The Union: England, Scotland and the Treaty of 1707

The Union

Michael Fry was educated at the universities of Oxford and Hamburg. He is the author of The Scottish Empire (2001), How the Scots Made America (2003) and Wild Scots: Four Hundred Years of Highland History (2005). He has also written numerous articles on modern Scottish history and several political pamphlets. He has contributed to most major Scottish and British newspapers and has been a weekly columnist for the Scotsman, The Herald and the Sunday Times.

This eBook edition published in 2012 by

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First published in 2006 by Birlinn Ltd

Copyright © Michael Fry 2006

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eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-526-0

ISBN: 978-1-84158-628-1

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Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction

CHAPTER 1 1702: ‘Strange people’

CHAPTER 2 1703: ‘Much stumbled’

CHAPTER 3 1704: ‘Hard laws’

CHAPTER 4 1705: ‘Scotland’s ruin’

CHAPTER 5 1706: ‘Blinded nation’

CHAPTER 6 1707: ‘Auld sang’

CHAPTER 7 After 1707: ‘Fair words’

Notes

Index

List of Illustrations

1. The various contemporary ideas for a flag to represent the Union of England and Scotland

2. John Campbell, second Duke of Argyll

3. The old castle of Inveraray, built about 1450 and demolished in 1774

4. The deserted and echoing chamber of the Scottish Parliament as it appeared in Victorian times

5. The ‘thin, sour look’ of Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, the Patriot

6. A flattering portrait of Queen Anne, contrived by the Dutch art of Willem Wissing and Jan van der Vaardt

7. William of Orange, King of Scots, caught in a rare good mood, by Anna Maria Braunim

8. The entrance in the Canongate of Moray House

9. The traditional Riding of the Scots Parliament in 1681

10. A charming portrait in childhood of James, the Old Pretender, and of his sister Louise

11. Queensberry House (1695), today a portal to the new Scottish Parliament

12. Sidney, Lord Godolphin, architect of Union from the English side, by Sir Godfrey Kneller

13. John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough

14. James Douglas, Duke of Queensberry, who carried Union through the Scots Parliament

15. The magnificent baroque palace at Drumlanrig in Dumfriesshire

16. Map of the colony of Darien

17. The Palace of Holyroodhouse

18. The east front of Edinburgh Castle frowns down on the Scottish capital

19. The vivid coat of arms of the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies

20. James, Duke of Hamilton

Illustrations on chapter opening pages are from John Slezer’s Theatrum Scotiae (1693)

Introduction

I should first record with deep gratitude my debt to the libraries where I have worked on this book: especially, and as ever, the National Library of Scotland, always so welcoming; then others I was new to, or almost, the special collections of Glasgow University Library, housing the papers of Principal John Stirling; the Huntington Library at San Marino, California, final destination of papers of the Earls of Loudoun; and the William A. Clark Memorial Library of the University of California at Los Angeles, where the cross-referencing of a huge collection of print from the eighteenth century, a good deal of it not available in Scotland, is a wonder to behold – and where the technophobia of the scholar will be instantly dispelled by the courteous care of the staff. During the months of research and writing I have discussed problems and ideas with many colleagues, but faults and errors in the final text are my own.

The book is written to mark the 300th anniversary of the Union between Scotland and England which falls on May 1, 2007. In England it is not a date likely to loom large even in the minds of most people interested in history; in standard works on the period, it generally takes up no more space than other domestic developments in Britain, the Act of Settlement, for example, and less space than the War of the Spanish Succession, one of the great stepping stones to global power for the United Kingdom about to be born.

A historian may despair of bringing the English to any deeper appreciation of the Union’s importance, as one of the acts of foundation of the state we all live in. Among Scots there is no such problem, since the Union stands as a central event, perhaps the central event for good or ill, in the two millennia of their recorded history. At any rate it must rank along with Wars of Independence, Reformation, Enlightenment and Empire as one of the keys to understanding what Scotland is and what Scotland means, or how her always uncertain history may yet run.

