How the Scots Invented the Modern World (8 page)

When he returned to Holland, he had met William of Orange. The future king was immediately attracted by Carstares’s honesty, dedication, and pious eloquence, and made him his chaplain. Unlike Andrew Fletcher, he had remained loyal to William after 1688, and proved a rock of support for the government in Edinburgh and in the Kirk. In 1703 he became Principal of Edinburgh’s university. With his brother-in-law William Donlop serving as Principal of the University of Glasgow, he dominated Scottish education with a Colossus-like presence. Thanks to Carstares, university life in Scotland would from that time on be resolutely “Whig”
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: pro-Revolution, pro–Protestant succession, pro–House of Hanover—and pro-union.

Carstares’s Presbyterian credentials and support for a strong independent Kirk were a byword in Edinburgh (before his death in 1715, he would even pen a forthright if qualified defense of the hanging of Thomas Aikenhead). But his fear of a Stuart restoration ran deeper. Almost to a man, the Kirk was opposed to the treaty. But Carstares warned his colleagues in the General Assembly that if the treaty of union failed, they might well find themselves with a Roman Catholic king. They faced a trade-off. If they insisted on getting everything they wanted, they could end up losing it all. But if they could accept an Episcopalian king and the merger with England, they would win concessions on the final draft, and preserve the Kirk’s control over its doctrine and discipline. His arguments worked, and the General Assembly agreed to the treaty. It was a monumental act of statesmanship on Carstares’s part—and done, in defiance of critics of union, without recourse to a single bribe. It also deprived treaty opponents of their most potent resource, the religious card. Years later someone would find an unsigned letter addressed to Carstares preserved in his private papers. It read simply, “The union could never have had the consent of the Scottish Parliament if you had not acted the worthy part you did.”

Now the Earl of Mar, writing to Harley in London, was more confident than ever that the treaty would pass. But he believed that the opposition would still try “some foolish extravagant thing” to postpone the final day.

That “foolish extravagant thing” came on October 23. A mob stormed the house of Patrick Johnson, Lord Provost (or mayor) of Edinburgh and a treaty commissioner. The municipal guard had to be called out, and they arrested six rioters. The rest roamed the streets unchecked, smashing windows and threatening passersby. By nine o’clock they had intimidated any and all law-enforcement authorities and marauded at will. Queensberry sent a party of soldiers from Holyrood to the Netherbow Port to keep at least one gate out of the city open.

The next day three regiments of royal troops marched in at Queensberry’s orders. Edinburgh was placed under martial law, and the city streets again became clear. But from this point on, no supporter of union dared go outside without armed bodyguards. Queensberry himself took the precaution of leaving Parliament House every day in a closed carriage at full gallop, while the crowd flung curses and excrement at the scrambling vehicle.

On November 7 the unrest spread to Glasgow, whose Provost fled to Edinburgh to escape the enraged throng. Anti-union protesters tried to stir many of the same emotions as the National Covenant had done seventy years earlier. On November 20 an armed mob marched into Dumfries, burned a copy of the treaty, and tacked up a crudely written proclamation that said ratification of union would be “contrary to our fundamental liberties and privileges . . . as men and christians.”

But this was 1707, not 1637. And day by day, ratification of the treaty went ahead as planned.

On November 4 the first article, providing that England and Scotland “for ever after be united in one kingdom by the name of Great Britain,” was presented to the assembled Parliament (unlike the English division into Lords and Commons, all the members of the Scottish Parliament met as a single body). The most emotional outburst from the opposition came not from Andrew Fletcher, but from another diehard member of the opposition, Lord Belhaven. In a long, almost hysterical speech, he compared the proposed treaty to an act of murder, with Scotland’s ancient mythic mother, Caledonia, expiring under the dagger blows of her treacherous sons, as her dying breath paraphrased Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “And you too, my children!”

