How the Scots Invented the Modern World (7 page)

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 leader 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.

The Scottish Parliament traditionally opened with a stunning if anachronistic display of medieval pageantry.
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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 but 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?

In that sense, all the solemn procession and pageantry was a sham. London had actually been running Scottish affairs for more than a century, since the reign of James I. Scotland’s greatest families had long since been brought to heel. As for Parliament, no one had any illusions about its claims to be a body representative of the Scottish nation. The current Parliament had been elected in 1703; the last election before that had been in 1689.

Unlike its English counterpart, Scotland’s Parliament did not enjoy a long-established reputation as a forum for public debate or as the defender of the rights of freeborn citizens. On the contrary, it had a long and shameless history of supine subservience to royal authority. Most Scots barely noted its existence. If it disappeared, very few beyond its actual members would notice or care. James Johnstone, the needy pro-union Lord Clerk Register, pointed this out to friends even before the Parliament began. “As for the giving up the legislative [power], we had none to give up.” He went on, “For the true state of the matter was, whether Scotland should continue subject to an English ministry without [the privilege of trade] or be subject to an English Parliament with trade.”

Others, however, were determined not to be so clearheaded or realistic. Here they had one trump card to play: religion. Once Parliament had opened and the Queen’s letter was read, urging them to ratify the treaty, the member for Pardivan rose to propose a public fast day before proceeding any further. His intention was clear: to stir up resentment against the treaty within the Kirk and among the Presbyterian clergy. The treaty had said nothing about the Kirk. Unlike independence of Parliament, the independence of the Presbyterian Church and its General Assembly was an issue that could stir deep emotion in Scotland. Many ministers were already fiercely opposed to union; a public fast day would certainly turn into a series of massive public demonstrations against the treaty and the hated English.

And Queensberry and the pro-union forces knew it. As one member put it, the fast-day proposal “occasioned a long jangle” but was finally defeated. But the question of the Kirk still remained unresolved. The first serious vote took place on October 15, on whether to proceed to consider the treaty article by article. Fletcher, Hamilton, and the others fought hard to delay, but the motion was carried by sixty-six votes.

The next day the opposition received a body blow they had not expected. The General Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland, meeting in Edinburgh at the same time, gave its tacit consent to the union treaty.

This coup can be credited to the efforts of one man: William Carstares, Principal of the University of Edinburgh and current Moderator of the General Assembly. Alert, intelligent, and close-mouthed, Carstares, like so many prominent men in pre-Union Scotland, had suffered heavily for his faith. He was the eldest of nine children of a prominent Covenanting minister who had been driven into hiding by Lauderdale’s dragoons. Carstares was then jailed in Edinburgh Castle for distributing anti-Lauderdale broadsides. He had fled to Holland after his release, where he joined a plot against James II, and was arrested again. Under torture, Carstares had provided evidence that sent an innocent man to the gallows at Grassmarket. Perhaps for that reason he had acquired an inner taciturnity, a guardedness in dealing with both friends and foes, as well as a studied hatred of the Stuarts and their supporters.