Scotland and England 1286-1815 9781788854184, 1788854187

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SCOTLAND AND ENGLAND 1286–1815

SCOTLAND AND ENGLAND 1286–1815 Edited by

ROGER A. MASON Department of Scottish History University of St. Andrews

This eBook was published in Great Britain in 2021 by John Donald, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd Birlinn Ltd West Newington House 10 Newington Road Edinburgh EH9 1QS First published in Great Britain in 1987 by John Donald Copyright © The Editor and Contributors severally, 1987 eBook ISBN 978 1 78885 418 4 The right of the editor and contributors to be identified as the authors of this book has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher. The publishers gratefully acknowledge the support of the Strathmartine Trust towards the publication of this book

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library.

Preface The essays collected in this volume are the product of a two-year seminar programme sponsored by the Department of Scottish History at the University of St. Andrews and held in St. John’s House, the University’s Centre for Advanced Historical Studies, between October 1984 and April 1986. Particular thanks are due to the Director and Management Committee of St. John’s House for providing such splendid facilities for the seminars. This is the third such volume to find its way into print and it is a pleasure to be able to acknowledge the support of John Donald Publishers Ltd. in continuing to make their publication possible. In addition, thanks are due to all those who participated in what proved to be a lively and informative series of meetings and in particular to the speakers both for prompting much stimulating debate and for converting the spoken into the written word with speed and efficiency. Roger A. Mason St. Andrews June 1987

Contributors John D. Brims: Glenfiddich Research Fellow in Scottish History, University of St. Andrews Keith M. Brown: British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Scottish History, University of St. Andrews Edward J. Cowan: Professor of History, University of Guelph Jane E. A. Dawson: Tutor in Modern History, University of St. Andrews Anthony Goodman: Reader in Medieval History, University of Edinburgh Alexander Grant: Lecturer in Medieval History, University of Lancaster Roger A. Mason: Lecturer in Scottish History, University of St. Andrews Marcus Merriman: Lecturer in History, University of Lancaster Nicholas Phillipson: Senior Lecturer in History, University of Edinburgh Michael Prestwich: Professor of Medieval History, University of Durham John Robertson: Fellow and Tutor in Modern History, St. Hugh’s College, Oxford David Stevenson: Reader in History, University of Aberdeen

Contents Preface Contributors Abbreviations Introduction 1. Colonial Scotland: The English in Scotland under Edward I Michael Prestwich 2. The Anglo-Scottish Marches in the Fifteenth Century: A Frontier Society? Anthony Goodman 3. Crown and Nobility in Late Medieval Britain Alexander Grant 4. Scotching the Brut: Politics, History and National Myth in Sixteenth-Century Britain Roger A. Mason 5. James Henrisoun and ‘Great Britain’: British Union and the Scottish Commonweal Marcus Merriman 6. Two Kingdoms or Three?: Ireland in Anglo-Scottish Relations in the Middle of the Sixteenth Century Jane E. A. Dawson 7. The Price of Friendship: The ‘Well Affected’ and English Economic Clientage in Scotland before 1603 Keith M. Brown 8. The Early Covenanters and the Federal Union of Britain David Stevenson 9. The Solemn League and Covenant Edward J. Cowan 10. Andrew Fletcher’s Vision of Union John Robertson 11. Politics, Politeness and the Anglicisation of early Eighteenth-Century Scottish Culture Nicholas Phillipson 12. The Scottish ‘Jacobins’, Scottish Nationalism and the British Union John D. Brims Index

Abbreviations APS BL BIHR EETS EHR HMC IR JMH NLS PRO PSAS SHR SHS SRO STS TRHS

Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland British Library Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research Early English Text Society English Historical Review Historical Manuscripts Commission Innes Review Journal of Modern History National Library of Scotland Public Record Office Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland Scottish Historical Review Scottish History Society Scottish Record Office Scottish Text Society Transactions of the Royal Historical Society

Introduction

Ten years ago, in the bibliography of his magisterial work Scotland’s Relations with England: A Survey to 1707 (Edinburgh, 1977), William Ferguson commented that ‘surprisingly little has been written on the specific theme of Anglo-Scottish relations’. That English historians had rarely thought the subject worth more than a passing reference may actually occasion very little surprise. It is remarkable, however, that their Scottish counterparts, while by no means ignoring its importance, had devoted so few full-length studies to exploring the manifold ramifications of a relationship which was plainly critical in shaping Scotland’s history and development. Ferguson’s pungent and at times acerbic book, surveying the centuries up to the parliamentary union of 1707, was a timely reminder to Scottish and English historians alike of the importance of viewing their respective national histories in a wider British context. Since Ferguson’s work appeared, however, not only has research and publication in the fields of Scottish and English history continued apace, but the idea of writing truly British history has also been placed firmly on the academic agenda. The purpose of the present volume, therefore, is to present in readily accessible form the results of at least some of this scholarly activity. The twelve essays printed here are the fruits of recent and continuing research into a wide variety of aspects of Scotland’s long and often troubled relationship with England. At the same time they demonstrate the value of exploring — both in comparative and integrative terms — the British dimension of the national histories of both countries. Concentrating on the late medieval and early modern periods, the essays cover a different (though overlapping) timespan to that adopted by Ferguson. As a collection of discrete and detailed studies, however, they are not — and could not be — designed to supersede Ferguson’s sweeping survey. Rather they supplement and extend it, illuminating areas of Anglo-Scottish relations which Ferguson was unable to investigate in any detail. Nevertheless, like Ferguson’s work, it is hoped that this collection will reinforce the view that this is a subject area rich in possibilities and well worthy of continued research interest. Broadly speaking, the collection falls into three parts corresponding to three distinct phases in the history of Anglo-Scottish relations. The first phase — with which the first three essays are concerned — is the period of mutual hostility and intermittent warfare between the

independent Scottish and English kingdoms which lasted from the late thirteenth century until the end of the middle ages. Appropriately, the volume begins with the Wars of Independence themselves and Michael Prestwich’s revealing examination of Edward I’s attempts to reduce Scotland to the status of an English colony. As his analysis demonstrates, as a colony Scotland proved difficult and expensive to control, and Edward’s efforts in this direction were not just unsuccessful but probably misguided as well. Partly as a result of the unresolved ambiguities of the colony’s constitutional position and partly too as a result of Edward’s ultimate failure to gain complete control over the northern kingdom, it proved impossible to incorporate Scotland within the domains of the English crown. The wars, indeed, were eventually to end with Scotland’s right to an independent existence effectively vindicated. This was a situation, however, which the English crown was unwilling to recognise or accept. In consequence, the neighbouring kingdoms continued to eye each other with deep suspicion — occasionally flaring into open violence — throughout the later middle ages. Under such warlike circumstances, it is hardly surprising that there emerged in the border region a trans-national ‘frontier society’ which, bearing comparison with similar zones elsewhere in Europe, is the subject of Anthony Goodman’s fascinating essay. Yet, as he makes clear, while this frontier society certainly recognised the existence of shared values and a common martial ethic, in the late fourteenth and particularly the fifteenth century its leaders were made increasingly aware of their separate national allegiances. The two governments were plainly intent on integrating their marcher areas into the social and political worlds of their distinct and developing kingdoms. While they had much in common, these kingdoms were in some fundamental respects quite different, and it is in fact the disparities in the political experiences of the two late medieval monarchies which provide the starting-point for the third piece in this section, a thought-provoking essay in comparative history by Alexander Grant. He begins his investigation with the apparent paradox that, despite its institutional weaknesses, Scotland in the later middle ages was politically much more stable than England. He then goes on to explain the absence of dynastic strife and the comparatively low levels of political violence in Scotland in terms of the differing character of local lordship in the two kingdoms and the consequent differences in the nature of the critical relationship between the monarchies and their respective aristocracies. Dissimilar though the two kingdoms were in the later middle ages, they were not so different as to preclude any possibility of union between them. Dynastic union through the intermarriage of the Scottish and English royal houses was always on the cards and was of course eventually to come about in 1603 as a result of a marriage contracted a hundred years before. Yet in many ways dynastic union was no more than an accident of blood. Certainly, it was not inevitable. Furthermore, its implications were by no means always welcome. Not only did those in favour of union have to work hard to achieve their goal, but they had also to confront the myriad problems which arose in the seventeenth century as a direct result of the

creation of the British monarchy. The achievement and immediate consequences of the union of 1603 are the subject of the second part of the collection and, in so far as six essays are devoted to this phase of Anglo-Scottish relations, the events of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries may be seen as the focal point of the book. The section begins with Roger Mason’s study of the uses made of history and historical mythologies in both unionist and anti-unionist propaganda in the century leading up to 1603. Looking back to the development of nationalistic pseudo-histories in the middle ages, the essay traces the emergence in the sixteenth century of a unionist ideology which sought historical legitimacy through the re-interpretation of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s influential History of the Kings of Britain. A key figure in the elaboration of this unionist ideology was the Scottish merchant and pamphleteer, James Henrisoun, whose varied and exciting career is uncovered here in a lively essay by Marcus Merriman. Henrisoun was a Protestant Anglophile who did much to promote the unionist policies of Henry VIII and particularly Protector Somerset, but he was clearly also a Scottish patriot whose concern for the welfare of his countrymen led him into realms of sociological analysis in a manner comparable to (and often in advance of) that associated with the so-called ‘commonwealthmen’ of contemporary England. Henrisoun’s is a biography well worthy of the detailed reconstruction it receives here. These essays on the ideological background to union are followed by two more on the concrete political and diplomatic problems which were involved in effecting Anglo-Scottish union in the later sixttenth century. The first by Jane Dawson concentrates on the critical years around 1560 when Scotland was detached from her traditional alliance with Catholic France and realigned herself with Protestant England. It is argued here, however, through a telling analysis of the diplomatic manoeuvrings of the 5th earl of Argyll, that the British equation remains incomplete if Ireland is omitted from discussions of Anglo-Scottish relations. In this as in other periods, ignorance of the Irish dimension is liable seriously to impair our understanding of the policies and motives of leading politicians on both sides of the border. As the sixteenth century drew to a close, however, and Elizabeth’s refusal to marry clarified the dynastic issue, the likely outcome of the policies pursued by the English and Scottish governments did become clearer. But the ever-increasing likelihood that a Scottish king would bring about union by succeeding Elizabeth on the English throne did pose the problem of whether it was worthwhile continuing deliberately to maintain an English party in Scotland. Keith Brown’s detailed study of the extent to which the Elizabethan government sought to keep the ‘well affected’ sweet reveals some ambivalence on the English side and considerable rapacity on that of the Scots. Although money did change hands, it seems in fact to have done little to change people’s opinions or allegiances. Neither in Scotland nor in England did it prove necessary to buy support in order to accomplish dynastic union.

Yet the fact that the Union of the Crowns was so easily and above all peacefully effected in 1603 must not be allowed to obscure the many problems which multiple kingship entailed for the new British monarchy. For Scotland in particular, absentee government and an increasingly Anglicised royal house created strains and tensions which occasionally threatened to render the existing union totally unworkable. The first such occasion was during the reign of Charles I whose lack of understanding and sympathy for his Scottish subjects led in 1637 to a complete breakdown in relations between them and set in motion a train of events best described in British terms as ‘the war of the three Kingdoms’. In Scotland, however, although the union was clearly a major cause of discontent, the covenanting revolution was marked less by attempts to reassert Scottish independence than by persistent efforts to renegotiate a closer, more workable form of union with England. These crucial negotiations are the subject of two important essays in the present collection. In the first, David Stevenson discusses the various proposals for union put forward by the covenanters in the course of the 1640s and concludes that the Scots were less obsessed with religion than is often assumed and that they favoured a form of federal union which was in many ways strikingly modern in its approach to the devolution of power. Complementing Stevenson’s general study of the union proposals of the period, Edward Cowan embarks on an in-depth analysis of the background and implications of the single most important set of these negotiations: those surrounding the creation of the Solemn League and Covenant in 1643. Again, a thorough examination of the evidence suggests that the religious issue was less important than is usually thought and that it is a gross over-simplification to argue that the Scots were bent solely on imposing presbyterianism on England. On the contrary, both these essays indicate that the Scots were pragmatic as well as being able negotiators. Their plans for a more workable union were thwarted, not by Scottish fanaticism and intolerance, but by English expediency and indifference. It is hardly surprising therefore that these early attempts to renegotiate the terms of the union proved less than successful. It was not until the turn of the seventeenth century that the English government recognised (largely for reasons of national security) that the existing form of union was dangerous to them as well as disadvantageous to the Scots. The product of their sudden concern was the incorporating parliamentary union of 1707. The debates engendered by the reopening of the union question and the manner in which the Scots subsequently adjusted to their incorporation within a British state system are the subject of the final three essays in the collection. In the first, John Robertson provides a long-overdue assessment of the shape and sources of Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun’s visionary conception of a federation of European states and Scotland’s place within it. Fletcher was as aware as any of his contemporaries of the unworkability of the Union of the Crowns, but he was a passionate opponent of incorporation and all the dangers he believed it entailed in terms of the concentration of sovereign power and the threat of individual liberty. His commitment to

federal union was profound and he is seen here as reacting both to the apparent success of the incorporating unionists’ arguments and — more tentatively — to the sinister implications of an older European tradition of speculation about the establishment of a universal monarchy. Ultimately of course Fletcher failed in his efforts to counter the case for incorporating union. Nevertheless, not only did he play an influential role in the years preceding 1707, but he introduced to Scotland a strain of English classical republican political thought which was to have an enormous impact on some of the leading thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment. It is the purpose of Nicholas Phillipson’s essay to show how this and other English modes of thought were adapted in the eighteenth century to suit Scottish needs within the framework of the new British state system. Focusing on Fletcher’s use of classical republican concepts and particularly on David Hume’s adaptation of the language of Addisonian ‘politeness’, he argues that the Scottish literati made a remarkably successful effort to provide Scots and Englishmen alike with a civic ideology suitably tailored for life in the new British state in an increasingly commercial age. But the extent to which the Scots had by the end of the eighteenth century accommodated themselves to living within the framework of parliamentary union is perhaps best conveyed by the final essay in the collection. Here, in an unusually cool analysis of such radical groups as the Friends of the People, John Brims argues that in the 1790s popular nationalist fervour is notable primarily for its absence. While the Scottish ‘Jacobins’ were not afraid to play the nationalist card when it suited them to do so, they characteristically sought reform within a British parliamentary context. They did so, moreover, in the language of English constitutionalism. It is hard to think of a more telling example of the Scots’ domestication within the structure of the incorporating union. Clearly, a volume such as this cannot hope to be comprehensive in scope. As this brief introduction will have revealed, quite apart from its chronological limitations, there are a great many aspects of Scotland’s relations with England which it leaves entirely untouched. Nevertheless, the purpose of the collection — and of the seminars on which it is based — will have been amply fulfilled if it succeeds in stimulating interest in a field of study which is as potentially rewarding as it is obviously important. A host of questions still remain to be asked, far less answered. It is hoped simply that these essays, while making notable contributions to particular areas of research, will also prompt further enquiry and debate.

1 Colonial Scotland: The English in Scotland under Edward I Michael Prestwich

Among medieval historians, if not elsewhere, colonies appear to be fashionable. R. R. Davies has written on ‘Colonial Wales’, M. W. Labarge has described Gascony in a subtitle as ‘England’s first colony’, and Robin Frame has analysed Colonial Ireland.1 In the case of Scotland, however, independence rather than colonialism has been the keynote of recent research. Much more attention has been paid to resistance to Edward I than to the aims of the English in Scotland during his reign. Yet if the word ‘colony’ is taken in a broad sense of conquest, expropriation, exploitation and settlement, and of the creation of a scheme of government dependent upon that of the colonising power, there was arguably much that was colonial about English policy towards Scotland under Edward I. There is certainly a need for a reassessment of the English aims and achievement in Scotland during Edward I’s later years. There seems to have been surprisingly little contemporary discussion couched in theoretical terms about Edward’s position in Scotland. There is no record of anything like the sophisticated arguments derived from both Roman and feudal law that Raymond de la Ferrière employed on Edward’s behalf in the late 1290s to rebut French claims in Gascony.2 At the time of the Great Cause, when Edward intervened to resolve the disputed succession to the Scottish throne following the death of the Maid of Norway, considerable energy was put into the task of justifying the English king’s claim to overlordship of Scotland. The attempt to construct arguments based on the historical evidence that could be culled from monastic chronicles may have satisfied Edward’s clerks, and had some propaganda value, but the results were scarcely convincing.3 For the English, however, the situation was evidently clear and straightforward in the early 1290s. Scotland was a kingdom, over which Edward I possessed rights of ‘superior lordship’. A writ of July 1291 claimed triumphantly that by reason of this lordship, the realms of England and Scotland were now united, but the intention of the document was no more than to make it clear that writs made out by Edward in Scotland would be valid in English courts. It was not a statement of political intent.4

Edward had no truck with arguments put forward in the course of the Great Cause suggesting a division or even abolition of the Scottish kingdom.5 His intention, once the question of the succession was settled, was to exercise effective feudal authority over the new king. John Balliol’s abdication, forced by Edward in 1296, transformed the position. From the English point of view, there was no longer a Scottish king. One text, detailing the damages done at Coldstream by the English army, went so far as to describe Edward as king of England and Scotland, but in fact no change was made to his official title.6 The removal south of the Coronation Stone and many of the records of the Scottish crown might suggest that Edward had either appropriated the Scottish kingdom, or that he considered that Scotland was no longer a kingdom. In English documents, however, Scotland was still described as a realm, and no new claims were put forward by Edward. When he came to try to justify his position to Boniface VIII in 1301, Edward’s arguments followed familiar lines. He argued that Scotland was feudally subject to him, as it had been to his ancestors, and that it was a realm ‘subjected by right of ownership to our power’. The Scots were able to produce five types of argument to counter Edward’s claims, appealing to papal privilege, common law, prescription, free status and documentary evidence.7 Strong and ingenious as these arguments were, they were of little use against the might of Edward’s armies. By 1305, when that might appeared to have triumphed, the Ordinance drawn up for the government of Scotland referred to the country consistently as a land, not a realm. No explanation was provided, but it seems that Edward was relegating Scotland to a similar status to Ireland, that of a land ruled over by himself as lord. At the Carlisle parliament of 1307 Scotland was indeed listed as one of the king’s lands, along with Wales and Ireland.8 Lordship of Scotland was not, however, added to Edward’s titles, and a certain ambiguity over the precise constitutional position remained. The justification for Edward’s claim to rule in Scotland does not fit into a colonial model, for what he claimed to exercise was a form of feudal lordship. In practical terms, however, there was much that resembled colonialism about English policy in Scotland. The Ordinance of 1305 laid down the way in which the country was to be ruled by a royal lieutenant, with all the major officials being English. Englishmen and Scots were to serve jointly as justices. Archaic legal customs were summarily abolished, and the rest of the laws were to be revised by a council of Englishmen and Scots. Edward has received much praise for this enactment, from Scottish as well as English historians, even though it displays fewer indications of constructive thought than the Statute of Wales of 1284, or the Gascon ordinances of 1289.9 Far from receiving praise, Edward deserves criticism for displaying an insensitivity in the Ordinance which surely contributed to the astonishing failure of the English in Scotland in 1306–7. The constitutional arguments should not be laboured: far more important were the practical implications of English policy in Scotland. A central issue in the question of English colonialism is the way in which Edward granted lands in Scotland to his supporters. Edward

has been accused by McFarlane in a much-quoted phrase of preferring ‘masterfulness to the arts of political management’, and for the contemporary chronicler Pierre Langtoft one of the king’s failings was that he disdained the virtues of largesse. In Langtoft’s view, if Scotland had been properly shared out between the English barons, then Edward would have been able to hold it effectively, and his heirs after him.10 In fact, Edward was much less ungenerous in the case of Scotland than he had been in Wales, and the danger in his policy was less that English magnates would be discontented at receiving inadequate rewards for service, than the alienation of the Scottish nobles whom the king was anxious to win over to his cause. Edward’s policy of granting lands to his followers developed in clear stages. In 1296 confiscation was confined to Berwick and to the lands of those captured at Dunbar and elsewhere. These estates were not regranted to English magnates: the king clearly had hopes of exercising his superior lordship over a largely unchanged Scotland. With the Falkirk campaign of 1298 a much more thorough-going policy was adopted. At the York parliament which preceded the expedition Edward declared his intention of expropriating his Scottish enemies and redistributing their lands. The process was not to be an easy one. In the closing stages of the campaign the earls of Norfolk and Hereford objected vociferously when the king agreed to a request from Thomas Bisset of Antrim that he be granted the Isle of Arran. They felt that they should have been consulted, and withdrew from any further participation in the expedition. Their absence from a meeting at Carlisle did not prevent a distribution of Scottish estates taking place, although according to Walter of Guisborough Annandale and Galloway, and some lands elsewhere, were not granted out by the king for fear of further infuriating the earls. It may, however, have been at this time that John de St. John was granted land worth 1,000 marks in Galloway.11 Unfortunately there is no full record of the grants made by Edward in the autumn of 1298. They were made under the great seal which the king used for his rule in Scotland, and no enrolments survive. It is only from the original documents that we know of the grant made at Carlisle of the lands of Geoffrey de Mowbray, John of Stirling and Andrew de Chartres to the earl of Warwick. A Dodsworth transcript preserves the grant of Caerlaverock castle to Robert Clifford. The original of the grant of 25 September of all the lands of their rebellious Scottish tenants to Durham cathedral priory still exists. Later petitions also reveal grants made in 1298, showing that on 22 September Adam de Swinburn received the lands of John of Montgomery, and that three days later the barony of Renfrew was granted to the earl of Lincoln. A complete reconstruction of the distribution of estates made at Carlisle is, however, impossible.12 It was essential for Edward to reward his captains with grants of lands in Scotland, for he was not in a position to satisfy them simply by paying them wages. A substantial proportion of the cavalry troops served voluntarily, as most of the great magnates would not accept pay for summer campaigns. Nor, even when wages were paid, were they set at levels which

