Making the Union Work

Scotland, 1651–1763

Alexander Murdoch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000051759
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

Making the Union Work: Scotland, 1651–1763, explores and analyses existing narratives of Jacobitism and Unionism in late seventeenth to mid-eighteenth century Scotland.

Using in-depth archival research, the book questions the extent to which the currency of kinship patronage politics persisted in Scotland as the competing ideologies of Scottish Jacobitism and British Whiggism grew. It discusses the connection between the manifest corruption of patronage politics and the efflorescence of the Scottish Enlightenment. It also examines the stance taken by David Hume and Adam Smith in defining themselves as philosophers first, Whigs second, but Scots above all else, and analyses whether they achieved international success because of or despite the parliamentary union with England in 1707.

Organised chronologically and concluding with an assessment of the newly formed United Kingdom in the decades following the 1707 union, Making the Union Work: Scotland, 1651–1763 will be of great interest to researchers and academics of early modern Scotland.

1 Scotland 1651–1660

Conquest and union with England and Ireland

By the time the English army under the command of Oliver Cromwell destroyed the Scottish army that Charles II had led into England at the Battle of Worcester on 3 September 1651, it had captured the executive committee of the Scottish Parliament and inflicted a defeat so complete that only the occupation of Scotland by the army led by Edward I of England in the Middle Ages could rival it.¹ The Scottish diarist John Nicoll did not record his thoughts regarding the capture of the Committee of Estates of the Scottish Parliament, but he did reflect, at length, on the disaster at Worcester, noting that it occurred a year to the day after the catastrophic defeat of an earlier Scottish army by Cromwell at Dunbar on 3 September 1650, ‘quhairin wes manifestit the hot wraith and indignation of the Lord aganes this Kingdome of Scotland.’² God’s ‘judgements justlie overtuk’ the kingdom, ‘for under hevin thair wes not greater falset, oppressioun, division, haitreit, pryde, malice, and invy.’³ David Stevenson has described Nicoll’s text as a ‘very useful, though rambling and scrappy, source of information, gossip and opinion on public affairs’, which were later altered in places after the restoration of the Scottish monarchy. This imparted a retrospective element to his account but also, Stevenson notes, an impression of a man ‘shocked by the violence of the time.’⁴ In 1651 Nicoll was clerk of the Society of Writers to the Signet in Edinburgh. His text thus to some extent reflects the perspective of the legal profession in Scotland rather than that of committed enthusiasts for the National Covenant of the Church of Scotland. The disruption in the Scottish alliance with the English Parliament was caused by the execution of King Charles I in 1649, the recognition of Charles II King of Scotland, England and Ireland in the same year and the inauguration of Charles II as King of Scotland at Scone in Perthshire on 1 January 1651.⁵

Although it has been claimed that ‘the outcome of the battle [of Worcester] has been solely viewed from the perspective of the English Commonwealth’, that judgement was tempered by the concession that ‘the defeat of Charles II at Worcester had a deep effect on Presbyterianism in Scotland.’⁶ The Lord Chancellor of Scotland, the first Earl of Loudoun, recorded that once ‘the sad news of the defeat of the King’s armie at Worcester came … all men almost everie wher lossed both heart and hand.’⁷ In contrast, the Commonwealth of England declared a day of thanksgiving in celebration of their victory, to be held throughout the three kingdoms of England, Ireland and Scotland in October,⁸ but in Scotland the kirk refused to mark the occasion, ‘alledging that it was a day rather quhairin to fast and murne, than to rejoyce and geve thankis for their awin miserie and destruction,’ as John Nicoll expressed it. He claimed that ‘God in his richteous dispensation did overturne all, and made strangeris to cum in, and to command and subdue the hail Kingdome.’⁹ Yet in defeat Nicoll wrote that the Scottish Covenanting movement had not been destroyed, writing that ‘the Lord, out of his great mercy, did not remove his candelstik, but was pleasit to continue the light of his glorious gospel among us [the Scots], and did lat us find favour in the eyis of the enemies, …’ This did not mean that he was a supporter of the clergy of the Church of Scotland: ‘much wes taught aganes the King and the subjectis … bot lytill aganes the ministrie and their faltis.’¹⁰

