Scotland and the Wider World: Essays in Honour of Allan I. Macinnes (Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History, 44) 9781783276837, 9781787448162, 1783276835

Table of contents :
Scotland and the Wider World
Contents
Contributors
Preface
Abbreviations
Covenants, Clans and Unions in Context: Celebrating the Scholarship of Allan I. Macinnes
Part I: Peoples and Cultures in Britain and Ireland
The Commonwealth Refounded: The British Vision in its Edwardian Moment, 1547-50
Island Empire: James VI and I and the Isle of Man in an Archipelagic Context
The Forgotten Crisis of the Sixteenth-Century Irish Aristocracy
Part II: War, Religion and the House of Stuart
The Auld Alliance and the French Intervention in the Thirty Years’ War, 1630-48
Scotophobia in Later Stuart England
Alexander Shields (c. 1660-1700) on the Right of Punitive Arms
Charles Edward Stuart and Seven Hundred Irish Soldiers? A Reappraisal of a Turning Point in the ’4
Part III: Union, Empire and Enlightenment
From Didactic to Pragmatic: What Scottish Enlightenment?
The Two Rabs’ Big Adventure: Scottish Networks and Influence in Imperial Britain
Confederal Union and Empire: Placing the Albany Plan (1754) in Imperial Context
The Empire Strikes Back: Indian Influences on Land Legislation in Scotland and Ireland in the Late N
List of Publications
Index
Tabula Gratulatoria

Citation preview

STUDIES IN EARLY MODERN CULTURAL, ‎POLITICAL AND SOCIAL HISTORY Volume 44

SCOTLAND AND THE WIDER WORLD

Scotland and the Wider World 1 ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF ALLAN I. MACINNES

Edited by Neil McIntyre and Alison Cathcart

THE BOYDELL PRESS

© Contributors 2022 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation ‎no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, ‎published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, ‎transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, ‎without the prior permission of the copyright owner First published 2022 The Boydell Press, Woodbridge ISBN 978-1-78327-683-7 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-78744-816-2 (ePDF) The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd ‎PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK ‎and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. ‎668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA ‎website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate Cover image: details from Olaus Magnus, Carta Marina (1st edn, 1539).

Contents List of Contributors ix Preface xi List of Abbreviations xiii 1. Covenants, Clans and Unions in Context: Celebrating the Scholarship of Allan I. Macinnes Neil McIntyre, Alison Cathcart, and John R. Young

1

Part I. Peoples and Cultures in Britain and Ireland 2. The Commonwealth Refounded: the British Vision in its Edwardian Moment, 1547–50 Arthur Williamson

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3. Island Empire: James VI and I and the Isle of Man in an Archipelagic Context 34 Alison Cathcart 4. The Forgotten Crisis of the Sixteenth-Century Irish Aristocracy Ciaran Brady

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Part II. War, Religion and the House of Stuart 5. The Auld Alliance and the French Intervention in the Thirty Years’ War, 1630–48 Steve Murdoch

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6. Scotophobia in Later Stuart England Tim Harris

84

7. Alexander Shields (c. 1660–1700) on the Right of Punitive Arms Neil McIntyre

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8. Charles Edward Stuart and Seven Hundred Irish Soldiers? A Reappraisal of a Turning Point in the ’45 Daniel Szechi

v

116

CONTENTS

Part III. Union, Empire and Enlightenment 9. From Didactic to Pragmatic: What Scottish Enlightenment? Jean-François Dunyach

135

10. The Two Rabs’ Big Adventure: Scottish Networks and Influence in Imperial Britain Sarah Barber

150

11. Confederal Union and Empire: Placing the Albany Plan (1754) in Imperial Context Steven Pincus

167

12. The Empire Strikes Back: Indian Influences on Land Legislation in Scotland and Ireland in the Late Nineteenth Century Ewen A. Cameron

188

List of Publications 203 Index 211 Tabula Gratulatoria 217

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Contributors Sarah Barber is Senior Lecturer in History at Lancaster University Ciaran Brady is Professor Emeritus of Early Modern History and Historiography at Trinity College Dublin Ewen A. Cameron is Sir William Fraser Professor of Scottish History and Palaeography at the University of Edinburgh Alison Cathcart is Associate Professor in Early Modern Scottish History at the University of Stirling Jean-François Dunyach is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at Sorbonne University, Paris Tim Harris is Munro-Goodwin-Wilkinson Professor of European History at Brown University Neil McIntyre is an Affiliate in Theology and Religious Studies and former Lecturer in Scottish History at the University of Glasgow Steve Murdoch is Visiting Professor at the the Institute for Northern Studies, University of the Highlands and Islands Steven Pincus is Thomas E. Donnelly Professor of British History at the University of Chicago Daniel Szechi is Honorary Professor of History at the University of Aberdeen Arthur Williamson is Professor Emeritus of History at California State University, Sacramento John R. Young is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Strathclyde

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Preface

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his volume emerges from a conference held at the University of Strathclyde in 2018 that sought to acknowledge the enormous contribution made by Allan Macinnes to the study of early modern Scottish, British, and European history. Macinnes, currently Emeritus Professor at Strathclyde, retired in 2014 and, we believed, there was an urgent need to celebrate his exceptional career while also reflecting on the significance of his scholarship. Doing so has allowed us to think deeply about the transformation of Scottish History as a discipline in the past half-century as well as the development of the early modern British historiographical landscape. Colleagues, friends, and former students of Macinnes were invited to consider, therefore, how he had influenced their work and in what ways they saw it as building on, or a response to, his research. The key theme that emerged in the essays that follow was the way in which Macinnes had emphasised the need to consider Scotland – or, indeed, other territorial units – comparatively and in an international context. How, in other words, had Scotland interacted with the wider world? As will soon become clear, the wide-ranging contributions to this volume reflect, indeed, a career spent collaborating fruitfully beyond Scotland’s borders and taking Scottish History to a global audience. The volume has, however, been delayed severely by a number of unforeseen circumstances – not least serious illness, bereavement, and the impact of COVID-19. It is with great pleasure, then, that we can finally thank the institutions and individuals that helped to make the conference such a success, and who have supported the volume to publication. For their generous financial support, we thank, firstly, the Scottish Historical Review Trust and the Economic and Social History Society of Scotland. For her organisational nous and good humour, we thank Rowena Hutton. For the memorable whisky-tasting that concluded the first day of the conference, we thank Kieran German. For the provision of whisky glasses and the design of commemorative glassware, we thank Campbell McClure and Glencairn Crystal. For his fantastic last-minute discussion of the ‘Ice Pick’ on the second day, we thank Stephen Mullen. For his own heartfelt note of thanks, we are grateful to Mike Russell MSP. For their immeasurable patience and forbearance, sincere thanks to Boydell & Brewer, and especially Michael Middeke, Megan Milan, and Elizabeth Howard. Finally, we thank our wonderful contributors, whose enthusiasm and infinite patience has been so gratefully received. That a stellar cast of international scholars were so willing to get involved speaks to the strength of Macinnes’s friendship as well as his scholarship. Although not shy of controversy – a second volume of ix

PREFACE

essays by his opponents would have been no less prestigious! – we believe it is essential that, in the words of Mike Russell, his lifelong contribution to his field, his friends, and his country is fully recognised. We are delighted, therefore, to acknowledge in print our many debts to Macinnes and his hugely important work. Neil and Ali June 2021 ‎

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Abbreviations Bodl. Bodleian Library, Oxford BL British Library, London EHR English Historical Review HMC Historical Manuscripts Commission HL HuntingtonLibrary, San Marino, California MP Member of Parliament NLS National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh NRS National Records of Scotland, Edinburgh ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) RA Royal Archives, Windsor RPCS The Register of the Privy Council of Scotland RPS The Records of the Parliament of Scotland to 1707, ed. K.M. Brown et al. (St Andrews, 2007–19) SHR Scottish Historical Review TNA The National Archives, London

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1 Covenants, Clans and Unions in Context: Celebrating the Scholarship of Allan I. Macinnes Neil McIntyre, Alison Cathcart, and John R. Young

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cross a remarkable forty-year career that has continued apace since his retirement in 2014, Allan Macinnes has made a hugely significant contribution to Scottish, British and early modern historical scholarship. Across five monographs, nine edited books and innumerable essays and articles,1 Macinnes honed a distinctive style as a historian, renowned for his unrivalled coverage of Scottish and international archives and a take-no-prisoners approach to intellectual inquiry that recalled his days as a shinty player. This was later captured in the nickname he acquired among British historians in the early 1990s – Ice Pick – on account of his ‘direct’ style of engagement.2 Yet despite this fearsome reputation, Macinnes was also a committed teacher and advisor. As an early adopter of what is now accepted as an essential requirement of all professional historians – research-led teaching – he had incomparable success in producing a new generation of historians, many of whom remain active scholars today. Macinnes was integral to the transformation of Scottish History as a discipline in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In his own words, he sought to avoid what he perceived to be the excessive insularity and introspection of his immediate predecessors and contemporaries by emphasising comparative history and the promotion of Scottish History internationally.3 Much like his historical sparring partner Archibald Campbell, Marquess of Argyll, Macinnes has been comfortable operating in Scottish, British and overseas theatres. This has been reflected similarly in his many collaborations with early modernists in Europe and North America and in the wide-ranging contributions to this collection. Evaluating Macinnes’s wide-ranging scholarship is no easy task: any attempt to do so is liable to fall short when trying to fully capture its breadth and depth. 1

See List of Publications in this volume. ‘Sharp End of History’, The Herald, 13 Dec. 1993. With thanks to Dr Stephen Mullen for this reference. 3 ‘Union and Empire: A Considered Response’, Britain and the World, 1 (2009), 282–8. 2

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Rather than auditing a prolific and ongoing publication record, then, we have opted instead to trace three fundamental elements of his work that also serve to illuminate the broader historiographical landscape of the last half-century, and which remain major interventions in Scottish and British historiography. These elements are: (i) the study of Scottish history in a comparative international context and a rejection of Anglocentrism in British history; (ii) the study of the Scottish Highlands without recourse either to sentimentalism or the over-privileging of governmental perspectives; and (iii) the study of political economy and Scottish commerce before and after the Treaty of Union. Not only did Macinnes inject Scottish History with a much-needed dose of self-confidence, he also heeded his own call for historians of Scotland to make their case globally. I

Raised in Ballachulish, Argyllshire, and educated at Oban High School, Macinnes studied History as an undergraduate at the University of St Andrews from 1967 to 1971 before undertaking doctoral research at the University of Glasgow under the supervision of Archie Duncan and Ian Cowan.4 Supported by a generous Glasgow bursary, Macinnes began his research in 1971 and was appointed to a lectureship in the Scottish History department the following year. He took up the position in 1973. His work emerged at a time when Scottish History had become an increasingly distinctive and professionalised discipline.5 Dedicated chairs, departments and research clusters were established across the twentieth century in Scottish universities; journals, such as the Scottish Historical Review and Records of the Scottish Church History Society, provided important platforms for early publication; and publishers – most notably John Donald and Tuckwell Press – raised the profile of emerging historians of Scotland.6 There was, however, a lingering inferiority complex that was exemplified in the defensive nature of the contributions to Why Scottish History Matters.7 Macinnes and his contemporaries, nevertheless, heralded a more confident turn in the 1980s and early 1990s, seeking to raise the profile of the field internationally and collaborate across disciplinary boundaries. In his reflections on the state 4

‘The Origin and Organization of the Covenanting Movement during the Reign of Charles I, 1625–41: with a Particular Reference to the West of Scotland’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 1987). 5 B.P. Lenman, ‘The Teaching of Scottish History in the Scottish Universities’, SHR, 52 (1973), 165–90; Robert Anderson, ‘University History Teaching, National Identity and Unionism in Scotland, 1862–1914’, SHR, 91 (2012), 1–41; idem, ‘The Development of History Teaching in the Scottish Universities, 1894–1939’, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, 32 (2012), 50–73. 6 See e.g., John Dwyer, R.A. Mason and Alexander Murdoch (eds), New Perspectives on the Politics and Culture of Early Modern Scotland (Edinburgh, 1982). 7 Rosalind Mitchison (ed.), Why Scottish History Matters (Edinburgh, 1991).

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of the field at the ‘Whither Scottish History?’ conference held at Strathclyde University in 1993 (published in the SHR in 1994), Macinnes argued that in the late twentieth century the major challenge facing Scottish historians in general and early modernists in particular is neither pedagogic nor popular, nor even the next round of the research assessment exercise. Rather, it is to make a comparative impact internationally.8

This was Macinnes’s leading concern – he was, for example, a Fletcher-Jones Fellow at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California, in 1993, forming the basis for subsequent fellowships in 2002 and 2005, and visiting professor in British History at the University of Chicago in the intervening period – and it has been echoed in the work of many of his subsequent graduate students.9 At a time when Macinnes sought to project Scottish History internationally, historians of England were still reckoning with John Pocock’s call for a new subject – what became known as the ‘New British History’.10 The period of the seventeenth-century civil wars – already a crowded battleground for historians – was central to this debate and of much historiographical jousting.11 Conrad Russell, John Morrill and Kevin Sharpe were, for Macinnes, influential in shaping his own intervention.12 He, of course, thrived in this environment, asserting forcefully the importance of Scottish covenanters in revolutionary British politics. Before we turn to Macinnes’s own approach to British history

8

‘Early Modern Scotland: The Current State of Play’, SHR, 73 (1994), 30–46, at 31. Steve Murdoch, Britain, Denmark–Norway and the House of Stuart, 1603–1660 (East Linton, 2000); idem, Network North: Scottish Kin, Commercial and Covert Associations in Northern Europe, 1603–1746 (Leiden, 2006); Andrew Mackillop, More Fruitful than the Soil: Army, Empire and the Scottish Highlands, 1715–1815 (East Linton, 2000); Andrew Mackillop and Steve Murdoch (eds), Military Governors and Imperial Frontiers, c. 1600–1800: A Study of Scotland and Empires (Leiden, 2003); Alexia Grosjean, An Unofficial Alliance? Scotland and Sweden, 1569–1654 (Leiden, 2003); David Worthington, Scots in Habsburg Service, 1618–1648 (Leiden, 2003); Alexia Grosjean and Steve Murdoch (eds), Scottish Communities Abroad in the Early Modern Period (Leiden, 2005). Murdoch has encouraged a ‘second wave’ of such scholarship. See e.g., Kathrin Zickermann, Across the German Sea: Early Modern Scottish Connections with the Wider Elbe-Weser Region (Leiden, 2013); Siobhan Talbott, Conflict, Commerce and Franco-Scottish Relations, 1560–1713 (London, 2014); Claire McLoughlin, ‘Scottish Commercial Contacts with the Iberian World, 1581–1730’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of St Andrews, 2014). 10 J.G.A. Pocock, ‘British History: A Plea for a New Subject’, Journal of Modern History, 47 (1975), 601–21; idem, ‘The Limits and Divisions of British History: in Search of an Unknown Subject’, American Historical Review, 87 (1982), 311–36. 11 Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context (Cambridge, 2000), p. 22. 12 See e.g., Conrad Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies, 1637–1642 (Oxford, 1991); John Morrill (ed.), The Scottish National Covenant in its British Context (Edinburgh, 1990); Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, CT, 1992). 9

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writing, however, it is necessary first to evaluate his reading of Covenanting Scotland as expressed in his first monograph and several incisive essays.13 The importance of Macinnes’s study of the Covenanting period cannot be overstated and remains a significant reference point in the historiography.14 While David Stevenson provided a much-needed updated political narrative,15 Macinnes undertook a deeper assessment of both Caroline and Covenanting political projects and, in doing so, combined a major reinterpretation of the seventeenth-century upheavals with forensic analysis of key planks of government policy. His approach, above all, stressed the need to consider the interaction between policy and process: Macinnes, indeed, operated largely in the space between the devising of policy and the more complicated reality of its implementation. Although recognising the enforcement of the Books of Canons (1636) and Common Prayer (1637) and, thus, religion, to have been the issue that led ultimately to revolt in 1638, he asserted the primacy of political and economic factors in the formation of the Covenanting movement. Religion alone, he argued, could not explain the Covenanting revolution – a view at odds with an older partisan denominational historiography that had, of course, prioritised church history,16 as well as later twentieth-century works that had foregrounded issues of ecclesiology and church–state relations.17 In the context of late-1970s Scottish historiography, it represented also, more specifically, a response to Walter Makey’s Marxist reading of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Makey’s Church of the Covenant was among the first studies to view the revolution as a product of longer-term social changes (arising from inflation and the secularisation of kirklands) rather than the immediate political or religious context of the personal rule of Charles I.18 Macinnes, while welcoming recognition of the ‘profound influence’ of these changes, saw in the view of social causation an underestimation of the ideological 13

‘The Scottish Constitution, 1638–51: The Rise and Fall of Oligarchic Centralism’, in The Scottish National Covenant, ed. Morrill, pp. 106–33; Charles I and the Making of the Covenanting Movement, 1625–41 (Edinburgh, 1991); ‘Covenanting Revolution and Municipal Enterprise’, in Scotland Revisited, ed. Jenny Wormald (London, 1991), pp. 97–106; ‘Covenanting Ideology in Seventeenth-Century Scotland’, in Political Thought in Seventeenth Century Ireland, ed. J.H. Ohlmeyer (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 191–220. 14 L.A.M. Stewart, Rethinking the Scottish Revolution: Covenanted Scotland, 1637–51 (Oxford, 2016), pp. 2–4, 20–1. 15 David Stevenson, The Scottish Revolution, 1637–44, rev. edn (Edinburgh, 2003); idem, Revolution and Counter Revolution in Scotland, 1644–51, rev. edn (Edinburgh, 2003). 16 See e.g., W.L. Mathieson, Politics and Religion: A Study in Scottish History from the Reformation to the Revolution (2 vols, Glasgow, 1902); J.K. Hewison, The Covenanters: A History of the Church in Scotland from the Reformation to the Revolution (2 vols, Glasgow, 1908). 17 Gordon Donaldson, Scotland: James V–James VII (Edinburgh, 1965); I.B. Cowan, The Scottish Covenanters, 1660–1688 (London, 1976); James Kirk, Patterns of Reform: Continuity and Change in the Reformation Kirk (Edinburgh, 1989). 18 Walter Makey, The Church of the Covenant, 1637–1651: Revolution and Social Change (Edinburgh, 1979).

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and organisational radicalism of the disaffected as well as determinism in its ascription of political attitudes according to social class.19 Macinnes’s great achievement, therefore, was to illuminate the social dynamics of the revolution while also emphasising the political agency of the revolutionaries. At the heart of his research on the origins of the revolution was the most thorough-going analysis of Charles’s controversial and technically complex revocation scheme, with attention shifted away from the capital, Edinburgh, and particular scrutiny accorded to the Lanarkshire estates of the marquess (later duke) of Hamilton, the king’s chief advisor on Scottish affairs.20 The scheme was, famously, ‘the ground stone of all the mischieffe that folloued after’.21 Key was Macinnes’s effective demonstration of the way in which its impact cut across the social spectrum and forged class collusion in the 1630s – a critical component of his later argument regarding the emergence of ‘the Tables’ as an oligarchical provisional governing body comprised of disaffected social groups whose aims and ambitions were not necessarily aligned.22 Scotland may not have been wholly united in its opposition to royal policy, but the king was certainly successful in sowing disaffection at every level of Scottish society. The social dynamics of the revolution identified by Macinnes led to his placing of emphasis on the political sophistication and radicalism of the Covenanting movement. Where others had detected conservatism in the movement’s political language and aristocratic origins,23 for Macinnes such observations belied the revolutionary intent of its ‘radical mainstream’.24 Radicalism was to be found in the Covenant’s placing of permanent checks on magistracy and the manner in which its band of mutual association bound the covenanted together in pursuit of its imperatives. Radicalism was likewise to be found in political mobilisation, organisation and management – especially of the two leading constitutional assemblies of the day, the Scottish Parliament and the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. Macinnes drew particular attention to the emergence of the gentry as a distinct political class after its voting power was expanded at the expense of the abolished clerical estate; the revolutionaries’ construction of a sophisticated committee system that centralised power in the national legislature and which effectively linked the localities to the political centre; and the way in which the system was operated – perhaps manipulated – by a radical oligarchy that was linked also by kin, land and business interests. The Covenanting constitutional revolution had, therefore, effected a rapid transformation of the 19

‘Origin and Organization’, I, pp. 5–8. Covenanting Movement, pp. 49–101. 21 Sir James Balfour, Historical Works, ed. James Haig (4 vols, Edinburgh, 1824), II, p. 128. 22 Covenanting Movement, pp. 155–213. 23 R.A. Mason, ‘The Aristocracy, Episcopacy and the Revolution of 1638’, in Covenant, Charter and Party: Traditions of Revolt and Protest in Modern Scottish History, ed. Terry Brotherstone (Aberdeen, 1989), pp. 7–24; K.M. Brown, ‘Aristocratic Finances and the Origins of the Scottish Revolution’, EHR, 104 (1989), 46–87. 24 Covenanting Movement, p. 183. 20

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Scottish state and political community – an argument that laid the basis for future important work by John Young and Laura Stewart.25 Despite his trenchant criticism of the way in which Scottish history had tended to be portrayed as little more than a contest between Crown, nobles and clergy for power and influence,26 Macinnes’s concern to overhaul the broader metanarrative of the Covenanting period led to his prioritising of elite over popular politics. The implications of the socio-political analysis above have, nevertheless, stimulated further research into the extent and limits of contemporary political engagement and participation.27 Yet, rather ironically, his biography of the marquess of Argyll, principally as leader of the Covenanting movement, is a major contribution to the study of the early modern Scottish nobility.28 Not only did it retrieve the posthumous reputation of the marquess from centuries of royalist invective, but, furthermore, his placing alongside Charles and Oliver Cromwell as political leader was an explicit reinstating of the pivotal role of Scots covenanters in the British civil wars. As we shall now see, it was also a fine example of Macinnes’s distinctive writing of non-Anglocentric British History. The biography of the marquess built on Macinnes’s earlier The British Revolution, which had sought to challenge and correct the Anglocentrism that had been prevalent in histories of the ‘Wars of the Three Kingdoms’ – a term coined originally to circumscribe the entrenched historiographical construct that is the ‘English Civil Wars’.29 In this challenge he found allies among historians of early modern Ireland.30 While Macinnes supported the need to consider England, Scotland and Ireland comparatively and in a broad Britannic frame, he was critical of the tendency of modern British historians to reference the ‘Celtic’ nations only when it served to illuminate English events. In the New British History, that is, Scottish and Irish – as also Welsh – historians risked

25 J.R.

Young, The Scottish Parliament, 1639–1661: A Political and Constitutional Analysis (Edinburgh, 1996); Stewart, Rethinking. 26 ‘Early Modern Scotland’, 31–3, 41–2. 27 For a summary of recent work, see Neil McIntyre, ‘Preface: Experiencing the Covenant at Home and Abroad’, SHR, 99 issue supplement (2020), 331–5. 28 The British Confederate: Archibald Campbell, Marquess of Argyll, c. 1607–1661 (Edinburgh, 2011). For biography as a genre in early modern Scottish studies, see Amy Blakeway, ‘Biography and James VI’s Scotland’, Innes Review, 67 (2016), 83–92. 29 A.I. Macinnes, The British Revolution, 1629–1660 (Basingstoke, 2005). 30 Most notably in Ciaran Brady, Nicholas Canny, Aiden Clarke, Steven Ellis and Jane Ohlmeyer. See e.g., Ciaran Brady, The Chief Governors: The Rise and Fall of Reform Government in Tudor Ireland, 1536–1588 (Cambridge, 1994); Nicholas Canny, Kingdom and Colony: Ireland in the Atlantic World, 1560–1800 (Baltimore, MD, 1987); Aiden Clarke, Prelude to Restoration in Ireland: The End of the Commonwealth, 1659–1660 (Cambridge, 1999); S.G. Ellis, Tudor Ireland: Crown, Community and the Conflict of Cultures, 1470–1603 (London, 1991); J.H. Ohlmeyer, Civil War and Restoration in the Three Stuart Kingdoms: The Political Career of Randal MacDonnell, First Marquis of Antrim (Dublin, 2001).

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becoming ‘external adjuncts to support an English revisionism’.31 Macinnes was critical, too, of the way in which the framework had tended to disaggregate events from the Thirty Years’ War then raging in continental Europe.32 Macinnes’s framing of the British civil wars remains highly controversial in the historiography and has not gone uncontested.33 He maintained that Scots covenanters were in the ‘driving seat’ of British revolutionary politics when they exported their template for revolution southward and supported it militarily through the consummation of the Solemn League and Covenant in 1643.34 For Macinnes, the period 1638–45 could, therefore, be dubbed ‘the Scottish moment’ – a suggestion that was always likely to rankle historians of England.35 Leaving aside the extent to which the covenanters could be said to have set the political agenda in the early 1640s, Macinnes’s courting of controversy in The British Revolution captured the essence of his scholarship and approach as a historian. As neatly summarised by Jason Peacey, his was ‘a powerful rallying call to go forth and explore continental archives and to cast off the chains of disciplinary specialisms in order to integrate political thought and action, as well as to explore the influence of confessionalism and commerce’.36 A similar approach, indeed, was taken in Macinnes’s brilliant work on the Scottish Highlands, much of which remains unsurpassed in the historiography, and to which we shall now turn. II

Macinnes’s work on the Covenanting movement intersected with his lifelong interest in the Scottish Highlands.37 His functionalist interpretation of clanship and demonstration of the interplay between social trends and political crises in Scottish Gaeldom continues to represent an important milestone in Highland

31

‘Early Modern Scotland’, 42. See also K.M. Brown, ‘Seducing the Scottish Clio: Has Scottish History Anything to Fear from the New British History?’, in The New British History: Founding a Modern State, 1603–1714, ed. Glenn Burgess (London, 1999), pp. 238–65. 32 British Revolution, pp. 1–7, 42–3, 70–1. Similar sentiments are expressed in Steve Murdoch (ed.), Scotland and the Thirty Years War, 1618–1648 (Leiden, 2001); Steve Murdoch and Alexia Grosjean, Alexander Leslie and the Scottish General of the Thirty Years’ War, 1618–1648 (London, 2014); Adam Marks, ‘England, the English and the Thirty Years’ War’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of St Andrews, 2012). 33 Jason Peacey, ‘Reviewed Work: The British Revolution, 1629–1660 by Allan I. Macinnes’, Sixteenth-Century Journal, 37 (2006), 1179–80. 34 British Revolution, p. 150. 35 ‘The “Scottish Moment”, 1638–1645’, in The English Civil War: Conflicts and Contexts, 1640–49, ed. John Adamson (Basingstoke, 2009), pp. 125–52. 36 Peacey, ‘Reviewed Work’, 1180. 37 ‘Scottish Gaeldom, 1638–51: The Vernacular Response to the Covenanting Dynamic’, in New Perspectives, ed. Dwyer, Mason and Murdoch, pp. 59–94. See also The British Confederate.

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historiography.38 Although earlier twentieth-century scholarship certainly enhanced our understanding of early modern Gaelic society – with new light shed, for example, on the complexity of kin-based social structures, shifts in Gaelic language and culture, the use of charters, and later socio-economic changes wrought by clearance and crofting – these studies did not provide a holistic explanation for longer-term social and political change in the Highlands.39 Macinnes, by contrast, took a macro-level perspective of clanship from the fifteenth to the end of the eighteenth century. Although characterising Highland society as based on the interaction of ‘feudalism, kinship and local association’, clanship was conceptualised as neither the homogeneous nor static construct that it had been presumed to be. Instead he emphasised how Gaelic society had evolved over time and how the Highlands had been shaped by a range of external factors that had also affected other regions of Scotland. Macinnes, indeed, sought to erode the distinction that was so often drawn between Highland and Lowland Scotland in this period. The timeline was not synchronous, but the Highlands were no less affected by, for example, the consolidation of tenant farms, a commercial land market and the emergence of a propertied middle class.40 It was, then, the impressive chronological, geographic and intellectual scope of his work that saw it achieve ‘new standards of scholarship and sophistication’ at the time and ensure that it continues to inform understandings of the Scottish Highlands today.41 A broad view did not prevent Macinnes from making a series of specific insights, however. He uncovered, most notably, evidence of different organisational structures within individual clans; the evolution of the tacksman; the importance of fictive kinship and clientage; the role of central government in feud resolution; the cultural and socio-economic importance of resource redistribution; and the interplay between possession and property as expressed in the concepts of duthchas and oighreachd.42 By identifying the chief and fine as part of 38

Colin Kidd, ‘Review of Clanship, Commerce and the House of Stuart, 1603–1788, by Allan I. Macinnes’, Innes Review, 48 (1997), 184–6. 39 Within this body of literature see John Bannerman, The Beatons (Edinburgh, 1989); J. Munro and R.W. Munro (eds), Acts of the Lords of the Isles, Scottish History Society, 4th series, 22 (Edinburgh, 1986); Malcolm Gray, The Highland Economy, 1750–1850 (Edinburgh, 1957; reprinted 1976); Eric Cregeen, ‘The changing role of the House of Argyll in the Scottish Highlands’, in Scotland in the Age of Improvement: Essays in Scottish History in the Eighteenth Century, ed. N.T. Phillipson and Rosalind Mitchison (Edinburgh, 1970), pp. 5–23; Rosalind Mitchison, ‘The Highland Clearances’, Scottish Economic and Social History, 1 (1981), 137–49; Eric Richards, A History of the Highland Clearances (2 vols, London, 1982); T.M. Devine, Clanship to Crofters’ War: the Social Transformation of the Scottish Highlands (Manchester, 1994). There are also a number of volumes that cover comparative Scottish and Irish history. See e.g., L.M. Cullen and T.C. Smout (eds), Comparative Aspects of Scottish and Irish Economic and Social History, 1600–1900 (Edinburgh, 1977). 40 Clanship, Commerce, pp. ix, 14–23, 59, 142–51, 221–33. 41 Kidd, ‘Review of Clanship, Commerce’, 186. 42 Clanship, Commerce, pp. 1–55.

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the clan elite, moreover, he was able to trace the factors that led to fundamental changes (or ‘convulsions’) within clanship. He demonstrated, above all, the way in which the clan elite were orientated away from traditional obligations and towards commercialism; towards an approach to resource management based on exploitation, that is, rather than redistribution. Traditionally, this had been argued as having taken place in the aftermath of the last Jacobite uprising, but Macinnes revealed how clan chiefs had begun to cast off their customary responsibilities about a century prior, during the civil wars of the 1640s.43 Macinnes’s approach to the Highlands was balanced but critical, avoiding any suggestion of particularism while also cutting through Whiggish readings of the past that had presented Scottish Gaeldom as backward, barbaric and uncivilised. Rather than a conceptual or theoretical analysis, though, he considered the practical outworking of governmental ‘civilising’ policies. Not one to take policy or political thought at face value, Macinnes was unafraid to challenge the veracity of government records or the thrust of government policy. His questioning of the well-worn notion that there was a ‘Highland problem’ in the early modern period went so far as to invert the trope in order to argue instead that it was the Highlands that had suffered a problem – a ‘government problem’ – as exemplified by the persistent intrusion of central government in the region.44 Macinnes has continued to develop various aspects of his argument, such as the redeployment of Highland mercenaries as farmers in the seventeenth century, but his core arguments have been reinforced by subsequent scholarship. His research into Highland governance gave rise, indeed, to wider concerns regarding state formation, the relationship between power centres and peripheries, and land reform.45 Recent scholarship has continued to tread these themes, including the role of Highlanders in droving and exploitative and extractive industries, as well as their wider engagement with commercial and political opportunities beyond the Highland region and participation in the civil and military administration of the British Empire.46 43

Clanship, Commerce, pp. 59–81, 142–51, 221–8. ‘Repression and Conciliation: The Highland Dimension, 1660–1688’, SHR, 65 (1986), 167–95; Clanship, Commerce, pp. 56–9, 217–21. 45 ‘Who Owned Argyll in the Eighteenth Century? Continuity and Change from Clanship to Clearance’, in Power, Property and Privilege: The Landed Elite in Scotland from 1440 to 1914, Association for Scottish Historical Studies (St Andrews, 1989), pp. 95–113. ‘Scottish Gaeldom from Clanship to Commercial Landlordism, c. 1600–c. 1850’, in Scottish Power Centres from the Early Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, ed. A.I. Macinnes, Sally Foster and Ranald MacInnes (Glasgow, 1998), pp. 162–90. (With Saúl Martínez Bermejo, J.S. Amelang, Roberto Mazzucchi, Juan Pan-Montojo and Jón Viðar Sigurðsson) ‘Communities’, in Layers of Power: Societies and Institutions in Europe, ed. Saúl Martínez Bermejo, Darina Martykánová and Momir Samardižić (Pisa, 2010), pp. 55–94; ‘Land, Labour and Capital: External Influences and Internal Responses in Early Modern Scotland’, in Land Reform in Scotland: History, Law and Politics, ed. Malcolm Combe, Jayne Glass and Annie Tindley (Edinburgh, 2020), pp. 23–38. 46 See e.g., Robert Dodgshon, From Chiefs to Landlords: Social and Economic Change in the 44

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Macinnes’s blend of iconoclasm and robust analysis also found expression in his development of Jacobite studies. Despite – or, perhaps, because of – his Argyllshire background and study of Gaeldom, Macinnes determinedly exploded two popularly held notions regarding Jacobitism: that support for the Stuart monarchy in the Highlands was unwavering, and driven primarily by a shared commitment to Catholicism. Not only did Clanship reveal quite starkly that Highland support could be neither assumed nor interpreted as consistent over time, but it and subsequent essays and articles revealed how it was from the ranks of Scottish Episcopalians that Jacobite support was predominantly drawn.47 The relationship between Jacobitism and Episcopalianism continues to be mined for fresh insights.48 At the same time, Macinnes has stressed that 1746 was not the defining date it was assumed to be for Gaelic culture: both socio-economic and socio-cultural change had been triggered long before the ‘[i]ndiscriminate repression by the victorious Whig forces’ that followed the defeat of the Jacobite army at Culloden.49 It was, above all, Macinnes’s move away from the traditional obsession with the ’45 and the historiographical fixation on the Stuart court-in-exile in two landmark pieces that marked out his lasting contribution to studies of Jacobitism.50 By considering the depth of support for Jacobitism in Scotland Western Highlands and Islands, c. 1493–1820 (Edinburgh, 1998); Mackillop, More Fruitful than the Soil; Martin MacGregor, ‘The Genealogical Histories of Gaelic Scotland’, in The Spoken Word. Oral Culture in Britain, 1500–1850, ed. Adam Fox and Daniel Woolf (Manchester, 2002), pp. 196–239; Steve Boardman, The Campbells, 1250–1513 (Edinburgh, 2006); Alison Cathcart, Kinship and Clientage: Highland Clanship, 1451–1609 (Leiden, 2006); F.A. MacDonald, Mission to the Gaels: Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Ulster and the Highlands and Islands of Scotland (Edinburgh, 2006); Stena Nenadic, Lairds and Luxury: The Highland Gentry in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh, 2007); Martin MacGregor, ‘Warfare in Gaelic Scotland in the later Middle Ages’, in A Military History of Scotland, ed. E.M. Spiers, J.A. Crang and M.J. Strickland (Edinburgh, 2012), pp. 209–31; Allan Kennedy, Governing Gaeldom: the Scottish Highlands and the Restoration State, 1660–1688 (Leiden, 2014); Aonghas MacCoinnich, Plantation and Civility in the North Atlantic World: The Case of the Northern Hebrides, 1570–1639 (Leiden, 2015). 47 See n. 50 below. 48 See Kieran German, ‘Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire and Jacobitism in the North East of Scotland, 1688–1750’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Aberdeen, 2012), pp. 70–115; A.E. Nimmo, ‘Liturgy: The Sacramental Soul of Jacobitism’, in Living with Jacobitism, 1690–1788: The Three Kingdoms and Beyond, ed. A.I. Macinnes, Kieran German and Lesley Graham (London, 2014), pp. 39–54; Kieran German, ‘Non-Jurors, Liturgy, and Jacobite Commitment, 1718–1736’, Scottish Church History, 47 (2018), 74–99. 49 Clanship, Commerce, p. 210. 50 ‘Scottish Jacobitism: in Search of a Movement’, in New Perspectives on Eighteenth-Century Scotland, ed. T.M. Devine and John R. Young (Edinburgh, 1999), pp. 70–89; ‘Jacobitism in Scotland: Episodic Cause or National Movement?’ SHR, 86 (2007), 225–52. The latter was first published in French as ‘Le jacobitisme en Écosse, cause épisodique ou mouvement national?’, L’évolution des mondes modernes, Séminaire de D.E.A. De l’Institut de Recherches sur les Civilisations de l’Occident Moderne, Université Paris Sorbonne 2 (2004–5), 1–28. Macinnes’s

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– characterising it as a national movement rather than ‘an episodic cause’ – he gave impetus to studies that consider more deeply the constituency and culture of Jacobitism.51 This has also been captured in three edited volumes that have explored Jacobitism from a variety of perspectives and asked critical questions regarding its survival after the Revolution of 1688–90.52 Macinnes’s ‘robust and persuasive’ contribution to Jacobite studies, moreover, has encouraged new work on anti-Jacobitism and eighteenth-century Scottish Whig culture as well as fresh assessments of the Hanoverian succession.53 He has, as a result, forced eighteenth-century historians to take Jacobitism seriously as a political and cultural phenomenon, with his research on Jacobite trade and engagement with the European enlightenment challenging Whiggish views of modernity and thus neo-Whig histories of Britain. As we shall see, Whig triumphalism has been similarly challenged by Macinnes’s commitment to the study of political economy and Scottish commerce before and after the Anglo-Scottish union of 1707. III

Coinciding with the tercentenary of the Treaty of Union in 2007, Macinnes’s major reinterpretation of the British parliamentary union accorded primacy to matters of political economy and confirmed his interest in a field that would preoccupy him for much of his later career. Macinnes advocated for a less pessimistic view of the seventeenth-century Scottish economy and thus a less fatalistic perspective of Scotland’s political and commercial options at the turn of the eighteenth century.54 As well as challenging over two centuries of Whig historiography, it confronted important twentieth-century interventions that had opted to emphasise either political or economic motives in the making of the Union. Although welcomed for their economic perspective, Macinnes was critical of Chris Smout and Chris Whatley’s assessment that Scotland was effectively on the brink of economic ruin – an interpretation that seemed to imply that the move in this direction has been reflected in much subsequent work. See, for example, the similarly iconoclastic Murray Pittock, The Myth of the Jacobite Clans: The Jacobite Army in the 1745 (Edinburgh, 1995), and Daniel Szechi, The Jacobites: Britain and Europe, 1688–1788 (Manchester, 1994). 51 See e.g., D.S. Layne, ‘Spines of the Thistle: The Popular Constituency of the Jacobite Rising in 1745–6’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of St Andrews, 2016). 52 (With D.J. Hamilton) Jacobitism, Enlightenment and Empire, 1680–1820 (London, 2014); (with Kieran German and Lesley Graham) Living with Jacobitism, 1690–1788: The Three Kingdoms and Beyond (London, 2014); (with Patricia Barton and Kieran German) Scottish Liturgical Traditions and Religious Politics: From Reformers to Jacobites, 1540–1764 (Edinburgh, 2021). 53 C.A. Whatley, ‘Reformed Religion, Regime Change and the Struggle for the “Soul” of Scotland, c. 1688–c. 1788’, SHR, 92 (2013), 66–99, quote at 67; (with B.S. Sirota), The Hanoverian Succession in Great Britain and its Empire (Woodbridge, 2019). 54 As did his colleague Tom Devine. See The Scottish Nation, 1707–2000 (London, 1999).

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union was ‘an unprecedented act of political altruism on the part of the English ministry’.55 However, in rejecting what they saw as economic determinism, William Ferguson and Patrick Riley had, for Macinnes, over-exaggerated jobbery, patronage and intimidation at the expense of political principle.56 Intellectual historians did provide an important corrective by exploring contemporary and comparative polemical debates, but they have engaged far less with political economy.57 Inspired in part by Steve Pincus’s centring of political economy in his analysis of the development of seventeenth-century English political culture,58 Macinnes’s significant contribution was to see the Union chiefly as a consequence of Scottish and English political economy. He achieved this by taking a wider continental, transatlantic and transoceanic perspective – what would now be called global history59 – and by linking domestic and colonial histories – an approach emphasised by practitioners of colonial or imperial history.60 Macinnes had worked on the Union for some time prior to the publication of Union and Empire. By adopting an early interest in the research possibilities presented by historical computing, he questioned the extent to which all members of the Scottish Estates had been susceptible to political influence in the vote for incorporating union.61 This challenging of a Namierite view 55

Union and Empire, pp. 42–3, 47; T.C. Smout, Scottish Trade on the Eve of Union, 1660–1707 (Edinburgh, 1963); C.A. Whatley, Bought and Sold for English Gold? Explaining the Union of 1707 (East Linton, 1994). See more recently C.A. Whatley with D.J. Patrick, The Scots and the Union (Edinburgh, 2006). 56 Union and Empire, pp. 43–5; William Ferguson, Scotland’s Relations with England: A Survey to 1707 (Edinburgh, 1977); P.W.J. Riley, The Union of England and Scotland: A Study in AngloScottish Politics of the Eighteenth Century (Manchester, 1978). 57 Union and Empire, pp. 45–6; Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity, 1689–c. 1830 (Cambridge, 1993); John Robertson (ed.), A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union (Cambridge, 1995); David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000). Like Macinnes and Whatley, Kidd also contributed to the tercentenary debate. See Union and Unionisms: Political Thought in Scotland, 1500–2000 (Cambridge, 2008). 58 Steven Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650–1668 (Cambridge, 1996); idem, ‘Neither Machiavellian Moment nor Possessive Individualism: Commercial Society and the Defenders of the English Commonwealth’, American Historical Review, 103 (1998), 705–36. 59 For Macinnes’s recent forays into global history, see ‘Union, Empire and Global Adventuring with a Jacobite Twist’, in Jacobitism, Enlightenment and Empire, pp. 123–39. ‘Globalisation occurred on Loch Craignish in 1720’, unpublished conference paper, The Future of Early Modern Scottish Studies Conference, University of St Andrews, 13 January 2017. 60 See e.g., B.R. Hamnett, The End of Iberian Rule on the American Continent, 1770–1830 (Cambridge, 2017). 61 For the datasets, see TRUNVOTE: The Making of the Treaty of Union, 1706–7 (University of Glasgow, 1988). See also ‘Influencing the Vote: The Scottish Estates and the Treaty of Union, 1706–7’, History Microcomputer Review, 2 (1990), 11–25. ‘Treaty of Union: Voting Patterns and Political Influence’, in History & Computing III: Historians, Computers

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of political history, as well as a narrative often favoured by nationalists and attributed to the Jacobite George Lockhart of Carnwath (1673–1731) – that is, of Scotland having been ‘bought and sold for English gold’ – was a notable feature of his later work. On the other hand, Macinnes took aim again at a Whiggish and Anglocentric historiographical determinism that continued to implicitly if not explicitly suggest that a parliamentary union in general, and political incorporation in particular, were inevitable.62 Above all, then, Union and Empire emphasised options: options for union, options for commerce and different approaches to the question of national prosperity. With Scottish commercial activity in the seventeenth century central to his argument that the Scots did not have to meekly accept incorporating union with England, Macinnes demonstrated his strengths as a mercantile and maritime historian rooted in international archives. He highlighted, for example, the diverse commercial links retained by Scots in the Baltic region, France, Scandinavia and the Netherlands, with Scottish political economy revealed to have been influenced in particular by the Dutch.63 Scottish involvement in the American colonies received special attention, however, having been largely peripheral in broader analyses of the Union due to the failure of Scottish attempts to implement a separate imperial agenda.64 Here also Macinnes demonstrated the Scots’ aptitude in circumventing the English Navigation Acts, driving commercial innovation in Scotland as well as changes in English policy.65 Not only were Scottish commercial networks ‘pervasive from the Baltic to the Caribbean’, moreover, Macinnes insisted that the Scottish economy was not in a state of irrecoverable decline at the turn of the eighteenth century precisely because so much Scottish economic activity was illicit or hidden from record; more fatalistic assessments had not paid sufficient attention, that is, to Scotland’s success as a ‘rogue economic nation’.66 If Scotland had political and commercial options, then, how do we explain the Treaty of Union? For Macinnes, the answer lay in consideration of both the English perspective and Irish dimension, which had been, and continue to be,

and Data, ed. Evan Mawdsley, Nicholas Morgan, Lesley Richmond and Richard Trainor (Manchester, 1990), pp. 163–8. 62 Union and Empire, pp. 12–50. 63 Ibid., passim, but see pp. 201–39. See also (with Thomas Riis and Frederik Pedersen) Ships, Guns and Bibles in the North Sea and Baltic States, c. 1350–c. 1700 (East Linton, 2000). 64 Ibid., pp.137–71. 65 Ibid., pp. 183–9. See also ‘Circumventing State Power – Scottish Mercantile Networks and the English Navigation Laws, 1660–1707’, in Water and State in Europe and Asia, ed. Peter Borschberg and Martin Krieger (New Delhi, 2008), pp. 205–36; ‘Scottish Circumvention of the English Navigation Acts in the American Colonies, 1660–1707’, in Making, Using and Resisting the Law in European History, ed. Günther Lottes, Eero Meijainen and Jón Viðar Sigurðsson (Pisa, 2008), pp. 109–30. 66 Ibid., p. 199; Steven Pincus, ‘Round-Table: Union and Empire: the Making of the United Kingdom in 1707’, Britain and the World, 1 (2009), 269–72.

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neglected in the historiography.67 It is curious, indeed, that general histories of the United Kingdom have tended to be Anglocentric, while detailed studies of the Union have more often been conceived in specifically Scottish terms. For Macinnes, it was the ‘Scottish question’ pressing English politicians in the early eighteenth century that had led to political incorporation in 1707: the way in which Scotland represented a threat to English interests and possible solution to English problems, that is, and the way in which Ireland did not. The Union was primarily a result, therefore, of English politicians wanting it to happen, with English military and fiscal power wielded to persuade and coerce. It did certainly secure support from Scots who saw in it the potential to fulfil their economic vision, and it was significant that England preferred to negotiate rather than enforce union, but it was designed, above all, with England in mind: ‘from its conception to its delivery’ the Treaty ‘primarily served the interests of England’.68 Clearly, Macinnes’s assessment of the Union spoke to his own view of Scotland’s historic and present-day engagement with the wider world. He was unequivocal, indeed, about the implications of his argument in the context of debates regarding the future of the United Kingdom and its relationship with the European Union. Scotland then, as now, had options; what remained unclear, however, was whether fear would triumph over aspiration.69 While some will disagree with his political outlook, Macinnes’s wide-ranging work on early modern Scottish commercial activity and political economy has given us a far richer understanding of Scotland’s global connections before and after political incorporation. It may be some time, we feel, before the impressively holistic scope of his work is rivalled. IV

Bringing together colleagues and friends of Macinnes who have been inspired by his scholarship, the essays in this collection range widely across chronological, geographical and disciplinary boundaries, much like his work. They cohere around the three fundamental elements of his work discussed above. 67

Ibid., pp. 106–33, 172–200; ‘Union Failed, Union Accomplished: The Irish Union of 1703 and the Scottish Union of 1707’, in Acts of Union: The Causes, Contexts, and Consequences of the Act of Union of 1801, ed. Daire Keogh and Kevin Whelan (Dublin, 2001), pp. 67–94; ‘The Treaty of Union: Made in England’, in Scotland and the Union, 1707–2007, ed. T.M. Devine (Edinburgh, 2008), pp. 54–74; ‘Anglo-Scottish Union and the War of the Spanish Succession’, in The Primacy of Foreign Policy in British History, 1660–2000: How Strategic Concerns Shaped Modern Britain, ed. William Mulligan and Brendan Simms (Basingstoke, 2010), pp. 49–64. The neglect of the view from England is well captured by the late Jenny Wormald in ‘Round-Table: Union and Empire’, 277–82. 68 Ibid., p. 314. 69 ‘Union and Empire’, 284.

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Part I begins by reflecting on the complex interaction of peoples and cultures in early modern Britain and Ireland. Arthur Williamson returns to the protectorate of Edward Seymour, duke of Somerset, in order to reassess competing visions of Scotland’s future as a commonwealth during the ‘Edwardian moment’. We know, of course, that the Protestant British empire envisioned by the Protector did not come to pass, but, as Williamson reveals, the political thought of his close advisor, the Edinburgh merchant James Henrisoun, represented a remarkable intellectual leap in contemporary English and Scottish political cultures and bequeathed later generations with a ‘British’ political vocabulary that was redeployed as James VI acceded to the thrones of England and Ireland. Alison Cathcart returns to Macinnes’s early work on the Scoto-Manx connection in order to situate the Isle of Man in a broader, archipelagic discussion of James’s maritime empire. While she discusses lingering Scottish claims to the island she locates Man at the apex of James VI and I’s ‘empire of islands’. Doing so provides a more nuanced appreciation of James’s ability to formulate divergent policies for his various dominions and, as such, argues that centralisation did not necessarily mean uniformity. Ciaran Brady, meanwhile, undertakes a comparative study of the sixteenth-century Scottish and Irish nobility. By considering historiographical trends in early modern Scottish history that began with Macinnes’s Clanship – and, in particular, its emphasis on the adaptation of the Scottish nobility to the realities of seventeenth-century politics, which accorded with the experience of other western European nobilities – Brady provides a fresh assessment of the experiences of the Gaelic Irish aristocracy. In doing so, he demonstrates how conventional explanations for English policies of dispossession and plantation obscure the bigger picture: the ‘profound alteration’ in English attitudes toward the Irish elite that took place in the sixteenth century. The Irish nobility having been viewed as the principal means of establishing English rule on the island, they later came to be regarded as the principal threat to English hegemony. Part II takes as its focus the conflicts which shaped Scotland’s engagement with Britain and Europe in the seventeenth century. Steve Murdoch begins by uncovering Franco-Scottish military connections that call into question the supposed demise of the ‘auld alliance’ after 1560. The Union of the Crowns may have created a composite Britannic monarchy in 1603, but French political analysis could disaggregate the Scottish kingdom from the Stuart imperium. As a result, when Charles I failed to adequately support France during the Thirty Years’ War, Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu could turn to established Scottish contacts in spite of the House of Stuart, with Scots involved in every major French military engagement until the end of the war. The Covenanting movement was similarly provided with French financial and logistical support as well as the release of Scottish personnel from French service in the stand-off with Charles during the Bishops’ Wars of 1638–40. While the British civil wars had held out briefly the possibility of a closer Anglo-Scottish union, Tim Harris looks at varieties of Scotophobia that emerged 15

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in Restoration England as a result of the British revolutions. Macinnes and others have recognised that Scotophobia in England was far more complex than had previously been alleged, but Harris reveals how a variety of positive and negative stereotypes co-existed and were also blended together to form a ‘false composite’. Such stereotyping came to be bound up in religious and political allegiances and thus, for Harris, English views of Scotland and the Scots tell us much about English political identity. The Restoration period is also the focus of Neil McIntyre’s study of Presbyterian political thought. Taking as his starting point Macinnes’s contention that the Covenanting movement was in fact two movements – a movement of power from 1638, and a movement of protest from 1660 – McIntyre illuminates the process by which Covenanting ideology shifted from underwriting a revolutionary government to that of an atomised pressure group. By tracing both the theory and practice of a so-called ‘right of punitive force’ developed by dissenting Presbyterians to justify their upholding of the Covenants by arms in Scotland, Ireland and British North America, McIntyre reveals how Presbyterian political thought was reshaped to match the guerrilla tactics and popular support base of dissenting Presbyterianism after 1660. Finally in this section, Daniel Szechi makes the case for the hitherto unrecognised importance of Irish soldiers in the service of Charles Edward Stuart in the Jacobite rising of 1745–46. Historians have, at best, registered the existence of the Irish soldiers without commenting on their wider significance, but the vast majority have been content to ignore or dismiss them in their narrative accounts. By scrutinising the available evidence, however – including the largely untapped Stuart Papers at Windsor Castle – Szechi sheds new light on Charles and the ’45 that challenges the Whiggish determinism of much of the modern historiography. That the odds were stacked against Charles is undeniable, but was he always destined to fail? Part III comprehends Scottish roles in political unions, overseas empires and intellectual cultures – topics that have structured how Scotland is understood on the eve of modernity. Jean-François Dunyach brings together for the first time the disparate strands of Macinnes’s thinking on the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, reconstructing his vision of a ‘pragmatic Enlightenment’ and testing its veracity in a case study of the Playfair family of Angus. Sarah Barber’s case study of two eighteenth-century Ayrshire businessmen, Robert Hunter (b. 1666) and Robert Cunyngham (b. 1669), and their ventures on either side of the Atlantic, meanwhile, explores the liminal space occupied by Scots who participated in the British Empire, asking larger questions regarding the construction of empire by means of negotiation. The negotiation of empire was also central to debates on the 1754 Albany Plan, when attempts were made to place British North America under a more centralised government. Steven Pincus returns to the final pages of Union and Empire, and in particular Macinnes’s observation of the way in which Scottish thinking had linked the two concepts, in order to shed new light on a moment when politicians on either side of the Atlantic favoured an empire based on 16

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confederation. The Plan generated wider discussions on sovereignty and its diffusion, with Scottish blueprints for confederal union in 1705–7 and critical assessments of the subsequent Anglo-Scottish incorporating union pivotal in the surrounding debates. Pincus reveals, however, a trans-imperial partisan divide on the feasibility of confederation, with visions of confederal empire a notable feature of a transatlantic Patriot political programme. Had the Patriot coalition been in power in the 1760s, then perhaps their programme might have been adopted. The American Revolution was not inevitable, as Pincus sagely reminds us. While the domestic impact of Scottish imperial participation has long been recognised, far less consideration has been given to the way in which imperial engagement structured Scottish thinking on domestic social and political issues. Ewen Cameron concludes the volume, therefore, with an examination of three Scots with close connections to India – Francis, 10th Lord Napier (1819–98), Sir George Campbell (1824–92) and Douglas Campbell, eighth duke of Argyll (1823–1900) – that serves to highlight the diverse influence of India on the land question in nineteenth-century Scotland and Ireland. With so many Scots serving in the Indian administration – and with the nature of British imperial rule in India already at the forefront of many politicians’ minds after 1857 – parallels were frequently drawn by those discussing land legislation in Scotland and Ireland in the 1870s and 1880s. If Macinnes was concerned about an excess of introspection in Scottish studies, the essays presented here speak to his successful promotion of comparative history and the importance of understanding Scotland – and, indeed, other territorial units – in a much broader geographical frame. It is thanks, indeed, to Macinnes’s pioneering work that we have a much greater understanding of longer-term political and social changes in early modern Scotland as well as commercial, intellectual and military connections beyond Scotland’s borders. There is little doubt that his work will continue to inspire research on Scotland and its place in the wider world for many years to come.

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Part I Peoples and Cultures in Britain and Ireland

2 The Commonwealth Refounded: The British Vision in its Edwardian Moment, 1547–50 Arthur Williamson

I

n the autumn of 1547, Edward Seymour, duke of Somerset and Protector of England – also governor and uncle of England’s new child-king Edward VI – led English forces into Scotland. His purpose: to force the Scots to abide by the Treaties of Greenwich (1543). Through them the young Edward was betrothed to the new-born Scottish princess, Mary Stewart, and to which a small meeting of the Scottish estates had agreed – and yet from which the Scottish Parliament subsequently reneged in December 1543. The late king Henry had himself taken action on the matter, launching invasions in 1544 and 1545. But these had been secondary operations, no more than punitive expeditions subsidiary to his main concern: chivalric glory and a replay of England’s late medieval struggles in France. The events of 1547 differed in fundamental ways. For Somerset’s government instead focused entirely on Anglo-Scottish union and the creation of a new British order. We enter a different world articulated in a new tone even in Somerset’s opening proclamation, effectively its declaration of war. It at once stated as its purpose ‘the glorie of God, the honour and suretie of both the princess [princes] of England and Scotland and the weill and benefite of thair realmes and subjectis’. Not what one would expect from a war manifesto; and the proclamation went on to insist that their purpose would not prejudice either Scotland or England, and that the future would be determined with the advice of good men from both realms.1 Crucially, the Proclamation immediately went on to enlist Scots in a great common cause: the restoration of Christianity. Thereby, ‘they sall weill find 1

‘A proclamatioun maid be the Protector of England the tyme of the field of Pinkie’, in The Warrender Papers, ed. Annie I. Cameron, Scottish History Society, 3rd series, 18 & 19 (2 vols, Edinburgh, 1931–2), I, p. 17. This mindset contrasts starkly with the attitude of the 1544 invasion: brutal, terrorist and seeking ‘vengeaunce of their detestable falshed [oath-breaking falsity]’. Described in The late expedicion in Scotlande … (London, 1544), sig. B1r.

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both the glorie of God and his worde advanced, the bishop of Romes usurped jurisdictioun abolischeit, the honour of baith the realms preserved and the subjectis of the same weill satisfied and contented’. A shared new era became imagined, one of equality, justice and righteousness. It can hardly surprise us that Somerset attracted a significant number of Scottish supporters. For some time now, scholars have recognised the origins of British political vocabularies in the language growing out of what has come to be known in England as the Edwardian Moment.2 And yet these developments have not been perceived as a unified and integrated undertaking that embraced AngloScottish relations no less than the domestic reformation of church and society in the southern kingdom. Both aspects, it now begins to seem, sought to reclaim a single, coherent past, an idealised – if largely fanciful – British age. The Somerset years witnessed extensive efforts at social reform that accompanied the reform of the church and grew immediately out of evangelistic spirituality. Yet, those reforming efforts proved integral to, and were framed by, the creation of Britain. Thus, the language promoting the Protector’s British project in the summer of 1547 proceeded directly into that used in response to Robert Kett’s rising in the summer of 1549, and to an extent that can only strike us as arresting. We encounter common phrasing and a similar vision in James Henrisoun’s Exhortacion to the Scottes at the outset of the Scottish invasion and the Protector’s letters to the Norfolk rebels two years later.3 In 1549, these lines of thought provided a shared discourse for both the government and the rebels. That confrontation proved extraordinarily fraught and revealed the enormous potential for public policy formation within the spiritualised commonwealth, while at the same time exposing its severe limitations. The Protector could actually ask the armed commons that they ‘quitelie deuise suche meanes and ways as maye best avaunce the redresse of yor griefs’. He could even ask that they send ‘vpp suche names as be required by them’ to serve on boards reviewing enclosures.4 Yet, in the same letters, he also appealed reflexively to the traditional notions of natural hierarchy in the body politic and the assumptions of social inequality deriving from the order of nature, 2

Arthur H. Williamson, Scottish National Consciousness in the Age of James VI (Edinburgh, 1979), pp. 11–13; Roger A. Mason, ‘The Scottish Reformation and the Origins of AngloBritish Imperialism’, in Scots and Britons: Scottish Political Thought and the Union of 1603, ed. Roger A. Mason (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 161–86, at pp. 171 ff.; Marcus Merriman, The Rough Wooings of Mary Queen of Scots, 1542–1551 (East Linton, 2000), pp. 13–14, 289–91; Gervase Phillips, The Anglo-Scots Wars, 1513–1550: A Military History (Woodbridge, 1999), p. 179. 3 Cf. Henrisoun, An Exhortacion to the Scottes (London, 1547), reprinted in The Complaynt of Scotland, ed. J.A.H. Murray, Early English Text Society (London, 1872), pp. 208–36 (Appendix II), at p. 210, and the Protector’s letters to the rebels in 1549 (nos 1, 5 and 6) in Ethan Shagan, ‘Protector Somerset and the 1549 Rebellions: New Sources and New Perspectives’, EHR, 114 (1999), 34–63, at 54, 59, 60. 4 Shagan, ‘Somerset’, 58, 60.

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the Great Chain of Being. They ‘being the foote’ must ‘in all things obey the heade’. It was not, he declared, ‘mete that the foote wch hath no direccon … wthout the heade’ undertake decisions of governance. They and everyone else could only abhor this ‘vnnaturall order of life’.5 The Protector’s own views have been the subject of considerable scholarly debate, most notably involving Michael Bush and Ethan Shagan.6 It may be that Somerset’s quest for ‘popularity’ and the remarkable civic politics evinced in his letters resulted from the exigencies of the moment, and perhaps more generally his political vulnerability as protector-governor of a child king. Further, his thinking may well have shifted at various points, causing him to emphasise different elements within the reforming and commonwealth programme. Yet, as Shagan observes, radicalism grew immediately out of the vocabulary of the reforming elite and, still more, from a broader vision for transforming society.7 Tradition co-existed uncomfortably with reform, and, most immediately, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Protector’s outlook and that of many of his associates was genuinely conflicted. If the conflict proved real enough, the idealism should at no point be discounted or dismissed. A severe fault line, then, ran through reformist thought in the Edwardian world, embracing a near-egalitarianism that could never fully detach itself from instinctive traditionalism and hierarchy. That fissure extended further to the British project and actually comprises a continuation of the same ongoing tension. Somerset could likewise never completely abandon the notion that the English crown was superior to that of Scotland, and that the Scottish realm had always been England’s vassal and dependency. Yet, unlike King Henry and his predecessors, the Protector was, at moments, prepared to imagine relative equality in Protestant solidarity, manifested through British identity. I

It is hard to appreciate today what an enormous leap the latter involved, running counter to a commonplace through centuries of English political culture. From John Fortescue and the English legal tradition to poets like John Skelton – all firmly anchored in the hoary mythologies of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britannie (c. 1138) – English superiority proved reflexive rather argumentative, as natural as the air Englishmen breathed. All Englishmen knew the tale 5

Ibid., 56, 63. Ethan Shagan, ‘“Popularity” and the 1549 Rebellions Revisited’, EHR, 115 (2000), 121–33; M.L. Bush, ‘Somerset and the 1549 Rebellions: a Post-Revision Questioned’, EHR, 115 (2000), 103–112; Ethan Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2003), esp. ch. 8. 7 Shagan, ‘Somerset’, 78, n.1; idem, ‘Popularity’, 123. See also Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (London, 1999), pp. 79, 87, 99; idem, Thomas Cranmer: a Life (New Haven, 1996), p. 427. 6

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of the Trojan refugee, Brutus, the eponymous founder of Britain, whose eldest son ruled the lands that became England, holding superiority over his younger brothers in Scotland and Wales.8 The grip of this tradition loosened with the Protector, just as tradition generally relaxed somewhat during his rule. We might see what emerged as a kind of double consciousness that informed the government’s approach both to a reformed society as well as to the prospective British order that framed it. The term ‘double think’ might almost be warranted, with Stephen Alford describing William Cecil’s attitude towards Scotland as ‘rather schizophrenic’ and even ‘Orwellian’.9 Cecil was one of a number of individuals within an Anglo-Scottish, Anglo-Irish and Anglo-Welsh – we might almost say new British – community closely associated with the Protector’s regime. Modern studies focused narrowly on England during this period will make these figures appear more Anglocentric than they actually were, and render the war in Scotland merely a dangerous, and ultimately disastrous, distraction. Narrow focus on Scotland or Ireland, meanwhile, will lead to a distorting preoccupation with ‘the English imperial mind’, ‘Anglo-British imperialism’ and victimisation.10 Britain was the Edwardian focus, and at least initially it should be ours as well. Ranged against these deep-seated English assumptions, and, seemingly, against any form of Britain, had arisen a Scottish narrative with mythologies very nearly as long lived as the southern commonplaces. Scotland’s counter-myth of Gathylos of Athens confronted Geoffrey’s mythic Brutus of Troy. The counter-myth accompanied an extensive and growing literature, most notably John Barbour’s Bruce (c. 1375) and Blind Hary’s Wallace (c. 1476–78) – the last narrating William Wallace’s struggle against Edward I and ‘our ald ennemys cummyn of Saxonys blud’.11 Yet, far and away the 8

De laudibus (XIII), ed. and trans. S.B. Chrimes (Cambridge, 1949), pp. 32–3. See Arthur H. Williamson, ‘Patterns of British Identity: “Britain” and Its Rivals in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in The New British History: Founding a Modern State, 1603–1715, ed. Glenn Burgess (London, 1999), pp. 138–73, at p. 153; John Skelton (c. 1463–1529), ‘A Ballade of the Scottysshe Kynge’ (l. 4) and ‘Agaynst the Scottes’ (ll. 122–3), in The Complete English Poems, ed. John Scattergood (New Haven, 1983), pp. 113, 118. See also ‘Howe the Douty Duke of Albany’, in Complete English Poems, ed. Scattergood, pp. 362, 363, 365, 368. Geoffrey’s tale is well known today. See Roger A. Mason, ‘Scotching the Brut: Politics, History and National Myth in Sixteenth-Century Britain’, in Scotland and England, 1286–1815, ed. Roger A. Mason (Edinburgh, 1987), pp. 60–84, esp. pp. 61–3. 9 Stephen Alford, The Early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil and the British Succession Crisis, 1558–1569 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 8, 45, and more generally ch. 2; Stephen Alford, ‘Knox, Cecil, and the British Dimension of the Scottish Reformation’, in John Knox and the British Reformations, ed. Roger A. Mason (Aldershot, 1998), pp. 201–19, at p. 205. 10 Jennifer Loach, Edward VI (New Haven, CT, 1999), p. 40. Cf. M.L. Bush, The Government Policy of Protector Somerset (Montreal, 1975), pp. 7, 63, 65–6 and passim. Bush dismisses the Protectorate literature as ‘self-righteous propaganda’ (p. 22), which simply will not do. See Mason, ‘Scotching the Brut’, pp. 74, 76, and idem, ‘Scottish Reformation’, pp. 161–86, at p. 176 and passim. 11 Barbour’s Bruce appeared frequently in print and Blind Hary’s Wallace may well have appeared in more editions than any other writing printed in Scotland before 1700. See

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most authoritative statement of Scotland’s autonomy and dignity was Hector Boece’s Scotorum historiae a prima gentis origine libri xvii (1527). Boece, principal of the new College of Aberdeen and sometime colleague of Erasmus, offered a humanist rendering of the Scottish experience that included additional and seemingly compelling information about Scotland’s early (and quite fabulous) history. Translated into Scots, English, French and Italian, with the Latin text reprinted on the Continent, the Scotorum Historia commanded a continental audience and would be cited by writers ranging from Olaus Magnus to Jean Bodin to Huguenot controversialists.12 II

The Protector’s Britain, then, faced a formidable challenge, both in the form of the ethnic–racial division developed in the Wallace and from the counter-mythology that had achieved European stature through the Scotorum Historia. At the same time, reflexive claims of English overlordship needed to be disarmed, if not altogether dispatched. Both were met with the remarkable An Exhortacion to the Scottes, written by the Edinburgh merchant James Henrisoun, a close advisor to Somerset and a passionate advocate of Britain and reformation.13 Written during the summer of 1547 and distributed in September by the invading forces, Henrisoun’s pamphlet made quick work of all origin myths. Every nation wrapped itself in a preposterous story; none had a certain origin. The tales about both Brutus and Gathelos were absurd: there existed no need ‘to deduce Roger A. Mason, Kingship and the Commonweal: Political Thought in Renaissance and Reformation Scotland (East Linton, 1998), p. 99, n. 71. The Wallace saw five editions between 1600 and 1639, and another three between 1639 and 1649. See Laura A.M. Stewart, Rethinking the Scottish Revolution: Covenanted Scotland, 1637–1651 (Oxford, 2016), p. 149. 12 Jean Bodin, The Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, ed. and trans. Beatrice Reynolds (New York, 1945), p. 377. Dauvit Broun is surely right when he comments that in some ways ‘the narrative of an ancient and independent Scottish nation only took off during the Renaissance after it was refashioned and elaborated by Hector Boece’. See Dauvit Broun, Scottish Independence and the Idea of Britain (Edinburgh, 2007), p. 279. See also U. Moret, ‘Gaelic History and Culture in Medieval and Sixteenth-Century Lowland Scottish Historiography’ (Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Aberdeen, 1993), p. 58; Anon., Discours politiques …, in Memoires de l’estat de France sous Charles IX, ed. Simon Goulart (3 vols, Middleburg [Geneva], 1578), III, pp. 294a–b; Nicola Royan, ‘Boece, Hector (c. 1465–1536)’, ODNB. Cf. H.R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts (Oxford, 1996), p. 41. See also Brigitte Moreau (ed.), Inventaire chronologique des éditions Parisiennes de XVI siècle, d’apres les manuscrits de Philippe Renouard; III: 1521–1530 (Abbeville, 1985), pp. 119, 325, 371, 553. 13 Marcus Merriman, ‘Henrisoun, James (d. before 1570)’, ODNB; idem, ‘James Henrisoun and “Great Britain”: British Union and the Scottish Commonweal’, in Scotland and England, ed. Mason, pp. 85–112; Merriman, Rough Wooings, esp. pp. 269–73, 281–7. The name appears variously as Harrysone, Harrison, Henrysone, Henderson, Herrisone, and in still other variants. ‘Henrisoun’ is the convention established in recent scholarship.

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a pedigree … as Welshe & Scottishe Poetes haue phatastically fayned’. The Britons have always lived in Britain, quite probably since the flood. ‘What can bee more auncient, more noble, more high, then to haue a beginning beyond all memory.’ Ignoring Virgil, Henrisoun noted that the Romans took pride in ‘callying themselfes Aborigines, that is to saie, a people from the beginnyng’.14 Britons had originally inhabited the island, and, he added daringly, they still do. For Scots (and Englishmen) ‘are a people mixt with Britaynes & come of Britaynes’. ‘No countrey can bee so inuaded by straungers yt the whole race of the olde inhabiters can bee worne all out, but that the substaunce or more parte shall still remain.’ ‘And thoughe we haue been mixed with foreyn nacions, whereby the Britayne tongue is changed & out of vse, yet doth bloud and generacion remain …’. Naturally, he did not mean to suggest that ‘the Scottes be mere Britaynes, or Englishe men mere Britaynes, but that the more parte of bothe people bee discended of Britaynes’.15 Scots and Englishmen did differ from one another, but still shared a common origin and found themselves rooted in the same ethnic identity. So much for the Wallace! Henrisoun then proceeded to dismantle Boece’s basic claims, exploding the absurdities of his narrative with ribald hilarity.16 Gorgeous Latin, dreadful history. It would all be laughable if only these ‘fayned fables and lies’ had not wrought such political havoc.17 Where did all of this misbegotten fantasy (and the false ethnic preoccupations they undergirded) actually arise? Henrisoun had no doubt: from the ‘Monkes and Fryers’ and the clergy generally who maintained their power through falsehood and division, all integrated into perverted religion. Henrisoun, like Somerset and his associates, believed he lived in the ‘latter daies’ of human history and understood the current moment within what had become the Reformation master-narrative. All of this falsehood had appeared ‘after sathan was let lose’; that is, with the rise of the papacy and the creation of the medieval world. According to the Protestant reading of Revelation, Satan had been bound by the coming of Christianity, and after a millennium would be freed to reign once more – something he would do through his agent, the empowered Roman Church, the prophesied Antichrist. Now the great struggle for reform, truth and human destiny was occurring in what would prove history’s final era. Like every one of the Edwardians, Henrisoun was emphatic: ‘not only Gods woorde, but all other knowledge hath been obscured’ in the period of papal darkness.18 Again like his associates, Henrisoun anticipated wide-ranging social reform and intellectual triumph in the age of the restored faith. Although he does not 14 Henrisoun,

Exhortacion, pp. 213–14. Ibid., p. 216. 16 Ibid., pp. 224, 215, 219. 17 Ibid., pp. 213, 215, 222–4. 18 Ibid., pp. 212, 220–1. For most Protestants, the ‘loosing of Satan’ had occurred about the year 1000, the time that saw the rise of the Hildebrandine popes and the consolidation of the medieval order. 15

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develop the idea, he clearly also believed, along with his fellow Edwardians, that the restored Britain would prove integral to this emerging, enlightened world. Yet, Henrisoun faced a dilemma. A restored Britain required there to have been a coherent British monarchy at one time in the past. No doubt that Britain had fractured at some point, and the resulting divisions had enabled the subsequent invasions, starting with Caesar’s. But a primordial island populated only with disorganised (and potentially barbarous) British tribes manifestly would not do.19 Therefore, at various places, Henrisoun repeatedly endorsed Geoffrey’s Anglo-Welsh tale of Brutus, even if now shorn of its Virgilian travelogue. Yet, despite the multiple endorsements, Henrisoun was not visibly confident of its truth, nor, surely, comfortable with its political implications of English primacy. ‘Let vs se’, he went on, ‘whether we cannot vnite these people by another waie.’ If Brutus might seem dubious, the Roman emperor Constantine the Great (d. 337) was an unassailably historical figure. If he ruled Britain (and in time much else), then there did indeed exist a prior all-embracing structure: ‘then was Scotland and England but one Empire’. No less crucial, Constantine wore ‘a close crown Emperiall, in token that the lande is an empire free in it self, & subiect to no superior but GOD’.20 A free-standing British state, historically committed to reform and authentic Christianity, drawn together under Constantine’s red-crossed banner and embracing what was broadly a single people – here lay the promise of the past and the mission for the future. Later Scottish and Saxon invasions could only seem marginal, and accordingly Henrisoun looked to a time ‘when those hatefull termes of Scottes & Englishemen shalbe abolished and blotted out for euer’.21 None of this prevented Henrisoun from continually protesting, with palpable sincerity, his ‘earnest zeale and vnfained affeccion towardes my countrey’. He was not so ‘vnnatural’ as to feel otherwise.22 Precisely this ‘loue to my countrey’ had caused him to embrace the prospect of the new British age, which promised far-reaching reform, in addition to ‘makyng equalitie without superioritie’. In 1547, Henrisoun had already made clear that he was centrally concerned to create an environment in which ‘the people & common weale florish & prospere’.23 He emerges, then, not as an odd or idiosyncratic Scot opting for the Protector’s Anglo-Britain, but as a figure identifiably located well within the Edwardian reform movement and as a passionate activist for the British reformation.