would do much more than cover expenses. One obvious technique was for the grants to be made in advance of conquest taking place, as an inducement to fight. The chronicler Walter of Guisborough commented that many of the grants of 1298 were made in hope. In 1300 John de St. John complained that the land he had been granted in Galloway was in hostile hands, and it seems probable that he had never in fact been able to occupy it. In 1301 the castle and barony of Bothwell were granted to Aymer de Valence on 10 August, a month before the castle fell to the English.13 By 1302 the number of Englishmen holding lands in Scotland, at least in name, was substantial. A series of memoranda for the garrisoning of castles by a total of some 115 menat-arms shows that it was decided in the July parliament at Westminster that those who had been granted lands in Scotland should provide troops for guarding the castles. Fifty-one individuals are named. The largest quota of service was that of twelve men-at-arms owed by Aymer de Valence. The earl of Lincoln and John de St. John each owed ten. The earl of Warwick’s quota was only three, and no other earls appeared on the list. John Botetourt and William Latimer each owed four men, Robert Clifford, Robert de Tony, John de Segrave, John Kingston and various others three each. It seems likely that this is a reasonably accurate count of those who had received grants in Scotland, and the list is as interesting for those it does not include as for those it does. It is hardly surprising that Roger Bigod, earl of Norfolk, was not included, but two of his associates in the opposition to Edward in 1297, Robert Fitz Roger and John de Segrave, were. Both men had done good service in Scotland. Grants were not confined to men close to the king: only ten out of the fifty-one who received lands were household knights. The scheme is interesting as showing that, for all that feudal service is often considered to have been an anachronism by the early fourteenth century, Edward I and his advisers thought it worth trying to create a new form of such service in Scotland. The effort was, however, only partly successful. Warwick sent none of the men he was asked for, and more strikingly, both Clifford and the steward of the household, Walter Beauchamp, failed in their duty. In all, thirty-two out of the anticipated 115 did not appear, and it is not surprising that no more was heard of this particular system.14 The policy of granting Scottish estates to English magnates could cause problems in the event of the original Scottish owner changing sides, and joining Edward I. The point is obviously very relevant to the career of the future king, Robert Bruce. A significant part of the rather ambiguous terms of the agreement he made with Edward when he changed sides in the winter of 1301–2 was that he should continue to hold the lands of which he had possession in Scotland, and that in due course he should be allowed to inherit his father’s estates.15 It is unlikely that any English magnates had in fact succeeded in laying hands on any of Bruce’s estates, and there was therefore no need for Edward to compensate any of his followers for losses incurred as a result of Bruce coming over to join the English cause, but in other cases problems were to be much greater. It is striking that as far as Bruce was

concerned, Edward was not prepared to reward a Scottish supporter with new estates in Scotland in the way in which he was ready to make grants to Englishmen, and his lack of generosity to Bruce must surely have contributed to the future king’s decision to rise against the English yoke. Success appeared to come to Edward in Scotland with the capture of Stirling castle in 1304. The question of grants of land was raised immediately the garrison surrendered. On the day after the siege ended the fourteen leading magnates in the army were asked how those who had taken part in the campaign might best be rewarded. Lists of those present were prepared, and the committee met on three occasions, but to no avail. Edward was asked if the matter could be postponed until parliament met in England, and it was suggested that in the meanwhile it might be possible to make grants of wardships, marriages, franchisal rights and the like.16 The problem was not an easy one, for the first demand that John Comyn had made earlier in 1304, in his surrender negotiations at Strathord near Perth, after life and limb, was that those Scots who surrendered should have full hereditary enjoyment of their lands and goods, just as if they and their ancestors had forfeited nothing. This had been effectively agreed, subject to the Scots consenting to a royal ordinance regarding payment of a ransom and fine for their trespasses against Edward, while the more important leaders were also set terms of exile. These surrender terms meant that Edward had no substantial fund of estates to grant to the English magnates, and in fact involved some of those who had received lands in the past restoring them to their previous owners. The problem was not a new one for Edward: it was very similar to that which he had faced in the aftermath of the Barons’ Wars in the 1260s. The solution adopted was a similar one to the Dictum of Kenilworth of 1266, but it took some time to emerge. The question was not dealt with in the Ordinance for the government of Scotland of 1305 — this was one of the failings of that document — but was resolved when the Scots present at Westminster in 1305 appeared before Edward to swear to uphold the Ordinance. The king then announced terms for the redemption of estates according to the scale of involvement in resistance to the English, the most severe being the five years’ revenues demanded of Ingram de Umfraville.17 It is not clear how many Englishmen now stood to lose the lands they had been granted in Scotland, for the Bruce rebellion was to mean that little progress would be made in the complex process of redemption of estates. The earl of Lincoln had been granted the lands of James Steward, and these were restored in the autumn of 1305. Lincoln had to wait a year before receiving compensation in the form of a promise of £4,000 out of forthcoming ecclesiastical vacancies, wardships and marriages. In 1306 John de Bar was granted £2,000 in return for relaxing his demand for land worth 1,000 marks in Scotland, a deal which demonstrates the problems Edward had in reconciling the wants of his followers with the terms agreed with the Scots. Some English magnates were fortunate in being able to retain

their lands in Scotland. Aymer de Valence did not lose Bothwell, for William Murray had died in 1298, and Andrew Murray, his eventual heir, was only born in 1298, and there appears to have been little question of restoring the barony to him.18 The whole question was a very thorny one, and even had Bruce not rebelled, Edward would have faced major problems in achieving a satisfactory territorial settlement in Scotland. A petition presented early in Edward II’s reign from the burgesses of Roxburgh shows that those of their number who had surrendered in 1304 had failed, despite repeated attempts, to recover their holdings, even after Edward I had ordered that redress be made to them.19 Bruce’s action in slaying John Comyn and assuming the Scottish throne transformed the situation once more. It seemed that Scottish lands were once more there for the taking, and Edward resumed his policy of granting estates to his followers. The most famous grant was that to his son-in-law, the earl of Hereford, who received Lochmaben castle and all Bruce’s lands in Annandale on 10 April 1306. On 22 May John Hastings was given the lands and title of the earl of Menteith, some time before the earl actually surrendered. Bruce’s title of earl of Carrick went to Henry Percy, and that of earl of Atholl to Ralph de Monthermer.20 There was no general distribution of estates, however, for the bulk of decisions was delayed by Edward. Aymer de Valence wrote to him asking for Gilbert de la Haye’s lands to be given to Walter de Beauchamp, but the reply was that ‘the king wishes no lands given until he himself arrives in Scotland, when he will take fitting measures’. A little later Edward asked for the names of all who asked for lands to be recorded. The roll that was duly drawn up reveals something of the problems that he faced, with the very first entry showing that there was a conflict for Gilbert de la Haye’s lands, which were sought after by Hugh le Despenser as well as Valence. The king was importuned for grants all the way on that painful journey north in 1306. The requests were very specific in character: on 22 August, for example, Henry de Prendergast, taking advantage of the fact that he brought the king news of the capture of Simon Fraser, asked for the lands of Walter de Wyston and Robert de Nesbit, with those of their respective tenants Austin de Moray and Robert de Inchestour. Edward himself seems to have taken little initiative, though he had it recorded that when the time came for the drafting of an ordinance for the distribution of lands, he wished to see Gruffydd ap Rhys and Morgan ap Maredudd rewarded for their services. In fact, no ordinance dealing with the matter seems to have been produced, and a few grants survive. The events of 1307 meant that even if men did receive promises of lands in Scotland, they were unlikely to see them implemented.21 It is not clear why Edward did not produce the promised ordinance, but perhaps it is not surprising in the difficult days at the end of the reign, when the elderly king was finding it an increasing strain even to get up in the morning. Also, even after Bruce’s rising, it was still difficult to satisfy the English without alienating the Scots. The execution of the earl of Atholl in 1306 did not set his son David against Edward, for his mother was a Comyn. Accordingly, Ralph de Monthermer had to surrender the earldom of Atholl he had so recently

been granted, receiving a promise of compensation to the tune of 10,000 marks. Edward could afford to be more than usually generous in this case, as he laid down that half the sum was to come out of the wardship of the Gloucester estates, and half from David of Atholl. Neither Ralph nor David can have been happy with the deal, and Robert Bruce was to show himself perhaps wiser than Edward in not declaring the earldom forfeit, in the hope that Earl David might ultimately support him, as indeed he did for a time.22 The promises of lands in Scotland made by Edward did not, of course, necessarily bear much relationship to the uncomfortable reality of the English occupation. The situation was one in which English bases at Berwick and Carlisle supported isolated English garrisons in southern Scotland in an attempt to maintain a presence between the great summer campaigns such as those of 1300 and 1301. The burden fell largely upon royal castle constables and their men, with the addition of Valance’s troops in Bothwell, and by 1304 those of the earl of Lincoln in Inverkip. There is much evidence for the manning of the English-held castles in Scotland. In 1298 arrangements were made on a lavish scale: Berwick alone was to have a garrison of sixty men-at-arms and 1,000 infantry. Numbers were still large in 1300, when Edinburgh contained 325 men. Documents suggest a total garrison strength in the various royal castles of some 1,100 men in the autumn of 1302, but numbers fell later. An ordinance of 1304 allowed for only thirty-four men-at-arms and 131 footsoldiers in Berwick, Roxburgh, Jedburgh and Edinburgh combined.23 The commanders of these forces were largely drawn from the royal household, the most notable perhaps being John de Kingston, who commanded at Edinburgh almost continuously from 1298 until the end of the reign. William de Felton had been constable at Beaumaris in Anglesey before he was moved to Scotland and command at Linlithgow. William Latimer, a household knight of immense experience, was constable for a time at Berwick. John de St. John was another eminent household knight who held major command in Scotland. The Hastang brothers, Richard and Robert, who served at Roxburgh and Jedburgh, were exceptional in not being in receipt of fees and robes as household knights. A similar dominance of household men is shown by an examination of the clerks employed by Edward in his administration of Scotland, notably between 1298 and 1305. John Weston, permanent paymaster at Berwick, Richard de Bromsgrove, victualler there, and James Dalilegh, victualler at Carlisle, were all closely linked to the household. The settlement of 1305 brought to the fore John Sandale, an experienced household clerk and former paymaster in Gascony, now given the post of chamberlain.24 Elsewhere in his dominions Edward was cautious about rewarding his officials with grants of land in the region where they exercised power. His experiences with Jean de Grailly in Gascony, and with Stephen de Fulbourne and William de Vescy in Ireland had demonstrated that a conflict of interests might arise, and it is striking that it was not until Edward II’s reign that John Wogan began to build up his territorial strength in Ireland.25 There is no evidence that any such caution was employed in Scotland with regard to the constables of castles. The

records of lands held in 1302 show that John Kingston, the Hastang brothers, John de Segrave, then constable at Berwick, and John de St. John had all received grants of land. On the other hand, John of Brittany, the king’s kinsman, who was appointed as royal lieutenant in Scotland at the end of the reign, was to receive 3,000 marks a year out of the issues of the land, but appears to have been granted no lands in Scotland, a position which was certainly in line with policies adopted in Gascony and Ireland.26 One element normally present, indeed often dominant, in Edward’s ventures was strikingly little represented in Scotland. In Gascony Jean de Grailly, in Wales men such as Jean de Bevillard and William Cicun, in Ireland Geoffrey de Geneville (or Joinville), all demonstrate the king’s close connections with the Savoyard and Burgundian nobility. Above all, Otto de Grandson provides a connecting link between many of the king’s enterprises, particularly in the first half of the reign. In Scotland, however, the Savoyards were not involved to any great extent. The great master mason James of St. George’s talents were wasted on the limited works of fortification which took place, and he was accompanied by few of his compatriots.27 Mention should be made of one Burgundian who did serve Edward in Scotland, Jean de Lamouilly. An expert in the use of explosives, he received a grant of eighty marks worth of land in 1307, and later demonstrated his discontent at the way in which the English had failed to reward him properly for his services by kidnapping the earl of Pembroke as he returned from Avignon.28 A very important aspect of English colonialism in Wales was the construction of the great chain of castles in the north, with their associated borough settlements, which had of course a parallel of sorts in Gascony with the building of the bastides. English policy in Scotland was much less ambitious. The war began, of course, with the sack of Berwick in 1296, and Edward decided that the place should be turned into the northern equivalent of a bastide. Great care was taken with the planning of the town, but the new defences were initially only of earth and timber. Although some work was in time done to provide a stone curtain wall, this was only on a limited scale. Edward was surprisingly slow to provide the citizens of Berwick with the privileges needed to attract new settlers and trade. In 1302 the burgesses petitioned that ‘as they are new men come to the said town, and have great need of the king’s aid, and have several times asked him, for his own profit and the improvement of his town of Berwick, and for the burgesses inhabiting it’, he should grant them a new charter. They enclosed a draft charter with the petition, which provided for extensive rights of selfgovernment, the franchise of return of writ, two weekly markets, and a fair to last from Easter until Michaelmas. A charter was duly granted, but on much more limited terms. Some tenements in the town were still unoccupied, and there was much hostility from the burgesses towards one of the king’s household servants, Nicholas of Carlisle, whose attempt to acquire forty acres of land lying between the town and the sea threatened the economic viability of the place. Relations with the king were clearly under strain, but at the end of the reign, in

March 1307, a fresh attempt was made to boost the fortunes of Berwick with a new charter and an agreement that the burgesses should farm the place themselves for 500 marks a year. Nevertheless, it is clear that Berwick under Edward I never approached the prosperity it had enjoyed under Alexander III, and it was only when the town was recaptured by the Scots in 1318 that its fortunes began to revive once more.29 The English did not attempt to plant entire new communities anywhere else in Scotland. Roxburgh saw the influx of a number of English burgesses, but they, to their disgust, had to live alongside Scots.30 At the three sites where the building of new castles was planned, Inverkeithing, Tullibody and Polmaise, there is no indication that there were to be new settlements established. Nor does it seem that many traders tried to take advantage of Edward I’s activities in Scotland to find new markets and sources of supply. There is one surviving account of a partnership between two Londoners, which was to involve the purchase of woad at Amiens for sale in Scotland, the proceeds then to be used to buy wool and hides for export to St. Omer, but the venture was only a partial success as the woad never materialised, and litigation followed.31 In general terms, the effects of Edward’s wars must have been to curtail Anglo-Scottish trade drastically. There was an ecclesiastical dimension to the English attempt to colonise Scotland. The process of presenting English clerks to Scottish benefices began in 1296, when Walter of Amersham was appointed to Kinross. In 1298 a considerable number of appointments were made, of which the most significant were perhaps those of the wardrobe officials John Benstead and Ralph Manton, given provostries in St. Andrews and Bothwell respectively. Nicholas Hastang, brother of Richard and Robert, was presented to the church of Ayr. He was later to receive a prebend at Renfrew in addition. Master Baldred Bisset, the able canon lawyer who put the Scottish case over so well at the papal curia, lost his rich living of Kinghorn in Fife to Edward I’s clerk Peter of Dunwich, who also obtained a living at Old Roxburgh. As in the case of the grants of lands, the Englishmen appointed to Scottish churches did not always find it easy to gain possession. In 1304 Bernard of Ipswich was unable to take over a church in the diocese of Glasgow to which he had been appointed.32 Edward did not see any of his men appointed to a Scottish bishopric, and this must have meant that the process of installing royal clerks in Scottish livings would not proceed as far as the king would doubtless have wished. He was, of course, able to take full advantage of vacancies and of the seizure of bishoprics when their holders turned against the English crown, but there was hardly the same eagerness among his officials to obtain benefices in Scotland as there was in England. Edward must have hoped that his Scottish venture would prove profitable in financial terms, even though this was certainly not a motive in his decision to intervene in the first place. His Irish colony, if such it can be called, yielded receipts over the whole reign equivalent in value to a parliamentary subsidy, over £50,000, but the position in Scotland was

to be very different.33 The earliest reference to receipts from Scotland comes from the period before John Balliol’s accession, when £500 was raised and paid over to the English treasury.34 Then in 1297 Hugh Cressingham collected over £5,000 which was sent south to the exchequer in England, but within a very short time he was pleading for funds to be sent north for his assistance.35 The evidence for royal receipts from Scotland in the later years of Edward’s reign is rather fragmentary, and reflects the paltry level of income that was achieved. James Dalilegh’s accounts for 1302–3 show receipts of £668 from Lanark, Peebles, Ayr and Annandale, and of £206 from the same districts with the exception of Annandale in the following year. Between 1301 and 1304 John Weston at Berwick received £1,134 from Scottish lands, while his receipts together with Dalilegh’s for the period from March 1304 until the following February amounted to almost £1,400. In contrast, the account book of John Sandale, chamberlain of Scotland, for the last year of the reign, shows nothing received from lands held by the king in Scotland.36 The level of income that these records indicate shows that very little was raised which could be seen as offsetting the immense cost to Edward of campaigning in Scotland. There were no serious attempts made to increase revenue in Scotland by introducing English methods of taxation, either direct or indirect, as far as can be seen from the sources: to have done so would have been to court disaster. The English magnates must have hoped to profit financially from the grants that Edward made to them of lands in Scotland, but it is most unlikely that they ever obtained much. John de St. John’s experience, when he found that the lands granted to him in Galloway were ‘at war’, must have been a common one. The earl of Warwick certainly attempted to obtain revenues in Scotland, for in 1304 the king wrote to Alexander de Abernethy on his behalf, asking him to give the earl every assistance in collecting rents from the lands he had been granted north of the Firth of Forth: it is unlikely that much was ever raised. Humphrey de Bohun adopted a different policy when he made an indenture of retainer with Bartholomew de Enfield, in which he promised Bartholomew forty marks worth of land in Annandale. It is improbable that Bartholomew ever received anything tangible as a result.37 If it is permissible to speak of colonies in the middle ages, then there was certainly much that was colonial about Edward I’s intentions in Scotland, particularly after 1298. The extent to which those intentions were translated into achievements was, however, very limited. In constitutional terms there was considerable ambiguity about the English position. Starting from a claim to feudal suzerainty, Edward had shifted by the time that the Ordinance of 1305 was produced to a situation whereby a kingdom was reduced to the status of a land. The implication is that Edward had no intention of reviving Scottish kingship in any form, and that Scotland was to have a similar relationship to England as that of Wales, Ireland, or even Gascony. Edward certainly treated Scotland as if it was an English colony when it came to granting lands there to his magnates. The criticism of his lack of generosity voiced by Langtoft was not really justified: Edward was much freer with Scottish estates than he had

been with Welsh lands, and his policy stands in marked contrast with the parsimonious operation of royal patronage in England.38 The grants were a necessary means of persuading men to fight, but in practical terms they often did not amount to much, particularly in those cases where the king made promises of lands which had not in fact been conquered. The attempt to establish a form of feudal service was a failure, and it is unlikely that the English recipients of Scottish lands ever collected much revenue from them. The crown itself certainly found it hard to raise much money in Scotland. The extensive scale of land grants was not matched by a similar scale of actual occupation. Certainly, very large armies marched north, but the permanent presence of the English in Scotland was largely confined to castles south of the ‘Firth of Forth, which were under the command of members of the royal household. Even the attempt to colonise Berwick with English burgesses was not carried out with the thoroughness to be expected of Edward I, and the eventual treachery of one of those burgesses in 1318 is understandable, even without allowing for the hardships suffered in the course of Edward II’s reign. The English attempt at colonisation of Berwick brought no increase of economic prosperity, rather the reverse. There was an inevitable ambivalence in English policies in Scotland. If Englishmen were granted estates on a large scale, then the original Scottish landowners would be driven to oppose Edward I, and a long-term settlement would become yet more difficult. This dilemma was never properly resolved, and the process that was envisaged in 1305 for the redemption of their estates by the Scots along lines similar to the Dictum of Kenilworth would have resulted, if carried through, in immense bitterness. As it was, Edward found himself faced by costly claims for compensation from his supporters when they found that they had to return some of their lands in Scotland to the original owners. Edward had to try to create a permanent English vested interest in Scotland, but as a total military conquest such as had been achieved in Wales proved impossible, he also had to reach an accommodation with the Scottish nobility, or at least a large part of it. There was no real chance that a stable settlement could have been achieved along the lines envisaged in 1304–5; Scotland could not be converted into an English colony. Even without the seizure of the throne by Robert Bruce, Edward had surely set his country on a course which could only lead to continued warfare. NOTES 1. R. R. Davies, ‘Colonial Wales’, Past and Present, lxv (1974), 3–23; M. W. Labarge, Gascony, England’s First Colony, 1304–1453 (London, 1980); R. Frame, Colonial Ireland, 1169–1369 (Dublin, 1981). For a broader discussion of colonies, see M. I. Finley, ‘Colonies — an attempt at a typology’, TRHS, 5th ser. xxvi (1976), 167–88. 2. H. Rothwell, ‘Edward I’s Case against Philip the Fair over Gascony’, EHR, xlii (1927), 572–82; P. Chaplais, English Medieval Diplomatic Practice, I, ii (London, 1982), 422–30. 3. The appeal to monastic chronicles is discussed by E. L. G. Stones and G. G. Simpson (eds.), Edward I and the Throne of Scotland (Oxford, 1978), i, 137–62. 4. T. Rymer (ed.), Foedera (Record Comm., 1816–30), I, ii, 757.