Yet the historiography of the Union is by no means in a settled or even a satisfactory condition. Till the mid-twentieth century, at least, it was marked by the same complacent unionism as pervaded many other spheres of Scottish discourse, scarcely questioning that the nation had for 250 years lived on in the best of all possible worlds, otherwise known as the United Kingdom. While some of the transactions in 1707 did look a bit murky, we could be confident they had been inspired at heart by farsighted statesmanship which, if never expressed in anyone’s actual words at the time, could still be inferred from its beneficent results.

But in the late twentieth century, and for a range of reasons needing no rehearsal here, the United Kingdom slid into crisis, external and internal, in its relations to the outside world and in the relations of its component parts. One result came in the emergence or re-emergence of Scottish nationalism, which among scholars sympathetic to it demanded a rewriting of history so as to point towards a conclusion hardly even dreamed of before, the restoration of national independence. Oddly, the most striking reflection of this in the historiography of the Union came not in Scotland at all but in the work of the late Dr P.W.J. Riley at the University of Manchester, who for all I know had no personal opinion whether the United Kingdom should endure or not. In a fecund series of books and articles he set out an unsparing interpretation of the Union as a gross political job, typical of its time yet egregious in the way it betrayed the independence of a nation so long vindicated by a proud people against the odds. Riley struck the tone which colours one side of the ensuing debate down to the present, amid which his own views have been amplified in various aspects by the work of William Ferguson and Paul Scott, among others.

Yet it was not as if the Union would die quietly, either in real life or within the covers of books. Just as the United Kingdom was able to reassert its claims on the loyalties of Scots, and not without success after suitable political accommodation, so unionist historians have refused to swallow the claims of nationalist scholarship and have answered back. In books by Christopher Smout, Thomas Devine and Christopher Whatley, the smugness of earlier unionism vanished and some tougher thinking went into the task of parrying the undoubtedly cogent contentions of nationalism. It yet seems to me a shame that this revived unionist school has been unable to find a more robust base for its counterattack than a sort of Marxist determinism without the Marxism, in other words, a reiteration of the idea that Scotland’s economic woes made Union inevitable.

That is to say, we still have a problem with this central enterprise of Scottish historiography. Detachment is hard to attain. Had I not read a word of what all the scholars mentioned above found to write, I still think I could have made a good guess at which views they would espouse. There remains a tendency, if not here then elsewhere, for people to start off from their own attitude towards the Union and then seek justification for it in whatever historical evidence comes to hand. I would, however, certainly exempt Riley from my stricture. It seems to me that his fault, if any, was the more innocent one of excessive academic shock at the seamy side of politics, in particular of Scottish politics. Having myself dabbled in both the political and the academic life of Scotland, I hope I am free of illusions on either score.

Readers acquainted with my previous works may be surprised by the conclusion I reach at the end of this one (look now). I decided the way to approach the Union was to take nothing for granted but give a close reading to the evidence, as free of prejudice as I could render myself, and let it lead me where it might: hence the conclusion. I am especially pleased at one product of my labours, the at least partial reconstruction of certain crucial debates in the last Scots Parliament. Its sessions between 1702 and 1707 were often dramatic, as worthy of attention as any other parliamentary occasions in British history. But their flavour has been lost in the existing literature. Records of proceedings are infuriating in that they quote the speeches, often at length, yet omit, except in a few instances, to say who the speaker was; some convention of propriety appears to have dictated this bizarre reticence. Words disembodied from their speakers lose interest, but there are enough private memoirs of proceedings to have allowed me, by diligent attention to and collation of sources, to name the sequence of speakers in some debates with reasonable certainty, though the word ‘probably’ will be found hovering nearby if I am much less than certain.

My conclusion does not wholly concur with either side in the debate on the Union as described above. In particular, for example, I am unable to accept that the struggle over the terms of the treaty in the final session of the Scots Parliament was nothing more than a thin disguise for the brutal process of ramming a done deal through – the view put forward by Paul Scott or if anything yet more strongly by the late David Daiches. And persuasive as Riley’s particular arguments often are, still I find it hard to agree with his general view that contemporary politicians were never moved by anything higher than the basest personal motives; politicians in all times and places have been moved by the basest personal motives, yet may manage to find at least a little room in their hearts and minds for a few higher considerations. If I would force myself to concede that even in the Scotland of 2006, I cannot in reason be harsher on the Scotland of 1707.