19

Ibid., p. 231. Cf. Mason, ‘Scotching the Brut’, pp. 69, 70. Ibid., p. 218. 21 Ibid., p. 230. 22 Ibid., pp. 209, 211, 223. 23 Ibid., pp. 227, 230, 234, 235. 20

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III

We encounter the wider reforming theme in the following February with the Protector’s famous An Epistle or exhortacion, to vnitie and peace … (London, 1548).24 The Epistle presented more than an eloquent plea for union. No less was it a plea for reform – but not only religious reform. Although little noticed today, the Epistle also urged social reform, specifically law reform and economic development. The British design reached its fullest articulation five months later in July, with James Henrisoun’s remarkable ‘The godlie and golden book for concorde of England and Scotland’. Drafted to go out under the Protector’s name, and building on the brief comments in Somerset’s Epistle of February, Henrisoun set forth a far-reaching programme for restructuring Scottish society within ‘great brittan’, i.e., the new British commonwealth – the merely geographical ‘this Ile of bryttan’ being scored out and replaced. Religious reform inevitably lay at the core of Britain and the new Scotland Henrisoun hoped to create. The ‘primitive church … of Cryste’ would find its restoration ‘by avise’ through a commission composed of ‘certane of the most godly & prudente men of both realmes’. This British commission manifestly would not be composed simply of churchmen, and a distinctly anti-clerical edge suffuses ‘The Godly and Golden Book’. Henrisoun then moves immediately, almost seamlessly, from church reform to law reform. The same commission of ‘the said prudentes’ would then proceed to reform the laws and customs of both realms ‘as was the cyvill law in [the] tyme of Justinian’. Consistent with Somerset’s promise, this systematisation of the law would be done ‘as shalbe neydfull for every parte’; that is, the commission would neither supplant Scots law with the laws of England nor, apparently, create a single system of British law. Unsurprisingly, the new law codes would see print in the vernacular. Henrisoun’s reform of the laws articulated a Scottish legal project that would continue for more than a century, which included repeated efforts to secure printed law codifications, the works of such jurists as John Skene (c. 1543–1617) and Thomas Craig (1538–1608), the various law ‘practicks’ and, eventually, Viscount Stair’s Institutions of the Law of Scotland (1681).25 We need to see Henrisoun here as a British phenomenon, for no less did English Edwardians seek a Justinian to reform their laws, if ultimately with less success. Revealingly, though, the commission would not only authorise the new name of ‘our Empire’, but also common arms, the cross of Christ, ‘as gaue our first christen king in [the] expulsion of [the] Romans’. Neither the kind of cross nor the first Christian king is specified. Constantine goes altogether 24 Reprinted

in Complaynt, ed. Murray, pp. 237–46. Merriman has reminded us that Seymour’s project ‘came very near to success’. See Rough Wooings, p. 247. 25 Henrisoun, ‘Godlie and Golden Book’, TNA, SP 50/4/130–1, 133 (Sections 1, 2, 9). See also Williamson, Scottish National Consciousness, ch. 3, and J.D. Ford, ‘Dalrymple, James, first Viscount Stair (1619–95)’, ODNB.

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unmentioned; no red cross identifies the new era. The new anti-Romanism is striking. Throughout, the text adopts much more of a Scottish orientation than did Henrisoun’s Exhortacion the previous summer. The work of the ‘prudentes’ extended to the administration of justice. Henrisoun would split the Court of Session, Scotland’s recently formalised central court, and base one part at Aberdeen to serve Scotland north of the Forth while the other remained at Edinburgh to serve the south.26 The purpose was to make justice available to all, a matter taken with the greatest seriousness. At the same time, Henrisoun intended to abolish the church courts and ‘the endless abhominable consitore [consistory] lawes’. Local matters should be pleaded ‘at home befor there [their] barons & parsons’, serious matters such as treason, heresy and divorce should go to the newly accessible central courts. Access to justice now became available for ‘the poor wifes husbonde’ who might otherwise have been drawn into a ‘deadlie food [feud]’ or the poor herdsman victimised by theft. Henrisoun’s concern here proved remarkably thoroughgoing, for – incredibly – the Protector’s government would set things to right, if need be, ‘forth of our coffers’.27 This preoccupation with poverty and the vulnerability of the poor extended in still other directions. Henrisoun was much exercised about ‘the poor labourers of the grounde’. Their ‘common welth is mischeffe’ and their ‘libertie mor servitude than was the children of Israell in Egipt’. The remedy was long leases set at current rates and tithes secured at reasonable charge. Farming people could then plan for the future – ‘plante and maike policie’ – living ‘like substanciall commons & not as miserable cottards’. They could not be forced into local feuds, nor coerced into paying ‘blakk malles’ and ‘suche other extortions’. Further regulations would control ‘ingrossers’ of grain and cattle, mainly churchmen, who bought and hoarded foodstuffs in times of shortage.28 Henrisoun was not the first to seek long-term land tenures. No less than the prominent Scottish scholastic John Mair had urged them.29 But Henrisoun located these reforms within sweeping parish and diocesan reorganisation. Each bishop would maintain ‘a fre scole in the head town of his diocys’. Young people would no longer need to seek education abroad (and Scotland’s universities would be upgraded). Clerical non-residency would no longer be tolerated.30 26

See R.K. Hannay, The College of Justice (Edinburgh, 1933); A.M. Godfrey, Civil Justice in Renaissance Scotland: The Origins of a Central Court (Leiden, 2009). 27 Henrisoun, ‘Godlie and Golden Book’, TNA, SP 50/4/133 (Section 9). 28 Henrisoun, ‘Godlie and Golden Book’, TNA, SP 50/4/132–3 (Sections 8 and 10). Cf. Merriman, ‘James Henrisoun and Great Britain’, 98. 29 See John Mair [Major], Quartus sententiarum Johannis Majoris – Mair’s commentary on the fourth book of Peter Lombard, Sentences (Paris, 1512), fols 85–6 – discussed and translated by J.H. Burns in ‘The Scotland of John Major’, Innes Review, 2 (1951), 65–76, at 65–7. See also John Mair [Major], The History of Greater Britain, as well England and Scotland, ed. and trans. A. Constable, Scottish History Society, 1st series, 10 (Edinburgh, 1892), pp. 30–1. 30 Henrisoun, ‘Godlie and Golden Book’, TNA, SP 50/4/134 (Section 11).

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Church wealth would fund ‘honeste Hyers’ in the parishes. Exiled ‘connyng men’, whether clerical or otherwise, would return to assist these ‘honeste Hyers’ (figures surely quite like Henrisoun himself). Almshouses and hospitals, pulled down by ‘evill churchemen’ for their own ‘lukr & profittes’, would be restored. In this way, ‘old failed persons’ and ‘thos that be lamed’ as well as the young would find support. The bishops themselves would supply suffragans until ‘suche tyme [as] they be better devyns’.31 IV

Henrisoun’s reordering of church, law and community within the emerging British commonwealth (presumably his ‘prudentes’ would achieve comparable arrangements in England) formed the core of something still more far reaching: the vast demilitarisation of Scottish society and, concomitantly, what we can only call its proto-industrialisation. The legislator Romulus would prove no empty trope. At the elite level, Henrisoun sought to supplant ‘the blody liage with Fraunce’ with England’s Order of the Garter. The Scots’ military alliance with the French – the Auld Alliance putatively reaching back to the days of Charlemagne32 – would be replaced with an aristocratic honour that bore no particular military significance at all. The latter promised to be truly ‘vtile & profitabile’, linking the upper aristocracy with Edward’s spouse, Queen Mary. The Order encouraged intermarriage, which was only appropriate because the people of Britain were ‘descended … of one nature’ in addition to sharing the same tongue and being ‘bredd in one Ile compassed with the see’. So too it would only be appropriate – indeed, essential – for these Scots to serve on what would become a British Privy Council.33 The great lords would become involved in reforming and stabilising society rather than serving a genuinely foreign power. Reaching more deeply into the aristocracy, Henrisoun’s Somerset would offer leading figures ‘more honourabll pensions then they haue had for maynteyyngyng mischeffe’, and certainly better than any a foreign prince might award. Crucially, the government would forgive ‘offenses laitlie commytted’ upon their ‘assystynge vnto our godly precence [presence]’. Moreover, Henrisoun intended to reconfigure the ‘realme among them in equal portions for better governaunce’. This would somehow be done in such a way as not to prejudice the authority of James Hamilton, second earl of Arran, and Scotland’s ‘governor’ during Mary’s

31

Henrisoun, ‘Godlie and Golden Book’, TNA, SP 50/4/134 (Sections 11 and 12). See Chapter 5 in this volume. 33 Henrisoun, ‘Godlie and Golden Book’, TNA, SP 50/4/131 (Section 4). Henrisoun reaffirms his argument of the previous year that both Scots and Englishmen were descended from the ancient Britons. 32

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minority.34 Thereby, both nationally and locally, Scottish elites would find themselves integrated into (more rationalised) governance in the new era. Henrisoun then turned to the ‘mean barrons & ther younger brethren’ – one of the more problematic elements within Scottish society. Naturally, Henrisoun looked to those who participated in the Parliament that had ‘promyst vnion of the people in one indifferent naime of brittons’, and also to those who, as a result of their actions, had received nothing from the French alliance or the reactionary church hierarchy. Rallying them to the British cause would surely prove a powerful move, but Henrisoun visibly needed to reach further. The prospective Britain required more than simply a Protestant party (though, perhaps presciently, such ‘mean barons’ did turn up in unprecedented numbers to participate in the Reformation Parliament of 1560). Consequently, Henrisoun undertook on behalf of the Protector to provide ‘some augmentation’ of their livings and also to provide for the younger brothers ‘now broken in fraunce’. The latter would secure places at court or, remarkably, receive offices and benefices ‘after there [their] habilities’. Further, younger sons needed legal protections and remedies if their parents should die without setting aside sufficient goods ‘to kepe them from vyce’. Laws for that purpose should be instituted ‘as use is in other countries’. But Henrisoun was emphatic, arguing that such provision could come to pass only ‘gif it shuld not offend your [Scotland’s] iii estates’.35 England would not – could not – legislate for Scotland. The result again would prove demilitarising, with the lesser gentry integrated into the fabric of society and ‘broken men’ eliminated. Further still, Henrisoun undertook nothing less than the end of endemic feuding in the Borders. There would be recompense and assythement for the ‘assured’ (who formally committed to the new Britain) and who had suffered loss through feuding. In language reminiscent of the late twentieth century, Henrisoun declared on behalf of the Protector and the government that ‘we seak no landes, but the hartes of men’. To that end, the government would destroy all their fortresses except those on the sea coast needed ‘for resisting of forand countrees’.36 The world of the towerhouse and the citadel, whether English or Scottish, would become a thing of the past. At every level, from securing peasant tenures to abrogating the Auld Alliance, ‘The Godlie and Golden Book’ reconfigured Scottish society in fundamental ways that at once promoted the British commonwealth and demilitarised its structure. Yet, here lay only half the story. Scotland demilitarised would also be Scotland industrialised. The Protector intended to sponsor a vast development programme for Scotland which would propagate ‘virtu & riches’ throughout the 34

Henrisoun, ‘Godlie and Golden Book’, TNA, SP 50/4/131 (Section 5). Henrisoun, ‘Godlie and Golden Book’, TNA, SP 50/4/132 (Section 6). ‘Some portion’ would be provided to younger children from their ‘frindes lands’ – the lands of kindred and political allies – for their lifetime, to revert thereafter. 36 Henrisoun, ‘Godlie and Golden Book’, TNA, SP 50/4/132 (Section 7). 35

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realm. That enormous English investment, Henrisoun insisted, resulted from the ‘prudence for the common wealth of the hole Ile’.37 The Protector’s government would pay one hundred craftsmen ‘of all sortes’ for three years to upgrade Scottish industries: to teach Scots how to finish wool, skins and hides before export, and how to be ‘Myners, cutters of mosses … makers of iron mylls, saw mylls & others; collyerdes; dighters of wull, websters, wallers, tappishers; makers of worsates & serges; workers in the stole; diers of skynnes & hides; as bowers, fletchers, & such other.’ These measures would not only provide employment for ‘Idell people’ – that central Edwardian concern. They would also draw home rich Scottish merchants and craftsmen who now resided abroad and thereby repopulate Scotland’s burghs with their ablest people – again building on Edwardian concerns.38 But Henrisoun was only just beginning. Not only would there be new mines of gold, copper, iron, lead and other minerals. As these mines would apparently be located in western Scotland (Henrisoun probably had the leadhills of Lanarkshire in mind), so he envisioned constructing a massive canal that would ‘draw the Weste and Easte sees together’. At the same time, the English government would sponsor one hundred fishing ships, fully equipped, along with one hundred expert fishermen, to train Scots to exploit the ‘ryche fyshenges that [now] straungers gettes the holl profittes of’. The new fishing industry would find further support through the construction of strategic harbours.39 Within these restructured burghs, merchants and craftsmen would participate as citizens, holding office and deliberating about policy and the distribution of ‘the common goodes like in other more cyvill realmes’.40 Thus, a new social order accompanied the economic reconstruction. Henrisoun clearly looked to a transformation of Scotland’s economic foundations no less vast than the transformation of faith that was integral to it. They would do no less than what Romulus had done at the founding of Rome.

37

Henrisoun, ‘Godlie and Golden Book’, TNA, SP 50/4/135–6 (Sections 15 and 16). Henrisoun, ‘Godlie and Golden Book’, TNA, SP 50/4/135 (Section 15). See Richard Morison, A Remedy for Sedition … (London, 1536), sig. E4r: ‘Townes wold vp ageyne yf craftes were set vp’. This is discussed briefly in Merriman, ‘James Henrisoun and Great Britain’, p. 98. 39 Henrisoun, ‘Godlie and Golden Book’, TNA, SP 50/4/134, 136 (Sections 13, 16). Cf. Merriman, ‘James Henrisoun and Great Britain’, p. 98; Merriman, Rough Wooings, pp. 283–5; Merriman, ‘Henrisoun’, ODNB. See also Arthur H. Williamson, ‘Union with England Traditional, Union with England Radical: Sir James Hope and the Mid 17th-Century British State’, EHR, 110 (1995), 303–22, and idem, ‘Scotland, Antichrist and the Invention of Great Britain’, in New Perspectives on the Politics and Culture of Early Modern Scotland, ed. John Dwyer, Roger A. Mason and Alexander Murdoch (Edinburgh, 1982), pp. 34–58, at p. 45. 40 Henrisoun, ‘Godlie and Golden Book’, TNA, SP 50/4/134 (Section 14). 38

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THE COMMONWEALTH REFOUNDED 

V

Henrisoun claimed that the Protector had reviewed and corrected ‘The Godlie and Golden Book’. In a cover note to his ‘moist speciall freindis’ William Cecil and Sir John Thynne, he sought approval to have ‘the littil booke’ printed under whatever title and with such further corrections as Seymour thought fit. Yet, as Henrisoun came to realise, the regime proved far too vulnerable to undertake a project of this scope, the council itself included ‘our disfavouris’ and was divided about Scotland, while collapse lay visibly just over the horizon.41 However, the French triumph in 1550 stimulated an alternate radicalism, rooted in Hector Boece and Desiderius Erasmus and finding its fullest expression in George Buchanan and his De jure regni apud Scotos dialigus (1567). The new radicalism envisioned even more remarkable levels of participation and the beginnings of a genuinely republican politics. Radicalism, then, spoke in more than one voice. James Henrisoun and George Buchanan would rebuild Scotland, but not from the same materials. For Buchanan, military virtue remained central to civic capacity; the chivalric was reworked into civic forms rather than simply obliterated. As in antiquity, commerce remained an object of scorn, the source of ‘luxury’ and corruption.42 We have travelled very far indeed from the demilitarised and industrialised society Henrisoun imagined. By the 1560s, these two forms of radicalism had taken shape and found themselves in competition with one another, each having a long life ahead – and perhaps even anticipating the face-off between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson in the 1790s.

41

The dimming hopes were palpable, with Henrisoun adding: ‘I am in dispair of ony amyte or freindschip, thocht the mater [be] nevir so pythely perswadit, or so lyvely opynnit.’ He went on to request leave to depart for the Empire (surely the Low Countries), where he would spend a year repairing his fortunes. 42 See Paul J. McGinnis and Arthur H. Williamson (eds), George Buchanan: The Political Poetry, Scottish History Society, 5th series, 8 (Edinburgh, 2000), Introduction; Paul J. McGinnis and Arthur H. Williamson (eds), The British Union: A Critical Edition and Translation of David Hume of Godscroft’s De Unione Insulae Britannicae (Aldershot, 2002), pp. 1–9; Roger A. Mason and Martin S. Smith (eds), A Dialogue on the Law of Kingship among the Scots: A Critical Edition and Translation of George Buchanan’s De Iure Regni apud Scotos Dialogus (Aldershot, 2004), Introduction.

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3 Island Empire: James VI and I and the Isle of Man in an Archipelagic Context Alison Cathcart

I

n one of his earliest publications, Allan Macinnes set out to ‘redress’ the imbalance in historiography that, he argued, had reduced analysis of Scotland’s relations with the Isle of Man to ‘no more than brief asides in the general histories of Scotland’.1 The discussion began with the twelfth-century Kingdom of Man and the Isles and placed the Isle of Man within the wider context of Anglo-Scottish relations through to 1609–10, when James VI and I confirmed the Lordship of Man on William Stanley, sixth earl of Derby, after a long succession dispute. In a sense, this early article pointed to the approach that would be taken throughout his career: a Scottish focus, albeit within wider contexts, and an ongoing engagement with historiographical developments within the New British and Irish History, in particular the three-kingdoms approach to the civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century, the Willliamite revolution, and the emergence of Jacobitism in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.2 Although his familiar stomping ground was the era of the civil wars through to Jacobite rebellions, Macinnes did discuss the concept of imperial monarchy articulated by James VI and I, which rejected any claims of the papacy to have spiritual jurisdiction within the three kingdoms and instead asserted that he, James, as king, was the ultimate source of both spiritual and temporal authority.3 Macinnes also engaged with the trend for studies of state formation within early modern history, repeatedly emphasising the lack of uniformity in 1

Allan I. Macinnes, ‘Scotland and the Manx Connection: Relationships of Intermittent Violence, 1266–1603’, Proceedings of the Isle of Man Natural History and Antiquarian Society, 8 (1982), 362–77, at 362. 2 Allan I. Macinnes, Charles I and the Making of the Covenanting Movement, 1625–41 (Edinburgh, 1991); idem, Clanship, Commerce and the House of Stuart, 1603–1788 (East Linton, 1996). A full list of publications can be found at 203–9 below. 3 Allan I. Macinnes, The British Revolution, 1629–1660 (Basingstoke, 2005), pp. 19–24; Allan

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the policies of James VI, who needed neither any ‘blanket policy’ for Gaeldom nor a one-size-fits-all approach to the establishment of colonies across the Atlantic.4 But to suggest, as Macinnes has, that James did not attempt to impose uniformity across his three kingdoms is, however, only a partial understanding of his policies. By focusing further on the Isle of Man and James’s relationship to and governance of the island, this essay seeks to move beyond nationalist approaches to British and Irish history, or three kingdoms history, to a more nuanced, archipelagic appreciation of James VI and I and his island empire.5 I

In the twelfth century, kings of Man and the Isles were important power brokers within the archipelago and were able to hire, or hire out, a significant maritime fleet or mercenary force. After the transfer of the Isle of Man and the Isles from Norse to Scottish jurisdiction following the Treaty of Perth in 1266, Man begins to suffer neglect in the historical consciousness. As the era of petty kings and warlords gave way to the emergence of consolidated kingdoms and territorial monarchies, historiography has tended to focus on the four nations or three kingdoms that make up this north Atlantic archipelago. As a result the Isle of Man, alongside other islands in the archipelago, has been regarded as somewhat separate.6 To be fair, geographically speaking, the island is separate but far from remote; situated in the middle of the Irish Sea it is seventeen miles from Scotland, thirty miles from England, thirty-three miles from Ireland, and forty-three miles from Wales.7 The island remained, and remains to this day, distinct in constitutional terms.8 Alongside this separate and distinctive identity, it is likely that the island’s small size and seeming lack of importance to wider national political and economic development likewise contributed to continued neglect in much of the historiography. Thankfully, there are some notable exceptions. Medieval historians such as R. Andrew McDonald, Seán Duffy, and Ben Hudson pay significant attention to Man during the eleventh and twelfth centuries and Duffy has highlighted I. Macinnes, ‘Regal Union for Britain, 1603–38’, in The New British History. Founding a Modern State 1603–1715, ed. Glenn Burgess (London & New York, 1999), pp. 33–64, at pp. 35–8. 4 Macinnes, ‘Regal Union for Britain’, p. 51; Macinnes, Clanship, Commerce, pp. 57–9; Allan I. Macinnes, ‘Making the Plantations British, 1603–38’, in Frontiers and the Writing of History, 1500–1850, ed. Steven G. Ellis and Raingard Esser (Laatzen, 2006), pp. 95–125 at p. 104. 5 John Morrill, ‘The War(s) of the Three Kingdoms’, in The New British History, ed. Burgess, pp. 65–91, although Morrill’s definition of the archipelago is still very much defined by its three kingdoms. 6 J.R. Dickinson, The Lordship of Man under the Stanleys: government and economy in the Isle of Man, 1580–1704, Chetham Society, 3rd series, 41 (Manchester, 1996), pp. 2–4. 7 C.W. Gawne, The Isle of Man and Britain. Controversy, 1651–1895: From Smuggling to the Common Purse (Douglas, 2009), p. 7. 8 For more on the constitutional position of the island see Dickinson, Lordship of Man.

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the island’s strategic significance for both Edward II and the Bruces during the Bruce brothers’ invasion of Ireland in 1315–18. The island takes on greater significance again in the later seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries with the rise of smuggling, the transfer of the island to the dukes of Atholl, the subsequent purchase of the island by the crown, and wider constitutional reform.9 During the early modern period – and especially during the sixteenth century – Man is notably marginalised. Thus, despite Macinnes’ article in 1982, and a 1998 article by Tim Thornton, the Isle of Man continues to be overlooked in histories of the early modern archipelago.10 This is shortly to be rectified with the publication of A New History of the Isle of Man volume IV: Derby and Atholl periods, 1406–1830, edited by Tim Thornton.11 Part of the cause of this marginalisation is the dominance over the past fifty years or so of the New British and Irish Histories.12 Initiated by John Pocock in the early 1970s, this was an attempt to write a more integrated history of the four nations or three kingdoms of the Atlantic archipelago; rather than continue to write, as Pocock described it, the history of England writ large, historians should strive to engage more meaningfully with Scotland, Wales, or Ireland. This has produced a significant amount of scholarship and debate; probably as much history as historiography as historians of various opinions have questioned the validity or usefulness of such an approach or debated the direction it should 9

These include, but are by no means limited to, R. Andrew McDonald, Manx Kingship in its Irish Sea Setting, 1187–1229 (Dublin, 2007); idem, ‘Dealing Death from Man: Manx Sea Power in and around the Irish Sea, 1079–1265’, in The World of the Galloglass. Kings, Warlords and Warriors in Ireland and Scotland, 1200–1600, ed. Seán Duffy (Dublin, 2007), pp. 45–76; Benjamin T. Hudson, Irish Sea Studies: A.D. 900–1200 (Dublin, 2006); idem, ‘The Changing Economy of the Irish Sea Province’, in Britain and Ireland 900–1300: Insular Responses to Medieval European Change, ed. Brendan Smith (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 39–66; Seán Duffy, ‘The Bruce Brothers and the Irish Sea World, 1306–29’, Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies, 21 (1991), 55–86. McDonald, Hudson, and Duffy have all contributed to Seán Duffy and Harold Mytum (eds), A New History of the Isle of Man Volume III: The Medieval Period, 1000–1406 (Liverpool, 2015). For the later period see Gawne, The Isle of Man and Britain; John Belchem (ed.), A New History of the Isle of Man Volume V: The Modern Period, 1830–1999 (Liverpool, 2000). 10 Tim Thornton, ‘Scotland and the Isle of Man, c.1400–1625: Noble Power and Royal Presumption in the northern Irish Sea Province’, SHR, 77:1 (1998), 1–30. 11 Alongside the medieval and modern volumes (see n. 9 above) in the series is Richard Chiverrall and Geoffrey Thomas (eds), A New History of the Isle of Man Volume I: The Evolution of a Natural Landscape (Liverpool, 2006), while A New History of the Isle of Man Volume II: Prehistory is also forthcoming. And see David Cressy, England’s Islands in a Sea of Troubles (Oxford, 2020). 12 The term New British History is problematic, as it ignores Ireland completely despite the importance of the kingdom and its integral part in the development of the archipelago. For more on the problems of the terminology of ‘British History’ see John Morrill, ‘The British Problem, c.1534–1707’, in The British Problem, c.1534–1707. State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago, ed. Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 1–38, esp. pp. 2–10.

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take.13 While medievalists adopted such a framework, an integrated, threekingdoms approach, rather than a national one, has resulted in a nuanced appreciation of the interconnectedness of events during the War of (or for) the Three Kingdoms in the mid-seventeenth century.14 This stands in rather stark contrast to the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a period for which there has been less British (in Pocockian terms) history.15 From the late fifteenth through to the early seventeenth century there have been efforts to compare English intervention in Wales and Ireland, and occasionally Scotland too, and there is also the field of Irish–Scottish studies.16 In addition, Irish historiography is full of studies that examine English efforts to govern Ireland during the era of the Tudor reconquest. To be sure, this is a result of the fact that English monarchs claimed Ireland as a lordship (and kingdom after 1541) of the English crown but, while Scotland and Ireland shared long-standing connections that stretched back centuries, the three kingdoms were not united by regnal or parliamentary union as would be the case from 1603 and 1707, respectively.17 Although Scotland and England were not united during the sixteenth century (nor indeed were they united for most of the seventeenth century), on account of the place of the Stewarts/Stuarts in the fragile Tudor line of succession and efforts by Henry VIII and Protector Somerset to push their respective versions of union, a fraught relationship existed between the two realms and there was ongoing debate among contemporaries about what a future ‘Britain’ might

13

It is not possible to reference all of these works, but see various edited collections including S.G. Ellis and S. Barber (eds), Conquest and Union. Fashioning a British State, 1485–1725 (London, 1995); A. Grant and K. Stringer (eds), Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History (London, 1995); Bradshaw and Morrill (eds), The British Problem, c.1534–1707; Burgess (ed.), The New British History. 14 Morrill, ‘The War(s) of the Three Kingdoms’, in The New British History, ed. Burgess, pp. 65–91. This is not to suggest that all historians agreed with the concept of British History or found it a helpful framework. Macinnes, like many others, argued that it prioritised relations within the archipelago, to the detriment of relations with Europe, Scandinavia, and across the globe. 15 There has been less debate, too, although see Keith M. Brown, ‘Seducing the Scottish Clio: Has Scottish History Anything to Fear from the New British History?’, in The New British History, ed. Burgess, pp. 238–42. 16 Amongst others see N. Canny, ‘The Attempted Anglicisation of Ireland in the Seventeenth Century: an Exemplar of “British History”’, in Three Nations – a Common History? England, Scotland, Ireland and British History, c. 1600–1920, ed. R. Asch (Bochum, 1993), pp. 49–81; Ciaran Brady, ‘Comparable Histories? Tudor Reform in Wales and Ireland’, in Conquest and Union, ed. Ellis and Barber, pp. 64–86; N. Canny, ‘Irish, Scottish, and Welsh responses to centralization c. 1530–c. 1640’, in Uniting the Kingdom, ed. Grant and Stringer, pp. 147–69, esp. pp. 147–8; Brendan Bradshaw, ‘The Tudor Reformation and Revolution in Wales and Ireland: the Origins of the British Problem’, in The British Problem, c.1534–1707, ed. Bradshaw and Morrill, pp. 39–65. 17 We should not ignore the years from 1653 to 1659, when England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and the dominions of the English crown were united under Cromwell’s Protectorate.

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look like.18 Within the sixteenth century, therefore, the concept of British history loomed large, while few in government in either England or Scotland could afford to ignore Ireland given the wider confessional context and security concerns. Yet the historiography of the era is largely nation-orientated as historians’ focus has been shaped by territorial and political boundaries, albeit at times within comparative frameworks, but also by the surviving evidence. Such a centre-orientated perspective overlooks events at, and the influence of, the so-called ‘periphery’, while the associated trend for studies of state formation further marginalises the outlying regions of the Stuart British empire.19 The traditional view of James was that by 1603 he had tamed the nobility, pacified the Highlands, and brought the kirk back under his control.20 After 1603 he set about extending law and order throughout his frontier regions and borderlands. The prevailing narrative was of an increasingly centralised crown and government able to assert its authority throughout its emerging empire. The distinctiveness of outlying regions and localities was lost within wider, national, British, and even Atlantic studies. While national history is crucial for the writing of British, Irish, and archipelagic history, one should not be mistaken for the other. For example, British history in the English context is often taken as beginning in 1534, a date important in English history but one that matters little in Scotland or Ireland. Such dates are of even less importance in the peripheral, outlying regions of the archipelago such as Man, despite its strategic location at the very apex of James VI and I’s three kingdoms. II

The Isle of Man came under the jurisdiction of the Scottish crown in 1266 but it continued to be fiercely contested thereafter. Following the defeat of David II at Halidon Hill, Edward Balliol ceded extensive lands in southern Scotland to Edward III who, at that time, also annexed the Isle of Man. Although English hold on the island remained tenuous, by the mid-fourteenth century it was 18

See Chapter 2 in this volume. Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in early modern England, c.1550–1700 (Cambridge, 2000), p. 14 and Roger A. Mason, ‘Civil Society and the Celts: Hector Boece, George Buchanan and the Ancient Scottish Past’, in Scottish History. The Power of the Past, ed. Edward J. Cowan and Richard J. Finlay (Edinburgh, 2002), pp. 95–119, at pp. 96–7 both point out that many studies fail to define what is meant by state formation. Helpful definitions have been put forward by J.H. Elliot, ‘Atlantic History: A Circumnavigation’, in The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (Basingstoke, 2009), pp. 253–70 at pp. 260–1; Elizabeth Mancke, ‘Negotiating an Empire. Britain and Its Overseas Peripheries, c. 1550–1780’, in Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820, ed. Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy (Abingdon and New York, 2002), pp. 235–65, at p. 236; Steve Hindle, State and Social Change in Early Modern England, 1550–1640 (Basingstoke, 2002), p.15. 20 Thankfully, such views have been challenged and given greater nuance. 19

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regarded as a dependency of the English crown and, in 1406, granted to the Stanley lords of Derby.21 Nonetheless, regardless of political jurisdiction, Scottish claims to the island continued from 1266 through to the marriage of James III to Margaret of Denmark–Norway in 1467, which saw the final relinquishing of Norwegian overlordship of the Isles including Man.22 There remained a lingering awareness of the former Kingdom of Man and the Isles and, with it, a sense that Man belonged to Scotland, not England; this was evident in ecclesiastical terms too. The Diocese of Sodor (the Isles) and Man came under the jurisdiction of the Norwegian archbishop of Trondheim, and so the division of Man from the Isles had political as well as ecclesiastical complications.23 In 1472 the granting of metropolitan status to the bishopric of St Andrews brought all Scottish dioceses under the archbishopric, including that of the Isles, although the Scottish church was reluctant to see Sodor and Man split. In 1498 James IV successfully petitioned the papacy for Iona abbey to be erected as see of the bishop of the Isles until ‘his principal kirk in the Ile of Man be recoverit from Inglismen’.24 But more telling, and perhaps too often overlooked, is Archdeacon Donald Munro’s account of the Isles in his Description of the Western Islands of Scotland of 1549. In his Description Munro begins with the Isle of Man, where, he states, the ‘cathedral kirk of the Bishoprey of Man and Isles’ lies. When George Buchanan, the renowned European humanist and former tutor of James VI, came to write his Historia Rerum Scoticarum, published in 1582, in Book I he included an account of the country, region by region, and its people, as was customary at the time. For details regarding the western Isles he borrowed heavily from Monro and began with Man, an order also found in the description of the western Isles contained in the fifth volume of Joan Blaeu’s Atlas Novus, largely because, in turn, Blaeu’s work borrowed heavily from Buchanan.25 That Buchanan repeated Munro’s account, beginning with Man, perhaps reflects wider attitudes within Scotland, not just the western Highlands and Isles. But there is no doubt that, for the Hebridean chiefs and lords of the south-west of Scotland, Man remained part of their wider maritime world. Its geographic location meant that Man was not far from the burghs of Kirkcudbright and Wigton in south-west Scotland, nor from the north-east coast of Ireland. For Highlanders who regularly traversed the North Channel, either 21 Dickinson,

Lordship of Man, pp. 15–16, p. 15, n.14. Macinnes, ‘Scotland and the Manx connection’, 369–70. 23 See Alex Woolf, ‘The Early History of the Diocese of Sodor’, in The Medieval Period, ed. Duffy and Mytum, pp. 329–48 for a discussion of the diocese before the separation of Man from the Isles. 24 I.B. Cowan, ‘The Medieval Church in Argyll and the Isles’, Records of the Scottish Church History Society, 20 (1978), 15–29, at 17; Tim Thornton, ‘Conclusion – Man: the Medieval Legacy’, in The Medieval Period, ed. Duffy and Mytum, pp. 546–53, esp. 547–8. 25 Roger A. Mason, ‘From Buchanan to Blaeu: The Politics of Scottish Chorography, 1582–1654’, in George Buchanan. Political Thought in Early Modern Britain and Europe, ed. Caroline Erskine and Roger A. Mason (Ashgate, 2012), pp. 13–47, esp. 26–8. 22

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travelling to Ireland as part of a period of seasonal employment in the ranks of Irish lords rebelling against English authority or resisting encroachments from a neighbouring enemy, Man was simply another island in a wider maritime world they were intimately familiar with. In 1533 two of the main Hebridean chiefs, Alexander MacDonald of Dunivaig and the Glens and Hector MacLean of Duart, attacked Man and, despite prior English intelligence, the Islesmen managed to capture the English ship Mary Willoughby.26 What the aim of this attack was, other than to aggravate the English, is unclear, but it certainly did little to upset relations between the king and his Hebridean chiefs. Indeed, given the state of relations between James V and Henry VIII, it is likely that James was more than satisfied with the outcome, whether or not it had been little more than an opportunistic raid on the island.27 Having sent troops to Man in advance of the raid in 1533, in June 1540, a time when tensions between James and Henry were at their height, Edward, third earl of Derby, was licensed to raise a further one hundred men to be sent to the Isle of Man for its defence.28 Later, in 1547 when Protector Somerset was attempting to ‘persuade’ the Scots of the merits of union with England, a Scottish fleet was mustered from the usual west coast burghs (Glasgow, Dumbarton, Ayr, and Kirkcudbright) to intercept the victuals sent to supply the English army in Scotland. Making the most of the opportunity presented, ‘the men of warre prepared in the shippes upon the west coost of Scotlane’ awaiting the arrival of the English shipping were reported to have ‘don some notable damage in the Isle of Man’.29 Highlander involvement in Ireland had been a constant during the sixteenth century, but movement across the North Channel increased during the later decades as warfare intensified. With the outbreak of rebellion led by Hugh O’Neill, second earl of Tyrone, the English were more concerned than ever with rumours of a combined Irish, Scottish, and Spanish invasion. The activities of the Highlanders, and the provisions Tyrone was able to procure from burghs in the south-west of Scotland, came under further scrutiny. In January 1593 the English had intelligence that a Catholic conspiracy aimed to take Man for the Spanish; by July 1593 it was believed that a ‘rable’ of Highland ‘theves’, to the number of five hundred, were planning to invade the island en route to Ireland.30 26

J.S. Brewer et al. (eds), Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the reign of Henry VIII (22 vols, London, 1864–1932) (L&P Henry VIII), VI, no. 610 (p.281). The Mary Willoughby was recaptured by the English in 1547, see Richard Boulind, ‘Ships of private origin in the mid-Tudor navy: the Lartigue, the Salamander, the Mary Willoughby, the Bark Aucher and the Galley’, The Mariner’s Mirror, 59:4 (1973), 385–408, esp. 393–5. 27 Alison Cathcart, ‘James V, King of Scotland – and Ireland?’, in The World of the Galloglass, ed. Duffy, pp. 124–43, esp. p. 127. 28 L&P Henry VIII, XV, no. 831 (p. 78). 29 State Papers Online, 1509–1714 (SP), SP 51/1, fols 86, 93. The Irish Sea was the preferred route when hoping to avoid detection, see Alison Cathcart, ‘The Forgotten ’45: Donald Dubh’s Rebellion in an Archipelagic Context’, SHR, 91:2 (2012), 239–64, at 244–5. 30 Cotton Caligula D/II, fols 100, 102v; SP 52/55, fols 100v, 111; SP 52/56, fols 55, 58, 59.

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Fears of such a conspiracy appear to have dwindled, but two years later, in July 1595, intelligence of an expedition of Highlanders leaving Scotland resulted in efforts to advertise the Captain of Man.31 At the end of the month, it was reported that the force had grown to one hundred vessels and five thousand men but, while Man had been the target, they were ‘hinderit by tempest’ and instead headed for Lough Foyle in the north of Ireland.32 The details of this expeditionary force are not important here; suffice to say that it ended in disaster for the Highlanders, while the small party that did manage to reach Man were easily repelled.33 Later the same year, Angus MacDonald of Dunivaig, one of the main Hebridean chiefs, ‘delt verie earnestlie w[i]th the k[ing] that he might be suffered to invade thisle of Man to force it to the k[ing’s] obedience’. James replied that Angus ‘should not medle therew[i]th’, adding that the king would ‘have his [Angus’s] service when tyme served’.34 There is no doubt that James’s attitude towards the activity of his Highland subjects in Ireland up until this point had been ambiguous to the point of exasperating for the English, offering platitudes but doing little in earnest. James was not prepared simply to acquiesce to Elizabeth’s demands as he waited for her to die; instead, he readily turned a blind eye to the activities of his Highland subjects in Ireland as they contributed to ongoing resistance to the English queen. But in relation to Man he was not going to push Elizabeth too far, instead telling MacDonald ‘he wold never offend here [Elizabeth] as long as she lived butt if god should call her he wold employe him and otheres as ocasyon served’.35 James’s caution on this occasion was linked to his desire to succeed to the thrones of England and Ireland, but neither did he want to rely on Angus MacDonald or his Highland subjects to attack Man, given their recent humiliating engagement with the English off Rathlin and the Copeland Islands earlier that summer.36 Above all, however, James’s reluctance in 1595 to pursue whatever claims to Man he might have harboured probably resulted from his realisation that the island was a dominion of the English crown, a crown he hoped to inherit very soon; but also had much to do with the situation concerning Man at that time.

31

SP 52/56, fols 60, 62. SP 52, 56, fol. 67. 33 SP 52/56, fol. 71. For more on this expedition see SP 52/56, fols 85–6, 94–5; Macinnes, ‘Scotland and the Manx Connection’, 373–4; Ross Crawford, ‘Noble Power in the West Highlands and Isles. James VI and the End of the Mercenary Trade with Ireland, 1594–96’, in James VI and Noble Power in Scotland 1578–1603, ed. Miles Kerr-Peterson and Steven J. Reid (London, 2017), pp. 117–35, at pp. 125–7. 34 SP 52/57, fol. 60. 35 SP 52/57, fol. 62v. 36 It must have been obvious to the king that MacDonald was seeking personal revenge for the defeat the English inflicted on Hebridean forces earlier that year. While James did not want to concede much to Elizabeth, given the timing, he was not prepared to let MacDonald’s personal grudge unsettle Anglo-Scottish affairs. 32

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III

The kingship of Man had been vested in the Stanley family by Henry IV of England in 1406 for a homage of ‘two falcons’ and from then the Stanleys became rulers of Man with the title Kings of Man, although in the late fifteenth century Thomas Stanley adopted the title ‘Lord of Man’ rather than ‘King of Man’.37 By the time of the death of the first earl of Derby in 1504 the Stanley family had acquired a substantial territorial estate with its core holdings in Cheshire and Lancaster. Perhaps on account of that vast estate, Man was not particularly high on the earls’ agenda. In the second half of the sixteenth century, however, partly due to his own diplomatic service and his wife’s debts, Henry, fourth earl, began to redress the ongoing neglect of the island, at least in terms of his economic returns. No head of the Stanley family had visited the island since Sir John Stanley in 1422. Earl Henry visited in 1577 and presided at the meeting of Tynwald Court (the parliament of the Isle of Man, which included the House of Keys, consisting of twenty-four members, and the smaller Legislative Council, of eight members), when the customary statutes governing the island were codified and he made a survey of the rates of customs at every port. He also took steps to reassert the rights of the earls over the island, tried to reform lease-tenure, and commuted rents in kind to cash, even visiting the island a second time in 1583. Reform, after decades of neglect, was a slow process and still underway when Henry died in 1593. He was succeeded by his son, Ferdinando, fifth earl, who had already run up huge debts by borrowing from London merchants.38 His tenure of the earldom of Derby was short, and within six months of succeeding his father, Ferdinando died.39 Not only did he leave the Stanley estates burdened by debt, but without a direct male heir to inherit the estate the family was thrown into confusion. His brother, William, succeeded as sixth earl of Derby, but only after some time did he inherit Stanley lands, as the claim to the estate was disputed by Ferdinando’s three daughters, Anne, Frances, and Elizabeth, and their mother, Countess Dowager Alice. On account of the ambiguous nature of the land law at this time, there was no guarantee the family estate would descend with the peerage. Heirs-general (and usually daughters) were able to put forward legitimate counterclaims to estates and, as a result, protracted and costly legal battles were on the cards; so 37 Dickinson,

Lordship of Man, pp. 15–16. Henry, Lord Strange (before he succeeded his father to become fourth earl of Stanley) was appointed gentleman of the bedchamber to Philip of Spain in July 1554, a position that possibly influenced the choice of name for his second son (but eldest surviving male heir); see Louis A. Knafla, ‘Stanley, Henry, Fourth Earl of Derby (1531–1593), Magnate’, ODNB. 39 The sudden and rather violent nature of Ferdinando’s death raised allegations of foul play, with some suggesting poison, others suggesting witchcraft. In the end no wrongdoing was ever proven; see B. Coward, The Stanleys, the Stanley Earls of Derby, 1385–1672: the Origins, Wealth and Power of a Landowning Family, Chetham Society, 3rd series, 30 (Manchester, 1983), pp. 37, 145–7; David Kathman, ‘Stanley, Ferdinando, Fifth Earl of Derby (1559? –1594), Literary Patron’, ODNB. 38

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it would be with Stanley estates. To be fair, the long dispute over the Stanley estates was further complicated by intervention (or interference) on the part of the Cecils and Sir Thomas Egerton, connected through marriage to Earl William and the Countess Dowager Alice, respectively, although agreement was finally concluded in 1607. Unfortunately, settlement of the Stanley estates did not resolve the problem of the Isle of Man and there were further complications concerning the possession of the island. A large part of the problem was that it was possible for a lawyer to find fault with the claim of anyone to the island. Royal lawyers argued that the initial grant of 1406 to Sir John Stanley was imperfect and thus the island should revert to the crown; the countess argued that, by virtue of her husband’s conveyance of 1594 and his will, the island was part of her dower lands; while William, sixth earl, based his claims on the lease of his lands ‘in the dominion of England’. It was this claim that brought into the open the question of whether the Isle of Man was part of the dominions of England or not.40 During the course of this protracted legal battle James succeeded to the thrones of England and Ireland, thereby finally realising Scottish claims to the island and, he hoped, securing the Isle of Man as part of his wider British empire. It soon became apparent that that might not be the case, so James sought the advice of judges, whose final decision was that, while in law the island belonged to the crown, in equity it should revert to the Stanley family. James eventually adhered to this, and the island was regranted to the family following payment of £2,000 by the sixth earl to the royal exchequer, an outcome welcomed by the heirs general also. The island was granted to trustees who divided it between William and his nieces, all of whom eventually sold their interest in the island to Earl William. Final confirmation of the settlement came in 1610, ‘when a private Act of Parliament reiterated that the island was, and was to remain in perpetuity, in the possession of the Stanley family’.41 That may have been so, but what was more important for James was the recognition that the Isle of Man was a dominion of the English crown, his crown, and it was this imperial crown that had granted the island to the earls of Derby. IV

Following his relatively smooth succession to the thrones of England and Ireland in 1603, James repeatedly emphasised his right, on account of his bloodline, as the descendant of James IV and Margaret Tudor. He could also claim such a right to Ireland; not only was James a direct descendant of 40

For further reading on this legal dispute see Coward, The Stanley Earls of Derby, pp. 41–9; B. Coward, ‘A “Crisis of the Aristocracy” in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries? The Case of the Stanleys, Earls of Derby, 1504–1642’, Northern History, 18:1 (1982), 54–77, especially 59–60, and n. 60; Dickinson, Lordship of Man, pp. 18–19. 41 Coward, The Stanley Earls of Derby, pp. 48–9.

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Fergus I, who is said to have founded the kingdom in 330 BC, and Fergus MacEarc, ‘the first authentic King of Scots’ (as chronicled by Hector Boece in his highly entertaining but largely fabricated 1527 Scotorum Historia), but he claimed descent from the kings of Munster, Leinster, and Connacht too.42 For James his succession was providential; he had been chosen by God, not only to be king of three kingdoms, but also to bring greater unity to the two kingdoms of England and Scotland that were united by one sea, bounded by a common culture, language, and religion.43 James regarded his succession of 1603 as a stepping-stone towards a more perfect union under his imperial kingship.44 While first the English and then the Scottish Parliament rejected such proposals, this did little to dampen the king’s desire for closer union. James utilised the language of ‘our Empire’ and, post-1603, this involved the shift from an imperial monarchy free from papal jurisdiction to an empire consisting of ‘an aggregation of dominions’ under his monarchy.45 While he was enthusiastically British, his British message was not only ‘imprecise’ but deliberately ‘confusing,’ because he recognised that his realms and dominions did not share his sentiments.46 James was imprecise about his vision of Britain because he was all too aware that uniformity of government, law, justice, language, and culture could not, would not, and, indeed, should not necessarily be achieved or imposed throughout his kingdoms and dominions. While the extent of convergence or divergence has been debated by historians, when considering the periphery, it can be argued that James appreciated the futility of imposing uniformity and was astute enough to formulate divergent policies for the various parts of his empire of islands.47 In pushing his ‘British’ agenda, James used the rhetoric of one island surrounded by one sea, but he was fully aware that his empire consisted of more 42

Mason, ‘Civil Society and the Celts’, p. 100; Macinnes, British Revolution, pp. 13–19; Macinnes, ‘Regal Union for Britain’, p. 34. 43 James F. Larkin and Paul L. Hughes (eds), Stuart Royal Proclamations. Vol I. The Proclamations of King James I 1603–1625 (Oxford, 1973), no. 9 (pp. 18–19), no. 45 (pp. 94–8, at p. 95); Brian P. Levack, The Formation of the British State. England, Scotland and the Union 1603–1707 (Oxford, 1987), pp. 5–7. 44 Macinnes, ‘Regal Union for Britain’, p. 35. 45 Levack, Formation of the British State, p. 2. 46 Jenny Wormald, ‘James VI, James I and the Identity of Britain’, in The British Problem, ed. Bradshaw and Morrill, pp. 148–71, at pp. 153–5. 47 James did not attempt to impose uniformity in the way that his son would try to after 1625. Macinnes, ‘Regal Union for Britain’, p. 51; idem, Clanship, Commerce, pp. 57–59; idem, ‘Making the Plantations British, 1603–38’, in Frontiers and the Writing of History, 1500–1850, ed. Ellis and Esser, pp. 95–125, at p. 104. Nonetheless, Laura A.M. Stewart, ‘The Political Repercussions of the Five Articles of Perth: a Reassessment of James VI and I’s Religious Policies in Scotland’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 38:4 (2007), 1013–36, at 1036, rightly points out that we should not blame Charles entirely for the events of his reign, as his father, James, had bequeathed him ‘a potential time bomb in Scotland’ in relation to political and ecclesiastical affairs.

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than just four nations or three kingdoms. There were frontiers, borders, and, above all, islands. This island empire extended from Orkney and Shetland in the north, the Outer Hebrides in the west, and the Channel Islands in the south. It was through the marriage of his ancestor James III to Margaret of Denmark– Norway in 1469 that the Orkney and Shetland islands were ceded to Scotland, thus taking Scotland to its fullest territorial extent. It was through possession of the Channel Islands that James could maintain the claim which the English crown had to France (they were otherwise known as the English crown’s ‘French islands’). Meanwhile the Isle of Man, long fought over between Scotland and England, now lay at the apex of James’s empire and, no less so than other islands, shaped his British policy on both land and sea. Man was an important rendezvous point for supplies of men, munitions, and victuals sent from various ports in England (Liverpool, Chester, Bristol, and London), heading primarily to Dublin before making any onward journey to Carrickfergus, as part of English efforts to govern Ireland while also contending with ongoing rebellion there. Increased trade during the sixteenth century meant the Isle of Man had also become something of a safe haven for pirates, as Tudor efforts to patrol these waters were minimal, even in times of warfare.48 James’s Highland subjects had dominated the waters between Ireland and Scotland on account of maritime strength and coastal knowledge alongside craft that were perfectly suited to the conditions of the North Channel. Although the mercenary trade to Ireland had gone into decline in the closing years of the sixteenth century, there was still significant maritime activity – and violence – in the west and James wanted to curtail this. Safeguarding these waters was crucial if plantation efforts in both Scotland and Ireland were to be a success, especially in terms of stimulating trade and commercial opportunities. The various plantation schemes that commenced in both the western Isles of Scotland and the north of Ireland in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were part of James’s ‘civilising’ agenda; increasingly regarded as part of the process of state formation, plantation was a means of enacting political, social, and economic reform while also ensuring the extension of royal authority in frontier regions and borderlands. But, as grander schemes for plantation across the escheated counties of Ulster developed after 1608 with the Plantation of Ulster, the king’s ‘British’ project, James was well aware he needed to bring greater security to the Irish Sea and the waters off the west of Scotland. James passed legislation that sought to limit the number of vessels Highland chiefs could maintain and, to assist with an expedition against the Islesmen in 1608, he sent two additional English vessels to the Isles along with Sir William St John in the Advantage. Unfortunately for Andrew, Lord Ochiltree, who had 48 Dickinson,

Lordship of Man, pp. 326–30; David Loades, The Tudor Navy: An Administrative, Political and Military History (Aldershot, 1992), pp. 14, 45, 111, and esp. 144; N.A.M. Rodger, The Safeguard of the Sea: A Naval History of Britain, 660–1649 (London, 1997); pp. 145–6, 186. There was some effort to patrol Irish waters in 1545 (see SP 60/12, fol. 31), although for much of this period the only shipping dedicated to the Irish Sea was the pinnace Popinjay.

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been granted a commission to lead this expedition, these ships were completely unsuited to the conditions, in need of repair, inadequately victualled, and promptly returned.49 While the expedition was connected to efforts to bring his Highland chiefs to order after the failure of the plantation of Lewis, within the wider context of the North Channel James was trying to assert his authority not just on land but also at sea, and to clamp down on maritime violence to ensure that trade to and from Ireland could continue without obstruction. It was not only in the North Channel and the Irish Sea that piracy was a problem, for the years between 1608 and 1614 have been regarded as the ‘heyday’ of English and Dutch pirates who operated in the Channel, the Irish Sea, off the coast of Ireland, and further afield. Like Man, Lundy and Milford Haven were the favourite locations of many. James did not look favourably on piracy, especially if it impacted on the revenues of the crown, but many in his administration were happy to turn a blind eye because they benefitted personally from both piracy and wartime privateering.50 Although a Piracy Commission was established in 1608 it was probably the arrival of pirates from Algiers and Tunis that changed the attitudes of many to this activity, especially as they began to lose not just vessels but men to the slave trade as well.51 Further north it was not piracy that focused James’s attention but the presence of the Dutch in the waters around the Northern Isles. Although these islands had been ceded to Scotland as part of the marriage treaty of 1469, lingering territorial claims enabled Christian IV of Denmark–Norway to assert his jurisdiction over fishing in the north-eastern Atlantic.52 James did not want a competitor in northern waters, so the annexation of Orkney and Shetland, accomplished via the execution of Patrick Stewart, earl of Orkney, was largely born out of arguments for mare clausum around the British Isles which would 49

J.H. Burton and David Masson (eds), RPCS, 1st series (14 vols, Edinburgh, 1877–98), VIII, pp. 521–3, 523–5. 50 Larkin and Hughes (eds), Stuart Royal Proclamations, no. 46 (pp. 98–9). For English administration’s collusion with the pirate community see J.C. Appleby, ‘Neutrality, Trade and Privateering, 1500–1689’, in A People of the Sea: the Maritime History of the Channel Islands, ed. A.G. Jamieson (London, 1986), pp. 59–105; John C. Appleby, ‘A Nursery of Pirates: The English Pirate Community in Ireland in the Early Seventeenth Century’, International Journal of Maritime History, 2:1 (1990), 1–27; Keith Pluymers, ‘“Pirates” and the Problems of Plantation in Seventeenth Century Ireland’, in Governing the Sea in the Early Modern Era. Essays in Honor of Robert C. Ritchie, ed. Peter C. Mancall and Carole Shammas (San Marino, Huntington Library, 2015), pp. 79–107. Piracy in the Irish Sea is the focus of an ESRC-funded PhD; see Scott Carballo, ‘Piracy in the Irish Sea: Sovereignty, Economy and the Scottish Western Burghs, 1560–1630’ (University of Stirling, in progress). 51 Rodger, Safeguard of the Sea, pp. 347–53. 52 T.W. Fulton, The Sovereignty of the Sea. An Historical Account of the Claims of England to the Dominion of the British Seas, and of the Evolution of the Territorial Waters: with special reference to the Rights of Fishing and the Naval Salute (Edinburgh and London, 1911), pp. 118–208. Aonghas MacCoinnich, Plantation and Civility in the North Atlantic World. The Case of the Northern Hebrides, 1570–1639 (Brill, 2015).

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enable James’s British fisheries to challenge the dominance of the Dutch.53 The gradual development of the king’s assertion of closed, British seas, therefore, had various stimuli; it also chimed with James’s view of himself as an imperial monarch, asserting his royal authority at home and on an international stage. But while James argued for closed, British seas around the archipelago, adopting policies that countered Dutch dominance and sought to deal with levels of piracy, his assertion of imperial monarchy should not be confused with efforts to centralise and extend uniformity across his lands or his seas. While dealing with different maritime contexts, James was formulating policy for governance and law throughout his realms. In various localities and regions he was willing to delegate to local lords and landowners. In the western Highlands and Isles he looked to the Mackenzies of Kintail in the wake of the failed Lewis plantations, and to the Campbells of Argyll for law and government in the South Isles; in Ulster he supported Randall MacDonnell and the numerous undertakers who pushed ahead with plantation endeavours there; for the Isle of Man he returned the ruling elite to their previous position. In confirming William, sixth earl of Derby, as Lord of Man, James was restoring the status quo, delegating the governance of the island and enabling the earls (and their spouses) to implement reform on the island as they best saw fit.54 Macinnes may have argued that there ‘was undoubted imperial symmetry in the imposition of Scots law over the Northern Isles to complement the imposition of English common law throughout Ulster’, but in both Man and the Channel Islands there was no attempt to interfere with local law or custom.55 On Man, James allowed law and custom to continue uninterrupted. For the Channel Islands he confirmed the islanders’ ancient customs and privileges, primarily neutrality of the islands and the seas around them as far as the eye could see during times of war.56 Thus, policy towards outlying, border, frontier, or peripheral regions of James’s island empire depended on context and circumstance. James may have sought centralisation to some extent, but this did not go hand in hand with uniformity and, across his kingdoms, James was willing to encourage divergence in law, custom, and governance both by land and sea where necessary. 53 Fulton,

Sovereignty of the Sea, pp. 9–22, 251–9; Rodger, Safeguard of the Sea, pp. 350–1. Macinnes, British Revolution, pp. 61–2. 54 This aligns with an alternative reading of state formation, not necessarily something imposed from the centre but, rather, a process that involved the co-operation of local elites with central government; see Hindle, State and Social Change, especially pp. 2–4, 10–24; Allan Kennedy, Governing Gaeldom: The Scottish Highlands and the Restoration State, 1660–1688 (Leiden, 2014), pp. 6–14; idem, ‘Managing the Early-modern Periphery: Highland Policy and the Highland Judicial Commission, c. 1692–c. 1705’, SHR, 96:1 (2017), 32–60. In reality, however, while Mackenzie, Campbell, and MacDonnell appeared to co-operate with crown policy, often they did so only to the extent that such a policy aligned with personal, kin-based agendas. 55 Macinnes, British Revolution, p. 61. 56 Maritime policy regarding the Channel Islands would differ on account of their location so close to the French coast.

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The situation regarding Man epitomises James VI and I’s ability to manage his multi-kingdom inheritance and highlights awareness of the need for divergence. James may have viewed Man as a Scottish island but he recognised that, in practice, it was governed as a dominion of the English crown. While he would take steps, in a maritime context, to curtail piracy and extend his jurisdiction over his territorial waters, in terms of governance he altered little. The trend for state formation tends to prioritise events at the centre, suggesting that governance is one way, something that is done to or imposed on outlying areas, but it is important to look more closely at localities and peripheral areas and examine them within wider contexts. Doing so affords a greater awareness not only of the Isle of Man but of James’s reign and his policies, and also historiographical development. Examining the role of so-called peripheral regions offers a more nuanced understanding of Jacobean governance and the development of ‘British’ policy for the wider Stuart ‘island empire’. Indeed, in governing his territories James pursued centralisation and convergence where possible, but also encouraged and facilitated divergence.57 That his son, Charles I, had a very different approach cautions against any generalisation about early seventeenth-century Stuart British governance.

57

Mark Greengrass has pointed out that ‘the approach which concentrates exclusively on state-building from the centre misses the crucial dimension of awareness of the caution with which rulers dealt with deeply ingrained regional identities and differences’, quoted in Jenny Wormald, ‘The Creation of Britain: Multiple Kingdoms or Core and Colonies?’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, sixth series, 2 (1992), 191, n. 33.

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4 The Forgotten Crisis of the Sixteenth-Century Irish Aristocracy Ciaran Brady

I

n one of the earliest of his signal contributions to the rethinking of early modern Scotland, in particular, and of the comparative history of the Western European archipelago in general, Allan Macinnes presented a new and challenging account of the way in which the principal dynasties of Scottish feudal society gradually but successfully transformed themselves into a typical European aristocracy. In his Clanship, Commerce and the House of Stuart (1996) Macinnes offered a sustained analysis of the processes through which so many of the traditional dynasties achieved this transformation. His was not a simple account, nor a pretty one. Instead it meticulously detailed how the great clanship dynasts gradually divested themselves of their traditional status as leaders and protectors of their dynastic and feudal dependants; and, by exploiting the opportunities supplied by the procedures of written Scottish law, of economic advantage, of political alliance and connection, and also by sheer coercion, how they successfully transformed themselves into a powerful and wealthy capitalist aristocracy comparable in status, character and outlook to their peers south of the Tweed. Macinnes’s bold analysis not only offered a powerful critique of the sentimental and nostalgic image of the old Scottish nobility as propagated by writers as influential as Scott and Stevenson; also, with appropriate recognition of important regional and cultural variations, it had the advantage of supplying parallels with the history of the crisis and recovery of the English aristocracy as traced in the seminal work of Lawrence Stone. In this Macinnes was soon not to be alone. In the late 1990s and early 2000s a spate of research, notably by Keith Brown, Jane Dawson and Alison Cathcart, which, even while occasionally disagreeing with his interpretative emphases, confirmed his contention that the real objective of historical exploration should not be on their apparent submission to the power of the Stuart monarchy, but actually on the ways in which the Scottish nobility succeeded, with remarkable success, in adapting themselves and consolidating their status in the new world 49

Ciaran Brady

of seventeenth-century politics.1 In this, as Brown has persuasively argued, the experience of the Scottish nobility was not exceptional, but followed closely not only that of their English neighbours but also that of the Western European nobility as a whole. I

One curious side effect of this major reorientation of early modern Scottish history, however, was to throw into sharp relief the very different character of the conventional historiography relating to the history of the nobility of early modern Ireland. For, despite the fact that Macinnes and his colleagues had engaged with such topics as kinship structures, dynastic politics, faction, communal law, corporate property holding, conveyance and inheritance and the powerful force of inherited cultural traditions which were also essential features of the Irish nobility, historians of the Irish nobility continued, until quite recently, to emphasise the exceptional and tragic nature of the fate of this group over the course of the sixteenth century as one of political, cultural and, in several cases, personal extinction under the force of ‘the Tudor Conquest’ and its accompanying confiscations and plantations. Stretching back to the seventeenth century itself, this paradigm of conquest, dispossession and colonisation was deeply rooted in Irish historical writing, and until recently was very rarely challenged. Under this model the resistance and ultimately the defeat of the indigenous Irish nobility, both Gaelic Irish and Anglo-Irish, before the conquering force of the English crown formed the central theme of the Irish historical narrative whose progress was sign-posted by a sequence of key events. The ruin of the Anglo-Irish house of Kildare in the 1530s, the expulsion of the O’Mores and O’Connors in the midlands in the 1550s, the long drawn-out wars in Munster in the 1560s and 1570s which culminated in the extinction of the Fitzgerald earls of Desmond, the rebellion and defeat of the Ulster lords O’Neill and O’Donnell, their flight into permanent exile, the introduction of a massive plantation project in Ulster in the early seventeenth century and, finally, the rebellion in the 1640s of the confederate Anglo-Irish and Gaelic Irish united under the banner of Catholicism which was to end in their total destruction at the hands of Cromwell in 1649. Such were the central events of Irish history in which all of Ireland’s history was identified with the destruction of leading families among the Irish nobility.2 1

J.E.A. Dawson, The Politics of Religion in the Age of Mary, Queen of Scots: The Earl of Argyll and the Struggle for Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 2002); K.M. Brown, Noble Society in Scotland: Wealth, Family and Culture, from Reformation to Revolution (Edinburgh, 2000); idem, Noble Power in Scotland from the Reformation to the Revolution (Edinburgh, 2011); Alison Cathcart, ‘The Statutes of Iona: The Archipelagic Context’, Journal of British Studies, 49:1 (2010), 4–27. 2 For a succinct account of the origins of this historiography see T.W. Moody, ‘Introduction: Early Modern Ireland’, in A New History of Ireland: III Early Modern Ireland, ed. T.W. Moody,

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That there were exceptions to this simple account was occasionally recognised. The restoration of the house of Kildare in the 1550s, the survival of the Butler house of Ormond despite its blatant rebellion against the Irish viceroy in the 1560s, the successful adaptation to English rule of such leading families as the O’Briens of Thomond and Burkes of Clanrickard despite decades of turbulence and rebellion, and the even more remarkable adaptation of the house of MacCarthy Mór are all instances of exceptions to the dominant narrative which also reveal clear parallels with the Scottish model. Yet, despite their relatively high incidence, these cases, until recently, exercised little effect on the dominant paradigm, in good part because such recognitions were the result of the researches of family historians, local historians and genealogists whose publications were easily marginalised in the grand sweep of national histories. I say until recently because now this apparent historiographical anomaly has been addressed in Jane Ohlmeyer’s monumental study, Making Ireland English: the Irish Aristocracy in the Seventeenth Century (2012). In this superbly researched monograph Ohlmeyer, through the intensive study of ninety-one noble families, offered a radically new interpretation which for the first time placed these ‘exceptions’, hitherto neglected in the conventional national historiography, into a central place. Richly informed on the comparative literature relating the Scottish and English nobilities to their Continental peers, Ohlmeyer demonstrated that there were, after all, parallels to be drawn between the Irish experience and the broader European patterns. Central to this was her contention that, whatever their diverse ethnic, social, religious and political backgrounds, the noble elite, recognised and marvellously expanded by the Stuart monarchy, was determined to establish a new corporate identity based on service to the monarchy. That common commitment may have been occasionally disrupted through the wars of the 1640s and the failed republican experiments of the 1650s, but it survived to be re-established powerfully through the restoration of monarchy in the years after 1660. Ohlmeyer’s book is a powerful intervention in early modern Irish history writing. Yet, despite its significance for the history of the Irish aristocracy in the seventeenth century, there is also a sense in which her book has arrived post festum. Because, while it draws occasionally on materials pertaining to the later sixteenth century, her narratives and analyses are, as the title of the book indicates, overwhelmingly concerned with the seventeenth century, with the years after the flight of the Ulster earls and the inception of the Ulster plantation. The series of convulsions which led up to these tumultuous events, therefore, plays little part in this study. And while throughout her book Ohlmeyer acknowledges the several divisions and tensions which afflicted her composite state-centred aristocracy, the centre of gravity of her study has F.X. Martin and F.J. Byrne (Oxford, 1976), pp. liii–lxi; and for its perpetuation see chs 2–4 by G.A. Hayes McCoy in the same volume. The tradition is epitomised in Richard Berleth, The Twilight Lords (New York, 1978).

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entailed some diminution of the complexities underlying these divisions which had their origins in the political initiatives, conflicts and failed accommodations which occurred on repeated occasions stretching back, many decades before her study proper begins, to the middle years of the sixteenth century. And it is to an investigation of the character of these early, failed and now largely forgotten efforts at accommodation and to the reasons underlying their failure that the rest of this essay is devoted. II

It is from this sixteenth-century perspective – before the catastrophe of the 1590s and early 1600s – that it is appropriate to draw renewed attention to the work of a scholar who, though scarcely less marginalised by the conventional historiography than the genealogists and the local historians, supplied a small but detailed set of studies of individual noble families which extended over the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In his unpromisingly titled Gleanings from Irish History, W.F.T. Butler, presented a meticulous study of the MacCarthy Mór of Muskerry and some of his dynastic collaterals who successfully overcame the several legal and political obstacles posed to him by Tudor government to secure recognition of his claims to be the legitimate landlord of several extensive holdings in west Munster. But he also related the MacCarthy experience to the broader pattern of interactions between the crown and the Irish nobility under which both parties sought to find a means of transforming the existing structures and processes of power within the existing Irish lordships, both Gaelic Irish and Anglo-Irish, into forms recognisable under and acceptable to the norms of English common law.3 This series of negotiations, for which Butler coined the term ‘surrender and regrant’, was analysed by Butler largely in terms of legal argument, and the success or failure of each instance was assessed by him in relation to the historical records, customs and contingent political and dynastic factors at play in individual cases. Neglected for decades, Butler’s exploration of the policy of surrender and regrant was placed within a broader conceptual and ideological framework by Brendan Bradshaw in his monograph The Irish Constitutional Revolution of the Sixteenth Century (1979). Among the first to give due credit to Butler’s work, Bradshaw argued that what Butler had uncovered as ‘surrender and regrant’ was in reality the practical end product of a major alteration in English attitudes toward Ireland which, in some degree, were a consequence of ‘the Tudor revolution in government’, which had preceded it in the 1530s. Even more, it was a result of the influence of a new attitude toward the possibility of introducing radical and positive reforms within society and politics which he 3

W.F.T. Butler, Gleanings from Irish history (London, 1925); idem, Confiscation in Irish History (Dublin, 1917).

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identified with ‘civic humanism’. This revolution in English attitudes toward Ireland centred on ‘the act for the Kingly title’ passed by the Irish Parliament in 1541 which, while it abolished Ireland’s historical status in English law as a colony in the process of conquest, established it as a kingdom in its own right – an equal element in a dual monarchy binding Ireland and England together as equal in their common allegiance to a shared but constitutionally distinct sovereign. This statute, Bradshaw argued, constituted a formal declaration that the long war between the king’s English subjects and the king’s Irish enemies sanctioned since the twelfth century, but by now a fiction, was at an end; and that once the Irish lords had agreed to offer allegiance (Butler’s ‘surrender’) they would be welcomed as subjects, equal in the eyes of the sovereign to the descendants of the original conquerors in all matters (Butler’s ‘regrant’). Bradshaw thus supplemented Butler’s legal and local analysis with a more profound ideological interpretation. Ironically, however, it was this high ground that enabled Bradshaw to withdraw from the revisionist implications of his argument and return to the conventional narrative of conquest and dispossession. After mid-century the optimistic reformist humanist impulses which had exercised such an influence in earlier years, Bradshaw argued, were displaced by the darker anti-humanist assumptions associated by Bradshaw with the adoption of explicitly Calvinist principles in the ecclesiastical settlements established by the Edwardian and Elizabethan regimes.4 Some historians disputed Bradshaw’s essentially religious interpretation of the abandonment of conciliation and the turn toward coercion and proposed more secular alternatives, notably the influence on a new generation of Elizabethan courtiers of the attitude of the New World conquistadores toward the Amerindians, whom they regarded as ethnologically inferior. Thus inspired, it was both desirable and feasible to regard the Irish as so culturally underdeveloped or degenerate as to be treated by no other means than forceful suppression.5 Thus, despite such new perspectives, the paradigm of conquest survived, reinforced by the apparent largely chronological concessions to the antinomies suggested by Butler and the other neglected scholars. And yet the niggles continued. The evidential base of such claims, whether in regard to Calvinism or Spanish colonialism, when questioned was never satisfactorily established. And there were more positive and substantial reservations. An expanding series of detailed studies of lordships such as that of the O’Reillys, the MacMahons, the O’Farrells, the Kavanaghs and others not only emulated Butler’s researches but also demonstrated the persistence of the procedures of ‘surrender and 4

Brendan Bradshaw, ‘The Elizabethans and the Irish’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 66 (1977), 38–50; idem, ‘The Edwardian Reformation in Ireland, 1547–53’, Archivium Hibernicum, 34 (1977), 83–99; idem, ‘Sword, Word and Strategy in the Reformation in Ireland’, Historical Journal, 21 (1978), 475–502. 5 See especially Nicholas P. Canny, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: a Pattern Established (Hassocks, 1976) and his critique of Bradshaw, ‘Why the Reformation Failed in Ireland: une question mal posée’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 30 (1979), 423–50.