5. See for example the arguments of some of the foreign lawyers consulted by the English, and those of the exiled chief justice, Thomas Weyland, who in arguing for partition no doubt hoped to please Edward and so return to favour: Stones and Simpson, Edward 1 and the Throne of Scotland, ii, 358–65. 6. J. Stevenson (ed.). Documents illustrative of the History of Scotland, 1268–1306 (Edinburgh, 1870), ii, 32–5.1 am grateful to Professor G. W. S. Barrow for drawing my attention to this document. 7. E. L. G. Stones (ed.), Anglo-Scottish Relations 1174–1328 (London, 1968), 116. 8. Ibid., 120; Rotuli Parliamentorum (Record Comm., 1783), i, 220. 9. Stones, Anglo-Scottish Relations, 120–9; for comments, see for example G. W. S. Barrow, Robert Bruce and the Community of the Realm of Scotland (London, 1965), 189; W. C. Dickinson, revised and ed. A. A. M. Duncan, Scotland from the Earliest Times to 1603 (Oxford, 1977), 162 n.; F. M. Powicke, The Thirteenth Century, 1216–1307 (2nd. ed., Oxford, 1962), 712. 10. K. B. McFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England (Oxford, 1973), 267; T. Wright (ed.), The Chronicle of Pierre de Langtoft, ii, 328. 11. Ibid., ii, 312; H. Rothwell (ed.), The Chronicle of Walter of Guisborough (Camden Soc., lxxxix, 1957), 329; H. T. Riley (ed.), Willelmi Rishanger, Chronica et Annales (Rolls ser., 1865), 388; Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1292–1301, 536. 12. F. Palgrave (ed.), Documents and Records illustrating the History of Scotland (London, 1831), 202–4; Bodleian Library, Dodsworth MS 70, f. 64; Durham, Dean and Chapter Muniments, MC 992; J. Bain (ed.), Calendar of Documents relating to Scotland [CDS] (Edinburgh, 1884), ii. no. 1183. 13. M. C. Prestwich, ‘Cavalry Service in early Fourteenth Century England’, in J. Gillingham and J. C. Holt (eds.), War and Government in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 1984), 147–9; Rothwell, Guisborough, 329; Bain, CDS, ii, no. 1153; Palgrave, Documents, 234–6. 14. PRO, E 101/10/5, E 101/10/10; Bain, CDS, ii, nos. 1321, 1324. 15. E. L. G. Stones, ‘The Submission of Robert Bruce to Edward I, c. 1301–2’, SHR, xxxiv (1955), 131–2. 16. Palgrave, Documents, 274–5. 17. Ibid., 279-88; Rymer, Foedera, I, ii, 974–5. 18. Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1301–7, 481; Bain, CDS, ii, no. 1857; PRO, E101/369/11, f. 102v; Barrow, Bruce, 128. 19. Bain, CDS, iii, no. 115. 20. Bain, CDS, ii, nos. 1757, 1771, 1945; M. T. Martin (ed.),The Percy Chartulary (Surtees Soc., cxvii, 1909), 452. 21. Palgrave, Documents, 301–18; Bain, CDS, ii, no. 1782. 22. Bain, CDS, ii. no. 1945; Barrow, Bruce, 386–7. 23. Bain, CDS, ii, no. 1022; PRO, E 101/531/7; E 101.10.5; E 101/12/10. 24. For a fuller discussion, see my thesis, ‘Edward Ps Wars and their Financing, 1294–1307’ (deposited in the Bodleian Library, Oxford), 164–7, 185–90. 25. J. P. Trabut-Cussac, L ‘administration anglaise en Gascogne sous Henry III et Edouard I (Paris, Geneva, 1972), 142n; G. J. Hand, English Law in Ireland, 1290–1324 (Cambridge, 1967), 21–6. 26. Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1301–7, 391. There is some doubt about the level of John of Brittany’s fee, for Palgrave, Documents, 292, suggests 2,000 marks a year. Bain, CDS, ii. no. 1835, shows that he did receive some lands in England, which had formerly been held by John Balliol. 27. R. A. Brown, H. M. Colvin and A. J. Taylor, The History of the King’s Works (1963), i, 409–20. 28. Stevenson, Documents, ii, 480; Bain, CDS, ii, no. 1899; J. R. S. Phillips, Aymer de Valence, earl of Pembroke, 1307–1324 (Oxford, 1972), 111–5. 29. Brown, Colvin and Taylor, King’s Works, ii, 563–4; C. M. Fraser (ed.), Northern Petitions (Surtees Soc., cxciv, 1982), nos. 13, 14, 20, 22.1 have preferred the date of 1302 to 1306 for nos. 13 and 14, but either is possible. See also Calendar of Charter Rolls, iii, 27–9. 30. G. W. S. Barrow, ‘The Aftermath of War: Scotland and England in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries’, TRHS, 5th ser., xxviii (1978), 108. 31. G. A. Williams, Medieval London, from Commune to Capital (London, 1963), 122. 32. Bain, CDS, ii, nos. 839, 1023, 1502, 1598; Barrow, Bruce, 167. 33. Frame, Colonial Ireland, 67. 34. T. F. Tout, Chapters in the Administrative History of Medieval England (1920–33), ii, 90. 35. PRO, E 405/1/11, 1 June; M. C. Prestwich (ed.). Documents Illustrating the Crisis of 1297–8 in England (Camden Soc., 4th ser., xxiv, 1980), 100, 104–5.

36. Bain, CDS, ii, nos. 1608, 1646; Stevenson, Documents, ii, 428–9; PRO, E 101/13/16. 37. Bain, CDS, ii, nos. 1153, 1476, 1899. 38. I have discussed Edward’s patronage in a rather wider context in an article on ‘Royal Patronage under Edward I’, in P. R. Coss and S. D. Lloyd (eds.), Thirteenth Century England I: Proceedings of the Newcastle-upon-Tyne Conference 1985 (Woodbridge, 1986).

2 The Anglo-Scottish Marches in the Fifteenth Century: A Frontier Society? Anthony Goodman

When Frederick Jackson Turner developed his thesis about the central role of the frontier in the development of American institutions, he was not interested in testing its relevance to other countries and continents or to remoter periods of history. Because of his conviction that American values were unique and that they were formed by the pioneering experience of the frontier, he was at pains to emphasise the uniqueness of that experience: The American frontier is sharply distinguished from the European frontier — a fortified boundary line running through dense populations. The most significant thing about the American frontier is, that it lies at the hither edge of free land.1

Turner contrasted the frontier as a broad region, distinctive in its social characteristics, with the frontier as a jurisdictional and strategic boundary line. He wished to distinguish and distance American institutions from those of contemporary European nation-states. He saw the European national boundary dividing settled populations as an extension of the power of the central state, and the United States as an institutional embodiment of the democratic values which had evolved among the pioneers of the moving frontier. Turner focused attention on the peripheries of societies and the need to define their characteristics. His concept of the dynamism of the moving frontier has been given more general application, to societies as diverse as ancient Rome, the Spain of the Reconquista and early modern Russia.2 One recurring phenomenon which the study of frontiers has illuminated is the development of boundary zones whose semi-fixity and particular social problems produced ‘March’ jurisdictions. These ‘frontier societies’ were — to borrow a phrase used by Elena Lourie to describe the Spain of the Reconquista — ‘societies organised for war’.3 The adelantados appointed by the later medieval Castilian kings on the borderlands with Granada exercised such Marcher jurisdictions. In the period after 1350 and until the start of the Catholic Kings’ crusades in 1482, the borderline between Castile and Granada was fairly stable: in the rugged Castilian border regions, la Frontera, defence

institutions, raiding organisation and warlike values developed in ways similar to those among the neighbouring Moors. Despite confessional hostility, the Moors and Christians of the frontier co-operated in peacekeeping mechanisms, recognised a sort of brotherhood in hostility and experienced some degree of material acculturation. A shared environment created between them a tenuous cross-border frontier society as distinctive as Turner’s moving frontier society.4 Such societies were often regarded as semi-alien by the inhabitants of the interior; their cross-border contacts were tolerated as a necessary evil by suspicious princely officials. Early modern states attempted to sever these links, using the frontier line as an instrument of national separation and so fundamentally altering the character of cross-border relations. The boundary between France and the Swiss cantons in the sixteenth century ran through the frontier society of the Jura Mountains. The frontier then took on a new significance, marking the difference in religious confessions which state authorities strained to enforce. As a consequence Jura society split. Previously close economic and social links broke down, as it became difficult to own property or to marry over the other side, or even to make visits there. For the inhabitants the border now marked vital cultural distinctions, not just a difference in lordship. The need was felt to give the frontier line a special and minute delineation. An eighteenth-century traveller observed that trees near it were marked so that it was possible ‘without guide and without difficulty to recognise the boundary in any place, and touch with certainty a Swiss fir tree with one hand and a French fir tree with the other’.5 Thus national boundaries have various effects on borderlands, depending on environmental factors and the nature and relationships of the two neighbouring states. Some boundaries stimulate the development of distinctive frontier societies — but boundaries have been used to undermine such distinctiveness. Can these categorisations be usefully applied to the Anglo-Scottish Borders in the fifteenth century? Classic features of a frontier society have often been attributed to the Borders in the period from the Wars of Independence to the Union of the Crowns. Appropriate sentiments are to be found in the ballads The Battle of Otterburn and Chevy Chase, which describe conflicts between the frontier aristocracies centring on the battle of 1388. In these ballads the structure and values of the Scottish and English Border aristocracies are shown as complementary and their customs as practically identical. The issues motivating their conflicts are local and personal, not national. The opponents have a mutual admiration for and expertise in chivalrous virtue and skills, the practice of which, the ballad singers feel, distinguishes their society from the rest of Scotland and England. But the oldest surviving versions of the ballads date at the earliest from the sixteenth century. Their expression of these sentiments may echo those of Border audiences of mixed nationality: there were then large numbers of Scottish farmhands in parts of the English Marches.6 But the Scottish and English borderlands certainly developed as two halves of a singular

society after the Wars of Independence, in that they acquired distinctive mechanisms for defence and the making and maintenance of truces, similar habits of raiding and a shared culture of valour. They were societies organised for war. The Italian cleric Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini described a Northumberland community in 1435 whose rhythms of life were adjusted to the customary experience of raids from across the Tweed.7 The ballad Dick o the Cow suggests that the inhabitants of Inglewood Forest (Cumberland) in the later sixteenth century lived in a society where the individual was still able to gain redress by following the ‘hot trod’ across the Border and where the unofficial authority of a powerful Scottish surname chief extended deep into the English West March.8 Yet it is not to be concluded that institutions and attitudes remained unchanged generally in the Marches until the union; that the Marches constituted a monolithic frontier society. Changes in its nature in the later middle ages can be demonstrated by an adaptation of two sets of Turnerian contrast — those between moving and fixed frontiers, and those between the settled frontier and the frontier as wilderness. The Anglo-Scottish frontier line recognised by the two crowns in 1237 was already, as Geoffrey Barrow has demonstrated, well-established: much of the present-day line still corresponds to it. Later medieval borderers probably had clear opinions as to where their local national boundary was, defining it by reference to prominent geographical features of ancient importance.9 Some people had strong feelings about the immutability of the traditional borderline. When English envoys at Carham in 1401 asked their Scottish colleagues to restore fully Henry IV’s lordships of Berwick, Roxburgh and Jedburgh and ‘to declare them and their limits, frontiers, boundaries and borders for the removal of all doubt’, the Scots angrily rejected these proposals.10 Behind their reaction lay the suspicion that such a recognition might assist the English in altering the frontier line permanently. The reason for Scottish sensitivity on the point was that for much of the fourteenth century English advances had precipitated a fluctuating line of allegiances with Scotland. Especially after the capture of David II in 1346, the English strenuously attempted to impose a new unity of control over the Anglo-Scottish Marches. The old national boundary line continued to maintain institutional separateness, but new political boundaries were created.11 Within the regions of English allegiance in the Scottish Borders there was a revival of landowning links stretching across the national frontier, which had been a notable feature of Border society before the Wars of Independence.12 The Berwickshire knight Edward Letham, who had entered Edward III’s allegiance by 1346, in the 1360s was holding the wardship of the Northumberland heir John Manners’ properties at Etal in that shire and at Paxton (Berwickshire). Letham’s widow was to marry the Northumberland knight Robert Clavering.13 In Roxburghshire English northerners had speculated in land. Nicholas Knout, apparently a Yorkshireman, inherited Newton, on the river Eden north of Kelso, which he mortgaged in 1360 to Thomas Rydell, burgess of Berwick.14 A few years before then, the Northumberland knight John Coupland,

who served as sheriff of Roxburgh, acquired from Adam of Roulle Altonburn in the lordship of Sprouston near Kelso. Coupland seems to have assisted the rise of the Kers as landowners in this area: in 1358, with the Scottish tenants of Sprouston witnessing, he granted Altonburn to John Ker of Selkirk Forest, for long a pillar of Roxburghshire society under the English crown.15 Another example of an English intruder was the Cumberland knight Hugh Dacre, who established himself in Liddesdale by the acquisition of Hermitage castle through his marriage to Elizabeth Douglas (c. 1355).16 This Anglo-Scottish world was faced by enduring hostility from neighbouring Scottish landowners, those forfeited by the English crown and recipients of Scottish grants of occupied lands. But the practicalities of the situation led those in Scottish allegiance to tolerate the situation and on occasion to enter this uncongenial world peaceably. The chronicler Wyntoun, describing the earl of March’s burning of Roxburgh Fair in 1377, says that to the town ‘Off Scottis men maid gret repayre’. It is clear from the context that he meant men loyal to the Scottish crown. One of them was a servant of the earl of March’s chamber — perhaps purveying there for the earl’s household at Dunbar. March burnt the fair because he could not get redress for the killing of his servant at it, not because he was challenging English rule in Roxburghshire at this juncture.17 Unable to oust the English from Berwick either, where their presence crippled his control of his earldom, he tried to exploit it as best he could. He helped to maintain his household by levying tribute in money, wine and victuals on the burgesses of Berwick. He provided effective protection: in 1378 he assisted the earl of Northumberland in ousting from Berwick castle a band of Scottish raiders who had broken the truce and muscled in on his patch by seizing the castle on their own initiative.18 With the principal exceptions of Berwick, Roxburgh and Jedburgh, the areas of English occupation were soon to crumble. Landowners there had long had wellfounded doubts as to its stability and permanence. Coupland’s disposal of Altonburn to a Scot in 1358 perhaps reflected shrewd suspicion about the matter: Knout’s agreement with Rydell on Newton in 1360 contained the stipulation that he would not be liable to repay the mortgage if he or his heirs should lose the property ‘through the final peace between the kingdoms’.19 In the 1369 truce Edward III conceded that David II’s subjects should have half the rents and profits of their forfeited Roxburghshire lands. In return, the occupiers were not to be disturbed in possession during the truce.20 This agreement seems to have undermined the English occupation: loyalists in Teviotdale complained of their losses and the decline of order. In 1380 a list of estates lost locally was drawn up for the English commissioners before they held a March day.21 Some Scots fled to England; others changed allegiance.22 Robert Roulle, lord of Primside in the regality of Sprouston, gambled on the permanence of the Scottish recovery, though the English were still nearby in Roxburgh: in 1391 he was denounced as a traitor by the English crown.23 By 1409, when Jedburgh fell to the Scots, the English occupation seemed almost at an end and the old frontier line was practically restored as the

national boundary. This striking Scottish achievement was not seriously challenged in the fifteenth century: where the frontier line was concerned, the aims of English diplomacy were mainly confined to getting the metes and bounds of Berwick and Roxburgh recognised and assured and the debatable sections policed. But the continued presence of the English on Scottish soil showed that they had not abandoned the principle of occupation. In 1482 Edward IV schemed to re-occupy areas held under Edward III, and in 1491 Henry VII was hoping to get hold of Liddesdale.24 Families such as the Manners of Etal doubtless long remembered that they had once possessed nearby Scottish estates: others were eager to carve out a fortune there if the opportunity arose.25 English Border landowners had both historic and strategic reasons for not being committed as firmly as their Scottish neighbours to the maintenance of the ancient national borderline as the frontier of allegiances. Opinion on a crucial Border issue tended to divide the aristocracies on national lines in the fifteenth century. The period of the gradual restoration of the frontier (c. 1370–1409) partially coincided with that in which settlement in the Borders was receding in the face of wilderness, in which farms were abandoned and cultivation on marginal land gave way to pastoralism.26 Grain was still extensively sown: in 1424 Sir Alexander Home was growing it at Dunglass. He had 2,618 sheep on his local estates: the valuation set on them and on his cattle was more than twice as much as that set on his sown and stored grain.27 The wealth of Border lords and their tenants now lay chiefly in sheep and cattle: common concern about stock is found in 1429 truce legislation about pasturing cattle and horses on the wrong side of the frontier.28 The problem suggests the human emptiness of much of the Border landscape: it is likely that the Border population remained at a lower level in the fifteenth than in the fourteenth century. Outbreaks of warfare between the realms were mostly brief and large-scale invasions infrequent. The earl of Douglas had to call a conference in 1448 at Lincluden to construct ordinances of war for an invasion of England, based on recollections of practices in use up to 1424.29 Nevertheless, Border landowners were still deeply concerned about the possible destruction of their property by violence from across the Border. When Isabel Dalton made a grant of dower lands near Newcastle in 1407, she agreed that she would make a money payment in the event of destruction by the Scots.30 In 1434 the nuns of Coldstream, planning to go on pilgrimages, had copies of their charters made by a notary: they feared that the originals would be destroyed by raiding Englishmen, especially those who were their neighbours.31 When Andrew Ker granted land in Hownam (Roxburghshire) to Thom Robson in 1454, he conceded that a money payment by him or his heir would be made if Robson could not occupy the property ‘for open war of Englishmen’.32 Hownam was in a very exposed position east of Jedburgh. When property in Northumberland belonging to Balliol College, Oxford, was leased in 1476, an allowance in the farm was stipulated in case the premises were burnt or destroyed by the Scots.33

Here we have, then, expressions of a continuing sense of insecurity. This was fuelled by the problems of defending more sparsely populated regions. From this period Scottish schemes survive for early warning systems from the frontier line and for standing garrisons near it.34 Insecurity was also fuelled by the renewed alienation of the Border aristocracies on national lines, though strenuous efforts were made in the fifteenth century to improve their formal co-operation in enforcing truces.35 The borderers who were then evidently indifferent to national allegiances were marginal characters, criminal elements.36 Were cross-Border contacts diminished in the century? It is not clear whether borderers were visiting the opposite Marches less, since the safe-conducts and certificates of oaths of allegiance taken by those who stayed on, which the wardens issued, have disappeared.37 The English occupation had probably facilitated and stimulated a variety of contacts. These went on, at least in time of truce, even when a raid was in progress. One day in 1390 a Northumberland knight, Robert Umfraville, rode into Scotland with a great force. The same day Wyncellan Dorstan set out probably from Harbottle castle (Northumberland) to ask the abbot of Melrose to be godfather to Umfraville’s newborn nephew, and Nicholas Turpin rode to Gamelspath to meet the earl of March.38 The frontier aristocracies were in the habit of holding joint chivalrous sporting fixtures. In 1404 two Scots were to run six courses on horseback with lances against John son of Thomas Grey and Richard of Ledes at Carlisle, the jousts being presided over by the earl of Westmorland.39 In 1414 Sir William Douglas of Drumlanrig received licences from the English crown to come in a party to joust with Sir John Clifford and six others at both Carlisle and Berwick.40 There appear to be no more enrolled English royal licences for international tournaments in the Marches. But since Scottish lords continued to pass through the English Marches to visit shrines in England and on the continent, and to pay their respects to James I during his captivity, it is unlikely that the borderers among them gave up the habit of jousting with, their English neighbours. There was certainly a sentiment in favour of freedom of contact among Scottish borderers in the first half of the fifteenth century. At the Lincluden conference in 1448, some probably declared that past earls of Douglas, Archibald the Grim and Archibald the Tineman, when they were wardens, allowed ‘intercommuning’ with the English at will, except in time of war, when it was treasonable without their licence. The present earl and the whole assembly approved such practices.41 Nevertheless, attempts had been made and continued to be made to separate the population more firmly on national lines. In a truce draft of 1388, it had been stipulated that ‘no subject of either realm commune with the other, except in trade, nor enter any castle or enclosed town without special leave of the authorities there’.42 The proposal was probably prompted by the concern of both governments to stabilise allegiances after the recent shifts in the Border line. Ten years later truce negotiators were agreed on pinpointing immigrants as aparticular cause of disturbance and instability, presumably because they perpetuated dangerous and uneasily controlled cross-Border links:

That in regard a great many Scotsmen born had settled themselves on the marches of England, and had sworn fealty to the Crown of England; and in the like manner a great many Englishmen born had settled themselves in the marches of Scotland, and had sworn fealty to the Crown of Scotland, and that both these were notoriously known to be the principal authors of all the disturbances that happened in those parts, it was ordained that the Scotsmen born should remove to the south side of the river Tyne, and the English as far north as the town of Edinburgh.43

In 1455 the Scottish parliament attempted to curb the leniency shown to ‘intercommuning’ at Lincluden, decreeing that no Scotsman was to have trysts with Englishmen in Scotland or, on pain of treason, to have special assurance from an Englishman, except by leave of the king or warden.44 This statute, and the earl of Douglas’s plotting as a prolonged exile in England, probably acted as deterrents to aristocratic Border contacts with English neighbours, in order to avoid prosecutions like that of Andrew Ker in 1456.45 But common folk were less susceptible to such governmental pressure: their movements across the Border remained difficult to control. In the later fifteenth century there were significant numbers of Scottish immigrants labouring in the English Marches, to some of whom tenements were leased. In 1490 Henry VII ordered proclamation to be made that all Scots and other strangers who were ‘suspecte and no wele disposed’ and who applied themselves to idleness and begging were to be ejected thence and from Yorkshire out of the realm. Exception was made for householders or menial servants with Englishmen, of good name, and sworn to the king’s allegiance.46 The movement of trade across the Border is, like the movements of the people, illdocumented. It was probably stimulated in the mid-fourteenth century by a measure of peace and stability in the areas of English occupation and their connection with the English Marches which they protected. In 1361 Sir William Dacre’s manor of Nether Crailing (Roxburghshire), worth £40 p. a. in time of peace, was in fact worth as much as £36.47 In 1372 English commissions were appointed to enquire into the taking of fleeces and sheep at shearing time across the Scottish Border from Northumberland and Cumberland to defraud the revenue.48 Goods taken from England to the Scottish areas of English allegiance were not normally charged subsidy — in 1376 a commission was appointed to enquire into the extortions of the recently disgraced London financier Richard Lyons, farmer of the subsidy on wines and certain other goods shipped out of the realm. Contrary to the intent of his grant, he had been levying subsidy on merchandise taken to Berwick, Roxburgh, Jedburgh ‘and elsewhere on the March of Scotland, within the King’s own dominion and regal power, to the oppression and loss of his subjects there’.49 The fact that this remote region was considered worthy of his attention by the grasping Lyons suggests that it had a notable volume of trade. When Roxburgh fair was attacked in 1377, ‘mekill gud ... in lofftis brynt war then’ according to Wyntoun.50 The Scottish conquests did not entirely destroy this trade pattern. The economy of the regality of Melrose continued to be linked with the English allegiance. In 1389 Richard II granted the abbot and monks an abatement of customs on 1,000 woolsacks to be shipped from Berwick. They also received letters of protection enabling them to sell beasts and

chattels in Northumberland and Cumberland and to buy wines, victuals and merchandise there.51 Berwick under English rule had traditionally enjoyed much lower customs on wool exports than Newcastle. The royal concession to burgesses and merchants at Berwick in 1392, in consideration of the town’s losses from depopulation, show the intention that it should continue to attract the trade of the Scottish East March (despite the fact that most of it was no longer in the English obedience) as well as maintaining a stake in Northumberland exports. The collector of customs and subsidies at Berwick was ordered to allow a sack of wool, hides and fells or a pack of 240 fells to be excised at 26s 8d, and a last of hides at four marks, if originating between Tweed and Coquet in Northumberland; at half these rates if originating in Teviotdale and other parts of Scotland in the king’s obedience; and at a quarter of them if originating in the Scottish obedience.52 Clandestine as well as legitimate trade continued across the Border. The English government had long been concerned about the Anglo-Scottish rate of exchange and the circulation in England of Scottish coins of less valuable content than their English nominal equivalents. In 1387 a commission including the captains of Carlisle, Berwick and Roxburgh was appointed to enquire into the practice of merchants and others of carrying gold and silver in coin, ore and plate across the Border into Scotland.53 In the 1390s the English crown was trying to crack down on large-scale smuggling into Scotland. Reference was made in 1391 to a commission issued to the escheator of Cumberland to enquire into who was supplying the Scots with grain and other goods, and in 1392 the chamberlain of Berwick was to head an enquiry before a jury drawn from the town and from Roxburgh, Norham and Jedburgh into the Northumberland practice of defrauding the customs by taking wool, cloth and hides into Scotland.54 This trade was probably welcomed by Scottish Border lords, who, like Scottish nobles generally, relied heavily on imported grain and other commodities, particularly scarce in much of the Borders. Such needs were reflected in the earl of March’s negotiation of two English ransoms (with the earl of Northumberland’s help) in the form of English malt, to be purchased at Berwick or Dunbar (1386), and in the shipment by March’s son George Dunbar from Newcastle or Tynemouth of victuals for his garrison at Cockburnspath in 1404–5.55 Shortage of grain stocks was also a problem for English garrisons and noble households in the Borders. In 1402 the earl of Northumberland was licensed to purchase flour to victual Carlisle and Cockermouth castles from Ireland.56 During the fifteenth century purveying commissions were occasionally appointed to supply Roxburgh and Berwick castles from England.57 Local shortages gave the English crown an incentive to tolerate a measure of trade across the Border, despite fears of bullion losses. In 1403 the earl of Westmorland, as keeper of Roxburgh castle, and his deputy, were licensed to grant safe-conducts to Scotsmen from Teviotdale and their goods, in order to victual the garrison.58 In 1405 the house and estates of Melrose Abbey received Henry IV’s protection, on condition that the regality supplied the Roxburgh garrison with provisions at a fair price.59 In the 1450s Roxburgh and Berwick were

still receiving Scottish victuals.60 By then Berwick’s international trade in Scottish Border wool had probably declined. The falling value of Scottish currency in exchange made the payment of English customs less attractive, even at the preferential rates. The English loss of Jedburgh in 1409 lessened their ability to dominate the one section of Teviotdale which they had still controlled, northwards from there to Roxburgh. There ceased to be a preferential customs rate at Berwick for wool from the Scottish allegiance, only half the Teviotdale rate. In 1410 the Berwick burgesses successfully petitioned for a concessionary rate of 13s 4d on all Scottish wool and Northumberland wool from between Tweed and Coquet (the Teviotdale rate). Their particular interest in reducing the rate on Northumberland wool suggests that this was their main source of exports. The 1410 concession was confirmed for a limited period by Henry V and again early in Henry VI’s reign. In a petition considered in the 1426 parliament, the Berwick burgesses asked for the privileged rate to be extended southwards in Northumberland to the river Blyth. The argument which they put forward suggests that until recently their trade in wool and hides from the Scottish allegiance had still been significant. They said that they could not buy wool, hides or wool-fells in Scotland because the King of Scotland has proclaimed throughout his kingdom that none of his lieges may sell wool, wool-fells or hides of Scottish origin to the English under certain penalty, to their great hurt unless they have aid.61