‘The ministrie’ continued to be divided, as they had been since the beginning of the Scottish conflict with the English Commonwealth. So-called ‘Protesters’, those who had opposed the idea of encouraging Charles II to come to Scotland, were aghast at his subsequent coronation, and of the General Assembly co-operating with parliamentary encouragement of ‘malignant’ Royalists. Although Charles had accepted the Covenant, many Covenanters feared that he had not been sincere in doing so, and that as a result Scotland no longer enjoyed the favour of the Deity. As Nicoll’s comments in his diary indicated, echoed by those of his fellow lawyer Johnston of Wariston,¹¹ at least some Scots were convinced that they, as a Covenanted people, had lost sight of divine purpose in crowning Charles as king. Equally there were those, such as Nicoll and Johnston, who hoped that the Scots could regain their place as a chosen people. When Johnston of Wariston heard the news of the catastrophe at Worcester, he recorded in his diary that this ‘maid me cry to the Lord, O how true is the Lord in His threatenings and terrible in His jugments … How often hes this ruyne been fortold by His servants, that durst not runne on in the sam course of defection.’ He blamed Charles II for ‘his dissembled incoming to the Covenant’ but, he continued, ‘straunge hes been and is the idolatrye of this land and people, with him and the house of the King, which provoks the Lord the mor both to plaigue and remove him …’¹² Yet the majority of the kirk’s clergy continued to refuse to renounce Charles II, not just as King of Scotland, but as king of ‘Great Britain and Ireland’. This meant that no matter how forcefully the English army in Scotland and the Commonwealth government in London asserted that their victories had demonstrated that they, not the Scots, were the agents of God’s ultimate purpose for the world, the Scots viewed their conquerors as having betrayed the Solemn League and Covenant, and thus the ultimate purpose of God’s works.¹³

Despite the sack of the city of Dundee by an English army led by General George Monck just before the defeat of the Scottish army at Worcester, the English, or at least Cromwell, had come to Scotland to incorporate the Scots, rather than for conquest. Yet from the Scottish perspective God’s plan was to join Scotland and England into a covenanted British monarchy in which the Civil and Godly magistrates would be one.¹⁴ Many Scots thought and hoped that divine agency had not been revealed at Dunbar and Worcester and that in time this would become apparent. The fact remains, however, that to the victorious English, the majority of the Scottish clergy were misguided, and it was they who would have to accept that they had mistaken the nature of divine agency in England, Ireland, Scotland, and in due course, the wider world. The English army seized as many of the national records of Scotland as they could when the castle at Stirling surrendered to them in September 1651. Although some records had been smuggled out of the castle by the clerks responsible for them before the final surrender (later to be returned to the Lord Clerk Register after the Restoration), a large number of Scottish records were sent to the Tower of London for storage in December 1651. Many of the records of the Church of Scotland were also sent there after the surrender of the Bass Rock (where they had been sent to keep them out of English hands) in the spring of 1652. The ruling council of the Commonwealth and former kingdom of England, in other words, had decided to incorporate Scotland into the Commonwealth, starting with its historical records.¹⁵ Similarly, the units of the English army besieging Dunottar Castle in northeast Scotland partly had been deployed there because the regalia of Scotland (including the royal crown and sceptre) had been taken there for safekeeping when Charles II led his army into England. Although the castle did surrender to the English in May 1652, by that time the Governor had arranged for the regalia to be smuggled out of it and concealed beneath the floor of the kirk at nearby Kinneff, where they remained hidden until the Restoration.¹⁶