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regrant’ throughout much of the later century. And, on a broader scale, more serious attention to the phenomenon known as ‘the composition of Connacht’, something entirely neglected within the paradigm of conquest, began to throw up serious questions concerning the reasons behind the survival of the O’Briens and the Burkes.6 The cumulative effect of such disparate researches was not only to complicate the concept of conquest but also to present a broader interpretative problem. For they suggested that, instead of a simple turn toward coercion and conquest at mid-century, late-Tudor Irish policy appeared to oscillate between alternatives of military aggression on the one hand and diplomatic negotiation and legal arbitration on the other, with apparently little preference of one over the other. Of the many instances of such ambiguities throughout the later sixteenth century one alone may suffice, the example of the year 1585, which saw at once the first steps toward the establishment of plantation in Munster and a major initiative concerning tenurial reform and legal recognition known as ‘the composition of Connacht’. The underlying principles and practical development of the composition of Connacht are the subject of a later section of this essay. But first it is necessary more fully to explore the forces underlying the curious oscillations in Elizabethan policy in Ireland out of which the idea of ‘composition’ was to emerge. And in this regard it is useful to look more closely at an earlier instance of ambiguous Elizabethan practices in Ireland which has largely been obscured by its absorption within the simple paradigm of conquest. This is the crown’s dealings with the Ulster lord, Shane O’Neill. Shane O’Neill’s place within the narrative of the Tudor Conquest was effectively copper-fastened by his end.7 Having waged resilient and often successful war against the Dublin government since the mid-1550s, he was in 1567 eventually assassinated amid negotiations with the MacDonalds of the Glens, who were acting at the behest of the then English viceroy, Sir Henry Sidney. Shane’s violent end, however, has obscured the significance of the complex set of events which preceded it. In the protracted and ultimately failed negotiations concerning Shane’s claim to the earldom of O’Neill in the early 1560s, Shane had advanced one crucial point. Cutting through the indeterminable wranglings concerning the legitimacy of the original treaty of 1542, O’Neill argued that when Con Bacach ‘surrendered’ all his proprietal, seigneurial and customary rights to the crown, he included in those categories in a wholly undifferentiated manner rights which had accrued to him by virtue of his standing as a great 6

The accumulating body of local and dynastic studies is extensive but scattered: it is usefully discussed and cited in Christopher Maginn, ‘“Surrender and Regrant” in the Historiography of Sixteenth Century Ireland’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 38 (2007), 955–74; of special importance in regard to the composition of Connacht is Bernadette Cunningham, ‘The Composition of Connacht in the Lordships of Clanrickard and Thomond, 1577–1641’, Irish Historical Studies, 24 (1984), 1–14. See also in this context, Rory Rapple, Martial power and Elizabethan Political Culture in England and Ireland, 1558–94 (Cambridge, 2009), chs 5–6. 7 See in general Ciaran Brady, Shane O’Neill, 2nd edn (Dublin, 2016).

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magnate, but others were due to him in his exercise of the office of O’Neill. Thus, when the crown regranted to him in a wholesale and equally undifferentiated fashion, it had not transformed the Irish chieftains into English nobles, it had simply perpetuated their dual status. As a negotiating tactic, this was clever. It not only offered grounds for invalidating the 1542 treaty, but also greatly enhanced Shane’s claim, for, as the undisputed O’Neill, he now undertook to surrender for good those rights which were derived purely from the chieftainship. But it was also too clever, because it not only entailed that the crown should admit its error and abandon the original treaty; it also, and far more importantly, implied that all the other surrender and regrant procedures which had been conducted to date were likewise invalid and needed fundamental renegotiation. This was too much. And so it was determined that Shane should be removed. But the more general problem posed by Shane did not disappear on his death. And it was Sir Henry Sidney, a figure who been actively involved both in the negotiations with Shane and in the decision to destroy him, who moved to address it through the deceptively conservative means of a parliamentary statute. In the lengthy preamble to a Bill declaring the attainder of Shane presented to the Irish Parliament in 1569 a radical new interpretation of Irish history was expounded. The twelfth-century conquest hitherto regarded as the signal date of English rule in Ireland was not so significant after all. Instead it formed part of a long sequence of events dating back to the mists of history, to the time of the (mythical) British king Gurmundus, and stretching forward to the times of King John, Richard II and Henry VIII, when the inhabitants of Ireland had willingly acknowledged their allegiance to the English monarchy and that profession had been gracefully accepted by the kings. The Irish, therefore, whatever their ethnicity, had always been subjects of the English crown. This historical tradition, however, had been interrupted and corrupted by individuals and by particular families who had intervened between the crown and the crown’s Irish subjects and claimed a special intermediary role for themselves, usurping the rights of both monarchs and subjects. The ‘captains’, as the Bill called them, had no legitimacy whatever, and deserved neither the recognition of the crown nor the allegiance of the Irish people. They must either acknowledge this, and retire to their status as subjects among others, or else meet the fate of all usurpers.8 The intent of this historical and constitutional fiction was clear: it aimed to transcend the claims to allegiance of the great Irish chieftains and appeal directly to those below them, the strata of landed, cattle-owning wealthy families who, while they made no claims to the chieftaincies, occupied powerful positions in their own regions. But how was such a radical change in policy 8

For an elaboration of this issue see, Ciaran Brady, ‘The attainder of Shane O’Neill, Sir Henry Sidney and the problem of state building in sixteenth century Ireland’, in British interventions in Early Modern Ireland, ed. Ciaran Brady and Jane Ohlmeyer (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 28–48.

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to be implemented in practice? By what means could the English government successfully reach over the great traditional dynasties and establish such secure and dependable relationships with the lesser but substantial elements within Irish provincial society that were crucial to the success of the new policy? III

As it happens Sidney was working his way towards a possible strategy of enforcement even as his Bill was wending its way through the stages of parliamentary enactment in the form of policy that he would soon denominate as ‘composition’. ‘Composition’ (the term in sixteenth-century English simply connoted ‘a deal’) had its origins in violence, and coercion continued to be a central method in its implementation, though as a means rather an end.9 Its origins may be traced to the contrasting experiences of the regional governors appointed by the Dublin government to establish order in the provinces during the turbulent years of 1568–72. In this period, which witnessed an unprecedented set of overlapping rebellions among the Fitzgeralds of Desmond, the Butlers of Ormond, the O’Briens of Thomond and the Burkes of Clanrickard, the performance of the regional officials was markedly different. In Connacht, where a conventional provincial council had at last been introduced in 1569, the new president of the council, Sir Edward Fitton, fared lamentably. The leading figures of the nobility who were nominated to sit on the council failed to attend, boycotting its proceedings or finding excuses for non-appearance. More than that, they instituted a powerful campaign of intimidation aimed at preventing the people of the province from attending the council or even – and this proved crucial – supplying the itinerant court with food and other provisions. Isolated and dependent only on the small bodyguard allotted to the council, Fitton found himself powerless, humiliated and in danger of starvation. And so, reluctantly but inexorably, he was compelled to withdraw from Thomond and Clanrickard and take refuge on the banks of the Shannon in the garrison town of Athlone.10 In rebellious Munster, however, the situation was quite different. There, while a conventional presidential council had functioned briefly and without royal sanction in 1566, the first provincial governor to be appointed by Sidney in 1569 was an absolute military officer, Colonel Sir Humphrey Gilbert. During his time in office, Gilbert conducted a brutal campaign of terror, intimidation and ruthless reprisal, taking and killing hostages at will, burning houses and castles (often with their occupants), slaughtering cattle and burning crops. 9

For a more detailed discussion see Ciaran Brady, The Chief Governors: the Rise and Fall of Reform Government in Tudor Ireland, 1536–88 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 142–54. 10 Fitton’s sorry experience is related in detail in his letters to Sir Henry Sidney and Sir William Cecil, 23 February, 22 August 1571, TNA, SP 63/30, nos 15, 86.

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The colonel did not worry about provisions, he simply seized what he needed and often destroyed what he did not need. He was also untrammelled by the constraints of law; for he operated under the cover of martial law in the loosest possible sense. Gilbert’s conduct made him notorious. On his recall, his replacement, Sir John Perrot, though nominally appointed president, continued and extended the colonel’s martial government: and to great effect. The Butler revolt was soon suppressed, while in Desmond the principal allies of the rebel leader James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald were steadily peeled away and the rebel forced into the woods and eventually into exile.11 The contrasting lessons of Munster and Connacht were clear: law failed and pitiless force worked. A bleak conclusion. But from it Sidney, working in consultation with his counsellor Edmund Tremayne, drew some surprisingly positive inferences which Tremayne developed into a series of policy memoranda.12 For all their brutality and extremity, the conduct of the Munster governors, Tremayne argued, was no more than an extension and amplification of the intimidatory tactics employed by the great magnates: a complete realisation of the threat rather than its suggestion. But far from being the ultimate result which was, after all, no more than a continuation of the status quo, the governors’ success in beating the magnates at their own game of intimidation and protection provided a unique opportunity to transform the entire structure of Irish provincial society from the top down. Having asserted, through terror, their control of the system, the government’s agents could work, step by step, to dismantle the entire system through specific negotiations with property-holding families, greater and lesser, as to what degree of exactions they were willing to yield formally and on a regular basis in order to secure permanent protection or, in other words, full recognition of their property-holding status under the law of the crown. In short, the private bastard feudal practices of the provincial lords would now be appropriated by the crown, nationalised and used as a means of realising the aspirations of the Act of attainder against Shane O’Neill and of granting solid and permanent recognition to those who sought it of their status as true subjects of the Irish crown. In regard to how these transformative negotiations were to be implemented in practice Tremayne’s memoranda were clear enough, even if remarkably ambitious. What was required was a very large army – ideally a force of ten thousand which would descend upon the western provinces of Munster and Connacht and then pass northward to Ulster. But the purpose of this massive 11 Rapple,

Martial Power, ch. 5; Gilbert’s ‘Discourse for the reformation … of Munster’, February 1574, BL, Add Mss 48015, fols 378 ff; David Edwards, ‘The Butler Revolt of 1569’, Irish Historical Studies, 28 (1993), 228–55; Anthony M. McCormack, The Earldom of Desmond, 1464–1583 (Dublin, 2005) ch. 4. 12 Tremayne’s principal memoranda are TNA, SP 63/32, nos 64–6 (no. 66 is printed in David Heffernan (ed.), Reform Treatises on Tudor Ireland, 1537–1599, Irish Manuscripts Commission (Dublin, 2016), pp. 72–83); BL, Add. MS, 48015, fols 274–9; BL, Cotton MSS, Titus B 9 XII, fols 357–60 (also printed in Heffernan, Reform Treatises, pp. 96–103).

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force was not to initiate a new conquest; rather, it was by the force of its own gravity to secure individual agreements concerning the supply of victuals and the provision of accommodation from all of the property holders in a particular region in a manner similar to (though far greater than) those traditionally exacted by the great lords. But, having secured such agreements which would be settled at a rate far lower than the initial burden of the army, the force would move on to the next region to commence the procedure all over again.13 The advantages of this extraordinary strategy were several. In contrast to such alternatives as all-out war and colonisation, the military and financial risks of which were enormous, it was in essence conservative, presenting those to whom it was to be applied with nothing more than an exaggerated – but temporary – version of the traditional exactions of ‘coign and livery’ with which they had been for so long all too familiar. Moreover, unlike the alternative of colonisation it was almost self-sufficient. For after the very initial stages when the great force would have to be subsidised from England, it would generate its own means of subsistence, and as the new agreements were secured the resident force would be correspondingly reduced to match the levels of supply agreed upon. Finally, and this was its greatest appeal, this mode of proceeding provided a means of approximating the aspirations of the Act of attainder of Shane O’Neill, of reaching below the great lords and identifying at all of the lower levels of provincial property-holding society those families with whom the much-desired stable and dependable agreements might be reached. But now such relationships would be established and secured not by such speculative political, diplomatic and dynastic estimations which had proven so inadequate in the past. Instead they were to be founded on hard fiscal calculations of the ability of each property-holding family to yield an agreed supply – or tax – in terms of cattle, horses, grain or even money on an annual or regular basis: from each, according to his ability to pay, to each a legal recognition of their particular status within the hierarchical structure of provincial society. This was the policy of ‘composition’ with which Sidney successfully competed for reappointment as Lord Deputy in 1575. Yet, from the beginning Sidney’s implementation of the policy was beset by trouble, some of it more than was expected, some of it not anticipated at all. Though the expeditionary force of ten thousand envisioned in the policy memoranda was always aspirational, the reductions to which Sidney was compelled to agree in bargaining for his appointment were drastic: he was to be allowed an establishment of only five thousand men, and for a period of only three years.14 These constraints made the achievement of results in the conclusion of the fiscal negotiations which

13

See in particular TNA, SP 63/32, no. 66: ‘The army [is] not so much for holding them in obedience as to wring them so hard as for their ease they should desire to be loosed by some composition to remove the garrison.’ 14 Brady, Chief Governors, pp. 144–6.

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were to form the concluding phases of ‘composition’ immensely urgent, almost impossibly so. On taking up office, however, Sidney did indeed register some success. In Munster Sir William Drury, the martial president appointed by Sidney in the middle of 1576, within two years had concluded a series of composition agreements within the province, including one with the earl of Desmond himself. And this was all the more positive because the earl of Ormond, Desmond’s traditional provincial rival, had expressly confirmed his willingness to accept composition agreements within his territories, should Desmond comply.15 In Connacht, Sidney’s composition president, Sir Nicholas Malby, encountered stiffer resistance, though by the beginning of 1578 he too had made promising progress by dividing the family of the earl of Clanrickard against itself and had secured quite an extensive set of provisional agreements across the province.16 But in Gaelic Ulster, where the conclusion of ‘composition’ settlements was the greatest prize of all, given the legacy of Shane O’Neill, no progress was made whatsoever, as the earl of Essex, appointed by Sidney to be the composition president there, died after a long illness without ever having moved at all. Failure in Ulster was bad. But more serious – and far more ominous – was the resistance to Sidney’s composition policy that came from a quite unexpected source: the loyal English-Irish of the Pale. Sidney’s standing within the community of the Pale had hitherto been relatively high. His abandonment of billeting and reduction of purveyance charges, combined with his success against Shane O’Neill and his support for some beneficial legislation in the Parliament of 1569–71, gave him grounds for expecting that he might receive support for composition. Thus, on his arrival in the autumn of 1575 he summoned not a Parliament, for which he had no mandate, but a grand council of notables, and submitted his modest proposal. In preparation for its departure to the provinces his large expeditionary force would not be billeted on the country but kept in garrison if the country would agree to the proposal of supplying the government with a fixed sum of money to enable it to victual the garrison itself. The sums being proposed were a great deal less than the burden which, it was widely agreed, abuse of purveyance and billeting by Sidney’s predecessor had placed upon the community of the Pale. And in proposing it Sidney was doing no more than offering a modest version (and one without the element of direct coercion) of the composition deals he was negotiating in the other provinces.17 But his move was to prove explosive for two closely related reasons. The first was essentially constitutional: for what Sidney was putting before these proud 15

Sir William Drury to the Privy Council, 28 May 1578, and to Burghley 6 January 1579, TNA, SP 63/63, no. 29; 63/65, no. 5. 16 Sir Nicholas Malby to Walsingham 17 March 1577, ‘Notes touching the earl of Clanrickard’, 30 October 1578, TNA, SP 63/57, no. 40; 63/63 no. 10. 17 Ciaran Brady, ‘Conservative Subversives: the Community of the Pale and the Dublin Administration 1556–86’, in Radicals, Rebels and Establishments: Historical Studies XV, ed. P.J. Corish (Belfast, 1986), pp. 11–32.

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English freeholders was the idea of a permanent tax without the initial and repeatable consent of Parliament. This was a serious issue, though the concerns it aroused might have been assuaged in part, as Sidney indeed attempted to appease them, by arguing that this was an urgent emergency measure whose future application might indeed be addressed by a Parliament. But any chance that such an argument might prove persuasive was thoroughly drowned by the Pale community’s second ground of objection, which was both historical and ideological. This was the assumption, now being made explicit, that as far as the representatives of royal government were concerned, the descendants of the old twelfth-century conquest were no different in their status and identity from the other subjects of the Irish crown. This was something that was implicit in the Act for the kingly title enacted thirty-five years previously; though such implications were softened by the assumption that the de-Gaelicisation and Anglicisation of the province would be carried out on terms set by the English-Irish of the Pale. The prospect of cultural unification was made even more explicit by the Act of attainder of Shane O’Neill. But, once again, the assumption prevailed that such an outcome would be attained only through the surrender of the Gaelic Irish to English customs and English laws. But now Sidney’s demand for a tax without parliamentary consent quite reversed the emphasis, for it affirmed that the unity of the Irish people under a common sovereign required that the English of the Pale should be the ones to surrender their traditional constitutional rights and agree to a fiscal system which, though quite acceptable to the Gaelic Irish and to the degenerate English, was utterly anathema to the English of the Pale. The result was constitutional revolt and defeat for Sidney. A powerful delegation from the Pale convinced Queen Elizabeth that Sidney was indeed acting in an illegal manner and sealed his recall in March 1578. In the following year a major rebellion, in large part fuelled by the abortive nature of Sidney’s composition policy, broke out in Munster and consumed the Dublin government’s efforts for the next four years. But in 1584, Sir John Perrot who had served as president in Munster under Sidney in the early 1570s, took office as viceroy on the basis of a commitment to implement a modified version of Sidney’s composition policy. Perrot’s modifications included a compromise arrangement with the English of the Pale, whom he attached very closely to his administration, which entailed an undertaking to have any further demands for supply sanctioned by a Parliament and also, and as a priority, his assumption of personal responsibility for the introduction of composition deals within the lordships of Gaelic Ulster. In regard to Munster, where an extensive plantation was being developed in the wake of the Desmond rebellion, Perrot chose to move cautiously, though he made it known that he intended to introduce some kind of supply arrangements in the future.18 18

Victor Treadwell, ‘Sir John Perrot and the Irish Parliament of 1585–6’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy: Archaeology, Culture, History, Literature, 85C (1985), 259–308; Roger

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But in Connacht where, left to himself after Sidney’s recall, President Malby had successfully made a number of composition-style arrangements on a quite individual basis, Perrot was ready to introduce further advances. Thus, in July 1585 he established a provincial commission headed up by his new president, Sir Richard Bingham supported by senior legal officers within his administration, who were also influential figures among the English of the Pale. Building on Malby’s agreements the commission moved to devise a set of particular indentures seeking to encompass all of the great landowning families and their tenants-in-chief under which, in return for a dual agreement to pay a fixed annual rent, first to their great lords, the earls of Clanrickard and Thomond, and second to the presidency of Connacht, they would be relieved of all further cesses from the crown and feudal exactions from the lords.19 As drafted, the indentures did not identify the names of individuals or even family groups who were being asked to agree.20 Instead they rested on demarcations of land, called quarters, which were understood to contain some 120 acres of viable land. Though frustrating to the researches of modern scholars, this was, in fact, a clever way of proceeding. For it implied that legal recognition would be given to whoever occupied the quarters as long as they paid up the agreed rents assigned to these units: taxation, in other words, was the gateway to representation. In a second important way the 1585 composition marked a development from Malby’s. While the latter had taken a largely hostile attitude toward the great earls which did not exclude their extinction, the commissioners of 1585 were far more generous. Not only were the earls and a select group of their dynastic collaterals permitted to enjoy their old exactions under the new fixed conditions, but their own lands were to be exempted from taxation to the presidency. This arrangement so suited the earls that within a short period they themselves were offering to administer the entire composition and relieve the crown of the expense of a presidency. But even more significantly, the general acceptability of the new deal was demonstrated by its endurance, with some small exceptions, through the turbulent years of the late 1590s, and it survived intact into the post rebellion years of the early seventeenth century.21 The composition in Connacht was the signal achievement of Perrot’s viceroyalty. Elsewhere he was considerably less fortunate. In Ulster, where he himself took charge of the entire operation, things began well.22 An early (and Turvey, The Treason and Trial of Sir John Perrot (Cardiff, 2005); Hiram Morgan, Tyrone’s Rebellion; the Outbreak of the Nine Years War in Tudor Ireland (Woodbridge, 1993), ch. 3. 19 See in general Cunningham, ‘Composition of Connacht’. 20 A.M. Freeman (ed.), The Compossicion Booke of Connought, Irish Manuscripts Commission (Dublin, 1936), esp. pp. 15–24. 21 Ibid., pp. 18–19; ‘Declaration of the sums of money received and the compositions … in Thomond and Connaught’, December 1590, TNA, SP 63/156, no. 55; Sir John Davies to the earl of Salisbury, [1 July] 1607, in C.W. Russell and John P. Prendergast (eds), Calendar of State Papers, Ireland, of the Reign of James I (5 vols, London, 1872–80), 1606–8, pp. 279–80. 22 Morgan, Tyrone’s Rebellion, ch. 3; Ciaran Brady, ‘East Ulster, the MacDonalds and the

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constitutionally questionable) recognition of the MacDonnells as subjects of the Irish crown resulted in a cessation of their previously incessant intervention in the affairs of Ulster and provided him with an opportunity to initiate a series of intense negotiations with the greater and lesser lordships of the province. Central to this was a treaty with the O’Neills of Tír Eoghain, dividing the lordship between the current O’Neill, Turlough Luineach, whom Perrot agreed to raise to the peerage as earl of Omagh, and Hugh O’Neill, whom Perrot had already recognised, with Irish parliamentary sanction, as earl of Tyrone. This was accompanied by a series of agreements with Aodh O’Donnell and lesser dynasties of the province which included a commitment to the commutation of traditional exactions into a fixed sum which would be overseen by English sheriffs in each of the lordships. This was a composition scheme in its embryonic phase. It was still far too early for Connacht-style indentures, but it is clear that, as was the case in Connacht, Perrot hoped that the co-option of the nobility, especially the two new O’Neill earls, would secure something like the support that composition had garnered in the west. There were encouraging signs: government-appointed sheriffs were accepted in several lordships, and the earl of Tyrone gave assuring indications that he was actively furthering the transformation of traditional dues into a fixed annual rental. But, as was the case with Sidney’s Munster composition in the late 1570s, the progress of Perrot’s Ulster scheme was abruptly stalled by events outside the province. In Munster, Perrot’s apparent success in Connacht and Ulster heightened suspicions among the newly arrived English planter groups that he would soon attempt to introduce such un-English practices among them.23 As several of these planters enjoyed significant and direct influence with senior figures in the Elizabethan administration, including Lord Treasurer Burghley and Lord Chancellor Hatton, their fears and complaints received an especially sympathetic hearing at court. Their criticism was supplemented by figures among the English-born members of the Dublin administration who deeply resented Perrot’s high-handed disregard of them. Mounting dissatisfaction with the viceroy was immeasurably increased early in 1588 by the conviction that, preoccupied as he was with his programme of long-term internal reform, he was ignoring the immediate and enormous threat of a Spanish invasion. Perrot’s rejection of warnings, couched in less than temperate language, led to his abrupt recall and ultimately to his trial for treason.24 Provincial Strategies of Hugh O’Neill, earl of Tyrone, 1585–1603’, in Scotland and the Ulster Plantations. Explorations in the British Settlements of Stuart Ireland, ed. William P. Kelly and John R. Young (Dublin, 2009), pp. 41–61. 23 Morgan, Tyrone’s Rebellion, ch. 1; Sir John Perrot to the Privy Council, 5 March 1587, TNA, SP 63/128, no. 74; Perrot’s memorandum to the Privy Council, December 1590, TNA, SP 63/156, no. 51. 24 Turvey, The Treason and Trial of Sir John Perrot prints the text of the trial; Hiram Morgan, ‘The Downfall of Sir John Perrot’, in The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade, ed. John Guy (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 109–25 supplies the context.

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IV

In the wake of Perrot’s fall there then ensued over the next four years in Ulster a slow-motion version of the crisis that had occurred in Munster following the collapse of Sidney’s composition scheme in the late 1570s. As in Munster, bitter divisions arose between those who had most to gain from composition – freeholders, both great and small, as well as lesser branches of ruling dynasties who had no interest in competing for chieftaincies – and those who had most to lose from it – regional lords whose real wealth lay in the collection of taxes and exactions, and the soldiers who enforced the tax collection for them. Caught between these two extremes were the current leaders of the greater provincial dynasties for whom the very real promise of the gains to be made by generous tenurial recognition coupled with tax exemption had to be balanced against the more immediate risks of abandoning their traditional relationships with their vassals and sections of their own military. With these elements now abandoned by the Dublin government, whose promises had exposed them to so much, the result was the same as in Munster, with the earl of Tyrone now re-enacting the agonisings of the earl of Desmond – a period of prolonged prevarication and duplicity followed by complete capitulation to the opponents of composition and full engagement in rebellion.25 In Ulster, however, unlike Munster, the ultimate surrender of Tyrone and his allies in 1603 led not to immediate extirpation and plantation but to one of the most forgiving peaces ever granted by the Tudors to defeated rebels. This was in part because most of the leaders of the rebellion, especially Tyrone, had survived the war; and the crown was reluctant to proceed by means of attainder and execution toward confiscation. But more positively it was also due to a sincere desire to return to the status quo ante bellum, in short, a return to the processes of composition. Thus, remarkably, there ensued the granting of full pardons to all the surrendered rebels, the elevation of the current O’Donnell to the peerage of the earldom of Tyrconnell which his ancestors had craved for almost seventy years and the full recognition of the earl of Tyrone’s contested rights as the overlord of many of the lesser dynastic groups within the region of south Ulster.26 But the aspirations were illusory. The ravages of the long war had made it impossible for the reconstructed earls ever to approximate the roles that the original composition had imagined for them. First, and this was the least of their troubles, they were too poor. The decade of ruthless scorched-earth war had depleted their stock of wealth immeasurably, though not entirely beyond recovery. Hardly less seriously their loyalty to, or dependency on, the massive numbers of soldiers who had served for so long, had no further function, no guaranteed status in the new proposed settlement, and no reward for service in 25 Morgan,

Tyrone’s Rebellion, chs 5–6. Nicholas Canny, ‘The Treaty of Mellifont and the Reorganisation of Ulster, 1603’, The Irish Sword, 9 (1969), 249–62. 26

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defeat. This too was bad. But, as in Munster in the 1580s, what undermined far more so in Ulster in the 1600s any attempt to reconstruct the status quo was the enormously reinforced presence of a plantation interest in the form of the ‘servitors’, that is, English captains who had served during the long war in the hope of securing substantial tracts of rebel land as a reward. Disappointed by the generosity of the peace treaty, they were encouraged by the Irish viceroy, Sir Arthur Chichester, who was himself a servitor, to press their claims at court. And it was the increasing anxiety on the part of Tyrone and his allies that the servitors would be successful that played a major part in their decision to go into exile in 1607.27 Elsewhere the fortunes of the indigenous Irish aristocracy followed along a similar pattern. The house of Desmond ended in 1601 due to lack of an heir, while the houses Kildare and Ormond were beset by succession issues and lawsuits. In the west the noble dynasts fared better, with Thomond established a governor of Clare and Clanrickard appointed president of Connacht.28 But, for all that, there remained the question of the status of what had been intended, back before the crisis of the 1590s, in the ‘composition of Connacht’. Anxieties about what had been done in 1585 emerged from the beginning.29 The suggestion that the arrangements might be confirmed by the Parliament then sitting in Dublin was quietly dropped, given its constitutionally explosive implications. No further Parliament was held until 1615, though anxieties mounted in the intervening years. In 1615 the proposal of ratifying the composition by statute was also deferred. In 1625 a demand for the recognition of the indentures of 1585 formed a central part of ‘the Graces’, the conditions laid down by the Old English prior to their provision of a financial subsidy to Charles I, and, notoriously, this was one of the few that were reneged on once the money had been collected – a stratagem which, to the horror of Clanrickard and Thomond, enabled Lord Deputy Wentworth to open up the entire question of land titles as a preliminary to a policy of dispossession and plantation.30 27

See David Finnegan, Éamonn Ó Ciardha and Marie-Claire Peters (eds), The Flight of the Earls, Imeacht na nIarlaí (Derry, 2010). 28 The most authoritative guide to the tumults over the Desmond earldom remains George E. Cokayne et al. (eds), The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom, Extant, Extinct and Dormant, new edn, revised and much enlarged (12 vols, London, 1910–59), IV, pp. 232–52; Terry Clavin, ‘Fitzgerald, James fitz Thomas, “sugán” Earl of Desmond’, Dictionary of Irish Biography, ed. James McGuire and James Quinn (Cambridge, 2009), http://dib.cambridge.org/viewReadPage.do?articleId=a3162. See also C.W. Fitzgerald, The Earls of Kildare and Their Ancestors, 1057–1773 (Dublin, 1858), pp. 226–64; David Edwards, The Ormond Lordship in County Kilkenny, 1515–1642: the Rise and Fall of Butler Feudal Power (Dublin, 2003); Cunningham, ‘Composition of Connacht’. 29 See, for instance, Sir Richard Bingham to Burghley, 28 February 1594, TNA, SP 63/173, no. 68; on the 1615 arguments see, Aidan Clarke, ‘Pacification, Plantation, and the Catholic Question, 1603–23’, in New History of Ireland III, ed. Moody, Martin and Byrne, pp. 187–231, at pp. 221–3. 30 Aidan Clarke, The Graces (Dublin, 1968).

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Conventional explanations of this turn of events have their continuing force: the avariciousness of the New English servitor, planter and official class; the vulnerability caused by their continuing allegiance to Catholicism of the older communities, Gaelic and English-Irish; the desperation of a financially bankrupt monarchy. None of this may be denied. But the very persuasiveness of such narratives has helped to obscure the profound alteration in English attitudes toward the Irish nobility which, having once seen them as a principal means of re-establishing English rule in Ireland, came to regard them, as Spenser was among the first to perceive, as the principal threat of making the English in Ireland become more like the Irish. It was this fearful perception that fuelled a determination on the part of the English to use whatever means – coercion, division, accidental opportunity, legal chicanery – to ensure that, in appearance, whatever about reality, the practices of English legal culture should be unchallenged. And it was a no less fearful perception on the part of the remaining Irish nobility that the only way to survive in this hostile world was, as Jane Ohlmeyer has argued, to cleave to monarchy.

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Part II War, Religion and the House of Stuart

5 The Auld Alliance and the French Intervention in the Thirty Years’ War, 1630–48 Steve Murdoch

T

he history of the Franco-Scottish Auld Alliance has a long pedigree and remains a feature in written assessments of Scotland’s military campaigns from the late thirteenth until the mid- sixteenth century. This essay seeks not to rehash these well-known contributions but to query the end date often ascribed to that alliance. Recent scholarship has put beyond doubt any notion that the commercial aspect of the pact died in the mid-sixteenth century.1 Previously it was asserted that any meaningful military aspect to the alliance ended after the removal of French garrisons from Scotland under the terms of the Treaty of Edinburgh in 1560.2 But the treaty also saw the departure of English troops from Scotland, and, as we know, Anglo-Scottish relations generally improved thereafter.3 It is important to understand that Scotland’s ties with England did not necessarily mean that the continuation of an alliance with France was impossible. Thus, the Gens d’armes Écossais du Roi (1488–1788) continued to serve throughout the sixteenth century, with larger levies occasionally raised as allied forces when required.4 Henri Duc de Rohan reiterated the importance of the 1

Steve Murdoch, ‘The French Connection: Bordeaux’s “Scottish” Networks in Context, c.1670–1720’, in Scotland and Europe, Scotland in Europe, ed. G. Leydier (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 26–55; Siobhan Talbott, Conflict, Commerce and Franco-Scottish Relations, 1560–1713 (London, 2014). 2 Elizabeth A. Bonner, ‘Continuing the Auld Alliance in the Sixteenth Century: Scots in France and French in Scotland’, in The Scottish Soldier Abroad, 1247–1967, ed. Grant G. Simpson (Edinburgh, 1992), p. 42. 3 The exception here being the intermittent gratuitous piracy committed by both nations against each other. See Steve Murdoch, The Terror of the Seas? Scottish Maritime Warfare, 1513–1713 (Leiden, 2010), pp. 113–20. 4 Bonner, ‘Continuing the Auld Alliance’, pp. 33–7; Steve Murdoch and Alexia Grosjean, Alexander Leslie and the Scottish Generals of the Thirty Years’ War, 1618–1648 (London, 2014), pp. 28–30. For some interesting documents of the Scots Guard in the seventeenth century see also Alexander MacDonald (ed.), Papers Relative to the Royal Guard of Scottish Archers in France

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alliance in 1600, confirming its continued relevance on the cusp of the seventeenth century.5 George Gordon, marquess of Huntly, travelled to France in 1623 to breathe new life into the Gens d’armes, but returned to Scotland in 1624 on finding the unit effectively moribund.6 Upon Charles I’s accession to the throne in 1625, Stuart–Bourbon relations rapidly deteriorated, despite his recent marriage to Henrietta Maria.7 Within two years, Charles had blundered his way into war against her brother, Louis XIII. He did so at a time when his own sister, Elizabeth Stuart, the exiled queen of Bohemia, was desperately seeking allies for the coalition then fighting (partly) on her behalf against the Holy Roman Empire. Many of the belligerents hoped France might be persuaded to join the anti-Habsburg alliance, but that would take several more years and changes of circumstance to occur. The Scottish context to the Franco-British wars is often overlooked, but only a third of the six-thousand-strong Stuart army engaged against Louis XIII at La Rochelle in 1627 were English. Some two thousand Scots were present, commanded by William Douglas, earl of Morton, and another two thousand were Irish.8 There was, however, a further dimension to Scottish aggression against France which is also seldom commented upon. In 1621 King James assigned the territory of Nova Scotia to Sir William Alexander, who, with others, conceived of settlements there and on Cape Breton.9 The proposed Scottish colony proved difficult to populate, despite repeated encouragements to settlers. This all changed in 1627, when war broke out between Britain and France and Cardinal Richelieu sought to reassert French claims to Nova Scotia.10 Sir William Alexander exploited the situation by obtaining permission from Charles I to expand his territory deeper into New France.11 Under the 1629 Treaty of Susa, which concluded the war between (Edinburgh, 1835). For a manuscript history of the Scots Guards in France see Bibliothèque Nationale de France [BNF], Recueil de pièces, manuscrites et imprimées, relatives au Conseil d’État, à l’office de Chancelier, à la Maison du Roi, à différentes charges; extraits de Registres de la Chambre des Comptes, fols 428–39. 5 See Henri Duc de Rohan in Early Travellers in Scotland, ed. P. Hume Brown (Edinburgh, 1891), pp. 93–4. 6 Francisque-Michel, Les Ecossais en France, les Francais en Eccosse (2 vols, London, 1862), II, p. 278; David Stevenson, ‘Gordon, George, Second Marquess of Huntly (c.1590–1649)’, ODNB. 7 Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, CT, 1992), pp. 20–2. 8 Charles Rogers (ed.), The Earl of Stirling’s Register of Royal Letters; Relative to the Affairs of Scotland and Nova Scotia, 1615–1635 (2 vols, Edinburgh, 1885), I, pp. 200–1; Steve Murdoch, Britain, Denmark-Norway and the House of Stuart, 1603–1660: A Diplomatic and Military Analysis (East Linton, 2003), p. 67. 9 Rogers (ed.), Register, I, p. xv. 10 Rogers (ed.), Register, I, p. xxvi. 11 David Dobson, ‘Seventeenth-century Scottish Communities in the Americas’, in Scottish Communities Abroad in the Early Modern Period, ed. Alexia Grosjean and Steve Murdoch (Leiden, 2005), pp. 109–14; Murdoch, Terror of the Seas? pp. 173–4.

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Britain and France in Europe, some parts of the newly acquired Scottish territory were restored to France, with the rest restored under the 1632 Treaty of St Germain.12 Some scholars have claimed that Scottish participation in the Franco-Stuart war necessarily ended any residual military aspect of the Auld Alliance.13 Yet questions remain. To what extent did the French view the settlements as Scottish, rather than simply expansionist British projects of the House of Stuart and renegade French Calvinists? Did the French distinguish between contesting allegiances of Scots during the conflict? Evidence for this latter proposition is highlighted in the Richelieu papers, which show Huntly directly implicated in a conspiracy with French and Scottish Catholics to reinstate Catholicism in Scotland. More provocatively, the French hoped he would raise forces to invade England and foment civil war across the British Isles.14 Monsieur Wattson, the Scottish agent sent by Richelieu to ascertain these possibilities, returned to France in early 1629. Perhaps the French government was simply looking opportunistically for allies. Conversely, there may have been some residual memory that, when at war, France traditionally asked the Scots for help – even if, on this occasion, the Scottish monarch was the enemy. Whatever the motive for Monsieur Wattson’s journey, we can be certain that as France prepared to enter the wider anti-Habsburg alliance, they did so with Scotland very much in mind. Within a year of the 1632 Treaty of St Germain, Scots increasingly figured militarily in France’s conflicts with her neighbours. Of course, there are many reasons why France may have wished to recruit foreigners beyond the allegedly moribund Auld Alliance. Not least was latent suspicion of her own Protestant population, recently brought to heel with the retaking of La Rochelle in 1628.15 However, raising an army to match the size and standard of other powers in the Thirty Years’ War required a rethink of French recruiting policy towards both foreigners and French Protestants.16 This prompted an extensive recruitment campaign led by Richelieu, bringing German, Swiss, Italian, Irish, Swedish, Croatian and Hungarian as well as Scottish regiments into his armies.17 Nevertheless, levying foreign troops was considerably more expensive than recruiting Frenchmen, and, on average, foreign recruits made up only 10 per 12

Treaty of Susa, 19 April 1629 and the Treaty of St Germain, 29 March 1632, BNF, Département des Manuscrits. Dupuy 604, fols 9–16 and 17–30, respectively. 13 Ian Whyte, Scotland before the Industrial Revolution: An Economic and Social History (London, 1995), p. 272; S.G.E. Lythe, The Economy of Scotland in its European Setting, 1550–1815 (Edinburgh, 2001), p. 211. 14 M. Avenel (ed.), Lettres, Instructions Diplomatiques et Papiers d’état du cardinal de Richelieu (8 vols, Paris, 1853–77), VIII, p. 47, Addenda to III, p. 228. 15 David Parrott, Richelieu’s Army: War, Government and Society in France, 1624–1642 (Cambridge, 2001), p. 289. 16 Parrott, Richelieu’s Army, pp. 44, 47–8. 17 Stéphane Thion, French Armies of the Thirty Years’ War (Auzielle, 2008), p. 100; Parrott, Richelieu’s Army, p. 300.

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cent of the French armies during the Thirty Years’ War.18 So it was that even exiled French Huguenot regiments would eventually return from the Dutch Republic to serve in Cardinal Richelieu’s army, albeit not until after France’s official entry into the war in 1635.19 As we know, direct French military involvement against the Austrian Habsburgs began at least two years before the formal intervention. Having bankrolled the Swedish war effort against the Habsburgs since 1631, they now mustered forces for direct intervention on the Rhine. The commander was the marquis de la Force, and the army included the Gens d’armes – the company longed for by Huntly since the early 1620s, supported by Louis XIII in 1631 and finally deployed by Huntly’s son, Lord George Gordon, in 1632.20 Among the regiment’s captains was one Andrew, Lord Gray, of whom more below.21 However, the French had their eyes on more senior Scottish commanders than Gordon or Gray. Colonel John Hepburn left Swedish service in 1632, having been denied a generalship (partly due to his Catholicism) and after a very public spat with Gustav II Adolf.22 Keen to continue his role against the Habsburgs, he obtained a warrant from Charles I to levy ‘ane standing regiment’ for French service, for which he received permission to recruit 1,200 men, albeit the French hoped he could secure 2,000 soldiers.23 Charles notably mentions that this levy is ‘of ane other nature’, but avoids any direct mention of the Auld Alliance. Nevertheless, the levy was granted and Hepburn’s brother, James Hepburn, along with captains Sir Robert Moray, Sir Colin Campbell of Lundie and Alexander Erskine, among others, signed up to join him.24 Hepburn now commanded 18 Parrott,

Richelieu’s Army, p. 311. Parrott states 10 to 30 per cent, but the percentage reaches the latter only if including the German troops under Bernard of Saxe Weimar. 19 Attestation of Huijbert Maertensz, 26 June 1636, Rotterdam City Archives, ONA Rotterdam, 36/133. Maertensz confirmed that the ship with 400 French soldiers, destined for France, also contained their wives and children, suggesting a permanent return to their homeland from Dutch service. 20 William Gordon, The History of the Ancient, Noble and Illustrious Family of Gordon (2 vols, Edinburgh, 1727), II, pp. 627–9. For the raising of Lord Gordon’s company see RPCS, ed. David Masson, 2nd series, 1625–1660 (8 vols, Edinburgh, 1899–1908), IV, p. 482; Rogers (ed.) Register, II, pp. 586, 588. 21 Gordon, Ancient, Noble and Illustrious Family, p. 627. 22 James Grant, Memoirs and Adventures of Sir John Hepburn (Edinburgh, 1851), p. 190; E. Charvériat, Histoire de la guerre de trente ans, 1618–1648 (2 vols, Paris, 1878), II, p. 125. I would like to thank Elizabeth Scott for our fruitful exchange of sources relating to John Hepburn. See her book The Best Soldier: The Life of Sir John Hepburn. Marshal of France and First Colonel of the Royal Scots, 1598–1636 (Hawick, 2011). 23 Rogers (ed.), Register, II, p. 659; RPCS, 2nd series, V, p. 65. He had already mentioned his appointment to the Chancellor of Sweden in February. See John Hepburn to Axel Oxenstierna, 4 February 1633, Riksarkivet, Stockholm, Oxenstiernska Samlingen, E622. For the 2,000 men hoped for by Louis XIII see BNF, Recveil des Gazettes, Novvelles, et Relations […] (Paris, 1633) [hereafter Gazette], p. 111. I thank Xiaoping Qi for alerting me to this source. 24 John Hepburn to Marquis Hamilton, 23 June 1633, NRS, GD 406/1/254; Rogers (ed.), Register, II, pp. 659, 768. For Gordon and Erskine, see John Bruce et al. (eds), Calendar of State

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a significant force of ‘Strangeris’ within the French army, comprising his Scots and totalling some six thousand non-French troops, for use against the duke of Lorraine.25 With this foreign legion, he joined the maréchal de la Force’s army, which successfully occupied Hagenau and Saverne.26 Indeed, during the subsequent campaign Hepburn negotiated the surrender of numerous imperial garrisons along the Rhine.27 He thereafter campaigned with distinction at the siege of La Mothe in Lorraine between May and July.28 In recognition of his efforts there, Hepburn was promoted to maréchal de camp – roughly the equivalent of a lieutenant-general – thereby granting him the same rank as de la Force himself.29 Reports circulated that Hepburn’s command had increased to ten thousand men (again mostly foreigners), who were to be used to assist the ‘Princes in Germany’.30 The Scottish theologian John Durie, writing from Frankfurt only months later, estimated the size of the ‘de la Force–Hepburn army’ as twenty thousand infantry and four thousand cavalry. If correct, this indicates that Hepburn now controlled almost half the main French field army raised for the campaign.31 By this stage, many of Hepburn’s ‘Strangeris’ were Scots, and numerous commanders besides Hepburn were getting themselves noticed. The French wanted to increase the number of foreign recruits, and it was here that Louis XIII directly invoked the Auld Alliance – but not before the intervention of George, Lord Seton, with marquis Hamilton, noting the French king’s incredulity over the delay in getting more Scots.32 The Refusal that hes bin maid of ther levies hes bin Mervelit at, for the Refuseil is ane dereck breik of our auld Ancient allians, for it is serten that qhuan the king My Master suld Require to the Number of ten thousand Men our kingdome is oblygt to permet

Papers Domestic of the Reign of Charles I (24 vols, London, 1853–93) [CSPD], 1634–1635, p. 386. For Colin Campbell of Lundie and the other officers under Gordon in place by 29 October 1633, see Francisque-Michel, Les Ecossais en France, pp. 284–5. 25 John Hepburn to Marquis Hamilton, Paris, 23 June 1633, NRS, GD 406/1/254. 26 Anon., The History of the Present Warres of Germany: A Sixth Part (London, 1634), pp. 65–71; G. Peblis [Peebles] to Marquis Hamilton, 17 February 1634, NRS, GD 406/1/9340; BNF, Gazette (1633), p. 387. 27 Anon., The Modern History of the World. Or An Historical Relation of the most memorable passages in Germany, and else-where, since the beginning of this present Yeere 1635. Divided into three sections (London, 1635), I, pp. 8, 11, 15. 28 See Anon., The Modern History of the World, III, pp. 57–8; Gazette (1634), pp. 119, 143, 201, 215; G. Clanché, Sir John Hepburn, Maréchal de France: inhumé à la Cathédrale de Toul en 1636 (Toul, 1918), pp. 20–2. 29 Avenel (ed.), Lettres, Instructions Diplomatiques, IV, p. 710; Clanché, Sir John Hepburn, pp. 12–13; Thion, French Armies, p. 63. 30 HMC 10th Report (London, 1885), pp. 47–8. 31 Gunnar Westin (ed.), Negotiations about Church Unity 1628–1634: John Durie, Gustavus Adolphus, Axel Oxenstierna (Uppsala, 1932), p. 304. 32 Louis XIII to Marquis Hamilton, 10 October 1634, NRS, GD 406/1/9326; George Lord Seton to Hamilton, 7 October 1634, NRS, GD 406/1/8389.

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Steve Murdoch the sam, as also quhan our king suld Desyre to the Lyk Number of Frenchmen, his Majestie is oblygt to furnis bothe Men and Silver to pay them.

It could not be more explicitly expressed: Charles I’s refusal to allow Hepburn to complete his levy ran contrary to the terms of the Auld Alliance in French eyes and ‘hes bin Marvelit at’. Crucially – and perhaps for the first time in the early modern period – Seton gives a military definition to the alliance: Charles was obliged to send ten thousand men to France when requested, as the French were obliged to reciprocate. The origin of this number remains obscure, but it was a levy many in Scotland would seek to honour, albeit it would take time. Suitably chastened, Charles I finally began the process of raising the forces requested. James Hepburn was in London directly petitioning for more recruits for his brother, new levies were authorised and some two thousand more Scots joined Hepburn’s ever-growing army.33 The Auld Alliance was shown to be a meaningful military as well as commercial alliance at this juncture, and accepted as such in both Scotland and France, if reluctantly by Charles I. By this point Richelieu considered Hepburn to be among the finest officers of the French army.34 Further, the number of Scots levies continued to increase throughout 1635 and 1636, indicating a desire to fulfil obligations.35 With these new recruits, Hepburn crossed the Rhine again on 19 December 1635, relieving Heidelberg in the Palatinate soon after.36 It was for these actions that the Régiment d’Hebron became formalised as the premier Scottish unit (and the commander reputedly elevated to the status of maréchal de France) by Louis XIII in the spring of 1636.37 Hepburn died by a gunshot to the neck at the siege 33

There appears doubt in older scholarship that James Hepburn really was John Hepburn’s brother. This is most obviously stated when a third brother petitioned the Scottish Privy Council as ‘brother german’ to both Colonel John and Lieutenant Colonel James Hepburn on 26 July 1636, thus casting traditional Hepburn genealogies in doubt. See RPCS, 2nd series, VI, p. 603. For James being described as John’s brother and raising levies in London see BNF, Gazette (1634), p. 375. See also Gazette (1635), p. 667; for the permission to raise levies in Scotland, see RPCS, 2nd series, VI, pp. 140–1, 157, 305, 401–2, 666. 34 Avenel (ed.), Lettres, Instructions Diplomatiques, IV, p. 714. Hepburn is credited as one of ‘the first officers who taught [the French] how to make war on the sound principles revived by Gustavus’, along with the Count of Rantzau. See G. Hooper, Abraham Fabert Governor of Sedan: Marshal of France, the first who rose from the ranks (London, 1892), p. 116. For his campaigns in late 1634 see BNF, Gazette (1635), pp. 6–8, 12. 35 RPCS, 2nd series, VI, pp. 140–1, 157. Warrants both dated 2 November 1635 for Captain Alexander Gordon (a nephew of the earl of Sutherland) and Captain Robert Toures. 36 BNF, Gazette (1636), pp. 56, 80, 128, 131, 263, 373–4. 37 The Régiment de Hebron is said to have had three senior officers: Colonel Sir John Hepburn, Lieutenant-Colonel Munro, and Major Sir Patrick Monteith. It included 45 captains, 1 lieutenant-captain, 45 lieutenants, 48 ensigns, 4 surgeons, 6 adjutants, 2 chaplains, 1 drum-major, 1 piper, 88 sergeants, 288 corporals, 288 lance-corporals, 96 drummers, and 48 companies each consisting of 150 musketeers and pikemen, totalling some 8,316 men. For this breakdown, see Grant, Memoirs, p. 231; Clanché, Sir John Hepburn, pp. 24–5. Neither account factors in Lieutenant Colonel James Hepburn, who recruited in Britain in 1635. See

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of Saverne in July, never receiving this distinction in person.38 Richelieu aimed to maintain a Catholic officer in charge of each foreign regiment, and command had originally been intended for James Douglas, a Catholic, rather than James Hepburn, a ‘Huguenot’.39 However, by October 1637 the second Hepburn brother died while leading the regiment at Damvilliers in Lorraine and Douglas took over command. The regiment retained the Hepburn name until 1642. France was eager to secure yet more Scottish recruits, and here we enter the realm of intrigue again. In September 1637, Cardinal Richelieu sent his Almoner, ‘l’Abbé Chambre’ (Thomas Chambers), to Scotland on the first of several missions.40 He was tasked with exploring the best way to hire six thousand Scottish troops, with which Richelieu hoped to form three discrete new regiments. The cardinal emphasised that in Louis XIII’s eyes Scotland was a nation of great worth to France, and one which held great affection towards France.41 Chambers was to meet men the French could trust, including Lord Andrew Gray, who was in Scotland levying one thousand Scots destined for France in late 1638.42 Gray’s was possibly one of the two regiments mentioned again by Richelieu in October 1638 and guaranteed by Queen Henrietta Maria personally.43 David Stevenson believes Gray could not possibly have raised troops, given that the Covenanters were largely in control of the country at this juncture.44 Richelieu had instructed his ambassador in England to make it known that Charles might benefit from allowing disaffected Scots to enlist for France in order to get them out of the country, given the deteriorating domestic situation in Britain. By November he was again talking in terms of five thousand men, offering to personally make up any financial shortfall, should the ambassadorial coffers not suffice.45 Although Gray did raise his regiment and Andrew variously David Laing (ed.), A Diary of the Public Correspondence of Sir Thomas Hope of Craighall, 1633–1645 (Edinburgh, 1893), p. 21. March 1635; Gazette (1635), August 1635. 38 For Hepburn’s actions and death at Saverne see BNF, Gazette (1636), pp. 395, 432; Clanché, Sir John Hepburn, pp. 11, 29, 30. Louis XIV later had a marvellous monument erected on John Hepburn’s tomb, engraved with Le meilleur soldat du monde chréstien, et par conséquent de l’Univers. Reproduced in Clanché, Sir John Hepburn, p. 29. 39 David Parrott, ‘Hepburn [Hebron], James (d. 1637)’, ODNB. 40 He was known to Richelieu as Sieur Deschambres and was perhaps a professor at the Scots College in Paris in 1637. See B.M. Halloran, The Scots College Paris 1603–1792 (Edinburgh, 1997), p. 14. He was not ‘l’Abbé Chambre’ (Thomas Chambers), who was also in the employ of Richelieu, and who was also sent to Scotland around the same time. See Avenel (ed.), Lettres, Instructions Diplomatiques, V, p. 850. 41 Avenel (ed.), Lettres, Instructions Diplomatiques, V, pp. 847–9. In the note on the following page, Avenel makes a case for there being two men called Chambers on missions from Richelieu to Scotland at the same time. 42 RPCS, 2nd series, VII, pp. 103–4. Captain ‘Baron de Grais’ of Hepburn’s regiment had been reported as being killed in 1634, obviously erroneously. See BNF, Gazette (1634), p. 256. 43 Avenel (ed.), Lettres, Instructions Diplomatiques, VI, pp. 211–13. 44 David Stevenson, ‘Gray, Andrew, seventh Lord Gray (d. 1663)’, ODNB. 45 Avenel (ed.), Lettres, Instructions Diplomatiques, VI, pp. 238–40.

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Melvill joined it by 1639, whether it made it to France at that juncture is unclear but likely.46 Indeed, there were still Scots operating in French theatres of conflict. Colonel George Leslie commanded one thousand Scots in Bernhard of Saxe Weimar’s army along the Rhine, where he was joined by Arvid ‘Alexander’ Forbus in command of a regiment bearing his name.47 Whether Richelieu meant what he said about helping Charles by depopulating Scotland of possible malcontents, or whether something else was going on is debatable. Richelieu was well aware that Charles was moving ever closer to Spain. The cardinal’s actions and interests must also be contrasted against those of Henrietta Maria, operating in her husband’s interests. Charles had certainly been persuaded by his councillors that the French were in collusion with the Covenanters, who, by 1639, had fielded an army against him. Indeed, one of his secretaries wrote to a colleague: ‘you will understand what heavy burden the French begin to lay upon our merchants, and how they favour the Scots after the old manner’ – an allusion to the Auld Alliance.48 This raises an interesting question: why would Catholic France, and especially Cardinal Richelieu’s government, favour Calvinist Scots over Charles I and his Bourbon bride? The mechanisms by which the Covenanters won this diplomatic war have been covered elsewhere, but need to be summarised here for what follows in the 1640s to make sense.49 Long before the outbreak of hostilities between Charles and the Covenanters in January 1639, the Covenanting leadership had been planning their every move, from raising troops to organising the shipping of men and weapons back to Scotland, in order to be in a position to back their demands with military force. We can date the origins of their planning to the fallout from Charles’s coronation in Scotland and his subsequent holding of Parliament in 1633. Plotting to build the Army of the Covenant began soon after, with Alexander Leslie (the future earl of Leven) being the first recorded as wanting to return from Germany to defend the ‘Religio Patria’ the following year.50 From then onwards, Scottish communities in Europe and soldiers in foreign service were exploited to advantage. Various governments were informed as to why armed force might be required to bring Charles I into line. In some locations, such as the Dutch Republic, Calvinism was highlighted as a premier 46

Torick Ameer-Ali (ed.), Memoirs of Sir Andrew Melvill (London, 1918), p. 74. Melvill merely says he joined the regiment, and that they took no part in the Bishops’ Wars, suggesting they were overseas. 47 William P. Guthrie, The Later Thirty Years War: From the Battle of Wittstock to the Treaty of Westphalia (Westport, 2003), p. 98. For George Leslie and Arvid Forbus see Murdoch and Grosjean, Alexander Leslie, p. 66. Forbus was subsequently nominated to be an official conduit between the Swedish and French forces due to this deployment. See Severin Bergh (ed.), Svenska Riksrådets Protokoll, Bind VII (Stockholm, 1895), p. 575, Council minute, 14 August 1639. For a mention of the ‘Forbus’ regiment and his status as ‘Mestre de Camp Escosssois’ see Gazette (1635), p. 667. 48 CSPD, 1638–39, p. 143. 49 Murdoch and Grosjean, Alexander Leslie, pp. 103–8. 50 Ibid., p. 94.

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motivation; in Sweden, it was the continuation of the religious war for which so many Scots had fought and died over the previous twenty years. In Denmark and France, meanwhile, the intention was simply to seek familial arbitration by Charles’s relatives (his uncle and brother-in-law, respectively) to bring the king to his senses.51 The Covenanters were surprised to find unexpected avenues of support opening up in France, tied directly to French participation in the Thirty Years’ War, and an apparently genuine desire by many in the French government to help the Scots. This desire was strengthened by Richelieu’s deep distrust of Charles I, who had not only proved himself unreasonable by his rash war against France in 1627; Richelieu also believed (correctly) that he was too close to Spain, and raised such suspicions as early as 1634.52 Moreover, Charles had consistently hampered French attempts to gain the Scottish troops they believed the terms of the Auld Alliance entitled them to, as noted in numerous letters from Richelieu, Louis XIII and Lord Seton throughout the 1630s. Writing to the comte d’Estrades in London in December 1637, Richelieu again mentioned Thomas Chambers’s mission to Scotland, and stated explicitly that before the year was out: ‘The King and Queen of England will be very sorry for having refused the offers you have made to them on behalf of the King [of France] … People will soon learn that I am not to be scorned.’53 The Scots, on the other hand, had provided a number of excellent commanders and fielded several regiments. Although the cardinal wanted Catholics, he expected the majority would be Protestants; he was apparently unconcerned by this when looking for soldiers to continue the campaign against both Spain and the Holy Roman Empire.54 In the ensuing months, Richelieu sent more agents to Britain to establish the strengths and weaknesses of the contesting parties. One of these was his agent Sir Robert Moray, embedded in the Army of the Covenant as quartermaster general.55 Other officers also cashiered themselves from French service to fight alongside Moray, including Colonel Sir James Ramsay.56 The full extent of this support, and the number of returning veterans, is yet to be established, but supplies were considerable.57 In May 1640, four French ships carrying arms to

51

The diplomacy of the Covenanters with the Continental powers is discussed in Murdoch and Grosjean, Alexander Leslie, pp. 103–13. 52 Avenel (ed.), Lettres, Instructions Diplomatiques, IV, p. 563. 53 M.V. Hay (ed.), The Blair Papers (London, 1929), p. 126. 54 Avenel (ed.), Lettres, Instructions Diplomatiques, VI, pp. 211–13. 55 Alexander Robertson, The Life of Sir Robert Moray (London, 1922), pp. 3–10. Robertson was uncertain of the nature of his return, his actual role, or the duration of his stay. Nevertheless, Moray’s rank in the Army of the Covenant is given in the document recording his initiation into the Edinburgh Lodge of Freemasons, dated Newcastle, 20 May 1641. The document is reproduced in D. Murray-Lyon, The History of Freemasonry in Scotland (Edinburgh, 1873), p. 96; See also RPS, M1641/8/7. 56 RPS, M1641/8/234. 57 F. Guizot, History of the English Revolution of 1640, from the Accession of Charles I to his Death (London, 1903), p. 79.

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Scotland were arrested near Berwick.58 However, while some supplies did not reach the Covenanters, Charles I was also denied resources. Crucially, he failed to get the ten thousand Frenchmen Louis XIII had indicated he was entitled to under the terms of the Auld Alliance. This lack of support for Charles and overt support for the Covenanters is a possible indicator that Scotland – not its monarch – was the partner in the ancient relationship. As noted above, the main French civilian agent in Scotland was Abbot Thomas Chambers rather than Moray or Ramsay, although he also had some connections with the military.59 A brother to the senior Covenanter John Erskine, earl of Mar, Alexander was one of the captains who enlisted with Hepburn in 1633 along with Robert Moray. Erskine had received permission to raise troops in Britain in 1638, including five hundred Englishmen.60 Among the agents of Thomas Chambers we also find a Mr Erskine mentioned by name, while the agent William Colville pretended to be an officer in Erskine’s regiment to facilitate his free passage between Scotland and France.61 But there is more intrigue surrounding the regiment of Alexander Erskine than its use as a cover for espionage. Erskine now commanded a regiment ‘owned’ by his brother, Lord Erskine’s Foot. As already noted, Henrietta Maria guaranteed the raising of this regiment, but she could not have known that the Covenanters had no intention of allowing it out of the country. The Covenanters used the warrants issued in Charles’s name to openly recruit and train a Scottish regiment which was officially in French service, but which they deployed in the field against the king who had authorised its recruitment. They informed the French that their retention of the regiment would not prejudice but, rather, benefit France in the long run as, once peace was settled, it could be transferred. It would, therefore, consist of battle-hardened veterans rather than raw levies and thus be of greater service when it finally arrived. As they explained: ‘we good Scots shall never forget the old alliances and interests which we have in common with France’.62 They were true to their word, and at the end of the Bishops’ Wars in 1641, Lord Erskine’s Foot were duly dispatched as promised as part of a Covenanting dividend paid to the French for their support during the recent conflict. This comprised part of an intended troop deployment almost exactly matching that spelled out by Louis XIII in 1634, although the regiment arrived without its colonel. Alexander Erskine had been killed in August the previous year while on campaign with the Army of the Covenant.63 58

CSPD, 1640, pp. 244–5. Avenel (ed.), Lettres, Instructions Diplomatiques, VI, p. 688; V. Marcu, The Birth of the Nations from the Unity of Faith to the Democracy of Money (London, 1932), pp. 211–13. 60 See CSPD, 1638–1639, p. 150. 61 CSPD, 1639, p. 97; CSPD, 1640, p. 104. 62 HMC 4th Report (London, 1874), Appendix, p. 524. 63 Here I take the opportunity to correct Murdoch and Grosjean, Alexander Leslie, p. 150, where it stated that Erskine arrived with the regiment. I thank Edward Furgol for the updated information.

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Another regiment entered French service in 1642 under the command of James Campbell, earl of Irvine (Lord Kintyre).64 This was the Régiment d’infanterie Écossais, known thereafter as the Garde Écossaise despite having no connection to the historic unit of the same name. This regiment was to be granted the same pay and privileges as the French and Swiss guards, including freedom of religion. Moreover, they were encouraged to beat ‘The Scots March’ once deployed, in recognition of the renowned psychological impact that drum beat had achieved.65 Existing Scottish units were also granted further levies that year. One beneficiary was James Fullerton, who, in securing permission for five hundred new recruits, was allowed to add these to remnant Scottish companies to form yet another regiment.66 Colonel James Douglas, who had taken over Hepburn’s regiment in 1637, was also given permission to raise further Scottish recruits, and from this time his regiment bore his name.67 In addition to the ‘Covenanting dividend’, one can attribute this recruitment, in part, to the reaffirmation of the Auld Alliance as advocated for by Charles I in 1642, albeit the military dimension was not explicitly stated in his missive.68 Total recruitment would consist of five full regiments plus the company of ancient Gens d’armes (now reduced again to one hundred men). The largest regiment, the earl of Irvine’s Garde Écossaise, was projected to stand at around 4,500 soldiers as per all other French Guards regiments. Douglas was to maintain his regiment at two thousand men, while Lord Andrew Gray, Sir Colin Campbell of Lundie and Colonel James Fullerton would each have a regiment of 1,000 men. The ‘numbers of Scotch’ already in French service between 1642 and 1643 was roughly estimated at 3,500 men, dispersed mostly between the Regiment de Douglas and Garde Écossaise, and a total of 9,600 was expected to be reached by the end of the year.69 They were joined 64

For Irvine’s relationship with his half-brother, the first marquess of Argyll, see Allan I. Macinnes, The British Revolution, 1629–1660 (Basingstoke, 2005), pp. 126, 159. The details of this regiments’ constitution and rates of pay are found in BNF, Département des Manuscrits. Français 21451, fols 206–9: ‘Capitulation du Regiment des gardes Escossois, du 27e fevrier 1642’. I thank Marc Jaffré for sharing this reference with me. 65 BNF, Département des Manuscrits. Français 21451, fol. 207: ‘aussi battront leur marche Escossoise’. For more on the ‘Scots March’ and its use during the Thirty Years’ War see Alexia Grosjean, ‘The Scandinavian Service of British Isles Musicians, c. 1520–1650’, Northern Studies, 48 (2016), 30. 66 RPCS, 2nd series, VII, p. 281. 67 RPCS, 2nd series, VII, pp. 302–3, 372, 450, 460, 573, 586, 638. 68 ‘His Majesties missive anent the Privileges of the Scots in France’, 10 October 1642 cited in MacDonald (ed.), Papers Relative to the Royal Guard, p. xiv. 69 William Bray (ed.), The Diary of John Evelyn, volume IV (London, 1882 edn), p. 382. ‘Lundy’ here is indexed as James Campbell of Lundy, when that is actually the earl of Irvine (Lord Kintyre) who also held a title called Lord Lundy. He is conflated here with Sir Colin Campbell of Lundie, who served in France under George Gordon in 1633. For Sir Colin’s service see Francisque-Michel, Les Ecossais en France, p. 284; G. Fotheringham (ed.), The Diplomatic Correspondence of Jean de Montereul and the Brothers de Bellievre, French Ambassadors in England and Scotland, 1645–1648 (2 vols, Edinburgh, 1898), II, p. 337. For the other officers, see also RPCS, 2nd series, VII, pp. 247–8, 281, 302, 330; Thion, French Armies, pp. 80, 82.

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by English and Irish regiments, while a General Commissioner and entire secretariat was established to oversee the troops from the British Isles.70 The hold-up in the actual deployment was not always due to the lack of volunteers; Sir Colin Campbell of Lundie was initially arrested with his recruits in Scotland, but later released to continue on his way to France.71 Those regiments and companies that did arrive in 1643 soon found themselves in the thick of the campaigns of the Thirty Years’ War. The (new) Garde Écossaise participated in the battle of Rocroi on 16 May 1643, in which the French secured a major victory against the Spanish. The Scots fought in the second line of the main battalia, apparently without taking too many casualties, and were among several regiments to receive plaudits afterwards. Indeed, the French rated the Scots as equal to the Swiss and the Irish when ranking the top three of the fourteen foreign units in their army.72 The French wanted more Scots to replace their losses. Abbot Chambers sent his cousin, Captain Leith, to Scotland on a recruitment drive with Fullerton and one Captain Hepburn.73 They succeeded in raising at least two shiploads of recruits, one of which left Scotland from Aberdeen, the other from Leith. The recruits included freely enlisted men, veterans of the Bishops’ Wars, a few vagabonds, some religiously oppressed exiles and a Catholic priest with a price on his head – Gilbert Blakhal. Numbers of the less reputable among the recruits are often exaggerated, and we know that of Fullerton’s five hundred men, only eight are identified so far as somewhat dubious characters, while other redemption service soldiers were also only a handful in number.74 These recruits arrived in Dieppe in August and were soon needed. In their final military encounter of the year, the battle of Tüttlingen on 24 November, the Garde Écossaise was severely mauled. The battle was a catastrophic loss for the French altogether: some eight French generals and nine colonels were captured, along with around seven

Musters for Irvine’s Garde Écossaise can be found in BNF, Département des Manuscrits. Français, 25858, n. 1223. Montres, October 1642. 70 BNF, Louis XIV, Édict … portant création en hérédité d’un commissaire général à la conduite du régiment escossois … (Paris, 1644). It is explicit within this text that the Irish and English regiments in French service fall under the same Commissioner as the Scottish ones. This includes the Régiment du Hill Anglois noted alongside the Scottish regiments in BNF, Département des Manuscrits. Français, 22.623 (1643). I thank Pere Christofol for sharing this curious aide-mémoire with me. Dated 1643, it contains retrospective and misdated musters from 1645. 71 Fotheringham (ed.), Correspondence, II, p. 541. The arrival of six of Lundie’s companies is noted in BNF, Département des Manuscrits. Français, 22.623 (1643), fols 172, 197. 72 BNF, Département des Manuscrits. Français, 21451, fol. 205; Thion, French Armies, pp. 108, 129. 73 Gilbert Blakhal, A Brieffe Narration of the Services done to Three Noble Ladyes, 1631–1649 (Aberdeen, 1894), pp. 136–7. 74 Blakhal, A Brieffe Narration, pp. 181, 187. For prisoner recruitment see RPCS, 2nd series, VII, pp. 450, 573.

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thousand men taken prisoner and four thousand killed.75 Of these, Scottish losses included the capture of Sir Robert Moray and seven other officers, after which the Garde Écossaise could muster only some four hundred men, less than 10 per cent of its former strength.76 Only around 4,500 soldiers escaped back to the French garrisons on the Rhine after a bleak day for the French military establishment.77 Meanwhile, Douglas and his men had been deployed to Italy, from where they sought to be brought back, because the ‘climate is dangerous for the Scots, who have been reared in a cold climate’.78 Battlefield losses and heat exhaustion took their toll. There were soon further setbacks for the Scots in French service. In September 1645 the earl of Irvine died. The Covenanters asked the French to maintain the Garde Écossaise and promised to keep it at strength with ‘good Gentlemen’.79 Colonel James Douglas was killed the following month while commanding his regiment in a small action on the Flanders border.80 The recently ransomed Sir Robert Moray was nominated as colonel of the Garde Écossaise – not least due to his strong connections with the military leaders of Scotland and England, which were forged during the Bishops’ Wars.81 He was commissioned to recruit 1,200 fresh soldiers, while Archibald Douglas, titular 12th earl of Angus, took over his late brother’s regiment upon assurances he would raise another one thousand men to replenish it. Although primary sources contain multiple references to both Moray’s and Douglas’s regiments, there is considerable confusion among historians as to their strength, disposition and command structures.82 Both men spent their time in Britain recruiting rather than serving in the field, although Moray appears to have recruited only around three hundred new men, while Douglas fared little better. Moray eventually recruited some prisoners of war taken by the Covenanters during the civil wars.83 We know from extant 75

Peter Wilson, Europe’s Tragedy: A New History of the Thirty Years War (London, 2010), pp. 642–4. 76 Robertson, Moray, pp. 29, 62. 77 J.V. Polisensky, The Thirty Years’ War (London, 1971), p. 223. 78 Fotheringham (ed.), Correspondence, II, p. 544. 79 Fotheringham (ed.), Correspondence, I, p. 12. 80 Parrott, ‘Douglas, Lord James (c.1617–1645)’, ODNB; Robertson, Moray, p. 63. 81 Fotheringham (ed.), Correspondence, I, p. 16. 82 The complications of fulfilling the levies for the two notionally separate regiments are discussed fully in Fotheringham (ed), Correspondence, I, pp. 1, 23–4, 45, 66, 100–1, 138–9, 154, 155; Robertson, Moray, pp. 63–74, 76. However, Matthew Glozier believes the Régiment de Douglas to be the only Scottish unit to have survived the war. Parrott, Thion and Robertson refer only to the Garde Écossaise after 1646 (with Robertson having the Garde in existence until 1662). Moreover, Glozier confusingly dates the death of James Douglas and the transfer of command to Archibald Douglas to 1647. See Matthew Glozier, ‘Scots in the French and Dutch Armies’, in Scotland and the Thirty Years’ War, 1618–1648, ed. Steve Murdoch (Leiden, 2001), p. 123. 83 Fotheringham (ed.), Correspondence, II, p. 103. The practice of recruiting prisoners of war was also used to replenish the four regiments of the Anglo-Dutch Brigade. See Steve

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correspondence that the Gens d’armes were still active in 1647.84 Moreover, there were also many soldiers disbanded from the Army of the Solemn League and Covenant actively seeking positions in France, both individually and with whole regiments, throughout that year.85 In February 1647 Moray had been confident he could recruit these for Louis XIV.86 Although the subsequent troubles caused by the Engagement crisis of 1647–48 hindered these deployments, we know that many made it into French service. One such was Andrew Melvill, who opted for French service while his brother – not liking the French lifestyle – moved on to serve the Venetians, apparently unperturbed by the heat.87 From Melvill’s account we learn that he was wounded, and that the Scots played a part in the taking of Lens in 1647.88 They were back at Lens the following year for the last great field battle of the Thirty Years’ War. The Garde Écossaise was one of seven foreign regiments present, forming the first line of the centre with the Garde Suisse the Garde Française and the vieux regiments.89 The Scots found themselves isolated when four of the five French battalions recoiled, leaving the Garde Écossaise and Garde Française standing their ground unsupported. Even although the French guards were eventually overrun, the Scots held their ground until their opposition, the Spanish infantry, had to capitulate after the Habsburg cavalry had been routed and left the infantry surrounded.90 Lens was a resounding victory for the French in which the Scots played a crucial role. The Thirty Years’ War ended less than two months later, but the Scots remained in French service until the final dissolution of the foreign guards’ regiments at the French Revolution. It is demonstrated here that the Auld Alliance was invoked time and again by both French and Scottish authorities throughout the Thirty Years’ War. There is no doubt that the de facto governments in both France and Scotland did so for practical reasons as well as a genuine sense of amity. Remembering the Stuart–Bourbon war of the 1620s, one might conclude that the French ascribed the war to the government of Charles I while conceiving the Scots as distinct from the increasingly Anglicised House of Stuart. The emphatic use of terms such as ‘ancient’ or ‘auld’ to describe the alliance in correspondence in the aftermath of the war appears to confirm this. Lord Seton, in 1634, articulated Murdoch, ‘Nicrina ad Heroas Anglos; An overview of the British and the Thirty Years’, in Britain Turned Germany: The Thirty Years’ War and its Impact on the British Isles 1638–1660, ed. Serena Jones (Warwick, 2019; reprinted 2020), p. 32. 84 Fotheringham (ed.), Correspondence, II, p. 218. 85 Ibid., pp. 29–33. 86 Sir Robert Moray to (?), 9/19 February 1646/47. BNF, Ambassades de MM. Nicolas de Bellièvre et Pompone II de Bellièvre, sr de Grignon, en Angleterre; lettres de Mr de Montereul, résident en Écosse. (1645–1649) fol. 98. 87 Ameer-Ali, Memoirs of Sir Andrew Melvill, p. 79. 88 Ameer-Ali, Memoirs of Sir Andrew Melvill, pp. 80–1. 89 Thion, French Armies, p. 132. 90 Wilson, Europe’s Tragedy, p. 732. For the role of the Garde Écossaise at Lens, see Guthrie, The Later Thirty Years’ War, p. 192.