Edinburgh,

January 2006.

CHAPTER 1

1702

Edinburgh from the north-west, the Scottish capital with its new industrial suburb in the Dean Village

‘Strange people’

During the morning of February 21, 1702, William of Orange, King of England, Scotland and Ireland, Stadholder of the Dutch Republic, felt like a little relaxation from the cares without number which weighed on him.¹ He had a new horse, Sorrel, and he wanted to try her out in the park of Hampton Court. This was his favourite English residence, up the River Thames about 15 miles from London. He had found it a crumbling old Tudor pile and remodelled it in the magnificent style of his own age to resemble nothing so much as the Versailles of his arch-enemy, King Louis XIV of France. Round it stretched formal gardens, water-meadows and tree-lined avenues. Into these, on a chilly morning, William rode his untried steed at a walk, then a canter. Next he wanted to gallop, so he spurred Sorrel on. She had scarcely started forward when she fell to her knees and pitched the king off, hard on to his right shoulder. She had stumbled on a molehill. For years afterwards William’s enemies would toast the ‘little gentleman in black velvet’ who laid him low as his human adversaries, in the mêlée of battle or in the broils of politics, had never been able to do.

Though this proved at length to be a fatal fall, William had only broken his collar-bone. His frame was just too frail to stand the shock. His life had been one of ceaseless struggle, first to reassert the influence of his princely house in the Dutch Republic, next to vindicate its independence against the French, then to do as much for the three kingdoms of his uncle and father-in-law, King James VII and II, whom William had to depose and exile. Nor did he merely direct policy from his cabinet. In his native country’s struggle for survival he took the field in person, displaying reckless courage. It was by force, if without an actual clash of arms, that he won control of England in 1688 and seized the British Crowns for himself and his wife, Mary II. To defend them he then had to go to Ireland in 1690 where, once again, he fought at the Battle of the Boyne, leading a victorious charge across the river at a decisive moment. All this exacted a cost even while it ended in triumph for him. By the winter of his death he was sick and tired, his heart failing and making his limbs swell. It would take no more than a fall from Sorrel to finish him off.

Yet at first, and as ever, this austere, untiring man took a setback in his stride. He got the fracture set at Hampton Court, then insisted on returning by coach to Kensington Palace over roads so bumpy that the bone had to be set again after he arrived. Though he could not write and was obliged to spend all day in a dressing-gown rather than in any close-fitting coat, he worked on as usual at affairs of state, rising every morning at eight o’clock and going to bed every night at eleven, regular as clockwork. At the end of a week he was again wearing normal clothes and appearing in public. But when his doctors had taken the bandages off they found the fracture unknit and his shoulder still somewhat swollen, along with his right arm and hand. In fact inflammation was about to spread to the lining of his lungs and give him pleurisy, then to the lungs themselves and bring on the pneumonia which would kill him.

Doctors of the time could never have diagnosed this, but William took no notice of them or his condition anyway. He did not for a moment cease from his labours. He now prepared to go and give in person, as was then the practice, royal assent to measures just passed by Parliament. They included the Abjuration Act excluding by name from the throne his cousin James, the thirteen-year-old son and heir of James VII and II, who had died in exile at St Germain near Paris not long before, in September 1701. William also wanted to commend to the House of Commons a project of Union between England and Scotland. He sent members a message ahead of his intended visitation: ‘His Majesty would esteem it a peculiar felicity if during his reign some happy expedient for making both kingdoms one might take place, and is therefore extremely desirous that a treaty for that purpose might be set on foot, and does in the most earnest manner recommend this to the consideration of the House.’

Then on March 4, while William was walking up and down the corridors at Kensington Palace for some gentle exercise, soothing his eyes on his Dutch paintings, weariness overcame him. He flopped down in a chair and fell asleep. When he awoke he was cold, feverish and coughing. From that point on he grew weaker. His pulse was feeble. He could not eat. His doctors took alarm. On March 7 he developed a high fever and they gave him quinine, which did not work. He was in great pain, worse because his senses remained clear. All at once he stood at death’s door.