The petition illustrates how some royal policies (not always with Border trade primarily in mind), as well as problems caused by the adjustments in the frontier line and by declining population, tended to depress cross-frontier trading for much of the fifteenth century. Scottish kings and parliaments were anxious to staunch the drain of bullion abroad and to channel exports of wool and hides through Scottish ports.62 In 1455 James II directed a blow aimed specifically at Border trade: the supply of Berwick and Roxburgh was forbidden.63 Such political barriers reinforced the tendencies among the Border elites in the fifteenth century to make economic and financial ties away from the frontier, in and through the interiors of their realms. Merchants of Newcastle and ports further south along the eastern English seaboard were traditional suppliers of the English Marches.64 Scottish Border lords had long looked to merchants of the Lowlands to supply a large share of their consumption needs and to sell their wool. There are some indications of connections between Edinburgh merchants and Border towns and lordships in the fifteenth century which may have had commercial aspects. In 1432 the earl of Douglas confirmed a grant made by Andrew Roulle to Andrew Ker of property in the regality of Sprouston. Local lairds among the witnesses were Archibald Douglas of Cavers, James Rutherford and Thomas Cranston. But also witnessing were the provost of Edinburgh, William Libertoun, and the baillies Alexander Naper, John Barcare and Henry Dempstar.65 Douglas’s sheriff depute in Teviotdale in 1441

was Master Philip Pyle, who in 1445 witnessed a lease of property in Sprouston to Ker, dated at Edinburgh. In this lease Pyle was styled burgess of Edinburgh and Jedburgh. He was also a notary.66 It is tempting to speculate that Pyle used the two burghs as bases from which to finance, sell for and supply the Teviotdale lairds.67 Such activities are likely to have pulled into the Edinburgh and Lowlands commercial and cultural spheres regions which not many decades before were being attracted into an Anglocentric world.68 Most remaining cross-Border trade was probably essentially local in character. In 1435 Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini was led from a Scottish Border abbey across the Tweed ‘disguised ... as a merchant’, in which guise he stayed the night at an isolated Northumberland farming community on his way to Newcastle. For diplomatic reasons he was trying to evade the scrutiny of English officials in Berwick and Norham — he was probably taken on a well-trodden smuggling and reiving route. But the fact that peasants on his way were dazzled by his appearance and the novelty of his supplies of wine and wheaten bread suggests that they were not used to seeing fine merchants, but peddlars, thieves and drovers.69 Droving was important enough to come to the notice of Scottish parliaments. In 1451 parliament forbade the sale of cattle in England or to Englishmen except for gold or silver. In 1468 it forbade the sale of cows, oxen, sheep or other cattle abroad on pain of escheat: the wardens were not to have power to grant licences.70 On the other hand, legislation of 1454, 1478 and 1481 encouraged the import of victuals.71 A glimpse of a flourishing cross-Border market can be seen in 1467: it is clear that Scots were then in the habit of visiting the market at Norham.72 The Border society in which men such as Philip Pyle were constructing links with Edinburgh and the Lowlands was one whose inhabitants were keenly aware of the precariousness of the restored frontier. English control of sheriffdoms, baronies and benefices was not readily forgotten on either side of the frontier. Noble families prominent in the regality of Sprouston under English rule, such as the Colvilles, Rutherfords and Ainslies, were still prominent there in the fifteenth century. The James Gledstanes who was the earl of Douglas’s baillie in the regality in 1403 was probably related to the William of Gledstanes who had witnessed John Coupland’s grant of Altonburn in 1358.73 Especially as long as the English controlled Roxburgh and Berwick, the status and tenure of lordships such as Sprouston and Cavers and the integrity of the earldom of March were under threat. Shortly before 1456, for instance, an English raiding party apparently advanced up Kale Water and the Teviot valley, burning and harrying at Grahamslaw, Eckford, Crailing and Jedburgh.74 Management of and investment in property in the region was, therefore, a considerable risk. In a retour of 1438 the Ker lands at Altonburn were declared to be worth £20 p. a. in time of peace, but to have become waste and of no value.75 The gamble was often accepted by men with local roots. In 1401 Sir John Swinton purchased the strategically placed manor of Cranshaws in the Lammermuirs from the earl of Douglas for 500 marks’ worth of silver

vessels. Swinton’s outstanding military reputation and his high-placed English connections probably gave him confidence in his ability to protect the property.76 The Roulle family, lords of the exposed Roxburghshire property at Primside, who by 1391 had gambled on withdrawing from the English allegiance, do not seem to have fared well financially in the early fifteenth century. In 1430 Andrew Roulle leased some of his lands there to his neighbour Andrew Ker of Altonburn for nine years in return for a loan of £100. Ker was to acquire the whole property from the Roulle family.77 In 1431 Roulle mortgaged the demesne lands of Hownam to Ker, which he also acquired.78 In 1446 Ker’s son Andrew was granted a husbandland in Cessford — possibly the family’s first possession there.79 In 1473 Andrew II’s son Walter was established in Caverton.80 The rise of the Kers does not appear to have aroused resentment among their overlords and neighbours: generally they were not troubled in possession of their acquisitions. In 1456 Andrew Ker was acquitted of charges of treason by a jury of Roxburghshire lairds in the wardenry court of the earl of Angus.81 The following year Angus appointed Ker as baillie of Jedworth Forest for life.82 In 1478 the abbot of Kelso appointed Walter Ker as justiciar and baillie in the barony of Kelso and in other properties of the abbey.83 The monks of Kelso had long had good relations with the Ker family: in 1439 a grant to Andrew Ker was witnessed at the abbey, and in 1444 the abbot witnessed a grant by his son Andrew.84 In 1475 Walter Ker founded a chantry at the altar of St Katherine the Virgin in the abbey.85 Families such as the Kers established their dominance because they made themselves indispensable to crown, magnates and local society in the integration of the Borders more fully into the Scottish nation. They had mastered the problems of managing the region’s patchy farming resources and of protecting them from English inroads. Border society particularly needed powerful men in residence to form networks of hospitality, kinship and protection. The novel dominance of the Kers in Roxburghshire — and of the Homes in Berwickshire — was accepted because they were prepared to play this role and to identify their fortunes with those of their localities. The 1455 parliament had stressed the need to have good households near the Borders, ready to support the wardens.86 The Homes showed their commitment to the defence of Coldinghamshire and the East March by keeping household at Dunglass and founding their collegiate church there.87 Walter Ker of Cessford was praised by James IV as a good Border householder. In the royal grant to Ker in 1495 of Old Roxburgh as a barony, it was declared that he had provided hospitality and lodgings for travellers in the southern marches of the kingdom at his own expense.88 The distinctive role which the Scottish Border aristocracy had to play to preserve their dominance led them to distance themselves from their English neighbours and identify themselves culturally with the Scottish nation. They did not marry the English, as the English crown hoped the aristocracies of the two realms might do in 1401.89 Sir John Swinton wished to represent his grandfather Sir John (the purchaser of Cranshaws) as a patriotic defender of

the frontier line, in contrast to the earl of March who had for several years been in Henry IV’s allegiance — ‘and in contrar of the Erle of Marche, in defence of your realm he [Sir John] was slane at Homyldon’.90 Cultural distancing by the Scots was reflected in their enthusiasm for national and local religious cults and their declining reverence for St. Cuthbert. The warfare of the fourteenth century had stimulated the militarisation of the supernatural and the mobilisation of the saints. R. B. Dobson has described how the Blessed Virgin Mary became patrona de Carleyl, the city’s protector against Scottish invasion, whose image in the cathedral was much reverenced locally.91 A Scottish raiding force ravaging northern England in 1379 could hardly invoke St. Cuthbert’s protection against the plague currently raging there: they prayed to St. Kentigern, St. Romanus (Ronan?) and St. Andrew — without success, to the Englishman Thomas Walsingham’s glee.92 The earl of March who became Henry IV’s vassal was one of a number of leading Scottish nobles who continued to honour St. Cuthbert: his devotion to the saint had probably helped to inspire his earlier attempts to get Coldingham Priory restored to Durham.93 March’s piety was perhaps becoming old-fashioned in Scotland. The Homes, usurpers of his family’s influence in Coldinghamshire in the fifteenth century, and more ambiguous in their attitude to Durham’s claims over Coldingham Priory, seem to have favoured less embarrassing cults. Sir Alexander Home, in his will of 1424, ignored St. Cuthbert and ordered commemorative Masses in the church of the Blessed Virgin at Whitekirk (where her image was probably the centre of a local cult94) and the church of St. Michael at Oldhamstocks.95 The Homes’ collegiate church of the Blessed Virgin at Dunglass also became a local cult centre. In 1448 Sir Alexander’s son of the same name agreed that the friends of two borderers, Robin of Nesbit and William of Chirnside, should have a chantry in the church; two years later he made an endowment there for the souls of James II, Bishop Kennedy and members of the Home family.96 Such cultural assertiveness was part of a multi-faceted process of disengagement in the Borders in the fifteenth century, tending to create two frontier societies, both more firmly linked to their respective realms and nations. This adjustment was partly the result of the policies of central governments, but it was also rooted in the need of the Scottish Border aristocracy to construct a stable polity after the restoration of the old frontier line and in the context of economic decline. But the process of separation was far from complete, especially at the lower levels of society, less susceptible to governmental pressure, inclined to put pressing economic necessities above national loyalties and perhaps more traditional in cultural attitudes. The tendency of common folk, like sheep and cattle, to wander over the frontier and to ‘intercommune’ was regarded as obtuse by government. Regular institutional contact between the Border aristocracies to regulate society was more necessary than before the Wars of Independence. Peculiar local problems stemming from the existence of a frontier not at peace and peculiar methods of dealing with them continued to distinguish Border

society as a whole in Scotland and England. If the balladry of The Battle of Otterburn and Chevy Chase does reflect fifteenth-century sentiment, it is Sentiment which springs from the tensions created by these problems and the distinctive ways of dealing with them. The ballads emphasise the rigid political separation of the two aristocracies and societies and describe how it is sealed in blood. But at the same time they seek to perpetuate the idea of one frontier society in the sphere of skills and values, a common adherence to local rather than national patriotisms. The diffusion of such sentiments in Border society is likely to have facilitated communication between the inhabitants across the more rigidly viewed national divide. The Scottish borderer attending a day of truce at Hadden or a joust in Carlisle or a market day at Norham could enter into temporary fellowship with Englishmen as part of a ballad audience. The ballad affirmed their division but also their common heroic inheritance. In a period when national divisions and national culture counted for a good deal, borderers needed to oil connections by idealising their common frontier values. Such idealisation assisted their domestic coherence too. Recollection of great deeds performed through the brotherhood in arms of leading families boosted the morale of sparsely populated, relatively poor societies aware of their economic decline since the days of peace and of their vulnerability to invasion. The crises of allegiance and economy in the Borders in the second half of the fourteenth century produced, then, two societies, embattled against each other and more firmly integrated into their national communities. But their continuing crisis of confidence and their need to articulate a new relationship with each other may have begun to create ballad myths that they constituted two halves of a powerful and unique society. NOTES 1. F. J. Turner, ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’, in R. A. Billington (ed.). Frontier and Section. Selected Essays of Frederick Jackson Turner (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1961), 38. 2. W. D. Wyman and C. B. Kroeber (eds.). The Frontier in Perspective (Madison, 1957). 3. E. Lourie, ‘A Society Organized for War: Medieval Spain’, Past and Present, xxxv (1966). 4. For a historical sketch of this frontier, C. J. Bishko, ‘The Spanish and Portuguese Reconquest, 1095–1492’, Studies in Medieval Spanish Frontier History (London, 1980). An illuminating discussion of acculturation on the Castilian-Granadan frontier is in A. MacKay, ‘The ballad and the frontier in late mediaeval Spain’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, liii (1976). 5. J. R. V. Prescott, Boundaries and Frontiers (London, 1978), 197 ff. 6. For the texts of the ballads, F. J. Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (New York, 1957), nos. 161–2. 7. Memoirs of a Renaissance Pope, trans. F. A. Gragg and ed. L. C. Gabel (London, 1960), 34–35. 8. Child, Ballads, no. 185. In the ballad Hutton-in-the-Forest, six miles north of Penrith, is raided. In order to escape from feud with the Armstrongs, Dick prepares to move to Brough (Westmorland). 9. G. W. S. Barrow, ‘The Anglo-Scottish Border’, Northern History [M7], i (1966). For the physical features of the border line, see J. L. Mack, The Border Line (Edinburgh, 1924). 10. E. L. G. Stones (ed.), Anglo-Scottish Relations 1174–1328. Some Selected Documents (Oxford, 1970), 358ff. 11. For citations of Scots law in Roxburghshire and Berwick in 1358, J. Bain (ed.). Calendar of Documents relating to Scotland [CDS], iv (Edinburgh, 1888), no. 21. 12. J. A. Tuck, ‘Northumbrian Society in the Fourteenth Century’, NH, vi (1971), 22–23.

13. Bain, CDS, iv, nos. 82, 92, 130, 179, 196, 262; K. H. Vickers, A History of Northumberland, xi (Newcastle, 1922), 447–9. 14. Bain, CDS, iv, nos. 272, 282, 295. Newton was in the Scottish allegiance c. 1380. 15. HMC, Fourteenth Report. Appendix, pt iii. The Manuscripts of the Duke of Roxburghe [Roxburghe MSS] (London, 1894), p. 8, nos. 1, 2. For Coupland’s career. Tuck, ‘Northumbrian Society’, 36-38. His widow set up a chantry in Kelso abbey with an endowment of pasture in Northumberland (Bain, CDS, iv, nos. 148, 172). John Ker was granted by Edward III in 1363 the wardship of William Rutherford’s lands in Teviotdale (ibid., no. 89); in 1376, on John of Gaunt’s information, the king granted Ker the keeping of Nisbet in Teviotdale during the earl of Pembroke’s minority, in recompense for losses occasioned by the truce (Calendar of Patent Rolls [CPft], 1374–1377, 306). 16. G.E.C., Complete Peerage, iv, 5–6 and 5n. 17. D. Laing (ed.),The Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1879), iii, 9–10; Thomas Walsingham, Historia Anglicana [HA],ed. H. T. Riley, i (London, 1863), 340. 18. C. M. Fraser (ed.), Northern Petitions [NP], (Surtees Soc., cxciv, 1981), no. 113; HA, i, 387–9. 19. Bain, CDS, iv, no. 272. In 1358 David II granted the regality of Sprouston to Thomas Murray, pantler of Scotland (B. Webster (ed.), Regesta Regum Scottorum, vi, The Acts of David II [Edinburgh, 1982] no. 187). 20. Webster,Acts of David II, nos. 441, 444. 21. Bain, CDS, iv, no. 295; cf. no. 523. In 1376, on John of Gaunt’s information, Edward III granted Roger Walker ten marks p. a. from Clifton, Teviotdale (near Morebattle), in compensation for lands lost as a result of the truce (CPR, 1374–1377, 299). Cf. n.15 above. 22. The English still controlled the section of Teviotdale between their bases at Roxburgh and Jedburgh for a number of years. In 1392 Richard II licensed Thomas Sparowe’s acquisition of Maxwell and Softlaw, just south of Kelso (CPR, 1391–1396, 196). 23. Bain, CDS, iv, no. 424. Richard II then made a grant of the property, though no longer in the English allegiance, to Thomas Sparowe. 24. Ibid., no. 1476; ibid., Appendix, no. 32. 25. In 1399 Henry IV granted the keeping of Lochmaben castle and Annandale for life to Thomas Neville, lord Furnivall (ibid., no. 525). The English had completely lost control of Annandale in 1384. 26. M. L. Parry, Climatic change, agriculture and settlement (Folkestone, 1978); J. A. Tuck, ‘War and Society in the Medieval North’, NH, xxi (1985), 39–40, 42–3. 27. Manuscripts of Baron Home of The Hirsel [Home MSS], nos. iii, iv. 28. Bain, CDS, iv, Appendix, no. 21. 29. T. Thompson and C. Innes (eds.). The Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland [APS], (Edinburgh, 1814–75), i, 714–6. 30. Northumberland Record Office [NRO], Middleton (Belsay) MSS, BI/VII/2. 31. Historic Memorials of Coldstream Abbey, Berwickshire (London, 1850), 118–9. 32. Roxburghe MSS, no. 6. 33. NRO, Swinburne of Capheaton MSS, 5/68. In a lease of three mills for twelve years in 1474, the mayor and citizens of Carlisle included the proviso that the farm would be adjusted if the mills were burnt by the king’s enemies (Cumbria Records Office [CRO], Records of the City of Carlisle, Ca. 5/28). 34. APS, i, 714–6; ibid., ii, 44–45, 139–40. 35. For an account of Border conditions in the early fifteenth century, see R. L. Storey, Thomas Langley and the Bishopric of Durham 1406–1437 (London, 1961), ch. 3. 36. Ibid., 139 ff. Examples of the habits of co-operation between English and Scottish criminals are to be found in H. Summerson, ‘Crime and Society in Medieval Cumberland’, Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Soc., lxxxii (1982). 37. For letters of naturalisation granted in 1447 by the earl of Salisbury (Warden of the West March) to Johanna Gray, a Scotswoman, see CRO, Lowther Deeds, D/Lons, DD.C 58. 38. Bain, CDS, iv, no. 820. 39. Ibid., no. 659. 40. D. MacPherson and others (eds.), Rotuli Scotiae [RS], ii, 212. 41. APS, i, 714–6. 42. Bain, CDS, iv, no. 387. In this period the English government was keen that large proportions of its Border garrisons should be drawn from outside the region (Tuck, ‘War and Society’, 45).

43. W. Fraser, The Scotts of Buccleuch, i (Edinburgh, 1878), 21. The English Warden of the East March, John of Lancaster, was concerned about ‘intercommuning’ and proposed to Henry IV and the royal council c. 1406 that no one in the Marches should be allowed to enter into any agreement or contract with any place or man of the adverse party, except by the warden’s permission; see S. B. Chrimes, ‘Some Letters of John of Lancaster’, Speculum, xiv (1939), 7–8. 44. APS, ii, 44. 45. Roxburghe MSS, p. 10, no. 7. 46. Bain, CDS, iv, no. 1563. 47. Ibid., no. 62. For David IPs grant of the barony of Crailing to John Crichton in 1367, Webster, Acts of David II, no. 378. 48. Bain, CDS, iv, no. 200. 49. Ibid., no. 232. 50. Orygynale Cronykil, iii, 9–10. 51. Bain, CDS, iv, nos. 397–8. 52. NP, no. 27. In 1388 wool shipped from Berwick was having 13s 4d per sack levied on it, and wool shipped from Newcastle 50s per sack (C. M. Fraser (ed.), Northumberland Petitions (1966), no. 202); cf. ibid., no. 194; C. M. Fraser, ‘The Pattern of Trade in the North-East of England, 1265-1350’, NH, iv (1969), 61–62. 53. Bain, CDS, iv, no. 367; cf. ibid., no. 571. In 1373 proclamation had been made throughout England against Scottish money being accepted except at its content value, and the English parliament had fixed a rate of exchange disadvantageous to the Scottish fourpence piece (ibid., nos. 201, 209). 54. Ibid., nos. 423, 444; cf. ibid., nos. 571–2, 783. In 1401 the collectors of customs at Berwick were responsible too for their collection at Norham, Roxburgh and Jedburgh (ibid., no. 747). 55. Ibid., nos. 336 (misdated), 358, 676, 701. In 1387 the earl of March was licensed by the English crown to buy flour and malt in the northern English shires and in 1408 the earl of Douglas was to buy flour and barley in Yorkshire and the bishopric of Durham (ibid., nos. 372, 763). 56. Ibid., no. 609. 57. Examples in RS, ii, 218. 58. Bain, CDS, iv, no. 631. 59. Ibid., no. 689. 60. This is assumed from the prohibition of the practice in the 1455 parliament (APS, ii, 44). 61. NP, nos. 28, 29; cf. Bain, CDS, iv, no. 835; RS, ii, 151–2, 206, 235, 256. In 1440 Berwick burgesses were granted the privilege of exporting wool and hides at the now customary rate of 13s 4d from between Tweed and Coquet, as their petition said that they were used to doing from Teviotdale (CPR, 1436–41, 379–80). 62. Cf. the legislation in the parliaments of 1424, 1425 and 1427 restricting the export of bullion and enforcing customs (APS, ii, 5, 6, 9, 15). 63. Ibid., 44; cf. 47. 64. Cf. Fraser, ‘Pattern of Trade’. 65. Manuscripts of the Duke of Roxburghe, Floors Castle [Floors Castle MSS], Writs of Sprouston, Bdle 858. 66. Roxburghe MSS, nos. 13, 25. In 1450 Pyle witnessed a property grant in the barony of Cavers by William Douglas and in 1452, styled notary and baillie of Jedburgh, he witnessed a grant of the barony of Old Roxburgh to Ker. In 1456 he was a member of the Roxburghshire jury (as was Douglas) which acquitted Ker of charges of treason in the earl of Angus’s warden court convened at Selkirk (ibid., nos. 7, 8; Floors Castle MSS, Bdle 874). In 1472 Robert Napyre, burgess of Edinburgh, was among the witnesses who testified in an instrument recounting Walter Ker’s appearance at the altar of St. Katherine the Virgin in the kirk of St. Giles, Edinburgh, in connection with the redemption of lands in Hownam (ibid., Bdle 996). 67. In 1444 Pyle was granted an English safe-conduct to trade with Scottish or other merchandise in England and elsewhere for two years by land and sea (RS, ii, 323). 68. In the debts listed in Sir Alexander Home’s will of 1424 were forty nobles owed by Edinburgh burgesses (Home MSS, nos. iii–iv). Edinburgh burgh council complained in a letter to Bremen (Staatsarchiv Bremen, I/Bc 1445 Juli 15) about attacks on two ships sailing from Scotland to Danzig in 1444. Among merchants who had goods on board these ships were William Dickson of Selkirk and John Kympont of Peebles. I am very grateful to Mr David Ditchburn for giving me this reference. 69. Memoirs, 34.