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the presumption of military assistance in no uncertain terms. To Louis XIII the alliance was not vague but entailed specific military expectations. Charles I’s failure to adequately facilitate this military support led Cardinal Richelieu and Louis XIII to turn to trusted Scottish contacts, military and civilian, to maintain the alliance in spite of the House of Stuart. In doing so they demonstrated beyond contention that the French prioritised their relationship with the Scottish nation over relations with Charles I despite his marriage to Henrietta Maria. This was testified to both in words and in actions during the Bishops’ Wars. Throughout the period, the Covenanters received financial and logistical support as well as returning personnel. In turn, the French retained a stream of recruits, keeping the Scots involved in every major French military engagement up to the conclusion of the Thirty Years’ War and beyond. Nevertheless, the service and composition of the regiments in France in this period – and especially in the 1640s – has barely been researched when compared to the Scots in Dutch, Danish or Swedish service. Units other than the Garde Écossaise and Régiment de Douglas were in operation. The seven colonels of the five main regiments all require careful study. It will take further research beyond what is achievable in this exploratory essay to fully understand their impact during the Thirty Years’ War.

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6 Scotophobia in Later Stuart England Tim Harris ‘

A

Scotchman’, so relates an English jestbook from 1679, ‘presented King James with a Turnip of an extraordinary and prodigious size, which is a root the Scotchmen love very much.’ James VI and I was so ‘pleased with the humor’ that he gave the Scotsman ‘an hundred pounds’. Another courtier thought to himself, ‘If the King … reward a Turnip-giver so liberally, what will he do to him that offers a greater present’, and gifted the king ‘a very excellent Race-horse’. Taken aback by such generosity, the King turned to his nobles and asked, ‘What shall we give this man?’ and when all were silent proclaimed, ‘By my soul men … let us give him the Turnip.’1 As seventeenth-century jokes go, this is one of the better ones. It comes from a jestbook filled with jokes about foreigners, English religious minorities and country bumpkins. It was published in London (and also Amsterdam) at the height of the Exclusion Crisis in England – a crisis over whether to exclude the Catholic heir, James, duke of York and Albany, from the succession – and a time when Scotland was very much on English people’s minds. But although the book is replete with stereotypical representations of the French, Dutch, Spanish, Welsh, Puritans, Quakers and Papists, it is less obvious what ideological work this story about a Scotsman and the Scottish King James is doing. It serves to remind the English, perhaps, that the Scots were so poor that they were forced to eat turnips, so embodying a stereotype, of sorts, of the Scots. It also plays on a common trope: the English commonly made fun of the food foreigners ate.2 Yet the joke is at the expense of the courtier, who was presumably English. The Scotsman does rather well out of the deal. The story reminds us that the notion of Scottishness was frequently invoked in English culture at this time. Yet, as this essay will show, it could be invoked in a variety of different ways. 1

Democritus Junior, Versatile Ingenium, The Wittie Companion (London, 1679), p. 83. Tim Harris, ‘Francophobia in Late-Seventeenth-Century England’, in Louis XIV Outside In: Images of the Sun King Beyond France, 1661–1715, ed. Tony Claydon and Charles-Édouard Levillain (Farnham, 2015), p. 43. 2

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The early modern English, we have long been taught, were deeply Scotophobic. According to Susan Doran, ‘ethnic prejudices against the Scots were commonplace’ in late Elizabethan England.3 Jenny Wormald found that ‘hatred of the Scots ran through every stratum of English society’ at the time of James VI’s accession to the English throne in 1603.4 Likewise, Keith Lindley and David Scott believe it was ‘typical’ for ‘the early Stuart English’ to harbour ‘anti-Scots prejudices’; indeed, Scott has described ‘anti-Scottish feeling’ as ‘endemic throughout early Stuart England’.5 More recent research, however, suggests that such a view might be too bleak. Although Paul McGinnis and Arthur Williamson accept that ‘xenophobia and Scotophobia flourished abundantly and brutally in Stewart England’, they insist that this ‘is far from the complete picture’.6 Historians have pointed to the existence of a considerable amount of Scotophilia in England on the eve of the English Civil War, not least because of the lead the Scottish Covenanters took in resisting the innovations of Charles I and Archbishop Laud.7 Keith Brown and Allan Kennedy, while acknowledging that England did develop ‘a clear Scotophobic discourse’ in the seventeenth century, have nevertheless shown that Scots who moved to England ‘faced relatively low levels of prejudice’ and that ‘the more colorful examples of Scotophobia were targeted, localised and temporary’.8 As Allan Macinnes has himself pointed out, English attitudes towards the Scots were more complex than is often recognised.9 Moreover, most works that mention Scotophobia in seventeenth-century England focus on the early Stuarts or the period of the civil wars and interregnum. We know much less about what the English thought of the Scots in the later Stuart era.10 3

Susan Doran, ‘Polemic and Prejudice: a Scottish King for an English Throne’, in Doubtful and Dangerous: The Question of Succession in Late Elizabethan England, ed. Susan Doran and Paulina Kewes (Manchester, 2014), p. 218. 4 Jenny Wormald, ‘Gunpowder, Treason, and Scots’, Journal of British Studies, 24 (1985), 141–68, at 160. 5 Keith Lindley and David Scott (eds), The Journal of Thomas Juxon, 1644–1647, Camden Fifth Series, 13 (Cambridge, 1999), p. 27; David Scott, ‘The Barwis Affair: Political Allegiance and the Scots during the British Civil Wars’, EHR, 115 (2000), 843–63, at 858. 6 Paul J. McGinnis and Arthur H. Williamson (eds), The British Union: A Critical Edition and Translation of David Hume of Godscroft’s De Unione Insulae Britannicae (Aldershot, 2002), p. 52. 7 Michael Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars (London, 2009), pp. 82–3, 84–5; Tim Harris, Rebellion: Britain’s First Stuart Kings, 1567–1642 (Oxford, 2014), pp. 394–6. 8 Keith M. Brown and Allan Kennedy, ‘Land of Opportunity? The Assimilation of Scottish Migrants in England, 1603–ca. 1762’, Journal of British Studies, 57 (2018), 709–35, at 731, 733. 9 See, for example, Allan I. Macinnes. ‘The “Scottish Moment”, 1638–45’, in The English Civil War: Conflict and Contexts, 1640–49, ed. John Adamson (Basingstoke, 2009), pp. 134, 144–6. 10 An important recent study is Adam Fox, ‘Jockey and Jenny: English Broadside Ballads and the Invention of Scottishness’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 79 (2016), 201–20.

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This essay will revisit the question of seventeenth-century English Scotophobia, with a particular focus on the Restoration period. Clearly not all English people were Scotophobic; some of them could at times sympathise or identify with the Scots. Furthermore, although the English did stereotype the Scots, there was not a stereotype of the Scots. There were several different stereotypes, which could sometimes get blended together to form a false composite, but which were often disaggregated, so as to lead some people to hold positive views of certain types of Scots and others to hold negative views of other Scots. Instead of trying to explore the English stereotype of the Scot, it is better to ask how the English thought about the Scots and about Scotland. As the essay will show, the English in the Restoration increasingly came to think about the Scots in ways that were tied up with English political and religious allegiances. How the English thought about the Scots, and about Scotland, in other words, was a crucial aspect of English political identity. And the invocation of Scottishness, and of what was going on in Scotland, carried considerable ideological force in the polemical battles of Restoration England. I

It may be true that xenophobia flourished in Stuart England, yet not all xenophobias are the same beasts. Some are, in essence, a fear or hatred of a people from a foreign land, others more a fear of the land or country from which those people come. Some are both. English Hibernophobia, from the late twelfth through to the early seventeenth century, for instance, was at heart a fear or hatred of the Gaelic Irish, of an ethnically distinct people. Over the course of the seventeenth century, however, it came to be more a fear of the Catholics of Ireland, whether Gaelic Irish or of Old English descent. Francophobia in the seventeenth century, by contrast, was more a fear of France and its Catholic absolutist kings. Although the English did engage in negative stereotyping of the French, English polemicists often expressed considerable sympathy for the plight and sufferings of ordinary French people (Catholic as well as Protestant) living under Louis XIV. Hispanophobia was a fear both of Catholic Spain and of Spanish Catholics – of a perceived Spanish national essence.11 Scotophobia, on the surface, appears to have been in the main an antipathy towards the foreigner who hailed from Scotland. It could hardly have been a hatred of the Scottish political system, given the weakness of the Scottish monarchy in the sixteenth century and the fact that from 1603 onwards the crowns of Scotland and England were united (albeit there was a concern about the Scottish system of church government). However, there were different ethnic 11

Tim Harris, ‘Hibernophobia and Francophobia in Restoration England’, Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660–1700, 41 (2017), 5–32; Harris, ‘Francophobia in Late-Seventeenth-Century England’.

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groups in Scotland, and they were stereotyped in different ways. And which types of Scot were most feared or hated (or liked) changed over the course of the seventeenth century. Before asking what the English thought of the Scots, we should ask did they think about them? At what particular moments did the Scots intrude onto the English consciousness? There were certain times when the Scots and Scotland were very much on English people’s minds: during the crisis over Mary Queen of Scots in the 1570s and 1580s; at the time of James VI’s accession to the English throne in 1603; following the outbreak of the Scottish troubles in 1637 and during the civil war and revolution; and, perhaps increasingly so, after the Restoration, in part as a result of the key role the Scots had played in bringing about the mid-century revolution.12 Yet, in the years prior to 1637, according to Edward Hyde, the English had not been thinking much about Scotland at all.13 There were clearly times when the Scots were off the radar, so to speak. When dealing with how the English stereotyped foreigners, or religious minorities for that matter, we have also to consider the extent to which the English would have known or come into contact with such foreigners or minorities. Not many English people in the early seventeenth century would have encountered an actual Turk, for example; the English stereotype of the Turk was an ideological construct, one that few English men or women were likely to have challenged by real-life encounters.14 On the other hand, most English people at this time would have known people who were Puritans, and encounters with real-life Puritans might serve to confirm or else negate the polemical construct of the Puritan developed in print and on the stage.15 English attitudes towards the Irish in the seventeenth century were complex. The English knew Irish people who had migrated to England to take up work, and the Irish in England tended to be represented on the stage as objects of ridicule – but also as likeable and loyal. Yet there was also the fear of the Gaelic Irish, in Ireland, who seemed all the more frightening because they were remote and unknown.16 12

Tim Harris, ‘Publics and Participation in the Three Kingdoms: Was there Such a Thing as “British Public Opinion” in the Seventeenth Century?’, Journal of British Studies, 56 (2017), 731–53. 13 Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and the Civil Wars in England, ed. W.D. Macray (6 vols, Oxford, 1888), I, pp. 145–6. 14 Laura Perille, ‘“A Mirror to Turke”: “Turks” and the Making of Early Modern England’ (Unpublished PhD Thesis, Brown University, 2015); Anders Ingram, Writing the Ottomans: Turkish History in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 2015). 15 Patrick Collinson, ‘Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair: The Theatre Constructs Puritanism’, in The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre, and Politics in London, 1576–1649, ed. David L. Smith, Richard Strier and David Bevington (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 157–69; Tim Harris, ‘“A Sainct in Shewe, a Devill in Deede”: Moral Panics and Anti-Puritanism in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Moral Panics, the Press and the Law in Early Modern England, ed. David Lemmings and Claire Walker (Basingstoke, 2009), pp. 97–116. 16 Harris, ‘Hibernophobia and Francophobia’.

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The English would have been deeply familiar with Lowland Scots, who were descended from the same range of Germanic peoples as were the English and whose Scots language was, as a consequence, similar to English. There was already a sizeable Scottish presence in England by the fifteenth century, particularly in the northernmost counties of Cumberland, Northumberland, Westmorland and Yorkshire, due to the cross-border economy, but also further south, and even in unlikely places such as Lincolnshire.17 Scottish clergy were a visible, and at times disruptive, presence in Elizabethan England. One Londonbased Scottish cleric, who had previously preached against the vestments, provoked the ire of his congregation when he delivered a sermon in St Margaret Pattens on Whit Monday 1566 wearing a surplice; women threw stones at him, pulled him from the pulpit, tore his surplice and scratched his face.18 Scots were railing against James VI and Mary Queen of Scots from pulpits in London and elsewhere in the 1580s, supposedly with the connivance of local Puritans, prompting the government to instruct the bishops to silence them.19 There were even more Scots in England after the union of the crowns in 1603, as they migrated south to settle permanently in various parts of the country; indeed, Calvin’s Case of 1608 gave all Scots born after 1603 the rights of naturalised Englishmen. London was a major magnet: by the end of the seventeenth century it harboured perhaps thirty-five thousand Scots, making it the secondlargest Scottish city in Britain after Edinburgh.20 However, the English would have been much less familiar with Gaelic-speaking Celtic peoples of the Scottish Highlands. When English troops encountered Highlanders in the First Bishops’ War in 1639, they were taken aback by their ‘fantastique habitt’ and ‘strange words, in a language unknowne’.21 English characterisations of Scots and Scotland in the early seventeenth century comprised several different strands. There was the view of Scotland as a poor and remote northern country, cold and mountainous, where the soil was not particularly fertile, and whose people were primitive, barbaric and bestial.22 There was a perceived national essence of Scottishness, in other words, shaped 17

J.A.F. Thomson, ‘Scots in England in the Fifteenth Century’, SHR, 79 (2000), 1–16; Sarah Rees Jones, ‘Scots in the North of England: The First Alien Subsidy, 1440–43’, in Resident Aliens in Later Medieval England, ed. Mark Ormrod, Nicola McDonald and Craig Taylor, Studies in European Urban History, 42 (Turnhout, 2017), pp. 49–75; Alan Kissane and Jonathan Mackman, ‘Aliens and the Law in Late Medieval Lincolnshire’, in Resident Aliens, pp. 105–24; Jenna Schultz, National Identity and the Anglo-Scottish Borderlands, 1552–1652 (Woodbridge, 2019), pp. 112–13. 18 Peter Marshall, Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation (New Haven, CT, 2017), p. 474. 19 Peter Heylyn, Aerius Redivivus: Or, The History of the Presbyterians (Oxford, 1670), Lib. VIII, p. 262. 20 Brown and Kennedy, ‘A Land of Opportunity?’, esp. 711–12, 715. 21 BL, Add. MS 28,566, fol. 25v. 22 Arthur H. Williamson, ‘Education, Culture and the Scottish Civic Tradition’, in Shaping the Stuart World, 1603–1714: The Atlantic Connection, ed. Allan I. Macinnes and Arthur H.

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by geography and environment – a way of thinking that derived ultimately from Aristotle. This was often linked to various ethnic characterisations. The Puritan memoirist Lucy Hutchinson claimed that the Roman conquest of England had resulted in driving the Picts ‘into the barren country of Scotland, where they have ever since remained, a perpetual trouble to the successive inhabitants of this place [England]’.23 Then there were the Highlanders, supposedly the descendants of the ancient inhabitants of Scotland, who themselves had been a barbarous and uncivilised people, and who allegedly practised cannibalism.24 It was said that God made the first Highlander out of a horse turd.25 Yet it was not just the English who held such views. The negative stereotype of the Highlanders was also embraced by Lowland Scots. James VI and I thought them ‘alluterly barbares, without any sort or shew of civilitie’.26 The Scots who inhabited the troubled borderlands with England, an area characterised by poverty, cattle raids and feuding, were likewise stereotyped as uncivilised and barbaric, and hence prone to violence, though again the representation of the disorderly borderers was shared and perpetuated by other Scots.27 Then there was the view of the Scots as inhabitants of a foreign country that had often been in conflict with England – the Scot as foreign enemy. Potentially all Scots were implicated here, regardless of ethnic background. In the post-Reformation period there emerged a stereotype of the Scots as opponents of episcopacy and advocates of resistance theory (although not all Scots were Presbyterian, of course). Following the accession of James VI to the English throne there developed the view of the Scots as immigrants taking English jobs – often upper-class migrants who acquired office at court. Paradoxically, however, the Scottish nobles who came south were viewed as impoverished – and hence ‘beggarly Scots’.28 (In reality, poor Scots comprised only about 10 per cent of Scottish migrants who settled in England in the period 1603–c. 1762.29) An Oxford wit jested that they were adding a new verb to the Latin dictionary,

Williamson (Leiden, 2006), p. 34; Arthur H. Williamson, ‘Scots, Indians and Empire: The Scottish Politics of Civilization 1519–1609’, Past and Present, 150 (1996), 46–83, at 47–8. 23 Julius Hutchinson and C.H. Firth (eds), Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson Governor of Nottingham By His Widow Lucy Hutchinson (London, 1906), p. 3. 24 Roger A. Mason, ‘The Scottish Reformation and the Origins of Anglo-British Imperialism’, in Scots and Britons: Scottish Political Thought and the Union of 1603, ed. Roger A. Mason (Cambridge, 1994), p. 185. 25 John Kerrigan, Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics, 1603–1707 (Oxford, 2008), p. 38. 26 Political Writings: King James VI and I, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge, 1994), p. 24. 27 Anna Groundwater, The Scottish Middle March, 1573–1625: Power, Kinship, Allegiance (Woodbridge, 2010), pp. 9–13, 30–1, 193–4; Schultz, National Identity, ch. 2. 28 Fox, ‘Jockey and Jenny’, 201–2. 29 Brown and Kennedy, ‘A Land of Opportunity?’, 713.

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‘scoto, scotas, to begge’.30 One Sussex resident thought Scottish immigrants were responsible for having ‘broughte the plage into England’.31 When the English wanted to say negative things about the Scots, they might blend these different elements together. Sir Anthony Weldon did so in his famous Description of Scotland written in James VI and I’s reign.32 So too did pro-court, anti-Scottish propagandists during the Bishops’ Wars. In the process they at times created a false composite: the Scots were loathsome because they were barbaric and uncivilised, lived in the cold and mountainous north, wore funny clothes, spoke a strange language and were Presbyterian – a strange mishmash of Highland and Lowland, Gaelic- and Scottish-speaking, Presbyterian and non-Presbyterian Scots.33 Yet we should perhaps distinguish between a stereotype and an insult. English commentators with axes to grind would often simply lash out at the Scots and the country they came from, incorporating all the nasty things they could think to say, albeit in doing so they might draw loosely upon an underlying stereotype or range of stereotypes. When Weldon alleged that James VI and I came ‘from a nasty barren Country (rather a Dunghil then a Kingdome)’, he was surely just trying to be as offensive as possible.34 Yet there was also a positive image of the Scots and the country they came from. The early Stuart cosmographer John Speed thought Scotland ‘faire and spacious’ and ‘furnished with all things befitting a famous Kingdome’, and ‘the people’ there ‘of good feature, strong of body, and of couragious minde, and in warres so venturous’.35 Writing in the reign of Charles II, Marchamont Nedham opined that the Scots were ‘a numerous and warlike People’ who, being united with England, would assist the English in defeating the French.36 The positive stereotype could even apply to the Highlanders. The pro-union Scot Sir Thomas Craig proclaimed in 1605 ‘nowhere will you find people of robuster physique, higher spirited, or longer lived, than among the Highlanders’.37 Having said all this, English thinking about the Scots often involved thinking about a supposed national essence: there was a reason why the Scots, as a people, 30

Charles Severn (ed.), Diary of the Rev. John Ward, Vicar of Stratford-Upon-Avon, Extending from 1648 to 1679 (London, 1839), p. 150. 31 TNA, SP 14/4, fol. 3. 32 [Sir Anthony Weldon], A Discription of Scotland ([Netherlands], 1626). 33 TNA, SP 16/424, fol. 110; Joseph Woodfall Ebsworth (ed.), Choyce Drollery: Songs and Sonnets (Boston, 1876), p. 394; Harris, Rebellion, p. 393; Tim Harris, ‘Religious and National Stereotyping and Prejudice in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Stereotypes and Stereotyping in Early Modern England: Puritans, Papists and Projectors, ed. Peter Lake and Koji Yamamoto (Manchester University Press, 2022). 34 Sir Anthony Weldon, A Cat May Look at a King (London, 1652), pp. 42–3. 35 John Speed, England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland Described and Abridged (London, 1627), sig. X2v. 36 [Marchamont Nedham], Christianissimus Christianandus (London, 1678), p. 80. 37 Sir Thomas Craig, De Unione Regnorum Britanniae Tractatus, ed. and trans. C.S. Terry, Scottish History Society, 1st series, 60 (Edinburgh, 1909), p. 447.

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were the way they were. Archbishop Laud, writing to the bishop of Derry John Bramhall in September 1639, said he thought ‘the national propension of that nation [the Scots]’ against episcopacy derived ‘from their sacrilegious humour’.38 In the early months of the civil war, the Church of England clergyman Daniel Wicherley said he found ‘the Scotts’ to be ‘a treacherous kind of people’.39 We can even find Scots who seemed to share the assumption that Scottishness was reflective of a national essence. This was particularly true of those who, either for political reasons or out of a desire to assimilate with the English, sought to distance themselves from their own Scottishness. Doran has observed how James VI and I sought to construct an image of himself as English in order to counter English Scotophobia, which in turn explains why he was so critical of the Celtic peoples of the Highlands.40 Aristotelian theories of how climate shaped personality were certainly shared by educated Scots. The Edinburgh physician Patrick Anderson thought the northern peoples were ‘barbarousely simple’, and that the Scottish climate partly helped to explain the sudden outburst of witchcraft in Scotland in the 1590s.41 David Hume of Godscroft, in a pro-union tract of 1605, asserted that the Scottish climate made its people more excitable, whereas the English climate made its men more reflective.42 At the end of the century, the transplanted Scot Walter Harris or Herries published a rebuttal to a Scottish defence of Scotland’s failed attempt to establish a colony at Darien, in which he writes in the guise of an Englishman defending English interests. In the process, Harris engaged in some standard negative stereotyping, comparing the Scots to Judas, styling them ‘Pedlars’, lambasting the Scottish climate and dismissing his adversary – whom he styles ‘our Calidonian’ – as ‘a Disciple of the Old Covenanting Crew’.43 If initially Scotophobia rested on a perception of national essence, however, this began to change as a result of the conflicts that engulfed the Stuart realms from the late 1630s onwards. There was considerable sympathy in England, especially among English Puritans, for Scottish Covenanter resistance to Charles I and Laud, with many English coming to see their ‘brethren’ the Scots as their ‘deliverers’. The English Parliament allied with the Scottish Covenanters during the civil war, so English royalism inevitably took on an anti-Scottish tinge. There were, however, many loyal Scots. In his efforts to combat the attempts of the Scottish Covenanters to woo public opinion in England in the late 1630s, Charles I drew on the services of Scottish-born divines – the Aberdeen Doctors, the transplanted Scot Walter Balcanquall, dean of Rochester and the 38

Laud to Bramhall, 2 September 1639, HL, HA 15172. Clive Holmes (ed.), The Suffolk Committees for Scandalous Ministers, 1644–1646, Suffolk Record Society, 13 (Ipswich, 1970), p. 65. 40 Doran, ‘Polemic and Prejudice’, p. 221. 41 Williamson, ‘Scots, Indians, Empire’, 48. 42 McGinnis and Williamson (eds), British Union, p. 179 and n. 3. 43 Walter Harris (or Herries), The Defence of the Scots Settlement at Darien, Answer’d Paragraph by Paragraph (London, 1699), pp. 31, 32, 34. 39

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Church of Ireland bishops John Corbet and Henry Leslie. There continued to be prominent Scots who backed Charles I during the civil war; indeed, war in Scotland in 1644–45 was a Scottish civil war as well as one of the theatres of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms.44 Thus, although English royalist propagandists, when writing against the Scottish Covenanters, did engage in anti-Scottish stereotyping, and often wrote as if speaking about all Scots, they nevertheless tended to qualify their attacks, albeit almost as an afterthought, by insisting that they did not condemn the whole nation, only those in rebellion against Charles I.45 In England, the Independents’ opposition to a presbyterian settlement in the church made them stridently anti-Scottish. The experience of war itself also intensified Scotophobia – especially in the north of England, due to the presence of the Covenanter army there, and the brutalities purportedly committed by some of the Scottish troops. Royalists resented the fact that when Charles I surrendered to the Scots at the end of the English civil war the Scots sold him to Parliament. Yet the Scots supported Charles I during the second civil war, opposed the regicide and declared for Charles II (albeit as a covenanted king). This made the Independents and republicans dislike the Scots even more, but complicated the attitude of some English royalists (i.e. Anglicans) towards Scottish Presbyterians. English thinking about the Scots was therefore shifting in complex ways. It became less centred on perceived national essence or character traits and more tied up with questions of political and religious identity, which often cut across the national – Anglo-Scottish – divide.46 II

What, then, of developments after 1660? We do see the continuation of the Weldonesque genre of satirising Scotland and the Scots. Weldon’s work itself was reprinted several times in the reign of Charles II.47 There was a vicious 44 Harris, Rebellion, pp. 390–1, 394–6; Laura Stewart, Rethinking the Scottish Revolution: Covenanted Scotland, 1637–1651 (Oxford, 2016), esp. pp. 76–86, 231–6, 246, 253, 325–6; Edward Cowan, Montrose: For Covenant and King (London, 1977); Barry Robertson, Royalists at War in Scotland and Ireland, 1638–1650 (Farnham, 2014). 45 See, for example, John Taylor, The Causes of the Diseases and Distempers of this Kingdom (London, 1645), p. 6, margin. 46 Robert Ashton, Counter-Revolution: The Second Civil War and its Origins, 1646–8 (New Haven, CT, 1994), pp. 306, 310; Mark Stoyle, Soldiers and Strangers: An Ethnic History of the English Civil War (New Haven, CT, 2005), pp. 142–8; Scott, ‘Barwis Affair’; Sarah Barber, ‘Scotland and Ireland under the Commonwealth’, in Conquest and Union: Fashioning a British State, 1485–1725, ed. Steven G. Ellis and Sarah Barber (Harlow, 1995), pp. 203–5; Sarah Barber, ‘The People of Northern England and Attitudes towards the Scots, 1639–1651: “The Lamb and the Dragon Cannot be Reconciled”’, Northern History, 35 (1999), 93–118; Harris, ‘Religious and National Stereotyping and Prejudice’. 47 Appended to Owen Felltham’s A Brief Character of the Low Countries (London, 1671) and

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satire published in 1679 by a Yorkshire clergyman ironically named Kirke, a mean-spirited work that reproduced many of Weldon’s tropes without his humour.48 The wittier Comical Pilgrim (1722) has a lengthy section making fun of Scotland, even repeating some of Weldon’s jokes.49 However, there was also a more positive view of the Scots. In the broadside ballad A Pair of Prodigals; Or England and Scotland Agreed of 1660, an Englishman and a Scotsman chastise each other for their previous disloyalty, and engage in some rather predictable national stereotyping – but both now celebrate the return of Charles II.50 The problem in the past had been not with the Scots or with Scotland, Restoration works tended to emphasise, but with the Scottish Presbyterians, who had infected the English Puritans. This was the argument of a history of the Presbyterians completed shortly after the Restoration by Peter Heylyn, Laud’s erstwhile chaplain, and published posthumously in 1670.51 This was why the English Puritans and the Scottish Presbyterians called each other ‘Brethren’, explained the Oxford theologian Henry Foulis in his History of 1662; they were both ‘as wicked’ as each other. ‘This hot-brained humour’ was not ‘fostered alone in Scotland … England also tasted the fiery trial of their madd prancks’. Yet not ‘all the Nation [of Scotland] hath these spots’, Foulis qualified; ‘There is a Church as well as Kirk of Scots’.52 The cavalier poet Matthew Stevenson wrote in 1661 of the ‘Anglo-Scotic Presbyter’, who ‘gulpt the Covenant’, whom he also styled ‘the English Jew’ (an allusion to an old English stereotype of the Scot as Jew).53 Die-hard supporters of the Good Old Cause in England, by contrast, sometimes condemned the Restoration in Scotophobic terms. Margaret Dixon of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, speaking on the eve of Charles II’s return, lamented the fact they could ‘finde noe other man to bring in then a Scotsman’: was there not ‘some Englishman more fit to make a King then a Scott?’54 The republican poet and Whig conspirator John Ayloffe condemned the restored Stuarts in the mid-1670s as ‘this stinking Scottish brood’, though what stank for Ayloffe was the brood, not Scottishness, since he was to join the earl of Argyll’s rebellion in 1685 against Charles II’s successor, the Catholic duke of York, now James VII and II.55 Batavia: The Hollander Display’d (London, 1672, 1680; Amsterdam, 1677). 48 Thomas Kirke, A Modern Account of Scotland ([London], 1679). 49 The Comical Pilgrim (London, 1722), pp. 49–61. 50 A Pair of Prodigals Returned; Or, England and Scotland Agreed (London, 1660). 51 Heylyn, Aerius Redivivus. 52 Henry Foulis, The History of the Wicked Plots and Conspiracies of our Pretended Saints, the Presbyterians (London, 1662), pp. 58–9, 202. 53 Matthew Stevenson, Bellum Presbyteriale (London, 1661), pp. 6, 11; Brown and Kennedy, ‘A Land of Opportunity?’, 732. 54 James Raine, Jnr (ed.), Depositions from the Castle of York, Surtees Society, 40 (Durham, 1861), p. 83. 55 John Ayloffe, ‘Britannia and Raleigh’, in Poems on Affairs of State: August Satirical Verse,

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English thinking about Scotland and the Scots in the Restoration tended to break down along partisan lines. The Country, later Whig, opposition to Charles II saw Scotland as the site of revived Stuart tyranny. They were particularly concerned about the measures taken against the Scottish Presbyterians following the Restoration: forcing ministers out of their livings; using the army to shut down illegal conventicles and collect fines (there were accusations of torture and rape); making preaching at a field conventicle a capital offence; imposing bonds on landlords to make them accountable for their tenantry if they attended Presbyterian meetings; and sending in the so-called ‘Highland Host’ to police the strongly Presbyterian south-west. Persecution drove some Covenanters to resist. There were rebellions in 1666 and 1679, and there were assassination attempts on the archbishop of St Andrews in 1668 and 1679 – the first a failure, the second successful.56 For the Country/Whig opposition in England, Scotland was where the Stuarts were revealing their proclivities for absolutism and arbitrary power, and offered a warning for what might follow in England, especially should the Catholic duke of York become king.57 In this regard, Country/Whig ‘Scotophobia’ in the 1670s and 1680s was comparable to Country/Whig Francophobia, which stressed the evils of the French system of government under Louis XIV. It articulated concerns about a style of rule in a particular country, rather than an anxiety about the inhabitants of that country. Indeed, Country/Whig thinking about Scotland included considerable sympathy for the plight of the people of Scotland under Stuart rule. From the mid-1670s the earl of Shaftesbury was receiving detailed reports from Scotland about the abuses and oppressions under Lauderdale and the threat to Scotland’s ‘libertys’.58 Speaking in the Houses of Lords on 25 March 1679, Shaftesbury lamented how ‘Scotland hath outdone all the eastern and southern countries in having their lives, liberties and estates subjected to the arbitrary will and pleasure of those that govern’.59 Colonel Birch bemoaned in the House of Commons a few weeks later that ‘If there be any arbitrary power in the World, it is in Scotland’.60 Writing after the Glorious Revolution, the Whig physician James Welwood, himself a Scot, alleged that ‘if one were to draw the Scheme of one of the most Despotick Governments in the World’, one need not ‘go so far 1660–1714, ed. Geoffrey de Forest Lord et al. (7 vols, New Haven, CT, 1963–75), I, p. 234; Warren Chernaik, ‘Ayloffe, John (c.1645–1685)’, ODNB. 56 See Chapter 7 in this volume. 57 Tim Harris, Restoration: Charles II and his Kingdoms 1660–1685 (London, 2005), pp. 104–32, 168–71. 58 TNA, SP 30/24/5/291, fol. 276; BL, Add. MS 4106, fol. 255. 59 William Cobbett (ed.), The Parliamentary History of England from the earliest Period to the Year 1803 (36 vols, London, 1806–20), IV, p. 1117. 60 Anchitell Grey, Debates of the House of Commons from the Year 1667 to the Year 1694 (10 vols, London, 1763), VII, p. 194; Tim Harris, ‘England’s “little sisters without breasts”: Shaftesbury and Scotland and Ireland’, in Anthony Ashley Cooper, The First Earl of Shaftesbury 1621–1683, ed. John Spurr (Farnham, 2011), pp. 183–205.

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as Constantinople, Moscow, or some of the Eastern Courts … Scotland alone might sufficiently furnish him with all the Ideas of Oppression, Injustice and Tyranny’.61 One Presbyterian author, also writing after the Glorious Revolution, compared Charles II’s use of a standing army to police Scottish Presbyterians in the 1660s and 1670s to Louis XIV’s dragonnades against the French Protestants, noting that this was one instance where ‘we were in fashion before France’.62 The Court/Tory response to Country/Whig thinking on Scotland and the Scots was to single out the Scottish Presbyterians as the archetype of the deviant, treacherous threat to state and society.63 Yet they did this to make a case against the English Whigs: to condemn English nonconformists by association, and thus also the English Exclusionists, since the nonconformists were deemed to be the main supporters of the Whigs. The Tory case against the Scottish Presbyterians was therefore in part a representation of Scottishness, or more precisely a particular type of Scottishness. But it was also transnational, a way of attacking all those deemed enemies of church and state in both kingdoms. Their image of the Presbyterian was Anglo-Scotic, to use Stevenson’s term. At the same time, they sought to represent the Scottish people, more generally, as loyal – and thus as having changed their character since the 1640s. Indeed, it became a crucial part of the Tory case against the Whigs that exclusion was impossible, since the Scots were loyal and would never accept it.64 The Tory construction of the Anglo-Scottish Presbyterian performed considerable ideological work. Scottish Presbyterians were represented as adherents of a false religion, who opposed not only episcopacy but also Erastianism, denied the royal supremacy over the church and made each minister a petty pope in his presbytery. They were also advocates of resistance theory, as taught by the Jesuits; enemies of popular culture; and hypocritical, prone to commit all types of sin, including sexual sins. The anti-Scottish Presbyterian stereotype drew heavily on the anti-Puritan stereotype that had developed in England in the late Elizabethan and Jacobean periods and which had been repeatedly deployed by royalist polemicists in the English civil war, against both English Puritans and Scottish Presbyterians. This made it easier for the stigmatisation of the Scottish Presbyterian to elide seamlessly into a condemnation of English Whigs and nonconformists: it was no coincidence, of course, that the enemies of exclusion in England christened their opponents Whigs in the first place, originally a term for a Scottish Presbyterian rebel. Yet the Tory representation of the Scottish Presbyterian was not purely invention. Some of the activities of radical Presbyterians north of the border served to confirm the stereotype, notably the aforementioned rebellions and assassination attempts, but also the 61

J[ames] W[elwood], Reasons Why the Parliament of Scotland Cannot Comply with the Late King James (London, 1689), p. 1. 62 Brief and True Account of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland (London, 1690), p. 2. 63 Andrew Campbell, ‘Beware the “Hive of Presbytery”: The Scottish Presbyterian as Folk Devil in Restoration Britain’ (Unpublished MA Thesis, Brown University, 2018). 64 Harris, Restoration, pp. 239–41.

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declarations of war against the Stuart brothers by the Cameronians in the early 1680s. Radical Presbyterians did publish resistance tracts. And then there was the notorious case of Major Weir, an associate of the would-be assassin James Mitchell, who confessed to incest, adultery and bestiality (with a cow and mare) in 1670 and was executed.65 Thus Court/Tory propagandists could point to the reality of what – some – radical Presbyterians were actually doing. The Anglican clergyman George Hickes, chaplain to the duke of York, published a lengthy account in 1678 of the doings of Mitchell and Weir entitled Ravillac Redivivus – recalling the name of the Frenchman who had assassinated Henri IV in 1614. Hickes claimed that Weir was not alone: there were plenty of other examples of fanatics put to death for bestiality. He also represented the Presbyterians as ‘Filthy, Cruel, Lying Ranters’, alleging that after their conventicles they ‘would lie together under the Bushes as familiarly as Man and Wife’. Indeed, he claimed that parish records proved that such were their ‘Adulteries and Fornications’ that there were ‘more Bastards born within their Country, the Western Holy-Land, than in all our Nation besides’.66 It is worth noticing here that this tract was written before the Exclusion Crisis. It was not that the Tories developed this line of argumentation in response to the challenge of exclusion – this was already how they thought. One key Tory polemicist who repeatedly highlighted the comparison between the English Whigs/nonconformists and the Scottish Presbyterians was Roger L’Estrange. Again, his line of argument predated the Exclusion Crisis (although he continued to reiterate it throughout the crisis). In his Account of the Growth of Knavery (1678), a response to Andrew Marvell’s Account of the Growth of Popery of the previous year, L’Estrange starts by condemning ‘the Platform of the Scottish Presbytery’ – the harshness of their religious and civil censures and the fact that they claim the king himself is under their command – but moves quickly to document the platform of ‘The English Presbytery’. His thrust is to condemn Presbyterian resistance theory, but the whole point of his intervention is to suggest that there was nothing peculiarly Scottish about the position of the Covenanters, since the English Presbyterians held the same views.67 During the Exclusion Crisis, Tory pamphlets and periodicals repeatedly harped on the threat posed by the Presbyterians. Sometimes they clearly identified their targets as Scottish Presbyterians, such as when they reported the alleged atrocities committed against government troops by the Cameronians in the 1680s. Yet often they talked about the threat posed by Presbyterianism more generally, drawing on negative representations of the Scottish Presbyterians that 65 Harris,

Restoration, pp. 118, 243–4, 336–7, 360–1, 367–8, 370; John Coffey, ‘The Assassination of Archbishop Sharp: Religious Violence and Martyrdom in Restoration Scotland’, in Politics, Religion and Ideas in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. Justin Champion, John Coffey, Tim Harris and John Marshall (Woodbridge, 2019), pp. 101–19; David Stevenson, ‘Major Weir: A Justified Sinner?’, Scottish Studies, 16 (1972), 161–73. 66 George Hickes, Ravillac Redivivus (London, 1678; 1682 edn), pp. 35, 43. 67 Roger L’Estrange, An Account of the Growth of Knavery (London, 1678).

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had already become firmly established prior to the Exclusion Crisis, which in turn owed much to an older stigmatisation of the English Puritan, though doing so in such a way that the negative representation became affixed to the English Presbyterians or nonconformists. This was the Anglo-Scotic Presbyterian stereotype: rooted partly, though not entirely, in Scottishness; anchored in reality, to a degree, though nevertheless a fabricated construct; and marshalled and deployed by the Tories to try to discredit the English Whigs in the eyes of the English public. It is clear that segments of the English populace did internalise this stigmatisation of the Whigs, as evidenced by the Tory crowds who, in order to demonstrate their opposition to exclusion, would burn effigies of Jack Presbyter and the Solemn League and Covenant at their rallies.68 While invoking the Anglo-Scotic Presbyterian stereotype to condemn the Whigs, the Tories at the same time insisted that the Scots, as a people, were now loyal. The government in England did its utmost to foster the impression that Scotland fully supported the duke of York. On two occasions during the Exclusion Crisis – 1679 and 1680–82 – Charles II sent his brother to Scotland, and on both occasions the authorities made sure that there were huge crowds of supporters to greet him when he arrived. And York did achieve some success in overseeing the proceedings of the Scottish Parliament in 1681, securing the passage of a series of anti-Presbyterian measures that won him the support of the established church.69 A poem of 1681 titled The Convert Scot, and Apostate English celebrated how the Scots had become ‘Proselites’ and condemned ‘our [England’s] Fanatick Presbyter’. ‘How Sweet blows the Northern Air’, the poem continues, ‘Dispelling Mists, and no Clouds there; /The Rebel Covenant washed Fair, / No thoughts against Apparent Heir’.70 III

In County Londonderry, Ireland, in June 1685, shortly after the accession of James VII and II and at the time of the Monmouth rebellion in England, the Irish Catholics starting ‘Braging over their Ale’ that ‘the British [Scots and English] and Protestants had [had] their tyme’ and they ‘Expected theires’ now, supposedly warning that if Monmouth were to win one victory ‘the Irish would all Rise and Kill and Murder’. The Irish made it clear they wanted the Scots out of their country. The terrified Scots began to arm in self-defence. On this occasion a local justice of the peace succeeded in calming tensions, though as the reign progressed there were episodes of ethnic violence between Irish Catholics and British Protestant settlers, at times resulting in death, before

68 Harris,

Restoration, pp. 281–4. Ibid., pp. 333–59. 70 The Convert Scot, and Apostate English (London, 1681), pp. 1, 5. 69

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order broke down completely from December 1688.71 In 1675 the London weavers rioted against the French, who were using machines to make silk ribbons and thus putting English workers out of a job, while there were similar attacks against French weavers in Norwich in 1683.72 There were also riotous assaults in Restoration England on nonconformist meetings – not just those of radical sectarians (Baptists, Quakers) but also Presbyterians.73 The seventeenth-century English knew how to hate with a passion. At times that hatred erupted into violence. Likewise, there is no doubting that Scotophobia could turn violent in Ireland, as indeed it had on occasion in England during the 1640s and 1650s. And yet it appears not to have done so in Restoration England. Scotophobia might have been widespread in seventeenth-century England. It might have ‘flourished abundantly and brutally’. But this is not the complete picture. It did not generate the same levels of violence or the same intensity of hatred as some other English xenophobias or even English religious divisions. Indeed, there is a case to be made that during this century of revolution the English reserved their deepest antipathies for their fellow English – Protestants of a different persuasion – whom they wanted fined, locked up, beaten up or even dead. Scotophobia, while it could be personal and at times intense, was by and large an ideological construct. It was also a muddled one, blending different types of Scot into a false composite. It could be embraced by people who in other contexts might support other types of Scots. And it was an ideological construct that changed over the course of the seventeenth century. By the Restoration, English thinking about the Scots came to polarise along party lines. For the Country and Whig opposition to Charles II, the Scots deserved the sympathies of the English for their sufferings under a revived Stuart tyranny. For Anglicans and Tories, it was not the Scots who were to be feared – they had shown themselves loyal – but, rather, the Presbyterians, an Anglo-Scotic construct used also to target English dissidents. The fact that Scotland, and images of Scottishness, were being invoked by English polemicists to comment on English affairs undoubtedly did serve to perpetuate, reinforce and reshape English stereotypes of Scotland and of the Scots – both sympathetic and negative, though perhaps mainly the latter. In the English imagination, Scotland was still a place where nasty things could happen and where some of its people could be very unpleasant. Yet, if so, the negative stereotypes were being perpetuated at a time when both the English Whigs and the English Tories were seeking to claim the Scots for their own. 71

Tim Harris, Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–1720 (London, 2006), pp. 112–13, 123–5, 139–40. 72 Tim Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 191–204; Brodie Waddell, God, Duty and Community in English Economic Life, 1660–1720 (Woodbridge, 2012), pp. 213–14. 73 Harris, London Crowds, p. 52; Harris, Restoration, pp. 301–5; John Hickes, A True and Faithful Narrative of the Unjust and Illegal Sufferings (London, 1671).

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7 Alexander Shields (c. 1660–1700) on the Right of Punitive Arms Neil McIntyre

T

he purpose of this essay is to explore a major ideological shift performed by the preacher and polemicist Alexander Shields in his epic 700-page tome A Hind Let Loose, or, An Historical Representation of the Testimonies of the Church of Scotland, first printed in the Netherlands in 1687 and republished at Edinburgh in 1744 and Glasgow in 1770 and 1797. In this work Shields made a significant contribution to the shape of dissenting Presbyterian political thought in Scotland, Ireland, and the United States in the eighteenth century. The subject engages with Macinnes’s scholarship on two levels. It represents, first, a nod towards his unfulfilled undergraduate desire to study Shields at doctoral level. At our meetings Macinnes lamented how his own doctoral supervisors, Ian Cowan and Archie Duncan, had persuaded him to concentrate on the emergence of the Covenanting movement rather than the maintenance of the cause after the Restoration. While scholars may be curious to know how his own study might have played out, they are surely grateful for the research trajectory he pursued. Second, the essay picks up an idea first proffered in his essay on Covenanting ideology in the seventeenth century.1 Here Macinnes argued that the Covenanting movement was in fact two movements: a movement of power, from 1638; and a movement of protest, from 1660. This is perhaps an over-simplification of a far messier reality on the ground, but it remains the case that we know relatively little about the process by which Covenanting ideology shifted from underwriting the existence of a revolutionary regime to that of an atomised pressure group. Of course, the complexity of this shift cannot reasonably be covered here, so the essay will therefore focus specifically on the justification of what Shields termed ‘punitive force’; that is, the move by radical Presbyterian dissenters from defence to offence. It is argued here that this shift 1

A.I. Macinnes, ‘Covenanting Ideology in Seventeenth-century Scotland’, in Political Thought in Seventeenth-Century Ireland: Kingdom or Colony, ed. J.H. Ohlmeyer (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 191–220.

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reflected the politics of religion at the local level in the Restoration period, providing a theoretical framework which vindicated violence resistance in the 1680s and the campaigning of future generations of dissidents seeking to imitate their ‘renowned Ancestors’.2 I

Shields was born at Haughhead near Earlston, Berwickshire, in 1659 or 1660 to the tenant farmer James Shields. He had no direct contact with the hegemonic period of the Covenant, but was raised in an area with a strong Covenanting pedigree.3 As a teenager Shields graduated MA from the University of Edinburgh and studied theology there until he, like many others, fled to the Netherlands in 1679 (although whether he was involved in the rebellion of that year remains unconfirmed). He continued his studies at Utrecht but returned to Scotland some time in the early 1680s. He then moved south to London, where he served as amanuensis to the famed Independent theologian John Owen. While in London, Shields was licensed to preach at the behest of Nicolas Blaikie, the ejected minister of Roberton in Lanarkshire who became minister of the Scots Church at Founder’s Hall in Lothbury.4 After the authorities were alerted to Shields’s preaching against the oath of allegiance he was arrested at an illegal meeting at Embroiderers’ Hall in Cheapside. His interrogation was later recounted in A True and Faithful Relation of the Sufferings of the Reverend and Learned Mr Alexander Shields, published posthumously in 1715. On 6 August 1685 he was sentenced to imprisonment on the Bass Rock, but after fourteen months he escaped dressed as a woman.5 Joining up with the itinerant preacher James Renwick, Shields became a leading polemicist for the Presbyterian prayer societies known variously as the Cameronians, United Societies or ‘mountain-men’, who had separated from the dissenting mainstream in 1680. With Renwick’s capture and execution in February 1688, 2

Renewal of the Covenants, National and Solemn League; a Confession of Sins; and Engagement to Duties; and a Testimony; as they were carried on at Middle Octarara in Pennsylvania, November 11, 1743 (n.p., 1748), p. vii. 3 Haughhead was a conventicling hotspot in the dale of Teviot. The local landowner, Henry Hall of Haughhead, had been a Protester in the 1650s, took part in the rebellion of 1679 and provided protection for Donald Cargill in 1680. See Robert Wodrow, The History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland from the Restauration to the Revolution (2 vols, Edinburgh, 1721–22), II, pp. 134–5. The Gordons of Earlston were staunch Presbyterians, with Alexander (1650–1726) a key spokesman for the United Societies. See Michael Shields, Faithful Contendings Displayed, ed. John Howie (Glasgow, 1780), pp. 18–66, 371–4, 387, 411–12, 439. 4 For Blaikie, see Hew Scott, Fast Ecclesiae Scoticanae (7 vols, Edinburgh, 1914–28), III, pp. 323, 324. 5 For his escape, see RPCS, ed. P.H. Brown, 3rd series (14 vols, Edinburgh, 1908–33), XII, pp. 496–500, 503, 506, 524–5, 533.

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Shields took on the mantle of leadership by supporting the forcible ejection of established clergy in the western shires and leading a renewal of the Covenants at Borland Hill near Lesmahagow in Lanarkshire. However, by 1690 Shields had reconciled – not uncontroversially – with the Church of Scotland.6 The following year he was appointed to serve as chaplain to the Cameronian regiment raised by James Douglas, earl of Angus, in a move that echoed the chaplaincies of the Covenanting armies in the 1640s.7 He was also called to the parish of St Andrews, but not admitted until 15 September 1697.8 As Michael Jinkins has observed, this was Shields’s only charge to a parish ministry, and he remained there for just under two years before the General Assembly authorised him to accompany three other ministers and a group of colonists to Darien.9 By the time of his fever and death at Port Royal, Jamaica on 14 June 1700, Shields had become thoroughly disillusioned with his mission abroad. He had come to respect the indigenous peoples of Central America, but despaired at the moral laxity of his fellow countrymen. II

In 1687, Shields was responsible for the production of two key texts for the United Societies: An Informatory Vindication and A Hind Let Loose.10 Shields helped to revise and print the former as a response to accusations ‘in Letters, Informations, and Conferences, given forth against Them’.11 The latter, meanwhile, was where, in the words of the Societies’ clerk and Shields’s brother, Michael, ‘the testimony maintained by the United Societies is vindicated, and their suffering for adhering to the same justified’.12 It also offered a stern rebuke to those Presbyterians prepared to seek legal shelter under James VII and II’s Declaration for Liberty of Conscience, which was issued by the Scottish Privy Council on 12 February, revised on 31 March and reissued on 28 June.13 Historiographical consideration of A Hind Let Loose has come primarily from those scholars interested in the relationship between history writing and national 6

Thomas Pitcairn (ed.), Acts of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, 1638–1842 (Edinburgh, 1843), pp. 224–5; An Account of the Methods and Motives of the late Union and Submission to the Assembly offered and subscribed by Mr Thomas Lining, Mr Alexander Sheil, Mr William Boyd (n.p., 1691). 7 For those chaplaincies, see E.M. Furgol, A Regimental History of the Covenanting Armies (Edinburgh, 1990). 8 NRS, Parish of St Andrews, CH2/316/1/2, 37r–42v. 9 Michael Jinkins, ‘Sheilds, Alexander (1659/60–1700)’, ODNB. 10 Shields, Contendings, pp. 287, 319. 11 An Informatory Vindication of a Poor, Wasted, Misrepresented Remnant of the Suffering, Anti-Popish, Anti-Prelatick, Anti-Erastian, Anti-Sectarian, True Presbyterian Church of Christ in Scotland, 2nd edn (n.p., 1707). 12 Shields, Contendings, p. 359. 13 RPCS, 3rd series XIII, pp. 123–4, 138–9, 156–8.

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identity, such as David Allan and Colin Kidd.14 Kidd has also discussed the text in relation to Presbyterian opposition to the British state and the nineteenthcentury literary fascination with the later Covenanters’ so-called ‘assassination principles’.15 Similarly, Caroline Erskine and John Coffey have reflected on Shields’s engagement with George Buchanan and the Buchananite historiographical tradition.16 While Erskine is correct in her assertion that Shields was not a scholar of the calibre of Samuel Rutherford – a reality which should come as no surprise to us, given their different social backgrounds, careers and ages at time of writing – Shields arguably played the greater role in shaping and transmitting the Covenanting tradition in the century which followed. Indeed, while John Knox, Buchanan and Rutherford continued to be read by husbandmen in the eighteenth century, A Hind Let Loose was sold by travelling chapmen to cottars in the Lothians who had it read aloud by their adult children on Sabbath afternoons. Moreover, Robert Wodrow’s influential History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland (1721–22), as a bulkier and more expensive work, was in fewer hands and tended to be loaned from one household to the next.17 Despite this interest in Shields the historian, comparatively little attention has been paid to the ideas he espoused or the immediate context in which those ideas were formulated. Only Ian Smart has considered Shields’s contribution to early modern political thinking as part of a broader survey of the Covenanting canon.18 Here again Shields suffers in comparisons made with Rutherford and Rutherford’s polemical successor, James Stewart of Goodtrees. Indeed, Smart dismisses him as an unoriginal thinker, a perception which Shields sought to convey himself when observing in his Preface that ‘there is nothing here but what is confirmed by Authors of greatest note & repute in our Church, both ancient & modern’.19 Mark Jardine has since analysed the Societies to 1688 in his detailed doctoral thesis, but his was not a study of theological or political 14

David Allan, Virtue, Learning and the Scottish Enlightenment: Ideas of Scholarship in Early Modern History (Edinburgh, 1993), pp. 12, 36, 40–1, 96–7, 108, 121–3, 166–7; Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity, 1689–c. 1830 (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 54, 57, 68, 203–4. 15 Colin Kidd, ‘Conditional Britons: the Scots Covenanting Tradition and the EighteenthCentury British State’, EHR, 117 (2002), 1147–76; idem, ‘Assassination Principles in Scottish Political Culture: Buchanan to Hogg’, in George Buchanan: Political Thought in Early Modern Britain and Europe, ed. Caroline Erskine and R.A. Mason (Farnham, 2012), pp. 269–88. 16 Caroline Erskine, ‘The Reputation of George Buchanan (1506–1582) in the British Atlantic World before 1832’ (Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2004), pp. 77–107; John Coffey, ‘George Buchanan and the Scottish Covenanters’, in George Buchanan, ed. Erskine and Mason, pp. 189–203. 17 George Robertson, Rural Collections; or, the Progress of Improvement in Agriculture and Rural Affairs (Irvine, 1829), pp. 98–100. 18 I.M. Smart, ‘The Political Ideas of the Scottish Covenanters’, History of Political Thought, 1 (1980), 167–93. 19 [Alexander Shields], A Hind Let Loose, or, An Historical Representation of the Testimonies of the Church of Scotland (n.p., 1687), Preface.

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thought, as he acknowledged.20 And as recently as 2013, Keith Brown identified the ideas of the later Covenanters as a gap in our understanding of early modern Scotland.21 There has been, therefore, a lack of regard for Shields’s role as theorist and polemicist, and only passing consideration of his published output. III

A Hind Let Loose is divided into three parts which can be broadly categorised as history, martyrology and political theory. Part one recounts the history and mythology of the Church of Scotland from the Culdees and Lollards to the Protestant Reformation, the reign of James VI and his son, Charles I, the Covenanting Revolution and the Restoration (which is further divided into four parts: 1660–66, 1666–76, 1679–85 and 1685–87). It also includes twelve reasons why the Societies could not support James VII and II’s policy of religious toleration. Part two then provides examples of persecution authorised by the Restoration regime and a summary of ‘Common Practicks & forms of Procedure in these Courts’ – a not insignificant survey of legal process, or the apparent lack thereof, that is revealing of contemporary attitudes to law and justice.22 Finally, part three advances the ‘present testimony’ of the Societies, which is broken into seven sections. It covers their refusal to acknowledge the established clergy or attend the established church, to recognise James as king and to swear oaths contrary to the Covenants, followed by justifications for field meetings, defensive arms, punitive force and the non-payment of fines and taxes. It is notable that Shields explicitly separated defensive and punitive arms. Unlike so many other early modern resistance tracts – with the possible exception of Edward Sexby’s Killing Noe Murder (1657)23 – Shields showed no hesitancy in moving the Societies from a position of resistance to attack. Not only did he wrap Presbyterian violence in the garb of self-defence, like Rutherford in 1644 and Stewart in 1667–69, he also made clear that the Societies understood certain actions to have been offensive in nature. The 1680 Sanquhar Declaration had, indeed, declared war on James’s predecessor, Charles II, ‘and all the Men of his Practices […] and against all such as have strengthened him, sided with, or any wise acknowledged him in his Tyranny’, but the practical implications of this statement were not spelled out, nor was there an exposition of the

20 Mark

Jardine, ‘The United Societies: Militancy, Martyrdom and the Presbyterian Movement in Late-Restoration Scotland, 1679 to 1688’ (Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2009), p. 6. 21 K.M. Brown, ‘Early Modern Scottish History – A Survey’, SHR, 92 issue supplement (2013), 5–24, at 23. See also Brown’s review of The Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution, ed. Michael Braddick, in SHR, 95 (2016), 244–6, at 245. 22 [Shields], A Hind Let Loose, pp. 203–8. 23 Erskine, ‘Reputation’, pp. 130–1.

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theoretical framework which supported it.24 Shields did, however, attempt to keep this first-strike action within the bounds of Protestant orthodoxy when observing that the Scottish Reformation had proven in some cases it is Lawfull & laudable for private persons, touched with the zeal of God & love to their Countrey, & respect to Justice trampled upon by Tyrants, to put forth their hand to execute righteous judgment upon the Enemies of God & mankind, intollerable Traitors, Murderers, [and] Idolaters.25

In mind here were the murders of Cardinal David Beaton and Italian courtier David Rizzio, who met grizzly ends in 1546 and 1566, respectively. Validation from the era of the Covenants proved to be more problematic, but Shields was unafraid to differentiate the cause of his forebears from that maintained after the Restoration. He observed that there were principles ‘which now we oune in our Testimony, for which many have dyed, that seem not to be confirmed by or consistent with the Testimony of this Period’. That is, ‘we not only maintain defensive resistance, but in some cases vindictive and punitive force, to be executed upon men that are bloody beasts of prey, and burdens to the earth, in cases of necessity’.26 This idea, of men acting like predatory animals, derived from seventeenth-century legal thinking on the Latin maxim hostis humani generis – ‘enermies of mankind’ – first articulated by Cicero in De officiis, and entering Anglophone discourse in Sir Edward Coke’s Institutes of the Lawes of England.27 Such was the apparent success of the Covenanting Revolution, however, ‘when the ordinary & orderly course of Law was running in its right Channel’, that there was no need for the people to resort to such ‘extraordinary violent courses’.28 But, while insisting that he was upholding the spirit of the Scottish Reformed tradition, Shields was evidently reimagining that tradition to meet the needs of the Societies’ more fragmented and localised conflict. The seventh chapter of A Hind Let Loose was an explicit vindication of James Mitchell, the would-be assassin of Archbishop James Sharp and Bishop Andrew Honyman; David Hackston of Rathillet, who was held accountable for the murder of Sharp in 1679; the group who facilitated ‘the cutting of that Arch-Traitor’; and anyone who refused to disavow these actions under oath.29 Shields could have opted to apologise for the assassination, condemned its perpetrators, distanced the cause from the act, or, at the very least, sanitised it for his audience. In fact, Shields did tidy some of the ragged edges of early 24 Wodrow,

History, II, app. 47. A Hind Let Loose, p. 39. The rhetorical relationship between godliness and patriotism was consolidated by the Covenanting regime. See the parliamentary oath of 1641 at RPS, A1641/8/1a. 26 Ibid., p. 88. 27 Mark Goldie, ‘Captain Kidd, Piracy and the Sovereignty of the Seas’, The Carlyle Lectures: John Locke and Empire, University of Oxford, 9 February 2021. 28 [Shields], A Hind Let Loose, p. 88. 29 Ibid., p. 636. For the indictment of the assassins, see ‘Indictment of the murderers of Archbishop Sharp’, NRS, High Court of Justiciary Records, JC 39/31. 25 [Shields],

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Cameronian political and ecclesiological thought in An Informatory Vindication. But, by integrating the assassinations into his tradition unreconstructed, however, Shields was transforming the nature of resistance mandated by Scotland’s covenants. The section began with an adage from the Book of Ecclesiastes and attributed to King Solomon which became a mantra of dissenting Presbyterians during the Restoration period: that ‘oppression maketh a wise man mad’.30 Presbyterian violence was to be explained by the apparent extremity of the persecution they had endured at the hands of government officials.31 Shields marvelled that violence by dissenters had been so restrained by comparison.32 In the mode of Reformed scholasticism, he cleared his argument by dismissing twelve premises. He drew a distinction between murder – which would of course breach the Sixth Commandment – and divinely sanctioned execution.33 Shields, indeed, articulated seven instances when ‘taking away the life of men’ was warrantable. This included killing in self-defence and during a ‘just war’. Crucially, this could be either a defensive war by members of a commonwealth or private subjects against tyrants, thus allowing him to circumvent the more established idea of resistance led by inferior magistrates.34 More obviously calibrated for present purposes was the premise that it was lawful to kill when rescuing colleagues or to kill those who had made ‘a trade of destroying the lord’s people’.35 Daring rescues and prison-breaks had, certainly, been a feature of Cameronian policy across the previous half-decade, most famously at Moss Plat (Lanarkshire) in March 1682, Inchbelly Bridge (Dunbartonshire) in June 1683, Lesmahagow (Lanarkshire) in January 1684, Enterkin Pass (Dumfriesshire) the following July and the tower of Newmilns (Ayrshire) in April 1685.36 James Russell’s account of the murder of Sharp, meanwhile, noted how the sheriff-depute of Fife, William Carmichael, had made a lucrative trade of local dissent by his process of summoning dissenters, fining them when they failed to compear and confiscating and selling their goods when the charge to pay the fine expired.37 30

Ibid., p. 633. See Ecclesiastes 7:7. Cf. Thomas McCrie (ed.), The Life of Mr Robert Blair, minister of St Andrews, containing his autobiography from 1593 to 1636, with supplement to his life, and continuation of the history of the times to 1680, by his son-in-law, Mr William Row, minister of Ceres (Edinburgh, 1849), p. 548. 32 [Shields], A Hind Let Loose, p. 634. 33 Ibid., pp. 640–51. For the Reformed view of the Sixth Commandment, see John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. J.T. McNeill and trans. F.L. Battles (2 vols, London, 1961), 2.8.39. For contemporary exegesis, see Alexander Broadie, ‘James Dundas (c. 1620–1679) on the Sixth Commandment’, History of Universities, 29 (2017), 143–65. 34 [Shields], A Hind Let Loose, pp. 653–4; Robert M. Kingdon, ‘Calvinism and resistance theory, 1550–1580’, in The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1750, ed. J.H. Burns and Mark Goldie, 4th edn (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 198–215. 35 [Shields], A Hind Let Loose,, pp. 654–6. 36 See Jardine, ‘United Societies’, pp. 47, 61, 65, 66, 73, 74, 75, 119, 129. 37 James Russell, ‘Account of the Murder of Archbishop Sharp’, in James Kirkton, The Secret 31

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Having set out his stall, Shields proposed the following question. It gives a sense of the desperation felt by the Societies and is worth quoting in full. This context is often missing when Covenanting radicalism is debated by historians and will be considered in greater detail in the following section. Whether or not private persons, incessantly pursued unto death, and threatened with ineluctable destruction by Tyrants and their Emissaries, May, to save themselves from their violence in case of extreame Necessity, put forth their hand to execute righteous Judgement upon the Chief & principal Ringleaders, Instruments, & Promoters of all these destructive Mischiefs & Miseries, Who are open & avowed Enemies to God, Apostates, Blasphemers, Idolaters, Tyrants, Traitors, Notorious Incendiaries, Atrocious Murderers, and known and convict to be publick Enemies, prosecuting their Murdering Designs notourly & habitually, and therefore guilty of death by all Laws of God & man; And in such an extraordinary case, put them to death who have de jure forefeited their lives to Justice, when there is no access to publick Justice, nor prospect of obtaining it in an orderly way, nor any probability of escaping their intended destruction, either by flight or resistance, if they be past longer unpunished.38

For affirmation, Shields drew on nine arguments ‘from the Dictates of natural reason’.39 Although not intended to be comprehensive – over twenty pages of scriptural examples and precepts would see to that40 – they constitute the most intriguing aspect of his position. When pointing to the practices of other nations, for example, not only did he include classical Greece and Rome, but also ‘Oriental Indians’, where the principle of punitive arms was to be considered ‘a relict of reason, not of rudeness’.41 Shields did not hesitate to deploy evidence from beyond western Christendom, as he had already highlighted the revolt of heathen and Muslim subjects under the young ruler of the Javanese sultanate of Banten – a revolt supported by Charles II and the East India Company.42 European commercial expansion and colonialism were, indeed, generating innovations in political thought at home, as Stewart had drawn on a colonial perspective when formulating his theory of government.43 Shields’s fifth argument, meanwhile, was almost Hobbesian in its conception of the state of nature as a state of war: ‘Let it be considered, what men might have done in such a case before Government was erected, if there had been some publick and notour Murderers still preying upon some sort of men. Certainly then private persons (as all are in that case) might kill them, to prevent further and True History of the Church of Scotland from the Restoration to the year 1678, ed. C.K. Sharpe (Edinburgh, 1817), p. 404. 38 [Shields], A Hind Let Loose, pp. 657–8. 39 Ibid., p. 658. 40 Ibid., pp. 669–90. 41 Ibid., pp. 658–9. 42 Ibid., p. 626. For these events, see P.J. Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (Oxford, 2011), pp. 68–72. 43 [James Stewart], Jus Populi Vindicatum, or, The Peoples Right, to defend themselves and their Covenanted Religion, vindicated (n.p., 1669), p. 81.

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destruction.’44 This was followed by a rehearsal of Stewart’s writings on the popular origins of government, an appeal to the fourth article of the Solemn League and Covenant (the duty to bring enemies of the Covenant to public trial) and an argument that can be summarised as ‘offence is often the best form of defence’.45 His fourth argument, however, is the most illuminating. He began: Let these Murderers & Incendiaries be considered, either as a part of the Community with them whom they murder & destroy, or not: If they be a part, and do belong to the same Community (which is not granted in this case, yet let it be given) Then when the safety of the whole or better part, cannot consist with the sparing or preserving of a single man, especially such an one as prejudges all and destroyes that better part; he is rather to be cut off, than the whole or better part be endangered.46

Shields suggested that tyrannical public officials ought not to be considered part of a community. If the supreme magistrate refused to carry out the ‘necessary work of Justice’ to preserve the community over which they governed, then it was incumbent on any citizen to destroy the destructive member. Not only was Shields advancing a more popular form of resistance and retributive justice, he was also inverting the legal concept of ‘enemy of mankind’ to justify its application against public officers whose actions were judged to be unlawful. Here, then, was a political theory that reflected the development of Presbyterian politics since 1660. While the politics of the Covenant were pervasive and had penetrated local society during the civil wars, as recent work has shown,47 the war effort was orchestrated by the state and conducted at the national level. With no institutional backing for the Covenants after the Restoration of Charles II, however, dissenting Presbyterians resorted to a variety of informal structures based loosely on prayer societies, church courts, shire committees and war councils to maintain the cause in defiance of a ‘backsliding’ – and thus illegitimate – church and state.48 The 1682 Lanark Declaration referred to these unofficial structures more formally as ‘a General and unprelimited Meeting of the Estate and Shires of Scotland’, but subsequent publications by the United Societies sought to play down the acquisition of magisterial power implied by the term.49 Their aims may have remained broadly similar to those of the erstwhile 44 [Shields],

A Hind Let Loose, p. 666. Cf. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C.B. MacPherson (London, 1985), pp. 183–8. 45 [Shields], A Hind Let Loose, pp. 667–9. 46 Ibid., pp. 665–6. 47 C.R. Langley, Worship, Civil War and Community, 1638–1660 (London, 2015); L.A.M. Stewart, Rethinking the Scottish Revolution: Covenanted Scotland, 1637–1651 (Oxford, 2016); J.M. McDougall, ‘Covenants and Covenanters in Scotland, 1638–1679’ (Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2018), pp. 71–107. 48 Neil McIntyre, ‘Conventicles: Organising Dissent in Restoration Scotland’, SHR, 99 (2020), issue supplement, 429–53. 49 ‘The Act and Apologetical Declaration of the True Presbyterians of the Church of Scotland, published at Lanark January 12. 1682’, Informatory Vindication, pp. 176–85.

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revolutionaries – a covenanted king and office holders; an equilibrium between king and Parliament; a Presbyterian church settlement in Britain and Ireland – but the focus of operations had shifted to the localities. The Societies did certainly forge connections with sympathisers abroad, with networks in England, Ireland, Germany and the Netherlands utilised for printing, arms running and ordinations, but exile was not a viable option for the vast majority of members. Their commitment to the constitutional and ecclesiastical attainments of the 1640s in a hostile political environment required a tactical revision fitted for the new front line of Presbyterian politics. The planning behind the proposed assassination of Sheriff-Depute Carmichael (the intended target before Sharp found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time) gives us a sense of this. A series of meetings were held in homes throughout eastern Fife in 1679 which, although featuring a handful of gentry, were predominated by colliers, craftsmen and lesser proprietors representing dissent in the villages of the East Neuk. They debated the condition of the local area, sought divine counsel and corresponded with colleagues in the south and west of the shire. The assassination of Sharp may have been spontaneous, but the act was one which had hitherto involved careful planning and provisioning, and which had drawn on covert networks to secure the wider support of the locality. The night before they set off, the conspirators posted a paper on the door of the grammar school in Cupar which threatened anyone who bought confiscated goods from Carmichael and his lackeys. Russell noted that the paper terrified ‘all these persons who were accessory to the present troubles, troupers, soldiers, judges, clerks, and all others in that shire’.50 It was unlikely that the Societies would effect regime change in Scotland: they had few sympathisers in government and shunned collaboration with higherprofile dissenters. But the local face of the current regime – petty officials, parish clergy, military men – could be targeted. Indeed, similar cases had occurred earlier in 1679 with the assault of the town-major of Edinburgh in March and a skirmish in Lesmahagow where Lieutenant-General Thomas Dalyell, the so-called ‘Muscovia beast’, was briefly taken prisoner and read the National Covenant.51 The shift in focus was also reflected in the Societies’ declaration against informants, which was drafted by Renwick on 28 October 1684 and posted on selected church doors by 8 November. The extensive list of targets (councillors, lawyers, officers, soldiers, militia leaders, established clergymen and their assistants among the gentry and commons) were reputed ‘enemies to God and the covenanted Work of Reformation’ and to be ‘punished as such,

50

Russell, ‘Account’, pp. 403–11. RPCS, 3rd series, VI, pp. 143, 155, 160–61, 162–3, 166–7, 173, 174–8; Osmund Airy (ed.), The Lauderdale Papers (3 vols, London, 1884), III, pp. 162–4. For Dalyell’s sobriquet, earned while campaigning against Poles and Tartars for Tsar Alexei I, see [James Stirling and James Stewart], Naphtali, or, The Wrestlings of the Church of Scotland for the Kingdom of Christ (n.p., 1667), p. 172; Kirkton, History, p. 225. 51

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according to our Power, and the Degree of their Offence’.52 Such radicalism was tempered only by Shields’s reminder that the godly ought to endeavour the repentance and reform of a local tyrant (effectively by intimidation) rather than their extirpation. But if their adversaries persisted with ‘cruel Murdering violence’ the upholders of the right of punitive arms ‘in Theorie, will also reduce it to practice’.53 IV

Shields’s right of punitive arms departed from conceptions of resistance established by European Protestants in general and Scottish Presbyterians in particular. But to what extent did he and the Societies reflect a broader culture of arms bearing? Were they any more violent than the society which spawned them? Is their advocacy of righteous murder as shocking as it first appears? The adoption of hand-held firearms was widespread in sixteenth-century Europe, with the Scottish Parliament stipulating in 1535 that landholders were to provide quantities of arms, ammunition and trained men scaled to the size of their estates.54 However, while regarded as essential for the defence of the kingdom, their use in the settlement of disputes posed significant challenges to the social order. As is well known, statute passed in the reign of Charles II’s grandfather, James VI, had therefore aimed to curb, if not wholly eradicate, the problem of violent feuding. In 1567 it was declared that ‘na maner of person nor personis of quhatsumever estate, conditioun or degre’ were to carry or use firearms privately or publicly outside of licenced homes. There was, of course, an extensive list of exceptions: military men in royal service, officer holders charged to organise citizens and subjects, and anyone ‘cuming, remaning, or departing’ from armies, assemblies, hosts, raids, wappenschawings (a periodic review of men under arms) and warfare.55 The Act had to be reissued following the Marian civil wars.56 By 1600 it was stipulated that even where there was no evidence of slaughter, mutilation or ‘uther odious violence’, the bearers of firearms were to be pursued at law.57 This body of legislation set the tone for arms bearing in the seventeenth century and was later cited by the Scottish

52

‘The Apologetick Declaration, and Admonitory Vindication, of the true Presbyterians of the Church of Scotland: Especially anent Intelligencers and Informers’, Informatory Vindication, pp. 185–91. Its contents were agreed at a General Meeting of the United Societies on 15 October. See Shields, Contendings, pp. 149–50. 53 [Shields], A Hind Let Loose, pp. 690–3. 54 RPS, 1535/29. I am grateful to Mr Ian MacLellan for discussion on this point. 55 Ibid., A1567/12/22. 56 Ibid., A1575/3/2. 57 Ibid., 1600/11/25.