In those times kings died, as they did most things, in public. When William took to his bed, courtiers constantly pressed round it. From The Hague arrived his closest confidant, Arnout van Keppel, a handsome young Dutchman whom he had made Earl of Albemarle in the English peerage. Albemarle, though distressed, tried to cheer the king up. He returned the bleak reply: ‘Je tire vers ma fin.’ He hardly slept that night. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Tenison, came at dawn with the Bishop of Salisbury, Gilbert Burnet, a fat and garrulous Scotsman. They gave the king communion and waited. His agony grew so acute that he asked his physician, Prof. Gorvaert Bidloo, how long it would last. The answer was ‘not long’.

Without fear William composed himself to die. His final visitor turned up, Hans Willem Bentinck, Earl of Portland, the friend of his youth who had once nursed him through a near fatal bout of smallpox, fought by his side at the Boyne and been the faithful, indefatigable servant whose diplomacy secured his new Crowns against foreign machination. But the English hated Portland for the Dutch avarice he displayed, and he flounced off once William took a fancy to Albemarle. Now, after two years’ absence from court, Portland reappeared. The king, by this time no longer able to speak, grasped his old comrade’s hand and laid it on his heart. Burnet recorded: ‘Between seven and eight o’clock the rattle began, the commendatory prayer was said for him, and as it ended he died, on Sunday, the 8th of March 1702, in the fifty-second year of his life.’² He would be buried privately in Westminster Abbey four nights later.

William’s sister-in-law, Anne, younger daughter of James VII and II, was proclaimed. As Queen of Scots she summoned those of her northern kingdom’s noblemen who happened to be in London and took the coronation oath before them. A military officer had already set off to bring first word of her accession to Edinburgh. It was received there with little emotion.³ Orders went out to delay transport of a Lowland regiment to the Netherlands and raise the level of vigilance round the main Highland garrison at Fort William. When the official notice of the king’s death reached Edinburgh on the night he was interred, the royal councillors decided it had got too late to do anything: they could wait till morning to proclaim Anne from the Cross and make sure of some sleep before all the fuss that would follow.

William of Orange had been loved by the Scots even less than by the other nations of the British Isles; only Protestant Ulstermen cherish his memory. As for the English, recent historians have written that he deserved better of them than they were ready to concede, though they could never display much affection for such a cold, hard, humourless man.⁴ They showed no relish for rule by a foreigner in any case. It did not even help that he quelled France, their arch-enemy, and set the Britain of the future on the road to becoming a great power. At home he saved England’s parliamentary constitution, indeed accorded the legislature a stronger position than it had ever enjoyed before. With that he brought a return to political stability at the end of a century of revolutions. Yet all this counted for little in making the English like him, then or now.

In Scotland no such paradox appears. William of Orange was the worst of all Kings of Scots. Since the nation had been in chaos through much of the seventeenth century, his Revolution of 1688 made little difference. And to call it in English fashion the Glorious, let alone Bloodless, Revolution is risible.

William left his indelible mark on the history of Scotland by bringing down the legitimate line of the House of Stewart. Of course, he counted through his mother as a member of that house himself, and a fuller member of it, Anne, would reign on after him till her death in 1714; the Hanoverians who followed her descended through another female from Scotland’s native dynasty. Yet these were all monarchs de facto, not de jure. The royal succession – which, according to Scots, had followed without a break from Fergus mac Erc in 330 BC to their own day – sundered in 1688. And the royal succession was their proudest boast, not least because it put them one up over the English. A lawyer of high culture, Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh, Lord Advocate under James VII, looked back to Scottish antiquity and found that ‘we are still the same people and nation, but the English are not the old Britons, but are a mixture descending from Danes, Saxons and French’. This was the root and stock of the Scots’ independence: ‘No historian can pretend that we obeyed any race, save that which now reigns: whereas we can condescend, where the English and French were conquered by strangers, and had their royal line dethroned and inverted.’⁵

All nations cherish their myths but without that one the Scottish nation might have been unable to preserve itself. For such a small country it had always shown an extraordinary, though perilous, diversity. It still bore marks of its origins at the turn of the millennium as a union of Gaels in the west, Picts in the north, Britons in the south-west and Angles in the south-east, to which in course of time Vikings of the Northern and Western Isles were superadded. Names of petty kingdoms where these different peoples had dwelt – Moray, Fife, Lothian, Galloway and more – survived up to and beyond the seventeenth century; another, Strathclyde, was to be resurrected in the late twentieth century as a monstrous local authority. The patchwork could have dissolved and almost did about 1300. It was then that the heroism of King Robert Bruce refounded nation and monarchy which, burgeoning by triumph over English aggression, became entwined round the sprig, a rather distant one, of the ancient royal stem he represented. Scotland maintained herself as an independent nation into the dawn of the modern era, though always more untidy, precarious and provisional than other nations, than its southern neighbour especially, and never able to efface its variegations through any durable centralising force: all the better for that, Scots would say.

