The Glasgow Enlightenment

Andrew Hook, Richard B. Sher, Andrew Hook, Richard B. Sher

• Publisher: John Donald
• Year: 2001
• Print ISBN: 9781910900567
• eBook ISBN: 9781788854849
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Scottish History
• Index: History

The Glasgow Enlightenment is widely regarded as the first book to explore the nature and accomplishments of the Enlightenment in eighteenth-century Glasgow in a comprehensive manner. In addition to a general introduction by the editors, there are seven chapters devoted to Glasgow University professors, such as Adam Smith, Francis Hutcheson, Thomas Reid, John Millar, William Leechman, and John Anderson. At a time when the Glasgow economy was booming in the strength of its trade with America, these and other Glasgow men of science and learning were making major contributions to the European world of philosophy, law, political economy, natural philosophy, medicine, and religious toleration. There are also five chapters on other individuals and topics, including the physician and author John Moore, James Boswell during his student days, images of Glasgow in popular poetry, and Popular party clergymen who challenged the dominant views of the academic Enlightenment with an alternative vision of liberty and piety. This edition features a new bibliographical preface by Richard B. Sher that discusses the substantial secondary literature on eighteenth-century Glasgow and the Glasgow Enlightenment since the original publication of this book more than a quarter of a century ago.

PART I

The University and Enlightenment Culture

1

Politics and the Glasgow Professors, 1690–1800

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Roger L. Emerson

The cultural politics of eighteenth-century Scotland focused principally on two related sets of institutions: those of the established church and those of the schools, including the colleges and universities. In both sets the determination of policy and the recruitment of staff slipped after 1690 from the hands of clerics into those of laymen, especially politicians.¹

In the kirk, this process began in 1690 with the Erastian settlement imposed by William and his advisors, who were not willing to follow the extreme policies urged upon them by devout and fanatical elements. By 1712 the Barrier Act (1697) and the Toleration and Patronage Acts (1712) had restored the process of recruitment to the gentry, prevented the zealous and bigotted from harrassing dissidents, and made it difficult for a popular party to dominate the church. Increasingly, political manipulation of presbyteries, synods and the annual General Assembly imposed moderation on the kirk. The cases brought against the Glasgow divinity professor John Simson on grounds of heresy (1714—29), the various secessions (e.g., 1733, 1761), the failure of strict Presbyterians to discipline the three Homes (John, Henry and David Hume) for their philosophical and theatrical indiscretions during the 1750s, and the ability to use the church for the purposes of government, which was so greatly facilitated by the Moderates after the mid-1750s, all point to the kirk’s loss of independence. As this happened its clergy also changed, but not in ways the Moderates had expected. The failure of the heritors and taxpayers to raise clerical stipends lowered the quality of the ministers and let into the parishes men whose social antecedents made them more docile and deferential towards those who had appointed them.

In the schools something similar happened. Those founded and staffed by the Scottish Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SSPCK) imposed anglicizers upon reluctant Highland parishes. Lowland heritors tended to employ and pay right-thinking young men, many of whom would trim their views because they aspired to promotion into better livings in the kirk. In the colleges and universities the pressures were equally clear. These institutions were visited between 1690 and 1702 by a parliamentary visitation commission, a committee of which attempted to standardize a new and reformed curriculum. Further visitations were contemplated in 1708 at St Andrews,² and were carried out in 1716–17 at Aberdeen, 1717–18 at St Andrews and Glasgow, and again in 1726–27 at Glasgow. Similar political interference was sought by Foxite Whigs such as the earl of Buchan at Edinburgh in 1782–83, Professor John Anderson at Glasgow in 1783–84, and Buchan’s friend William Ogilvie at Aberdeen in 1786.³.

The Crown increased its ability to interfere in collegiate matters by awarding grants that were usually of limited duration or contingent upon the life of the monarch. At Glasgow, these are to be seen in the grant of the tack of Bishop’s teinds, in Queen Anne’s Bounty and other particular grants that lapsed with the death of the sovereign, and in other sinecure offices used to reward academics. The establishment of regius chairs, grants for facilities and extraordinary purchases and favours, such as the making of their libraries deposit libraries for copyrighted materials, all showed the increasing reliance of the universities upon the state. But nowhere was this dependence more apparent than in appointments. As the real value of university livings at Glasgow rose on average from about £100 per annum to over £200,⁴ the concern to control these positions grew and became rooted in considerations other than ideology and orthodoxy in religion and politics. The politicians were eager to monopolize such patronage; and, as they organized increasingly effective machines, they were able to do so. None did so better than Archibald Campbell, first earl of Ilay and, after 1743, third duke of Argyll (1682–1761), and Henry Dundas, first Viscount Melville (1742–1811). When there were no strong political managers, however, corporations like Glasgow University went their own ways and talked of their independence.