70. APS, ii, 40, 92. 71. Ibid., 41, 119, 141. 72. Excommunications were pronounced against the Homes at Norham church on 4 September 1467 in the presence of many Englishmen and Scots who were visiting the market there that day; see R. B. Dobson, ‘The last English monks on Scottish soil: Goldingham priory 1461-78’, SHR, xlvi (1967), 18. 73. Roxburghe MSS, nos. 2, 45. 74. Ibid., no. 7. 75. Ibid., no. 4. 76. A.C.S., The Swintons of that Ilk and their Cadets (Edinburgh, 1883), nos. xii, xiv, xxxiii; pp. 9ff, 27ff. The threats to the Swintons’ possession of Cranshaws in the fifteenth century were domestic. 77. Floors Castle MSS, Bdles 858–60, 998; Roxburghe MSS, nos. 39–42. 78. Floors Castle MSS, Bdles 864, 992–6; Roxburghe MSS, no. 31. 79. Floors Castle MSS, Bdle 865; cf. Roxburghe MSS, nos. 27, 29. 80. Floors Castle MSS, Bdle 866; cf. Bdles 867–8. 81. Roxburghe MSS, no. 7. 82. Ibid:, no. 34. 83. Ibid., no. 35. Walter Ker’s exploitation of his moorland at Caverton is reflected in his provision to Kelso abbey of ‘le turf, pete, hathir, cole and brume’. For a valuation of lands in Caverton as at the same level as in the time of peace in 1430, ibid., no. 17. 84. Floors Castle MSS, Bdle 998; Roxburghe MSS, no. 42. Among the witnesses to the 1439 grant were the prior of Fogo and other monks. 85. Ibid., no. 20. In 1471 the abbot of Kelso headed the list of sureties for the payment to Sir Alexander Home’s brother John of tocher for his bride Margaret Ker (Home MSS, no. xi). 86. APS, ii, 44–5. 87. In 1450 Sir Alexander Home made a grant of lands in Chirnside to the college, dated at Dunglass (Home MSS, no. viii). Homes dated charters at Dunglass in 1433 and 1443 (ibid., no. vii; Roxburghe MSS, no. 31). 88. Floors Castle MSS, Bdle 876; cf. Bdles 861–2. Andrew Ker had received a royal grant of the lands and barony of Old Roxburgh in 1452 (Bdle 874). 89. Bain, CDS, iv, no. 589. 90. Swintons of that Ilk, no. xxxiii. 91. ‘Cathedral Chapters and Cathedral Cities: York, Durham and Carlisle in the Fifteenth Century’, NH, xix (1983), 41– 42. 92. HA, i, 409–11. 93. A. L. Brown, ‘The Priory of Coldingham in the late Fourteenth Century’, IR, xxiii (1972), 91ff. 94. In 1435 Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini was impressed by what he heard locally about the Virgin of Whitekirk and went on pilgrimage there (Memoirs, 32–33). 95. Home MSS, nos. iii–iv. There was an aisle of St. Cuthbert in the church of Coldingham Priory in 1426, presumably containing an image and altar before which Home could have had an offering made (Swinton of that Ilk, no. xx). 96. Fraser, Scotts of Buccleuch, ii, 39–41; Home MSS, no. viii.

3 Crown and Nobility in Late Medieval Britain Alexander Grant

This essay1 is an attempt at a comparative study of Scottish and English political life in the later middle ages, between roughly 1350 and 1500.2 Its initial premise is that national politics were then less violent and more stable in Scotland than in England, and its main theme is the explanation of that contrast. The exercise will, it is hoped, shed some useful light on the political histories of both countries. First, however, the premise that Scotland’s political life was less turbulent than England’s in this period requires some elaboration. Nowadays the old ‘thud and blunder’3 approach to late medieval Scottish history has largely disappeared, at least from academic writing. Yet it is still worth emphasising that, with respect to major acts of violence, late medieval Scotland was relatively more fortunate than England. For a start, between 1350 and 1500 only two Scottish kings died at their subjects’ hands: James I in 1437, as the result of a conspiracy which had no support among the political community as a whole; and James III in 1488, in a conflict in which most of the political community either supported the king or stayed neutral. On both occasions the dead kings were succeeded by their eldest sons. In contrast England during the same period saw four kings being killed — Richard II, Henry VI, Edward V and Richard III — and the crown changing hands through force no fewer than six times; indeed in these years every English reign except Henry V’s either began or ended with a royal deposition. Moreover, pitched battles were much rarer in Scottish political conflicts than in English ones: ten in Scotland, twenty-two in England.4 Similarly, late medieval Scotland experienced only fifteen rebellions, serious conspiracies and significant armed demonstrations against the government; late medieval England experienced twenty-eight. And — probably the most important statistic of all — during the period only twenty Scottish magnates met untimely deaths, in battle, on the scaffold or in custody, for political reasons, whereas as many as sixty-eight of their English counterparts suffered that fate (the magnate classes in both countries were roughly the same size, normally containing between about forty and sixty individuals5).

The contrast with England is not just a matter of statistics; it probably has to do with attitudes at the top level of Scottish society. That is suggested by considering what happened after major acts of violence. In Scotland, it seems, what violence there was generally had little aftermath at all. In 1402, for example, David duke of Rothesay, eldest son of Robert III and lieutenant for his aged father, was seized by his uncle the duke of Albany (the king’s brother), and was imprisoned in Albany’s castle at Falkland, where he died. The aftermath was simply a parliamentary enquiry which justified Albany’s actions in seizing Rothesay, and exonerated Albany from all blame for his nephew’s death: Rothesay had died ‘through divine providence’,6 the enquiry stated, and that was the end of the matter. Likewise, consider the culmination of late medieval Scotland’s worst political conflict, between James II and the earls of Douglas—the nearest Scottish equivalent to the English ‘Wars of the Roses’. In 1452 James II summoned the eighth earl of Douglas to Stirling castle, and demanded that he break the bond he had made with the earls of Crawford and Ross. According to the main contemporary source, Douglas said, he mycht nocht nor wald nocht. Than the king said, falss tratour, sen thow will nocht I sail, and stert sodanly till him with ane knyf and straik him in at the colere and down in the body. And thai sayd that Patrik Gray straik him nixt the king with ane poll ax on the hed and strak out his hames [?brains]. And syne the gentillis that war with the king, gaf thaim ilkane a straik or twa with knyffis.7

The greatest magnate in the kingdom had been murdered by the king in a fit of temper. But what happened then? The brothers and associates of the murdered earl revolted, there was a battle in which the rebels fled when the royal standard was raised against them, a parliamentary enquiry declared that James had been justified in all his actions, and a formal reconciliation took place between the new earl of Douglas and the king.8 The conflict seemed to be over. And although it restarted in 1455, when King James attacked and finally crushed the house of Douglas, nevertheless by the standards of the Wars of the Roses the whole episode was little more than a storm in a teacup. The royal action of 1455 was, in fact, most unusual for Scotland. Scottish rebellions normally ended — as that of 1452 at first seemed to have done — in reconciliation rather than in violent punishment. In 1363, after a rebellion against David II by several of the kingdom’s greatest magnates had collapsed in the face of quick, decisive action by the king, there were no repercussions, except that the rebels had to submit and promise to be faithful in future to the king and his officers.9 Similarly, when the Lord of the Isles revolted in 1411 it took the bloody pitched battle of Harlaw to check him; but after Harlaw he too was forced merely to submit to the government.10 Or take the events of 1489: in the year after James III’s death, one group of his successful opponents rebelled against the new regime because of dissatisfaction at the distribution of the spoils, and joined forces with some of the late king’s supporters. This is like the events of the early part of Henry IV’s reign in England. But in Scotland the 1489 rebellion was easily contained by the government, and in the end simply

petered out. There was a general reconciliation in 1490,11 there was no bloodbath similar to those of the early 1400s in England, and there were no more rebellions against the new king, James IV. It would require a tediously thorough — probably year-by-year — study of late medieval Scottish politics to prove the point conclusively.12 But there is no doubt that the lurid acts of violence (‘action highlights’, they could be called) which punctuate the political histories of all countries in the later middle ages were less frequent in Scotland than in England, and also that in Scotland there was more readiness to compromise, to submit and to conciliate. The consequences of violent actions, more often than not, were the dampening down of inflamed passions rather than more violence and revenge. The most striking feature of late medieval Scottish politics — perhaps, it might be said, the cardinal principle behind political activity — seems to have been what can be called ‘the acceptance of the fait accompli’: recognise what has happened, and do not cause more trouble. In England, on the other hand, individual political crises appear to have had much wider repercussions, with one violent action leading on to another, and more and more of the political community becoming involved — as the sequence of events from the start of the Appellants crisis in 1387 through to the final defeat of the Percies in 1408, or the Wars of the Roses, which lasted spasmodically from 1453 to 1487, patently demonstrate. ‘React to the fait accompli’, rather than accept it, seems a more applicable dictum for late medieval England’s political society. Exceptions can, of course, be found to both generalisations. The differences between what happened in Scotland and England during this period were not quite so clear-cut as they have been presented here: the contrast has been expressed starkly for the purposes of the argument. Yet even when it is toned down and the exceptions are allowed for, the basic point still appears valid: politics in late medieval Scotland were apparently more low-key than in England. It is obvious, for instance, that K. B. McFarlane’s revealing comment about late medieval England, ‘throughout our period political miscalculation has a way of ending on the battlefield or on the scaffold’,13 just does not apply to late medieval Scotland, where so few magnates actually died as a result of their political activities. To put it simply, during the late middle ages it was much less dangerous — much less a matter of life and death — to be a politically active magnate in Scotland than in England. The first point to make in seeking to explain this contrast is that the answer does not lie in any special reasonableness, stability, or other form of innate ‘Scottish superiority’. The ‘action highlights’ of late medieval Scottish history show that, when the need arose, individual Scottish nobles were just as prepared to indulge in violence and outrages as English nobles were. Thus there is no question of arguing for any general personality differences between the Scottish and English nobilities. Does that apply to the monarchs as well? Here an argument could perhaps be made for

significant differences. After all, the only Scottish king to succumb to rebellion, James III, was also the only one whose policies immediately evoke those of his unsuccessful English counterparts, in particular Richard II’s. Also, of course, Scotland’s political society never had to suffer the problems of royal madness, as England’s had to after Henry VI’s breakdown in 1453. Yet too much should not be made of these points. It would be wrong to say that James III ruled badly and the other late medieval Scottish kings ruled well. In fact the policies and rule of all Scottish kings in this period are open to criticism in one way or another; none can be portrayed as the ideal medieval monarch. Granted none of them went mad, like Henry VI. But nowadays English historians tend to attach as much significance to Henry VI’s sanity as to his insanity; his personal rule is described in terms of weak or wilful stupidity,14 and is given at least as much emphasis in explanations of the reign’s disasters. Moreover, a reasonable Scottish parallel for Henry VI can be found in Robert III, who is said by Bower to have asked to be buried in a dung-heap, and to have as an epitaph, ‘here lies the worst of kings and the most miserable of men’.15 Bower also states that in Robert III’s reign there was ‘the greatest discord, wrangles and strife betwixt magnates and nobles, because the king, weak in body, nowhere exercised rigour’.16 Yet the result was not a political breakdown, as under Henry VI. Admittedly the situation in Henry VI’s reign was complicated by the power struggle for control of the government which developed during his illness; but in Scotland both Robert III’s reign and the end of his father’s saw a similar power struggle caused (ostensibly at least) by royal age and infirmity, which led to several notorious acts of violence. Thus in Scotland the issue of a lieutenancy for an infirm king did cause political disturbance, just as in England. In Scotland, however, the disturbance was almost entirely limited to the royal family; it did not percolate throughout political society, as happened in Henry VI’s England. It therefore appears unlikely that the personal failings of individual kings can be used to provide an adequate explanation of the differences between Scottish and English political history in the late middle ages. Although no two kings were the same, collectively (as with the nobilities) there seems to be little to choose between them. There is no reason to suppose that the Scottish kings, had they been miraculously transported to Westminster, would have been any more successful than their English counterparts. And from that it may be concluded that it was rather easier to be a successful monarch — or at least a not-too-unsuccessful one — in late medieval Scotland than in late medieval England. This conclusion has important implications not only for Scottish but also for English history. If the explanation of the contrast between Scottish and English politics in the late middle ages cannot be found simply in the personalities of the kings, and if less than firstclass kingship was more likely to produce dangerous political repercussions in late medieval England than in Scotland, then the current tendency among many English historians to emphasise personal factors (especially individual kings’ policies) when explaining the

political events of the late middle ages17 needs to be seriously questioned. Moreover, it is also customary nowadays for political historians of late medieval England to play down the lurid events and ‘action highlights’, just as this essay has done for Scotland. Until recently, for instance, it was stressed that the Wars of the Roses consisted of miniature, local campaigns which ‘amounted to little more than twelve or thirteen weeks in thirty-two years’,18 and, more generally, it has been argued that violence was no worse in England in the late middle ages than in previous centuries.19 But, as was demonstrated above, there does appear to have been substantially less political violence in late medieval Scotland. Also, the characteristics of late-medieval Scottish political society outlined above can be found in medieval England — in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Rebellion was treated much more leniently by the Norman and Angevin kings than by the later Plantagenets. The ‘anarchy’ of Stephen’s reign, the great rebellion of 1173–4, the Magna Carta wars, and even the civil war of 1263–5, all failed to produce bloodbaths like those of fifteenth-century England. Indeed when Edward I put John earl of Atholl to death in 1306, that was the first time an earl had been executed in England since Waltheof of Huntingdon in 1076.20 These points, therefore, suggest strongly that there were particular problems in late medieval England after all, and that the reaction against the old-fashioned view of its turbulence and anarchy during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries can perhaps be taken too far. If the comparatively low-key nature of late medieval Scottish politics cannot adequately be explained by personal factors, it is obviously necessary to turn to impersonal ones. Can differences in the political structures of the two countries be used to explain the contrast in their political histories? Although medieval Scotland’s political society had close ties with England’s — most of Scotland’s central and local institutions and a large number of its noble families derived from twelfth-century England — over the centuries many differences developed between them, and it does seem that several of these had a direct bearing on the raising and lowering of political tension. This will be argued by considering first the crowns and governments of the two countries, and then their nobilities and localities. The immediate reaction to any comparison of the Scottish and English crowns in the late middle ages is that the English was infinitely stronger. So far as the machinery and institutions at the crown’s disposal are concerned, that is true enough. In the late middle ages, Scotland still had a simple household administration, which did not even have a fixed central location like Westminster. The chamberlain was until 1428 the crown’s chief financial officer, and there was no full-time Exchequer, audits simply being held on an ad hoc basis at irregular, roughly annual intervals by boards of specially appointed auditors. Financial turnover was very low, hardly ever above £10-£12,000 sterling a year, and more usually less than half of that; the money came from customs on exports (especially wool) and from crown lands, but not from direct taxation, which was relatively rare in Scotland. Scottish military

institutions were equally simple. There were none of the great English military developments: Scottish armies, throughout the later middle ages, continued to be raised through the age-old obligation of defensive military service on all able-bodied men, and they were always unpaid (which explains the rarity of direct taxation, the low financial turnover, and indeed the apparent lack of development of the Scottish parliament). The same applies to judicial institutions. The only central courts were those of parliament, the royal council, its fifteenth-century offshoot the sessions, and the peripatetic courts of the two justiciars; local courts were held by the sheriffs and the more important landowners. Scotland had no corpus of professional judges like England’s; the justiciars and the sheriffs all belonged to the nobility, and the main lay and ecclesiastical landowners were not only in charge of seignorial justice but were also the leading members of the parliamentary and conciliar courts.21 Yet although late medieval Scottish royal government seems rudimentary by English standards, it was not necessarily ineffective. Medieval governments should be judged by their results, not by their machinery.22 The hub of all medieval government was the royal council, and there are striking similarities both in personnel and in function between the late medieval Scottish and English councils.23 Scotland also had an adequate system of communications betwen the council and the localities through brieves (the Scottish equivalent of writs) and precepts.24 In finance, it was the English system which suffered from bad tallies, perennial arrears and long delays, not the Scottish; and the Yorkist and early Tudor methods of chamber finance, which simplified the fiscal system and greatly increased the yield from the crown lands, were little different from those used in Scotland from James I’s reign on.25 As for military matters, Scotland won its wars in the later middle ages (in other words its war aims, the maintenance of national independence and integrity, were achieved); England did not. Admittedly the Scots suffered several military disasters, but these tended to come at the beginning of periods of hostility, so that much of Scotland’s warfare consisted of gradual recovery from initial setbacks. For England the pattern was the opposite: initial success followed by gradual failure. Judged by eventual results, then, the vast differences in the two military machines are deceptive. Much more relevant is the fact that the English pattern of increasingly unsuccessful warfare, and the constant requirement of heavy taxation to pay for it, were both considerable sources of political tension which Scotland was spared. And (as will be argued more fully) the complexity of the English judicial system was by the late middle ages more of a hindrance than a help to the administration of justice. In Scotland, on the other hand, the machinery for settling disputes, although largely run by amateurs and extremely simple by English standards, appears in practice to have operated no worse than in England, and perhaps indeed rather more successfully, as the statistics for acts of political violence given in the first part of this essay indicate. Furthermore, it is possible to argue that the very ‘sophistication’ of the English system of government could lead to political problems. The more complex a medieval government was,

the more there would be to go wrong; the more centralised it was, the more it would depend on efficiency at the centre. To work to its full potential, English medieval government seems to have required full-time, competent direction from the centre — which it normally did not receive. It has been shown that the English system of criminal law was likely to work at all satisfactorily only when it received the personal attention of a vigorous monarch,26 and this conclusion can probably be applied to the administration as a whole. Yet not until the reign of Henry VII did England have a king who was prepared to be a full-time professional ruler.27 The argument, however, does not apply to the far less sophisticated, less centralised Scottish system of government — which because of its simplicity was much more likely to ‘muddle along’, even if there was less than first-class direction at the centre. More specifically, in late medieval England both the theoretical and the actual strength of the crown can be shown to have been sources of political tension. Because of the exalted nature of English kingship, one of the major themes of late medieval English history is a politically dangerous intransigence and an excessive regard for the royal prerogative on the part of several kings. Another is the concept of accroachment, in which the exercise of royal power by someone who was not the king was regarded as treason, and which could be used against both the king’s ministers and his opponents (one obvious reason for the dangers of English political life). A third is the difficulty of distinguishing between the crown’s public powers of government, which were limited by Magna Carta and other laws, and its private powers of administering the royal household, which were not so limited and at times could be applied very extensively.28 None of these themes seems to have been very important in late medieval Scotland. An episode like Richard II’s ‘questions to the judges’ in 1387, in which all three issues featured prominently,29 would have been inconceivable north of the Border. There the religious mystique of kingship was less developed: although Scottish kings had long styled themselves ‘rex Dei gratia’, they did not enjoy ecclesiastical coronation and unction until 1331, and by then the popular theory of kingship had been affirmed in the Declaration of Arbroath of 1320.30 David II perhaps had a more exalted view of kingship than his predecessors,31 but after him Scottish kings appear to have been much more pragmatic about it, at least until the reign of James III. Late medieval Scotland did have treason trials, but not very many, and mostly on the basic charges of armed rebellion and alliance with England. Scotland’s treason law seems even more limited than Edward III’s English statute (which was often exceeded in practice), and no equivalent to the concept of accroachment can be found until 1469, at the end of James III’s minority.32 As for the royal household, this never appears as an important political issue — no doubt largely because in Scotland’s much less formal system of government the distinction between the public and private powers of the crown was never so significant as in England, and also perhaps because the Scottish royal household, unlike the English, did not have the bureaucratic stimulation of running a great war machine. Only the

faintest echoes of contemporary English disputes over the household can be found in Scotland, such as the statements in parliament under Robert I and David II that requisitions or ‘prises’ for the household would be limited according to ancient custom, or the drawing up of an ordinance for the king’s and queen’s households by Robert II’s council in 1371.33 In late medieval England, the issue of the royal household was closely connected with the subject of crown patronage. The dispensation of patronage — grants of land, leases, wardships, annuities, cash, licences, privileges, perquisites, favours, and appointments in administrative and judicial areas — made a vital contribution to the strength of the English crown. Operating within a highly centralised system of government, it meant (as Sir Richard Southern has stressed) that the crown was normally able ‘to reward those who mattered, and to ensure that those who were not rewarded continued not to matter’.34 From as far back as Henry I’s reign (and no doubt earlier), this use of patronage for political ends was a fundamental feature of English kingship. The system of patronage, however, was open to abuse by members of the royal household and court, as often happened during the late middle ages. Having easy and sometimes exclusive access to the king and the central administration, they were able to manipulate patronage for their own benefit, monopolising favour for themselves and their followers and denying it to those beyond the immediate court circle, especially to their political opponents, whose affairs they could frequently disrupt. Thus among the most serious political grievances of late medieval England were the waste of royal resources on favourites, and the disruption of the proper course of justice by delaying or expediting proceedings and employing biased judges and officials. Also, because the tentacles of late medieval English government reached so far, the partisan operation of the patronage system often had damaging effects on the local communities. Most positions of local power, for example the shrievalties, custodianships of castles, and even commissions of the peace, were central appointments, and were thus vulnerable to political factions — especially the shrievalties, which (by an act of 134035) had to change annually. At times of partisan government, attempts were naturally made to maintain a grip on the country through local appointments: household domination of the shrievalties is very marked in Henry VI’s reign, for instance, while under Richard III the king’s northern followers flooded into offices in the south of England.36 One consequence was that corrupt practices by court-backed officials were likely to go unchecked.37 Another was that changes in central power tended to affect local government and local power structures; thus at the height of the Wars of the Roses alternating Lancastrian and Yorkist governments carried out purges of each other’s local administrations.38 Both consequences tied local and central politics closely together, often forcing many gentry to take sides in central power struggles in order to look after their own local interests. Abuse of royal patronage, therefore, was a major cause of political tension in late medieval England. But because royal patronage was mostly a private matter — the king exercising the royal prerogative as he and those closest to him wished — it

sometimes became impossible to rectify the abuses satisfactorily without removing the king himself. Again, late medieval Scotland seems not to have suffered so badly from these problems — royal favourites never caused political trouble, except perhaps under David II and James III.39 Admittedly crown patronage took much the same form as it did in England, and attitudes to it were similar. Its distribution was generally politically motivated and often unbalanced, it could operate negatively as well as positively, and it was a factor in at least four rebellions.40 The general dangers from the abuse of patronage, however, appear much less in Scotland — not because the patronage was distributed more wisely, but because its scope and extent were much more limited. The crown lands had been exhausted by the share-out of territories to Bruce supporters in the Wars of Independence, and when they were rebuilt, the crown had to use them as the main basis of its revenue. Grants of land were therefore fairly uncommon. Cash grants and annuities were much more usual, especially between 1371 and 1424, but the paucity of the crown’s revenue meant that relatively little was available; rarely more than £1,000 sterling a year went on patronage, and much less after 1424. (In contrast, Edward III spent at least £13,000 a year in the 1360s, while Henry IV at the beginning of his reign was spending over £30,00041). And because Scottish government was less centralised, the manipulation of administrative and judicial affairs, although it did take place, was never so important as in England. Apart from the wardenship of some great castles (to which appointments were made centrally, sometimes with serious political consequences), local offices were mostly dominated by local magnate families. Shrievalties changed hands much less frequently, and indeed during the late middle ages most of them became hereditary possessions.42 This of course would not have prevented corrupt practices by the sheriffs, and indeed quarrels over appointments can be connected with at least two violent deaths;43 but it did remove them from the sphere of everyday political patronage. Thus the shrievalties (and indeed most other local offices) were relatively unaffected by changes in power at the centre — something which probably contributed greatly to the stability of late medieval Scottish politics. A further point about crown patronage in late medieval Scotland is that its most characteristic form was the granting of privileges: the erection of baronies and regalities (which gave lords judicial powers over their estates), the waiving of feudal incidents through concessions of tenure ‘in blench ferme’ (for an honorific reddendo like a penny or a glove), the bestowal of permission to arrange the descent of estates in a particular way, the grant of peerage titles, and the remission of customs dues on exported goods.44 Most significantly, all this kind of patronage was self-contained, simply affecting the recipient’s own lands or goods without disappointing or damaging the interests of anyone else. Such patronage might have caused individual jealousies; it probably did not generate widespread tension within the political community as a whole.