Like other nations of Europe, Scotland meanwhile saw struggles between king and nobility, if here somewhat less severe because the king was often a child, his father having usually suffered a gruesome and premature death. Constant external threats to national existence made for greater internal stability than England or France enjoyed till their kings could impose royal absolutism on aristocratic aggrandisement. At any rate the unique result in Scotland was to place king and people on an easier footing than could ever be possible in England or France, where the monarch had to overawe his subjects.

For example, during James VI’s journey south in 1603 to claim the throne of his late cousin, Elizabeth of England, the people swarmed to welcome him in almost intolerable numbers. English courtiers who went to meet the king halfway noted how the throng seemed to upset or even alarm him. Scots in his entourage explained that at home a crowd was a sign of trouble. Rather than smile and wave as Elizabeth had always done, James cursed. He asked what all these people wanted, and smooth-talking Englishmen replied they came of love to see him. He cried in Scots: ‘I’ll pull doon ma breeks and they shall see ma erse.’ When he had spoken like that at home, his people answered in kind. That was how Scots treated their kings, worthy of loyalty but on a level with themselves. True, this bonhomie could turn into insolence from Scotland’s thuggish lords. They would try to bully James. When the Master of Glamis had trapped him at Ruthven Castle in 1582, and made the fifteen-year-old lad burst into tears, he said with contempt: ‘Better that bairns should greet than bearded men.’ But James learned to surmount this sort of intimidation. Early one morning in the summer of 1593 he was in bed at the Palace of Holyroodhouse when a group of armed nobles burst in on him. The king defied them, then got them to parley. Meanwhile the people of Edinburgh, hearing he was in trouble, gathered in the courtyard outside. The last thing he wanted was a fight round his person. He leant out of a window, shouted down that he was fine: they should all go home. They bawled happily back in answer, and the danger vanished.

From scenes like these we get some inkling of how much Scotland lost after her kings departed in 1603. James VI returned just once. His son Charles I, though born at Dunfermline, grew up to all intents and purposes an Englishman, coming back only to treat Scots with disdain where it hurt most, in their Calvinist religion. That was why they got hold of Charles II young and drummed into him that he was a covenanted king, bound by oath to God and his people. The result turned out the opposite to what they intended: a sovereign resolved to sit never again through three hours of a ranting Presbyterian sermon but rather to terminate the rule of the saints in the Church of Scotland. The episode in which he all but exterminated their remnant was grimly known as the Killing Time. James VII and II tried his absolutist but blundering best with the Scots. Before he succeeded he came and resided in Edinburgh for a time so as to take the heat out of efforts in England to exclude him, as a Catholic, from the throne. His sojourn in Scotland as a sort of viceroy offered him a chance to show his monarchical potential. He did not too badly. But his religion still set up a bar between him and this most Protestant people – especially as he was said to enjoy watching captive Covenanters tortured.

The final crisis between dynasty and nation rose towards its climax on the afternoon of Sunday, December 9, 1688. It was then that the House of Stewart, which over three centuries had done more than anything else to ensure Scotland’s survival, commenced its fall. Edinburgh was in the hands of a mob. They knew that 500 miles away William of Orange had landed at Torbay in Devon and with his army was advancing on London to save Protestantism. There, that same afternoon, James VII and II prepared to send his family to France as a prelude to his own flight. The king’s cause in Scotland seemed just as dire. Rather than try to restore order in his name, the Duke of Gordon, governor of Edinburgh Castle, shut himself up behind the ramparts. At Holyrood the Scottish government under the Chancellor, the Earl of Perth, was running out of time. It would not have lasted the night but for the presence of mind of the Lord Provost, Magnus Prince, who at the waning of a gloomy winter’s day ordered the gates of the city locked and posted guards to stop troublemakers getting out over the walls to the palace beyond.