Belhaven saw a powerful and prosperous England, its navy “the terror of Europe,” devouring a defenseless Scotland. “We are an obscure, poor people, though formerly of better account, removed to a remote corner of the world, without name and without alliance. . . . Now we are slaves forever.” Then he employed a different classical allusion: “Hannibal, My Lord, is at our gates; Hannibal is at our gates; Hannibal is come the length of this table, he is at the foot of the throne: he will demolish this throne if we take not notice; he would seize upon this regalia,” Belhaven bellowed, pointing to the Crown and Sceptre of State, “and whip us out of this house never to return.”

Then he turned to the other members. “We want neither men nor sufficiency of all manner of things to make a nation happy,” he cried, and then in a mighty wail, “Good God, what is this! An entire surrender.” Overcome with emotion, Belhaven broke off his speech, pleading that he was unable to finish.

The house sat, stunned. Then another figure, leaner and much older, rose to speak. It was Lord Chancellor Polwarth, newly honored by the Queen with the earldom of Marchmont, the same man who had cast the final vote sentencing Thomas Aikenhead to death eleven years earlier. Now he had a slight smile on his lips. “Behold, he dreamed,” Lord Marchmont sneered, with a glance at Belhaven, “but lo: when he awoke, behold it was a dream.” The remark broke the spell. The house voted, and Article One passed by thirty-two votes. “A good plurality,” wrote the Earl of Mar, and added, “but fewer than we expected.”

The next two articles also passed, after bitter wrangling. Then debate began on Article Four, providing for “full freedom and intercourse of Trade and navigation.” Andrew Fletcher had largely held his fire until now. He had moved to protest the use of royal troops to suppress the disturbances on October 23, saying that the rioters had been the true voice of the Scottish people. He had quarreled with his ostensible leader, the Duke of Hamilton, who had turned out to be a huge disappointment and a weak reed in organizing opposition—but then Fletcher was always quarreling with the Duke of Hamilton.

Now Fletcher came into his own. The treaty’s economic provisions, the heart of the union, raised Fletcher, as one friend put it, to “a vast heat.” The prospects for Scotland of access to English markets seemed to him dim. “For my part, I cannot see what advantage a free trade to the English plantations [in America] would bring us, except a further exhausting of our people, and the utter ruin of all our merchants. . . .” The union, he thundered, “would certainly destroy even those manufactures we now have.”

Nor was it clear to him how foreign trade, which he contemptuously described as “the golden ball for which all nations of the world are contending,” would benefit Scotland as a whole. “Our trade cannot increase on a sudden,” Fletcher argued, and there would be no money left after the rich and well-born had taken their share to spend on extravagant houses and clothes in London. Scotland’s own geographic advantages would play against her. “The wholesomeness of our air, and the healthfulness of our climate,” he had written, “afford us great numbers of people, which in so poor a country can never be all maintained by manufactures, or public workhouses, or any other way” than the one Fletcher had proposed fourteen years earlier: slavery. “Besides,” he added, “the natural pride of our commonalty, and their indisposition to labor, are insuperable difficulties, which the English have not to contend with in their people.” In short, the English might find a way to make commerce pay as a source of national wealth; the Scots, Fletcher believed, never could. Hence, growth through union was an illusion.

With or without the help of bribes, the vast majority in the Parliament understood that the real illusion was Fletcher’s: that formal independence could be maintained without economic strength. Treaty supporters understood that Scotland’s material poverty and failing economy were powerful reasons to
support
union. The future for Scotland, and the world, lay in the sea lanes of trade and empire. “This nation being poor,” said William Seton of Pitmedden, a former treaty commissioner, “and without force to protect its commerce, cannot reap great advantage by it, till it partake of the trade and protection of some powerful neighbor nation, that can communicate both these.” Article Four passed overwhelmingly, 156 to 19. Fletcher himself was so disappointed and furious at the final vote that he stormed out of the house.

The next two months were anticlimax, as Parliament made its way through the rest of the twenty-five articles, approving each after wearying and inconsequential debate with the symbolic touch of the Sceptre of State. By the first of the year of 1707, the Crown’s ministers began to talk of being “in sight of land.” Then, in January, they came to the last great barrier to final approval. This was Article 22, which abolished the Scottish Parliament and fixed representation in the new British Parliament at sixteen Lords and forty-five Commons, a ten-to-one advantage for the English members. To opponents, no provision of the treaty seemed to symbolize Scotland’s reduced status in the new union as much as did Article 22. “The Scots deserve no pity,” Fletcher had warned, “if they voluntarily surrender their united and separate interests to the Mercy of an united Parliament,” where the Scots would have only forty-five elected members. The very principle of representative government for which both Scots and English had fought and died, first in the Civil War and then in 1688, seemed under attack.