In the long run, the politics of the church and the universities were tremendously important because they shaped the attitudes, values and ideas of Scots, particularly those of the educated élite. It is extremely difficult to believe that Scots would have exhibited so much interest in improvements, science and technology, politeness and enlightenment had not patronage in the kirk and schools come to rest in the hands of many individuals who were already committed to those ends because they saw them as intrinsically good or as necessary to the making of political careers in a British state. The pressures to control zealous Presbyterians in 1712 came from Anglicans more than Scottish Episcopalians, and the need to exercise moderation in the church was also as much English as Scottish. The politicians favoured by the English were the polite, cultivated men already like their better selves, but also men whose positions in Scotland made them capable of securing political support for Whig governments and, after 1707, for a United Kingdom.

This is not to say that the roots of the Scottish Enlightenment were English, but it is to suggest that English political needs and pressures made it possible for men like William Carstares; James Ogilvy, first earl of Seafield; John Kerr, first duke of Roxburghe; John Hay, second marquis of Tweeddale; Ilay and others to come to power and to place in the church and universities men who shared their outlooks and aspirations. Ilay, the most effective of these men, became the great creator of the Scottish Enlightenment because politics required someone like him — a capable organizer with both Highland and Lowland connections who could get things done. It was largely accidental that this great patron was also a lover of learning, an amateur scientist and an enthusiastic improver who liked the company of intellectuals, or that he came to power in the early 1720s.

I

BETWEEN 1690 AND 1704, Scottish political factions fell into court and country parties that looked to ‘great men’ for leadership. By 1705 one fairly stable political group, the Squadrone, had emerged under the leadership of the first dukes of Montrose and Roxburghe, in whose wake followed the second marquis of Tweeddale, the earls of Rothes, Leslie, Melville, Leven, Marchmont and Haddington, and lairds such as Maxwell of Pollock, Dundas of Arniston, Baillie of Jarviswood and a host of related men whose acres were more or less broad. During the debates over the Union of 1707, the Squadrone tended to pursue a policy of independence for a reformed Scotland. After the Union, for which most of its members voted, the Squadrone was sometimes in office but more often was allied with English country party politicians, with whom it was associated throughout most of the period of power enjoyed by Sir Robert Walpole (c. 1722–42). For most of that era, it was opposed in Scotland by the friends of the second and third dukes of Argyll. They formed a court party, which dominated Scottish politics between 1725 and 1742 and again from 1746 to 1760. Walpole and the Pelhams found the Argathelians indispensable. Although principles mattered to both these sets of Whigs, their lust for office and spoils mattered even more.

Every political manager in eighteenth-century Scotland sought to control as many places of honour, profit and power as he could. They all had interests in the universities’ valuable livings as well as in what was said and done within their walls. The long-run effects of these concerns included keeping the colleges open to new ideas and responsive to the classes whose sons they educated. The Scottish colleges became not merely clerical institutions but also institutions engaged with a secular world that they sought to improve. If politicking in the universities produced some bitterness and litigation, it also produced progress. When Ilay sought to discipline Glasgow University in the mid-1720s, he also tried to raise its academic standards and to force its medical professors to teach. Moreover, most chairs created in the eighteenth-century universities were also founded in years when factions newly come to power, or threatened by opponents, were trying to consolidate their hold on institutions. In Glasgow, it seems likely that the chairs of law (1713), medicine (1714), ecclesiastical history (1716) and botany (1720) owed their creation at least in part to considerations of this sort.⁵

University politics were seldom as simple as naming a new professor. Even if the post was a regius chair, the Crown had probably been solicited by several important people whose candidates had at least to be considered. Other chairs involved legal patrons jealous of their rights to appoint, who would take suggestions only if it were clearly in their interest to do so. The kirk everywhere had a right to inquire into the religious beliefs and morals of prospective professors. Professors whose incomes depended on fees could be expected to oppose appointees likely to diminish enrolments. They were litigious, and that mattered. Academic recruitment was a matter for negotiation, but those who had to be consulted differed from one university to another, as becomes clear from a brief comparison of Edinburgh and Glasgow.

At Edinburgh, the town council was by 1800 the legal patron to eighteen of the university’s twenty-six chairs, and it still protested appointments it did not make. The city fathers controlled the college funds and throughout most of the eighteenth century supervised the university through a town council committee chaired by the university or college bailie. The Senatus Academicus at Edinburgh counted for little before 1763. Even as late as 1789 that university had to seal its diplomas with ‘one of the City Seals’, a procedure described by its professor of Greek as ‘inconvenient and unsuitable to the dignity of the University’.⁶

Glasgow knew nothing of such subservience to a merchant oligarchy. Its professors were also freer from interference by the town council than were those at Marischal College, Aberdeen where the professors of divinity and mathematics were chosen by the council, albeit after an allegedly open and competitive examination of candidates. There, too, the council had some say about the Crown’s choice of a principal because his salary was largely derived from a church living in the gift of the town. Although Glasgow’s town fathers could and did act as trustees for some bursaries and other funds, they did not have much purchase on the college livings. Nevertheless, more sons of merch...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Illustrations
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Glasgow and the Enlightenment
• I The University and Enlightenment Culture
• II Beyond the Academic Enlightenment
• Index
• Plates