On the Monday morning Gordon ventured a sortie, clattering down the High Street with an armed escort. He wanted to urge the Chancellor to come and take refuge with him. But Perth said he was about to leave for his own Castle Drummond, 40 miles away beyond Stirling, in case he had to escape abroad; he would be taken prisoner as he embarked for France. All he would do was sign an order authorising the duke to draw on the revenue for any military needs. When Gordon tried, officials of the Exchequer refused to pay him. Once Perth was gone that afternoon, the rabble moved in on the palace and the Abbey of Holyrood next to it, housing the Chapel Royal.

James VII had made the chapel a symbol of his reign. While resident in Edinburgh, he ordered mass to be celebrated there for the first time in more than a century. Later he invited the parishioners of the Canongate, who used the abbey as their kirk, to shift to an elegant new building nearby, which still stands today. Then he paid for the chapel to be fitted out for the order of chivalry he founded, the Knights of the Thistle, with a throne for himself and a dozen stalls for them. It was a high-class job: Grinling Gibbons did the carvings. The king sent up more lavish fittings for it in his own royal yacht – an altar, an organ, vestments and images.

Just before the popular reaction to all this now burst out, the abbey had been on royal orders sprinkled with holy water and reconsecrated for St Andrew’s Day. Nothing was more likely to provoke the Calvinist citizens of the capital. Students started the trouble. After they left their classes at the university on the Monday of the crisis, they gathered on the Meadows nearby so that the Lord Provost could not again trap them within the walls of the city. They marched round towards Holyrood. As they approached, the commander of the guard, Captain John Wallace, drew up his 100 men in the forecourt. Outnumbered, these had to retain the initiative – and contemporary methods of keeping order were rough. They opened fire, then for good measure lobbed hand grenades into the crowd. Twelve students were killed and many wounded. The rest fled in panic back up the hill. Blood had been shed and Gordon sent word that he was ready to deploy his troops, but the Lord Provost did not want general carnage in the streets. Prince disposed of the town guard and trained bands of militia, about 700 men in all. With these he sought to defuse the situation. He sent a messenger to Holyrood, offering to escort Wallace and the guards to safety in the castle. The messenger arrived too late.

This was because what remained of the government of Scotland had blundered in. While the Lord Provost stayed cool and collected, those privy councillors still lurking in the capital were trying to calm their nerves in a drinking den but instead worked themselves into a panic. They too gave orders to the town guard, that it should go down and take over security at Holyrood – in other words, they signalled royalist surrender. The students followed cheering. Wallace, yet more outnumbered than before, told his men to run but they were all chased and caught.

Militia and mob were now in merry mood, ready to carry on in the common cause. They decided to break into the abbey and destroy its splendours. They tore down throne, stalls and organ, and paraded with the debris up the High Street. Some paused at the Nethergate and reverently took down for burial the skulls of Covenanting martyrs stuck up there on spikes. They proceeded to the Cross, where they lit a bonfire and danced round it while they burned the blasphemous baubles. They made an effigy of the pope and burned him too. Others, finished with the abbey, turned on the palace. They aimed first at a college of Jesuits installed by the king, but these had fled. So the rioters, shoulder to shoulder with the forces of order, hammered down the doors of Perth’s suite and rifled whatever he had left behind. Next they penetrated the royal apartments, smashing what they did not want, destroying what they could not bear away. It was this jape that brought on such an act of sacrilege as would have appalled any previous generation of Scots. Under Holyrood lay the Stewarts’ burial vault, though none had been interred there since James V in 1542. Hallowed though the place was, the rabble did not spare it. They burst in, hacked at the tombs and scattered the royal dust. This was the sorry end of the direct line of Scotland’s native dynasty which, except in futile rebellion, would never set foot in the country again.