The impressive nature of the medieval English crown and its governmental system — especially in theory — seems therefore to have been at best a mixed blessing. The opportunities it gave for predatory,45 partisan rule were often difficult to resist. Thus it has been stated that ‘the two depositions of the fourteenth century suggest not the weakness but the strength of the English medieval monarchy’,46 and the same point seems to apply also to the five occasions when a king lost his throne in the fifteenth century. In late medieval Scotland, on the other hand, there was much less chance that central power struggles, incompetent monarchs, or selfish courtiers would have wide-ranging and damaging effects on the country as a whole. Instead, the apparent weakness of the monarchy — or perhaps, to put it in more neutral terms, the relative simplicity of the system of government — appears to be one of the main factors in explaining why Scotland was spared the repetitive English sequence of upheavals, political violence, and regicides. In the old view of Scottish history, the corollary of a weak crown was an excessively strong nobility, which was able to use its unbridled powers in an orgy of lawlessness and feuding. That, it must be admitted, has some truth: late medieval Scottish magnates were powerful, and much feuding did take place. But the converse, that because the English crown was strong the English nobility was not so powerful, and was less able to indulge in feuds, does not fit the facts of English history. Late medieval England had just as many powerful, not to say overmighty, magnates as Scotland, and they carried out more rebellions and removed more kings from the throne. Thus it is clear that the traditional formula, weak crown = powerful nobility: powerful crown = weak nobility, simply does not apply to Britain during the late middle ages. As for feuding and noble lawlessness, there is actually much more evidence for that in England than in Scotland, and indeed it is now seen by historians as a major cause of the mid-fifteenth century’s political upheavals.47 No quantitative comparison of English and Scottish feuding is possible, of course, if only because the relevant English records are much fuller than the Scottish.48 Nevertheless, even when the disparities in the sources are allowed for, it still seems safe to say that noble feuding could not have been any worse, so far as its impact on the political community is concerned, in late medieval Scotland than it was in England. In fact it can be argued, in general terms at least, that feuding may have caused rather fewer political problems in late medieval Scotland. Although there is abundant evidence that Scottish nobles were perfectly ready to act violently and lawlessly when they considered it necessary, there are good reasons for believing that such ‘necessities’ did not occur as often as in England. To begin with, some of the commonest causes of disputes among English landowners were less common in Scotland. For instance failure to leave sons, which often led to quarrels over the claims of daughters and collateral heirs, was probably a much worse problem in England: between 1350 and 1500 the rate of extinction in the direct male line

suffered by English magnate families fluctuated between twenty-five and thirty-five per cent in every twenty-five year generation, whereas for Scottish magnate families it was twentyfour per cent in 1350–74, sixteen per cent in 1375–99, thirteen per cent in 1400–24, fifteen per cent in 1425–49, and as low as ten per cent in 1450–74 and 1475–99.49 Something else which affected late medieval England was the operation of the Assize of Novel Disseisin, which, although originally designed to reduce conflicts, positively encouraged them in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries because of the way it was then interpreted by lawyers and judges.50 That was less likely with the equivalent Scottish procedure, of ‘Dissasine’, which, since Scots law was not so technically advanced, probably kept its original function.51 Such considerations are even clearer with respect to the procedures developed for transferring land after a landlord’s death in accordance with his wishes. In England this was done by means of the ‘use’: the landlord granted the land to agents, or ‘feoffees to use’, who while technically possessing it actually returned all the proceeds to the landlord, and then after his death transferred it according to his instructions. The difficulty about this ingenious procedure was that the feoffees’ instructions were not enforceable in the Common Law courts — which indeed did not recognise the procedure at all — and so it was fairly easy to challenge the transmission of land by this means. Uses were therefore a significant source of disputes among late medieval English landowners.52 In Scotland, in contrast, the procedure of the use was not employed. Instead, a landlord would resign the land to his overlord, who would then grant it to the desired recipient, but with the condition that the landlord retained the ‘liferent’, or proceeds, of the land; the transaction would be carried out in the usual feudal form, ratified by a charter from the overlord which was valid in Scottish law and which carried the overlord’s promise to guarantee the transaction.53 This procedure was just as common as that of the use, but the potentialities for challenging it, and hence for disputes, were obviously much less than in England. Then, when disputes did arise, the means of settling them seem to have been more effective in practice in Scotland than in England, at least with respect to the great majority, which occurred at the local level between relatively small landowners. (In both countries, disputes among great magnates were affairs of national importance, and would usually be dealt with by king and council.) There were two basic ways of settling disputes among local landowners, by arbitration out of court or by a lawsuit in court — by ‘love and law’, as the medieval jingle put it.54 Both methods were employed in both countries, but it appears that in England the lawsuit was more typical, in Scotland the arbitration out of court. In late medieval England, however, the lawcourts proved to be extremely poor at settling disputes. The most important, effective and impartial court for landowners had been the General Eyre, but that had been swamped with business in the later thirteenth century and had ceased to operate in the early fourteenth.55 In the system of courts that emerged after the collapse of the Eyre, lawsuits could easily be dragged out for years by means of legal technicalities, and

when verdicts were reached it was often through partiality and corruption — for instance, in the fourteenth century it was quite common for one party in a dispute to arrange for it to be dealt with by a favourable judge, specially appointed by a commission of ‘oyer et terminer’.56 At the same time, since generally ‘possession was nine tenths of the law’, these lawsuits tended to be accompanied by outright violence, as disputing parties struggled to control the lands in question. At first sight the situation in late medieval Scotland seems to have been as bad, for disputes appear most commonly to have been settled out of court by means of the bloodfeud. The medieval Scottish bloodfeud, however, was not necessarily so violent as its name suggests. As Jenny Wormald has demonstrated, it was formalised into a social system intended to avoid vendettas: ‘The point was not that the feud was bloody, but that the escalation of violence was halted by settlement and compensation’.57 In this system responsibility for settling the disputes, halting the escalation of violence and ensuring the compensation of injured parties rested not with the courts but chiefly with the magnates, who acted either as lords of their followers or as heads of their families or kins: ‘The head of the kin or the lord of the victim of crime had not only the right but also the responsibility of forcing the man who committed the crime to compensate the injured man, or in the case of murder his closest relatives and dependants’.58 In 1360, for instance, a violent quarrel, involving several killings, between the Drummonds and the Menteiths (formerly Stewarts of Menteith) was eventually settled at the instigation of several magnates. Chief among these was Robert Stewart (the future King Robert II), who was described in the document narrating the settlement as ‘head of the kins on both sides’,59 presumably because he was head of the house of Stewart and, as earl of Strathearn, was overlord of the Drummonds. In the late 1390s or early 1400s an earl of Douglas seems to have been instrumental in settling a bitter quarrel between the two main cadets of the house of Douglas, Sir James Douglas of Dalkeith and George Douglas, first earl of Angus.60 In 1409 the duke of Albany and the earl of Douglas (then the two greatest Scottish magnates) made an indenture which was concerned chiefly with preventing their respective followers from committing crimes, fighting with each other, and so on. They agreed that in case that outhir controuersy or bargane happyn amang thair men, thai sal lelily do thair power to ger it be amended amang thaim self in lufely manere, and gif thai may nocht acorde be trety in lufely manere, thai sail call bath the partyis ... befor thaim and thair counsele, askand thaim to be submittit to thaim and to thair counselis ..., ande quha sa refusis til submit him to the saide lordis ..., the party refusand that nouthir of the saide lordis sal mayntene na suppouel fra thinefurthe in tha causis that he refusis to submit him apon.61

Similarly, in 1500 William Lord Graham and John Lord Oliphant agreed that ‘gyff ony of thar friendis men and servandis and allya has actionis agane utheris thai sall cum to thar lordis and schaw thar action and caus befor tham that it may be considerit and sene and therefter the lordis to decreit and deliver’.62 Many other examples of such arrangements and

pacifications, which follow the principles of the formalised bloodfeud, are to be found in late medieval and early modern Scotland.63 Two explanations may be suggested for this difference between the two countries’ normal dispute-settling procedures. One has to do with attitudes to the lawcourts. The growth in the scope and prestige of the royal courts in twelfth- and thirteenth-century England had been so great that they virtually monopolised litigation, with the result that parties in disputes instinctively saw them as the natural means of reaching a settlement, irrespective of their efficiency. And probably more importantly, since it was widely accepted that the best title to land in medieval England was that given by the verdict of a royal court, it is common to find landowners in disputes being desperate to obtain a favourable verdict, by fair means or foul.64 In such a situation the arbitrated settlement was probably second-best: it was naturally tempting for someone who was being made to compromise out of court to try to gain a better settlement through the lawcourts — especially if there was a chance (as there often was) that the legal processes might be manipulated in his favour. Also, it seems that in England arbitration procedures were often taken over by lawyers and judges, and operated in much the same way as formal lawsuits — with much the same disadvantages, too.65 In Scotland, however, the royal lawcourts and their legal personnel never developed so far. That is partly because seignorial courts were much more important than in England, and partly because the ‘bloodfeud’ system of arbitration and compensation was already wellestablished when Scotland was feudalised in the twelfth century. Turning to the royal courts was thus not such an automatic reaction for Scottish landowners; the law seems generally to have been invoked only if an out-of-court settlement could not be reached.66 Also, since the procedure of resigning lands was extremely common in medieval Scotland — resignation to the overlord was the standard way of altering the tenure of land — public resignations and quitclaims, recorded in formal documents, provided a very effective means of ratifying arbitrated settlements.67 The second explanation, which is more complex, has to do with the nature of local power. That late medieval Scottish magnates seem in general to have been able and willing to try to settle disputes rather than take sides in them may well have been because they were relatively secure and unchallenged in their exercise of local power, in contrast to their English counterparts. This is suggested by a variety of points. For a start, as has been said already, seignorial courts were a very prominent feature of late medieval Scottish lordship. Most Scottish nobles of any standing held their main estates with baronial powers, enjoying extensive civil and criminal jurisdiction equivalent to that of the sheriff courts. Also some magnates — an increasing number as the late middle ages went on — held in regality, which gave them exclusive and virtually royal jurisdiction over their lands. And barony and regality courts not only flourished in late medieval Scotland, but, equally importantly, were accepted as an integral part of the country’s judicial and administrative system.68 In the middle ages

the Scots crown, unlike the English, did not attempt to undermine their jurisdiction. Seignorial courts therefore both helped Scottish magnates to maintain authority over their estates and their men, and provided a clearly legal means of doing so. No doubt there were sometimes clashes of jurisdiction — arising, for instance, out of disputes between the men of different lords — but presumably the effect of such clashes would often have been minimised by arrangements between neighbouring lords for joint arbitration procedures, as in the Albany-Douglas indenture of 1409. Also, the estates of the great magnates tended to be less fragmented or disparate than in England. This was especially so down to about the end of the fourteenth century, when most of the earldoms and great ‘provincial’ lordships of pre- and early feudal Scotland still survived in magnate hands. These covered very large but unified areas of land, and roughly corresponded to provinces of the country: Mar and Ross in the north, Galloway and Annandale in the south, are good examples. They were held as baronies and often as regalities, and within them the earls and lords would have virtually or even totally unchallenged local power. Admittedly their number was limited — there were seventeen earldoms and about fifteen lordships — and in the fifteenth century their importance declined sharply, as a result of the processes of escheat to the crown, forfeiture, and divided inheritance.69 Nevertheless, for much of the medieval period in Scotland the existence of such a clearly regionalised pattern of magnate influence must have significantly affected the general development of local power structures. Other magnates held agglomerations of much smaller units of land. Yet these units too, although more like parishes than provinces, were usually compact, unified areas, over which their lords would have been able to exercise clear authority.70 Next, when in the fifteenth century the ‘provincial’ earls and lords had mostly disappeared from the Scottish political scene, they were replaced by the greater barons and original lords of parliament (many of whom became earls in the second half of the century71), and these magnates also tended to enjoy fairly clear-cut regional influence and power; especially the Gordons in the north-east, the Campbells in Argyllshire, the Hamiltons in lower Lanarkshire, and the Kennedies in Galloway. The long-established traditions of Scottish lordship no doubt help to explain this replacement of one regionalised power-structure by another. But the demographic history of these new magnate families is probably even more important, for they were remarkably fertile, much more so than the families of the older ‘provincial’ earls and lords. Out of the thirty-six families of greater barons (i.e. magnates who were neither earls nor ‘provincial’ lords) at the beginning of the fifteenth century, twenty-five, or seventy per cent, survived the entire century in the direct male line; and during the century as a whole, the extinction rate in the direct male line for such magnate families was only between five and ten per cent per generation. Moreover, in almost every case of an extinction in the direct male line, the family estates went, by entail, to the nearest male cadet branch.72 The

result was that in the fifteenth century magnates’ lands hardly ever came to heiresses, and so, at the magnate level, heiresses were extremely rare — in fact only nine heiresses to magnate estates can be identified in fifteenth-century Scotland.73 Hence, since magnate families tended to intermarry, fifteenth-century Scottish magnates hardly ever married heiresses. Now, in general, marriage to heiresses was the chief means for medieval nobles to acquire land; but complexes of estates built up in that way were usually widely scattered. Because of the rarity of heiresses among fifteenth-century Scottish magnate families, however, their estates were not affected like that. Instead, their landed interests and influence were much more likely to remain focused on their own particular areas. Also, when magnates did not marry heiresses, they did not have their wives’ lands at their disposal for endowing their younger sons; they had either to use their own estates, or to find marriages for their younger sons among heiresses of the local gentry. Thus in the fifteenth century Scottish magnate families tended to establish their cadet branches within their own spheres of influence — which in turn, of course, bolstered their own local power.74 A further, related, point is that at this time — the mid-to-late fifteenth century — magnates’ local power was also greatly bolstered by the ties of kinship. The great force and extent of kinship ties in late medieval Scotland may have been a legacy from the Celtic past, but so far as the nobility is concerned they were probably stimulated by other factors. The remarkable fertility of fifteenth-century magnate families not only ensured their survival in the male line, but also meant that they established many durable cadet branches, which were often linked to the senior branches by tenurial ties and by the increasingly common entails to male heirs,75 which gave cadets a theoretical chance of inheriting the main family estates (entails to male heirs, by definition, created patrilineal lineage and kinship groups). At any rate, in the fifteenth century a Scottish magnate could expect special respect, obedience and service from his blood relations, who had come to be understood, agnatically, as all those with the same surname and arms. But the concept of kinship was not confined to blood relations. It also embraced a magnate’s other supporters, like his feudal tenants, his retainers and his clients, and so corresponded to his following or affinity.76 The equation of kin and following is fairly common in medieval Europe,77 but is particularly significant in late medieval Scotland. There, what can in this context be called the artificial kinship ties between a lord and his dependants came in the fifteenth century to be established almost invariably through the medium of the bond of manrent. This was a written undertaking by an inferior — a lesser noble, or laird — to a superior — a greater noble, lord, or magnate — promising loyalty and service in general terms.78 One of the most striking features of the system is that it was extremely rare for a man to give bonds to more than one lord.79 Thus the artificial kinship group created by the bond of manrent was like the natural kinship group of blood relations: in both cases there was only one head or lord, to whom exclusive loyalty and service would be owed (saving allegiance to the crown, of course). And, equally importantly,

these kinship groups generally had considerable geographical coherence as well. As has been demonstrated, the cadets of a magnate’s family were often established within or close to his sphere of influence; and most of his other followers, recruited through bonds of manrent, would also have come from the same area.80 It was the combination of these three kinds of ties — of kinship, artificial kinship, and neighbourhood — that maintained the distinctly regional nature of Scottish lordship even after the disappearance of most of the ‘provincial’ earldoms and lordships. Throughout the late middle ages, therefore, most Scottish magnates were probably able to exercise relatively clear-cut, unchallenged, local power. This is in striking contrast to the situation in much of England. To put it very briefly and obviously oversimply, English magnate estates were always much more fragmented and disparate (a legacy from the early Norman period and beyond);81 seignorial courts, outside a few palatinates and the Welsh marches, did not exercise much effective authority, because they had been undermined by royal jurisdiction;82 there was far more inheritance by heiresses, which made the territorial pattern very fluid;83 kinship was not a particularly cohesive force beyond the immediate family,84 except perhaps in the far north; and indentures of retinue, the English equivalent of bonds of manrent, did not establish such exclusive lord-man relationships, for in England a man was quite likely to have indentures with a number of lords.85 This difference in local power structures must go far towards explaining why feuding was more likely to be formalised and relatively peaceful in Scotland than in England. Magnate power-struggles for domination of a particular region would have been less likely in Scotland. Moreover, individual Scottish magnates would have found it easier to settle disputes among lesser landowners within their spheres of influence; there was much less danger that one party in a dispute would appeal successfully for support to a rival magnate than there was in England. Exceptions to these generalisations can, of course, be found. Fifteenth-century Ayrshire, for instance, witnessed several serious feuds, especially the Boyds against the Darnley Stewarts and the Montgomeries against the Cunninghams.86 Conversely, early fifteenthcentury Warwickshire has been shown to have been highly stable, under the unchallenged control of the Beauchamp earls of Warwick.87 The Ayrshire feuds, however, can probably be attributed to an unusual lack of strong regional lordship: the region’s leading magnate was the head of the house of Stewart (earl of Carrick, lord of Renfrew, Cunningham and Kyle), but he was also king, and the result was a local power vacuum, which lesser magnate families seem to have competed to fill. As for Warwickshire, after the Beauchamp line of earls died out in 1446 the same kind of trouble can be found as in many other parts of England — rivalry between the new earl of Warwick, Richard Neville (whose interests were not so concentrated as his predecessors’), and the duke of Buckingham. Thus Sir William Mountford of Coleshill, a leading Warwickshire gentleman and Beauchamp retainer,

gravitated towards Buckingham; and when after Mountford’s death a quarrel over his inheritance broke out, one son had Buckingham’s support, while the other turned to Richard Neville. During the dispute, one tactic employed by both parties was to transfer their ‘estates’ (the lands which they claimed) to feoffees-to-use; one employed the duke of Buckingham and the earl of Wiltshire as his feoffees, the other employed the earls of Warwick, March (the future Edward IV) and Pembroke. In this way a gentry family dispute sucked in leading Lancastrians and Yorkists; the quarrel was eventually settled on the battlefields of the Wars of the Roses.88 Even these exceptions, therefore, stress the importance of unchallenged local power; and although the contrast is not absolute, this does seem to have been a more typical feature of noble society in late medieval Scotland than in late medieval England. The discussion of noble power in the localities thus gives the same result as the discussion of royal power at the centre: factors making for stability are to be found in Scotland, factors making for instability are to be found in England. The Scottish nobles, it must be stressed again, were not any more saintly, pacific or law-abiding than their English counterparts, but their political circumstances, both in the localities and within the kingdom as a whole, were significantly different. The point can be developed, in conclusion, by a brief comment on how ‘bastard feudalism’, that ugly but convenient term for describing socio-political relationships in the late middle ages, appears to have worked in practice in the two countries. It can be seen from the arguments presented already that ‘bastard feudal’ relationships in late medieval Scotland were likely to be relatively stable. Ties of natural and artificial kinship, backed up by the geography of magnate followings, would have worked towards establishing effective and exclusive links between lords and their men. And in general, the greater a magnate’s local prestige and standing, the more he would be able to attract followers or clients from the local lesser nobility, lairds or gentry; the more a magnate enjoyed clear-cut local power, the less risk there was of local gentry or lairds deserting him for a rival, or of playing two rival magnates off against each other. For the same reasons, it was presumably reasonably easy in most cases for a magnate to keep control over individual local lairds and gentry. If a follower quarrelled with his lord, it would generally have been quite difficult for him to find effective alternative lordship. Magnate confidence in such control must be reflected in the agreements made between nobles for arbitration in disputes among their followers. More positively, Scottish magnates were well placed to provide the ‘good lordship’, or in Scottish terms ‘maintenance’, which men always sought from their lords in the middle ages. A lord was principally obliged to protect his followers and look after their interests: the nature of the Scottish lordship which has been described above would have made that a relatively straightforward task. There were various ways in which a lord could maintain a follower’s interests: in his own court, backed up by his own authority; by arranging and