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Privy Council when issuing a proclamation against the unlicensed carrying of firearms and melee weapons in the wake of Sharp’s assassination.58 In their influential studies on blood feud and the origins of civil justice in Scotland, Keith Brown and Mark Godfrey have both emphasised the decline of feuding and rise in litigation across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.59 Godfrey has since described early modern Scotland as a ‘litigating society’.60 This essay does not propose to dispute that trend, but it ought to be borne in mind that recourse to Scotland’s nascent central court system did not necessarily obviate the enduring martial character of Scottish society or its persistently violent nature in the seventeenth century. This was, lest we forget, a century which featured three revolutions in government (1637–51, 1661–62 and 1688–91), English conquest and military rule (1652–60) and militaristic campaigns against religious dissent and Highland ‘disorder’.61 The willingness of the United Societies to carry out their political and religious objectives by force, and the right of punitive arms constructed to rationalise it, becomes more comprehensible in this context. But although the tradition of Scots in military service at home and abroad is well established in current scholarship, the legacy of the mid-century civil wars on Scottish society has yet to be properly explored.62 An in-depth assessment is beyond the scope of this essay, but brief reflections on Restoration Scotland as a society recovering from two decades of upheaval give rise to several questions. What, for example, became of the munitions, provisions and personnel of the army of the Covenant? To what extent was the dissenting Presbyterian community reinforced by the experience of ex-servicemen? And in what ways did the 1640s and 1650s shape Scottish attitudes to political violence later in the century? A proclamation issued by the Scottish Parliament in 1643 and accompanying instructions sent to colonels by the Committee of Estates illuminate what was expected of fencible men by the mid-seventeenth century. All males between sixteen and sixty ‘of quhatsumever qualitie, rank or degrie’ were to provide themselves with forty days’ provisions, munitions and equipment. Horsemen were to be fitted with pistols and broadswords, but could resort to jacks, secreites or lances if the former were found wanting. Foot soldiers were to supply either 58

RPCS, 3rd series, VI, pp. 188–9. K.M. Brown, Bloodfeud in Scotland, 1573–1625: Violence, Justice and Politics in Early Modern Society (Edinburgh, 1986); A.M. Godfrey, Civil Justice in Renaissance Scotland: the Origins of a Central Court (Leiden, 2009). 60 A.M. Godfrey, ‘Rethinking the Justice of the Feud in Sixteenth-Century Scotland’, in Kings, Lords and Men in Scotland and Britain, 1300–1625: Essays in Honour of Jenny Wormald, ed. Steve Boardman and Julian Goodare (Edinburgh, 2014), pp. 136–54, at p. 137. 61 For the Scottish Highlands in this period, see Allan Kennedy, Governing Gaeldom: The Scottish Highlands and the Restoration State, 1660–1688 (Leiden, 2014). 62 Macinnes is the notable exception here. See A.I. Macinnes, ‘The Impact of the Civil Wars and Interregnum: Political Disruption and Social Change within Scottish Gaeldom’, in Economy and Society in Scotland and Ireland, 1500–1939, ed. Rosalind Mitchison and Peter Roebuck (Edinburgh, 1988), pp. 58–69. 59

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muskets or pikes alongside swords, but halberds, Lochaber axes and Jedburgh staffs were deemed acceptable replacements. They were to rendezvous within forty-eight hours of an order and demonstrate their commitment to ‘the true Protestant religione, the liberties of the kingdome, his maties honour and the peace and saiftie of this thair native cuntrey’.63 Heritors (i.e. landowners in a parish) were to provide the soldiery, with captains appointed to train recruits in combat, manoeuvres and military discipline.64 We know that some of these officers later turned out for the 1666 Pentland Rising – namely LieutenantGeneral James Wallace, the majors Joseph Lermont and John McCulloch and the captains Andrew Arnot, Robert Lockhart and John Paton – but we can only presume that the two dozen or so lairds who rose in arms had experience of war committees or surmise that the middling- and lower-class participants had served in the Covenanting army. One contemporary did, however, link the equestrian skills and martial competence of dissenters to the civil wars.65 These skills were utilised for the protection of itinerant preachers and local conventiclers, the attendance of clandestine meetings on moors or hillsides and for evading capture after reconnaissance or engagement. Further research is obviously required before firmer conclusions can be drawn on the social impact of the militarisation achieved by the Covenanting regime, but it is clear that the question of arms – their ownership, purpose and use – was under regular scrutiny in the Restoration period.66 For a start, the oath of allegiance devised in 1661 confronted theories of armed resistance by asserting that under no circumstances was rising in arms warrantable.67 The spectre of war and conquest, moreover, saw Scottish parliamentarians legislate for militia service in every shire and a standing army of twenty thousand foot and two thousand horse to suppress invasions or insurrections. For the former, the ‘power of armes’ was held to ‘propperlie reside in the king’s majestie, his heirs and successours, and that it wes and is their undoubted right and theirs alone to have the power of raiseing in armes the subjects of this kingdome’.68 Stewart would later condemn the lack of constitutional limitation of this prerogative power.69 The control of arms for the latter, meanwhile, was designated the responsibility of militia commissioners appointed by the king, with the 1669 63

RPS, 1643/6/77. Instructions from the Committee of Estates to the Colonels and Committees of warre in the several Sheriffedomes of this Kingdome (Edinburgh, 1643), p. 3. 65 Airy (ed.), Lauderdale Papers, III, p. 123. 66 For England and Ireland, see Tim Harris, ‘The Right to Bear Arms in English and Irish Historical Context’, in A Right to Bear Arms? The Contested Role of History in Contemporary Debates on the Second Amendment, ed. Jennifer Tucker, B.C. Hacker and Margaret Vining (Washington, D.C., 2019), pp. 23–36. I am grateful to Professor Harris for providing me with a copy of his chapter in advance of publication. 67 RPS, 1661/1/88. 68 Ibid., 1661/1/24. 69 [Stewart], An Accompt of Scotlands Grievances by reason of the D. of Lauderdale’s Ministrie (n.p., [1675]), pp. 5–6, 40–1. 64

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Militia Act continuing the customary practice of wappenschaws and arming men according to ‘their qualities and degrees’.70 The regulation of firearms was a perennial concern of the Scottish Privy Council at this time, suggesting that the United Societies were not a peculiarly violent aberration in an otherwise peaceful society. Scots were prohibited from purchasing arms from demobilised Commonwealth soldiers, imports were banned to encourage native industries and licences were issued on a sporadic, case-by-case basis.71 The records also expose a tension in government thinking: the necessity of armed and trained militias for protection against internal and external threats, but awareness of the potential either for militias to be subverted from within or for their horses, munitions and supplies to fall into dissenters’ hands. As a result, frequent calls for disarmament and the requisitioning of horses in the Presbyterian heartlands of the south-west were counter-balanced by complaints from commissioners that the militias were insufficiently furnished.72 By the latter stages of Charles’s reign the Council was having to issue proclamations against arms bearing by the lower classes, as ‘these rebellions have been chieflie occasioned by our commons there being suffered to conveen in numbers amongst themselves and to travell in arms’.73 The ubiquity of references to arms and the efforts at regulation are matched by the regime’s consistent prioritising of coercion over persuasion in the implementation of policy. The 1661 Homicide Act stipulated that in cases of homicide, including casual homicide, homicide in lawful defence and the pursuit of rebels and their abettors, the guilty party ‘shall not be punished by death’ and shall be ‘absolved from any criminal pursuit pursued against him for his life’.74 This actually confirmed statute passed in 1649 when the remaining Covenanters were clinging precariously to power.75 When coupled with the 1670 Conventicles Act, however, which pulled no punches in its equation of dissent with sedition,76 officers, soldiers and militiamen were safe in the knowledge that they could, theoretically, eliminate dissenters without facing the death penalty themselves. In fact, violence and extortion were almost guaranteed by the Act: in the case of a field meeting, not only were those who convened or officiated at a conventicle to be punished with death and confiscation of their goods, but 500 merks (per dissenter) was to be paid to any ‘good 70

RPS, 1663/6/64, 1669/10/14. RPCS, 3rd series, I, p. 134, II, p. 618, V, pp. 528–9, 546, 554, 558, 568, VI, p. 274, VIII, pp. 327–8, 344–5. 72 Ibid., II, pp. 268, 272–5, 284, 413, IX, pp. 124, 157–9, 345–8, X, pp. 313, 330, 350. 73 Ibid., X, pp. 564–6. 74 RPS, 1661/1/265. 75 Ibid., 1649/1/118. 76 The Lord Advocate, Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh, defined sedition as ‘a Commotion of the people without authority, and if it be such as tends to the disturbing of the Government … it is Treason’. See The Laws and Customs of Scotland in Matters Criminal (Edinburgh, 1678), p. 64. 71

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subject’ who succeeded in capturing them. Indemnity was offered in advance ‘for any slaughter that shall be committed in apprehending them’.77 Sheriffs, stewards and lords of regality were similarly incentivised by their entitlement to the fines of those below the rank of heritor. This policy was exacerbated by the prevailing fiscal-military system: soldiers were engaged in tax collection to meet their own pay, while the government response to dissent was to raise more troops, thus requiring further grants of taxation. A dangerous policy cycle was duly created.78 The high-water mark of this aggressive approach to dissent came in 1678 with the so-called ‘Highland Host’, which, although a misnomer on account of its largely Lowland composition, served to inflame dissent, alienate otherwise loyal subjects in the west of Scotland and give English MPs grounds to fear the growth of arbitrary government under Charles II.79 The Host, which involved quartering, garrisoning, disarmament, confiscation, the purging of town councils and the imposition of bonds for good behaviour on heritors, wadsetters and life-renters was understood by Cameronians to be incontrovertible evidence of war having been declared on dissenting Presbyterians.80 It was in this fractious environment that a younger generation of dissenters – Shields among them – were raised and radicalised. Their resort to violence, in other words, was not, or not only, an outgrowth of their intense commitment to the Covenants, but reflective of a wider arms-bearing society and responsive to the coercive thrust of government policy. V

There were no more violent rescues or assassination attempts under the auspices of the Covenant following the Revolution of 1688–90, but the martial ethos of the Covenanting tradition and its reflection in the right of punitive arms continued to be exhibited in the eighteenth century. Admittedly, we know very little of Shields’s experience of war in Flanders with the Cameronian regiment, but there is evidence that he exported his ideas to the Darien colony. In a letter to an unknown correspondent he remarked that one of the colonists, Mr Byres, had prohibited all efforts to repel the Spanish while he continued to make the case for the ‘lawfulness of war’.81 This view won out when a party of two hundred colonists and sixty natives led by Alexander Campbell of Fonab attacked the Spanish camp near Toubacanti.82 Shields’s colleague, Francis Borland, would

77

RPS, 1670/7/11. R.A. Lee, ‘Government and Politics in Scotland, 1661–1681’ (Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Glasgow, 1995), pp. 104–51, 152–94. 79 Tim Harris, Restoration: Charles II and His Kingdoms (London, 2006), p. 126. 80 Wodrow, History, I, pp. 458–510. 81 J.H. Burton (ed.), The Darien Papers, Bannatyne Club, 90 (Edinburgh, 1849), p. 249. 82 Ibid., p. 251. 78

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later attest that it was the Scots’ breach of Covenant that had ensured the downfall of New Caledonia.83 The offensive posture vindicated by Shields had a longevity which outstripped his intentions, as he had hoped, perhaps naively, ‘that what I have said be not stretched further than my obvious & declared Design’. He was not specifying, that is, ‘what may or must be done in such Cases hereafter’.84 His influence can, however, be traced on either side of the Atlantic Ocean. John MacMillan, for example, who became minister of the reconstituted United Societies from 1706, received armed support from ‘20 or 30 men’ who ‘violently withstood’ his successor from preaching in the kirk of Balmaghie after MacMillan had been deposed by the presbytery of Kirkcudbright on account of his outspoken views on the uncovenanted Church of Scotland.85 The General Meeting of the United Societies continued to organise and supply arms and ammunition for its members in 1708, 1713 and 1714.86 Arms were similarly gathered for the renewal of the Covenants at Auchensaugh near Douglas (Lanarkshire) in 1712 upon ‘surmises of opposition designed ag[ain]st the Publick work’.87 Arms were likewise at the renewal of the Covenants at Middle Octorara in Lancaster Country, Pennsylvania on the centenary of the Solemn League, which captured the martial essence of the tradition when the participants drew their swords during the service. They did so because ‘no War is proclaimed without a drawn Sword’; it thereby symbolised their maintenance of ‘the same defensive War’ as the ‘faithful witnessing Remnant’. The phrasing here was intentional: ‘This is not offensive, but defensive: not for falling upon Persons to take away their Lives, but a defending of our Religion and ourselves from all unjust Assaults’.88 The gloss was almost certainly a response to the recent secession from the established church in 1733. In addition to their substantially greater numbers, the Seceders presented no less of a challenge to the Societies by their contesting the ownership of the Covenants and questioning their ‘dangerous Extreme of espousing Principles in favours of propagating Religion by offensive Arms’.89 Shields’s reputation was, nevertheless, defended by the congregation of Middle Octorara.90 His influence is also highlighted explicitly in the Societies’ declaration against the Seceders in 1741 and the testimony of the Reformed Presbytery in 1761.91 However, the group known as the Howdenites or ‘Active Testimony people’ would later criticise their former brethren the Reformed 83

[Francis Borland], Memoirs of Darien (Glasgow, 1715), pp. 91, 94. A Hind Let Loose, p. 690. 85 NRS, Presbytery of Kirkcudbright, CH2/526/1A, 215r–216v. 86 NRS, Reformed Presbytery, CH3/269/2, pp. 93, 127, 129, 131, 139. 87 Ibid., p. 123. 88 Renewal of the Covenants … at Middle Octarara, pp. xix–xx. 89 Acts of the Associate Presbytery (Edinburgh, 1744), pp. 82–3. 90 Renewal of the Covenants … at Middle Octarara, p. xxxvi. 91 The True Copy of the Declaration and Testimony published at Mount-Herrick, near Crawfurd-John (n.p., 1741), p. 34; Act, Declaration and Testimony for the whole of our covenanted Reformation, as 84 [Shields],

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Presbyterians for having drifted from the practice of prosecuting the Covenants by force.92 VI

After 1660, maintenance of the Covenanting cause in the face of a hostile government saw Covenanting ideology reshaped to match the guerrilla tactics and popular support base of dissenting Presbyterians. While Shields was not solely responsible for this development, his rationalising of these tactics and their integration into the Covenanting tradition guided the principles and practices of the United Societies after 1690 and Reformed Presbyterians from 1743. Their blend of political violence and religious commitment was aptly summarised in the memoirs of the Cameronian conspirator and Jacobite spy John Ker of Kersland, to whom this essay shall give the last word: The Cameronians are strictly Religious, and ever act upon that Principle, making the War a part of their Religion, and converting State Policy into Points of Conscience. They Fight as they Pray, and Pray as they Fight, making every Battle a new exercise of their Faith.93

attained to, and established in Britain and Ireland; particularly, betwixt the years 1638 and 1649 inclusive, 3rd edn (Edinburgh, 1777), p. 46. 92 The Active Testimony of the True Presbyterians of Scotland (n.p., 1749), pp. 10–11. 93 John Ker of Kersland, Memoirs (2 vols, London, 1726), I, p. 12. John was the brother-in-law of Daniel Ker of Kersland, a Cameronian officer who provided armed support for the Convention of Estates in 1689. He died at the battle of Steenkerque on 3 August 1692.

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8 Charles Edward Stuart and Seven Hundred Irish Soldiers? A Reappraisal of a Turning Point in the ’45 Daniel Szechi

C

harles Edward Stuart does not have many fans among modern historians of Jacobitism.1 While it is still possible to be impressed by his boldness and dash in 1745, most assessments of the prince tend to be strongly coloured by his selfishness, mendacity and pig-headedness during the rising and his alcoholism and domestic violence in the years that followed.2 Beneath a facade of charisma and charm Murray Pittock finds him a bitter, paranoid and authoritarian man, with a bad case of arrested development in terms of his volatile, tantrum-driven relationships with older men whom he viewed as father figures.3 Frank McLynn sees Charles Edward’s behaviour as characterised by ‘depression, rage, [and] paranoia’, keyed to ‘a total lack of any mechanism for dealing with authority, and hence a fatally blurred distinction between his own will and reality’.4 Allan Macinnes concludes that, whatever virtues he may have had, ‘he can be castigated accurately as a rash adventurer’.5 And this writer would not disagree in the slightest with these analyses. 1

I am greatly indebted to the naval historian Albert Parker for reading, and offering corrections to, an early draft of this essay and a long discussion of naval matters that followed (which has profoundly influenced the interpretation put forward below). I am also grateful to him for his generosity in sharing relevant sources with me. Mr Parker’s book on the Austrian War of Succession at sea, which I keenly look forward to reading, is in progress and should appear within the next couple of years. 2 For a generally more positive view, however, see, for example, David Daiches, Charles Edward Stuart. The Life and Times of Bonnie Prince Charlie (London, 1973); Christopher Duffy, The ’45 (London, 2003). 3 Murray G.H. Pittock, ‘Charles Edward [Charles Edward Stuart; styled Charles; known as the Young Pretender, Bonnie Prince Charlie] (1720–1788), Jacobite claimant to the English, Scottish, and Irish thrones’, ODNB. 4 Frank McLynn, Charles Edward Stuart. A Tragedy in Many Acts (London, 1988), p. 75. 5 Allan I. Macinnes, ‘Charles III: the Uncrowned Contender’, Charles III: the Uncrowned

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The purpose of this essay, however, is not to drive one more nail into the coffin of the Bonnie Prince’s reputation, but to explore the significance of a telling, and historiographically intriguing, moment in Charles Edward’s career. As is well known, the prince landed in mainland Scotland on 25 July 1745 accompanied by only the famous ‘seven men of Moidart’, and when the ship that had brought him to Scotland, the Du Teillay, sailed away Captain Claude Durbé and its owner, Antoine Walsh, left him with ‘not more than twelve men for company’.6 But it was not supposed to be like that. During the first months of 1745 Charles Edward made plans to arrive with a great many more.7 To be specific, his onset was to be supported by a second ship, the Elisabeth, carrying Irish soldiers in French service, plus 60 gentleman volunteers specially enlisted in a company of the French marines, plus circa 1,500 muskets, 1,800 broadswords, a light artillery train of 22 pieces and barrels of powder, ball and flint capable of sustaining this force immediately after it landed.8 The best-laid plans of mice and princes, of course, gang aft agley, and Charles Edward arrived in Scotland with none of the soldiers, none of the marines and only part of his painfully accumulated military equipment. And the response to this failure in the historiography of the ’45 is very interesting indeed. For there is a clear split between those who notice the Irish soldiers and include them in their narrative (and implicitly in their interpretation of the prince and the ’45) and those who do not. On one side, historians such as Jeremy Black, Christopher Duffy, Frank McLynn, Jacqueline Riding and Bill Speck matter-of-factly register what the prince was trying to do in terms of delivering an expeditionary force to Scotland, and all but Speck specifically describe them as Irish soldiers in French service.9 By contrast, the great majority of the other writers on the ’45 do not mention any Irish soldiers at all.10 Indeed, the most widely published modern Contender | Allan I. Macinnes (gale.com). 6 [Louis La Trémoille, Duc de Trémoille, ed.] A Royalist Family, Irish and French (1689–1789) and Prince Charles Edward, trans. Amelia G. Murray Macgregor (Edinburgh, 1904), p. 26: log of the Du Teillay. 7 A Royalist Family, Irish and French, pp. 12–13: [Dominique O’Heguerty] to Antoine Walsh, Paris, 27 March/7 April 1745; p. 13: Charles Edward to Walsh, Fitzjames, 1/12 April 1745; pp. 13–14: Walsh to Charles Edward, Nantes, 11/22 April 1745. 8 RA, Stuart Papers 266/86: Charles Edward to James III and VIII, St Nazaire, 21 June/2 July 1745; Philip Henry Stanhope, Lord Mahon, ‘The Forty-Five’: Being the Narrative of the Insurrection of 1745 Extracted From Lord Mahon’s History of England. To Which are Added Letters of Prince Charles Stuart From the Stuart Papers, Copied by Lord Mahon From the Original MSS. at Windsor (London, 1851), p. 148: Charles Edward to James Edgar, Navarre, 1/12 June 1745. 9 Jeremy Black, Culloden and the ’45 (London, 2000), p. 73; Duffy, The ’45, p. 45; McLynn, Charles Edward Stuart, pp. 118, 121; Jacqueline Riding, Jacobites. A New History of the ’45 Rebellion (London, 2016), p. 64; William Speck, The Butcher: The Duke of Cumberland and the Suppression of the ’45 (London, 1981), p. 8. 10 See, for example, Evelyn Lord, The Stuarts’ Secret Army. English Jacobites, 1689–1752 (Harlow, 2004), pp. 191–2; J.D. Mackie, A History of Scotland, 2nd edn (London, 1978), p. 275; Sir Charles Petrie, The Jacobite Movement (London, 1932), pp. 184–5; Katherine

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writer on the ’45, Stuart Reid, has repeatedly made a point of emphasising Charles Edward’s failure to find soldiers to support his expedition, observing in 1996 that the prince: ‘in an almost pathetic gesture towards the 6,000 regular troops demanded by the Scottish Jacobites’, set out with only ‘60 marines recruited by Lord Clare’.11 Others note the military supplies carried aboard the Elisabeth, and sometimes its French marine company, but make no mention of any soldiers, and L.L. Bongie and Hugh Douglas go a little further by mocking the prince for taking little to Scotland apart from ‘a good supply of brandy’.12 It is as if the majority of those writing on the ’45 are unaware of the Elisabeth’s role as a troop transport. Indeed, the only explicit rejection of the possibility that Charles Edward tried to carry a body of Irish soldiers with him to Scotland came from the late John Gibson in 1994, when he forthrightly dismissed any notion that they ever existed: ‘I can find no authority for the assertion, recently made, that Clare’s Regiment was embarked on L’Elisabeth.’13 There is clearly a historiographical problem here. Either the prince sailed with a force of Irish soldiers or he did not; either way, the moment is of significance for our understanding of the ’45. So, taking Gibson’s challenge head on: what is the evidence that there were ever any soldiers aboard the Elisabeth? For the sake of clarity it is at this point worth rehearsing the basic facts about the ship and her brief role in the history of the rising. The prince sailed from Bonne Anse near Nantes aboard the eighteen-gun frigate Du Teillay14 on 4/15 July, accompanied by the Elisabeth, which was a sixty-four-gun royal ship of the line which had been leased to the Franco-Irish merchant Walter Ruttlidge for a privateering ‘cruise in the north’.15 On 8/19 July the two ships were sighted by HMS Lyon, also a ship of the line, but carrying only fifty-eight guns. Lyon pursued the French ships and caught up with them at 17.30 on 9 July, at which point a classic ship-to-ship slugging match took place ‘at pistol shot’ range, i.e. less than fifty

Tomasson and Francis Buist, Battles of the ’45 (London, 1962; reprinted 1978), p. 24; A.J. Youngson, The Prince and the Pretender. A Study in the Writing of History (London, 1985), p. 69. 11 Stuart Reid, 1745. A Military History of the Last Jacobite Rising (Staplehurst, 1996), p. 10. See also idem, Like Hungry Wolves. Culloden Moor 16 April 1746 (London, 1994), p. 9. 12 L.L. Bongie, The Love of a Prince. Bonnie Prince Charlie in France, 1744–1748 (Vancouver, 1986), pp. 117–21; Hugh Douglas, Jacobite Spy Wars. Moles, Rogues and Treachery (Stroud, 1999), pp. 60–6. 13 John S. Gibson, Lochiel of the ’45. The Jacobite Chief and the Prince (Edinburgh, 1994, reprinted 1995), p. 188, n. 2. 14 There is some confusion about how heavily armed the Du Teillay was. This stems from the fact that she carried twenty-four ‘swivel’ guns and eighteen ‘canons de fer’ (iron cannon). This would seem to give a broadside capacity of forty-two guns. Such swivel guns were, however, very light pieces intended purely to sweep the decks of any ship the Du Teillay was about to board; they were useless in a ship-to-ship cannonade and thus were not generally counted as a significant part of a contemporary ship’s armament. 15 Royalist Family, Irish and French, p. 12: [Dominique O’Heguerty] to Antoine Walsh, Paris, 27 March/7 April 1745.

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feet.16 Du Teillay tried to intervene in support of the Elisabeth early on, but her rigging took such damage from the few cannon and grapeshot aimed at her from the Lyon that she had to retreat.17 Four and half-hours of cannonading later, the badly shot-up warships separated and frantically tried to repair some of the damage they had suffered. The Elisabeth’s hull appears to have been particularly badly hit, and in addition 55 men had been killed, including both the captain and his brother, and 121 others were seriously wounded. The Lyon’s masts and rigging had been shot to pieces, the captain, all three lieutenants and the sailing master were wounded and the rest of her crew had suffered appallingly: out of the ship’s complement of 440 men, 62 were killed or mortally wounded and 100 seriously injured. That night Jean-Pierre Bart, the ship’s second captain18, who was now commanding the Elisabeth, informed Charles Edward that the ship was too badly damaged to continue the voyage and that he was going to have to sail to Brest for repairs. The prince at that point decided he would continue on to Scotland, with epic consequences which are well known. As regards the eventual fate of the two ships, suffice it to say that the Lyon limped back to Plymouth, where she underwent major repairs before sailing again in September; the Elisabeth seems to have taken longer to repair, but was back in action by at least late October.19 Turning now to the evidence, we must start by looking at the practicalities. Elisabeth was a 900-ton ship, so she was certainly big enough to carry hundreds of soldiers for a relatively short voyage. Such numbers and the troops’ personal effects and equipment, plus extra food and water to sustain them on the voyage would, though, have slowed the vessel down quite considerably. On the plus side, in the event of a battle at sea some of the soldiers could be used to support the ship’s marines and artillery. Land forces carried aboard ship were generally kept on the orlop deck (the lowest deck in the ship), where they would not get in the way of the crew working the vessel. But in the event of a sea-fight some of them (the least seasick) could be deployed on the open deck, where they could be very useful if the fight was being conducted at short range because of the volleys of musketry they could direct at the enemy’s deck crew and gunports. 16

Joseph Allen, Battles of the British Navy, 2nd edn (2 vols, London, 1852), I, p. 154. I am profoundly grateful for this and other references and a set of photos of the logs of HMS Lyon taken for me by Simon Harrison, the creator of the ‘Three Decks – Warships in the Age of Sail’ website (https://threedecks.org/), which is an invaluable resource for the naval history of the eighteenth century. 17 Royalist Family, Irish and French, p. 19: log of the Du Teillay, 9–10/20–1 July 1745. 18 Like many privateers Elisabeth carried far more officers than a royal warship on active duty; in this case twenty-two rather than six. This was to provide spare command capacity to put aboard captured enemy ships. I am grateful to Albert Parker for this information. 19 TNA, ADM 52-646-006: Sailing Master John Tory’s log, 10 July 1745; TNA, ADM 51-538008: Captain Piercy Brett’s log, 19 July 1745; Alfred Hachette, ‘L’Affaire Mique (1745–1794)’, Revue Historique, 133 (1920), 2 (I owe my thanks to Albert Parker for this reference); https:// threedecks.org/index.php?display_type=show_ship&id=2255.

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They would also have usefully supplemented the ship’s crew if the fight had gone on to become a boarding action. With respect to the documents, the clearest-cut evidence comes in two letters by Charles Edward, one to James III and VIII and one to his father’s secretary, James Edgar, in which the prince specifically states that the Elisabeth had: ‘700 men aboard as also a company of sixty volontiers, all gentlemen’.20 But what exactly did he mean? Charles Edward’s way of referring to the number of men aboard was the way army officers often referred to the number of troops carried aboard a ship, implying that there were 700 soldiers aboard, plus the 543 or so ship’s crew and marines.21 And the Elisabeth could possibly have carried that many passengers for a very short coastal journey, and definitely could have done so if she was sailing en flûte, which is to say with the great majority of her guns removed. But the accounts of the fight between the Elisabeth and the Lyon and, just as importantly, the physical damage suffered by the Lyon, indicate that the Elisabeth was fully armed. In which case she could not have carried that many troops on a voyage as far as Scotland without overcrowding on such a scale as to have made it impossible for her to sail or fight effectively. The prince must have been referring to the total number of men (crew, marines and soldiers) aboard. Of course, even then Charles Edward could have been lying; he certainly was not averse to doing so to get what he wanted at other times. There was no obvious reason for him to lie about this subject at this point to these two correspondents, but we should consider the possibility. And in the interests of finally nailing this issue that is what I will now do. So what other evidence do we have? There are three surviving ships’ logs: Durbé’s from the Du Teillay, Captain Piercy Brett’s log from the Lyon and the separate log compiled by John Tory, the sailing-master, also from the Lyon. In addition, aboard the Du Teillay Abbé James Butler, Duncan Cameron (a soldier in the Royal Ecossois), Colonel Sir John Macdonell, banker Aeneas Macdonald and shortly-to-be Adjutant-General John Sullivan were eyewitnesses and subsequently wrote brief descriptions of the voyage and the fight between the Elisabeth and the Lyon. Captain Bart also published an account of the action in the Mercure de France, and Henry Ruffane, captain of marines aboard the Lyon, was 20

RA, Stuart Papers 266/86: Charles Edward to James, St Nazaire, 21 June/2 July 1745; 266/102: Charles Edward to Edgar, St Nazaire, 21 June/2 July 1745. Both letters were published by Mahon, ‘The Forty-Five’, pp. 150–1. Robert Chambers assumed this referred to the ship’s company (History of the Rebellion of 1745–6, 7th edn (London, 1869), p. 18), but since the working crew of the Elisabeth was normally only ca. 400 men, but more on this voyage because she was sailing as a privateer and needed extra prize crews (Elisabeth: https:// threedecks.org/index.php?display_type=show_ship&id=2255), this cannot have been the case. 21 There are a range of potential numbers for the size of the Elisabeth’s crew, from 400 (her regular complement when acting as a royal ship-of-the-line) to a maximum of 672 (as calculated from a contemporary source, now lost, by Albert Parker). I have opted for one of the intermediate possibilities.

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subsequently court-martialled and sentenced to death for cowardice during the fight, and the process generated a number of depositions describing what transpired. None of these sources is, however, specifically concerned with who was, or was not, on board the Elisabeth, and none of them specifically discusses the matter, but they do contain incidental and circumstantial evidence which is worth considering. The only report that bears directly on how many troops were aboard is a post-facto account written by Abraham van Hoey, the Dutch ambassador to France.22 This states that there were reported to be three hundred volunteers aboard, plus seventy marines. Reviewing all these sources, the most apposite place to start is with the fact that the Lyon was able to catch up with the Elisabeth at all.23 Before the development of ‘copper-bottoming’, shipweed growths on their hulls badly slowed all ships down if they were at sea for any length of time. But the French ship had been in harbour for a while and it was standard practice to use such interludes to beach the vessel and careen the hull, i.e. scrape off the shipweed, molluscs, etc., it had accumulated.24 Of course, the commander of the Elisabeth, Captain Pierre De Hau,25 may have neglected to do this, though it would have been an unusual omission for a ship about to go on a privateering cruise, as this was one of the ways French raiders were able to pick and choose their fights (Royal Navy ships tended to be at sea longer and get steadily slower as their hulls got more clogged).26 In any event, the Lyon’s successful pursuit indicates that she was indubitably faster than the Elisabeth, which Sullivan described as ‘a hevy log’ compared with the ‘fine, light’ Lyon. Macdonell and Butler also remembered the Lyon as ‘a better sailor’, and Durbé was also impressed, remarking that the Lyon was ‘sailing always better than we’. Father Charles Leslie in his history of the ’45 also asserts that Elisabeth and Du Teillay sought to escape, but that the Lyon, ‘a better sailer’, caught up with them.27 When the actual fight began the Lyon also demonstrated her superior speed and manoeuvrability by sailing literally

NRS, GD 1/609/4/4c, 4e: ‘Extrait d’une Lettre de Paris du 30e Juillet 1745’ (Extract of a letter from Paris of 30 July 1745). 23 It should be noted that Albert Parker disagrees with me on the significance of the Lyon’s ability to catch up with the two French ships, arguing that this was simply a function of the Lyon being better placed with respect to the prevailing wind, and that we cannot assume the British ship was in any way faster (private communication, February 2020). 24 N.A.M. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean. A Naval History of Britain 1649–1815 (London, 2004), p. 298. 25 Many sources give his name as ‘d’O’, but Albert Parker has convincingly identified the correct form as ‘de Hau’. 26 It should be noted, however, that the Lyon must have been relatively clean, as she had only recently (May 1745) undergone a ‘great repair’ (i.e. complete refit). 27 Alistair and Henrietta Tayler (eds), 1745 and After (London, 1938), pp. 50–1; RA, Stuart Papers 268/8, fol. 8r: Butler to James Butler, Duke of Ormonde (copy), August 1745; Royalist Family, Irish and French, p. 19: log of the Du Teillay, 9–10/20–1 July 1745; RA, SP M10, p. 22: Leslie’s MS ‘history of the ’45 (‘meilleur voilier’). 22

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in circles round the Elisabeth, pouring in fire and raking her fore and aft.28 Put together, these eyewitness observations, plus the Lyon’s overhauling and outmanoeuvring her, suggest that the Elisabeth was heavily laden, consonant with there being a considerable number of extra men as well as munitions aboard. This raking inflicted terrible damage on the French ship, including some of her gunports being beaten into a single gash along her side, which almost certainly knocked out some of her guns. Nonetheless, the Elisabeth was able to continue fighting for four-and-a-half hours and in turn inflicted such horrendous casualties on the British ship that, according to three accounts, Captain Brett tried to strike his colours.29 Going by the structural harm they caused, the French gunners seem to have concentrated their fire on the Lyon’s masts and rigging. This was a well-understood tactic designed to disable an enemy ship preparatory to either boarding it and capturing it by storm or making one’s escape. But, as was generally the case with eighteenth-century warships during a fight at sea, most of the Lyon’s crew were below decks serving the guns, which prima facie makes the heavy casualties they suffered rather puzzling. The explanation seems to have been, however, that the Elisabeth’s, ‘musket practice [i.e. the small-arms fire from her decks and rigging] was better than that of the Englishman’. Indeed, as Brett closed with the Elisabeth he cut the Lyon’s boats adrift to improve his manoeuvrability because, according to Macdonell, he could see that the French ship was ‘well furnished with musketry’, implying there were unusual numbers of soldiers and marines on its decks and in the crow’s nests on its masts.30 Later on, despite the hammering she was taking from Lyon’s broadsides, the Elisabeth’s officers continued to try to steer her as close as possible to the British ship, which (given the damage Elisabeth’s artillery must have suffered when her sides were knocked in) can only have been in the hopes of making best use of its advantage in musketry.31 The sheer weight of musket fire from the Elisabeth also seems to have forced the evacuation of all but essential crew from the Lyon’s open deck. The normal battle station for the marine contingent carried by British ships of the line was aloft in the rigging and on the open deck, from whence they would shoot at enemy officers, crew and marines engaged in the same harrassing fire as 28

Royalist Family, Irish and French, p. 19: log of the Du Teillay, 9–10/20–21 July 1745. Battles of the British Navy, I, p. 154; TNA, SP 42/29 f. 274: Petition of Harry Rufane pleading for clemency, 5 October 1745; Henry Paton (ed.), The Lyon in Mourning; Or, a Collection of Speeches, Letters, Journals Etc., Relative to the Affairs of Prince Charles Edward Stuart by the Rev. Robert Forbes … 1746–1775 (3 vols, Edinburgh, 1895–6), ‘Journal of the Prince’s imbarkation and arrival, etc., taken from the mouth of Aeneas Macdonald (a banker in Paris, and brother of Kinlochmoidart) when he was in a messenger’s custody in London, by Dr. Burton of York’, I, p. 286; Mercure de France, August 1745, vol. 49, pp. 199–200. 30 Tayler and Tayler (eds), 1745 and After, p. 50, n. 2 (Sir John Macdonell). Sir John’s original description of the fight mentions Elisabeth’s superior musketry no less than three times in the equivalent of one page (RA, SP M/10, pp. 5–6: [Colonel Sir] John MacDonell, MS History of 1745 [no date]). 31 Paton (ed.), Lyon in Mourning, I, p. 286 (Aeneas Macdonald). 29 Allen,

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themselves, and constitute the first line of defence if the enemy tried to board. But, according to the depositions filed by Midshipman John How and others during the court-martial of Marine Captain Ruffane, Captain Brett was obliged to order all the surviving marines to go below, where they helped to serve the ship’s guns. The only remaining (living) marines How could find on deck were two wounded men and Ruffane, all hiding behind a hay bale. Ruffane was an experienced officer with a good service record, yet the intensity of the fire he had undergone seems to have broken his nerve. Despite being confronted by How, who demanded ‘if he was not ashamed to lay there, seeing the condition we were in?’, the ‘very much terrified’ Ruffane absolutely refused to move.32 Meanwhile, down below, How states, ‘a great many’ were being ‘killed and wounded’, very likely because of mass musketry directed at the Lyon’s gunports. This was because the gun crews had to cluster close to the open gunports in order to reload the guns, which made them vulnerable to musket fire, though because the shots sent through the gunports could not be aimed at anyone in particular they would cause significant casualties only if there was a high volume of fire directed there. And, indeed, the volume of musket fire from the French ship was so great that, according to Bart’s account, the Lyon’s crew were forced to close the lower gunports.33 The upshot is that the heavy casualties among the Lyon’s gun crews, the evacuation of her decks and the closing of her lower gunports suggest that unusually large numbers of soldiers and marines on the Elisabeth were blazing away at the British ship. Finally, it is interesting that Captain De Hau’s original battle plan, as agreed with Captain Durbé, also relied on the Elisabeth ‘being superior in men’. This would not normally have been the case, as the Elisabeth’s regular crew complement numbered only around 400, as compared with the Lyon’s around 450, but for this voyage she was carrying extra crew and marines (total 543) and, if the argument advanced below is correct, about 200 soldiers. What De Hau envisaged was that he would ‘suffer the first fire & board the English man imediatly’, i.e. let the British ship draw close, absorb its first broadside and then grapple and board her.34 Aiming the Elisabeth’s main guns at the Lyon’s masts and rigging was a key element of such tactics: if De Hau was to close with the faster, more manoeuvrable British ship he needed to slow her down or cripple her. De Hau was, however, mortally wounded early in the fight, and the confusion that followed apparently prevented the French closing with and boarding the Lyon immediately. The damage Elisabeth’s sails and rigging suffered 32

TNA, SP 42/29 fol. 254: ‘Deposition of John How a midshipman, against Captain Rufane’, 4 October 1745; fol. 274r: Petition of Harry Rufane pleading for clemency, 5 October 1745; Mercure de France, August 1745, vol. 49, p. 199. 33 Mercure de France, August 1745, vol. 49, p. 199. 34 Tayler and Tayler (eds), 1745 and After, p. 50 (Sullivan); Royalist Family, Irish and French, p. 19: log of the Du Teillay, 9–10/20–1 July 1745; Paton (ed.), Lyon in Mourning, I, pp. 285, 286 [Aeneas Macdonald]; Elisabeth: https://threedecks.org/index.php?display_type=show_ ship&id=2255; Lyon: https://threedecks.org/index.php?display_type=show_ship&id=5111.

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in the ships’ exchanges of fire then prevented second Captain Bart doing the same.35 And so the Elisabeth and the Lyon instead knocked each other to pieces. By the time the two separated, quite apart from the other damage she had taken, the Elisabeth was crippled by the loss of her mainmast, while, Cameron observed, ‘the Lion was obliged to sheer off like a tub upon the water’.36 The upshot of all this circumstantial detail is that the Elisabeth was indeed carrying a substantial force of soldiers and marines. We cannot say for certain, but in all likelihood the soldiers at least were drawn from the Irish regiments in French service. The majority of the Irish Brigade was still composed of first-generation immigrants hardened and embittered by the penal laws that kept the Catholic majority of the population down and ensured that the Protestant minority remained politically, economically and socially in control, and support for the Stuart cause was very strong in their ranks. Most of them could also speak English and/or Gaelic and were used to the climate and comestibles of the British Isles, which is to say they were the most useful troops in the French army in the event of an invasion of Scotland.37 Charles O’Brien, Jacobite marquis of Thomond (but generally known as Viscount Clare), was the officer in charge of administering the Irish regiments and the Royal Ecossois and he was involved in the plot from the outset, and ‘Captain Connoway’ (specifically noted as an officer in Clare’s regiment) and Michael Sheridan, the only named infantry officers who we know were aboard the Elisabeth, were soldiers in the Irish brigade.38 The evidence, then, strongly suggests that there were a number of Irish soldiers aboard the Elisabeth. But how many? Clearly not as many as seven hundred because such numbers could not have been squeezed into a fully armed ship of that size for a voyage of that length. In light of the Elisabeth’s increased crew for this voyage, I would favour a rather lower figure of two hundred soldiers, to square with Charles Edward’s ‘700’ plus sixty marines, but we are otherwise basically in agreement: she was carrying hundreds of troops to Scotland.39 35

Mercure de France, August 1745, vol. 49, p. 199. Paton (ed.), Lyon in Mourning, I, p. 203: ‘Journal of the Prince’s imbarkation and arrival, etc., the greatest part of which was taken from Duncan Cameron at several different conversations I had with him’. 37 Éamonn Ó Ciardha, Ireland and the Jacobite Cause, 1685–1766. A Fatal Attachment (Dublin, 2002), pp. 33, 196–7, 203–4, 295, 297; Andrew Bamford, The Lillies and the Thistle. French Troops in the Jacobite ’45 (Warwick, 2018), pp. 37–42, 47–8; W.D. Macray ed., Correspondence of Colonel N. Hooke, Agent From the Court of France to the Scottish Jacobites, in the Years 1703–7 (2 vols, London, 1870), II, 439: plan for ‘l’Entreprise d’Ecosse [the Enterprise of Scotland]’, Paris, 22 July/2 August 1707. 38 RA, Cumberland Papers, MAIN/4, fol. 301: [Clare] to Sir Thomas Sheridan, 29 July/9 August 1745; Tayler and Tayler (eds), 1745 and After, pp. 48–9, p. 51, n. 2 (Sir John Macdonell); RA, SP M/10, p. 6: MacDonell, MS History of 1745. 39 The prince’s letter had previously convinced me the Elisabeth was carrying fully seven hundred Irish soldiers, but I have now concluded that was impossible given that she was not en flûte, and this article should be taken as a revision of arguments I have made elsewhere. 36

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I

Question resolved? Not quite. For in terms of our understanding of the ’45 all of the above only brings us to the crux of the matter: so what if Charles Edward tried and failed to bring two hundred or so professional soldiers with him in 1745? The first point to make is that his doing so tells us something about the prince and his ability to listen. Though John Gordon of Glenbuchat went to Rome in 1739 to pledge that he and his fellow conspirators would rise whenever a Stuart prince pitched up in Scotland with or without foreign professional troops in attendance, the Associators who succeeded him, and (initially) their emissary, John Murray of Broughton, emphatically demanded direct French military support.40 They insisted that they would not rise unless they saw French boots on the ground. Which, of course, was not in Charles Edward’s gift. He correspondingly spent a great deal of time and effort in 1744–45 trying to persuade Louis XV’s ministers that they should invest some thousands of French troops in an invasion of the British Isles. And, as we know, he failed. As was the case in 1705–7, the senior officers of the French army wanted to focus on the key theatres of war in Flanders and Italy, and the overstretched French navy was being starved of resources and was correspondingly reluctant to take on the burden of supporting a new theatre of war overseas.41 Charles Edward could potentially have given up at this point, or else have done what he actually did in July 1745: proceed to Scotland virtually alone and with next to no matériel. Instead he responded with breathtaking effrontery. If Louis XV would not give him the troops he needed, he would take them. For all the overtly legal processes O’Heguerty, Ruttlidge, Walsh and Clare used to get control of the Elisabeth and the Du Teillay, they were at core engaged in a grand larceny: the theft of about two hundred of the king’s troops. As far as I am aware, none of the paperwork associated with this part of the conspiracy has survived, but the fact that it was finally carried to fruition only by bribing the official responsible for signing off on the voyage tells us that it was deeply dubious from the outset.42 It was also adventurism of the most reckless kind. Quite apart from the fact that in 1745 Louis XV was officially an ally of the exiled Stuarts, over the long term the French pension paid to James III and VIII was the best source of income the Stuart government-in-exile had (when it was actually paid) and France was the best hope of its ever achieving a restoration.43 For Charles Edward and his coterie to do what they did was thus utterly irresponsible. It risked alienating the only friendly source of military power 40

Walter B. Blaikie ed., Origins of the Forty-Five and Other Papers Relating to that Rising (Edinburgh, 1916; reprinted 1975), p. 25; McLynn, Charles Edward Stuart, pp. 111–12, 117. 41 McLynn, Charles Edward Stuart, pp. 112–20; Daniel Szechi, Britain’s Lost Revolution? Jacobite Scotland and French Grand Strategy 1701–1708 (Manchester, 2015), pp. 157–60, 167–84. 42 McLynn, Charles Edward Stuart, pp. 120–1. 43 Edward Gregg, ‘The Financial Vicissitudes of James III in Rome’, in The Stuart Court in Rome. The Legacy of Exile, ed. Edward Corp (Aldershot, 2003), p. 68.

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capable of taking on and defeating the British state. But it does prove that the prince was listening. By hook or by crook he was going to give the Scots Jacobites at least a downpayment on the substantial body of French support they had been demanding for years.44 This in turn suggests a couple of further insights into Charles Edward and his capabilities. Though we do not know where and how the conspiracy originated or exactly what Ruttlidge, Walsh, O’Heguerty and Clare did to make it happen, it is clear that it was very well organised and that the prince was presiding over it from the outset.45 He was the vital moving force. His confidence in himself and his plan also carried both him and his agents through the ups and downs of carrying it into practice. Most notably, when the Elisabeth was about ten days late arriving at the rendezvous with the Du Teillay (possibly because it had taken longer than envisaged to get the troops to the ship and safely packed aboard), Charles Edward did not despair or lose his nerve. The operation continued and the expedition sailed.46 Which brings us to the question of what the prince thought he might accomplish with one understrength battalion of French soldiers and a company of marines. When Charles Edward arrived on Eriskay and sent out word of his arrival one of his first visitors was Alexander Macdonell of Boisdale. Famously, having seen how little the prince had brought with him, Boisdale bluntly told him to go home, only for Charles Edward to reply ‘I am come home, sir, and I will entertain no notion at all of returning to that place from whence I came; for that I am persuaded my faithful Highlanders will stand by me.’47 A nice ringing response, indeed, but not one that effectively addressed the prince’s major problem at this stage of the rising: the refusal of leading Highland Jacobites to come out in rebellion. Two key conspirators in particular, Norman Macleod of Macleod and Sir Alexander Macdonell of Sleat, rejected Charles Edward’s call to arms specifically because he had not come with a substantial body of French troops.48 We can only speculate what difference around 250 FrancoIrish soldiers would have made to Macleod and Sleat, but it is an exercise worth carrying out. In 1719, as part of a much bigger invasion plan, George Keith, earl Marischal, a handful of Highland chieftains and 307 Spanish professional soldiers landed at Eilean Donan. Despite subsequently wasting a good deal of time quarrelling among themselves, this intervention had the effect desired: as James Butler, duke of Ormonde, had predicted, ‘the talk of the country will 44

RA, Stuart Papers 262/131: King James to Colonel Daniel O’Brien, Rome, 7/18 February 1745. 45 Royalist Family, Irish and French, pp. 9–17; McLynn, Charles Edward Stuart, pp. 113–21. 46 Royalist Family, Irish and French, pp. 17–18 (log of the Du Teillay); Paton (ed.), Lyon in Mourning, I, p. 285. 47 Paton (ed.), Lyon in Mourning, I, p. 205 [Cameron’s narrative]. Boisdale’s sentiments on the subject were clearly shared by his chief: Gibson, Lochiel of the ’45, ‘Mémoire d’un Écossais’, p. 177. 48 McLynn, Charles Edward Stuart, p. 129.

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make them three thousand, … and the rumour of the regular troops being in that country will have a very good effect. The number is inconsiderable in this country [Spain], but will be of great importance in Scotland.’49 Those few Spanish troops did indeed set stories of a great invasion running through the Highlands and overcame a good number of Jacobites’ understandable disinclination to rise again so soon after the dismal failure of the ’15. Even after definite news arrived that the main Spanish invasion force (aimed at south-western England) had been forced to return to Spain due to storm damage, the rising continued for two more months, sustained by what those Spanish soldiers represented: a great power committed to supporting a Highland rising.50 And the landing of Charles Edward and his handful of companions did in fact set the rumours racing: by mid-August John Campbell, Lord Glenorchy, was hearing from supposedly reliable sources that ten thousand French troops had landed in Arisaig.51 We also know that the actual arrival in Aberdeenshire in November 1745 of Lord John Drummond with the Royal Ecossois and a composite battalion drawn from the other Irish Brigade regiments (ca. 570 men total52) dramatically boosted Jacobite recruitment there. Until then Lord Lewis Gordon had only raised about 1,600 men and was having problems filling out the two battalions (around 400 men) he had personally mustered, but after the arrival of the French regulars under Lord John Drummond at the end of November he was soon fielding over five thousand.53 It thus seems highly likely that the arrival of about 250 French soldiers and marines at the very start of the rising would have had at least a similar impact, and perhaps would have persuaded one or both of Macleod and Sleat to join the rising. The Abbé Butler certainly thought that Macleod was teetering on the edge of coming out in arms; some French troops on the ground might well have tipped the balance.54 Another legitimate area for informed projection is the likely military effect of Charles Edward landing with this small army at his back. The prince might well have used the Maurepas marines as a regular military unit, but the rest of the volunteers aboard the Elisabeth were almost certainly officers and 49

William Kirk Dickson (ed.), The Jacobite Attempt of 1719. Letters of James Butler, Second Duke of Ormonde, Relating to Cardinal Alberoni’s Project for the Invasion of Great Britain on Behalf of the Stuarts, and to the Landing of a Spanish Expedition in Scotland (Edinburgh, 1895), 62: Ormonde to [Cardinal Giulio Alberoni], Astorya, 2/13 February 1719. 50 Dickson ed., Jacobite Attempt of 1719, pp. xli–liii. 51 TNA, SP 54/25, fol. 296: Glenorchy to Lord Advocate Robert Craigie of Glendoick (copy), Taymouth, 15 August 1745. 52 Bamford, Lillies and the Thistle, p. 70. 53 Murray G.H. Pittock, ‘Gordon, Lord Lewis (c. 1725–1754), Jacobite army officer’, ODNB; Duffy, ’45, p. 352; Murray G.H. Pittock, The Myth of the Jacobite Clans: The Jacobite Army in 1745, 2nd edn (Edinburgh, 2009), pp. 71–2. I owe my thanks to Ewen Cameron, a PhD student at the University of Strathclyde and the author of a very good MRes dissertation on the rising post-Culloden, for reminding me of the impact of the arrival of Lord John Drummond and the Royal Eccossois. 54 RA, Stuart Papers 268/8: Butler to Ormonde, August 1745.

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non-commissioned officers from the Irish brigade55 and, as trained and probably for the most part veteran soldiers well accustomed to instructing new recruits, they would have been much better used as cadre, i.e. for training and disciplining newly raised Jacobite troops. This would very likely have corrected from the outset a chronic problem within the Jacobite rising, where, precisely because of a lack of training and experienced officers, the Lowland volunteers and conscripts were slow to become militarily effective. The impact that Lieutenant Nicholas Glasgoe of Dillon’s regiment had on Lord Ogilvy’s battalion (in which he served as a major) after his arrival in December 1745 is a case in point: he was instrumental in transforming it into the most effective Lowland regiment in the Jacobite army.56 All of which reflects positively on the prince’s strategic thinking. This is one area where even the most critical commentators are inclined grudgingly to respect Charles Edward. For many historians the fact that he grasped what they see as the centrality of London and England in terms of seizing control of the British Isles marks him out as fundamentally intelligent.57 Others, of whom I am one, are more sceptical about the superior virtues of his Anglocentric focus.58 Nonetheless, it is indisputably the case that seizing a secure base in Scotland was essential, as a precursor either to a long civil war or to a strike into England, and bringing the human seedcorn for a future professional Scots army with him was a good move under any circumstances. II

Granted, then, that Charles Edward certainly intended to arrive in Scotland with a body of French professional soldiers, and could easily have done so, we have to ask how it might be possible for so many writers on the subject to have missed this fact, or otherwise ignore it. One answer is hinted at in the information that can be garnered from two of our most well-known published original sources on the ’45: David Weymss, Lord Elcho’s Short Account of the Affairs of Scotland, and Chevalier James Johnstone’s Memoirs of the Rebellion. Elcho makes no mention at all of any troops accompanying the prince, and Johnstone refers in passing only to ‘soldiers of the regiment of Maurepas [i.e. the French marines], who had

55

As was the case with the planned Swedish expeditionary force to Scotland, for which see Göran Behre, ‘Sweden and the Rising of 1745’, SHR, 51 (1972), 148–71. 56 Pittock, Myth of the Jacobite Clans, p. 96; Duffy, ’45, p. 573; Bamford, Lillies and the Thistle, pp. 25, 72. 57 Duffy, ’45, pp.  312–13; McLynn, Charles Edward Stuart, pp. 122–6, 173–4; Pittock, Culloden, pp. 22, 26. 58 Allan I. Macinnes, Clanship, Commerce and the House of Stuart, 1603–1788 (East Linton, 1996), p. 201; Jeffrey Stephen, ‘Scottish Nationalism and Stuart Unionism: the Edinburgh Council, 1745’, Journal of British Studies, 49 (2010), 47–72.

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volunteered their service in the expedition’.59 Likewise Captain Durbé’s log of the voyage of the Du Teillay and the other printed accounts of the voyage make no specific mention of any substantial number of Irish soldiers. As far as I am aware, Charles Edward also never mentioned his expeditionary force to the Highland chieftains whom he encountered after his landing at Lochaber. But he had very good reasons for this. Quite apart from the fact that he was never a man to look back and regret anything, it suited him at that point politically to present himself as a fearless martial prince who threw himself among his Scots followers in the full confidence that they needed nothing more than his presence and his sword to rush on to victory. As Donald Cameron of Lochiel recalled, ‘the Prince told them … that he had only come with such a small band of supporters and so poorly supplied to give them the opportunity to display the zeal they had always professed’. Likewise Butler rather naively observed: ‘The Prince was pleased to assure the people that he hoped by their bravery and fidelity to surmount all difficulties and that for his part he would give them daily proof of his love and tenderness.’60 One is reminded of the apocryphal cat that slips and falls in a puddle, then announces that it meant to do that all along. For reasons to which I have already alluded, it was also for the best, both for him, his expatriate Irish backers and the officers who had effectively deserted their posts to join him if he did not trumpet the fact that he had subverted, and made his best effort to steal, around 250 of Louis XV’s best soldiers and marines. Thus, because some of the most easily accessible sources do not mention them, and because of the participants’ retrospective conspiracy of silence, it is not entirely surprising that many writers on the ’45 have missed the fact that the prince set out with a force of Irish soldiers. The key documents that shed light on the inception of the rising are for the most part in the Stuart Papers at Windsor, and until recently access to this vital collection was restricted to established academic researchers (not even PhD students were admitted) because of a lack of working space in the Royal Archives and insufficient numbers of archivists able to guide scholars through the huge numbers of letters, memoirs, accounts, etc. which it contains. This may explain how leading scholars as steeped in the sources as Stuart Reid and John L. Roberts could have missed this vital episode. There may, though, be something deeper here. There is a strong tendency towards Whig determinism in a great many treatments of the ’45. Laurence Bongie, Hugh Douglas and John Gibson, for example, all apparently had access to the Stuart Papers, yet they, too, overlooked the Elisabeth’s passengers.61 The 59

E. Charteris (ed.), A Short Account of the Affairs of Scotland in the Years 1744, 1745, 1746. By David, Lord Elcho (Edinburgh, 1907), pp. 238–9; James C. Johnstone, Memoirs of the Rebellion in 1745 and 1746 (London, 1820), p. 6. 60 Gibson, Lochiel of the ’45, ‘Mémoire d’un Écossais’, p. 177; RA, Stuart Papers 268/8: Butler to Ormonde, August 1745. 61 Reid, 1745. A Military History, pp. 11, 24–5, 41–2, 53–4; John L. Roberts, The Jacobite Wars: Scotland and the Military Campaigns of 1715 and 1745 (Edinburgh, 2002), pp. 214–16;

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subtext of a majority of works on the subject is that the whole enterprise was doomed from the start, not so much by the fact that the prince arrived with little more than the clothes he stood up in, but by the mighty and ineluctable forces of history.62 The Jacobites were all Catholic, feudal dinosaurs who were bound to be defeated by the overwhelmingly powerful British fiscal-military state.63 Such a vision of the Jacobites is self-evidently a travesty: the great majority of them were Episcopalian Protestants, the motivation that brought men into the Jacobite army was as varied as on the British side, and Jacobites were demonstrably neither economic nor constitutional dinosaurs.64 But this Whig view of history, and of the Jacobites, persists. And in that context Charles Edward’s failure to arrive with any French troops supports the conventional narrative. The fact that he tried to do so, and but for a chance encounter might very well have succeeded, also runs up against the propensity for determinism built into much of modern historiography. Because something happened, so the argument goes, it had to happen.65 This predestinarian vision of the past implicitly denies the role of contingency and happenstance, and the Elisabeth and her passengers would unduly complicate matters. Let me be clear: I am not asserting that Charles Edward was defeated by a few unlucky breaks; the odds were against him and the likelihood was always that he would fail. But the history of warfare is full of unexpected outcomes.66 Few would have bet on the Covenanters winning a war with Charles I in 1637, Prussia surviving the Seven Years’ War in 1761 or the obscure Captain Napoleon Buonaparte becoming Emperor of the French in 1793, either. III

In conclusion, there can no longer be any doubt that Charles Edward did his absolute best to arrive in Scotland with a small force of professional soldiers, and henceforth the historiography tout court needs to reflect this. It was not the six thousand men some of the Scots Jacobites had previously demanded, but if it had come off it was a down payment that would likely have encouraged an Bongie, Love of a Prince, pp. 299–325; Gibson, Lochiel of the ’45, p. 193; Douglas, Jacobite Spy Wars, pp. 255–8. 62 See, for example, Linda Colley, Britons (London, 1992), pp. 77–80; Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People. England 1727–1783 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 199–202; Mackie, History of Scotland, pp. 277–8; W.A. Speck, Stability and Strife: England, 1714–1760 (London, 1977), p. 251. 63 Murray G.H. Pittock, Culloden: Great Battles (Oxford, 2016), pp. 117–36. 64 Murray Pittock has comprehensively demolished this vision of the Scots Jacobites: Myth of the Jacobite Clans, pp. 31–109. 65 For a trenchant defence of this Calvinist approach to history, see: Richard J. Evans, Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History (London, 2014). 66 John Keegan, The Mask of Command (London, 1987), pp. 13–14.

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even greater turnout than actually transpired (which, given the circumstances, was rather impressive67). Organising and carrying off this larceny was also a remarkable achievement on his part, for all that it was outrageously irresponsible and potentially damaging for the Jacobite cause. Above all else, perhaps, the episode strongly indicates that we need to be much more open to the impact of contingent events on the course and outcome of the ’45. A misty morning, a turn in the wind or a mechanical breakdown aboard HMS Lyon and she might never have caught up with the Elisabeth; another hour of life for Captain De Hau and the fight between them might have gone to a boarding action with the odds strongly in favour of the Frenchman. And then the Jacobite prince arrives with a small army to back him, with who knows what effect on the rising. We cannot possibly say Charles Edward’s lost force of French and Irish soldiers cost him a victory, but it could certainly have made a difference. For all kinds of strategic reasons the British government had the stronger hand in the long term, but war is a fluid, unpredictable process that not infrequently slips out of the control of its masters – as, indeed, the very advent of the prince demonstrates. The injection of a small body of French regulars into its opening phase would have reinforced that volatility in spades.

67 Pittock,

Myth of the Jacobite Clans, pp. 71–8.

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Part III Union, Empire and Enlightenment

9 From Didactic to Pragmatic: What Scottish Enlightenment? Jean-François Dunyach

I

n his long and fruitful career as a historian of Scotland, Allan Macinnes had but a few occasions to directly tackle that monument of national and international historiography that is the Scottish Enlightenment. However, through such works as Union and Empire (2007), Jacobitism, Enlightenment and Empire (2014), his noted contribution to The Enlightenment in Scotland, National and International Perspectives (2015) or his recent History of Scotland (2019), one can sketch some striking features out of his insights on the Scottish eighteenth century and its multifarious dimensions. As a historian devoted to the political and social history of Scotland, Macinnes has thus broadened the chronological scope of his research to deploy a vision of the Scottish Enlightenment as ‘pragmatic’ as opposed to ‘didactic’.1 This essay aims to present that definition in a broader historiographical context, then to compare it to a particular case study, i.e. the Playfair family of Angus and its various particular and collective courses in and out of Scotland during the second half of the eighteenth century. I

The interpretation of the Scottish Enlightenment as ‘applied’ can indeed boast a long historiographical tradition. However fuzzy in its practical definition, the notion has been primarily ascribed to politics and economy as the application of philosophical liberalism to society. Among the many illustrations of the contention one can quote such varied works as those of Dennis C. Rasmussen or Joel Mokyr.2 Since its questioning by historians of science and technics, the 1

Allan I. Macinnes, ‘Applied Enlightenment: Its Scottish Limitations in the Eighteenth Century’, in The Enlightenment in Scotland, National and International Perspectives, ed. Jean-François Dunyach and Ann Thomson (Oxford, 2015), pp. 21–58. 2 Dennis C. Rasmussen, The Pragmatic Enlightenment, Recovering the Liberalism of Hume,

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notion now seems to be focusing more on the social dimension of technics, the application of science and technology to society, economy and/or ‘statecraft’, and the history of environment.3 In the process, several of these developments have taken a somehow ‘practical turn’, with a particular interest in the study of actions and process that one might dub pragmatic Enlightenment. With others, Allan Macinnes has given ground to the establishment of a clear distinction between didactic and applied Enlightenment, i.e. between theoretical and programmatic visions on the one hand and pragmatic actions and applications to society on the other.4 As he contends, the Enlightenment in Scotland can be associated with the common sense balancing of reason and emotion, with the philosophical inculcation of scepticism, with a holistic view of man in society, with the community interest in science and medicine no less than in the liberal arts, and with an experimental methodology for problem solving across the whole range of human experience.5

Along with a general reconsideration as to the nature and scope of ‘enlightened’ action, the pragmatic Enlightenment has also shed new light on the political and sociological issues regarding its agents. Indeed, a second common assumption contends that leading luminaries of the Scottish Enlightenment were mostly, though not exclusively, based in Edinburgh and have been associated with a progressive Whig influence in Scotland upholding the Hanoverian Succession of 1714, often with a correlative celebration of the 1707 Treaty of Union as ‘an enlightened aspect of state formation’.6 Again, the contention, a Scottish and eighteenth-century application of the Whig interpretation of history, has faced many challenges in past years. In the wake of this criticist approach to the Scottish Enlightenment, one should mention Jonathan Israel’s extensive narrative whose clear-cut distinction between branches and political projects within the Enlightenment has resolutely assigned Scotland to its conservative side, devoted, in Nicholas Phillipson’s words, to the ‘consolidation of an inherently corrupt aristocratic and clerically driven establishment’.7 Smith, Montesquieu and Voltaire (Cambridge, 2014); Joel Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton, 2002), pp. 284–97. 3 Harvey Chisick, ‘David Hume and the common people’, in The ‘Science of Man’ in the Scottish Enlightenment: Hume, Reid, and their contemporaries, ed. Peter Jones (Edinburgh, 1989), pp. 5–32; Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, Enlightenment’s Frontier, the Scottish Highlands and the Origins of Environmentalism (New Haven and London, 2013); Paul Wood, ‘The Scientific Revolution in Scotland’, in The Scientific Revolution in National Context, ed. Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 263–87. 4 Macinnes, ‘Applied Enlightenment’. 5 Ibid., p. 21. 6 Ibid. See also Allan I. Macinnes, Union and Empire, The Making of the United Kingdom in 1707 (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 13–50. 7 Nicholas Phillipson, ‘Foreword’, in The Enlightenment in Scotland, ed. Dunyach and Thomson, p. ix; Jonathan Israel, Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution and Human Rights, 1750–1790 (Oxford, 2011), pp. 208–47; idem., ‘Enlightenment, which Enlightenment?’,

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Indeed, Israel’s top-down perspective of the Enlightenment as the transmission of philosophical/political ‘tradition’ from a critically limited number of seminal authorities, notably Spinoza, throughout Europe seems definitely prone to what one might dub ‘diffusionism’. As a classical fundamental explanatory pattern of religious or intellectual history, diffusionism tends to explain intellectual movements and their effectual impact on societies through the distinction of prominent seminal figures delivering decisive and consistent doctrines whose history mostly relies on the narrative and chronicle of their transparent and flawless diffusion from a centre to peripheries (often both geographical, institutional, intellectual and social: from a capital city to provinces, from a leading school/academy to lesser institutions, from the founder to the disciples and heirs, from elites to the lower ranks of society) along the lines of a too well-known dramaturgy: birth and hardships, repression and censorship, victories and establishment, betrayals and conversions, orthodoxy and heterodoxy.8 This perspective has been widely challenged as granting too much importance to the consistency of doctrines, with an obvious disregard for their vacillations throughout time, their historical conditions, the concrete aspects of their diffusion and, moreover, their actual influence on society. Hence Macinnes’s case, along with many others, for an accurate study of networks, transfers, cross-social and national influence, intellectual mix, go-betweens and agents of transfer.9 Challenging the classical view on the Scottish Enlightenment and its hall of fame, Hume, Robertson, Ferguson and Smith, Allan Macinnes makes a case for a more balanced statement, acknowledging that the contribution of the literati, though indeed ‘intellectually distinctive’, was nonetheless not totally detached from the Republic of Letters and its historical background. The distinctiveness of the Scottish Enlightenment was not just dependent on ‘stellar intellectuals’ but was also the product of the ‘intellectual building blocks’ established during the times of the Republic of Letters. In this respect, the Scottish holy trinity of kirk, university and law requires revision with a fresh insight on its actual contribution to society. Moreover, one should not undermine the impact of Jacobitism in the Scottish Enlightenment equation: the Jacobites, contends Macinnes, offered an intellectual as well as a political challenge in the Scottish Enlightenment that has been both underplayed and misrepresented. This programmatic revision thus embraces William Robertson’s contribution to Scottish jurisprudence, science and political economy with such institutional breakthroughs as Edinburgh’s Medical Society Journal of the History of Ideas, 67 (2006), 523–45. See Thomas Ahnert, The Moral Culture of the Scottish Enlightenment, 1680–1805 (New Haven and London, 2015), pp. 4–5; Janet Starkey, The Scottish Enlightenment Abroad: The Russells of Braidshaw in Aleppo and on the Coast of Coromandel (Leiden and Boston, 2018), pp. 8–10. 8 Antoine Lilti, ‘Comment écrit-on l’histoire intellectuelle des Lumières? Spinozisme, radicalisme et philosophie’, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, pt.1 (2009), 171–206. 9 Macinnes, ‘Applied Enlightenment’.

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(founded in 1731) for the improvement of medical knowledge or such establishments as Aberdeen’s Work House (1738–41), all ‘based as much on principles of applied Enlightenment as of Christian charity’, though ‘applied Enlightenment, whether through the universities or improving societies, did not necessarily lead to social, economic or educational advancement for the country as a whole’.10 Strongly advocating a rigorous sociological perspective on the driving forces for learning and progress in Scotland, Macinnes stresses the dependence of the promotion of applied Enlightenment towards aristocracy, civic authorities and especially Scotland’s political managers in the eighteenth century – namely Archibald Campbell for the Whig and Henry Dundas for the Tory interests. Patronage and its networks were indeed essential for the social determination of scientific excellence in the Scottish universities as these institutions fostered numerous links with both the professions, improvers and entrepreneurs and the wider Scottish community, as exemplified with the foundation of the Andersonian Institute for ‘useful learning’ – according to founder John Anderson’s own words – in 1796 in Glasgow.11 The pragmatic turn stressed by Macinnes also delineates a somewhat institutional geography with the assessment of the effective contribution of Scottish institutions to applied Enlightenment. The universities thus apparently proved more substantially devoted to the progress of agriculture than to industry. Despite their common presence in Glasgow, Adam Smith and James Watt definitely embodied two different spheres: while the former’s Wealth of Nations provided a decisive contribution to political economy, it mostly ignored the importance of technology in economics epitomised by the latter, who worked from 1756 to 1764 as mathematical instrument maker to the university. Distinct from Smith’s didactic Enlightenment, Watt, along with John Anderson (who encouraged Watt’s experiments), thus embodies a clear turn for practicality that would eventually find its way outside of Scotland when Watt’s inventions met the sponsorship of English entrepreneurs, namely Dr John Roebuck and then Matthew Boulton, notably in Sheffield and Birmingham. Though such initiatives as Anderson’s Institute came later in the 1790s, one may contend that local conditions, notably a structural lack of capital and a growing remoteness from political and economic decision making imperial centres fostered a constant trend in the exportation of Scottish know-how south of the border and beyond, deciding a wider, mostly English fate for a whole generation of Scottish entrepreneurs, inventors and engineers who would have to find training and support outside Scotland.12 This capitalistic gap was, in some way, a solid counterpart to Scotland’s widely renowned intellectual influence. 10

Ibid., p. 22. J. Muir, John Anderson, Pioneer of Technical Education, and the College He Founded, ed. J.M. Macaulay (Glasgow, 1950); A.H. Sexton, The First Technical College: A Sketch of the History of ‘the Andersonian’ and the Institutions Descended From It 1796–1894 (London, 1894). 12 Macinnes, ‘Applied Enlightenment’, p. 22. 11

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Economics was also widely at stake, and the distinction between didactic and applied Enlightenment stresses many new issues for Scotland. While Adam Smith brilliantly epitomised Scotland’s intellectual domination in the field of theory, figures such as the Jacobite James Steuart would provide the grounds for pragmatic statecraft in his extensive Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy (1767). This was mostly based on his practical observations of Continental manufactures while in exile (1746–63), whose insights on the economic aftermaths of technology, light state control over economy, and ‘cheap money’ monetary policy to support demand, production and employment (as another Jacobite sympathiser, John Law, had contended earlier in the century) proved particularly influential. An illustration is to be found in Alexandre Vandermonde’s lectures for the first chair of political economy (created in 1795 in revolutionary France) with a magistral illustration of the influence of Scottish pragmatic Enlightenment with a host of references to James Steuart and a common aim of applying Enlightenment for the benefit and progress of society.13 Applied statecraft was also at stake in the Scottish Enlightenment through remarkable statistical enquiries, works and accounts such as John Sinclair of Ulbster’s Statistical Accounts (1791–99) that massively involved the ministers of the kirk throughout the country as well as the five universities in the collection and compilation of a host of data in Scotland. This striking depiction of Scotland and its society in the 1790s was also emblematic of the tension between state intervention and liberalism. Though Sinclair was himself an advocate of the former, it nonetheless set the Scottish applied Enlightenment on a par with previous statistical traditions, either Continental or insular, initiated a century earlier by such works as Vauban’s Méthode Générale et facile pour faire le dénombrement des Peuples (1686) or the English School of statistics. If time and economic conditions are definitely to be taken into account, so is geography regarding the Scottish applied Enlightenment. The range of applications was particularly wide indeed, from agriculture to town planning and statecraft. For the former, by far one of the most active domains of applied Enlightenment, such initiatives as the Honourable Society of Improvers, founded in 1723 and which operated until 1745, Allan Ramsay’s Select Society for Philosophical Inquiry and the Promotion of Public Speaking, founded in 1754, the Edinburgh Society for Encouraging Arts, Sciences, Manufactures and Agriculture (founded in 1755 with the support of David Hume) and the later The Highland and Agricultural Society (1784), proved crucial to a largescale improvement and contributed to the development of the long-neglected Highlands, along with their smaller-scale replicas, i.e. local societies for the propagation of agricultural improvement. One should not in turn indulge in diffusionism and overestimate the influence of science and technology on the 13 Manuela

Albertone, ‘The Difficult Reception of James Steuart at the End of the Eighteenth Century in France’, in The Economics of James Steuart, ed. Ramón Tortajada (London, 1999), pp. 41–56.

