chartered corporation, modeled on the British East India Company, to create a seaborne Scottish trading empire flowing both east and west. The resulting Darien Company occupies one of the bitterest and saddest chapters in Scottish history.