enforcing a settlement out of court; or, if the case came to the royal courts, by supporting his follower there. This last might appear sinister, but serious cases would probably have finished up before the royal council, or in the later fifteenth century its offshoot the session, and would have been dealt with on a political basis. Given the limitations on central power in late medieval Scotland, it would probably have been unusual for the council or session to have attempted to impose a settlement displeasing to the local magnate. Settlements in such cases, however reached, may well have been unjust or unfair, but in the present context that does not matter so much as the fact that they would have been enforceable by the local magnate, and therefore would have helped maintain stability. In England, once again, the situation was different. Magnates did not have such exclusive relationships with their followers, and there were more local rivalries. Furthermore, the close links between the centre and the localities, especially with regard to patronage, would have made it fairly easy for a magnate’s dispensation of good lordship to be blocked or disrupted if he had any influential rivals. Lord-man ties therefore probably tended to be more fragile — which would have put many English magnates under increasing pressure to provide good lordship, because otherwise their followers might look elsewhere. But how could an English magnate look after his followers’ interests? Not in his own court, which had little power; not through agreed arbitrations, which rarely worked satisfactorily; not in the royal courts, which were notoriously poor at reaching enforceable decisions; and not always even at the centre of government, because there he might easily have fallen foul of political rivals. In fact the best, and perhaps at times the only effective, way for an English magnate to provide good lordship would have been through illegal methods: bribery and corruption, overawing local courts, open violence, and so on. It is significant that whereas in Scotland the term maintenance simply meant ordinary good lordship, in England it came to have the more restricted meaning of illegal support of followers in court cases.89 It is not denied that such illegal practices went on in Scotland, but it certainly is much harder to find direct evidence of them, or even legislation against them. The conclusion seems to be, therefore, that no matter how jaundiced or rosy a view is taken of bastard feudalism in general, its operation would appear to have led to rather more stability and less lawlessness in late medieval Scotland than in England. The consequences for the two colmtries’ political histories seem clear. One final point may be made. Throughout this essay it has been stressed that late medieval Scotland did not suffer any really serious political breakdown or civil war remotely comparable with the Wars of the Roses in England. Nor, to widen the comparison, was there anything like the great Armagnac-Burgundian struggle which took place in France during the first half of the fifteeth century. But it must now be pointed out that in the early fourteenth century Scotland did undergo just such a civil war, between the Bruces on the one hand and

the Balliols and Comyns on the other. The trouble flared up in the uncertainty over the royal succession following the death of Alexander III in 1286, and became so serious that Edward I of England was brought in to adjudicate on the claims to the throne — with disastrous effects for Scotland. Full-scale civil war then broke out, greatly complicating the Anglo-Scottish conflict, when Robert Bruce seized the throne in 1306; it slackened off after Bannockburn, but started up again in the 1330s, during the minority of David Bruce, and did not come to a complete end until the later 1340s. This civil war was every bit as serious for Scotland as the Wars of the Roses were for England and the Armagnac-Burgundian struggle was for France. Now the aftermaths of these great English and French civil wars are generally reckoned to have seen a slackening in political intensity, an increasing avoidance by the nobles of dangerous political activity, a reduction in support for what rebellions there were, an increase in noble readiness to make political compromises and live with political rivals, and a general reluctance to ‘rock the boat’: in other words, in early modern England and France politics were rather more low-key and less violent nationally than in the later middle ages.90 These phenomena are to be seen as well in late medieval Scotland, which was also experiencing the aftermath of a terrible civil war. That, then, might indicate another reason for the contrast between Scotland’s and England’s political histories in the late middle ages. If so, since the point has a general, psychological, application, it may provide a convenient means of tying together the various institutional factors which have been discussed in the main parts of this essay. The final suggested reason for the particularly low-key nature of late medieval Scottish political life, therefore, is that, as in early modern England and France, it was conditioned by being conducted during the aftermath of a bitter civil war — a civil war which took place a century or so earlier in Scotland than in the other two countries. APPENDIX: ACTS OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE A. Pitched Battles Scotland: Glasclune, 1392; Harlaw, 1411; Inverlochy, 1431; Arbroath, 1466; Brechin, 1452; Arkinholm, 1455; ‘Bloody Bay’, Tobermory, 1481x1485; Lochmaben, 1484; Sauchiebum, 1488; Gartalunane, near Aberfoyle, 1489.(10) England: Radcot Bridge, 1388; Shrewsbury, 1403; Topcliffe, 1405; Bramham Moor, 1408; London Bridge, 1450; Heworth, 1453; St Albans (I), 1455; Blore Heath, 1459; Ludford, 1459; Northampton, 1460; Wakefield, 1460; St Albans (II)), 1461; Mortimer’s Cross, 1461; Towton, 1461; Hedgeley Moor, 1464; Hexham, 1464; Edgecote, 1469; Barnet, 1471; Tewkesbury, 1471; Bosworth, 1485; Stoke, 1487; Blackheath, 1499. (22) B. Rebellions, Conspiracies and Armed Demonstrations

Scotland: Stewart/Douglas, 1363; March, 1401; MacDonald, 1411; Stewart (Albany), 1425; MacDonald, 1429–31; Graham, 1437; Crichton, 1445; Livingston/MacDonald, 1450–1; Douglas/Crawford, 1452; Douglas, 1455; MacDonald, 1460–3; Albany/Angus, 1482; Angus/Home, 1488; Lennox/Huntly, 1489; MacDonald, 1491. (15) England: Kentish peasantry, etc., 1381; Appellants, 1388; Cheshire, 1393; Bolingbroke, 1399; Holland, etc., 1400; Percy, 1403; Percy, 1405–8; Oldcastle, 1414; Cambridge, 1415; Gloucester, 1425; Cade, 1450; York, 1452; York, 1455; York/Salisbury, 1459; York/Salisbury, 1460; March/Warwick, 1461; Margaret of Anjou, etc., 1461–4; Robin of Redesdale, 1469; Warwick, 1470–1; Oxford, 1473; Clarence, 1477; Gloucester, 1483; Buckingham, 1483; Tudor, 1485; Lovel, 1486; Lincoln/Lambert Simnel, 1487; Perkin Warbeck, 1491–5; Cornishmen, 1499. (28) C. Magnate Deaths Scotland: (1) Executions: duke of Albany, 1425; Stewart lord of Fife, 1425; earl of Lennox, 1425; earl of Atholl, 1437; earl of Douglas, 1440; Fleming lord of Biggar, 1440; earl of Douglas, 1452 (assassinated by the king); earl of Ormond, 1455; earl of Mar, 1479 (or = death in custody). (9) (2) Deaths in Civil War Battle or Disturbance: Ogilvy lord of Auchterhouse, 1392; earl of Caithness, 1431; earl of Crawford, 1446; lord of Oliphant, 1446; earl of Moray, 1455; earl of Glencairn, 1488. (6) (3) Deaths in Custody: earl of Angus, 1361; duke of Rothesay, 1401; lord of Mar, 1402; lord of Kennedy, 1434; earl of Douglas, 1491. (5) England: (1) Executions: Beauchamp of Kidderminster, 1388; earl of Arundel, 1397; earl of Wiltshire, 1399; earl of Huntingdon, 1400; earl of Kent, 1400; earl of Salisbury, 1400; Despenser, 1400; Lumley, 1400; earl of Worcester, 1403; Earl Marshal, 1405; earl of Cambridge, 1415; Scrope of Masham, 1415; Oldcastle, 1417; duke of Suffolk, 1450; Say and Sele, 1450; earl of Devon, 1461; earl of Wiltshire, 1461; Bonville, 1461; Richemount Grey, 1461; earl of Oxford, 1462; duke of Somerset, 1464; Hungerford, 1464; Ros, 1464; earl of Devon (Stafford), 1469; earl of Pembroke, 1469; Earl Rivers, 1469; earl of Worcester, 1470; Welles, 1470 (i); Welles, 1470 (ii); duke of Buckingham, 1483; Earl Rivers, 1483; Hastings, 1483; Fitzwalter, 1496; Audley, 1497; earl of Warwick, 1499. (35) Unofficial executions and lynchings, such as those of the earl of Salisbury in 1400 and the duke of Suffolk in 1450, have been included in this list. (2) Deaths in Civil War Battle or Disturbance: earl of Stafford, 1403; earl of Northumberland, 1408; Bardolph, 1408; duke of Somerset, 1455; earl of Northumberland, 1455; Clifford, 1455; duke of Buckingham, 1460; duke of York, 1460; earl of Rutland, 1460; earl of Salisbury, 1460; earl of Shrewsbury, 1460; Viscount Beaumont, 1460; Audley, 1460; Egremont, 1460; Scales, 1460; earl of Northumberland, 1461; Dacre, 1461; Neville, 1461;

Welles, 1461; prince of Wales, 1471; marquess of Montagu, 1471; earl of Devon, 1471; earl of Warwick, 1471; Wenlock, 1471; duke of Norfolk, 1485; Ferrers of Chartley, 1485; earl of Lincoln, 1487; Viscount Lovel, 1487; earl of Northumberland, 1489. (29) (3) Deaths in Custody: duke of Gloucester, 1397; duke of Gloucester, 1447; duke of Clarence, 1477; duke of York, 1483. (4) The lists of Scottish magnates have been compiled from J. B. Paul (ed.), The Scots Peerage (Edinburgh, 1904–14), and the English lists from G. E. Cokayne, The Complete Peerage, ed. V. Gibbs et al (1910–59). Only men who were peers or heads of magnate families in their own right have been included; their sons have not, even where they held courtesy titles, except in the cases of Walter Stewart of Fife (executed in 1425), the eldest son of Murdoch duke of Albany, and Edmund earl of Rutland (killed in 1460 at Wakefield), the son of Richard duke of York. NOTES 1. It has been developed from a paper given to the History Department staff seminar in Queen’s University, Belfast, and subsequently presented in Oxford, Glasgow, St. Andrews and Lancaster Universities; I am most grateful for the many helpful comments made by friends and colleagues on these occasions, and, especially, to Dr. Keith Stringer for his criticisms of the penultimate draft. 2. Surprisingly, this has not been attempted for late medieval political history since John Major’s Historia Maioris Britanniae, tam Anglie quam Scotie, first published in Paris in 1521 (ed. A. J. G. Mackay [SHS, 1892]). The starting-point of 1350 has been taken for the essay because of the complications caused before that date by Scotland’s Wars of Independence; but cf. the comments on pp. 50–51 above.

The basic studies of the two countries on which the essay largely rests are: Scotland: R. Nicholson, Scotland: The Later Middle Ages (Edinburgh, 1974); A. Grant, Independence and Nationhood: Scotland 1306–1469 (London, 1984); A. A. M. Duncan, James I (2nd edn., University of Glasgow, Scottish History Dept. occasional papers, 1984); A. I. Dunlop, The Life and Times of James Kennedy, Bishop of St. Andrews (Edinburgh, 1950); N. Macdougall, James III: apolitical study (Edinburgh, 1982); and L. J. Macfarlane, William Elphinstone and the Kingdom of Scotland 1431–1514: The Struggle for Order (Aberdeen, 1985); England: M. H. Keen, England in the Later Middle Ages (London, 1973); M. Prestwich, The Three Edwards: War and State in England 1272 –1377 (London, 1980); A. Tuck, Crown and Nobility 1272–1461: Political conflict in late medieval England (London, 1985); J. A. F. Thomson, The Transformation of Medieval England, 1370–1529 (London, 1983); S. B. Chrimes and others (eds.), Fifteenth-century England, 1399–1509: Studies in politics and society (Manchester, 1972); J. R. Lander, Government and Community: England1450–1509 (London, 1980); N. Fryde, The Tyranny and Fall of Edward II, 1321–1326 (Cambridge, 1979); A. Tuck, Richard II and the English Nobility (London, 1973); J. L. Kirby, Henry IV (London, 1970); G. L. Harriss (ed.), Henry V: The Practice of Kingship (Oxford, 1985); R. L. Storey, The End of the House of Lancaster (London, 1966); B. P. Wolffe, Henry VI (London,

1981); R. A. Griffiths, The Reign of King Henry VI (London, 1981); C. D. Ross, Edward IV (London, 1974); and C. D. Ross, Richard III (London, 1981). 3. The phrase is Jenny Wormald’s; see her review of Nicholson, Later Middle Ages, in EHR, xcii (1977), 599. 4. For details behind these and the other statistics in this paragraph, see the appendix, ‘Acts of Political Violence’. 5. ‘Magnates’ are understood here to be the peers of both countries, and, for Scotland before the mid-fifteenth century, those ‘provincal lords’ and ‘greater barons’ who were the precursors of the lords of parliament. For England, see T. B. Pugh, ‘The magnates, knights and gentry’, in Chrimes (ed.), Fifteenth-Century England, and J. E. Powell and K. Wallis, The House of Lords in the Middle Ages (London, 1968), chs. 20–29. For Scotland, see A. Grant, ‘The Development of the Scottish Peerage’, SHR, lvii (1978), and A. Grant, ‘Extinction of Direct Male Lines among Scottish Noble Families in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries’, in K. J. Stringer (ed.), Essays on the Nobility of Medieval Scotland (Edinburgh, 1985), 213–5, 225– 31. 6. T. Thomson and C. Innes (eds.). The Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland [APS] (Edinburgh, 1814–75), i, 582–3. 7. W. A. Craigie (ed.),The Asloan Manuscript (STS, 1923–5), i, 240–1. 8. Ibid., i, 241–3, 237–8; APS, ii, 73; J. Wormald, Lords and Men in Scotland: Bonds of Manrent 1442–1603 (Edinburgh, 1985), 152. 9. Sir Thomas Gray, Scalacronica, trans. H. Maxwell (Glasgow, 1907), 173–4; John of Fordun, Cronica Gentis Scotorum, ed. W. F. Skene (Edinburgh, 1871–2), i, 381; Walter Bower, Scotichronicon Johannis de Fordun cum Supplementis et Continuatione [Chron. Bower], ed. W. Goodall (Edinburgh, 1759), ii, 367, 369–70. 10. Chron. Bower, ii, 444–5. 11. APS, ii, 213–8, 223. 12. A brief attempt to combine a political narrative for the period 1342–1469 with the ‘new’ interpretative framework is presented in Grant, Independence and Nationhood, ch. 7; cf. Macdougall, James III, for a detailed modern study of one particular reign. 13. K. B. McFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England (Oxford, 1973), 147. 14. ‘The war was fought because the nobility was unable to rescue the kingdom from the consequences of Henry VI’s inanity by any other means’: K B. McFarlane, ‘The Wars of the Roses’, reprinted in his England in the Fifteenth Century (London, 1981), 240. ‘I do not think it [the word “inanity”] sufficiently allows for the power wielded by Henry VI or for the perverse wilfulness with which he exercised it’: B. P. Wolffe, ‘The personal rule of Henry VI’, in Chrimes (ed.), Fifteenthcentury England, 44. Cf. Storey, House of Lancaster; Wolffe, Henry VI; Griffiths, Reign of Henry VI. 15. Chron. Bower, ii, 441. But it should be added that two of his English contemporaries, Henry IV and Archbishop Arundel, expressed similar sentiments in their wills: K. B. MacFarlane, Lancastrian Kings and Lollard Knights (Oxford, 1972), 218–9. 16. Chron. Bower, ii, 440. 17. Stemming, perhaps, from K. B. McFarlane: when crown-noble conflict occurred, it ‘was almost always the fault of the king; which is to say that it depended how often the hereditary succession brought those unfit to rule to the throne’: McFarlane, Nobility, 120. 18. J. R. Lander, Crown and Nobility 1450–1509 (London, 1976), 62; but now see A. Goodman, The Wars of the Roses (London, 1981), 227–8, which calculates the actual campaigning time at a minimum of 61 weeks. 19. McFarlane, Nobility, 114–5. 20. G. W. S. Barrow, Robert Bruce and the Community of the Realm of Scotland (London, 1965), 229; cf. Fryde, Tyranny of Edward II, 61–2. For comparisons between Scotland and England in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, see K. J. Stringer, Earl David of Huntingdon, 1152–1219: A Study in Anglo-Scottish History (Edinburgh, 1985). 21. Grant, Independence and Nationhood, ch. 6. For a much fuller and rather different discussion of fifteenth-century Scottish government, see Macfarlane, Elphinstone, 1–15 and chs. 3, 5, 8; Dr Macfarlane has a gloomier view of Scotland’s governance than I do, but his account of the machinery and institutions is admirable. 22. ‘English writers often assume that copious records are a sign of good government, and clear evidence of the superiority of medieval English administration over that of almost all other medieval systems of government except perhaps that of the papacy. Yet records do not necessarily mean efficiency. The fullest of medieval English records belong to the fifteenth century, a period which is not often regarded as one of great administrative achievement. Records reflect bureaucratic departmentalisation ...’: B. Webster, Scotland from the Eleventh Century to 1603 (Cambridge, 1975), 149. 23. A. L. Brown, ‘The king’s councillors in the fifteenth century’, TRHS, 5th ser., xix (1969); A. L. Brown, ‘The Scottish

“Establishment” in the Later Fifteenth Century’, Juridical Review, new ser., xxiii (1978); J. F. Baldwin, The King’s Council in England during the Middle Ages (reprinted Oxford, 1969); A. A. M. Duncan, ‘The Central Courts before 1532’, in Introduction to Scottish Legal History (Stair Society, 1958), 324–36. 24. T. M. Cooper (ed.). The Register of Brieves (Stair Society, 1946); H. McKechnie, Judicial Process upon Brieves (Glasgow, 1956). 25. A. Steel, The Receipt of the Exchequer, 1377–1485 (Cambridge, 1954); B. P. Wolffe, The Royal Demesne in English History (London, 1971), chs. VI, VII; A. L. Murray, ‘The Comptroller, 1425–1488’, SHR, iii (1973), esp. 1–3, 13–22; C. Madden, ‘The Finances of the Scottish Crown in the late Middle Ages’ (Glasgow University Ph.D. Thesis, 1975). 26. J. G. Bellamy, Crime and Public Order in England in the Later Middle Ages (London, 1973), 4–12. Cf. Michael Clanchy’s comment, in his review of Bellamy’s and other books, that ‘It might even be argued that royal power contributed to disorder and that the judicial authority of the crown was a public nuisance’: ‘Law, Government, and Society in Medieval England’, History, lix (1974), 78. 27. This emerges clearly from M. M. Condon, ‘Ruling Elites in the Reign of Henry VII’, in C. Ross (ed.), Patronage, Pedigree and Power in Late Medieval England (Gloucester, 1979), and from Wolffe, Royal Demesne, ch. VII; cf. A. Grant, Henry VII (London, 1985). For the difference that Henry V, briefly, made to English governance, see Harriss (ed.), Henry V. 28. J. G. Bellamy, The Law of Treason in England in the later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1970), ch. 5; S. B. Chrimes, English Constitutional Ideas in the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge, 1936), ch. 1; C. Given-Wilson, The Royal Household and the King’s Affinity: Service, Politics and Finance in England, 1360–1413 (New Haven, 1986), esp. ch. III; T. F. Tout, Chapters in the Administrative History of Medieval England (Manchester, 1923-35), vols III, IV, passim; Tuck, Richard II, ch. 3; Wolffe, Henry VI, chs. 6, 7; Ross, Edward IV, chs. 13, 14. 29. S. B. Chrimes, ‘Richard II’s Questions to the Judges, 1387’, Law Quarterly Review, lxii (1956). 30. APS, i, 474–5. 31. Presumably provoking the enactment of 1370, that royal officers must not carry out mandates under the great, privy and signet seals contrary to the statute or common law: APS, i, 509. Cf. David’s employment of Roman law authorities against the earl of Ross, mentioned in the earl’s Quaerimonia of 1371: C. Innes (ed.), Ane Account of the Family of Innes (Spalding Club, 1864), 71. 32. T. M. Cooper (ed.), Regiam Majestatem (Stair Society, 1947), 249–50; APS, i, 632; ii, 186. Compare the charges against the lord of the Isles in 1475 with those against the ninth earl of Douglas and his family in 1455: ibid., ii, 108–9 and 75–7. 33. Ibid., i, 476, 508, 547. 34. R. W. Southern, ‘King Henry I’, in his Medieval Humanism and other studies (Oxford, 1970), 231. Cf. Given-Wilson, Royal Household, chs. III, IV; A. Tuck, ‘Richard II’s System of Patronage’, in F. R. H. Du Boulay and C. M. Barron (eds.), The Reign of Richard II (London, 1971); Wolffe, Royal Demesne, 60-65, 76-112; Ross, Edward IV, 312-8; and, for the contemporary record of Richard III’s patronage, R. E. Horrox and P. W. Hammond (eds.), British Library Harleian Manuscript 433 (Gloucester, 1979–83). 35. Statutes of the Realm, i (Record Commission, 1810), 283. 36. R. M. Jeffs, ‘The Later Mediaeval Sheriff and the Royal Household’ (Oxford University D.Phil. Thesis, I960), ch. V; followed by Griffiths, Reign of Henry VI, 333–41. A. J. Pollard, ‘The Tyranny of Richard III’, Journal of Medieval History, iii (1977), 157–62; Ross, Richard III, 118–24. 37. Most notoriously, because of the Paston Letters (ed. J. Gairdner [reprinted Gloucester, 1983]), in East Anglia during the 1440s and ’50s; see, e.g., Griffiths, Reign of Henry VI, 584–92. But, as Griffiths points out (p. 584), East Anglia ‘was in no fundamental sense peculiar in fifteenth-century England’. For the fourteenth century, see, e.g., J. R. Maddicott, Law and Lordship: Royal Justices as Retainers in Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century England (Past and Present Supplements, 1978). 38. Jeffs, ‘Later Mediaeval Sheriff, 173–6, 195–7, 212, 214–8, 226; Griffiths, Reign of Henry VI, 784–5, 801–2, 823; Ross, Edward IV, ch. 4; C. A. Robertson, ‘Local Government and the King’s “affinity” in 15th-century Leicestershire and Warwickshire’, Transactions of the Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society, lii (1976–7). 39. In general, Scottish crown patronage is a seriously neglected subject; but it can now be studied for David II in B. Webster (ed.), Regesta Regum Scottorum, vi: The Acts of David II (Edinburgh, 1982), and for James III in Macdougall, James III (which explodes the old myth about James’s ‘low-born favourites’, but suggests that the influence of men like Archbishop Scheves may have been resented), while some details about it in the period 1371–1424 are to be found in A. Grant, ‘The Higher Nobility in Scotland and their Estates, c. 1371–1424’ (Oxford University D.Phil. Thesis, 1975), chs. III,