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agricultural revolution in Scotland, which was also reciprocally fuelled by local innovation, market demands and prices fluctuations in most of its technical, social and economic dimensions. The Clearances and the withdrawal from clanship economy were thus a major occasion of, and in some respect an assumed incentive for, a ‘modernised’ direct management of the Highlands resources at the cost of a tremendous social impact. Another illustration of Scottish locally applied Enlightenment is also to be found in town planning, with no less than probably up to 250 planned villages in Scotland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.14 Behind and beyond their geometric layouts and wide streets, one can grasp the steady action of paternalistic landlords eager to adapt hygienic standards to rural townships away from the cities’ squalor, as well as a social determination towards moral oversight on populations. Yet again, these applications of Enlightenment principles through Highland improvements, planned villages and urban renewal were essentially local initiatives, though they epitomise a larger Enlightenment bent for architectural and urban ‘rational’ design. Through such insights, the Scottish pragmatic Enlightenment thus provides a clearer view on the actual conditions of the integration of Scotland in the British ensemble in the second half of the eighteenth century, along with a series of revised political, sociological and economic issues that indeed require further concrete illustrations.15 In many respects, the various agents of the Scottish Enlightenment combined both aspects, didactic and pragmatic, as the social structures of ascension and acknowledgement by authorities and institutions implied a range of resolutely practical actions and strategies. II

Despite the methodological limits of prosopography, one may nonetheless contend that a host of Scottish family courses in the eighteenth century perfectly illustrate the general evolutional frame sketched by pragmatic Enlightenment. Moreover, in a broader perspective, family lives and strategies also make a strong case for pragmatism in history. Indeed, the Playfair family of Angus, a particularly striking group of mid-eighteenth-century siblings, provide an eloquent and colourful illustration of Scotland’s evolutions. A first biographical feature was institutional. Through the Reverend James Playfair Sr (1712–72), minister of Liff and Benvie in Angus, the family rested firmly on two key pillars of the Scottish Enlightenment, namely the kirk and the 14

Bob Harris and Charles McKean, The Scottish Town in the Age of the Enlightenment 1740–1820 (Edinburgh, 2014); Douglas G. Lockhart (ed.), Scottish Planned Villages, Scottish History Society, 5th series, 18 (Edinburgh, 2012). 15 On the social and economic aftermaths of integration, see A.C. Chitnis, The Scottish Enlightenment: A Social History (London, Croom Helm and Totowa, NJ, 1976); Bruce Lenman, Integration, Enlightenment, and Industrialization: Scotland 1746–1832 (London, 1981).

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university. James Playfair, as a doctor in Divinity from St Andrews University, illustrated the superior education typical of the executives and higher members of the kirk that somehow ensured, as for their Church of England counterparts, a distinct though increasingly isolated social position in the society of the time. The later education and training provided to James Playfair’s progeny would exemplify that social distinctiveness. Another characteristic of James Playfair’s local eminency was evidenced by his close circle of acquaintances such as his neighbour in the presbytery of Dundee, the Reverend Robert Small (1732–1808), himself a doctor in Divinity from St Andrews, a reputed scholar and Scottish literati, later co-founder (in 1783, with other such fellows as John Playfair, the Reverend James’s son) of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.16 Among his many interests, Robert Small would partake in John Sinclair’s enterprise with A Statistical Account of the Parish and Town of Dundee (1792), just as a cousin of the by then deceased James Playfair, the Reverend Doctor James Octavius Playfair (1738–1819), had given the entries for Meigle and the adjacent Angus parish of Eassie and Nevay in the Statistical Account (1791).17 The somewhat ‘national mission’ and statecraft achievement, the ‘government by numbers’ so to speak, embodied by the Old Statistical Account thus illustrated the social and intellectual eminence of local clergy of which the various branches of the Playfairs and the Smalls partook.18 The Smalls’ pragmatic assessment would not be complete without the wide connections established through Robert’s younger brother, William (1734–75), whose course is well known.19 William Small would broaden the social and intellectual/symbolic family capital to a wider British and transatlantic scope. Himself a graduate from Marischal College, Aberdeen, and a famed Professor of Natural Philosophy at the College of William and Mary (1758–64), where he 16

Scott Hew, Fasti Ecclesiæ Scoticanæ; the Succession of Ministers in the Church of Scotland from the Reformation (5 vols, Edinburgh, 1925), vol. V, p. 317; Robert and William Chambers, The Gazeteer of Scotland (London, 1844), vol. I, p. 235. Robert and his brother William were the sons of a Presbyterian minister, as John Playfair would himself follow his father’s steps in the kirk, an illustration of the familial and social consistency bestowed upon the Kirk of Scotland. 17 Robert Small was also the author of several scientific publications such as the Demonstrations of some of Dr Matthew Stewart’s General Theorems (1785) and an Account of the astronomical discoveries of Kepler (1804). James Octavius Playfair was born the son of a farmer in Perthshire and studied at St Andrew’s University before becoming minister of Newtyle (1770), then Meigle (1780). St Andrews University awarded him an honorary Doctorate in Divinity in 1779 and he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1787. He is the author of a renowned System of Chronology (1782) that potentially influenced his distant cousin, William Playfair (1759–1823), for his own graphical inventions. 18 See Alain Desrosières, Gouverner par les nombres, L’argument statistique II (Paris, 2008); Alain Supiot, La gouvernance par les nombres. Cours au Collège de France (2012–2014) (Paris, 2015). The consistent link between statistical accounts and the social/political control of the kirk was later exemplified by the New Statistical Account of Scotland published between 1834 and 1845 under the auspices of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. 19 Joan Lane, ‘Small, William (1734–1775)’, ODNB.

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taught Thomas Jefferson, Small also established connections with such personalities as Benjamin Franklin, who provided him with a letter of introduction to Matthew Boulton in Birmingham, a move that would decide his later course as a doctor of medicine and member of the Soho nebula, notably as one of the first members of the Lunar Society.20 A decisive go-between in the connection between Watt and Boulton, Small would perfectly illustrate a first 1760s Soho generation of Scottish skilled expatriates to England, with the likes of James Keir and James Watt, while a second generation, a decade later, would follow with trainees such as William Murdoch, John Rennie and William Playfair. In Mannheimian terms, the ‘common historical events’ differentiating the distinct identities of these two generations seem to have relied more on socio-economic background than specific collective circumstance.21 A sociological approach to the Scottish pragmatic Enlightenment, crossing institutional, geographical and generational criteria, may draw apparently forthright conclusions from eighteenth-century Scottish ‘Intellectual Achievers’’ background: An overall profile of the Scottish achiever of the eighteenth century would indicate that he was born in an urban parish. His parents belonged to the Church of Scotland, lived in the midlands […], and could be classified as upper middle class. The subject had three or four siblings, but he himself was probably the oldest. He attended the local parish school and from there went on to the university. As an adult he married, had two or three children, became a part of the upper middle class if he had not been born into it, and lived to be approximately three score and ten years of age. In sum, the eighteenth-century Scottish achiever seems to resemble his twentieth-century counterpart in many ways.22

Though most members of the ‘founders’’ generation we have sketched did not systematically comply to each criterion (and a strong case is to be made here for rural parishes), they nonetheless matched the most relevant, notably their original kirk background and their higher educational and occupational profile, as physicians, university professors and ministers accounted for no less than 40 per cent of the Scottish literati.23 20

James Patrick Muirhead, The Life of James Watt … (London, 1858), pp. 249–54. In 1765, Small was awarded an MD degree from Aberdeen University. 21 On the notion of generation and the sociology of knowledge, see Karl Mannheim’s 1928 classic essay Das Problem der Generationen, translated into English as The Problem of Generations in 1952; Jane Pilcher, ‘Mannheim’s Sociology of Generations: an Undervalued Legacy’, The British Journal of Sociology, 45:3 (1994), 481–95. One may nonetheless draw attention to the fact that James Playfair, just as William Robertson (later his son’s patron in the kirk and university), belonged to the generation of Scottish ministers that had to cope with the 1745 crisis and its aftermaths. James Playfair’s own political opinion is unknown, but his son John would perfectly observe his patron William Robertson’s moderate positions. 22 Bonnie Bullough and Vern Bullough, ‘Intellectual Achievers: A Study of EighteenthCentury Scotland’, American Journal of Sociology, 76:6 (1971), 1048–63. 23 Bullough and Bullough, ‘Intellectual Achievers’, 1059. Physicians were a major category

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The following generation of Playfairs would somehow thicken the brush strokes. A blatant illustration was the elder brother, John (1748–1819), whose institutional and educational background perfectly matched the features already mentioned. Born into and educated by the kirk in the person of his own father until the age of fourteen, John perfectly followed the family curriculum by matriculating in the University of St Andrews to study Divinity.24 Graduating in 1765 and then licensed as a minister in 1770, John emphasised and enlarged the family capital with particular mathematical skills that would eventually earn him a social promotion towards the university. The upward move was far from smooth: despite being one of the youngest deputy Professors of Natural Philosophy in the history of the University of St Andrews, John Playfair collected podium places to the chair of Mathematics at Marischal College in 1766, then to St Andrews’ chair of Natural Philosophy in 1772. The same year, a biographical twist would add to his burden with James Playfair’s death, which bestowed his family support upon him and would decide a move towards Liff and Benvie, where he succeeded to his father as minister. The ensuing legal feud over his nomination would mobilise and thus reveal support of a superior kind, notably William Robertson, whose action proved decisive in the succession settlement.25 By then, Robertson had already monopolised most of the highest titles and sinecures within the kirk, the university and the royal household as royal chaplain to George III (since 1761), principal of the University of Edinburgh (since 1762), Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland (since 1763) and Historiographer Royal (since 1764).26 In post-1745 Scotland, religious moderation and a clear pro-government line were indeed a token with 16 per cent, followed by university professors (15 per cent) and ministers (9 per cent). Another significant category were lawyers, advocates, and judges with 9 per cent, followed by teachers, engineers, artists, printers, and antiquarians each for 5 per cent. 24 James G. Playfair, ‘Biographical Account of the Late Professor’, in The Works of John Playfair Esq …: with a memoir of the author, ed. F. Jeffrey (4 vols, Edinburgh, 1822), vol. I, pp. ix–lxxvi; Robert Chambers, ‘John Playfair’, Dictionary of Eminent Scotsmen (4 vols, Glasgow, 1833–35), vol. IV, pp. 106–12; Jack B. Morrell, ‘Playfair, John (1748–1819)’, ODNB. 25 Playfair, ‘Biographical Account of the Late Professor Playfair’, pp. xiii–xiv. The case was settled in favour of John Playfair in August 1773 by a resolution of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. Samples of the correspondence between John Playfair and William Robertson are held in the Manuscript Collections of the NLS, MSS 3942, RobertsonMacDonald of Kinlochmoidart Papers, and show the scope of their intellectual closeness as well as Robertson’s support towards his protégé. 26 Jeffrey R. Smitten, ‘Robertson, William (1721–1793)’, ODNB; Stewart J. Brown (ed.), William Robertson and the Expansion of Empire (Cambridge, 1997); idem., ‘The Shaping of Moderation: William Robertson and Arminianism’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 22 (1992), 281–300; Richard B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: the moderate literati of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1985). On the Historiographer Royal for Scotland, see Denys Hay, ‘The Historiographers Royal in England and Scotland’, SHR, 30:109 (1951), 15–29, and J.-F. Dunyach, ‘Les historiographes et les usages de l’histoire en Grande-Bretagne’, in Les historiographes en Europe du Moyen Age à la Révolution, ed. Chantal Grell (Paris, 2006), pp. 157–85.

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of political pragmatism. A multipurpose patron, Robertson thus managed to secure the position of Moderator of the Synod for Playfair, before helping him to make his way into the university. In order to secure that other move, political protection was required. Robertson’s hold on universities was replicated and secured by Henry Dundas’s absolute political patronage over Scotland.27 The latter included the Scottish alma mater: as late as 1801, Dundas would boast that ‘Every professor in the universities of Saint Andrews and Edinburgh has been appointed for more than 20 years past either actually by myself or upon my recommendation […]’.28 The Scottish Royal Society (founded in 1783) would later replicate the same patronage pattern and illustrate the consistency of ‘moderate’ elites under the protection, if not the supervision, of such personalities, such as its first vice-president, none other than Henry Dundas himself.29 The Scottish homo academicus background was complete thanks to a web of social and political bonds tied around Edinburgh’s conviviality, eminently illustrated by the famed Poker Club (1762–84), whose founders and membership included the institutional elites of kirk, law, university and administration.30 By the mid-1780s, John Playfair had managed to make his way up into most of these circles. This achievement was the result of a long process of intense networking, with pendular travels to Edinburgh (the social and hierarchical ascent had to be geographical too) and the constitution, thanks to Robertson, of an impressive address book of academic acquaintances and support including Adam Smith, physicist and chemist Joseph Black, geologist James Hutton (all three founders of the Oyster Club), the then Professor of Mathematics at the University of Edinburgh, Matthew Stuart, his son and assistant Dugald, and the Astronomer Royal Neville Maskelyne.31 27

David Brown, ‘The Government of Scotland under Henry Dundas and William Pitt’, History, 83:270 (1998), 265–79; Michael Fry, The Dundas Despotism (Edinburgh, 1992; reprinted 2004); Holden Furber, Henry Dundas: First Viscount Melville, 1741–1811, Political Manager of Scotland, Statesman, Administrator of British India (Oxford, 1931), notably part II, ‘The Political Management of Scotland’. Dundas was Solicitor General for Scotland (1766–75) and Lord Advocate (1775–83) before joining William Pitt’s administration as President of the Board of Control (1793–1801), Secretary of State for War (1794–1801), and First Lord of the Admiralty (1804–5). 28 BL, Pelham Papers, Add MSS 33108, fol. 450. On Dundas’s patronage over St Andrews University, see Roger L. Emerson, Academic Patronage in the Scottish Enlightenment, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Saint Andrews Universities (Edinburgh, 2008), pp. 495–520. 29 Steven Shapin, ‘Property, Patronage, and the Politics of Science: the Founding of the Royal Society of Edinburgh’, The British Journal for the History of Science, 7:1 (1974), 1–41. Henry Dundas was the first vice-president of the Royal Society, from 1789 to 1798. 30 Richard Sher, ‘Poker Club (act.1762–1784)’, ODNB; Rosalind Carr, ‘The Gentleman and the Soldier: Patriotic Masculinities in Eighteenth-Century Scotland’, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, 28:2 (2008), 102–21; Corey E. Andrews, ‘Drinking and Thinking: Club Life and Convivial Sociability in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Edinburgh’, The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, 22:1 (2007), 65–82. Bourdieu’s classic study of the academic world, Homo Academicus (1984), was translated into English as Homo Academicus (Stanford, CA, 1990). 31 Adam Smith was officially appointed Professor at the University of Glasgow in 1751;

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The move towards Edinburgh was advanced in 1782 by a lucrative offer to become the tutor to the two sons of William Ferguson of Raith, Ronald and Robert, that involved moving closer to Edinburgh, thus allowing a closer participation in the city’s circles of intellectual life.32 As Richard Sher perfectly portrayed it, the literati’s sociability was key to the admission into the coveted academic circle and occurred in a wide range of locations, an accurate ‘geography of the mind’ and crucible of the Scottish Enlightenment, notably in Edinburgh, that any aspirant had to grasp and aim at.33 Playfair’s training was not only scientific and institutional, it also included social skills and conviviality. The ongoing patronage and promotion within the kirk and the university also had to cope with generational factors and circumstances. Under Dundas’s supervision, William Robertson would play a decisive role in the selection of a younger generation of ‘post-45’ prelates and academics, among whom were John Playfair and Dugald Stewart, whose simultaneous nominations in the university uncover some of the mechanics involved in the election process.34 Though famous, the episode is nonetheless worth a reminder. The occasion was provided through the death in January 1785 of Matthew Stewart (1717–85), Professor of Mathematics at Edinburgh University since 1747. Stewart’s diseased condition since 1772 – which necessitated his ceasing of any teaching in 1775 – had urged the hiring of an assistant lecturer in the person of his own son, Dugald (1753–1828). Despite his steadily weaker state, Matthew was particularly active in the Scottish literati society and circles, notably as one of the joint founders of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, along with his friend William Robertson, the latter’s protégé John Playfair, a member of the Oyster Club with the same two and his colleague Adam Ferguson. Ferguson (b. 1723), himself tired of the burden of his professorship in Moral Philosophy in Edinburgh, took Joseph Black (1728–99) was Professor of Medicine and Chemistry at the University of Edinburgh since 1766; James Hutton (1726–97) did not hold any position in the University. Other members of the Oyster Club (founded in 1777) included David Hume, John Clerk, Adam Ferguson, and William Robertson, later John Playfair himself, and received famed visitors such as James Watt and Benjamin Franklin. Apart from institutional bonds such as University and/or Kirk, Freemasonry also provided a common affiliation to these eminent personalities. Thanks to his patrons’ recommendation, John Playfair met Astronomer Royal Neville Maskelyne (1732–1811) on the occasion of the latter’s scientific expedition to Perthshire in 1774. Maskelyne later granted him access to the scientific circles of London (Playfair, ‘Biographical Account of the Late Professor’, pp. xv–xvi). Sher, Church and University, pp. 113–14, 136–41; Emerson, Academic Patronage in the Scottish Enlightenment; idem., Professors, Patronage and Politics: the Aberdeen Universities in the Eighteenth Century (Aberdeen, 1992). 32 Playfair, ‘Biographical Account of the Late Professor’, pp. xvi–xvii. 33 Richard B. Sher, The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and America (Chicago, 2008), pp. 106–16, especially p. 109 on the Oyster Club. 34 On Robertson’s action within the Church, see John R. Mcintosh, ‘Principal William Robertson, the Popular Party and the General Assembly’, Scottish Church History, 43:1 (2014), 31–49, and Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment.

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the opportunity of his friend Matthew Stewart’s death to apply for a sinecure. The whole process was monitored by William Robertson, Henry Dundas and George III’s favourite and former Ferguson’s tutee, Philip Stanhope, fifth earl of Chesterfield, and implied the nominal appointment of Ferguson to the chair of Mathematics to secure a revenue with other stipends, while Dugald Stewart would be appointed to the chair of Moral Philosophy. Given the author of the Essay on the History of Civil Society’s condition, the hiring of a Joint Professor to effectively teach was urgently recommended and led to the appointment of none other than John Playfair himself.35 Dugald Stewart and John Playfair, both founding members of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, were officially appointed on the same day, 18 May 1785, by Edinburgh’s town council. The pair would subsequently progressively establish their own prominent web of patronage over the university, as Robertson (d. 1793) would leave the scene. In 1805 Playfair would in turn exchange the chair of Mathematics for that of Natural Philosophy in succession to John Robison (1739–1805), whom he succeeded by the same token as General Secretary to the Royal Society of Edinburgh. The ensuing academic and ecclesiastical controversy around John Leslie’s (1766–1832) appointment to the then vacated chair of Mathematics would display the scope of Playfair’s manoeuvring skills and hold on the university.36 John Playfair also strikingly illustrates the crucial importance of family connections in the pragmatic Enlightenment. Indeed, beyond the Enlightenment – be it Scottish or elsewhere – family strategies have always provided a consistent historical constant in collective pragmatic arbitration and projection, a series of practices often labelled ‘adaptive strategies’ by sociologists.37 In the Playfair case, the loss of the father in 1772 resulted in a resolute plan of action with an array of specific trainings and ‘vocational guidance’ that would all tackle the Scottish Enlightenment at some point. A first though still largely undocumented case among John’s siblings is Robert (1751–1825), who held office as a solicitor in Edinburgh. The choice of 35 Jane Fagg, ‘Biographical Introduction’, in The Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, ed. Vincenzo Merrolle (2 vols, London, 1995), I, pp. lxxiii–lxxiv; Emerson, Academic Patronage in the Scottish Enlightenment, pp. 328–9; Gordon McIntyre, Dugald Stewart, the Pride and Ornament of Scotland (Brighton (Sussex), 36 Playfair, ‘Biographical Account of the Late Professor’, pp. xxii–xxiii; Jack B. Morrell, ‘The Leslie Affair: Careers, Kirk and Politics in Edinburgh in 1805’, SHR, 54:1 (1975), 63–82. Doubts on Leslie’s religious orthodoxy were circulated by his Moderate opponents to thwart his election. Both Playfair and Stewart had to actively canvass and lobby the authorities to secure their candidate’s election. 37 Phyllis Moen and Elaine Wethington, ‘The Concept of Family Adaptive Strategies’, Annual Review of Sociology, 18 (1992), 233–51. On family strategies in a broader context, see Christopher Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914. Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford, 2004), and Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires: an Eighteenthcentury History (Princeton, NJ, 2012). On the Scottish global context, see Angela McCarthy, Scottish Migrants Networks and Identities since the 18th-century (London, 2006).

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law was perfectly illustrative of the family’s social standing and multipurpose skills including the third pillar of the Scottish Enlightenment after kirk and university. The requisite education and urban location of the office, with its correlative necessary social practice and networks, also contributed to the general move of the Playfairs from Angus to Edinburgh.38 Recorded as a founder and censor of the famous Scottish legal faculty, the Supreme Court Society of Solicitors of the Court of Session in 1784, Robert Playfair was himself connected to the Scottish capital intelligentsia and would illustrate his action as trustee in the much-disputed Royal Theatre of Edinburgh affair (1790–94), which involved such prominent characters as Henry Dundas himself.39 In the family portrait gallery, another younger brother, the architect James Playfair Jr (1755–94), would also resolutely broaden the original family scope of kirk and local trade and prove particularly illustrative of the Scottish pragmatic Enlightenment. Although the conditions of James’s initial training are unknown, his early move to London and attempt at a ‘nation-wide’ career in Britain were carried under the auspices of his elder brother John, who mobilised his vast network in the capital for the occasion.40 By 1783, James had already launched a multipurpose trade combining invention and architecture, with a patent for a shaving box (1782), a pamphlet on A Method of Constructing Vapour Baths, a partnership in his brother William’s industrial endeavours, along with first exhibits at the Royal Academy.41 An early introducer of French architect and urban planner Claude-Nicolas Ledoux’s innovative neoclassical architecture in Britain, James would mostly practise in Scotland, despite his strong London connections such as with his life-long friend Sir John Soane.42 While he was away from Scotland, Robert would attend his younger brother’s business. Among James Playfair’s most noted works such as Forfar town hall, Kirriemuir church and Cairness House, one has to mention two different projects – one 38 John

Finlay, ‘Legal Education, 1650–1850’, in The Edinburgh History of Education in Scotland, ed. John Anderson, Mark Freeman and Lindsay Paterson (Edinburgh, 2015), pp. 114–32, notably pp. 123–9 on the Writers to the Signet. 39 Society of Solicitors of the Court of Session and other Supreme Courts of Scotland, Act of Sederunt concerning the Admission of Agents and Solicitors (Edinburgh, 1784), p. 12. The dispute over the Edinburgh Royal Theatre opposed John Jackson, proprietor of the theatre and publisher of the first History of Scottish Theatre (1793), to his lessee the actor and theatre manager Stephen Kemble. The persons involved were the duke of Hamilton and Henry Dundas as patentees, Robert Playfair as trustee for the creditors of John Jackson, and as a third-party the actress (and Hamilton’s mistress) Harriet Esten as would-be lessee. The litigation was eventually resolved in 1794. The Melville Papers (NLS, MSS 353, Melville Papers, fols 1–35) hold several documents and correspondence over the case. 40 Peter Leach, ‘Playfair, James (1755–1794)’, ODNB. 41 Ibid. James Playfair, A Method of Constructing Vapor Baths… (London, 1783). Playfair’s patent for a shaving box (1782) was registered by the Enrolment Office, now deposited at TNA, C 54/6663. 42 At James Playfair’s death in 1794, Sir John Soane acquired most of his friend’s papers to support his widow and family.

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effective and one that remained unexecuted – that perfectly epitomise the conditions regulating the pragmatic Enlightenment. One tackles the range of necessary actions to achieve a performative operation on society, and crucial was the securing of Henry Dundas’s patronage (around 1785) for the design of Melville Castle, which James Playfair effectively completed between 1786 and 1791. Though undocumented, John’s support in the process seems most probable and added another Playfair within the circle of Dundas’s protégés while broadening the former’s clientele. James’s other project directly addresses the Scottish pragmatic turn with the plan for a model village at the ‘Budden’ (Boddin, Angus), commissioned by David Scott, fifth laird of Dunninald (1746–1805) in 1787–89. The project, with its hippodamian grid-shape plan, was perfectly in line with contemporary visions of a rational plantation and city in the Scottish planned villages movement of the time, and a somewhat exotic twist with a pagoda-shaped market place.43 James Playfair would follow his planning projects with the drawing in 1790 of an ‘American city’ designed for French settlers in Ohio for his brother William’s scheme of the Scioto Company in France, a striking example of a cross-Channel circulation of the already ascertained Scottish expertise in town planning.44 His sudden death in 1794 would open another family adaptation phase, with John on the front line again.45 The adoption of James’s son, William Henry, his education in Edinburgh University and subsequent launch of his career under John’s auspices illustrate the crucial importance of the professor on the family destinies and strategies.46 William Henry’s later successful course as the architect of the Athens of the North is too well known to be chronicled here, except for the significant tribute to his family, the John Playfair monument on Calton Hill, dedicated to his uncle while bearing a plaque to the memory of his father James on the side. A conclusion to our case study of the Scottish pragmatic Enlightenment should consider the colourful figure of William Playfair (1759–1823), younger brother to John, Robert and James. William’s course would follow the lines already delineated, with a particular twist that tackles the social construction of science during the Enlightenment.47 Trained at an early age in mathematics and science by his brother John, William would soon experience the general family 43

Sir John Soane Museum Collections, London, ref 78/10/5–7: ‘James Playfair: Design for a village designed to be built at the Budden’ (London, 1787). 44 NLS, MSS 33/5/25, James Playfair, journal of architecture, fols 71–2, 8–17 August 1790; Jocelyne Moreau-Zanelli, Gallipolis: Histoire d’un mirage américain au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 2000). 45 Charles McKean, ‘Playfair, William Henry (1790–1857)’, ODNB. 46 Ibid. 47 See Karl Polanyi, Science, Faith and Religion (Oxford, 1946); Harry Collins, ‘Social Construction of Science’, in A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology, ed. Jan Kyrre Berg Olsen, Stig Andur Pedersen and Vincent F. Hendricks (Chichester, 2009), pp. 84–7 and Wiebe E. Bijker, ‘Social Construction of Technology’, in Companion to the Philosophy of Technology, ed. Olsen, Pedersen and Hendricks, pp. 88–94; Jones, Industrial Enlightenment, pp. 1–21.

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move towards the centres of power, influence and knowledge. William’s own path would in turn broaden the scope: his original turn for mechanics decided a training under the inventor, engineer and close friend to the Small brothers, Andrew Meikle.48 Family connections involving Robert Small, Matthew Boulton and James Keir would soon trigger another move, out of Scotland, towards the West Midlands in 1777. Trained and hired as a draughtsman and an accountant by James Watt, Playfair would perfectly illustrate that moment when ‘the Enlightenment in Scotland was running out of, rather than on, steam’.49 Playfair’s later endeavours, from metalware production in London to industrial schemes in pre-revolutionary Paris, from actuarial essays on the national debt to his graphical inventions in statistics (the pie and bar charts), all reflect, one may contend, the consistence of pragmatic Enlightenment, be it Scottish, British or elsewhere, and its remarkable aptitude to geographical transpositions and circulations. However apparently chaotic, hectic and restless, William Playfair’s course would perfectly illustrate, although from below and from the margins, a whole-family multi-generational ascension project patiently undertaken and eventually carved in stone on Calton Hill.

48 John

P. Shaw, ‘Meikle, Andrew (1719–1811)’, ODNB; Jones, Industrial Enlightenment, pp. 116–29. 49 Macinnes, ‘Applied Enlightenment’, p. 22.

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10 The Two Rabs’ Big Adventure: Scottish Networks and Influence in Imperial Britain Sarah Barber

S

cottish men criss-crossed Britain and Ireland, the continent of Europe and the Atlantic for political, economic and colonial adventure. This essay will focus on two Ayrshire neighbours: Robert Hunter, grandson of Robert Hunter, 20th laird of Hunterston, and son of lawyer James, born in Edinburgh in 1666; and Robert Cunyngham, born in 1669, the eighth of nine sons of Richard Cunyngham, the purchaser of the barony of Glengarnock.1 From Covenanting backgrounds, they were part of the generation of Scots who, through service, forged a place for themselves in British society, engineering and benefitting from opportunities created by, first, the Williamite settlement of 1688–89 and then the 1707 Act of Union. By their deaths – in 1734 and 1743, respectively – both men could claim to be metropolitan men of fashion, and yet occupied a liminal space between newly minted acceptance within England and the comforts of traditional Scottish connection. Ties of kith and kin generated an ‘economy of obligation’, and we might refer to a parallel ‘society of obligation’, with familial relationships expressed through patriarchal channels: the military, the church and trade.2 The two Rabs met their obligations and propelled themselves into Augustan society via their relationships with others who were perched precariously on the fringes. In some cases, this meant Celtic networks and the reshaping of British polities and society. Often, it involved renegotiating the nature of religious confession and profession in which European Protestants were willing to exchange nation to secure faith, and this essay will follow 1

James E. Scanlon, ‘A Life of Robert Hunter, 1666–1734’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Virginia, 1969); Mary Lou Lustig, Robert Hunter, 1666–1734: New York’s Augustan Statesman (New York, 1983); NRS, CS 96/3096/1; Roberdeau Buchanan, Genealogy of the Roberdeau Family (Washington, 1876). 2 Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: the Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 1998). Cunyngham’s and Hunter’s families were also medics.

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Huguenots and Palatines in this process.3 Underpinning economic and societal bonds was moral obligation, and in this regard the Rabs negotiated their establishment venture through women. Examining a micro-study of two Ayrshire men highlights important larger questions about the construction of empire through contested and resolved negotiations. It marries the social history of empire with its economic and political counterparts. Through the complexities of interwoven obligations, the restless back and forth across multiple sites, and the fluidity and dexterity required for social mobility in Hanoverian Britain, we can discern the importance of the ‘obligations of Scottishness’. I

The Hunters and Cunynghams were families that had suffered for their commitment to Reformed religion who, with the overthrow of James VII and II, saw the opportunity for advancement.4 The most direct means to serve church and state and thereby substantiate Scottish networks was through the army. In 1688 Hunter, having abandoned his apothecary apprenticeship, joined the dragoons, and was among those at the Revolution who escorted Sarah Churchill and Anne Stewart away from James’s court.5 The following year he was commissioned an aide major in the regiment of Covenanter Colonel Henry Erskine, Baron Cardross, to whom he was related. He was part of the suppression of the Highlands, and in 1694 obtained a commission as a captain in the Royal Scots Dragoons that was soon playing an active part in the Low Countries’ campaigns of the War of Spanish Succession.6 His finest hour came at Ramillies, when his military strategy proved sharper than that of the generals, though it would prove the end of his military career. At the end of 1706 he left for London. Robert Cunyngham was a junior member of a large family, but both his parents died before he was two years old. An elder brother, William, had gone to the West Indies and, aged about sixteen, Robert followed him and trained as an accountant. In 1685 he was working for Christopher Jeaffreson in St Christopher, but ‘after the revolution K: Willm sent the Duke of Boltons Regiment of foot to the Leaward Islands; I being a Gentleman born of an ancient & noble family thought it more honorable to be in the Army then in an 3

J.F. Bosher, ‘Huguenot Merchants and the Protestant International in the Seventeenth Century’, William and Mary Quarterly, 52:1 (1995), 77–102; Owen Stanwood, ‘The Protestant Moment: Antipopery, the Revolution of 1688–1689, and the Making of an Anglo-American Empire’, Journal of British Studies, 46:3 (2007), 481–508; idem., ‘Between Eden and Empire: Huguenot Refugees and the Promise of New Worlds’, American Historical Review, 118:5 (2013), 1319–44. 4 James Paterson, The History of the County of Ayr (2 vols, Ayr, 1847), II, pp. 105–21, 132–46. 5 NRS, Stair Muniments 141/1/37. 6 Charles Dalton ed., English Army Lists and Commission Registers, 1661–1714 (6 vols, London, 1892–1904), IV, 58.

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accompting house’.7 In a mere six days (to quote Cunyngham) he was heading a company under Lieutenant Colonel Edward Nott.8 In one petition, he accounted his beginnings as a foot-soldier to September 1692 and his command from 1 May 1695 to 23 January 1699, when the regiment was disbanded.9 During this time, Cunyngham exercised the obligations of faith and family through his wastrel brother. William drank away his handouts and gave Robert a revulsion for alcohol, but the younger remained dutiful and charitable to the elder. Robert was the epitome of Protestant rectitude: ‘God blessed my present industry by which I have acquired a good estate for which I have good reason to be thankful.’10 Robert Cunyngham was an exercise in patriarchal self-fashioning. His belief in his ancient Scottish nobility was unshakable, he felt cheated of his position in society, and clawed his way back using the discourse of duty, loyalty, and rectitude. To do so required subterfuge and dissembling. The practical means of his escape from being an accountant, easing himself into the life of proprietorship to which he felt entitled, was his marriage, probably in the early 1690s, to French Huguenot émigré Judith-Elizabeth de Bonneton. She was the child of marriages between prominent, aristocratic Huguenot families, but the religious troubles in France meant that her maternal uncle, a Protestant war hero, had renounced his faith in order to advance himself to title and position in Louis XIV’s France; while her aunts, Anne and Elizabeth de Barat, had fled to French St Christophe, where Elizabeth’s husband, Jourdain de Salenave, was Lieutenant-General of the French quarter. The war between England and France spread to their empires and left Jourdain de Salenave in an ambiguous position, and the French in St Christopher, some of whom were Protestants and some of whom were not, dancing between competing jurisdictions and confessions in order to hold on to their estates. But Cunyngham presented his wife’s family in parallel with the dutiful, martial, and noble tones that he created for himself, and honoured it through the names of his children. He had daughters: Elizabeth (14 August 1694), Salenave’s goddaughter as well as granddaughter; Mary, the fourth born, who would marry another Huguenot, Captain Isaac Roberdeau; and Jourdaina (1709). His son Daniel (19 July 1701) was named after Elizabeth’s father and his birth was the signal for Robert to stop giving money to his brother. Charles was named after his wife’s uncle. Bonneton ‘a Son Born Decr 5th 1706. D’ and Barat, the next son (Shrove Tuesday 1708), also died. Judith’s final pregnancy would end with a daughter, stillborn on 29 December 1715.11 The spare statement of Protestant rectitude by which Cunyngham ‘acquired 7

Historical Society of Pennsylvania (hereafter HSP), Am.0491, unfol. English Army, IV, 90. 9 TNA, CO 153/13, pp. 194–97. 10 HSP, Am.0491, unfol. 11 NRS, CS 96/3096/1: Charles was born 2 October 1702. His death was reported at second hand in the late 1730s. 8 Dalton,

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a good estate’ disguised his method. He was working as an accountant and steward on the Salenave’s four hundred acres at Cayon when he married Elizabeth (de Barat), Salenave’s niece. The aunts went to England, obtained denizen status and a pension, and left Cunyngham with power of attorney. Between around 1692 and 1715 Salenave was in England, demonstrating her loyalty, Protestantism, and entitlement to her estates, and Cunyngham was in St. Christopher’s maximising the lands he would inherit through his marriage.12 To do this, he evicted incumbents and pleaded their failure to show the industry and cultivation that marked a Protestant and a loyal Briton. He earned a reputation as an ‘obstinate’, self-righteous man, with a hot temper. In particular, fellow Scots, Governors Walter Douglas and Walter Hamilton, found him awkward and difficult to manage and favoured his competitors, such as the Solicitor General of the Leeward Islands, John Spooner – ‘a verry worthy honest Gentleman’ – and Ayrshire neighbour and contemporary, James Milliken of Nevis, whose advancement through military service and marriage almost exactly mirrored Cunyngham’s own.13 In April 1715 Elizabeth Salenave ‘made a guift to my Neice Judith Elizabeth … [of] the Land to me belonging in the Island of St Christopher’, and in December created a very long (unwitnessed) will leaving her £100 a year. She left money to other members of Judith’s family and the equivalent of £100,000 to several Huguenot refugees. Her references to Robert Cunyngham were not glowing. He was defined by other recipients: Elizabeth’s father; her niece’s husband; but the only direct reference was to ‘my Nephew Richard Cunningham [sic]’.14 A lengthy codicil hinted at his patriarchal empire building in her lifetime: Mr Cuningham was to give me an Account of the Effects which I left him when I came away in Mills Kettles and Sugar and some Sheep whereof he was to give me an account which he had not done And if it happen that what I have received do exceed what I have left him he may take it out of what I leave in my Will to his Son.15

Saleneve’s accountant and attorney was left with ‘the care … and management’ of her estates.16 But Cunyngham self-described this as having ‘rented a plantation afterwards purchased one’ and ‘acquired a good estate’. The precise points at which Cunyngham was acting as an autonomous proprietor and when he was constructing his position through the connections with Salenave and de Bonneton are difficult to distinguish. His overall intention seems to have been to engross land in St Christopher. Contrary to crown policy, which tried to 12

TNA, CO 152/39, no. 74; CO 152/10, nos 39, 39i; CO 153/12, pp. 183–5; CO 152/11, no. 21; CO 152/10, no. 37; CO 152/10, nos 15, 15 i–iii. 13 S.M. Nisbet in UCL, Legacies of British Slave Ownership, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/ person/view/2146645491. 14 Robert had a brother, Richard; Elizabeth may have misspoken or been mis-transcribed: but no possible explanations are flattering. 15 TNA, PROB 11/551/194. 16 TNA, CO 152/10, nos 14, 15 ii.

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keep grants small so as to prevent cliques of over-mighty planters, Cunyngham forged a network of Scottish-Huguenot links across the parishes of St Mary Cayon, St Peter and St George Basseterre. All parishes in the southern French quarter, he would link properties to connect his Cayon estate on the windward (east) with his Basseterre storehouse and embarkation point on the south-west coast.17 His immediate neighbours were McDowall, Gordon, Douglas, Dalziel, and Colhoun. His accounts list Scottish and French planters, merchants, ships, captains, widows, creditors, and debtors for whom he used his skills as an agitator and litigator; his money as protector and sponsor; and tied his family, friends, and servants into huge webs of obligation.18 II

The key year for Robert Hunter was 1706. On 15 August, General John Hay, Hunter’s friend, relation, and commanding officer at Ramillies, died from fever. At thirty-eight, the general had married a second time to the seventeen-year-old Elizabeth Orby. At forty, the still-unmarried Hunter took Hay’s widow as his wife. The Orbys were a family whose loyalty had been fluid, meaning their own estate was encumbered, and they exacerbated their troubles by tying their fortunes to those of the earls of Macclesfield and the Hamiltons.19 The Orbys and the Scottish families with whom they had intermarried were embroiled in a mammoth web of chancery cases, disputed probate, and damaging scandal. The Macclesfield connection also drew in Sir William Beeston, through whom Elizabeth Orby inherited land in Jamaica.20 Hunter stood to inherit 6,599 acres in Crowland and 1,506 acres at Burton Pedwardine, Lincolnshire, three houses in the Savoy, an estate in Chertsey, Surrey, and those in Jamaica, through a union of obligation to the Hays and the Hamiltons. Williamite loyalist, George Hamilton, first earl of Orkney, had been appointed in 1698 to the governorship of Virginia, but remained an absentee because, as a Scot, he could not command an English colonial territory. But, in anticipation of the Act of Union, Whitehall was grooming Scots such as Orkney, the Hays, and John Lord Dalrymple, the earl of Stair, with prospects of colonial advancement.21 In April 1707 Hunter was named Orkney’s deputy in Virginia, succeeding Colonel Edward Nott – Robert Cunyngham’s former commander – who had also died in 1706.22 Hunter was directed to publish the Act of Union Lt Samuel Barker, ‘A New and Exact Map of the Island of St. Christopher in America’ ([London], 1753). 18 NRS, CS 96/3096/1–2; CS 96/3097; CS 96/3098; CS 96/3106. 19 Presumably, Elizabeth Orby had a sister, which was Charlotte Orby ‘granddaughter’ of Charles Gerrard. 20 TNA, PC 1/2/235; TNA, PROB 11/581/96. 21 Stephen Saunders Webb, Marlborough’s America (New Haven, CT, 2013), pp. 147–8. 22 TNA, CO 5/1315, no. 46; TNA, CO 5/1362, p. 218. 17

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and ‘take Notice that Scotchmen are thereby to be looked upon for the future as English Men, to all intents and Purposes whatsoever’.23 Hunter received his instructions while anchored in Portsmouth, but never reached Virginia. His ship was intercepted and he was taken captive to France, where he remained for two years before being exchanged for the bishop of Quebec. Hunter’s colonial mission was to restrict over-mighty colonial landholders, and in this, experienced Scottish military-men of ‘Loyalty, Courage and Good Conduct’ made excellent (and expendable?) defenders of an establishment, crown, anti-Catholic position which one might call ‘proto-British’.24 Thousands of miles removed, they took the brunt of the plantocracy’s outrage by getting their hands dirty, while those of the men of the Board of Trade and Plantation remained soft and spotless. The same could be said of French, German, and Swiss Protestants displaced by the war who might serve the ‘Laws and Government of Virginia and in all Matters Ecclesiastical, Civil and Military’, while retaining instruction in their own languages.25 On Hunter’s return from imprisonment, the crown appointed him governor of New York and revisited its policy of transplanting Palatine refugees. Hunter was uneasy about their prospects, but some New Yorkers praised Hunter’s ‘Judgment, Prudence and temper’ that would settle the émigrés and dampen faction through diversity.26 The Palatines believed they deserved better, and Hunter’s experience did not bear out the official history that they ‘behaved themselves peaceably, and lived with great Industry’.27 Not only that, but Hunter had to vouch for bills of credit to the tune of £27,680. When the Tory administration took office in 1710, it left Hunter to disband the rebellious New York communities at his own expense. In 1718 the colony of New York discharged its debts in plate, of which Hunter was entitled to 2,525 oz. 7½ pw. for ‘Incidents and sundry Extraordinary disbursements for the Publick service’.28 He was also battling the imperialism of Edward Hyde, Lord Cornbury, and Sir Francis Nicholson, whose career as a trusted lieutenant of Sir Edmund Andros dogged Hunter around the colonies. Each man represented high-handed supra-colonialism across North America, and to them blended, devolved, or diversified power structures run by newcomers were anathema. Such high-handedness also offended the region’s powerful merchant elite, and 23

TNA, CO 324/9, p.140; CO 138/12, pp. 90, 91. The same instructions were sent to all colonial governors. The opportunities it provided for Scottish advancement were not welcomed by all, and a famous opponent of the Scots in the Leeward Islands was Governor Daniel Parke of Antigua, who was assassinated by a clique of settlers including Daniel McKinnon, Robert Cunyngham’s brother-in-law. 24 TNA, CO 5/1362, pp. 238–9, 352–5. 25 BL, Add. MS 61599, fols 42–42b; TNA, CO 5/1362, p. 397. 26 TNA, CO 5/1049, no. 138; TNA, CO 5/1049, no. 163. 27 William Smith, The History of the Province of New-York (London, 1757), p. 124. 28 Acts of Assembly passed in the Province of Nevv-York, From 1691, to 1725 ([New York], 1726), pp. 96, 137, 151.

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Andros and Nicholson had provoked a rebellion led by German merchant Jacob Leisler. Thus, Hunter acquired imperialist enemies and local opponents among both pro- and anti-Leislerists. Engrossing merchants, such as the Franco-Dutch merchant Samuel Bayard, opposed Hunter’s attempts to finance government through duty and excise. Samuel Mulford blocked Hunter’s authority to the point of slandering the governor in the assembly and then libelling him. On the other side of the British political divide, Daniel Coxe and his son, Samuel, were consistent opponents of Hunter from a pro-Cornbury standpoint, dispatching to London their own catalogue of complaints. Scots and dissenters, transported to New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania as indenturers and apprentices, were to some a dangerous exercise in licence and transgression: ‘Scotch and Quaker factions, concerned sundry years in the divisions and incendiary parties, that has brought those Provinces into such confusion of Government, injustice to the Proprietors and aversion of the Planters and inhabitants’.29 Governor Hunter, however, built relationships of trust through their shared values and parallel experience, to incorporate fringe settlers to centralise the empire by undermining, overturning, and re-integrating pre-established but over-mighty elites. Rather than the English who ‘Engross[ed liberty] to themselves’, dissenters such as Lewis Morris and Scots David Barclay, David Lyall, John Johnstone, and David Jamison, as Hunter’s loyal allies, would not only claim liberty for themselves and others, they would ‘bring England to a Temper’.30 The relationship between ‘English orthodoxy’ and Celtic, Continental, and colonial inclusion was encapsulated in the Society for the Promotion of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. Hunter was elected in 1706 and was a steadfast if not uncritical servant.31 Even conventional Anglicans praised his efforts in New York and New Jersey.32 In Rye, Westchester, ‘the People were of various Persuasions … some Quakers, some Anabaptists, others Independents; tho’ once they were violently set against the Church, they now conform heartily’.33 Hunter’s ‘Liberality and Encouragement’ furnished the church with a 29

TNA, CO 5/970, no. 4. Sarah Apetrei, ‘The “Sweet Singers” of Israel: Prophecy, Antinomianism and Worship in Restoration England’, Reformation & Renaissance Review, 10:1 (2008), 3–23 at 6; TNA, CO 391/3, pp. 309–11; William Atwood, The Scotch Patriot Unmask’d (London, 1705), p. 8; William Atwood, The Case of William Atwood, Esq; (London, 1703), pp. 5–6; Avner Shamir, English Bibles on Trial: Bible Burning and the Desecration of Bibles, 1640–1800 (Abingdon, 2017), pp. 99–100 31 Standing Orders of the Society ([London], [1706]), p.16; Lambeth Palace Library (hereafter LPL), SPG XIV, fol. 189. 32 John Moore, Of the Truth and Excellence of the Gospel (London, 1713), pp. 58–60; David Humphreys, An Historical Account of the Incorporated Society (London, 1730), pp. 63, 209–12, 243–4, 334; Alison Gilbert Olson, ‘Governor Robert Hunter and the Anglican Church in New York’, in Statesmen, Scholars and Merchants: Essays in Eighteenth-Century History, ed. Anne Whiteman, J.S. Bromley and P.G.M. Dickson (Oxford, 1973), pp. 44–64. 33 Humphreys, Historical Account, p. 210. 30

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‘handsome Altar-piece … of Carolina Cedar, rail’d in, and a decent Pulpit and Reading Desk’, and he sponsored repairing and ‘beautify[ing]’ the chapel at Fort Hunter.34 Swiss, German, French, Irish, and Scottish Christians, such as William Skinner at Perth Amboy, could establish themselves (literally) through the Society. Hunter promoted Daniel Bondet, once the poor minister of the French Plantation in Massachusetts, who had languished in London persuading the Society that he would preach in English and in conformity with the liturgy.35 Bondet went to the French congregation in New Rochelle. Hunter supported the Society’s mission to non-Christians and Bondet had some success with the Siwanoy. The mission to the Iroquois went less well. Huguenot educator Elias Neau found a role in Hunter’s America predicated on his willingness to proselytise slaves. While in 1712 his school was accused of having trained slaves in rebellion, Hunter cooled the controversy by reminding ministers of their duty to promote Christianity from the pulpit. Scottish ‘dissent’ could tame his High Church antagonists.36 Former non-juror John Talbot brought excessive ‘warmth’ of temper and Jacobitism to the Jerseys, but through Scottish former Quaker George Keith, Hunter was able to work with Talbot and Daniel Coxe to develop St Mary’s, Burlington into the Episcopal centre.37 Tory Episcopalian William Vesey, rector of Trinity, New York – with ‘his noted Sincerity’: anyone who did not hear his memorised sermons fell prey to heresy – abused the governor as a schismatic.38 Hunter temporarily prevailed, though the bishop of London nevertheless created Vesey his commissary in New York. Francis Philipps of Philadelphia complained that those who procured his arrest and branded him immoral were, in fact, Hunter’s political allies.39 On the eve of Lent, 1714, Trinity church was desecrated; vestments smeared with excrement and prayer books ripped. The incident, unreported in Britain, could have been an act of contempt for the church, committed by supporters of Hunter, or the action of Vesey and Philipps to discredit the governor. Either way, by singling out

34 Lustig,

Robert Hunter, p. 107; Atwood, Case, p. 9. Mary Dewitt Freeland, The Records of Oxford, Massachusetts (Baltimore, 2003), p. 148; LPL, SPG XIV, fols 21, 36–7, 216–17, 233–4; New York Historical Society (hereafter NYHS), Hunter Papers, Box 1, folder 6 ‘Receipts’, unfol. n.d. 36 Joseph S. Tiedemann, ‘Presbyterianism and the American Revolution in the Middle Colonies’, Church History, 74:2 (2005), 306–44; History of Queens County New York, with Illustrations, Portraits, & Sketches of Prominent Families and Individuals (New York, 1882); Benjamin Franklin Thompson, History of Long Island (New York, 1839), pp. 50–1. 37 LPL, SPG XIV, fol. 232; George Morgan Hills, ‘John Talbot, the first bishop in North America’, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 3:1 (1879), 32–55; John Moore, Of the Truth and Excellency of the Gospel (London, 1713), p. 60; NYHS, Hunter Papers, Box 1, Folder 2, unfol. 38 William Vesey, A Sermon Preached in Trinity-Church in New-York ([New York], 1709), p. 21; Lustig, Robert Hunter, p. 107; Atwood, Case, p. 9; LPL, FP VII, fols 81–2. 39 LPL, FP VII, Pennsylvania: fols 1–82. 35

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vestments and the Book of Common Prayer the incident reflected views on orthodoxy within Anglican worship. Jonathan Swift, the Irish cleric who negotiated between Presbytery and popery while remaining a ‘Church-of-England Man’, lobbied Hunter for an Episcopal position in America.40 While Hunter was held in Paris, Swift ascribed to him the authorship of (Shaftesbury’s) Letter Concerning Enthusiasm and quipped to his friend to ‘make haste and get my Virginian bishopric’.41 Swift wrote three letters mentioning the possibility, discounted because he was a jester losing faith in the Whig administration.42 But if we reinterpret the period as one in which Hunter represented a Briticised polity, formed by drawing into its core values those on its fringes, Swift’s appointment becomes conceivable. When the Tories took office in 1710, Swift excoriated the Whigs as ‘ungrateful dogs’ but retained his friendship with Hunter, who subsequently wrote to Swift enthusiastic about gaining approval for an Episcopal seat at Burlington.43 To both Swift and Cunyngham he rhapsodised the natural beauty of the colony, sullied only by its base human voices. With puns about ‘bad rectors’ he distained Vesey and his clerical allies in Ciceronian Latin and the vernacular: ‘Quonorogh quaniou diadega generoghqua aquegon tchitchenagraee; or, lest you should not have your Iroquoise dictionary at hand, Brother, I honour you and all your tribe; tho that is to be taken cum grano salis. For one of them has done me much harm.’44 Jaded and used like a dog, he had spent ‘three years of life in … torment and vexation’.45 Swift was just one of the figures of the beau monde who provided Hunter with a social group which carried both superficial wit and bonhomie along with deeper intellectual critique.46 While in America, Hunter penned and performed (in private) ‘America’s first play’, a dramatic reconstruction of his experience of New York. It has been recently both highlighted and deemed provincial and derivative.47 While there is not space here to explore Androboros in detail, I 40

Jonathan Swift, ‘The Sentiments of a Church of England-Man With Respect to Religion and Government’ (1708), in Miscellanies in Prose and Verse, 4th edn (Dublin, 1721), pp. 57–91; Ian Kevin Higgins, ‘The Sentiments of a Church-of-England Man: a Study of Swift’s Politics’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Warwick, 1989). 41 Jonathan Swift, The Works of Dr Jonathan Swift, ed. A Donaldson (Edinburgh, 1761), Letter 96: ‘A Monsieur Monsieur [sic] Hunter, gentilhomme Anglois, à Paris’, London, 12 January 1709, pp. 206–9, p. at 207. 42 Jordan D. Fiore, ‘Jonathan Swift and the American Episcopate’, William and Mary Quarterly, 11:3 (1954), 425–33, at 429. 43 Arthur L. Cross, The Anglican Episcopate and the American Colonies (New York, 1902), pp. 100–1; John Hawkesworth (ed.), Letters, written by Jonathan Swift (London, 1767). 44 Swift, Letters, pp. 257–60. 45 Ibid., p. 341. 46 Hunter was friends with Steele and Addison as well as Swift, and the circles of Augustan wits are another example, which there is not space here to explore, of the emergent imperial society being more inclusive and far less binary than the emphasis on Whig versus Tory or High versus Low Church would suggest. 47 Androboros: A B[i]ographical [sic] Farce in Three Acts, viz. The Senate, The Consistory, and The

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suggest that it is cleverer and more important than that. It was the safety valve for Hunter’s frustration and anger, a vehicle for his politics, the means to expound the complexities of the British church and state and a burlesque example of how to resolve them. In North America there was a polyglot community which held diverse, competing, and rival interests in tension. Within often-cacophonous voices, we glean the importance of Scottish plain speaking. Hunter produced a witty but viciously barbed study of an American micro-society. Its founding Christian principle was from St John’s Gospel: ‘In my Father’s house are many mansions.’48 A ‘mansion’ in this context was a local community; in this case, New York, called ‘Moor-fields’, which denoted unenclosed and uncultivated land, but had the additional connotation in Scots to signify that it was held by a proprietor or by a town as common. Hunter styled himself the ‘keeper’ of this mansion. Each mansion had its own civil (Senate) and ecclesiastical (Consistory) bodies. On the one hand, Hunter employed his renowned linguistic ability to satirise disruptive elements. The ‘English’ overlords forging empire through high-handed imposition were rendered as Greeks. The eponymous anti-hero, Androboros, was Nicholson, a brooding off-stage presence: from the Greek for ‘man-eater’, it was a convenient means to insert ‘bore’, ‘boor’, or ‘boar’ into ‘Andros’.49 Cornbury was ‘the most Potent Lord Oinobaros, Count of Kynommaria, Baron of Elaphokardia’ (the greatest wine-drinker, practitioner of strange madness, and master of the cowardly heart). When Vesey called Cornbury’s administration ‘mild’, the clerk of the assembly read out ‘wild’.50 The many different nationalities provided opportunities for baser wit. The illiterate merchant of Dutch descent, Abraham Lackerman (Doodlesack), spoke in patois and the FrancoDutch Samuel Bayard (Babilard) was rendered ‘Babil’. On the other hand, the key contributions placed in the mouth of Hunter’s loyal supporters – dissenting and Scottish immigrants – were there to demonstrate the diverse, inclusive, and latitudinarian approach to social and political construction. Jamison (Aesop) was a home-spun poet who wove stories of rats seeking shelter from a ‘Saxon Lord’, of curs barking at hounds, frogs croaking and bees assailed by wasps: ‘the Drone being, by the Commons Voice,/ Chose for the Greatness of his Noise’.51 Morris was Solemn: I believe it is needless to put you in mind of our Origine … and how we came hither. … we were of that Number of Publick Spirited Persons, distinguish’t from our Neighbours by an inward Light or Faculty … The Romans call it AEstrum, the French, Verve, our Northern Nation has indeed given it a Courser Name, which gave us a

Apotheosis (Printed at Monoropolis [i.e., New York: William Bradford], since August 1714); Peter A. Davis, From Androboros to the First Amendment: A History of America’s First Play (Iowa City, 2015). 48 John 1:1, 1:6–8; John 14:2 (KJV). 49 Davis, Androboros, pp. 46–50. 50 Davis, Androboros, p. 198; [Hunter], Androboros, Act II, scene III, p. 12. 51 [Hunter], Androboros, p. 17.

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Hunter’s vision of New York was a (masculine) synthesis, which recognised and rationalised the irony that this Scotticised/Briticised colony was held together by ‘Anglicisation’. The members of either polity could be enthusiast, orthodox, rebel, or loyalist – all would be protected, supported, and included provided they worked co-operatively with Hunter the ‘keeper’ of Moor-fields mansion. III

The Rabs’ parallel lives collided in England around 1716–17. In 1716, Elizabeth Orby died in Perth Amboy, and in 1719 Hunter left the ‘Countrymen’ for whom he was ‘an affectionate Parent’, citing poor health, care of his ‘little family’, and his ‘private Affairs on the other side’.53 He swapped posts with his successor, William Burnet, to be Controller of the Customs. Hunter took up lordship of Chertsey, Surrey, acquiring a Thames-side manor as befitted an English gentleman. His Lincolnshire land was heavily mortgaged and Hunter remained embroiled in the mass of litigation swallowing the Orbys’ name and reputation. What Hunter needed was someone rich, self-righteous, and thick-skinned. Robert Cunyngham arrived in London with his newly acquired St Christopher’s fortune in the spring of 1717. St James’s – ‘the ordinary Residence of all Strangers, because of its Vicinity to the King’s Palace, the Park, the ParliamentHouse, the Theatres, and the Chocolate and Coffee-Houses, where the best Company frequent’ – hosted many fellow Scots and Ulster-Scots.54 Neighbour and friend to both was Archibald Hutcheson, MP for Hastings: ‘born in Ireland: But … [a good] Englishman … Zealous for the True Interest of the Nation … bred from a Child a Protestant’.55 Hutcheson described Cunyngham, who shared with the former a love of economics and an absence of wit, as Hunter’s knight errant. Cunyngham amused himself devising a ‘Royal British Lottery’, designed to be more profitable for both government and adventurers than those of the Netherlands or France.56 Cunyngham enjoyed the St James’s scene. He was a cultivated man with an exceptional library. Much of the Salenave inheritance went on regular book-buying sprees, hundreds at a time.57 He joined the parish of St James’s, which in 1718 held the funeral for one of his sons. His houses in London were 52

Ibid., p. 4. Weekly Journal or British Gazetteer, 24 October 1719. 54 ‘John Macky’ [Daniel Defoe], A Journey through England (London, 1722), pp. 74–5, 167–8. 55 Archibald Hutcheson, Collection of Advertisements (London, 1722), p. 15. 56 NRS, CS 96/3096/1, unfol; Bob Harris, ‘Lottery Adventuring in Britain, c.1710–1760’, EHR, 133:561 (2018), 284–322; Cecil L’Estrange, Lotteries and Sweepstakes (London, 1932). 57 NRS, CS 96/3098. 53

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‘frequently visited by persons of very good fashion’, and he kept an excellent table where his quality, status, and largesse, like any aspiring gentleman’s, were measured in silver. Cunyngham’s bookplate, which formed the pattern to be engraved on all his worldly possessions, was made by (probable) countryman, John Craig, from his establishment, the ‘Hand and Ring’ in Norris Street. Here, Craig employed a network of Huguenot smiths.58 At the expense of his Huguenot in-laws Cunyngham bought pieces for his Huguenot contacts and Scottish friends from Scottish and Huguenot craftspeople. Craig refused to extend credit to Hunter, so Cunyngham made these purchases on his behalf and it is possible that much of the plate paid to Hunter from New York travelled through the workshop. By Craig’s death in 1735 – his wife continued in Norris Street – Craig and his then partner, George Wickes, had acquired royal patronage and Wickes moved to the ‘King’s Arms’, Panton Street.59 Since Cunyngham took houses in both Norris and Panton Streets, Craig and Cunyngham may have shared both space and business. In 1719 Cunyngham was lodging with a widow, Ann Countess, in King Street, when a seventeen-year-old relative of hers arrived from Oxford. This was Elizabeth Arnold. When Countess died, she made over the house to Arnold, and Cunyngham – who seemed to have become reliant on Arnold – stripped her, locked her in her room for weeks, and used sex to ensure Arnold was dependent on him to contrive to keep both in the King Street house. In his turn, Hunter used Cunyngham’s reliance on Arnold to persuade him not to return to St Christopher, ‘for that without his Assistance he the said Governr sho’d be ruined’.60 Cunyngham’s price was employment worth £500 a year. He wanted, but was denied, Hunter’s post in the Customs; but was promised ‘some valuable Lands in the Governmt of New York … [Hunter] saying that it was a fine Country & that [Cunyngham] would like it very well & … [it] would be of great Advantage to … Robert Cunyngham’s ffamily’. Hunter then undertook to purchase those West Indian lands that were part of the French redistribution, which, in Cunyngham’s absence, had been appropriated by his powerful neighbour, John Spooner.61 For five years Hunter employed Cunyngham in the management of his Crowland Abbey estates. Hunter, then Cunyngham (and Arnold), lived in Crowland manor house and recreated polite society through their membership of the Spalding Gentleman’s Society, under the patronage of the duke of

58

Daily Courant, issue 3954, 26 Jun. 1714; Daily Courant, issue 7017, 17 Apr. 1724; T.C. Barnard, Making the Grand Figure: Lives and Possessions in Ireland, 1641–1770 (New Haven, CT, 2004), p. 146. 59 Tessa Murdoch, ‘Power and Plate: Sir Robert Walpole’s Silver’, The Burlington Magazine (May 2015), pp. 318–24; Elaine Barr, George Wickes: Royal Goldsmith, 1698–1761 (London, 1980). 60 Affidavit of Elizabeth Arnold, 12 April 1737: TNA, PROB 18/60/22 [Exh. A], [a]. 61 TNA, PROB 18/60/22 [Exh. A and B]; TNA, CO 239/1, 32a.

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Buccleuch, lord of the manor of Spalding-cum-Membris.62 Hunter presided over the manorial court from October 1723, later joined by Cunyngham, whom he employed as bailiff and receiver of the rents, and, as in all financial matters, he kept immaculate records.63 Cunyngham used his considerable talents as a dogged, litigious, and obstinate man to extract the maximum income from the estate by squeezing the ancient copyholders.64 The copyhold rents were calculated from the survey made in 1650, worth when Orby took over the demesne a very modest £15 10s 2½d per annum. Cunyngham resurveyed the estate, and in this he could draw in Huguenot descendants of fen-drainers who had settled in the bordering parish of Thorney in the Cambridgeshire fens, moving into Crowland. Together, Huguenots and Scots could muster considerable expertise in constructing dykes, mills, and drainage channels, with a view to connecting fertile land on the river Welland with the important port of Boston. Seemingly immune to personal attack, the irascible man got the job done, though at considerable personal cost: his close Applica[tio]n & Diligence therein was so great a ffatigue that it occasioned several of the Labourers who attended him in the Survey of Lands of the said Governours Estate in Lincolnshire to leave him … [Cunyngham would] constantly go out on foot on the said Survey two Hours before Day Light in the Morning & not return till as long a time after it was dark at night so bemired that he was obliged to be washd with hot Water And particularly that he was one Day in a great heat of Sun brought from a ffield covered with Water by the Assistance of four Men in so bad a Condition that he was thought dead.65

Cunyngham suffered a near-fatal fall from his horse, laid out considerable sums in running Crowland, and used his own resources to support Hunter. He noted ‘particularly … a Gold Watch which Miss Hunter wore at the time her ffather … went for Jamaica & which the said Robert Cunyngham bought of Mr Craig a Jeweller in the Haymarket’. He ‘made [Arnold] a Present of the Household Goods he had provided for his Use at Crowland’.66 At Christmas 1725, one of the most remarkable pieces of Craig’s silver to find its way to Crowland was a font basin, by Huguenot maker Abraham Buteux, engraved not on behalf of the lord of the manor but with Cunyngham’s arms and motto.67 The following November he called Arnold to him and, in Hunter’s house on 29 January 1727, Cunyngham was ‘Married to Eliz Arnold by Mr [Barnaby] Gooch’, who was ‘a 62

Dorothy M. Owen and S.W. Woodward (eds), The Minute-Books of the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society, 1712–1755, Lincoln Record Society, 73 (Fakenham, 1981); D. and M. Honeybone, The Correspondence of the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society, 1710–1761, Lincoln Record Society, 99 (Woodbridge, 2010). 63 NRS, CS 96/3096/1, fols 53–61. 64 Lincolnshire Archives (hereafter LA), Crowland Manor/14, ‘A’. 65 TNA, PROB 18/60/22, [Exh.A]; An Actual Survey of the North-Level Part of the Great Level of the Fens … Taken Augt 1749, John Wing. 66 TNA, PROB 18/60/22, [Exh.A]. 67 NRS, CS96/3096/1, fol. 43.

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Priest in holy Orders of the Church of England according to the fform prescribed in the Book of Common Prayer’.68 While Cunyngham stamped his patrimony on objects, knowledge, places, and people in silver, Arnold had Cunyngham confirm their marriage by writing a memorandum and having Cunyngham sign it.69 That paper was the only power Arnold had. Any silver Cunyngham gifted came engraved with his arms and could be reclaimed. Cunyngham presumably knew that his wife, who died in the autumn of 1726, was in poor health and was paving the way for himself and Arnold to parade as lord and lady of Crowland. Despite Arnold raging at Hunter’s failure to meet past obligations, he pressed Cunyngham further. Through the duty owed to the earl of Stair, Hunter stood surety for Stair’s cousin, Captain James Dalrymple, another Scottish soldier living a fine life in the metropole while engaged in nationwide speculation.70 Cunyngham stood as security in Hunter’s stead – Hunter protesting that he ‘should never be troubled for it’ – and was arrested and imprisoned for non-payment. Cunyngham sued Dalrymple.71 Dalrymple’s family affairs therefore became Cunyngham’s concern, particularly after Hunter’s death in 1735. Dalrymple had served in Ireland, where he met Mary Gainer, with whom he had several children.72 Gainer and Dalrymple dragged each other through the courts. Despite citing evidence that they acted as husband and sober, respectable, dutiful ‘Madam Dalrymple’ – two of their children who died in Gibraltar were buried by the communion table and their daughter Jean was christened at their lodgings in Westminster by the Revd Dr James Anderson of the Church of Scotland, with John Dalrymple standing in for Jean’s father – it could not be proven that they were lawfully married.73 In the summer of 1738 Cunyngham instructed Arnold to pay Mary Gainer 7s a week and left for Scotland.74 For eighteen months he paid Arnold her own and their child’s maintenance and paid for the upkeep of Dalrymple and his children in Scotland.75 He bequeathed his ‘faithfull friend’, Elizabeth Arnold, £1,000 at 5 per cent interest, an annuity of £50 and the London household effects, including the Craig silver given as gifts for service, which included bearing children, but while ‘no one loved with more Sincere Affection then I have all ways loved you’, she was cast aside.76 68

TNA, PROB 18/59/72. NRS, CS 96/3096/1, fol. 43; LA, PAR/1/6; TNA, PROB 18/59/72. 70 Dalrymple was in the Foot regiment of John Leslie, 10th earl of Rothes. He was indebted to Joseph Studley, an attorney of the Court of King’s Bench, whose business seems to have been funding purchases of lands (in England) forfeited at the Fifteen. 71 TNA, PROB 18/60/22, [Exh.A]. 72 Rival accounts have Gainer as a school-girl whom Dalrymple abducted or a prostitute in Dublin. She claimed a marriage in Kilkenny by a Catholic priest. 73 Bill of Advocation for Mary Dalrymple, 9 February 1741 ([London], [1741]). James Anderson of the Scots Church, Swallow Street, Piccadilly was a famous proponent of Freemasonry. 74 TNA, PROB 18/60/22, [Exh.G]. This will was reported dated 12 July 1738. 75 TNA PROB 18/60/22, [Exh.F]; NRS, CS 96/3100, fol. 24. 76 TNA, PROB 18/60/22; Answers for Captain James Dalrymple to the Bill of Advocation of Mary 69

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In Scotland in 1737 Dalrymple married Margaret Cunningham, whom Dalrymple referred to as Cunyngham’s ‘Name-sake’ but may have been Robert’s niece, and he eschewed Mary Gainer. In his case of scandal against Gainer their life together across the empire was deemed ‘not relevant to infer Marriage’ and she was ordered to stop using the Dalrymple name.77 According to Dalrymple, Gainer went to London ‘in Prosecution of new Adventures; and accordingly she soon pickt up a new Keeper, Robert Cunningham of the Island of St. Christophers, who was come to reside at London, an old Gentleman of a large Estate, having no Wife nor Family in this Country’.78 The two went up to Scotland, where Gainer replaced Arnold as ‘House-keeper’, all the while defaming Dalrymple’s marriage as bigamous. ‘[N]ot disposed to part with his new Mistress’, Cunyngham negotiated his regular payments. At Livingston, Mary Gainer gave birth to ‘Susannah Cunyngham’, who in due course would marry Hew Dalrymple of Nunraw, the son of James Dalrymple and his ‘public’ wife, Margaret Cunningham.79 Arnold (who referred to Gainer as ‘Vile Jade’) refused to give up to Cunyngham the proof of their clandestine marriage in order that he might contract another: for this ‘base dealing as to my Household Goods, which I left in her Care when I came from London, the Ill offices she has done me, and her Insolent behaviour since’, Cunyngham punished Arnold as he did all ‘undutiful’ women, slashing her income to £25 a year. To ‘my Dear Wife Mary Gainer (which I have hitherto concealed)’ and their daughter Susannah he bequeathed the Scottish estate of Craig or ‘Cunyngham’s Rest’, most of which she sold.80 Her dowry was the money owed Cunyngham from James Dalrymple, ‘wherewith I hope she will be very well contented’.81 Empire, patrimony, status, and power were safeguarded by family. Securing the Protestant international came at a price, and while Hunter and Cunyngham procured a place in English elite society for their sons, Thomas and Daniel, both were encumbered by the manner of their inheritance. Thomas Orby Hunter became MP for the Cinque Port of Winchelsea, a lord of the Admiralty and a commissary-general in the army on the Continent. But he was only a lessee of the Crowland estate, and returned to the courts. There, he reminded the crown that he was still owed for the Palatine émigrés and was at ‘very great and constant Charge and Expense’ for an estate ‘greatly exposed, and frequently Gainer and her Children, 16 February 1741 ([n.d., n.p]); Memorial for Mary Dalrymple, formerly Mary Gainer, 18 February 1741; The Petition of Mary Dalrymple, 26 February 1741; The Case of the Appellants (heard before the House of Lords, 19 March 1741). Mary Gainer died in 1758 and requested that she be buried with Robert Cunyngham in Greyfriars, Edinburgh. 77 The Case of the Appellants, p. 3. 78 Answers for Captain James Dalrymple, p. 3. 79 This is the confirmation that Susannah was the child of Robert Cunyngham and Mary Gainer. She would not have been married to her half-brother, but could have married his cousin. A Margaret Cunningham was a beneficiary of Robert’s will. 80 TNA, PROB 20/671; NRS, CC 9/7/59. 81 TNA, PROB 20/671.

