David W. Allan - Scotland in the Eighteenth Century: Union and Enlightenment

SCOTLAND IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

UNION AND ENLIGHTENMENT

David Allan

First published 2002 by Pearson Education Limited

Published 2013 by Routledge

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Nation

One issue above all was made so problematical by eighteenth-century events that it continues to perplex the Scots even today: their nationhood the need continually to ask Who are we? The answer, of course, has never been entirely straightforward. A convoluted political and religious relationship with the English, the unavoidable fact of extreme geographical proximity and deeply rooted ethnic and linguistic ties have ever muddied the water. Yet the late-medieval conflicts with England, continuing sporadically into the sixteenth century, had somehow fashioned a collective identity among Scotlands disparate inhabitants, infusing them with a profound sense of their own separateness. If knowing what properly defined a Scot remained complicated first amid intensifying hostilities between the countrys Gaelic-speaking Highlanders and Scots-speaking Lowlanders and then because of the peoples own violent religious differences following the Reformation a working solution to the problem, frequently repeated and almost universally endorsed by all ranks and persuasions, gradually emerged. Whatever else they might be, the Scots, by the later seventeenth century, could at least be sure that they were not English.

The impact of the Treaty of Union, by whose ratification in 1707 the last Edinburgh Parliament agreed that Scotland should be incorporated into a newly forged British state governed from the English capital, was therefore necessarily unsettling. Deciding whether to establish these new arrangements in the first place, as well as which of several possible variant forms they might take, inevitably caused internal convulsions. All manner of other issues were also left unresolved for the Scots by the creation of a new polity. Key questions were in fact settled not in the surprisingly laconic treaty but in the slow and difficult evolution of political practice over succeeding decades: What precisely was to be the new role of Scotlands politicians and institutions? How might the Scots secure their own interests within a predominantly English state? And would Westminster seek to preserve or to erode Scotlands distinctiveness? Even less clear were the ramifications for the Scots identity. In particular, if nationhood were ordinarily expressed through the free exercise of sovereign self-government, had Scotland itself also ceased to exist in 1707? Whatever their views, and however they preferred to answer these questions, all Scots were forced to confront the consequences of Union. It is with the background to this epochal event that we must begin.

Eighteenth-century Scotland

In 1700 the separate kingdoms of Scotland and England still had a considerable distance to travel before their slightly awkward marriage could be consummated. Mutual suspicion, at times verging on a complete breakdown in relations, marked the notably cantankerous years leading up to the treaty. Superficially it can appear that Union was the result of irresistible processes of convergence that, if not quite inevitable, it was the product of long-term forces pressing the two neighbours ever closer to some kind of lasting political unification. While this interpretation certainly dominated between the eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, recent historiography, less deferential towards older pieties, has begged to differ. It is now generally agreed that, although specific trends of convergence can indeed be identified as far back as the sixteenth century (especially those arising out of both peoples shared formal commitment to Protestantism), so too were deeply rooted patterns of divergence also strongly evident. These were in fact still driving the two old enemies further apart until a surprisingly advanced stage in the pre-Union proceedings.

The political developments of the seventeenth century were not the least of the hindrances to closer and happier Anglo-Scottish relations. The experience of the regal union or union of the crowns, stemming from 1603 when James VI of Scotland had succeeded his mothers childless cousin Elizabeth, Queen of England, thus beginning an often unhappy arrangement by which two historically antagonistic kingdoms shared the same monarch, lay at the root of the strained relationship. Pro-unionists ever since 1603 have pointedly interpreted this royal connection as a milestone on the road to greater intimacy; and the Treaty of Union was indeed, as we shall see, in many ways a solution to the constitutional and diplomatic tensions which were James VI and Is peculiar legacy to his successors (though it was not, it should be added, the only possible solution: elsewhere in seventeenth-century Europe, the Habsburgs awkward tenure of both the Bohemian monarchy and the German emperorship did not result in a unified state). But the intrinsic problems of multiple monarchy, especially when it is remembered that a third throne that of Ireland came along with Jamess English inheritance, led many Scots to even greater resentment of Englands pre-eminence within the British Isles. It also prepared them to resist any suggestion that their own future might lie with absorption in what would inevitably be an anglocentric polity.