It was going to be a fierce debate, and to lead it Queensberry had chosen his right-hand counsel, John Dalrymple, Earl of Stair. Stair was, as John Prebble has put it, “witty, wise, and ambitious.” The son of Scotland’s most distinguished jurist, both he and his father had been savagely persecuted by the Stuarts. Then the son, realizing there were advantages to going with the flow, switched sides. He became Lord Advocate, and finally Secretary of State for Scotland.

A man constrained by few principles or much sense of humanity, Stair, more than anyone else, was responsible for the hideous events in Glencoe on February 13, 1692, when the pro-Orange Campbells had slaughtered thirty-seven of their pro-Jacobite neighbors, the MacDonalds of Glencoe, including women and children (“’tis strange to me,” he wrote callously when the news of the massacre set off shock-waves in the Scottish Parliament, “that means so much regret for such a sept of thieves”).
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The ensuing scandal had forced his resignation from the secretaryship, but his loyalty to William and Mary earned him the title Earl of Stair in 1700.

As a public figure, Stair was viewed by ordinary Scots with alarm, even fear. Rumors had it that he and his family were possessed by the devil. His sister Sarah was said to be able to levitate over walls at will. His mother was popularly believed to be a witch, and when her daughter Janet married against her will, her mother had (according to scandalmongers) cursed her: “Ye may marry him, but sair ye shall repent it!” On the wedding night, terrible screams were heard from the bridal chamber. When the door was opened the next morning, the daughter was found dead, bathed in blood, with the groom raving in the chimney corner, hopelessly insane.

The sensational story of “the Dalrymple curse” became the original for a novel by Sir Walter Scott and memorable to generations of operagoers as the Mad Scene in Donizetti’s
Lucia di Lammermoor.
Although the story is false (in fact, Janet Dalrymple died of a natural illness two weeks after her marriage), the myth of a curse gave Stair a certain intimidating presence among his colleagues—all except, of course, Andrew Fletcher, who at one point in the debate offered to tie Stair to his horse’s tail and drag him through the streets of Edinburgh (he was forced to apologize for the remark the next day).

It was Stair who helped Queensberry draw up his list of pliant Scottish commissioners for the original signing of the treaty. It was Stair who proposed the original strategy for getting the treaty past the Parliament, by offering up the molasses first, especially freedom of trade, before getting down to the sulfur, which meant Article 22. Now it was this extraordinary and amoral man, the very opposite of William Carstares in public reputation and integrity, who rose to carry the treaty over its final hurdle.

His argument was characterstically direct and unsentimental. All this talk of principle would get Scotland nowhere. The real issue was who paid the bills. The only way to draw any sensible comparison between the two kingdoms in representative terms, Stair explained, was not how many members each Parliament had before union, but how much each was willing to pay in taxes. The English would begin by paying into the new British Treasury thirty-five times the amount of revenue the Scots would pay. From that perspective, he concluded for his colleagues, the English were entitled to a thirty-five-to-one advantage in members. Take ten-to-one, he told them; at that rate, union comes cheap.

The debate was furious and emotional. Stair stood like a rock, however, answering every objection and insult and in the end, on January 7, Article 22 passed by forty votes. Stair left Parliament House exhausted but exultant, and threaded his way past the usual hostile crowds to his Edinburgh lodging. He retired early and never woke up. When his servant opened the door to his room early the next morning, he found his master dead in bed, a victim of a stroke. He was fifty-eight years old.

The treaty of union had claimed its first martyr. Supporters and his family printed up a broadside in his memory, decorated with black borders and skulls, declaring that “The Union shall perpetuate his name, as long as there’s an ear or mouth in fame!” Opponents pointed to the Dalrymple curse, and suggested a different epitaph: