How the Scots Invented the Modern World (6 page)

It was the brainchild of William Paterson, a Dumfriesshire Scot living in London who was also the man who had drawn up the original proposal for the Bank of England. Like another fast-talking Scot, John Law, who would convince the French crown to set up the Bank Royale in 1718, Paterson had a keen grasp of the realities of the new overseas trading economies emerging in seventeenth-century Europe. And like Law, whose ambitions would eventually push the French financial system into ruin, Paterson was something of a dreamer who never let details stand in the way of a good plan. With the help of an East Lothian landowner and member of Parliament named Andrew Fletcher, who will become a key figure in our story later on, Paterson urged his fellow Scots to get in on the public joint stock company sweepstakes that was bringing in such wealth for England, such as the East India Company and Royal Africa Company, the latter of which dominated the slave trade. Parliament agreed and, on May 26, 1695, duly granted Paterson’s company a permanent monopoly for Scottish trade with Asia and Africa, and a thirty-one-year monopoly with America.

English merchants reacted with predictable dismay and hostility. They lobbied Parliament, which petitioned King William not to sign the bill. Although he did sign it, the business and political climate in London and Westminster became so antagonistic that the Scottish company’s original hopes of cashing in on the existing English trade links had to be scaled back. Paterson had another plan up his sleeve, however. On July 23, 1696, the Scottish Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Trade agreed to his proposal to use the company to found a Scottish colony in Panama, on the Isthmus of Darien. Paterson had an almost mystical belief in the importance of this uninhabited strip of beach and jungle to the future of world trade. Darien would be the perfect entrepôt for the flow of goods between the Atlantic and the Pacific, he believed, between East and West; he called Panama “the door of the seas, and the key of the Universe.” And now it could belong to Scotland rather than to England or Spain (who had laid claim to it since the time of Balboa). The company’s original mission had changed from encouraging trade to creating colonies. All Paterson needed were volunteers willing to go to Panama as colonists—which did not seem too difficult, since rural Scotland was slowly sinking into a prolonged famine—and money.

The English did everything they could to prevent the money from being raised. English subscribers withdrew; bankers in Amsterdam and Hamburg were told in no uncertain terms what would happen to their favorable dealings with London if they contributed funds to the Darien scheme. Instead, the Scots themselves raised the necessary cash, in a huge outpouring of patriotic sentiment—and anti-English resentment—not seen since the National Covenant. Hundreds of landowners and merchants emptied their pockets to buy Darien stock. Many of Scotland’s leading aristocratic families mortgaged their fortunes. The company raised the entire amount of 400,000 pounds in a matter of months, although it amounted to almost half of the total money in circulation in Scotland.

It was a magnificent gesture, yet what motivated the vast majority of subscribers was not a sense of a good investment opportunity, but rather a point of honor. The English had tried to sabotage the project, or so everyone believed; therefore they had to show the English what Scots were made of. London’s political point man in Edinburgh, the Marquis of Queensberry, had strong misgivings about the whole enterprise. However, he ended up subscribing three thousand pounds when he learned that the Duchess of Hamilton had done the same.

Ships, stores, and settlers, among them William Paterson and his family, soon gathered at Leith harbor near Edinburgh. The goods they would carry to Panama to trade with the natives included five thousand English-language Bibles and four thousand powdered wigs. On July 17, 1698, “amidst the tears and prayers and praises” of the entire city of Edinburgh, five ships set sail for the New World. On November 3 they dropped anchor at the Bay of Darien.

From start to finish, their stay was a disaster. On arriving, Paterson and his fellow colonists realized they had taken on provisions for only six months, instead of nine as originally intended. The English, from their bases in Jamaica and Havana, made sure that no more were to be had. As anyone could have predicted who knew that mosquito-infested coast, fever broke out, eventually killing settlers at a rate of twelve a day. Drunkenness spread, and discipline, godly or otherwise, collapsed. Then the Spanish reasserted their claims to Darien as part of Panama. They seized one of the company ships and threatened to attack. Beaten, exhausted, and decimated by disease, the survivors set sail again in July 1699, only one year after they had left Leith harbor to the clamor and acclaim of their countrymen.

Of the 1,200 who originally set out, very few returned home. Among the dead was William Paterson’s own wife, buried, along with her husband’s dazzling dream, on the surf-swept beach at Darien.

Characteristically, the Scots still refused to quit. Two more expeditions set out, but neither one did any better. The last one, better armed and provisioned and with more men, fought the Spanish and the jungle almost incessantly from the day they landed. Finally, in April 1700, they too gave up. The four ships, crowded with men, according to one eyewitness, “like hogs in a sty,” set out for home but ran into terrible storms. The ships scattered, and two foundered. The other two found refuge in nearby English and Spanish ports, but were seized by authorities. Not one ship returned to Scotland.

The Darien venture cost more than two thousand lives and over 200,000 pounds. It also broke the bank, literally. The loss of so much hard currency, and the ruin of so many families and business concerns that had been tied up with the Darien scheme, pushed the still-struggling Bank of Scotland over the edge. In December 1704 it suspended payments to creditors. With the kingdom’s finances in tatters, and its agriculture in the grip of famine and starvation, Scotland’s ruin was complete.

Darien also further poisoned relations between the two kingdoms. “I have been ill served in Scotland,” was King William’s remark, and when he died in 1702 and his wife’s sister Anne, the last of the Protestant Stuarts, took over as queen, the bitterness over Darien deepened. The English had been by turns amused, scared, and relieved by the debacle. They now saw the Scots as upstart economic rivals, pure and simple, and decided that their empire and its wealth must be permanently walled off from any Scottish interlopers. In 1704 Parliament passed an Aliens Act, which ruled that all Scottish nationals living in England were now officially foreign aliens, and incapable of passing their English property on to their heirs. It also banned all major import trade with Scotland. The law was revoked two years later, but it reveals a good deal about the depth of anti-Scottish feeling in the southern kingdom.

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

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.