Extract from The Scots and the Union - Chapter Two

The Scots and the Union

Christopher A. Whatley

Whatever the competing explanations for the union of 1707, very few would take issue with the proposition that Scotland was in a parlous condition at the turn of the eighteenth century. Yet, during the past four decades historians have delved deeply into the period and significantly revised older, gloomier interpretations of the seventeenth century that emphasised poverty, backwardness, religious intolerance and feuding. All these were to be found, as will be seen in this and the following two chapters. What is now clear however is that the century was also one of change and achievement.

Certainly at elite level, Scotland was no cultural or intellectual backwater. Although Scots drew heavily on European ideas and practice, the flow was not all one way. If not equal, the relationship between cosmpolitan Scotland and the rest of Europe had long been at least synergetic. From the middle ages, Scots scholars contributed substantially to European philosophical and scientific life. The roll of honour includes Duns Scotus, John Mair (or Major), and George Buchananan - best known in the sixteenth century as a poet, but also, for Scots, a profoundly important political theorist whose views would be used to bolster the case against incorporating union with England. George Wedderburn, an acquaintance of Galileo, featured to, along with John Napier of Merchiston, the originator of logarithms and the slide rule. (Less well known nowadays is Napier's work as a theologian, and that at a time of acute fear of a Spanish invasion he wrote a widely read attack on Roman Catholicism which portrayed the pope as antichrist and predicted not only the date of the world's end bust also, significantly perhaps given the sufferings the Scots would endure in the 1690s, that the Day of Judgement would fall between 1688 and 1700.)

In the later seventeenth century James Dalrymple (first viscount Stair) wrote his Institutions of the Laws of Scotland (1681), one of Europe's finest legal texts. It was Stair who brought from the governers of the university in Leiden, one of the most prestigious seats of learning in Europe, the invitation to the Edinburgh-born physician, man of letters and opponent of union Archibald Pitcairne to join them in 1691. Aberdeen produced a string of leading physicians who attended the Stuart kings after the Restoration: Dr Robert Morrison, Sir Alexander Fraser, and Drs Patrick Abercromby and John Arbuthnot. The Scottish universities were capable of turning out scholars of real international distinction and influence: John Blair, founder of William and Mary College in Virginia in 1693, was educated at Aberdeen and Edinburgh. Amongst their staff too were men of the same calibre: St Andrews boasted the mathematician James Gregory in the 1660s, and Edinburgh David Gregory twenty years later. Scots too were to be found scattered throughout the continent, thickly in places, as adventurers and merchants and, as will be seen in greater detail below, as mercenaries in the armies of the Swedish kings and the Dutch Republic and others, mainly at the rank of foot soldiers, but also as generals and, in the navy, as seamen, captains and admirals.

During the seventeenth century too there were periods of optimism in and about Scotland. In 1603, for example, when James VI journeyed south to become king of England and Ireland in addition to Scotland, this was viewed by a number of Scots as the means by which a glorious British empire - with presbyterianism providing its moral foundations - might be founded. Another was the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, albeit that this unbridled 'sentiment for royality', following the period of Cromwellian rule, was to prove short-lived. Longer-lasting was the economic recovery which by the later 1670s meant that Scots could enjoy condition that had not been bettered since 1603. Even at the start of the following, more difficult, decade, there were those who were confident that Scotland was on the road to prosperity: Sir Robert Sibbald (a graduate of Edinburgh before studying in Europe), a beneficiary of the enlightening patronage of James, duke of York, who was appointed as physician to the king and geographer royal in 1682, prefaced his Scottish Atlas by remarking on the peacefulness of the times and how 'for Stately Buildings, fertile fields, we begin to contend with the happiest of our Neighbours': it was partly to capture and describe that his Atlas was devised. With some justification, historians have traced to this enormously creative and confident period in Scottish history - which saw the institution of the Advocates' Library and royal patronage of a range of intellectual activities - the pre-union foundations of the Scottish Enlightenment. Nevertheless, the century ended in disappointment. Three questions arise: what precisely was the state of Scotland at the end of the seventeenth century and at the beginning of the eighteenth century; why was the condition of Scotland a matter of such concern for contemporaries; and what were the political consequences of what was, as will be seen, relative Scottish underdevelopment?