These events led on to civil war as Jacobitism emerged, so-called after the Latin form of the name James. The aim of the movement, which had a century’s life ahead of it, was to restore the legitimate line of Stewarts. It relied first on loyalists to James VII who refused to accept the Revolution, yet in time found means to draw in wider groups suffering the consequences. Jacobitism at one or other of its peaks would be for many Scots above all an expression of their patriotism, crystallised in fidelity to a dynasty supposed to be 2,000 years old, older than the nation itself. If the dynasty went, then so might the nation. There were rival interpretations of Scotland’s history, but this proved a powerful one.

To settle the affairs of post-revolutionary Scotland, a national Convention gathered in Edinburgh over the winter of 1688–9. One leading Jacobite, James Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee, soon abandoned it and rode for the North. He had been a brave, but stupid, and no doubt for that reason ultra-loyal servant of James VII, as of Charles II before him, especially in brutal suppression of the Covenanters. Claverhouse went to the Convention in hope it might reverse the Revolution. Once it dawned on him that this was not going to happen he walked out. In the North he would find many other Jacobites among aristocracy, gentry and clergy, while in the Lowlands, too, there were Jacobite lairds. Claverhouse managed during the summer of 1689 to raise more than 2,000 men – quite enough, given the modest scale of Scottish warfare, to launch a rising. Having ranged up to the Highlands and along the Great Glen, he was by the end of July moving south. He crossed into upper Strathspey towards the Pass of Killiecrankie, leading into the Lowlands.

Marching in the opposite direction came a force loyal to King William under General Hugh Mackay of Scourie. He was a Gael from a far northern clan – its lands included Cape Wrath – the only one to have switched sides during the Revolution. He brought about the change of heart himself, coming home after a long mercenary’s career in Europe. Mackay did not know or did not believe that Jacobite forces had mustered so fast. So when, on July 27, he was advancing through the pass, he remained unaware of their approach from the other side. Claverhouse could and did read the situation. Leading his troops at a run in the heat of summer, he mounted a hill above the pass. An astonished Mackay turned his regiments to face them, suddenly aware of his great peril. For a couple of hours the two sides skirmished, each meanwhile trying to extend its lines and outflank the enemy. Claverhouse resolved matters at seven o’clock in the evening, when the sun was no longer in his men’s faces. He ordered a Highland charge down the braes of Killiecrankie. It smashed Mackay’s thin, stretched lines. His troops fled back along the pass, being cut down as they ran. In this moment of supreme triumph Claverhouse, rising in the stirrups to rally his irresolute cavalry, was shot under the left arm and fell dying. The first Jacobite rising had won a great victory, but its leader was no more. The scale of the loss could be gauged days later when the clansmen tried to debouch into the Lowlands. At Dunkeld, guarding the southern end of the pass, they were stopped dead by the Cameronians, a regiment raised from the most extreme Covenanters to defend the Revolution. These, outnumbered three to one in fighting round the cathedral, would not yield even when their commander, Colonel William Cleland, lost his life.⁶

With an about equal disposition to heroism and sacrifice on either side, stalemate followed. It was this that at length brought the most infamous episode of William’s reign, the Massacre of Glencoe. In February 1692 his troops killed thirty-eight MacDonalds during a snowy dawn in their fastness among the mountains. The cull was modest by Highland standards.⁷ In earlier bloodbaths, prisoners or innocents had been slaughtered in hundreds by their conquerors; to clansmen in arms it was routine. Yet somehow the carnage in Glencoe seemed more horrible. The Mac-Donalds had, despite a notorious reputation as marauders and thieves, been at peace on that winter’s morning, had indeed for days beforehand been offering Highland hospitality to the soldiers about to murder them. The affair went down in legend as the treachery of the Campbells, their hereditary enemies. Yet it was much more the treachery of their nation’s rulers, servants of King William.

The king had been brandishing both carrot and stick at Highlanders. He offered Jacobite chiefs inducements to abandon their cause, but threatened if these were spurned to come in person and exact submission by force – the nearest he ever got to visiting Scotland. The chiefs took a little while to weigh up his subtlety before they concluded that William meant what he said. They were required to take an oath of allegiance to him by December 31, 1691. As the deadline approached most all at once fell into line. MacDonald of Glencoe arrived on that last day of the year at Fort William. He presented himself to the governor, General John Hill, only to find he had come to the wrong place. The oath was to be administered by a civil, not military, officer: in this case by the sheriff-depute of Argyll, Sir Colin Campbell of Ardkinglass, 50 miles away at Inveraray. In fear and trembling MacDonald set off through snowdrifts and got there on January 3. But Ardkinglas had gone home after the deadline, and storms hindered his return for three more days. Even then, MacDonald found himself reduced to pleading in tears before his oath was accepted. When Ardkinglas went to Edinburgh with the certificate of all oaths from his county, he was obliged by the clerks of the privy council to erase the name of MacDonald of Glencoe, as one who had sworn too late.