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liable, to Inundations, by Soakage through, and Breach of Banks made and erected for defending the same against the Force of the Floods of Water … [and] the scouring and cleansing the Drains and Out-lets’.82 From beyond the grave Robert Cunyngham controlled women to maintain patriarchy as three separate sets of dependents fought in England, Scotland, and the Americas. In ‘Cunyngham v Conyngham’ Arnold and Gainer denied the relationship and probity of the other. Daniel’s inheritance was dependent on an approved marriage and all female children taking the famous ‘Surname and Coat of Arms’.83 Daniel’s portrait has him seated in the library of his Shropshire manor house, with one hand propping up a ledger; that of his wife, Elizabeth Hodges, was commissioned from the Scottish virtuoso, Allan Ramsay.84 Hunter, Cunyngham, and Dalrymple patrimonies were secured and the machinations underpinning them suppressed, but cases in which a political union was forged by social scandal and judicial vendetta were increasingly exposed. In 1753, Lord Hardwicke steered an Act through Parliament ‘for the Better Preventing of Clandestine Marriage’.85 Cunyngham, even Hunter, were not high-profile Scots in the British empire. But they left copious paperwork which allows historians seeking to understand empire and the construction of British power structures in the eighteenth century to chart adventure in three significant ways. Lives were knitted together by sentimental and instrumental obligations that traversed oceans, jurisdictions, and nations such that we can trace the interconnectedness of Scottish men and the creation of new Britons. British dominion was centralised as peripheral peoples operated through (and circumvented) the (English/British) metropole and, in a parallel process, the new elite thrust themselves forward using the channels by which a centralised empire was created from diverse colonies. Their lives illustrate how social understandings mapped onto their politico-economic counterparts. Such a labyrinth of connections over so many jurisdictions fomented dispute and the labour and expense of unravelling them in the courts of Hanoverian Britain. This, in itself, created imperial statute. Thousands of grimy boxes enable historians to create a social history of empire and explanations for the elite dominance of some and others’ poverty and despair; those 82

A Bill to enable his Majesty to grant the Inheritance of the Manor of Crowland ([London], [1752]), p. 4. 83 TNA, PROB 20/671; TNA PROB 31/254/738. 84 Mason Chamberlin the elder, Portrait of Daniel Cunyngham, gentleman of Shropshire, 1766, oil on canvas, 127 x 101.5cm, Shugborough Hall, Staffordshire, National Trust: NT 1271064; Allan Ramsay, Portrait of Elizabeth Cunyngham, oil on canvas, c.1740, 238 x 146cm, National Gallery of Scotland, NG 2133 (on loan). 85 See the work of Leah Leneman: ‘Clandestine Marriage in the Scottish Cities 1660–1780’, Journal of Social History, 26:4 (1993), 845–61; idem, ‘The Scottish Case that Led to Hardwicke’s Marriage Act’, Law and History Review, 17:1 (1999), 161–9; idem, ‘Seduction in Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-century Scotland’, SHR, 78:1 (1999), 39–59; idem, ‘“No unsuitable match”: Defining Rank in Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-century Scotland’, Journal of Social History, 33:3 (2000), 665–82.

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who gained public credit and those mired in economic debt. Every enterprise involved risk and hazard, but, with the line between adventure and misadventure so finely drawn, sufficient status enabled powerful men to bury obligations they did not want made public. Women provide the suppressed narratives in this essay, but slavery could be another social history reconstructed in this way. The values of the Protestant ascendancy, created in the lifetimes of the two Rabs, enabled them and their sons to recreate themselves as fine British gentry with English country seats, to enter the establishment, and to erase their follies; but they were not powerful enough to protect their imperialist misadventures from being exposed by the historian.

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11 Confederal Union and Empire: Placing the Albany Plan (1754) in Imperial Context Steven Pincus

O

ver the course of a remarkably creative and productive career, Allan Macinnes offers one of his most provocative and stimulating insights in the last pages of his Union and Empire.1 In reflecting on the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707, Macinnes observes that ‘the fortunes of the Union have been umbilically linked to the Empire’. Consequently, ‘as the British Empire has declined in the twentieth century, Union has moved from a constitutional fixture to a constitutional option, particularly within the context of a European Community that continues to expand at the outset of the twenty-first century’.2 Macinnes correctly highlights the bet that some Scots made on the benefits of empire in their political calculations. If union was attractive to some Scots because of the benefits of empire, then Scotland, after decolonisation, might well now choose the European Union rather than the United Kingdom. Inspired by Macinnes, I want to shift, in this essay, away from the focus on the benefits of incorporating union to examining a moment in which empire was reimagined as confederation, a moment in which confederation was preferred by a range of politicians to the 1707 model of incorporation.3 Scottish proposals for a confederal union, rather than an incorporating one, did not receive a full hearing in the first decade of the eighteenth century. But the idea of a confederal empire did not simply disappear. This imperial strategy re-emerged with a vengeance in the middle of the eighteenth century. This time the notion of a confederal empire received a full and fair hearing. Had history 1

I am grateful for the helpful comments and suggestions of Jeff Collins, Matthew Kruer, James Livesey, Peter Mancall, James Vaughn, David Waldstreicher, and Carl Wennerlind. 2 Allan I. Macinnes, Union and Empire: The Making of the United Kingdom in 1707 (Cambridge, 2007), p. 326. 3 Macinnes himself explored some later eighteenth-century discussions of a federal model: Union and Empire, pp. 23–6.

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played out somewhat differently in the summer and autumn of 1754, the British government might well have transformed the entire constitutional basis of the empire, opting for a confederal structure. In 1754 British imperial politicians on both sides of the Atlantic drew up remarkably sophisticated plans for confederal union. After much discussion and debate within the Board of Trade and among ministerial circles George Montagu-Dunk, second earl of Halifax, circulated his ‘Draft of a Plan or Project for a General Concert’.4 Less than a month earlier, Benjamin Franklin had played a key role in drafting the different, but remarkably similar, Albany Plan of Union. When Franklin reflected on the Plan over the course of his long and eventful life, he often compared the place of the American colonies within the empire to that of Scotland. Without a union, he remarked, the colonies were ‘so many separate states, only subject to the same king, as England and Scotland were before the Union’. He was ‘fully persuaded’ that a union was ‘best for the whole’.5 But Franklin was insistent that the union he imagined could not be one in which England dominated. ‘It has long appeared to me,’ he later reflected, ‘that the only true British politics were those which aimed at the good of the whole British Empire, not those which sought the advantage of any one part in the disadvantage of the others.’6 Why did British politicians on both sides of the Atlantic propose a confederal rather than incorporating union in 1754? Why did they share the view with many in England and Scotland in the early eighteenth century that several states under a single sovereign was politically insufficient, while rejecting the early eighteenth-century commitment to incorporating union? Unfortunately the rich and well-researched scholarship on the union moment of 1754 does not provide satisfactory answers to these questions, almost universally ignoring the earlier robust and partisan debates about confederation.7 One group of scholars emphasises only the Albany Plan of Union, seeing in it the origins of American national and independent sentiment.8 A second group, the so-called imperial school historians, instead emphasises the 1754 moment as a 4

George Montagu-Dunk, second earl of Halifax, The Draft of a Plan or Project for a General Concert to be Entered into by His Majesty’s Several Colonies upon the Continent of North America, [August 1754], BL, Add. MS 32736, fols 250 ff. 5 Benjamin Franklin (London) to William Franklin, 13 March 1768, franklinpapers.org. Franklin returned to this theme repeatedly: Benjamin Franklin, Marginalia in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Present Disputes (1769), [1770], franklinpapers.org; Benjamin Franklin, Marginalia in [Allan Ramsey] Thoughts on the Origin and Nature of Government (1769), franklinpapers.org; Benjamin Franklin, Tract Relative to the Affair of Hutchinson’s Letters, [1774], franklinpapers.org; Benjamin Franklin (London) to Samuel Cooper, 8 June 1770, franklinpapers.org. 6 Benjamin Franklin, Tract Relative to the Affair of Hutchinson’s Letters, [1774], franklin� papers.org. 7 The honourable exception is Alison L. Lacroix, The Ideological Origins of American Federalism. (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 18–20, 24–9. 8 George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, vol.

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missed opportunity to create a lasting British empire based on parliamentary supremacy.9 A third and more recent group highlights the moment as a time of divergence between an American confederal vision of empire and a British hierarchical one.10 Against these views I suggest that there was a deeply trans-imperial partisan divide over the possibility of confederal empire. Critics of the American nationalist narrative are correct to insist that at stake in the 1750s was not a choice between proto-independence and empire, but they are wrong to assert that there was a British ministerial consensus for hierarchical empire. In fact, on both sides of the Atlantic there were proponents of both hierarchical and confederal empire. Politicians and administrators on both sides of the Atlantic appreciated that French encroachments across the globe had created an urgent imperial crisis. This crisis meant that the Old Guard method of governing the empire by commercial regulation would no longer do. Some thought the only solution was to mimic what they understood to be the roots of French success and create a more hierarchical and centralised empire. Others argued that Britain should pursue the option eschewed in 1707, and plump for a confederal empire. While scholars have been right to highlight differences among the various proposals for confederation on offer, the advocates of confederation in 1754 shared far more with each other than they did with the authoritarian Whigs on either side of the Atlantic. Empire building, as mid-Hanoverian Britons well knew, generated profound partisan divisions. Those divisions were so deep and so bitter precisely because empire building and state formation were two names for a single process.11 I

Britons in the 1750s faced an imperial crisis. Many believed in the late 1740s and early 1750s that France was on the brink of achieving global hegemony. IV (Boston, 1853), pp. 92, 121–2, 125–6; Robert C. Newbold, The Albany Congress and Plan of Union of 1754 (New York, 1955), pp. 173, 183. 9 Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, vol. V (New York, 1942), pp. 123–4, 131–3, 138, 144, 166; Andrew D.M. Beaumont, Colonial America and the Earl of Halifax, 1748–1761 (Oxford, 2015), pp. 139–49. 10 Timothy J. Shannon, Indians and Colonists at the Crossroads of Empire (Ithaca, 2000), pp. 10–11, 13, 55–6, 88, 207. Shannon insists that ‘a single thread’ ran through all British proposals for imperial reform settling ‘definitively the nature of colonial dependence and imperial authority in its empire’; Alison Gilbert Olson, ‘The British Government and Colonial Union, 1754’, William and Mary Quarterly, 17:1 (1960), 23; Gordon S. Wood, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (New York, 2004), pp. 76–7; Fred Anderson, The Crucible of War (New York, 2000), p. 85; Daniel Baugh, The Global Seven Years War, 1754–1763 (London, 2011), p. 79; Lacroix, Ideological Origins of American Federalism, p. 24. 11 I take inspiration from Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History. (Princeton, 2010), pp. 8–11; Karen Barkey, Empire of Difference (Cambridge, 2008), p. 12.

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Britons responded, just as they had done in the first decade of the century, with new and creative institutional responses. While the British government followed the advice of Robert Harley in 1707 and created an incorporating union between England and Scotland, Britons in the 1740s and 1750s explored confederal alternatives. Commentators on both sides of the Atlantic asserted with increasing urgency that the French were poised on the brink of achieving universal dominion. Increasingly dense networks of journalists, merchants, and imperial administrators reported on and commented about the threat. By early 1754, North Americans were well aware of the global danger posed by the French. ‘France has hitherto, by the means of Great Britain chiefly, been prevented from enslaving the world and mankind’, asserted Archibald Kennedy the New York collector of customs, friend of Benjamin Franklin, and father of a Scottish peer. Their ‘late encroachments upon His Majesty’s rights and territories, in the East and West Indies, in Africa, and in Hudson’s Bay’ were ‘so well known’ in North America by 1754 that they were hardly worth a ‘mention’. The conquest of North America was just part of ‘the grand monarch’s universal system’.12 The ultimate French aim, concluded the commissioners at the Albany Congress itself, was to gain ‘an Universal Monarchy’ by conquering North America and engrossing its ‘whole trade’.13 Metropolitan Britons were no less agitated by French encroachments and rapid French commercial development. ‘The French have long been aspiring to universal monarchy’, John Russell, fourth duke of Bedford, matter-of-factly asserted in the House of Lords.14 The oft-republished and widely quoted Patriot political economist Malachy Postlethwayt insisted that ‘Numbers of men of the best sense in the kingdom, nay in Europe’ now were certain that France sought ‘universal empire’.15 The establishment newspaper, The Whitehall Evening Post, belatedly reported that the French had ‘a grand plan for rendering themselves masters of North America’.16 Commentators on both sides of the Atlantic increasingly demanded structural reorganisation in the face of the increasingly ominous threat posed by France. But, unlike in 1707 when English politicians quickly coalesced behind the notion of an incorporating union, confederal notions were discussed far more widely in public discourse and among political actors. By mid-century, the incorporating Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707 was increasingly seen as only one possible response to the recurring French threat. Mid-Hanoverian Britons were reminded again and again in occasional 12

[Archibald Kennedy], Serious Considerations on the State of the Affairs of the Northern Colonies (New York, 1754), pp. 3, 5. 13 Albany Congress, Representation of the Present State of the Colonies, 9 July 1754, franklinpapers.org. 14 John Russell, fourth duke of Bedford, 27 April 1744, The Parliamentary History of England, ed. John Wright (vols 13–30, London, 1806–20), XIII, p. 793. 15 Malachy Postlethwayt, The Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce (2 vols, London, 1751–55), I, p. 444. 16 Whitehall Evening Post, 4 Jul. 1754, p. [1].

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pamphlets, in learned treatises, in newspapers, and in magazines of the possibilities and advantages of confederal rather than incorporating union.17 In the run-up to the union of 1707, mid-Hanoverian readers would have known well from reading a recent edition of Gilbert Burnet’s History that ‘the Scots had got among them the notion of a federal union, like that of the United Provinces, or of the cantons of Switzerland’. But, as it turned out, the English negotiators had already ‘resolved to lose no time in the examining or discussing of that project’. Instead the Anglo-Scottish negotiations, detailed by Macinnes, took place on the narrow ground of the terms of an incorporating union.18 Mid-Hanoverian readers understood that Jacobites in particular had immediately turned against the incorporating union. ‘Three parts of four of the nation were against it’, recalled the Jacobite Colin Lindsay, third earl of Balcarres, of the union in a tract reprinted in 1754. By the terms of the union, Balcarres lamented, ‘the Parliament of Scotland is gone and extinguished and the representation of Scotland in the Parliament of Britain is, in the House of Commons, but one single more than the County of Cornwall sends alone’. In the Lords, the Scots were allowed but sixteen peers, whose right to sit there was no longer hereditary. The Scots, Balcarres complained, were ‘mistaken’ to believe that the union would promote such an ‘increase of trade’ that they ‘would soon become rich’.19 James VIII and III declared in 1743 that Scotland was ‘reduced to the condition of a province, under the specious pretense of an Union with a more powerful neighbor’. The result was not an economic boom but ‘poverty and decay of trade’ and ‘unprecedented taxes’.20 By the union, agreed the Jacobite-influenced philosopher Voltaire, Scotland became ‘a province of England’.21 By the 1750s, however, a far broader range of Britons expressed scepticism about the benefits of incorporation and waxed enthusiastic about confederal union. In Scotland, we now know, Patriot Whigs increasingly expressed scepticism about the virtues of the incorporating union of 1707.22 Daniel Defoe, who had been one of the most prominent defenders of incorporating Union in 1705–7, came to believe that the economic benefits of the union to Scotland were limited. In his oft-reprinted and widely disseminated Tour Through 17

John Robertson, ‘Empire and Union: Two Concepts of the Early Modern European Political Order’, in A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of 1707, ed. John Robertson (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 5–6, 22–31. 18 Gilbert Burnet, Bishop Burnet’s History of His Own Time (6 vols, Edinburgh, 1753), V, pp. 299–300; Macinnes, Union and Empire, pp. 277–83. 19 Colin Lindsay, earl of Balcarres, An Account of the Affairs of Scotland relating to the Revolution of 1688, 2nd edn (Edinburgh, 1754), pp. 114–16; Burnet, Burnet’s History of His Own Time, V, p. 319. 20 Andrew Henderson, The History of the Rebellion, 5th edn (London, 1753), pp. 53–4: Declaration of James VIII, 23 December 1743. 21 Voltaire, The Age of Lewis XIV (2 vols, London, 1753), I, pp. 303–4. 22 Amy Watson, ‘Patriotism and Partisanship in Post-Union Scotland, 1724–1737’, SHR, 97:1 (2018), 57–84.

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the Whole Island of Great Britain, Defoe argued that Scotland would be far more prosperous ‘if those engagements were fulfilled which were promised to [the Scots] before the union’. While Glasgow, it was true, benefitted tremendously from access to the American tobacco trade, the incorporating union of 1707 provided much more benefit to the Glaswegians ‘than to any other part of the kingdom’. ‘The union has in great measure suppressed’ Scottish woollen manufactures, Defoe noted, ‘the English supplying them better and cheaper’. ‘The Union’, Defoe concluded, ‘has opened the door to all the English manufactures and suppressed many of the Scots; has prohibited their wool from going abroad, and yet scarcely takes it off at home.’23 For many, even many Whigs, the economic benefits from the incorporating union of 1707 were equivocal at best. In fact Britons across the empire continued to discuss the potential benefits of confederal unions. In the aftermath of the War of Spanish Succession, the well-regarded and widely cited Frenchman Charles-Irenee Castel, abbé de SaintPierre, positively expounded the possibilities of confederation. He called for a European ‘union and perpetual Congress’ modelled on the Dutch republic or Swiss confederation.24 The former Whig secretary of state and influential journalist Joseph Addison ‘considered with a great deal of pleasure’ the remarkable success of the Swiss confederation.25 Others, including the sons of Lord Chancellor Hardwicke, pointed to the success of the Amphyctionic League and the Boeotian confederation, which reminded one mid-Hanoverian classicist of the Dutch ‘states-general’.26 Cadwallader Colden, New York polymath, politician, and graduate of the Royal School and Edinburgh University, pointed to another contemporary successful confederation, that of the Iroquois. ‘The Five Nations (as their name denotes) consist of so many tribes or nations, joined together by a league or confederacy like the United Provinces [of the Netherlands], and without any superiority of the one over the other’, Colden observed. That confederation was so successful, Colden maintained, it had ‘continued so long, that the Christians know nothing of the original of it’.27 Benjamin Franklin, who was well informed about the effects of

23 On Defoe’s passionate defence of incorporating union 1705–7, see Macinnes, Union and Empire, pp. 235–8; Daniel Defoe, A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, 5th edn (London, 1753), IV, pp. 43, 124–5, 164. 24 Quoted in Steve Pincus, The Heart of the Declaration (New Haven, CT, 2016), p. 141. 25 Joseph Addison, Remarks on the Several Parts of Italy (London, 1753), pp. 283–4. 26 William Smith (translator) (Rector of the Holy Trinity in Chester, Chaplain to the earl of Derby), The History of the Peloponnesian War, translated from the Greek of Thucydides (London, 1753), I, pp. 124–5; [Philip Yorke and Charles Yorke], Athenian Letters (London, 1743), III, p. 92. 27 Cadwallader Colden, The History of the Five Nations of Canada, 3rd edn (London, 1755), I, p. 1. This tract was serialised in the British press: Leeds Intelligencer, 27 Aug. 1754, p. [1]. It was also widely praised. For one example: [Ellis Huske], The Present State of North America, part 1 (London, 1755), p. 26.

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the incorporating union of 1707, similarly praised the strength of the Iroquois confederation, which ‘has subsisted for ages, and appears indissoluble’.28 On both sides of the Atlantic, many Britons responded to the increasingly menacing French threat with calls for confederal union. Benjamin Franklin’s May 1754 ‘Join or Die’ print in the Pennsylvania Gazette was only the most famous instantiation of a broad pan-imperial sentiment.29 In 1753 the Glaswegian-born Robert Dinwiddie thought it ‘absolutely necessary for all the colonies to join together in raising a proper force to prevent the French settling on the lands of the Ohio’.30 On this, if on little else, James Glen, the governor of South Carolina, agreed with Robert Dinwiddie. ‘The English colonies on the continent’, Glen opined, were ‘as a rope of sand, loose and inconnected’. He called for ‘an union or association’ modelled on ‘the seven united provinces’ of the Netherlands.31 William Shirley explained to the Council and House of Representatives of Massachusetts that only ‘one general league of friendship, comprising all His Majesty’s colonies’ could convince the Six Nations to renew the covenant chain. ‘Such an Union of Councils, besides the happy effect it will probably have upon the Indians of the Six Nations’, Shirley continued, ‘may lay a foundation for a general one among all His Majesty’s colonies, for the mutual support and defense against the present dangerous enterprises of the French on every side of them.’32 The veteran Whig politician, Horatio Walpole, argued for ‘a plan of union’ that 28

Benjamin Franklin (Philadelphia) to James Parker, 20 March 1751, franklinpapers.org. Franklin’s comments, and his subsequent role in shaping both the Albany Plan and the founding of the United States, have stimulated a robust debate about the Iroquois origins of the American federation. One scholar has asserted that the ‘Iroquois played a key role in the ideological birth of the United States’: Bruce E. Johansen, Forgotten Founders (Ipswich, 1982), p. xii. This thesis has provoked a lively debate, including a forum in the William and Mary Quarterly, 53:3 (1996), 587–636. The controversy has been renewed recently: Erik M. Jensen, ‘The Harvard Law Review and the Iroquois Influence Thesis,’ British Journal of American Legal Studies, 6:2 (2017), 225–40. For scepticism, see among others: Elisabeth Tooker, ‘The United States Constitution and the Iroquois League’, Ethnohistory, 35:4 (1988), 305–36; Shannon, Indians and Colonists, p. 8. My argument sidesteps this debate but highlights that the Iroquois Confederation was one of many positive examples of confederation cited and discussed by Britons in the mid-eighteenth century. 29 On the print and its various local interpretations in North America, see Shannon, Indians and Colonists, pp. 83–7. 30 Robert Dinwiddie (Williamsburg) to James Hamilton, 22 May 1753, in Louis Knott Koontz (ed.), Robert Dinwiddie Correspondence (Berkeley, 1951), pp. 271–2; Robert Dinwiddie (Williamsburg) to James Hamilton, 24 November 1753, in Koontz (ed.), Dinwiddie Correspondence, p. 407. 31 James Glen (South Carolina) to Robert Dinwiddie, 14 March 1754, in Koontz (ed.), Dinwiddie Correspondence, p. 481. The Dutch confederation, in which ‘every province is a distinct sovereignty, only united for the common interest’, was a frequent touchstone for British Americans in this period: see Ezra Stiles (Newport) to James Hillhouse, 15 November 1755, Beinecke, MS Vault Stiles, Correspondence Box 2/ Folder 188. 32 William Shirley’s Speech to the Council and House of Representatives of Massachusetts

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‘might be formed between the Royal, Proprietary, and Charter governments under the protection and with the approbation of the Crown of Great Britain for their mutual security and protection’. Walpole added that ‘such a plan, even if these dangerous encroachments of the French should be disappointed without hostilities, should be taken soon under consideration’.33 Just as French aggression in the first decade of the eighteenth century prompted Britons to rethink constitutional arrangements, so French encroachments in the wake of the War of Austrian Succession prompted constitutional reflection. In the middle of the eighteenth century, unlike at its outset, many were willing to take seriously the possibility of confederation. Indeed Britons discussed an amazingly wide range of confederations past and present that could serve as models. Thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic contemplated confederation not as a prelude to independence but as a possible long-term and lasting solution for the empire. Confederation, they hoped, would balance localist priorities with the urgency of colonial defence and the long-term aims of imperial prosperity. II

Not everyone in mid-Hanoverian Britain thought confederation was a good idea. Indeed, politics in the period were particularly partisan. At the heart of these divisions were debates about how to govern the empire. One particularly intense division emerged precisely over the proper constitutional arrangements necessary to respond to the growing French threat. Many commentators knew that partisan divisions had become intrinsic to British politics, at least since the Revolution of 1688, if not before. ‘Were the British government proposed as a subject of speculation to a studious man’, wrote David Hume, ‘he would immediately perceive in it a source of division and party, which it would be almost impossible for it, under any administration, to avoid.’34 ‘As to the unanimity of the people’, Thomas Hay Viscount Dupplin, a supporter of the Pelhams and member of the Board of Trade, informed the House of Lords, ‘I believe it can never be expected, whilst we preserve our liberties: in free countries there will always be parties and divisions.’35 Whatever the cause, by late 1753 no one could doubt that ‘the influence of party is strong’. ‘There is a sort of magic in party’, an essayist noted in the Bay, 2 April 1754, Charles Henry Lincoln (ed.), Correspondence of William Shirley (2 vols, New York, 1912), II, pp. 42–4. 33 Horatio Walpole (Wolterton) to Thomas Pelham-Holles, first duke of Newcastle, 22 June 1754, BL, Add. MS 32735, fols 540–1. 34 David Hume, Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects, 4th edn (London, 1753), ‘Of the Parties of Great Britain’, I, p. 90. 35 Thomas Hay, Viscount Dupplin, 7 May 1753, Parliamentary History of England, XIV, p. 1378.

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leading London-based opposition newspaper, implying that the majority of the nation had been bewitched by partisanship.36 ‘Our good nature was necessarily soured by the spirit of party’, agreed another journalist.37 Partisanship was a fact of life right across the empire. In Ireland, struggles between the Lord Lieutenant Lionel Sackville, first duke of Dorset, and Henry Boyle, the Speaker Irish House of Commons, was widely seen as a battle between Patriots and their establishment Whig opponents.38 Partisan conflict ran high between ‘the monied and the landed interest’ in Jamaica as well. ‘The animosities’, wrote one observer, ‘have dissolved friendships, divided families, and turned every man’s voice, if not his hand against his neighbor.’ The planters, apparently, had turned against the administration, with the ‘merchants in general’ being the ‘hearty friends’ of Governor Charles Knowles.39 In North America, too, partisan divisions dominated the political landscape in colony after colony. ‘Party feuds’ re-emerged in New York in 1753 after the resignation of the unpopular Governor George Clinton. While the issues debated ranged in the province from collective colonial defence to the nature of the new college to be founded in New York City, they consistently poised the followers of James DeLancey against the grouping around Lewis Morris and Peter Livingston.40 The Quaker party remained dominant in Pennsylvania throughout the late 1740s and 1750s. But those who wanted a more aggressive response to French commercial and military aggression sparked a vitriolic essay debate that had all the characteristics of ‘party zeal’.41 Massachusetts was divided into complex and bitter partisan divisions. This intense partisanship led one Boston newspaper to reprint Sir Thomas Burnet’s opinion that it ‘may be affirmed with freedom, and

36

London Evening Post, 30 Oct. 1753, p. [1]. The World, 19 Dec. 1754, p. [2]. 38 George Stone, Archbishop of Armagh (Dublin) to Thomas Pelham-Holles, first duke of Newcastle, 10 October 1753, BL, Add. MS 32733, fol. 42r; Lionel Sackville, first duke of Dorset (Dublin Castle) to Thomas Pelham-Holles, first duke of Newcastle, 14 January 1754, BL, Add. MS 32734, fols 39–42; George Sackville (Dublin Castle) to Robert Maxwell, 11 February 1754, fol. 131; London Magazine, Mar. 1754, p. 99; London Magazine, Apr. 1754, p. 147; Whitehall Evening Post, 16 Feb. 1754, p. [1]. For discussion of how the money bill dispute of 1753 was transformed into a widespread pamphlet war, see Ian McBride, Eighteenth Century Ireland (Dublin, 2009), pp. 299–300. 39 Charles Knowles (Jamaica) to Thomas Pelham-Holles, first duke of Newcastle, 29 January 1754, BL, Add. MS 32734, fols 85–6; Charles Knowles (Jamaica) to Robert d’Arcy, fourth earl of Holdernesse, 6 February 1754, TNA, CO 137/60, fol. 69; Humble Representation of the Governor and Council of Jamaica, 11 November 1754, TNA, CO 137/60, fol. 121v; Gentleman’s Magazine, Aug. 1754, p. 351; Extract of a Letter from a merchant in Kingston, Jamaica in Pennsylvania Gazette, 26 Mar. 1754, p. [2]. 40 Independent Reflector, 19 Jan. 1753, p. [2]; Independent Reflector, 22 Feb. 1753, p. 51; New York Mercury, 2 Dec. 1754, p. [2]; New York Mercury, 30 Dec. 1754, p. [1]; Egnal, Mighty Empire, pp. 64–5. 41 Pennsylvania Gazette, 26 Sep. 1754, p. [1]; Egnal, Mighty Empire, p. 77. 37

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I am sure it may be maintained with truth, that the weak part in the constitution of our government is a tendency to tumult, sedition and rebellion’.42 Complex ideological divisions with a dizzying variety of local inflections have made it challenging to recover the pattern of politics in the mid-Hanoverian British empire. Nevertheless by 1753–54 three developments crystallised alignments: the growing realisation of French commercial and geopolitical success on a global scale; the divisive Jewish Naturalisation debate of 1753–54; and the death of the leading minister Henry Pelham in 1754. These three developments together served to reduce support for the intellectually prestigious middle-ground position of the Old Guard – associated with Henry Pelham himself, David Hume, and Josiah Tucker. These men had argued that Britain held an unassailable first movers’ advantage in the competition with France and, therefore, negotiation rather than military aggression or constitutional rethinking was the proper response. While Hume continued to denounce advocates of war based on ‘jealousy of trade’ and Tucker published frequently on the dangers of belligerent policies, most in Britain and across the empire had come to accept the reality and urgency of the French threat. But they did so in the ideologically supercharged environment that defined the immediate aftermath of the Jewish Naturalisation debate. Two issues, among others, divided politicians on either side of a newly supercharged political spectrum: the basis of imperial wealth and the proper organisation of the empire in the face of the growing French threat. One group of politicians and polemicists, an authoritarian Whig/neo-Tory grouping, argued that Britain’s economic malaise and geopolitical weakness was caused by Britain’s obtuse European commitments. These costly wars and subsidies had dramatically increased labour costs in Britain, making British manufactures uncompetitive in overseas markets. The remedy was for Britons to turn their backs on Europe and pursue an aggressive, hierarchical, and highly centralised imperial policy in the Atlantic modelled in part on the French empire. This group, then, emphasised the importance of colonial production of goods and raw materials and the urgency to create a centralised empire, and insisted on the urgency of colonial incorporation. 42

Boston Evening Post, 15 Jul. 1754, p. [1]. I find Egnal’s account of divisions over imperial policy more persuasive than Peterson’s division between those who had New England sensibilities versus a small group around Governor Shirley with imperial sensibility, not least because the prominent New England families, the Otises and the Hancocks, as well as the popular preacher Jonathan Mayhew, most actively supported the imperial struggle with France: Egnal, Mighty Empire, pp. 38–42. On Mayhew, see Jonathan Mayhew, A Sermon Preach’d in the Audience of His Excellency William Shirley, 29 May 1754 (Boston, 1754). Several years earlier Mayhew had made it clear that he understood politics in an imperial rather than Bostonian context by preaching a laudatory sermon on the death of the Patriot Prince Frederick Henry: Jonathan Mayhew, A Sermon Preach’d at Boston in New-England, May 26 1751 Occasioned by the much lamented death of His Royal Highness Frederick Prince of Wales (Boston, 1751).

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A Patriot coalition in Britain and across the empire agreed that the French state was making a determined effort to establish global hegemony through commercial and colonial domination. Only a global response would suit. They called for a radically different response than the authoritarian Whig/Tory grouping. They began from the argument that colonial consumption rather than colonial production was the key to British economic resurgence. As a result, because they valued the behaviour of thousands of local consumers in a variety of locations, these politicians and polemicists called for tailoring policies to the specific local conditions in each region. The Patriots emphasised the political and economic contributions of a far broader segment of society than their authoritarian opponents. Their political economic impulses were far more democratic. They advocated, therefore, a confederal rather than a centralised, hierarchical response to the French threat. They felt that in the areas of local economic regulation and taxation provincial governments were far more likely to be responsive to the needs, interests, and habits of local consumers. They called for a horizontally integrated empire based on confederation rather than incorporation.43 The debate over the Jewish Naturalisation Act provided the occasion for Tories, a Patriot rump, and a group of disillusioned establishment Whigs, called ‘authoritarian Whigs’, to advance a political economic blueprint for the empire.44 From the outset John Russell, fourth duke of Bedford, was seen as the ‘head’ of this new grouping.45 In spring 1753 Bedford joined with the Tory London alderman and West Indian planter William Beckford to hire the Pennsylvanian James Ralph, a long-time opposition journalist, to launch a new essay paper to enunciate their position. The Protester elaborated and co-ordinated the themes developed by Bedford, Beckford, and their friends.46 43

I thus disagree with Shannon’s claim that there was ‘an emerging consensus among imperial officials that the colonies needed to be reduced to a uniform dependence’. Shannon, Indians and Colonists at the Crossroads of Empire, p. 64. 44 Sarah Kinkel, Disciplining the Empire: Politics, Governance and the Rise of the British Navy (Cambridge, 2018), pp. 13–14; James M. Vaughn, The Politics of Empire at the Accession of George III (New Haven, 2019), pp. 165–200. Long ago Jack Greene also noticed a move by imperial officials in the late 1740s to call for ‘more rigid controls’. Nevertheless Greene does not place those calls within the context of the partisan ideological struggles in Britain in the period: Jack P. Greene, ‘An Uneasy Connection: An Analysis of the Preconditions of the American Revolution’, in Essays on the American Revolution, ed. Stephen G. Kurtz and James H. Hutson (Chapel Hill, 1973), p. 65. 45 William Beckford (Soho Square) to John Russell, fourth duke of Bedford, 4 June 1754, in Lord John Russell (ed.), Correspondence of John, Fourth Duke of Bedford (5 vols, London, 1842–46), II, p. 150. 46 Richard Rigby to John Russell, fourth duke of Bedford, 4 June 1753, in Russell (ed.), Correspondence of Duke of Bedford, II, p. 127; William Beckford (Soho Square) to John Russell, fourth duke of Bedford, 28 July 1753, in Russell (ed.), Correspondence of Duke of Bedford, II, p. 128; Robert W. Kenny, ‘James Ralph: An Eighteenth Century Philadelphian in Grub Street’, The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 64:2 (1940), 226–7. On the ideological

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The authoritarian Whigs insisted that the commitment of Robert Walpole and the Pelhamites to maintaining the balance of power on the Continent, and to protecting the Electorate of Hanover, were the source of all Britain’s economic woes. ‘We were once undeniably rich, and are now rich in paper only,’ lamented the Protester. The cause was clear: the misguided pursuit of ‘political moonshine’, in other words ‘the balance of Europe’.47 ‘We have seen’, complained Bedford’s close friend and political brother-in-arms John Montagu, fourth earl of Sandwich, the wealth of this nation, that wealth for which our manufacturers labor, and our sailors defy the oceans and winds; that wealth which is either the gift of bountiful nature, or the profit of incessant industry, squandered in projects which had no other tendency than to extend the bounds and improve the interest of Hanover.48

The Bedfordites, therefore, embraced a blue-water policy. They wanted Britain to turn its back fully on the European continent and aggressively pursue war and imperial expansion in the Atlantic. ‘We have nothing to do with the continent’, argued the naval man and Bedford client, Sir Peter Warren, ‘let us confine ourselves to our own element, the ocean. There we may still ride triumphant in defiance of the whole House of Bourbon.’49 ‘We have no occasion to attack France by land in Europe’, maintained William Beckford, ‘nor can they attack us.’ Instead Britain’s true element was the sea. ‘By confining ourselves therefore to a maritime war, and a war in America, we have from the nature of things every reason to expect success,’ Beckford concluded.50 The authoritarian Whig/Bedfordite grouping thought the benefits of empire lay in territorial acquisition and the acquisition of precious commodities – silver, gold, tobacco, sugar. They had, therefore, defined themselves as a party opposed to immigration, since they saw no need to increase the number of consumers. Beckford and Bedford decided jointly to support the publication of

significance of The Protester, see Kinkel, Disciplining the Navy, p. 94; T.W. Perry, Public Opinion, Propaganda, and Politics in Eighteenth-century England: a Study of the Jew Bill of 1753 (Cambridge, MS, 1962), pp. 106–9; Bob Harris, Politics and the Nation: Britain in the Mid-eighteenth Century (Oxford, 2002), pp. 51–2. The Protester was wound up when Newcastle convinced his brother to provide Ralph with a pension. 47 The Protester, 25 Aug. 1753, p. 75. 48 John Montagu, fourth earl of Sandwich, 31 January 1744, Parliamentary History of England, XIII, p. 560. 49 Peter Warren, 5 February 1750, Parliamentary History of England, XIV, p. 713. On his relationship with Bedford, see Peter Warren (Louisbourg) to John Russell, fourth duke of Bedford, 4 October 1745, in Julian Gwyn (ed.), The Royal Navy and North America: The Warren Papers, 1736–1752, Navy Records Society (London, 1973), pp. 175–6; John Russell, fourth duke of Bedford (London) to Peter Warren, 30 October 1745, in Russell (ed.), Correspondence of Duke of Bedford, I, pp. 54–5. When Warren stood for Parliament in 1747, Bedford contributed substantially to his election for Westminster. 50 William Beckford, 14 November 1754, Parliamentary History of England, XV, pp. 354–5.

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‘a small treatise’ penned by the discontented North Carolinian land speculator, Henry McCulloh.51 McCulloh attributed French success to their centralising and uniform policies. Therefore, it was hardly surprising that he thought the British would be best served by modelling their behaviour on the French. The British, he said, should not be afraid to adopt ‘every scheme’ of the French ‘which may suit our present interest and designs’.52 McCulloh was not the only one in this group to propose colonial incorporation. James Abercromby, a Scot who spent over a decade in South Carolina, followed the Bedfordite line in complaining of long-term ‘ministerial misconduct’ in focusing on ‘the affairs of another continent’, on concerning itself with the European balance of power, rather than turning its back on Europe and adopting an aggressive policy of colonial territorial expansion and consolidation.53 In a 1752 tract Abercomby argued that it was possible to derive ‘Universal maxims of government with regard to dependent states, such as colonies are’. Roman colonies, he insisted, came ‘the nearest to that of ours’. By contrast, the Greek colonies which stood in relation to their mother countries as mere ‘confederates’ bore no meaningful relationship to the present situation. As a result, unsurprisingly, Abercromby called for the establishment ‘of a proper subordination in the exercise of legislative and judicial powers of government, as well as trade in the plantations’.54 Given the importance that they laid on colonial production and their admiration for French centralisation, it was hardly surprising that McCulloh and the Bedfordites proposed new means to extract revenue from the colonies. In fact, McCulloh’s programme exactly presages the reforms implemented by George Grenville’s administration after the Seven Years’ War. McCulloh famously proposed a stamp tax to be applied to ‘all writings, deeds and instruments, or other matters relating to the law’. The result of such a new colonial tax, McCulloh thought, would be that the colonies would no ‘longer be burdensome to this kingdom, in advancing money for their security and

51

William Beckford (Soho Square) to John Russell, fourth duke of Bedford, 4 June 1754, in Russell (ed.), Correspondence of Duke of Bedford, II, p. 150. While Beckford claimed to introduce McCulloh to Bedford, he needed no such introduction, having submitted a memorial to him several years earlier: Henry McCulloh, Memorial Addressed to the Duke of Bedford, 2 May 1748, TNA, CO 5/5, fols 292–5. 52 Henry McCulloh, The Wisdom and Policy of the French (London, 1755), p. 79. For McCulloh it was essential that plans agreed upon by the Board of Trade should never be deviated from. This was, he said, the French system (pp. 53, 67–8, 73–4). See the same point in Henry McCulloh, A Miscellaneous Essay Concerning the Courses Pursued by Great Britain in the Affairs of Her Colonies (London, 1755), pp. 13–15. 53 James Abercromby (Craven Street, London) to William Pitt, 25 November 1756, in Charles F. Mullett, ‘James Abercromby and French Encroachments in America’, Canadian Historical Review, 26:1 (1945), 57. 54 James Abercromby, ‘An Examination’, May 1752, in Magna Charta for America ed. Jack P. Greene, Charles F. Mullett and Edward C. Papenfuse Jr (Philadelphia, 1986), pp. 70–2.

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enlargement’.55 Members of the Bedfordite coalition were convinced that an aggressive colonial policy, if properly administered, would pay for itself. Not only could the colonists be taxed, but they would, according to Beckford, ‘join heartily with us in driving the French as far as possible from their confines’, and they would do so ‘without subsidy or reward’.56 The Patriots on both sides of the Atlantic, by contrast, thought the best means to counter the French was to focus on colonial consumption and reimagine the empire in confederal terms. They argued for an imperial political economy that focused on colonial consumption as the key to generating imperial prosperity. And, as a direct consequence of their focus on consumers, they insisted on a confederal model of empire as the best means to ensure the purchasing capacity of colonials. Malachy Postlethwayt, the Patriot political economist, argued that colonial trade was both the most important and the most dynamic part of Britain’s commercial portfolio. Postlethwayt estimated that ‘above half the trade and navigation of Great Britain’ depended on ‘her American settlements’.57 Patriot publications in the period after the War of Austrian Succession echoed this point. ‘Great Britain has enjoyed the benefit of a most extensive commerce since the discovery of America,’ argued Otis Little, a member of the powerful and influential Otis clan of Massachusetts; this trade, ‘if properly attended to, will contribute more to its future interest than any other branches of trade, by enlarging the demand for all its manufactures and increasing the means of its naval force’.58 Unlike the Bedfordites, however, Postlethwayt and the Patriots laid far heavier emphasis on colonial consumption than colonial production of raw materials. ‘As our colonies increase our navigation’ by taking ‘off our manufactures and superfluidities at home’, Postlethwayt argued, ‘they are justly looked on to be the greatest support of the power and affluence of the nation..59 Otis Little, similarly, supported plans for increasing bounties for North American ‘rough materials’, which ‘would soon enable them to supply the nation with a variety of articles in return for its manufactures, which are now purchased of foreigners in cash and imported in their ships’.60 Benjamin Franklin made the same point. In the colonies ‘a vast demand is growing for British manufactures; a glorious market wholly in the power of Britain, in which foreigners cannot interfere, which will increase in a short time even beyond her power of supplying, though her whole trade should be to her colonies’.61 55 McCulloh,

A Miscellaneous Essay, pp. 92–3. William Beckford, 14 November 1754, Parliamentary History of England, XV, p. 358. 57 Postlethwayt, The Universal Dictionary, p. 55. 58 [Otis Little], The State of Trade in the Northern Colonies Considered (London, 1748), p. 9. 59 Postlethwayt, The Universal Dictionary, p. 372. 60 [Little], The State of Trade, p. v. 61 [Benjamin Franklin], Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, in William Clarke, Observations of the Late and Present Conduct of the French (Boston, reprinted London, 1755), p. 45. 56

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Postlethwayt and the Patriots, like the Bedfordites, praised French policy. Like the Bedfordites, they ascribed French commercial dynamism to a sea change in French political behaviour. But, unlike the Bedfordites, who ascribed French advances to their uniform, centralised, and authoritarian military policies, Postlethwayt and the Patriots favoured state support for commercial endeavours. They did not think that territorial acquisitions would pay for themselves. Postlethwayt praised the French for the substantial support they had given to commerce since the age of Louis XIV. Postlethwayt noted French state support for a variety of commercial endeavours and infrastructural projects. Where McCulloh highlighted French military construction and centralised control, Postlethwayt highlighted state support for manufacturers, merchants, and colonists. State support for manufacturers allowed the French to recruit talented artisans from all over Europe and to encourage their own.62 State support enabled France ‘to supplant Britain and Holland in the manufacture of cloth’.63 Colbert’s loans to Turkey merchants allowed them gradually to supplant the British in the Mediterranean trade.64 The wise management by Jean-Louis Henri Orry de Fulvy, French Intendant des Finances, transformed the French East India Company. ‘In very few years’, thought Postlethwayt, Orry made the French company ‘formidable in comparison to any in Europe’.65 ‘The encouragement they have from the crown of France’ explained the recent prodigious development of the French colonies in America and the West Indies.66 Postlethwayt called for a fundamental reorganisation of the British empire. He agreed with the Bedfordites that British imperial policy needed more coherence. But, whereas the Bedfordites advocated tightening restrictions and increased central control, Postlethwayt called for a confederal empire. In The Universal Dictionary he outlined a proposal for ‘a special council of commerce to consist of experienced merchants, or such who have been long engaged in the concerns of trade and colonies’. The council would be ‘properly elected by the principal trading cities and towns of Great Britain and Ireland’. It would also include ‘deputies from our colonies in America, the interest of those colonies being intimately interwoven with that of England’. The council would ‘sit every week in London throughout the year’ and would gather information ‘relating to the colonies and all branches of commerce and manufactures’. The council would then advise Parliament on commercial and imperial policy. But it was clear that, in Postlethwayt’s formulation, this representative council from across the empire would in fact be the true policy-making body. Parliament, armed with information from this confederal council, would ‘with far more ease, and 62 Postlethwayt,

The Universal Dictionary, p. 124. The Universal Dictionary, p. 513. Later in the text Postlethwayt details Colbert’s great success in establishing ‘woolen manufactories of diverse kinds in France’ (p. 814). 64 Postlethwayt, The Universal Dictionary, p. 814. 65 Postlethwayt, The Universal Dictionary, p. 830. 66 Postlethwayt, The Universal Dictionary, p. 443. 63 Postlethwayt,

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less liability of deceit and imposition have the true and genuine state of all branches of trade laid before them’. The council would deliver Parliament ‘the truth’, which would lead to more efficient policy. Parliament, in effect, would simply implement the policy recommendations of this fact-gathering body.67 Confederal union, rather than central and uniform direction, would give vigour to British imperial policy, in Postlethwayt’s view. ‘Our great aim tends towards such a union amongst all His Majesty’s dominions, as will promote the strength and vigor, as well as mutual prosperity of them all.’ ‘For the happy general union that we would cement’, Postlethwayt explained, ‘is no less constitutional than commercial, and such also as may the least interfere with the particular interest of each other, but advance that of the whole.’ This was the only way to ‘strengthen the whole British Empire’.68 By placing the discussions of confederation and political economy into their proper imperial partisan context, it becomes clear that the widespread enthusiasm for confederation in the aftermath of the War of the Austrian Succession had a specific ideological location. Lawrence Gipson and the Imperial School of American historians are right to point out that there was widespread agreement in the 1750s that imperial reform needed to begin with Parliament. Gipson and the Imperial School are also correct that that the colonists had yet to develop a critique of parliamentary sovereignty. But they are wrong to posit consensus. In fact, the Bedfordites/authoritarian Whigs rejected any call for confederation. They wanted a hierarchical, extractive empire based along the lines of what they understood to be the French model. Their Patriot opponents, on both sides of the Atlantic, instead called for a confederal union supported by the promotion of colonial consumption of British manufactured goods. III

What, in 1754, was the nature of the proposals for confederal union advanced on either side of the Atlantic? Did the American plan reveal widespread enthusiasm for confederation while the British plan unmasked the long-held preference for centralised government? Or did both plans reveal a general commitment to confederal union among Patriots and their allies on both sides of the Atlantic? Increasingly concerned about the dangers of French encroachments and the weakening ties with the Iroquois, the British government ‘thought fit to recommend a convention of delegates from the Assemblies of the several colonies to assemble at Albany in the province of New York’. ‘The principal design’, recalled Thomas Hutchinson, one of the Massachusetts commissioners at the Albany Conference, was ‘to unite the colonies in measures for their 67 Postlethwayt,

The Universal Dictionary, p. 873. Malachy Postlethwayt, Britain’s Commercial Interest Explained and Improved (London, 1757), I, pp. 461, 469–70. 68

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general defense and to settle a quota of men and money, wherever they might be necessary against a common enemy.’69 No one who attended the congress at Albany was in any doubt that the British government supported, indeed demanded, the creation of a confederal plan for the American colonies. The commissioners who met at Albany agreed to a confederal plan along Patriot lines. That plan for ‘the union of all the colonies’ was first sketched out by Benjamin Franklin on his way to Albany. It was then vetted by the New York Patriots James Alexander and Archibald Kennedy before being discussed and further revised by the commissioners.70 While some have debated how far the commissioners altered Franklin’s original plan, all agreed that it was his plan that formed the basis for the confederation. The Albany commissioners drew up a remarkable plan for confederal union. That plan, initially circulated for discussion among the North American assemblies, was widely noted in the British press.71 In the end, the Albany commissioners agreed to a plan that created a President General appointed by the crown and a Grand Council proportionately elected every three years by the colonial assemblies. This new confederal government would have the power to regulate Indian affairs, settle new colonies, and provide for and co-ordinate defence. The whole would be funded ‘from something that may be nearly proportionable to each colony and grow with it’, such as an excise tax on alcohol or a stamp tax. The plan did not, as Cadwallader Colden perceived, assume that the colonies would pay all the costs for their own defence. The imperial Parliament would ‘provide the necessary funds’ that could not be raised in the colonies. Under the plan, the commissioners made clear, unlike in the incorporating union of 1707, ‘the several colonies may each enjoy its own constitution, laws, liberties, and privileges as so many separate corporations in any commonwealth’.72 69

Thomas Hutchinson, History of the Colony of Massachusetts-Bay, 2nd edn (4 vols, London, 1765–1828), III, pp. 19–20. 70 James Alexander (New York) to Cadwallader Colden, 9 May [June?] 1754, The Letters and Papers of Cadwallader Colden (9 vols, New York, 1973), IV, p. 442; Joyce Chaplin (ed.), The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (New York, 2012), p. 122; Hutchinson, Colony of Massachusetts-Bay, III, pp. 20–1; Thomas Pownall (New York) to ? [probably earl of Halifax], 23 July 1754, in Beverly McAnear (ed.), ‘Personal Accounts of the Albany Congress of 1754’, Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 3:4 (1953), 744; William Shirley (Boston) to Sir Thomas Robinson, 24 December 1754, Lincoln (ed.), Correspondence of William Shirley, II, p. 113. 71 The plan itself was printed in Stephen Hopkins, The Plan of Union Adopted at Albany in July 1754 (Newport, [1755]), pp. 9–12. British press discussions: Whitehall Evening Post, 14 Sep. 1754, p. [2]; Caledonian Mercury, 23 Sep. 1754, p. [1]; Scots Magazine, Sep. 1754, p. 446; Whitehall Evening Post, 17 Oct. 1754, p. [1]; Caledonian Mercury, 21 Oct. 1754, p. [1]. 72 Albany Congress Committee, Short Hints Towards a Scheme for General Union of the British Colonies on the Continent, 28 June 1754, franklinpapers.org; Benjamin Franklin, ‘Reasons and Motives for the Albany Union’, July 1754, franklinpapers.org; Cadwallader Colden, ‘Remarks on Short Hints Towards a Scheme for Uniting the Northern Colonies’, [May–June 1754], Letters and Papers of Cadwallader Colden, IV, pp. 449–50. The best modern

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The commissioners at Albany knew well that their plan was only the first step towards making a confederation. They anticipated, correctly, that ‘the colonies were seldom all in equal danger at the same time, or equally near the danger, or equally sensible of it; that some of them had particular interests to manage, with which an union might interfere; and that they were extremely jealous of each other’. For this reason it was next to impossible that all the colonies would accede to the union. They resolved, therefore, that ‘the union be established by act of Parliament’.73 Immediately after the Albany congress, Franklin expressed to Cadwallader Colden his hope that the plan ‘with some improvements that I think necessary’ be ‘approved of by the King and Parliament’.74 At the same time that Franklin and the commissioners were drawing up a plan for confederal union on the advice of the Board of Trade, the Board of Trade itself was working on a plan for confederation. In late June, as the American commissioners were meeting in Albany, the duke of Newcastle reported that he had ‘given orders some time ago to the Board of Trade to prepare a scheme for a general concert among the Northern colonies’. To that end, Halifax had already ‘prepared very proper heads for that purpose, which are now under consideration’.75 On both sides of the Atlantic statesmen drew up plans to reorganise the empire in North America along confederal lines. The Board of Trade’s Plan of Union, like the Albany Plan, went through several drafts and was vetted by a range of experts. In mid-August, Halifax announced that the Board of Trade’s plan ‘for a general union and concert of the colonies in North America’ had been formed and was only awaiting signatures from two members of the Board who had travelled to their country residences.76 Far from being an attempt to impose centralised governance on the colonies, the Board of Trade ‘endeavored as much as possible to adapt the plan to the constitution of the colonies’.77 The Board of Trade, like the commissioners at Albany, drew up a plan for confederal union with an executive tempered by a popularly elected council. Like the commissioners at Albany, the Board of Trade argued that confederation was necessary to put ‘a stop to these [French] encroachments and invasions’ and discussion of the plan itself is in Alan Houston, Benjamin Franklin and the Politics of Improvement (New Haven, CT, 2008), pp. 165–70. 73 Benjamin Franklin, ‘Reasons and Motives for the Albany Union’, July 1754, franklinpapers.org; Hutchinson, Colony of Massachusetts-Bay, III, p. 22; William Shirley (Boston) to Sir Thomas Robinson, 24 December 1754, Lincoln (ed.), Correspondence of William Shirley, II, pp. 112–13. 74 Benjamin Franklin (Colden’s Landing NY) to Cadwallader Colden, 14 July 1754, franklinpapers.org. 75 Thomas Pelham-Holles, first duke of Newcastle (Claremont) to Horatio Walpole, 29 June 1754, BL, Add. MS 32735, fols 597–8. 76 George Montagu-Dunk, second earl of Halifax (Horton) to Thomas Pelham-Holles, first duke of Newcastle, 15 August 1754, BL, Add. MS 32736, fol. 243r. 77 George Montagu-Dunk, second earl of Halifax (Horton) to Thomas Pelham-Holles, first duke of Newcastle, 15 August 1754, BL, Add. MS 32736, fol. 243v.

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was well aware that security in North America required improving relations with the Indians. To that end, the Board’s plan included provisions ‘for defraying the expense of presents to the Indians’, ‘for putting Indian affairs under one general direction’, and for augmenting defences in Indian country. Like the commissioners at Albany, the Board of Trade proposed the creation of a legislative council. Whereas the Albany commissioners had proposed proportional representation from each colony, the Board of Trade instead proposed that ‘the respect Councils and Assemblies’ would ‘appoint proper persons (one of each colony) subject to the Governor’s approbation’. These ‘Commissioners’ would in turn ‘agree upon the quantum of money to be supplied by each colony for defraying the expense of the service’. These quantums would be determined by considering ‘the number of inhabitants, trade, wealth, and revenue of each colony’. These calculations would in turn be based on ‘very full and authenticated accounts of these particulars and of the state of each colony respectively’.78 Far from imposing centralised governance on the colonies, the Board of Trade plan gave the American provinces a critical role both in choosing representatives or commissioners and in gathering the information that would form the basis of a proportional taxation scheme. The Board of Trade did not imagine that the new confederal union would offload all of the costs of empire onto the colonies. The plan ordered the colonial governors to remind their respective assemblies that ‘His Majesty does not intend to withdraw that part of the expense which the Crown has been annually at for the security and protection of the colonies’. The imperial government would also continue to pay ‘whatever sums of money have been usually given by His Majesty for Indian services’, as ‘His Majesty is willing to bear the ordinary establishment for this service, and that upon any great emergency they shall receive such support from His Majesty as shall be thought reasonable’.79 The Board of Trade in the 1750s had no notion that the colonies, even confederated, should be exclusively responsible for defraying the costs of their own defence or subsidising Indian presents. The plans for confederal union drawn up almost simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic resembled each other far more than they differed. While both plans insisted on the importance for co-ordination both to repel French encroachments and to improve the all-important relations with the powerful groupings of North American Indians, neither called for the kind of centralised control on the French model demanded by Bedford’s authoritarian Whig/ Tory grouping. While it is true that the Albany plan imagined a council based on proportional representation from the colonies – much like the House of Representatives in the United States – and the Board of Trade plan imagined a 78

George Montagu-Dunk, second earl of Halifax, The Draft of a Plan or Project …, BL, Add. MS 32736, fols 247–8. 79 George Montagu-Dunk, second earl of Halifax, The Draft of a Plan or Project …, BL, Add MS 32736, fols 251–2.

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single commissioner elected from each colony, both plans imagined a centrally appointed executive whose power would be tempered by representatives of the individual provinces. On both sides of the Atlantic the French threat of mid-century evoked confederal rather incorporating plans of union. IV

In the 1750s, unlike in the first decade of the eighteenth century, the British ministry gave a serious airing to confederal union. A range of politicians, imperial administrators, and polemicists responded to the new French threat by revisiting and reimagining arguments for confederal rather than incorporating union. In the 1750s Patriots on both sides of the Atlantic advocated redefining the British imperial constitution. Not only did they take the possibility seriously, they drew up, debated, and vetted sophisticated plans for confederation. The advocates of these plans admitted that centralisation and coercion had turned France into a formidable foe. But they rejected the French hierarchical model in favour of one which imagined a messier but more equally balanced polity. These advocates of confederation rejected traditional notions of empire based on unified sovereignty, in favour of an imperial state in which power would be wielded at a variety of levels. The American commissioners gathered at Albany, as well as the British members of the Board of Trade, were committed to defending and improving British imperial governance. They knew that empires could be confederations and confederations could be empires.80 Benjamin Franklin, one of the authors of the Albany plan, waxed nostalgic about what might have been. Confederal union, he opined, ‘was really the true medium; and I am still of opinion for both sides of the water if it had been adopted’. Long after American independence, Franklin remained convinced that ‘the colonies so united would have been sufficiently strong to have defended themselves’ against the French threat and then ‘of course the subsequent pretense for taxing America, and the bloody contest it occasioned, would have been avoided’. Had confederal union been embraced in 1754, Franklin believed, the British empire would have persisted.

80

These statesmen knew that the Athenian Empire had been based on a confederal model, and knew the United Provinces to be an imperial state. Others have noted the theoretical compatibility between confederations and empire. In discussing the Comanche Empire, for example, Pekka Hamalainen notes that ‘Comanche chiefs were local and regional actors first, but periodically they also ran a larger political entity, the Comanche confederacy’. Pekka Hamalainen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven, CT, 2008), p. 348. Jennifer Pitts has pointed out the fundamental compatibility between European confederal thinking, and even the European Union, and empire: Jennifer Pitts, Boundaries of the International: Law and Empire (Cambridge Press, 2018), pp. 10–11.

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‘But’, he lamented, ‘such mistakes are not new; history is full of errors of princes and states.’81 Neither plan of union was adopted. But this was not because of the incompatibility of British and American visions of empire. Such incompatibility emerged only as the authoritarian Whig/Tory faction tightened its grip on British government in the 1760s and 1770s.82 Patriots on both sides of the Atlantic reimagined the empire as a confederation. In the aftermath of the War of Austrian Succession political moderates, including Britain’s leading minister the duke of Newcastle and his friend the earl of Hardwicke, were forced by French commercial and military aggression to reject any notion of political complacency. They were made to choose between reorienting the empire in favour of a more centralised hierarchical structure based on colonial extraction modelled on the French, or a more decentralised and messy confederation. By 1754 these moderates had thrown in their lot with the Patriots. This rapprochement between the Pelhamites and the Patriots explains why the plans promoted by the Board of Trade and the Albany commissioners were so similar. They both derived from a common trans-Atlantic Patriot ideology. Their plans came to naught for highly contingent reasons. Had the Patriot coalition that ushered in the great victories of 1759 remained in power after George III’s accession, it is entirely conceivable that the confederal plans of 1754 might have been revived. The American Revolution, the imperial civil war that broke out in the 1770s, was by no means inevitable. The Scottish plans for confederal union that received no airing in 1705–7 were repurposed in the 1750s. This time the possibilities of confederal empire were taken more seriously. Though, once again, in the end, incorporating union triumphed. In 2021, Scots are faced with two competing options – remaining within the incorporating union of the United Kingdom or joining the confederal union of Europe. The choices are stark indeed. But both options have an imperial history.

81

Chaplin (ed.), Benjamin Franklin, p. 123. best accounts of these developments are Vaughn, The Politics of Empire; Justin duRivage, Revolution against Empire (New Haven, CT, 2017); Kinkel, Disciplining the Empire. 82 The

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12 The Empire Strikes Back: Indian Influences on Land Legislation in Scotland and Ireland in the Late Nineteenth Century Ewen A. Cameron

T

his essay emphasises that the Indian example was one of many forces that affected the construction of legislation such as the Irish Land Acts of 1870 and 1881 and the Scottish Crofters’ Act of 1886.1 These acts gave important, although limited, land rights to small tenants. These included compensation for improvements, fixity of tenure, fair rent and, in Ireland, the right to free sale of the tenancy. Other influences included the poverty produced by the agricultural crisis of the late 1870s and early 1880s, which resulted in near-famine conditions in the west of Ireland and in the Scottish Highlands. Organised agitation – in the form of the Irish National Land League, founded in Mayo in 1879, and the Highland Land Law Reform Associations, formed in 1882 and 1883 – also played a part. Parliamentary pressure applied by the Irish Parliamentary Party and the ‘Crofters’ Party’ in Scotland was also significant, although the importance of the latter should not be exaggerated. While protest was an important factor in the Irish and Scottish land legislation of the 1880s, events of an entirely different order were relevant in India. The shadow of the Rebellion of 1857 hung heavily over the deliberations of those interested in land reform in India in the succeeding decades.2 The impact of the events of 1857 was more profound, 1

The work for this essay originated in discussions with Allan I. Macinnes when he was supervising my PhD thesis at the University of Glasgow. The centrality of the eighth duke of Argyll to this narrative is a reminder of the extraordinary political longevity of the House of Argyll, whose history Macinnes has done so much to analyse. See Allan I. Macinnes, The British Confederate: Archibald Campbell, Marquess of Argyll, 1607–1661 (Edinburgh, 2011); idem, Clanship, Commerce and the House of Stuart, 1603–1788 (East Linton, 1996). This political survival is all the more remarkable, given the execution for high treason of both the first marquess in 1661 and the ninth earl in 1685. 2 K. Theodore Hoppen, The Mid-Victorian Generation, 1846–1886 (Oxford, 1998), pp. 183–97; G.R.G. Hambly, ‘Richard Temple and the Punjab Tenancy Act of 1868’, EHR,

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however, in that subsequent events, often of a much lower intensity, engendered an exaggerated response.3 There was also a close interaction between Ireland and Scotland, regardless of common Indian influences. Further, the influence of India was not all in one direction, as different experiences and outlooks produced different ideas on how the Indian legacy operated. These points will be pursued by a brief examination of three individuals whose views demonstrate this diverse legacy: Lord Napier, a former governor of Madras who chaired an important Royal Commission into the grievances of the Scottish crofters in 1883–84; Sir George Campbell, who spent most of his career in India and who, on his return to Scotland, was elected as the Radical Liberal MP for the Kirkcaldy Burghs; and George Douglas Campbell, eighth duke of Argyll, a Highland landowner who served as secretary of state for India during Gladstone’s first administration from 1868 to 1874, and who would almost certainly have been horrified to be bracketed with Napier and Sir George. I

The study of the connections between Scotland and the British empire is now well established in Scottish historiography, with contributions deepening our understanding of how Scots operated within the empire as administrators, missionaries, teachers, capitalists and individual emigrants. Our attention has also been drawn to the importance of the empire in the formation of Scottish national identity.4 It has recently been argued that ‘the empire was a community of units that related to each other in different ways alternatively as transmitters, mediators and receivers of policy and opinion’.5 We are, however, only beginning to understand how Scotland was placed in this system and how the empire affected Scotland in terms of the role played in public life by figures who

79 (1964), 47–66; Thomas R. Metcalf, ‘The Influence of the Mutiny of 1857 on Land Policy in India’, Historical Journal, 4 (1961), 152–63. 3 Parliamentary Papers 1878, LVIII. Report of the Deccan Riots Commission; Ravinder Kumar, ‘The Deccan Riots of 1875’, Journal of Asian Studies, 24 (1964–65), 613–35; Neil Charlesworth, ‘The Myth of the Deccan Riots of 1875’, Modern Asian Studies, 6 (1972), 401–22; Clive Dewey, ‘The Influence of Sir Henry Maine on Agrarian Policy in India’, in The Victorian Achievement of Sir Henry Maine: A Centennial Reappraisal, ed. Alan Diamond (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 353–75, at p. 374; D.A. Washbrook, ‘Law, State and Agrarian Society in Colonial India’, Modern Asian Studies, 15 (1981), 649–721, at 686. 4 John M. Mackenzie has been central in drawing many of these themes together for the nineteenth century. See his ‘Essay and Reflection: On Scotland and the Empire’, International History Review, 4 (1993), 714–39; idem, ‘Empire and National Identities: The Case of Scotland’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 8 (1998), 215–32. 5 S.B. Cook, Imperial Affinities: Nineteenth Century Analogies and Exchanges between India and Ireland (New Delhi, 1993), p. 18.

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had been moulded by imperial influence – a theme that has been developed in more recent historiography.6 Lord Napier and Ettrick was a Border landowner who had been a career diplomat, serving in Vienna, Constantinople, St Petersburg, the United States, The Hague and Berlin before being appointed governor of Madras in January 1866. Following the assassination of the Earl of Mayo in the Andaman Islands in 1872, he acted as temporary governor general of India, but was passed over for the permanent appointment and retired to Scotland.7 His experience in India in the 1860s, where much attention was paid to land tenure in the aftermath of the rebellion of 1857, gave him an obvious background on the land question. Napier’s career demonstrates very clearly the diversity of influences which influenced the debate on the land question in the 1880s. Especially interesting, in the light of his subsequent ideas on the Highlands, were his experiences in Russia in the early 1860s. In the course of an address to the annual meeting of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science in Plymouth in 1872, he noted the tendency towards the consolidation of land in great estates and the proliferation of tenancies-at-will. He went on to note that, while serving in St Petersburg, he had the good fortune to be a witness … of the promulgation of the Act of Emancipation and Endowment, and, notwithstanding the disenchantments which are ever ready to follow in the track of philanthropy, the scene still remains the greatest recollection of my life, an impression that can never be repeated and can never be forgotten.

While he did not underestimate the limitations of the emancipation of the Russian peasantry, especially the continuing authority of the village (through which the peasants held their land in a collective manner), he was clear that the granting of ‘a legal and lasting interest in the land of Russia to fifty million of its inhabitants’ must ‘inevitably conduct them to the full exercise of individual liberty, and to the full enjoyment of individual property’. It is striking that when Napier came to compose the section on land in the report of the Royal Commission, he adapted the idea of the township as the central feature of the new order which he proposed. He also thought that the ‘dignity and self respect’ of the people of India was augmented by the firm possession of property rights.8 Interestingly, the nature of the Russian rural commune, or Mir, had been hotly debated in the generation prior to the emancipation: some saw it as an ancient 6

Antoinette Burton, At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain (Berkeley, CA, 1998), pp. 1–23; Andrew Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Harlow, 2005). 7 A.J. Arbuthnot, rev. David Washbrook, ‘Napier, Francis, tenth Lord Napier of Merchistoun and first Baron Ettrick (1819–1898)’, ODNB; Scotsman, 13 Oct. 1870, 20 Dec. 1898; Times, 20 Dec. 1898; Longman’s Magazine, Feb. 1899, 378. 8 Lord Napier and Ettrick, ‘Opening Address’, in Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science: Plymouth and Devonport Meeting, 1872, ed. Edwin Pears (London, 1873); John Gooding, Rulers and Subjects: Governments and People in Russia, 1801–1991 (London, 1996), pp. 62–5.

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and egalitarian institution which would serve as a barrier against the individualism of the West, others viewed it as a more recent development predicated on the necessity to raise revenue in a structured manner.9 Some regarded Lord Napier’s thoughts on land reform as being unduly radical for translation to the United Kingdom. The Times remarked that ‘we see no particular reason for setting to work to imitate either Russia or Germany or India in the matter of our land laws’.10 Nevertheless, it is notable that in both India and Russia, although on a much larger scale, Napier had acquired experience of land reform. He had a deep and abiding interest in systems of land tenure in different countries, as, indeed, did Sir George Campbell. In correspondence with Campbell in 1877, he praised a recent publication of Campbell’s on Turkey as showing that he was free of ‘national prejudices, or presuppositions’ and Campbell’s ‘varied personal experience of many countries, religions and races’ was a positive characteristic of the book.11 This was not merely empty praise among friends. Napier and Campbell, as this essay will show, were determined to develop ideas on the land question that were not bound by national legal jurisdictions or prevailing ideas of political economy. In the Indian case, an extra dimension was added by the fact that reforms were based on the regularisation of historical and traditional forms of land tenure. In one of his earliest speeches in the House of Lords, Napier asked whether it would be possible to have a return of statistics showing the amount of land under cultivation and capable of improvement, and the extent of land used for sport but capable of cultivation. His motivation for this interest, he declared, was the increasing price of food, the extent to which the nation was becoming dependent on foreign sources for food supply and the importance of ascertaining ‘in what degree the productive powers of our own kingdom could be developed’. In particular, he was worried about the amount of land which was ‘purposely retained in an unproductive state, simply for the sport and entertainment of the upper classes’.12 In an early indication of the debate which 9

Jerome Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia: From the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ, 1971), pp. 508–9. It is worth noting that the most important English-language interpreter of these debates, and many other matters relating to Russia, was a Scot. See Donald Mackenzie Wallace, Russia (London, 1877). Wallace was from Dumbarton, widely educated in Scotland, France and Germany, spoke a multitude of languages and had spent six years in Russia researching his book. He later became a foreign correspondent of The Times and acquired Indian experience as private secretary to Lord Dufferin during his period as governor general from 1884 to 1888, and as a companion to the future Nicholas II during his tour of India in 1890–1. See G.E. Buckle, rev. H.C.G. Matthews, ‘Wallace, Sir Donald Mackenzie (1841–1919)’, ODNB. I am grateful to Mr John Gooding for alerting me to the work of Wallace. 10 The Times, 13 Sep. 1872. 11 Napier to Campbell, 9 January 1877, BL, Campbell of Edenwood Papers, MSS Eur E 349/12. The book was Sir George Campbell’s The Races, Religions and Institutions of Turkey and the Neighbouring Countries (London, 1877). 12 Parliamentary Debates, 3rd series, 216, cols 1478–9; Highlander, 5 Jul. 1873.