The Commonwealth Parliament in September 1651 lost no time after receiving news of their great victory at Worcester in planning the extension of its authority to Scotland. It referred the task of bringing in a bill ‘for asserting the Right of the Commonwealth to so much of Scotland as is now under the Power of the Forces of the Commonwealth’ on 9 September and on 26 September the Council of State was instructed to nominate Commissioners for the government of Scotland. On 30 September the matter was submitted to the Scottish and Irish committee of the Commonwealth’s Council of State.¹⁷ John Lambert and Richard Deane, generals with the army in Scotland, were nominated by the end of October, along with two other military men, an Alderman of the City of London, and two leading members of the Commonwealth regime (Oliver St John and Sir Harry Vane junior). The Council of State also prepared a draft ‘Declaration of the Parliament of the Commonwealth of England, concerning the Settlement of Scotland.’ This included a pledge to ‘promote the Preaching of the Gospel’ in Scotland, a commitment to incorporate Scotland into the Commonwealth ‘as now settled, without King or House of Lords’, a declaration that reparations would be extracted as compensation for the damage done by the Scottish invasions of England in 1648 and 1651, and a pledge that those Scots who had ‘kept themselves free from the guilt of those things which have compelled this war’ would ‘be taken into the protection of the Parliament, and enjoy the Liberties and Estates, as other the free people [sic] of the Common-wealth of England.’¹⁸

The Declaration concluded by stating that ‘the Parliament are satisfied, That many of the people of Scotland who were Vassals, or Tenants to, and had dependency upon the Noble-men and Gentry (the chief actors in these invasions and wars against England), were by their influence drawn into, and have been involved with them in the same Evils.’ Those ‘Vassals, or Tenants to,’ who were willing to put themselves under the protection of Parliament and conform ‘themselves to their Government and regulation, shall not only be pardoned for all Acts past, but be set free from their former dependencies and bondage-services.’ They would ‘be admitted as Tenants, Freeholders, and Heritors, to farm, hold, inherite, and enjoy from and under this Common-wealth, proportions of the said confiscated and forfeited lands under such easie Rents’ that would bring about ‘a more comfortable subsistence than formerly’ for ‘a free People, delivered (through Gods goodnesse) from their former slaveries, vassalage, and oppressions.’¹⁹ Those nominated Commissioners for Scotland who were not already resident in Scotland set off from London on Christmas Day 1651 and arrived in Scotland on 15 January 1651/2, where they set up their headquarters at Dalkeith outside Edinburgh. The Declaration of Parliament was formally published at the Mercat Cross at Edinburgh on 12 February 1652 as a ‘Tender of Union’. At the same time, the text of the declaration was sent out to all the shires and royal burghs of Scotland with the instruction (rather than the request) that representatives with ‘good affection to the welfare and peace of this Island’ were to appear at Dalkeith before the end of the month ‘to assent to’, rather than deliberate upon, the Commonwealth’s offer of parliamentary union with England (and Ireland).²⁰ Some of the responses to the Tender of Union submitted to the Commissioners made clear that the offer of union was not subject ‘to the full and free deliberation of the people in their collected body’, ie to the judgement of a full Scottish Parliament. The English Commissioners for Scotland may have assumed that, having conquered Scotland, there was no role for a Scottish Parliament, given that Scotland was to be incorporated into the English Commonwealth. Other responses pointed out that they had been ordered ‘to approve we know not what, … whereby we have no access to desire either the privileges which may be supposed to come by this tender, or t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction: Making the union work: Scotland 1651–1763
• 1. Scotland 1651–1660: Conquest and union with England and Ireland
• 2. Charles II as King of Scotland 1660–1685
• 3. A second Revolution? Scotland 1685–1702
• 4. Union 1702–1715
• 5. Post-union struggles 1715–1727
• 6. The transformation of Jacobitism, 1727–1745
• 7. The Scottish economy and Scottish society, 1688/9 to c.1763
• 8. The limits of the union? Scotland and the United Kingdom 1745–1763
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index