Behind this lay the wiles of the Scottish Secretary, Sir John Dalrymple of Stair. He had drawn up orders against chiefs still holding out, for MacDonald of Glencoe was far from alone. ‘I hope the soldiers will not trouble the Government with prisoners,’ Stair concluded.⁸ But it was fantasy to think of a punitive campaign against diehards in a Highland winter. Talks with them continued behind the scenes well after the deadline. Dalrymple thought he might best prove the king meant business by making an example of somebody: ‘if MacIain of Glencoe, and that tribe, can be well separated from the rest, it will be a proper vindication of the public justice to extirpate that den of thieves.’⁹ By January 23 the message got through to Sir Thomas Livingston, commander-in-chief in Scotland. Taking his cue from a political superior, he wrote to an officer at Fort William:

I understand that the Laird of Glencoe, coming after the prefixed time, was not admitted to take the oath, which is very good news here, being that at Court it’s wished he had not taken it . . . So Sir, here is a fair occasion for you to show that your garrison serves for some use . . . begin with Glencoe, and spare nothing which belongs to him, but do not trouble the Government with prisoners.

This echo of Stair was in effect the formal order for the massacre which followed and which was never punished.¹⁰

It was through acts not just of man but also of God that Scotland suffered affliction. Lying at the climatic limits of primitive agriculture, she had often gone hungry. But the famine of the 1690s went beyond anything known or remembered. The whole nation seemed to fall back to a lower stage of development. The economy ground to a halt as merchants exported coin to buy grain from abroad. The people reverted to barter. The state struggled to function without the taxes it could not collect. Highland bands debouched in quest of sustenance on the Lowlands. The Jacobites spoke of ‘King William’s seven ill years’. That term drew an analogy between him and the wicked Pharaoh of the Bible to suggest a divine judgment on the Scots for the sin of dethroning James VII and II. The memory long outlasted the crisis. A century later when the Old Statistical Account was being written – itself the expression of a new, scientific approach to national prosperity – the authors still cited stories from 100 years before of corpses in the fields and by the roads or on the seashore, with survivors swarming to beg in the burghs after failed harvests on their farms. Even in the twentieth century oral tradition had not forgotten: when human bones were uncovered by workmen near the foreshore at a village on the Moray Firth, local people at once identified them as victims of the famine who had died after trying to survive on shellfish and been buried above the high watermark.

At least among forward-thinking Scots a new spirit sought to put the terrible experience to some good use. They were starting to come to terms with their physical and social reality in a methodical way that would make the nation a cradle of new sciences in the Enlightenment of the following century. Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, a choleric laird from East Lothian, dwelt on the miseries of the poor and indifference of the rich. He thought that at the height of famine 200,000 beggars were on the move in Scotland. Never a man to shirk drastic solutions, he proposed reducing these wretches to a sort of benign slavery, regulated by law to secure their basic human rights, rather than leaving them to their fate. The scientist Sir Robert Sibbald wrote how ‘everyone may see death in the face of the poor that abound everywhere; the thinness of their visage, their ghostly looks, their feebleness, their agues and their fluxes threaten them with sudden death’. He often came across unburied corpses: ‘Some die in the wayside, some drop down in the street, the poor sucking babs are starving for want of milk which the empty breasts of their mothers cannot furnish.’ Patrick Walker, a clerical biographer, found women in the markets crying, ‘How shall we go home and see our children die in hunger? They have had no meat these two days, and we have nothing to give them.’ Martin Martin, author of a survey of the Western Isles, said ‘many of the poor people have died by famine’ after failed crops caused by ‘the great change of the seasons, which of late years is become more piercing and cold’. He got closest