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would occur over the contents of the Royal Commission Report in 1883, the duke of Argyll rose to pour scorn on Napier’s request. Argyll felt that the information requested could not be supplied without the exercise of highly subjective opinions as to the use and potential capabilities of land.13 This was the first in a series of clashes between the two men; it should be noted that while Napier was governor of Madras (1866–72) and temporary viceroy of India (1872), Argyll was secretary of state for India. There is no evidence that they clashed over policy matters during this period.14 The essence of Napier’s ideas on land, as expressed in the report of the Royal Commission which he chaired, involved giving security of tenure and thirty-year improving leases to crofters who held land worth more than £6. Crofters with land worth less than £6 were to be encouraged to emigrate. The ‘township’ was to be responsible for the management of the common pasture: all settlements with three or more holdings with common pasture, or a history of such within a forty-year period, were to be constituted as townships. Napier felt that the township had a ‘distinct existence in the sentiments and traditions of its component members’.15 It is interesting to note that he had regarded the ‘village’ – the key element in the emancipation of the Russian serfs in 1861 – much more negatively. The distinction between the two cases lay in Napier’s varying perceptions of the Russian peasant, who was ‘immersed in ignorance’ and of the Highland crofter, who showed ‘native intelligence’.16 The report was also the occasion of an exchange of views between Napier and Argyll. Argyll attacked the report as flawed because it did not recognise the fact that the crofter was not merely a small farmer but a labourer who had an attachment to the land. It was too much land, rather than too little, which was the obstacle to progress in the crofting community.17 Napier was not intimidated by such ducal opinions, which he felt would ‘popularise us’.18 The sections on land tenure in the Napier Report were not acted upon and Napier’s notions of communal townships, drawn from his imperial experience, had little influence on the Crofters’ Act of 1886. Nevertheless, the Act did recognise and give statutory embodiment to traditional rights that had been usurped by the 13

Parliamentary Debates, 3rd series, 216, cols 1482–5. G. Douglas Campbell, eighth duke of Argyll, Autobiography and Memoirs (2 vols, London, 1906), II, pp. 269–92. 15 Parliamentary Papers 1884, XXXVI. Report of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the Condition of the Crofters and Cottars in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, p. 17. 16 Napier, ‘Opening Address’, p. 10; Report of the Commissioners, pp. 2–3. 17 Duke of Argyll, ‘A corrected picture of the Highlands’, Nineteenth Century, 26 (1884), 681–701; Lord Napier, ‘The Highland crofters: a vindication of the report of the Crofters’ Commission’, Nineteenth Century, 27 (1885), 437–63; Parliamentary Debates, 3rd series, 294, cols 106–18; Ewen A. Cameron, Land for the People? The British Government and the Scottish Highlands, 1880–1925 (East Linton, 1996), pp. 24–8. 18 Charles Fraser Mackintosh to John Stuart Blackie, 4 July 1884, NLS, MS 2635, Blackie MS. 14

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advance of commercialism.19 In fact, as Napier’s ideas were regarded as impractical by the government, it was the Irish Land Act of 1881 that was resorted to as a model for crofters’ legislation.20 Despite the fact that the most tangible influence of India – the communal township – did not figure in such legislation, this does not mean that there was no imperial influence in land legislation of the period. II

In the career of Sir George Campbell, the link between the empire, Ireland and the Scottish Highlands can be clearly documented. Campbell was a member of a Fifeshire landowning family, the son of an East India Company official, a member of the Indian Civil Service from 1842 to 1875 and a Radical MP for the Kirkcaldy Burghs from 1875 to 1892. During his career in India he had advanced the notion of tenant right in the various posts which he held, most notably his period as a civil commissioner in Oudh from 1857 to 1862, and his period as lieutenant governor of Bengal from 1871 to 1874. During this latter period, the viceroys Lord Mayo and his temporary successor Lord Napier were generally supportive of Campbell’s ideas on the land question and other reforms relating to the collection of population statistics and vocational education, but Campbell had a more difficult relationship with Lord Northbrook, who followed Napier.21 In appointing Campbell, Lord Mayo laid out the fiscal, educational, tenurial and political issues that would face him in his new position, but said that ‘I should be most unwilling to fetter you with any conditions or to attempt to indicate in detail what [are] my own views with respect to the changes which I consider to be essential in the future administration of Bengal.’22 Campbell had also been a significant influence on Gladstone during the construction of the Irish Land Act of 1870.23 The relationship between India and the ideas that drove Irish land reform legislation has been analysed by historians and was recognised by contemporaries of Campbell, such as John Stuart Mill. As Mill reflected in 1869 after reading a paper of Campbell’s on the Irish land question: Englishmen who know India are the men who can understand and interpret the rival ideas and economic relations of Ireland. They are not slaves of English technicalities

19

W.E. Gladstone to W.H. Harcourt, 26 January 1885, TNA, CAB 37/14/173–4. For a detailed discussion of this, see Cameron, Land for the People?, pp. 24–39. 21 G. Le G. Norgate, rev. David Steele, ‘Campbell, Sir George (1824 –1892)’, ODNB; Sir Richard Temple, Men and Events of My Time in India (London, 1882), p. 238. 22 Mayo to Campbell, 23 November 1870, BL, MSS Eur E 349/10. 23 E.D. Steele, Irish Land and British Politics: Tenant-Right and Nationality, 1865–1870 (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 104–8; R.D. Collinson Black, Economic Thought and the Irish Question, 1817–1870 (Cambridge, 1960), p. 55; Cook, Imperial Affinities, pp. 55–62. 20

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Ewen A. Cameron and they know that the English form of property in land is neither a law of the universe nor an immutable principle of morality.24

Mill, who did not trouble himself to visit Ireland, had studied the Irish land question in some depth and argued for a form of peasant proprietorship that he believed would make Irish agriculture more productive and Irish rural society more stable. He believed that this would lead to the moral improvement of individuals and the collective, and help to maintain the union as Irish nationalism gathered pace in the post-famine period. He also developed a view that deprecated the imposition of English ideas of land tenure and social development on Ireland.25 In this he anticipated Campbell and others, and influenced them. Campbell toured Ireland in 1869 and produced a small book detailing his views on the Irish land question. This work contains a concise expression of the historicist views deemed to be so influential. In the imposition of English forms of land tenure in Ireland, Campbell saw an analogy with the history of land tenure in India.26 He argued: In Ireland there are two sets of laws – the English laws and the laws or customs of the country, which, enforced in a different way, are as active and effective. In the clashing of these two systems lies the whole difficulty … The extreme theory of property is everywhere overborne and modified by that custom.27

Campbell recognised the salient fact that in Ireland, as in the Scottish Highlands, it was the tenant, rather than the landowner, who made the bulk of the investment in improvements. He argued further that these investments were recognised by landlords in the form of compensation at the conclusion of the tenancy and the buying and selling of the customary right between outgoing 24

Mill to Campbell, 9 July 1869, BL, MSS Eur E 349/10. In a further letter, 31 December 1869, Mill told Campbell: ‘there is nothing like Indian experience for enabling men to understand Ireland’. 25 E.D. Steele, ‘John Stuart Mill and the Irish Question: The Principles of Political Economy, 1848–65’, Historical Journal, 13 (1970), 216–36; idem, ‘John Stuart Mill and the Irish Question: Reform and the Integrity of the Empire, Historical Journal, 13 (1970), 419–50; Lynn Zastoupil, ‘Moral Government: John Stuart Mill on Ireland’, Historical Journal, 26 (1983), 707–17; Bruce L. Kinzer, England’s Disgrace? J.S. Mill and the Irish Question (Toronto, 2001), pp. 44–119; J.M. Robson, The Improvement of Mankind: The Social and Political Thought of John Stuart Mill (Toronto, 1968), pp. 253–5; Graham Finlay, ‘John Stuart Mill and Ireland’, in Social Thought on Ireland in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Séamas Ó Síocháin (Dublin, 2010), pp. 27–46. Fortythree articles published in the Morning Chronicle in 1847–48 – which were the basis of Mill’s ideas on the Irish land question – can be found in J.M. Robson (ed.), Collected Works of J.S. Mill (33 vols, Toronto, 1963–91), XXIV, pp. 879–1035. 26 Sir George Campbell, The Irish Land (London, 1869), p. 24; idem, ‘The Tenure of Land in India’, in Systems of Land Tenure in Various Countries: A Series of Essays Published under the Sanction of the Cobden Club, ed. J.W. Probyn (London, 1881), pp. 213–89. Earlier versions of his views can be found in his Modern India: A Sketch of the System of Civil Government (London, 1852), pp. 82–98, 300–77. 27 Campbell, Irish Land, p. 6.

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tenants and their successors or sometimes the landlord. Clearly, tenants had rights in their land beyond those implied by the rent, although it could be argued that the need to purchase tenant right on entering a tenancy was partly offset by low rents. Campbell and others argued that a legislative recognition of this de facto situation was required.28 In the background to these exchanges of views, and at the centre of the expectations of the crofters, was the Irish Land Act of 1881. This legislation had conferred security of tenure on all tenants-at-will in Ireland and ultimately became the model for the Crofters’ Act of 1886. Napier had given specific consideration to the model provided by the Irish Land Act in the course of composing the recommendations concerning land in his report: he noted that ‘all that has been said and done in regard to Ireland and the Irish Act has been impressed upon the imagination and aspirations of the people’.29 Nevertheless, he was determined not to let the Irish Act influence the substance of his ideas on the land question. He did not think a general review of the levels of rents, comprehensive fixity of tenure – ‘far less the power of free sale’ – was required in the Highlands. He went on to make what was, in the light of subsequent events in the Highlands, a very salient point when he suggested that legislation on the model of the Irish Act would not ‘give the people any extension of area, the thing they most want’.30 Charles Fraser Mackintosh (the Liberal MP for Inverness Burghs, later Crofter MP for Inverness-shire and a colleague of Lord Napier on the Royal Commission) noted Napier’s opposition to copying the Irish Land Act, but remarked ‘that is no reason why others should not advocate its application’.31 Indeed, the application of the Irish Act to Highland conditions became the substance of the government’s position in 1885 and 1886 as they moved to legislate on the crofter question. Detailed comparison in the form of analysis of the immediate roots of the two pieces of legislation and their provisions is only part of the story. A further area of comparison lies in the extent to which they sprang from a common intellectual response to what were perceived to be common social and economic problems in Ireland and Highland Scotland. Part of this response lay in changing views of the history of political economy of Celtic societies; a further element came from imperial experience. A view emerged in the 1860s that conditions in rural India 28 Campbell,

Irish Land, pp. 7–12; Peter MacLagan, Land Culture and Land Tenure in Ireland: The Results of Observations during a Recent Tour in Ireland (Edinburgh, 1869). The author was the MP for Linlithgowshire. See W.E. Vaughan, Landlords and Tenants in Mid-Victorian Ireland (Oxford, 1994), pp. 67–102. 29 Napier to Harcourt, 1 November 1883, Bodl., MS Harcourt Dep 114, fol. 159. 30 Napier to Harcourt, 3 April 1884, Bodl., MS Harcourt Dep 115, fol. 10. Similar views were expressed by Ranald MacDonald, who acted as Lady Gordon Cathcart’s factor in South Uist, Benbecula, and Barra. See his The Crofters’ Bill, With an Analysis of its Provisions and the Crofters Commissioners’ Report (Aberdeen, 1885), pp. xvii–xx. 31 Charles Fraser Mackintosh to John Stuart Blackie, 23 October 1884, NLS, MS 2635, Blackie MS.

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represented an approximation of the social structure of historical societies in the Celtic regions of the British Isles. A central feature of this approach was the idealisation of the communal nature of such societies. In historical terms this was applied to systems of land tenure and social organisation which were held to have existed in the Scottish Highlands and Ireland, but also in contemporary Russia and India. Campbell was keen to draw parallels between communal landholding in Western antiquity and contemporary Eastern society in order to emphasise the common origins of structures of landholding in these cases: In early times land was held in Britain – as in other parts of Europe and Asia – on the old communal system … The ancient village communities of Britain, like modern Indian villages, parcelled out the land among themselves … many rights and privileges were held in common.32

Campbell also idealised this form of landholding and noted the disadvantages of its erosion over time in the West and the social inequalities which were apparent in societies, such as Egypt, which had not been influenced by it: I found that the democratic self-governing village community is altogether wanting in Egypt. The village system is patriarchal and not republican; and in the village, as in the State, privilege prevails over right. In the Indian village republic (in the north of India at any rate), though there is not equality of property, there is seldom violent contrast, and there is some sort of equality of right and condition. In all the Egyptian villages into which I went, whether in Lower or Upper Egypt, I always found an extreme inequality.33

This ‘historicist reaction’ against classical political economy posited that the application of strict principles of commercialism to societies which retained strong elements of customary social and economic relations was a threat to their fabric.34 Campbell drew attention to this development in a commentary on Irish land reform: Throughout Europe and Asia the village or communal system exists and supplies the machinery of co-operation. In Ireland that has ceased to be; the landlord has taken the place of the communal organisation; the people have no cohesion.35

The combination of this thinking with the increasing attention being paid in both Scotland and Ireland to the positive features of the Celtic past proved to be 32 33

Sir George Campbell, ‘The Tenure of Land’, Fortnightly Review, 17 (1875), 27–43, at 28. Sir George Campbell, ‘An Inside View of Egypt’, Fortnightly Review, 23 (1878), 25–47, at

34. 34 Clive Dewey, ‘Celtic Agrarian Legislation and the Celtic Revival: Historicist Implications of Gladstone’s Irish and Scottish Land Acts, 1870–1886’, Past and Present, 64 (1974), 30–70; idem, ‘Images of the Village Community: A Study in Anglo–Indian Ideology’, Modern Asian Studies, 6 (1972), 291–328; John Shaw, ‘Land, People and Nation: Historicist Voices in the Highland Land Campaign, c. 1850–1883’, in Citizenship and Community: Liberals, Radicals and Collective Identities in the British Isles, 1865–1931, ed. Eugenio F. Biagini (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 305–24. 35 Sir George Campbell, ‘The Land Legislation for Ireland’, Fortnightly Review, 29 (1881), 18–34, at 28–9.

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a potent combination. The arguments of the Brehon Law Commissioners at work in Ireland in the 1860s seemed to suggest that Irish rural society was closer to its Celtic origins and could be legislatively reconciled to them. A further important influence in creating a historicist mindset in relation to the land question was the influence of the eminent lawyer and Indian official Sir Henry Maine. After his return from India he was appointed by the duke of Argyll to the Indian Council in November 1871. Maine’s Ancient Law was a seminal text and included a detailed discussion of the early history of property which paid a great deal of attention to the history of village communities in India and in Russia.36 It has been argued that he had a profound influence over viceroys and secretaries of state of both Liberal and Conservative administrations. His veneration of Victorian society led him to argue that its methods of organisation ‘would be hopelessly inadequate in a backward agrarian society like India’ and helped to create the climate of opinion for the legislative recognition of traditional land tenures.37 Maine’s influence on revenue officers on the ground was also considerable: it gave them a ‘crucial analytical device unlocking all the secrets of the agrarian institutions they were struggling to understand’.38 In Scotland, the work of the antiquarian William Forbes Skene was moving in the same direction, but it did not extend as far as legislative recommendations. Indeed, not only had Skene been active in the famine relief operations in the Scottish Highlands in the late 1840s – operations which gave no quarter to critics of laissez-faire political economy – but his Edinburgh firm of solicitors (Skene, Edwards and Garson) acted for many Highland landowners in their attempts to resist the implications of the Crofters’ Holdings Act of 1886, although Skene was retired by this point.39 It is an understated theme in the discussion of the historicist origin of Irish and Scottish land legislation that, far from being radical, it provided an essentially conservative justification for what appeared to be far-reaching alterations in the rights of landowners.40 As Sir George Campbell noted, ‘nothing is so conservative as the wide spread of property, and especially property in land’.41 Nevertheless, in some senses Campbell’s views did have a radical hue. He did not regard land as property in the same sense as other forms of property. As he explained in 1875: the natural value of the soil is so apparent that, municipal law apart, the right of individuals to appropriate the land to the exclusion of all others, is not prima facie 36

Sir Henry Summer Maine, Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Society and its Relation to Modern Ideas, 10th edn (London, 1897), pp. 244–303. 37 Dewey, ‘Sir Henry Maine’, 357. 38 Ibid., 363. 39 T.M. Devine, Great Highland Famine: Hunger, Emigration and Clearance in the Scottish Highlands (Edinburgh, 1988), p. 128; Cameron, Land for the People?, pp. 44, 92, 149–52; W.D.H. Sellar, ‘William Forbes Skene (1809–92): Historian of Celtic Scotland’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 131 (2001), 3–21. 40 Dewey, ‘Celtic Agrarian Legislation’, 30, 41–2, 70. 41 Campbell, ‘Tenure of Land’, 32

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In his publications on Scotland, Ireland, India and the land question generally, Campbell was one of the most vocal of those influenced by historicist thinking in the 1870s and 1880s. His election to Parliament in 1874 provided a further platform for his views, but it is probably true to say that he was less influential during his parliamentary career than at earlier points, and he remained a more effective – if somewhat long winded – communicator in print than in person. III

As has been noted, the duke of Argyll sought to defend the rights of property in the Highlands against what he perceived to be the wrong-headedness of Lord Napier. In the early 1870s, while Campbell was in Bengal and the duke was secretary of state for India in London, they corresponded both privately and officially. The duke appreciated Campbell’s work and, to an extent, sympathised in his difficult relations with Northbrook. On the land question, however – ‘one matter on which I differ from you’ – the duke was in a less emollient mood. Campbell was attempting to develop a policy to give tenants – ‘ryots’ – perpetual leases and fixed rents, an idea that struck at the heart of the duke’s conception of the role of the landowner in the economy and society. Although he served in the government that passed the Irish Land Act of 1870, his correspondence with his namesake – whom he described to Gladstone as ‘my Indian radical’ – reveals the intellectual and political doubts he had about a policy that would eventually lead to his resignation from government in 1881 in opposition to the more significant land act of that year.43 He argued that the award of perpetual tenure may have incentivised the tenant to a degree, but it had the effect of reducing landowners to ‘mere rent chargers … a most mischievous condition of things because a mere rent charger ceases at once to have any interest in improvement and has no inducement to lay out one farthing upon it’. The duke was critical of the fundamental structure of landholding in India and Bengal in particular: I am afraid I think the whole of the Indian land system bad – our inheritance from the bad system that prevailed before us – and one of the main causes of the comparative stagnation of all eastern nations which have adopted the same system in its main features. But at least we need not try to make it worse than it is by getting it up as a model and an object of desire that the nominal owner of land should be placed under every inducement to be an unimproving consumer of his share of the produce of the soil. 42

Campbell, ‘Tenure of Land’, 28. See also his ‘Property in Land’, Westminster Review, 133 (1890), 181–90. 43 Argyll to Gladstone, 13 January 1870, BL, Add MS 44101, fol. 196.

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Far from idealising Indian tenures, he argued that the layers of rent chargers, each of whom had to have their cut, but who had no real interest in improvement, were at the heart of what he saw as a stagnant society and economy. He was as critical of the class that were closest in approximation to the European landed classes – the zamindars – as he was of the tenants. They did not act as the engine of improvement, the role that the duke believed that his own class should play.44 In the debates leading up to the passage of the Irish Land Act of 1870, the duke repeatedly argued in his correspondence with Gladstone that using the idea of ancient customary practices was dangerous and would endanger property rights across the United Kingdom and not merely in Ireland.45 Their letters raise many of the same themes that would recur in 1881 when the duke resigned from the cabinet, and later in the decade when he criticised Gladstone’s approach in the run-up to the Crofters’ Act of 1886. In January 1870, Argyll warned Gladstone that he should be careful ‘before you use ancient Celtic usages in a barbarous condition of society, as having any practical bearing upon our legislation in the present day’.46 He argued that Irish history was simply ‘irrelevant’ to the construction of the 1870 Bill.47 Argyll was writing at this moment, of course, as secretary of state for India. Argyll’s 1881 resignation demonstrated the political difficulties of land reform in a cabinet stuffed with landowners, although Argyll was distinctive in the extent of his opposition.48 Although he had worries about the establishment of a land court to set ‘fair rents’ and its capacities for ‘interference with contract’, his real opposition was to the right of ‘free sale’, granted alongside ‘fixity’ of tenure. He remarked that the ‘universal right of “free sale” establishes the principle of joint ownership where it has never been acquired equitably’, and he concluded that ‘the proposal of free sale will destroy all the virtue of ownership and render impossible the only operations which have hitherto produced improvements among the cottier tenantry of the west’.49 Argyll also articulated his opposition in an official context through a series of cabinet memoranda in late 1880 and 1881.50 In a later letter to Gladstone, Argyll emphasised that, for him, the Bill represented the ‘death of ownership of land 44

Argyll to Campbell, 4 February 1873, BL, MSS Eur E 349/11. See also Argyll to Campbell, 16 May 1873. As late as 1887 they were still in touch. See Argyll to Campbell, 27 April 1887, BL, MSS Eur E 349/12. Campbell had sent him recent publications, for which the duke sent his thanks – but he could not resist a barb: ‘I have a vivid recollection of the ability of your Indian papers and have regretted much the wide divergence of your views on the principles applicable to our western law and civilisation and history.’ 45 Steele, Irish Land and British Politics, pp. 204–10. 46 Argyll to Gladstone, 4 January 1870, BL, Add. MS 44101, fol. 178. 47 Argyll to Gladstone, 7 January 1870, BL, Add. MS 44101, fol. 184. 48 Kirsteen Mulhern, ‘The Intellectual Duke: George Douglas Campbell, 8th Duke of Argyll, 1823–1900’ (Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2006), pp. 190–207. 49 Argyll to Gladstone, 28 June 1881, BL, Add. MS 44105, fols 9–13. 50 Memoranda by the duke of Argyll, 24 November 1880 and 3 January 1881, TNA, CAB 37/4/75, CAB 37/5/1.

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in Ireland as ownership is enjoyed in every civilised country’. Even Gladstonian blandishments had little effect. Two years later Argyll informed Gladstone that the crofting row in Scotland about which you expressed some anxiety is in part – and great part – the mere reverberation of the Irish Land Act among a population somewhat similarly situated and partially in distress this year from a failure of potatoes and of the fishery.

He was determinedly of the view that the difficulties had not arisen from the policies of the proprietors and, in particular, that there had been no evictions and no general raising of rent. His point was that the events unfolding in Skye in the early 1880s did not constitute grounds for further legislative interference in the relations between landlords and tenants.51 The disputatious duke tackled a more dangerous opponent in the shape of Henry George, the American land reformer and popular economist, who toured the Highlands in 1884. In his defence of property, Argyll drew on the example of India to demonstrate the malign influence of state ownership of land: India is a country in which, theoretically at least, the state is the only and universal landowner, and over a large part of it the state does actually take to itself a share of the gross produce which fully represents ordinary rent. Yet this is the very country in which the poverty of the masses is so abject that millions live only from hand to mouth, and when there is any – even a partial – failure of the crops, thousands and hundreds of thousands are in danger of actual starvation.52

Argyll regarded the areas of India, such as Bengal, where a permanent settlement of land for revenue purposes had been made in 1793, as approximating to a society under the benign influence of private landowners. These were the areas, he went on to argue, which had become most wealthy.53 He regarded George’s confiscatory proposals as akin to the ‘violation’ of the 1793 settlement of Bengal.54 In his period as secretary of state for India, the prejudices which had characterised his Highland estate management littered his despatches to Indian officials. In particular, he sought to justify the savage pruning of his tenantry on the Isle of Tiree. In these clearances during the famine years of the 1840s and early 1850s, he deliberately targeted those with small holdings – whom he felt had multiplied through unchecked subdivision during the neglectful proprietorship of his grandfather, the spendthrift sixth duke – in an effort to eradicate those who were most vulnerable to crop failure and hence likely to become a

51

Argyll to Gladstone, 10 February 1883, BL, Add. MS 44105, fol. 143. Duke of Argyll, ‘The Prophet of San Francisco’, Nineteenth Century, 15 (1884), 537–58, at 555. 53 Although modern economists have argued the reverse. See Abhijit Banerjee and Lakshmi Iyer, ‘History, Institutions and Economic Performance: The Legacy of Colonial Land Tenure Systems in India’, American Economic Review, 95 (2005), 1190–213. 54 Argyll, ‘Prophet’, 555–6. 52

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burden on the landowner.55 In the land reforms promulgated in the Punjab in the late 1860s, he feared the same result if the tenants who had been given occupancy rights were allowed to sublet their holdings. Writing to Lord Mayo, the viceroy, in November 1869, he argued: I need not point out to an Irish landlord the dangers which are connected to such a power. No doubt these dangers depend on the conditions of society. Hitherto in India the competition for land has not been such as to lead to mischievous subdivision. On the contrary, under former Governments I believe the difficulty has been to get tenants who would occupy and cultivate. But you must recollect that our settled rule has brought in wholly new conditions. We shall have fewer wars, and I hope, also, fewer famines. Under peace and plenty the population must increase at a rate not before known, and if a low kind of food is available, such as the potato, we may have in the Punjab the same pressure of population on the means of subsistence which led to so much misery in Ireland.56

It has been noted, however, that Argyll did not recognise the existence of true landlord right in India, and this was his justification – or excuse – for his support of legislation which appeared to contradict his views on the land question in a Scottish or Irish context.57 Other despatches in the same period display a marked hostility to the notion of giving permanent security of tenure to occupiers (‘pestilent in its consequences’) and, in a direct statement of opposition to the ideas of Sir George Campbell, the duke pointed out to Lord Northbrook (Mayo’s successor) the error of creating ‘privileged tenants’ by Rent and Revenue legislation for the North West Provinces: The whole system is, I think, thoroughly wrong. By all means let our courts respect and enforce ‘custom’ in the legal sense. But do not let us go on passing new Acts, professing to protect men against the inevitable results of social progress, which are breaking up … the old antiquated systems of land tenure in India.58

The duke was one of the few politicians who stood out against Gladstonian land policy in the 1880s. He resigned from the government in 1881 in protest against the Irish Land Act of that year, regarding it as an unwarranted interference in the contract between landlord and tenant.59 He was also strongly opposed to the Crofters’ Act of 1886, although even he regarded it as a necessary measure

55

Duke of Argyll, Scotland As It Was and As It Is (Edinburgh, 1887), pp. 432–7; Devine, Famine, pp. 226–44. 56 Argyll, Autobiography, II, pp. 280–1. 57 E.D. Steele, ‘Ireland and the Empire in the 1860s: Imperial Precedents for Gladstone’s First Irish Land Act’, Historical Journal, 11 (1968), 64–83, at 69. Steele notes that the section of his letter which makes this point is excluded from the published version. 58 Argyll, Autobiography, II, 285–7. 59 Ibid., 346–83.

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to restore calm to the Highlands. Indeed, this was the only possible justification he could imagine for the Irish Act of 1881.60 IV

This essay has aimed to establish that the experience of India and ideas about Indian land tenure were in the minds of those writing and speaking about land legislation in Scotland and Ireland in the 1870s and 1880s. This was a period of intense debate on the land question, with the participants – from Henry George to the duke of Argyll – using every available resource to bolster their arguments. Nevertheless, it is not mere serendipity which brought the influence of India into play. There are three reasons for this: first, the example of India was at the forefront of the minds of leading Liberals in the second half of the nineteenth century, with events such as the Rebellion of 1857 causing practical consideration of the nature of British imperial rule; second, the historicists, who were such influential critics of classical political economy in this period, drew on Indian evidence; and third, the scale of involvement of Scots in the Indian administration, and their continued role in public life after returning from India, ensured that for men like Lord Napier and Sir George Campbell, who were interested in the land question, parallels would be drawn.

60

Argyll to Arthur J. Balfour, 5 March 1886, BL, Add MS 49800, fol. 7.

202

List of Publications

Books

A History of Scotland (London, 2019) The British Confederate: Archibald Campbell, Marquess of Argyll, c. 1607–1661 (Edinburgh, 2011) Union and Empire: The Making of the United Kingdom in 1707 (Cambridge, 2007) The British Revolution, 1629–1660 (Basingstoke, 2005) Clanship, Commerce and the House of Stuart, 1603–1788 (East Linton, 1996) Charles I and the Making of the Covenanting Movement, 1625–41 (Edinburgh, 1991) Edited books

(with Patricia Barton and Kieran German) Liturgical Traditions and Religious Politics in Scotland, c. 1540–1764 (Edinburgh University Press, 2021) (with Brent S. Sirota) The Hanoverian Succession in Great Britain and its Empire (Woodbridge, 2019) (with Kieran German and Lesley Graham) Living with Jacobitism, 1690–1788: The Three Kingdoms and Beyond (London, 2014) (with Douglas J. Hamilton) Jacobitism, Enlightenment and Empire, 1680–1820 (London, 2014) (with Arthur H. Williamson) Shaping the Stuart World, 1603–1714: The American Connection (Leiden, 2006) (with Marjory-Ann D. Harper and Linda G. Fryer) Scotland and the Americas, c. 1680–c. 1939: A Documentary Source Book, Scottish History Society, 5th series, 13 (Edinburgh, 2003) (with Jane H. Ohlmeyer) The Three Kingdoms in the Seventeenth Century: Awkward Neighbours (Dublin, 2002) (with Thomas Riis and Frederik Pedersen) Ships, Guns and Bibles in the North Sea and Baltic States, c. 1350–c. 1700 (East Linton, 2000) (with Sally Foster and Ranald MacInnes) Scottish Power Centres from the Early Middle Ages to the Present Day (Glasgow, 1998)

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Book chapters

‘Introduction: Liturgical Continuities and Denominational Differences’, in Liturgical Traditions and Religious Politics in Scotland, c. 1540–1764, ed. Allan. I. Macinnes, Patricia Barton and Kieran German (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), 1–17 ‘Political Economy and the Shaping of Early Modern Scotland’, in The Architecture of Scotland in its European Setting, 1660–1750, ed. Louisa Humm, Aonghus MacKechnie and John Lowrey (Edinburgh, 2020), pp. 15–35 ‘Land, Labour and Capital: External Influences and Internal Responses in Early Modern Scotland’, in Land Reform in Scotland: History, Law and Politics, ed. Malcolm Combe, Jayne Glass and Annie Tindley (Edinburgh, 2020), pp. 23–38 (with Brent S. Sirota) ‘Introduction: The Making of the Protestant Succession’ and ‘Securing the Union and the Hanoverian Succession, 1707–37’, in The Hanoverian Succession in Great Britain and its Empire, ed. Brent S. Sirota and Allan I. Macinnes (Woodbridge, 2019), pp. 1–19, 136–54 ‘Charles III: the Uncrowned Contender’, State Papers Online: The Stuart and Cumberland Papers from the Royal Archives, Windsor Castle (Cengage, 2017); Charles III: the Uncrowned Contender | Allan I. Macinnes (gale.com) ‘A Ghaidhealtachd and the Jacobites’, in Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobites, ed. David Forsyth (Edinburgh, 2017), pp. 161–77 ‘Applied Enlightenment: Its Scottish Limitations in the Eighteenth Century’, in The Enlightenment in Scotland: National and International Perspectives, ed. Jean-François Dunyach and Anne Thomson (Oxford, 2015), pp. 21–58 ‘Contacts and Tensions: Highlands and Lowlands in the Nineteenth Century’, in Gael and Lowlander in Scottish Literature: Cross-Currents in Scottish Writing in the Nineteenth Century Scotland, ed. Christopher MacLean and Ronald W. Renton, Association for Scottish Literary Studies (Glasgow, 2015), pp. 1–21 (with Kieran German and Lesley Graham) ‘Introduction: Living with Jacobitism’, in Living with Jacobitism, 1690–1788: The Three Kingdoms and Beyond, ed. Allan I. Macinnes, Kieran German and Lesley Graham (London, 2014), pp. 1–9 ‘Union, Empire and Global Adventuring with a Jacobite Twist’, in Jacobitism, Enlightenment and Empire, 1680–1820, ed. Allan I. Macinnes and Douglas J. Hamilton (London, 2014), pp. 123–39 (with Douglas J. Hamilton) ‘Introduction: Identity, Mobility and Competing Patriotisms’, in Jacobitism, Enlightenment and Empire, 1680–1820, ed. Allan I. Macinnes and Douglas J. Hamilton (London, 2014), pp. 1–12 ‘The Reception of Buchanan in Northern Europe in the Seventeenth Century’, in George Buchanan: Political Thought in Early Modern Europe, ed. Caroline Erskine and Roger A. Mason (Aldershot, 2012), pp. 151–70 (with John R. Young) ‘The Weckherlin Project: Crown, Parliament and Competitive Intelligence’, in Parlamentos: A lei, a prática e as epresentações da Idade Média à actualidade, ed. M.H.D.C. Coelho and M.M. Tavares (Lisbon, 2010), pp. 1381–7 204

LIST OF PUBLICATIONS

‘Confessional Confederations and Rights of Resistance in Scotland, Ireland and England, 1638–1652’, in Król a Prawo: Stanów Do Oporu, ed. Mariusz Markiewicz, Edward Opaliński and Rysard Skowron (Kraków, 2010), pp. 123–37 (with Saúl Martínez Bermejo, James S. Amelang, Roberto Mazzucchi, Juan Pan-Montojo and Jón Viðar Sigurðsson) ‘Communities’, in Layers of Power: Societies and Institutions in Europe, ed. Saúl Martínez Bermejo, Darina Martykánová and Momir Samardižić (Pisa, 2010), pp. 55–94 ‘Anglo-Scottish Union and the War of the Spanish Succession’, in The Primacy of Foreign Policy in British History, 1660–2000: How Strategic Concerns Shaped Modern Britain, ed. William Mulligan and Brendan Simms (Basingstoke, 2010), pp. 49–64 ‘The “Scottish Moment”, 1638–1645’, in The English Civil War: Conflicts and Contexts, 1640–49 ed. John Adamson (Basingstoke, 2009), pp. 125–52 ‘The Hidden Commonwealth: Poland–Lithuania and Scottish Political Discourse in the Seventeenth Century’, in Citizenship and Identity in a Multi– National Commonwealth. Poland–Lithuania in Context, 1550–1772, ed. Karin Friedrich and Barbara M. Pendzich (Leiden, 2009), pp. 233–60 ‘Scottish Circumvention of the English Navigation Acts in the American Colonies, 1660–1707’, in Making, Using and Resisting the Law in European History, ed. Günther Lottes, Eero Meijainen and Jón Viðar Sigurðsson (Pisa, 2008), pp. 109–30 ‘The Treaty of Union: Made in England’, in Scotland and the Union, 1707–2007, ed. T.M. Devine (Edinburgh, 2008), pp. 54–74 ‘Circumventing State Power – Scottish Mercantile Networks and the English Navigation Laws, 1660–1707’, in Water and State in Europe and Asia, ed. Peter Borschberg and Martin Krieger (New Delhi, 2008), pp. 205–36 ‘Commercial Landlordism and Clearance in the Scottish Highlands: The Case of Arichonan’, in Communities in European History: Representations, Jurisdictions, Conflicts, ed. Juan Pan-Montojo and Frederik Pedersen (Pisa, 2007), pp. 47–64 ‘William of Orange: Disaster for Scotland?’, in Redefining William III: The Impact of the King-Stadholder in International Context, ed. Esther Mijers and David Onnekink (Aldershot, 2007), pp. 201–23 ‘Scottish Commerce: An Øresund Snapshot, 1681–1683’, in Von Menschen, Ländern, Meeren: Festschrift für Thomas Riiss, ed. Gerhard Fouquet, Mareike Hansen, Carsten Jahnke and Jan Schlürmann (Tönning, 2006), pp. 341–64 ‘Making the Plantations British, 1603–38’, in Frontiers and the Writing of History, 1500–1850, ed. Steven G. Ellis and Raingard Esser (Laatzen, 2006), pp. 95–125 ‘Death and Mourning in Early Modern Scottish Gaeldom’, in Tod und Trauer: Todeswahrnehmung und Trauerriten in Nordeuropa, ed. Torsten Fischer and Thomas Riis (Kiel, 2006), pp. 77–101 ‘Introduction: Connecting and Disconnecting with America’, in Shaping the Stuart World, 1603–1714: The American Connection, ed. Allan I. Macinnes and Arthur H. Williamson (Leiden, 2006), pp. 1–30

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LIST OF PUBLICATIONS

‘The Multiple Kingdoms of Britain and Ireland: the “British Problem”’, in The Blackwell Companion to Stuart Britain, ed. Barry Coward (Oxford, 2002) pp. 3–25 (with Jane H. Ohlmeyer) ‘Introduction: Awkward Neighbours?’, in The Three Kingdoms in the Seventeenth Century: Awkward Neighbours, ed. Allan I. Macinnes and Jane H. Ohlmeyer (Dublin 2002), pp. 15–35 ‘The British Military-Fiscal State and the Gael: New Perspectives on the ’45’, in Rannsachadh na Gàidhlig 2000, ed. Colm Ó Baoill and Nancy R. McGuire (Aberdeen, 2002), pp. 257–69 ‘Union Failed, Union Accomplished: the Irish Union of 1703 and the Scottish Union of 1707’, in Acts of Union: The Causes, Contexts, and Consequences of the Act of Union of 1801, ed. Daire Keogh and Kevin Whelan (Dublin, 2001), pp. 67–94 ‘Covenanting Ideology in Seventeenth-Century Scotland’, in Political Thought in Seventeenth Century Ireland, ed. Jane H. Ohlmeyer (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 191–220 ‘Slaughter under Trust: Clan Massacre and British State Formation’, in The Massacre in History, ed. Mark Levene and Penny Roberts (Oxford, 1999), pp. 127–48 ‘Scottish Jacobitism: In Search of a Movement’, in New Perspectives on Eighteenth Century Scotland, ed. T.M. Devine and John R. Young (Edinburgh, 1999), pp. 70–89 ‘Regal Union for Britain, 1603–38’, in The New British HistoryFounding a Modern State, 1603–1715, ed. Glenn Burgess (London, 1999), pp. 33–64 ‘Politically Reactionary Brits? The Promotion of Anglo-Scottish Union, 1603–1707’, in Kingdoms United? Great Britain and Ireland since 1500, ed. S.J. Connolly (Dublin, 1999), pp. 43–55 ‘Scottish Gaeldom from Clanship to Commercial Landlordism, c. 1600–c. 1850’, in Scottish Power Centres from the Early Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, ed. Allan I. Macinnes, Sally Foster and Ranald MacInnes (Glasgow, 1998), pp.162–90 ‘Highland Society in the Era of “Improvement”’ and ‘Highland Society’, in Modern Scottish History, 1700 to the Present, ed. Anthony Cooke, Ian Donnachie, Ann MacSween and Christopher Whatley (5 vols, East Linton, 1998), I, pp. 177–202, V, pp. 102–11 ‘Scottish Gaeldom and the Aftermath of the ’45: the Creation of Silence’, in Jacobitism and the ’45, ed. Michael Lynch, Historical Association (London, 1995), pp. 71–83 ‘The Aftermath of the ’45’, in 1745: Charles Edward Stuart and the Jacobites, ed. Robert Woosnam-Savage (Edinburgh, 1995), pp. 103–13 ‘Gaelic Culture in the Seventeenth Century: Polarization and Assimilation, in Conquest and Union: Fashioning a British State, 1485–1725, ed. Steven G. Ellis and Sarah Barber (London, 1995), pp. 162–94 206

LIST OF PUBLICATIONS

‘Landownership, Land Use and Elite Enterprise in Scottish Gaeldom: From Clanship to Clearance in Argyllshire, 1688–1858’, in Scottish Elites, ed. T.M. Devine (Edinburgh, 1994), pp. 1–42 ‘Clanship: A Historical Perspective’, in Collins Scottish Clan and Family Encyclopedia, ed. George Way and Romilly Squire (Glasgow, 1994), pp. 13–20 (with Fiona J. Watson) ‘Biographical Data and its Graphical Presentation. Scottish Parliamentary Commissioners, 1357–1707’, in Storia and Multimedia, ed. Francesca Bocchi and Peter Denley (Bologna, 1994), pp. 709–12 ‘Seventeenth-Century Scotland: The Undervalued Gaelic Perspective’, in Celtic Languages and Celtic Peoples, ed. Cyril J. Byrne, Margaret Harry and Pádraig Ó Saidhail (Halifax, NS, 1992), pp. 535–54 ‘Covenanting Revolution and Municipal Enterprise’ and ‘Jacobitism’, in Scotland Revisited, ed. Jenny Wormald (London, 1991), pp. 97–106, 129–41 ‘Evangelical Presbyterianism in the Nineteenth-Century Highlands’, in Sermons and Battle Hymns: Protestant Popular Culture in Modern Scotland, ed. Graham Walker and Tom Gallagher (Edinburgh, 1990) pp. 43–68 ‘The Scottish Constitution, 1638–51: the Rise and Fall of Oligarchic Centralism’, in The Scottish National Covenant in its British Context, 1638–51, ed. John Morrill (Edinburgh, 1990), pp. 106–33 ‘Treaty of Union: Voting Patterns and Political Influence’, in History and Computing III: Historians, Computers and Data, ed. Evan Mawdsley, Nicholas Morgan, Lesley Richmond and Richard Trainor (Manchester, 1990), pp. 163–68 ‘Who Owned Argyll in the Eighteenth Century? Continuity and Change from Clanship to Clearance’, in Power, Property and Privilege: The Landed Elite in Scotland from 1440 to 1914, Association for Scottish Historical Studies (St Andrews, 1989), pp. 95–113 ‘Scottish Gaeldom: The First Phase of Clearance’, in People and Society in Scotland: Volume 1, 1760–1830, ed. T.M. Devine and Rosalind Mitchison (Edinburgh, 1988), pp. 70–90 ‘The Impact of the Civil Wars and Interregnum: Political Disruption and Social Change within Scottish Gaeldom’, in Economy and Society in Scotland and Ireland, 1500–1939, ed. Rosalind Mitchison and Peter Roebuck (Edinburgh, 1988), pp. 58–69 ‘Scottish Gaeldom, 1638–51: the Vernacular Response to the Covenanting Dynamic’, in New Perspectives on the Politics and Culture of Early Modern Scotland, ed. J. Dwyer, Roger A. Mason and Alexander Murdoch (Edinburgh, 1982), pp. 59–94 Articles

‘Radicalism Re-asserted: Covenanting in the Seventeenth Century’, SHR, 99 issue supplement (2020), 473–90

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LIST OF PUBLICATIONS

‘John Ogilvie: The Smoke and Mirrors of Confessional Politics’, Journal of Jesuit Studies, 7 (2020), 34–46 ‘The Appin Murder: Jacobite Assassins or Campbell Killer?’, Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness, 68 (2015–17), 324–58 ‘Political Virtue and Capital Repatriation: A Jacobite Agenda for Empire’, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, 38 (2018), 36–54 (with Jean-François Dunyach and Richard Sher) ‘Introduction: Enlightenment and Empire’, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, 38 (2018), 1–17 ‘Los jacobitas y el nacionalismo escocés’, Desperata Ferro: Historia moderna, 28 (2017), 62–5 ‘Queen Anne and the Making of the United Kingdom’, Swift Studies, 30 (2015), 120–38 ‘Covenanting Exchanges with the French Court during the Wars for the Three Kingdoms’, Revue electronique d’etudes sur le monde Anglophone, 11:2 (2014) ‘Union and Empire: A Considered Response’, Britain and the World, 1 (2009), 282–8 ‘Jacobitism in Scotland: Episodic Cause or National Movement?’ SHR, 86 (2007), 225–52 ‘Lochaber – The Last Bandit Country, c. 1600–c. 1750’, Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness, 64 (2004–6), 1–21 ‘Le jacobitisme en Écosse, cause épisodique ou mouvement national?’, L’évolution des mondes modernes, Séminaire de D.E.A. De l’Institut de Recherches sur les Civilisations de l’Occident Moderne, Université Paris Sorbonne, 2 (2004–5), 1–28 ‘Unsustainable Capitalism’, Archaeological Dialogues, 701 (2001), 31–4 ‘Britain in 1700’, History Today, 50 (2000), 39–45 ‘Social Mobility in Medieval and Early Modern Scottish Gaeldom: the Controvertible Evidence’, Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness, 58 (1993–94), 371–405 ‘Early Modern Scotland: the Current State of Play’, SHR, 73 (1994), 30–46 ‘Crowns, Clans and Fine: the “Civilizing” of Scottish Gaeldom, 1587–1638’, Northern Scotland, 13 (1993), 31–56 ‘The Massacre of Glencoe’, The Historian, 35 (1992), pp. 16–18 ‘From Clanship to Commercial Landlordism: Landownership in Argyll from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century’, History & Computing, 2 (1990), 176–86 ‘Influencing the Vote: The Scottish Estates and the Treaty of Union, 1706–7’, History Microcomputer Review, 2 (1990), 11–25 ‘Glasgow: Covenanting Revolution and Municipal Enterprise, 1625–51’, History Today, 40 (1990), 10–16 ‘Treaty of Union: Voting Patterns and Political Influence’, Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung, 14 (1989), 53–61 ‘The First Scottish Tories?’ SHR, 67 (1988), 56–66 ‘Catholic Recusancy and the Penal Laws, 1603–1707’, Records of the Scottish Church History Society, 23 (1987), 27–63 208

LIST OF PUBLICATIONS

‘Repression and Conciliation: The Highland Dimension, 1660–1688’, SHR, 65 (1986), 167–95 ‘Jacobitism’, History Today, 34 (1984), 22–9 ‘Scotland and the Manx Connection: Relationships of Intermittent Violence, 1266–1603’, Proceedings of the Isle of Man Natural History and Antiquarian Society, 8 (1982), 362–77 Shorter works

‘The Appin Murder: Jacobite Conspiracy or Campbell Opportunism?’, History Scotland, 17 (2017), 16–22, 32–6 ‘Inaugural Lecture: A Strategy for History’, Aberdeen University Review, 192 (1994), 349–60 ‘Good Days, Bad Days: The Story of Scottish Slate’, The Story of Scotland, 41 (1988–89), 1146–8 ‘Clearance Begins’, The Story of Scotland, 31 (1988–89), 844–7 ‘Curbing the Clans’, The Story of Scotland, 22 (1988–89), 602–4 ‘The Long Road to Edgehill’, The Story of Scotland, 16 (1988–89), 446–8 ‘Charles I, “A Wee Man with Big Ideas”’, The Story of Scotland, 16 (1988–89), 424–8 ‘Taming the Frontiers’, The Story of Scotland, 15 (1988–89), 418–20 (with A.A. M. Duncan) ‘Scotland’s Parliament’, The Story of Scotland, 7 (1988– 89), 194–6 ‘The Crofters’ Holdings Act of 1886: A Hundred Year Sentence?’, Radical Scotland, 25 (1987), 24–6 ‘Education’, Changing Life in Scotland, 1760–1820, no. 20 (1977) ‘The Kirk and the Poor’, Changing Life in Scotland, 1760 –1820, no. 19 (1977) Compendia

‘The Solemn League and Covenant’, in Encyclopedia of Irish History and Culture, ed. James S. Donnelly, Jr. (2 vols, Detriot, 2004), II, pp. 669–71 ‘Clan Support for the House of Stewart’, ‘The Union: Support and Opposition’ and ‘Roman Catholic Recusancy’, in Atlas of Scottish History to 1707, Peter G. B. McNeill and Hector L. MacQueen, The Scottish Medievalists and Department of Geography (Edinburgh, 1996), pp. 148–50, 151–3 and 408–10 (with Fiona J. Watson) ‘Appendices’, in The Parliaments of Scotland: Burgh and Shire Commissioners, 1357–1707’, ed. M.D. Young (2 vols, Edinburgh, 1992–93), pp. 745–801 ‘Philip, Robert’, in Dictionary of Scottish Church History & Theology, ed. Nigel M. de S. Cameron (Edinburgh, 1993), pp. 656–7 ‘Stewart, James of the Glen (Seumas a’Ghlinne)’, in Dictionary of National Biography: Missing Persons, ed. C.S. Nicholls (Oxford, 1993), pp. 632–3 209

Index Aberdeen  25, 29, 80, 91, 141 agriculture  138, 139, 140, 188, 194 Albany, Duke of see James, Duke of Albany and York, and later James VII and II Albany Plan  16, 168, 173, 182–7 Americas  157, 158, 165, 178, 180–1, 186 Central America  101 North America  1, 16, 155, 159, 170, 175, 180, 183–5 Anglicans  92, 96, 98, 156, 158 anglicise  60, 160 anglocentric  2, 6, 13–14, 24, 128 Anglo-Irish  24, 50, 52 Anglo-Scotic  93, 95, 97–8 Anglo-Scottish  11, 15, 17, 21, 22, 24, 34, 69, 92, 95, 167, 170, 171 Anglo-Welsh  24, 27 antiquarian  143, 197 anti-Scottish  85, 90, 91–2, 95 archipelagic  15, 35–6, 38, 47, 49 architecture  140, 147 Argyll, Campbells of  47 and see Campbell Argyllshire  2, 10 army  10, 40, 57–8, 70–2, 74, 76, 80, 94, 95, 111, 120, 127, 151, 152, 164 of the Covenant  76, 77, 78, 82, 92, 110, 111 French  73–4, 124–5, Jacobite  128, 130, 131 Arnold, Elizabeth  161–5 assassination  54, 94, 96, 102, 104, 105, 108, 110, 113, 190 Atlantic Ocean  16, 35, 46, 114, 150, 168–70, 173–4, 180, 182, 184–7 Atlantic World  38, 176, 178 Ayr 40

Ayrshire  16, 105, 150–1, 153 Bedfordite 178–82 bishop  22, 29, 39, 91, 104, 155, 157 Board of Trade  168, 174, 184–7 Boece, Hector  25–6, 33, 44 borders  17, 45, 47, 81 Anglo-Scottish  31, 89, 95, 138 borderers  89, 190 Britain  15, 70–1, 75, 77–8, 81, 88, 108, 147, 150, 157, 169, 170, 176–8, 180–1, 187, 196 Hanoverian  151, 165 ideas of  25, 27, 28, 30–1, 37, 44 origins of  22, 24, 26 parliament of  171, 174 people of  30, 97 British  140–1, 149, 150, 156, 160, 165–6, 177, 179–80 civil wars  6, 7 empire  9, 15, 16, 17, 27, 38, 43, 165, 167–9, 176, 181–2, 186–7, 189, 193, 202 history  1, 2, 3, 34–8 Isles  46, 71, 80, 124–5, 128, 196 monarchy  27, 55 politics  168, 169–70, 174, 183, 187 projects  21–4, 27–8, 30–1, 44–8, 71 revolution  6, 7, 16 ships 122–3 state  102, 126, 130–1, 159 union  11, 21–4 Britons  26, 153, 165, 169, 170–4, 176 Buchanan, George  33, 39, 102 burghs  32, 39, 40, 189, 193, 195 Calvinists  53, 71, 76 Cameronians  96, 100, 101, 105, 113, 115

211

INDEX

Campbell, Archibald, Marquess of Argyll  1, 6 Colin, Sir, of Lundie  72, 79–80 Douglas, 8th Duke of Argyll  17, 189, 192, 197–202 George, Sir  189, 191, 193–8, 201–2 Carmichael, William  10, 108 Catholic  40, 75–7, 80, 84, 86, 97, 124, 130 church  26, 28–9, 31 Catholicism  10, 50, 65, 71, 72 cattle  29, 55–6, 58, 89 Celtic  91, 150, 156, 195–7, 199 centralise  5, 15, 16, 38, 47–8, 156, 165, 169, 176–7, 179, 181–2, 184–7 chaplain  93, 96, 101, 143 Charles I  4, 6, 15, 48, 64, 70, 72, 74–9, 82–3, 85, 91–2, 103 Charles II  90, 92–5, 97–8, 103, 106–7, 109, 113 Charles Edward Stuart  16, 116–20, 124–31 chieftains  9, 39–41, 45–6, 55, 63, 126, 129 Christians  28, 138, 159, 172 Christianity  21, 26–7, 157 church  22, 26, 30, 147, 150, 151, 156–7, 159 English  91, 92, 141, 163 government  86, 95 history 4 Irish 92 Scottish  5, 38, 39, 93, 101, 103, 114, 137, 140–1, 142, 143, 144, 145, 147, 163 civilise  9, 45, 200 Clanrickard, house of  51, 54, 56, 59, 61, 64 clanship  7–10, 15, 49, 140 clergy  6, 26, 88, 91, 93, 96, 101, 103, 108, 141 colonial  12, 106, 150, 154–6, 174–7, 179–80, 182–3, 185, 187 colonists  101, 113, 180–2 colonies  13, 35, 53, 70, 91, 113, 155, 158, 160, 165, 168, 173, 175, 179, 183, 185–6

commonwealth  15, 22–3, 28, 30–1, 105, 112, 183 Constantine 27–8 Constantinople  95, 190 conventicle  94, 96, 112 Covenant  4, 5, 7, 82, 93, 97, 100, 107–8, 113–14, 173 National 108 Covenanters  3, 6, 7, 75–8, 81, 83, 85, 91, 92, 94, 96, 102–3, 112, 130, 151 covenanting  4–7, 15–16, 76, 78–9, 91, 99–104, 106, 111, 113, 115, 150 and see revolutions crofters  188–9, 192–3, 195, 197, 199, 201 Cunyngham, Robert  16, 150–4, 158, 160–5 Darien  91, 101, 113 Dublin  45, 54, 56, 60, 62–4 Dundas, Henry, 1st Viscount Melville  138, 144, 146–7 Dutch  13, 46–7, 72, 76, 83, 84, 121, 159, 172 East India Company  106, 181, 193 ecclesiastical  39, 53, 108, 146, 155, 159 Edinburgh  5, 15, 25, 29, 69, 88, 91, 99–100, 108, 136, 137, 139, 141, 143–8, 150, 172, 197 Elisabeth  117–27, 129–31 emancipation  190, 192 empire  15, 35, 44–5, 47–8, 70, 77, 151, 153, 156, 159, 164, 165, 169, 170, 172, 174–8, 180-1, 185 England  6, 22–4, 30–1, 35, 37, 39, 43–5, 58, 69, 71, 75, 81, 97–8, 108, 127–8, 142, 150, 152–3, 156, 160, 165, 181 attitudes of  16, 84–95 crown of  15, 23, 41–3, 53, 77 government of  21, 38 history of  3, 7, 36 law of  28, 104 Restoration  16, 86–7, 93–4, 98 union with  13–14, 21, 27–8, 40, 168, 170, 171

212

INDEX

English-Irish  59, 60, 65 Englishmen  23, 26–7, 78, 88, 91, 93, 122, 160, 193 Enlightenment  11, 16, 135–40, 142, 145–9 Episcopalian  10, 89, 91, 95, 130, 157–8 ethnicity  25–6, 51, 55, 85–6, 89, 97 Europe  1, 7, 11, 14, 15, 25, 39, 49–51, 71, 76, 106, 109, 137, 150, 167, 170, 172, 176, 178–9, 181, 187, 196, 199

Highlanders  9, 39–41, 88–90, 126 Huguenots  25, 72, 75, 152–3, 157, 161–2 humanist  25, 39, 53 Hunter, Robert  16, 150–1, 154–65 ideological  4, 52–3, 60, 84, 86, 87, 95, 98, 99, 173, 176, 182 ideology  16, 99, 115, 187 immigrants  89, 90, 124, 159, 178 imperial  12, 13, 17, 24, 34, 43–4, 47, 73, 138, 155–6, 165–7, 168, 169, 170, 174, 176, 178, 180–3, 185, 186, 187, 190, 192, 193, 195, 202 improvement  138, 139, 140, 184, 188, 191, 192, 194, 198, 199 India  17, 188–202 Indian  17, 188–9, 191, 193, 196–200, 202 Ireland  14, 16, 17, 24, 35, 38–41, 46, 86–7, 97–8, 99, 108, 150, 160, 163, 175, 181, 188, 189, 193–202 crown of  15, 43-4 English government of  37, 45, 54–5, 65 history of  6, 15, 36–8, 50–4 Irish  6, 13, 15, 16, 34–8, 40, 45–6, 50–7, 60, 62, 64, 65, 70, 71, 80, 86–7, 97, 117–18, 124, 127–9, 131, 157, 158, 175, 188, 193–202 Iroquois  157, 158, 172–3, 182 islands  15, 26, 27, 35–6, 38–45, 47–8, 151, 153, 164, 190 Isles  34–5, 39, 45–7 and see British

federal  171, 173 fisheries  32, 46–7, 200 FitzGeralds of Desmond  50, 56, 57, 59, 63, 64 FitzGeralds of Kildare  50, 51, 64 Flanders  81, 113, 125 France  13, 15, 21, 30–1, 45, 69–72, 74–8, 80, 82–3, 86, 95, 121, 125, 139, 148, 152, 155, 160, 169, 170, 176, 178, 181, 186 Auld Alliance  15, 30, 31, 69, 71–4, 96–9, 82 Francophobia  86, 94 Franklin, Benjamin  142, 145, 168, 170, 172–3, 180, 183, 184, 186 French  15, 25, 30–1, 33, 45, 69–83, 84, 86, 90, 94, 95, 98, 117–18, 121–8, 130–1, 147, 148, 152, 154, 155, 157, 159, 161, 169–70, 173–7, 179–82, 184–7 Gaelic  8, 10, 15, 50, 52, 59, 60, 65, 86–7, 90, 124 George III  143, 146, 187 German  71, 155–7 Germany  73, 76, 108, 191 Gladstone  189, 193, 198–200 Glasgow  2, 40, 99, 138, 172 global  12, 14, 170, 176, 177 godly  28, 30–1, 33, 109

Jacobites  9, 10–11, 13, 16, 34, 115, 118, 124, 126–8, 130–1, 137, 139, 171 Jacobitism  10–11, 34, 116, 137, 157 Jamaica  101, 154, 162, 175 James VI and I  15, 34–5, 38–9, 41, 43–8, 70, 84–5, 87–91, 103, 109 James, Duke of Albany and York, and later James VII and II  84, 93–4, 96, 97, 101, 103, 151 James VIII and III  120, 125, 171 Judaism  93, 176–7

Hanoverian  11, 136, 151, 165 Henrisoun, James  15, 22, 25–33 Highlands  7–10, 41, 45–6, 90, 94, 110, 113, 126–7, 129, 139, 140, 188, 189, 192, 195, 197, 200

213

INDEX

kingdoms  22, 34–5, 37, 39, 44–5, 47, 53, 90, 95, 109, 170 Scottish  15, 73, 111, 172 Three  6, 34–8, 44–5, 92 United  14, 167, 179, 187

nationalist  13, 35, 169 navy  121, 125, 178, 180 Netherlands  13, 99, 100, 108, 160, 172, 173 nobles  6, 15, 38, 49, 50–2, 55, 56, 62, 64–5, 84, 89, 152 non–conformists  95, 96, 97, 98

Lanarkshire  5, 32, 100, 101, 105, 114 landlords  52, 94, 140, 194–5, 196, 200, 201 landowners  47, 61, 111, 189, 190, 193, 194, 197–201 Latin  25, 26, 89, 104, 158 Lincolnshire  88, 154, 160, 162 London  42, 45, 74, 77, 84, 88, 98, 100, 128, 145, 147, 149, 151, 156, 157, 160, 163, 164, 177, 181, 198 Lowlands  8, 88, 89, 90, 113, 128 Lyon  118–124, 131

oaths  100, 103, 104, 111 Orkney  45, 46, 154 orthodoxy  104, 137, 158, 160 palatinate  74, 151, 155, 164 papacy  26, 34, 39, 44 parish  29, 30, 96, 101, 108, 111, 141, 142, 154, 160, 162 parliament  31, 42, 181, 182, 183, 184 Act of  43 British  165, 171, 198 English  91, 92 Irish  53, 55, 59, 60, 64 Scottish  5, 21, 44, 76, 97, 108–10, 111, 171 parliamentary  11, 55, 56, 60, 62, 169, 182, 188, 198 union  11, 13, 37 partisan  4, 17, 94, 168, 169, 174, 175, 182 patriarchy  150, 152, 153, 165, 196 Patriot  175, 177, 180–3, 186–7 patronage  12, 138, 144, 145, 146, 148, 161 periphery  9, 13, 38, 44, 47, 48, 137, 165 Perrot, Sir John  57, 60–3 plantations  15, 35–7, 47, 50–1, 54, 60, 63–5, 148, 153, 157, 179 planters  62, 65, 154, 155, 156, 175, 177 Playfair, family  16, 135, 140 Reverend James Sr  140–1, 143 Reverend Doctor James Octavius 141 John  141, 143–6 James Jr  147–8 Robert 146–7 William  142, 148–9 polemicists  86, 95, 96,98, 99, 100, 103, 176, 177, 186

merchants  15, 25, 32, 42, 76, 118, 154, 156, 159, 170, 175, 181 metropole   39, 150, 163, 165, 170 military  9, 14, 17, 33, 58, 63, 79, 110–11, 150, 151, 153 aggression  54, 176, 187 alliances  15, 30, 69, 71, 74, 83 campaigns  69, 83 French  71–2, 78, 81, 83, 117–18, 125, 127, 175, 181, 187 power, English  14 power, Scottish  76, 80 men  56, 81, 108–10 ministers (church)  94, 95, 100, 101, 114, 139, 140–3, 157 ministers (administration)  125, 168, 169, 179, 186, 187 monarchy  10, 15, 27, 34–5, 37, 44, 47, 49, 51, 53, 55, 65, 71, 78, 86, 170 Napier, Francis, 10th Lord  17, 189–93, 195, 198, 202 nations  6, 13, 25, 35–6, 38, 45, 75, 83, 91, 92, 93, 96, 106, 150, 160, 165, 171, 172, 173, 175, 178, 180, 191, 198 national  5, 11, 13, 35, 37–8, 51, 86, 88, 90–2, 93, 101, 107, 135, 137, 141, 149, 168, 188, 189, 190, 191

214

INDEX

preachers  88, 99, 100, 111, 114, 157, 176 Presbyterians  16, 89, 90, 92–8, 99–100, 101–3, 105, 107–8, 109–10, 112–13, 115 Presbytery  95–6, 114, 141, 158 privateers  46, 118, 120, 121, Protestants  15, 23, 26, 31, 71, 77, 86, 95, 97, 98, 103, 104, 109, 111, 124, 130, 150, 152, 153, 155, 160, 164, 166 Puritans  84, 87, 88, 89, 91, 93, 95, 97

Romans  26, 27, 28, 89, 159, 179 Royalists  6, 91, 92, 95 Russel, John, 4th Duke of Bedford  170, 177 Russia  190, 191, 196, 197 science  135–9, 145, 148, 190 Scotland  5, 11, 13, 17, 23, 27–9, 37–41, 45–6, 69–71, 74–5, 80, 84, 117, 118, 119, 120, 124–5, 127, 128, 130, 136, 140, 147, 149, 163–5, 188–90, 196–8, 200, 202 historians of  2, 6, 34, 36–7, 49, 103, 110, 135 economy of  11, 13, 32 law of  28, 29, 137 origins  24–5, 25–7 parliament of  31, 171 Restoration  16, 99, 103–5, 107, 110–11 universities of  29, 138–9 views of  86–95, 97–8 Scotophobia  15–16, 85–6, 91–4, 98 Scots  6, 7, 13–17, 21, 22, 25–8, 30, 32, 40, 44, 47, 70–1, 73–83, 84–95, 97–8, 100, 110, 112, 114, 126, 128–30, 150–1, 153–4, 156, 159, 160, 162, 165, 167, 171–2, 187, 189, 202 Scotsmen  84, 93 Scottish-ness  84, 86, 88, 91, 93, 95, 97, 98, 151 Seymour, Edward, Duke of Somerset and lord Protector of England  15, 21–6, 30, 31, 33, 37, 40 Sidney, Sir Henry  54–60 soldiers  16, 63, 72, 76, 77, 79–82, 108, 110, 112, 113, 117–20, 122–31, 163 sovereignty  17, 182, 186 Spain  76, 77, 86, 127 Spanish  40, 53, 62, 80, 82, 84, 86, 113, 126, 127 Stanley, earls of Derby  34, 39–40, 42–3, 47 Stuart  10, 15, 16, 38, 38, 49, 51, 70, 71, 82, 83, 85, 86, 90, 91, 94, 96, 98, 124, 125, 129

Quakers  84, 98, 156, 157, 175 radicals  5, 52, 55, 95–6, 98, 99, 189, 191, 193, 197–8 radicalism  5, 23, 33, 106, 109 rebellions  34, 40, 45, 50–1, 56, 60–1, 63, 92, 93, 94, 96, 97, 100, 112, 126, 128, 156, 257, 176, 188, 190, 202 Reformation  22, 25–7, 31, 103, 104, 108 regiment  71, 72, 75–83, 101, 113, 118, 124, 127, 128, 151, 152 regime  24, 33, 53, 99, 103, 108, 111, 112 regions  8, 38, 45, 47–9, 55, 56, 63, 156, 186, 196 religion  4, 26, 44, 79, 95, 100, 11, 114, 115, 151, 191 religious  4, 16, 28, 51, 53, 77, 84, 86, 87, 92, 96, 98, 103, 110, 115, 137, 143, 150, 152 republic  72, 76, 137, 172, 196 republicans  33, 51, 92, 93, 196 revolutions  52–3, 82, 98, 110, 140, 187 American  17, 187 British  3, 7, 16, 87 Covenanting  4–5, 6, 16, 99, 103–4, 107–9 of 1688–90  11, 34, 94–5, 113, 151, 174 Richelieu, Cardinal  15, 70, 72, 75–7, 83 rising  22, 111 Jacobite, of 1745–6  16, 116, 118, 126–9, 131 Rome  22, 106, 125

215

INDEX

succession  34, 37, 43–4, 64, 84, 143 Hanoverian  11, 136

of 1707  2, 11, 12, 14, 21, 136, 150, 154, 155, 167 universities  2, 3, 29, 100, 137, 138, 139, 141–8, 172

tenancy  188, 194, 195 tenants  8, 100, 188, 193, 194, 195, 198–201 tenures  29, 31, 42, 54, 63, 188, 190–6, 198–9, 201–2 testimony  99, 101, 103, 104, 114 towns  29, 56, 113, 141, 146, 147, 159, 181 planning  139, 140, 148 townships  140, 190, 192, 193 trade  11, 45, 46, 105, 147, 150, 155, 170–2, 176, 179–82, 184, 185 tradition  23, 24, 55, 102, 104, 105, 110, 113, 114, 135, 137 traditional  9, 10, 22, 23, 38, 49, 56, 58, 59, 60, 62, 63, 150, 186, 191, 192, 197 transatlantic  12, 17, 141, 187 troops  40, 69, 71, 73, 75–8, 80, 88, 92, 96, 113, 118–21, 125–8, 130 tyranny  94, 95, 98, 103 tyrants  104–06, 109,

viceroys  51, 54, 60–2, 64, 192, 193, 197, 201 wars  21, 24, 47, 50, 53, 54, 58, 63–4, 70, 71, 76, 96, 103, 105, 106, 107, 109, 111, 113, 114, 115, 125, 128, 130–1, 152, 155, 176, 178, 201 Bishops’ War  15, 78, 80–1, 83, 88, 90, civil wars  3, 6, 7, 9, 15, 34, 51, 71, 81, 85, 87, 91, 92, 95, 107, 109, 110, 111, 128, 187 Thirty Years’  7, 15, 71, 72, 77, 80, 82, 83 of Austrian Succession  116, 174, 180, 182, 187 Seven Years’ War  130, 179 of Spanish Succession  151, 172 of/for the Three Kingdoms  6, 7, 37, 92 Welsh  6, 26, 84 West Indies  151, 161, 170, 181 Whigs  10, 11, 93–8, 129–30, 136, 138, 158, 169, 171–3, 175–8, 182, 185, 187 Whiggish  9, 11, 13, 16

Ulster  45, 47, 50, 51, 54, 57, 59–64 uncivilised  9, 89, 90 union  28, 37, 40, 44, 91, 154, 165, 194 confederal  17, 167–9, 170–4, 177, 180–7 debates concerning  13, 16–17, 167–73, 182–7 incorporating  12, 13, 14, 17, 90, 167–8, 170–3, 183, 186–7 of 1603  15, 44, 86, 88

York, Duke of, see James, Duke of Albany and York, and later James VII and II

216

Tabula Gratulatoria Sarah Barber Ciaran Brady Michael Broers Keith Brown Ewen A. Cameron Alison Cathcart Jane Dawson Jean-François Dunyach Steven G. Ellis Richard Finlay Karin Friedrich Robert Frost Linda G. Fryer Kieran German Tim Harris Karen Jillings Colin Kidd Aonghas MacCoinnich Catriona M. M. MacDonald Roger A Mason Neil McIntyre

Esther Mijers Noah Millstone Stephen Mullen Steve Murdoch Éamon Ó Ciardha Jason Peacey George Peden Steven Pincus Roy Ritchie Barry Robertson Jón Viðar Sigurðsson Scott Spurlock Abigail L. Swingen Daniel Szechi Miles Taylor Stephen Taylor James M. Vaughn Fiona Watson Arthur H. Williamson Andy Wood John R. Young

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‎Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History ISSN: 1476–9107 Series editors Tim Harris – Brown University Stephen Taylor – Durham University Andy Wood – Durham University Previously published titles in the series are listed below

STUDIES IN EARLY MODERN CULTURAL, POLITICAL AND SOCIAL HISTORY I ‎ omen of Quality: W ‎ ccepting and Contesting Ideals of Femininity in England, 1690–1760 A ‎Ingrid H. Tague II ‎ estoration Scotland, 1660–1690 R ‎Royalist Politics, Religion and Ideas ‎Clare Jackson III ‎Britain, Hanover and the Protestant Interest, 1688–1756 ‎Andrew C. Thompson IV ‎Hanover and the British Empire, 1700–1837 ‎Nick Harding V ‎ he Personal Rule of Charles II, 1681–85 T ‎Grant Tapsell VI ‎Royalism, Print and Censorship in Revolutionary England ‎Jason McElligott VII ‎The English Catholic Community, 1688–1745 ‎Politics, Culture and Ideology ‎Gabriel Glickman VIII ‎England and the 1641 Irish Rebellion ‎Joseph Cope IX ‎Culture and Politics at the Court of Charles II, 1660–1685 ‎Matthew Jenkinson

X ‎Commune, Country and Commonwealth ‎The People of Cirencester, 1117–1643 ‎David Rollison XI ‎An Enlightenment Statesman in Whig Britain ‎Lord Shelburne in Context, 1737–1805 ‎Edited by Nigel Aston and Clarissa Campbell Orr XII ‎London’s News Press and the Thirty Years War ‎Jayne E.E. Boys XIII God, Duty and Community in English Economic Life, 1660–1720 ‎Brodie Waddell XIV ‎ emaking English Society R ‎Social Relations and Social Change in Early Modern England ‎Edited by Steve Hindle, Alexandra Shepard and John Walter XV ‎Common Law and Enlightenment in England, 1689–1750 ‎Julia Rudolph XVI ‎ he Final Crisis of the Stuart Monarchy T ‎ he Revolutions of 1688–91 in their British, Atlantic and European Contexts T ‎Edited by Tim Harris and Stephen Taylor XVII ‎ he Civil Wars after 1660 T ‎Public Remembering in Late Stuart England ‎Matthew Neufeld XVIII ‎The Nature of the English Revolution Revisited ‎Essays in Honour of John Morrill ‎Edited by Stephen Taylor and Grant Tapsell

XIX ‎ he King’s Irishmen T ‎ he Irish in the Exiled Court of Charles II, 1649–1660 T ‎Mark R.F. Williams XX ‎ cotland in the Age of Two Revolutions S ‎Edited by Sharon Adams and Julian Goodare XXI ‎Alehouses and Good Fellowship in Early Modern England ‎Mark Hailwood XXII ‎Social Relations and Urban Space: Norwich, 1600–1700 ‎Fiona Williamson XXIII ‎British Travellers and the Encounter with Britain, 1450–1700 ‎John Cramsie XXIV ‎ omestic Culture in Early Modern England D ‎Antony Buxton XXV ‎Accidents and Violent Death in Early Modern London, 1650–1750 ‎Craig Spence XXVI ‎Popular Culture and Political Agency in Early Modern England and Ireland ‎Essays in Honour of John Walter ‎Edited by Michael J. Braddick and Phil Withington XXVII ‎Commerce and Politics in Hume’s History of England ‎Jia Wei XXVIII ‎Bristol from Below: Law, Authority and Protest in a Georgian City ‎Steve Poole and Nicholas Rogers

XXIX ‎Disaffection and Everyday Life in Interregnum England ‎Caroline Boswell XXX ‎ romwell’s House of Lords C ‎Politics, Parliaments and Constitutional Revolution, 1642–1660 ‎Jonathan Fitzgibbons XXXI ‎Stuart Marriage Diplomacy: Dynastic Politics in their European Context, 1604–1630 ‎Edited by Valentina Caldari and Sara J. Wolfson XXXII ‎National Identity and the Anglo-Scottish Borderlands, 1552–1652 ‎Jenna M. Schultz XXXIII ‎Roguery in Print: Crime and Culture in Early Modern London ‎Lena Liapi XXXIV ‎Politics, Religion and Ideas in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain ‎Essays in Honour of Mark Goldie ‎Edited by Justin Champion, John Coffey, Tim Harris and John Marshall XXXV ‎The Hanoverian Succession in Great Britain and its Empire ‎Edited by Brent S. Sirota and Allan I. Macinnes XXXVI ‎Age Relations and Cultural Change in Eighteenth-Century England ‎Barbara Crosbie XXXVII ‎ he National Covenant in Scotland, 1638–1689 T ‎Chris R. Langley XXXVIII ‎Visualising Protestant Monarchy: Ceremony, Art and Politics after the Glorious Revolution (1689–1714) ‎Julie Farguson

XXXIX ‎Blood Waters: War, Disease and Race in the Eighteenth-Century British Caribbean ‎Nicholas Rogers XL The State Trials and the Politics of Justice in Later Stuart England Edited by Brian Cowan and Scott Sowerby ‎XLI ‎Africans in East Anglia, 1467–1833 ‎Richard C. Maguire XLII Royalism, Religion and Revolution: Wales, 1640–1688 Sarah Ward Clavier XLIII Painting for a Living in Tudor and Early Stuart England Robert Tittler