IV. A vast amount of relevant material is also contained in Registrum Magni Sigilli Regum Scottorum [RMS], vols. i (ed. J. M. Thomson, Edinburgh, 1912) and ii (ed. J. B. Paul, Edinburgh, 1882), and in G. Burnett and others (eds.). The Exchequer Rolls of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1878–1908). 40. (1) 1363: the earl of Douglas rebelled partly because ‘the said king had not shown him such fair lordship as he would have liked’: Chron. Scalacronica (Maxwell), 173. (2) 1411: part at least of the lord of the Isles’ motive for the Harlaw rebellion seems to have been that his niece, the unmarried heiress to the earldom of Ross, was being made to direct its descent away from him and towards the family of the governor, the duke of Albany. (3) 1451: the lord of the Isles (now earl of Ross) revolted because he had been disappointed over a promise of ‘gud lordschippe’ from the crown: Asloan MS, i, 224; cf. A. Grant, ‘The Revolt of the Lord of the Isles and the Death of the Earl of Douglas, 1451–2’, SHR, lx (1981), 169–71. (4) 1489: the victors of Sauchieburn quarrelled over the distribution of the spoils of victory. 41. Grant, Independence and Nationhood, 165; cf. Grant, ‘Higher Nobility’, 267–70; G. L. Harriss, King, Parliament and Public Finance in Medieval England to 1369 (Oxford, 1975), 486–7, 497–8; A. L. Brown, ‘The Reign of Henry IV’, in Chrimes (ed.), Fifteenth-Century England, 19–20. 42. W. C. Dickinson (ed.), The Sheriff Court Book of Fife (SHS, 1928), pp. xxxiii-xxxvi. 43. Both times the office of sheriff of Roxburgh was involved. In 1342 Sir Alexander Ramsay’s appointment was followed by his seizure and murder by Sir William Douglas of Liddesdale, who wanted, and eventually gained, the office. In 1406 Robert III appointed his courtier Sir David Fleming of Biggar to it (it had been held by Douglases since 1342), and shortly afterwards Fleming was killed by Sir James Douglas of Balvenie; there were other motives, but the shrievalty may have been one factor. See Nicholson, Later Middle Ages, 144, 291; RMS, i, app. I, no. 156. 44. See the sources cited in note 39, above. 45. The adjective is Sir Richard Southern’s; see his ‘Henry I’, Medieval Humanism, 231. 46. Tuck, Richard II, 225. 47. See, especially, Storey, House of Lancaster, and Griffiths, Reign of Henry VI, ch. 20. 48. It should be pointed out that for the late sixteenth century, when Scottish records are much fuller, there is far more evidence of aristocratic feuding; see K. M. Brown, Bloodfeud in Scotland, 1573–1625 (Edinburgh, 1986). But, as Dr. Brown argues (pp. 266–7), the political, social and religious circumstances of that period were much more conducive to feuding than they were in the late middle ages. 49. McFarlane, Nobility, 172–6; Grant, ‘Extinction of Male Lines’, in Stringer (ed.), Essays on the Nobility, 211–16, especially Table 8. 50. D. W. Sutherland, The Assize of Novel Disseisin (Oxford, 1973), chs. IV, V. Professor Sutherland concentrates on the theory of the action, but the cases he cites show how widely separated theory and practice were in late medieval England. 51. H. L. MacQueen, ‘Dissasine and Mortancestor in Scots Law’, Journal of Legal History, iv (1983). Cf. H. L. MacQueen, ‘The Brieve of Right in Scots Law’, Journal of Legal History, iii (1982); McKechnie, Judicial Process upon Brieves, 10–21; APS, i, 470, 505–6. 52. J. M. W. Bean, The Decline of English Feudalism (Manchester, 1968), chs. 3, 4; N. Saul, Knights and Esquires: The Gloucestershire Gentry in the Fourteenth Century (Oxford, 1981), 194–6; M. E. Avery, ‘The History of the Equitable Jurisdiction of Chancery before 1460’, BIHR, xlii (1969), 135–43; Griffiths, Reign of Henry VI, 594. 53. Many examples of this procedure can be found in the main collections of noble documents of the period, e.g. W. Fraser, The Douglas Book (Edinburgh, 1885), vol. iii, and C. Innes (ed.), Registrum Honoris de Morton (Bannatyne Club, 1853), vol, ii; and (when the crown was the overlord) in RRS, vol. vi and RMS, vols. i, ii. See also Grant, ‘Higher Nobility’, 197–210. 54. M. Clanchy, ‘Law and love in the Middle Ages’, in J. Bossy (ed.), Disputes and Settlements: Law and Human Relations in the West (Cambridge, 1983); E. Powell, ‘Arbitration and the Law in England in the late Middle Ages’, TRHS, 5th ser., xxxii (1982). 55. A. Harding, The Law Courts of Medieval England (London, 1973), 52–6, 63–72, 86–92. 56. R. W. Kaeuper, ‘Law and Order in Fourteenth-century England: The Evidence of Special Commissions of Oyer and Terminer’, Speculum, liv (1979). 57. J. Brown (now Wormald), ‘The Exercise of Power’, in J. Brown (ed.), Scottish Society in the Fifteenth Century (London, 1977), 62. She discusses the subject in full in her ‘Bloodfeud, Kindred and Government in Early Modern Scotland’, and Present, lxxxvii (1980), reprinted in Bossy (ed.), Disputes and Settlements. 58. Brown, ‘Exercise of Power’, in Brown (ed.), Scottish Society in the Fifteenth Century, 62. 59. W. Fraser, The Red Book of Menteith (Edinburgh, 1880), ii, 239–46.

60. This feud was almost certainly over the lordship of Liddesdale. Following the death of the second earl of Douglas in 1388, Liddesdale was claimed by and initially retoured to Sir James Douglas of Dalkeith (presumably because of David II’s charter of it to his uncle, Sir William Douglas, in 1342: RRS, vi, no. 45); but it was subsequently recognosced by the governor, Robert earl of Fife, and eventually went to George Douglas, earl of Angus (cf. Fraser, Douglas, iii, nos. 47, 51). The affair is similar to that concerning Sir Malcolm Drummond’s unsuccessful claim in 1388 to the lordship of Selkirk (see APS, i, 557). It appears to have dragged on for at least ten years, and included several attacks on the Dalkeith estates by George Douglas and his associates. Yet although two leading magnates were involved, it did not impinge on national politics, or cause serious disturbances. Partly because of that, it is difficult to be sure of what happened; also, what evidence there is is fragmentary and circumstantial, coming chiefly from the (mostly virtually illegible) parts of the Morton (i.e. Douglas of Dalkeith) cartulary which were omitted from the printed Morton Register. See NLS, MS.72 (Morton Cartulary), folios 33r–39v, 32v, and folio 2V, items 94, 97, 98 and 101 in the MS table of contents; also SRO, MSS Morton, GD. 150/78 (one of four rolls listing the Douglas of Dalkeith muniments in c. 1400), lines 3–12. 61. Fraser, Menteith, ii, 277–80. 62. J. Anderson, The Oliphants in Scotland (Edinburgh, 1879), 47–8. 63. Wormald, Lords and Men, ch. 7. 64. Harding, Law Courts, 84, 93–5; cf. F. R. H. Du Boulay, An Age of Ambition (London, 1970), 137; McFarlane, Nobility, 115–6; Maddicott, Law and Lordship’, M. Clanchy, ‘A Medieval Realist: Interpreting the Rules at Barnwell Priory, Cambridge’, in E. Attwooll (ed.), Perspectives in Jurisprudence (Glasgow, 1977). 65. E. Powell, ‘The Restoration of Law and Order’, in Harriss (ed.), Henry V, 57–60 (an extremely illuminating passage); Griffiths, Reign of Henry VI, ch. 20; Powell, ‘Arbitration and the Law’, TRHS, 5th ser, xxxii; J. B. Post, ‘Courts, councils and arbitrators in the Ladbroke manor dispute, 1382–1400’, in R. F. Hunnisett and J. B. Post (eds.). Medieval Legal Records edited in memory of C. A. F. Meekings (London, 1978); R. M. Jeffs, ‘The Poynings-Percy dispute’, BIHR, xxxiv (1961). 66. As is stipulated, e.g., in both the Albany-Douglas and Graham-Oliphant agreements; see above, at notes 61, 62. This does not mean, of course, that cases were never brought in the formal law courts — for the workings of which, see Grant, Independence and Nationhood, 156–62; MacQueen, ‘Brieve of Right’ and ‘Dissasine and Mortancestor’; J. J. Robertson, ‘The development of the law’, in Brown (ed.), Scottish Society in the 15th century; and Macfarlane, Elphinstone, ch. 3, and 420–25 — but I do not share Dr. Macfarlane’s (and apparently Bishop Elphinstone’s) belief that the country’s judicial system desperately needed reform, especially not along centralised, English, lines (p. 191). 67. E.g., J. Robertson (ed.),Collections for a History of the Shires of Aberdeen and Banff (Spalding Club, 1843), 501–3, and RMS, i, app. I, no. 157; W. Fraser, The Red Book of Grandtully (Edinburgh, 1868), i, nos. 79*, 81*, 83*; Morton Reg., ii, nos. 107, 123, and RMS, i, no. 517. 68. Grant, ‘Higher Nobility’, ch. III; W. C. Dickinson (ed.). The Court Book of the Barony of Carnwath (SHS, 1937), pp. xiii–lxxii. 69. Grant, ‘Development of Peerage’, 1–11. 70. Grant, ‘Higher Nobility’, 175–6. 71. Grant, ‘Development of Peerage’, 12–27; cf. J. B. Paul (ed.), The Scots Peerage (Edinburgh, 1904–14), for details of their histories. 72. Calculated from the details in Grant, ‘Extinction of Male Lines’, in Stringer (ed.), Essays on the Nobility, 226–31. 73. Earldom of Ross, 1402; earldom of Mar, c. 1404; Gordon, c. 1408; Douglas of Nithsdale, c. 1419; earldom of Lennox, 1425 (though the crown kept the earldom); earldom of Moray, 1429; Douglas of Galloway (unentailed estates of the earls of Douglas), 1440; Stewart of Lorne, 1463; Ogilvy of Auchterhouse, c. 1470. 74. This emerges clearly from the accounts of cadet branches of these families given in the Scots Peerage. Cf. Brown, ‘Exercise of Power’, in Brown (ed.), Scottish Society in the Fifteenth Century, 60. 75. Scottish entails (or ‘tailzies’) are discussed for the period 1371–1424 in Grant, ‘Higher Nobility’, 308–11. 76. Wormald, Lords and Men, ch. 5. 77. Cf. J. Le Goff, ‘The Symbolic Ritual of Vassalage’, in his Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages (Chicago, 1980), 256–63, 287. 78. Wormald, Lords and Men, ch. 4. 79. Ibid., 27. 80. Ibid., 82. A good example of this can be seen in the sequence of fifteen bonds of manrent given to Laurence Lord Oliphant by various Perthshire and Angus lairds between 1468 and 1497: ibid., 350–3, and Anderson, Oliphants, 12–32. 81. F. M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England (3rd edn., Oxford, 1971), 626–9; S. Harvey, ‘The Knight and the Knight’s Fee’,

Past and Present, xlix (1970); S. Painter, Studies in the History of the English Feudal Barony (Baltimore, 1943), ch. I; G. A. Holmes, The Estates of the Higher Nobility in Fourteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1957), ch. 1; E.F. Jacob, The Fifteenth Century (Oxford, 1961), 318–33. 82. Painter, English Feudal Barony, ch. IV: D. W. Sutherland, Quo Warranto Proceedings in the Reign of Edward I (Oxford, 1963); M. Clanchy, ‘The Franchise of Return of Writs’, TRHS, 5th ser., xvii (1967). 83. McFarlane, Nobility, 142–56. 84. Du Boulay, Age of Ambition, 122–6; L. Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy (Oxford, 1965), 589–91. The rapid turnover of noble families — both senior and cadet branches (McFarlane, Nobility, 142–76) — must have seriously weakened kinship as a political force in late medieval England. 85. K. B. McFarlane, ‘Bastard Feudalism’, England in the 15th Century, 32–40; McFarlane, ‘Wars of the Roses’, ibid., 248–54. Many of the contrasts noted in this paragraph are explored for the earlier middle ages in Stringer, Earl David. 86. Some of the details are given in Scots Peerage, v, 141–2, 348; iii, 434–44; iv, 232, 244. See also Asloan MS, i, 215; APS, i, 574–5; and W. Fraser, Memorials of the Montgomeries Earls of Eglinton (Edinburgh, 1859), ii, no. 8 (1–8). 87. C. Carpenter, ‘The Beauchamp Affinity: a study of bastard feudalism at work’, EHR, xcv (1980). 88. C. Rawcliffe, The Staffords, Earls of Stafford and Dukes of Buckingham (Cambridge, 1978), 79–80; R. A. Griffiths, ‘The Hazards of Civil War: The Mountford family and the Wars of the Roses’, Midland History, v (1979–80). Cf. for other regions, M. Cherry, ‘The Courtenay earls of Devon: the Formation and Disintegration of a late medieval aristocratic affinity’. Southern History, i (1979); M. Cherry, ‘The struggle for power in mid-fifteenth-century Devonshire’, and A. Herbert, ‘Herefordshire, 1413–61: some aspects of society and public order’, both in R. A. Griffiths (ed.),Patronage, the crown and the provinces in later medieval England (Gloucester, 1981); S. M. Wright, The Derbyshire Gentry in the Fifteenth Century (Derbyshire Record Society, 1983). For a similar general argument about lordman relations in fifteenth-century England, see C. Richmond, ‘1485 and all that, or what was going on at the Battle of Bosworth’, in P. W. Hammond (ed.), Richard III: Loyalty, Lordship and Law (London, 1986), 197, note 59. 89. Brown, ‘Exercise of Power’, in Brown (ed.), Scottish Society in the 15th Century, 55–6. 90. This has been stressed for England in, e.g., McFarlane, ‘Wars of the Roses’, England in the 15th Century, 259–61. For France the point is less clear — rebellions continued into the later fifteenth century (P. S. Lewis, Later Medieval France [London, 1968], 226–37) — but political conflicts do seem gradually to have become less intense and bloody; and by the sixteenth century the French crown had developed a very effective way of harnessing local magnate power to its own interests through the system of provincial governors (R. R. Harding, The Provincial Governors of Early Modern France [New Haven, 1978], 7–37), which produced a national power structure not unlike that of late medieval Scotland. See also J. H. M. Salmon, Society in Crisis: France in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1975), 21–4; and, more generally, J. R. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modem State (Princeton, 1970), 89–91, and J. Vicens Vives, ‘The Administrative Structure of the State in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in H. J. Cohn (ed.), Government in Reformation Europe (London, 1971), 66–8.

4 Scotching the Brut: Politics, History and National Myth in Sixteenth–Century Britain Roger A. Mason

In the Picture Gallery of the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh hang the portraits of 111 Scottish kings. Commissioned by Charles II and painted by a Dutch artist, Jacob de Witt, this curious collection encompasses almost exactly two millennia of Scotland’s royal history. Beginning with Fergus I, whose foundation of the kingdom was alleged to have occurred in 330 BC, the portraits chronicle in unbroken succession each subsequent Scottish monarch down to Charles II himself and his brother, the future James VII and II.1 The first forty of these kings and with them the first seven centuries of their kingdom’s existence clearly belong to the world of fantasy rather than of history. The Irish Scots did not begin to colonise Argyll on the western seaboard of Scotland until the third or fourth century AD, while there is little evidence of a settled Scottish kingdom before the year 500. The subject of this essay, however, is not the ancient kings’ validity as history, but rather their function as myth. For drab and undistinguished though the portraits are, they are evidence of something more than the Stewart dynasty’s overweening pride in a long and largely fabricated pedigree. They are also an outstanding visual record of a historical mythology which for several centuries played a critical role in the development of Scottish national consciousness. Throughout the later middle ages and well into the early modern period, the long and illustrious line of kings was repeatedly invoked, not primarily to legitimise Stewart kingship, but to demonstrate the antiquity and autonomy of the Scottish kingdom. To be sure, as a means of promoting regnal solidarity, of focusing national loyalties on a royal house of venerable antecedents, the uses of the past were lost on medieval Scottish kings no more than on those of Europe generally.2 Nevertheless, Scotland’s mythical kings found their true role in a wider, British context. In particular, as the enduring symbol of the kingdom’s original and continuing independence, the ancient line of kings supplied a vital counterweight to an English historiographical tradition which insisted that Scotland was and always had been a dependency of the crown of England.

Curiously enough, this English tradition has its origins, not in the belligerent prejudices of Anglo-Saxon chroniclers, but in the poetic genius of imaginative Celtic bards. The man largely responsible for establishing the framework of medieval English historiography was the twelfth-century Welsh cleric, Geoffrey of Monmouth. Geoffrey’s Historia Regum Britanniae written in 1136, purports totell the story of the British people from their first arrival in Britain in the twelfth century BC under the leadership of Brutus, great-grandson of the Trojan Aeneas, until their final defeat at the hands of the invading Angles and Saxons in the seventh century AD.3 Along the way, it incorporates a great deal of material which is still familiar: the stories of Lear and Cymbeline, the gnomic prophecies of Merlin and in particular the heroic deeds of chivalry performed by Arthur and his gallant knights. Essentially a compilation of Welsh legend — based on the dubious authority of a work in the Welsh tongue — it would be intriguing to speculate on why Geoffrey’s tales of the British people exerted such a strong influence over the Anglo-Norman peoples of post-Conquest England.4 For present purposes, however, it will suffice simply to note that for several centuries (and with no apparent sense of irony) the English appropriated to themselves the heroic exploits of a British race whose Welsh descendants they were rather less inclined to honour. In fact, the British History — or Brut tradition, as it was also known — came to form the basis of an English national epos which, continued, expanded and elaborated by a host of medieval chroniclers, helped to underwrite — however paradoxically — the continuity of English experience and the antiquity of English kingship.5 Even in the sixteenth century this continued to be the case. If it is debatable whether or not the Tudor monarchs with their Welsh descent actively promoted the Brut legend,6 there is no doubt that it lay at the heart of the many versions of English history which poured from the press in the century following William Caxton’s pioneering publication of the Chronicles of England (1480) and Trevisa’s vernacular translation of Higden’s Polychronicon (1482) — both of them saturated in exotic Galfridian lore.7 There were of course critics of the tradition, most notably the humanist scholar Polydore Vergil whose Anglica Historia finally appeared in 1534. But Polydore was a mere Italian and his sceptical approach to the British History — and particularly his debunking of the Arthurian legend — was brushed contemptuously aside in the stridently patriotic chronicles of such later Tudor historians as Edward Hall, Richard Grafton and Raphael Holinshed.8 Moreover, the hapless Polydore was clearly tinged with Romish prejudice and thus highly suspect as a source for an English history rapidly assuming garishly Protestant hues. By the end of the sixteenth century, the writings of John Bale, Matthew Parker and above all John Foxe had adapted the British History to an apocalyptic timescale and, deftly combining patriotism with Protestantism, had given rise to the extraordinarily powerful conviction that England was an Elect Nation — that God, as Bishop Aylmer proclaimed, was Himself English — and that the imperial English monarchy had a leading role in that cosmic drama whose imminent dénouement would see the final

destruction of the papal Antichrist.9 In the century which culminated in 1603 in the union of the Scottish and English crowns, it was perhaps inevitable that this canonical version of English history should have evoked an ambivalent response from the Scots. In fact, as will become clear, England’s self-confident appraisal of her historic role and destiny had implications for a united Britain which the Scots tended to find either extremely attractive or highly repellent.10 As a result, ‘Scotching the Brut’ was a historiographical activity which might take two quite distinct forms. That is to say, while there were many Scots who sought to discredit the British History, there were some who sought to domesticate it — or rather to domesticate Scotland within it. In modern parlance, they might be described respectively as Scottish Nationalists and British Unionists and, not unnaturally, their interpretations of the past varied accordingly. We must begin, however, with the nationalist response for, irrespective of the prospect of union, there was much in the Brut tradition to irritate the Scots. In particular, there was the claim that the kingdom of Scotland was nothing more than a dependency of the English crown. Although this was only implicit in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s original work, his many disciples elaborated the British History in such a way as to make quite explicit their belief that the kingdom of the Scots was in the past and remained in the present a mere principality subject ultimately to the kings of England. Generally speaking, this claim to feudal superiority was founded on three main arguments.11 Firstly, it was said to be inherent in the division of the British kingdom which occurred on the death of its eponymous founder, Brutus the Trojan. Brutus, it was argued, had had three sons, the first of whom, Locrinus, inherited Loegria or England, while the second, Albanactus, inherited Albany or Scotland, and the third, Camber, inherited Cambria or Wales. Thus, if feudal rules of primogeniture were applied, England’s seniority among the British monarchies was abundantly clear from the very outset. In case this original proof of English superiority failed to impress, however, the Brut chroniclers could readily marshall a second and apparently still more conclusive argument. For was it not universally acknowledged that that glorious prince King Arthur had held sway over a vast sixth-century empire which encompassed not only the British Isles — Scotland being a tributary kingdom — but also Scandinavia and Gaul? This was surely an unassailable precedent which the Scots were bound to concede. Nevertheless, just to confirm their dependency, a third argument was advanced which was to figure particularly prominently in the sixteenth-century union debates and even to feature in the pamphlet wars which raged at the time of the parliamentary union of 1707. Namely, that throughout the middle ages Scottish kings had habitually done homage to their English counterparts and thereby quite openly acknowledged that they and their subjects owed allegiance ultimately to the English crown. Much as they may have wanted to, the Scots could not afford simply to ignore these arguments as delusions of the English imperial mind. After all, thus interpreted, the British

History was of much more than purely academic significance: it was also an ideological weapon which English kings could and did draw upon to justify armed aggression against the Scots. Just as in 1301 Edward I made considerable use of the Brut legend when charged by Pope Boniface VIII to explain his attempted subjugation of the northern realm, so in 1401 Henry IV demanded homage of Robert III on the basis of the same historical lore.12 Similarly, in the 1420s, the chronicler John Hardyng furnished Henry V with yet more evidence of the English claim and in his history of 1457 exhorted Henry VI to act on the information he had so copiously provided.13 Finally, as late as 1542, on the eve of one of his many Scottish campaigns, Henry VIII issued a Declaration wherein, as its title page puts it, there ‘appereth the trewe & right title that the kinges most royall maiesty hath to the soverayntie of Scotlande’.14 Of course, self-righteous as ever, Henry denied on this occasion having any intention actually of demanding homage of his nephew James V. Nevertheless, he not only proceeded to cite some twenty-two occasions on which the Scottish king’s predecessors had sworn fealty to their English overlords, but also invoked the whole panoply of the Brut legend — particularly Brutus and his progeny — to buttress the English imperial case.15 Clearly, opined a well-satisfied Henry, no king ‘hath more iuste title, more evident title, more certayn title, to any realme ... than we have to Scotland’.16 Such examples of the ideological uses to which the British History was put could doubtless be multiplied. It will be clear enough already, however, that the Scots had good grounds for resenting the imperialist construction which the Brut legend was made to carry and good grounds too for concocting a version of their own past which would demonstrate conclusively that the imperial ambitions of their English neighbours had no historical justification whatsoever. They wasted little time in doing so. A counter-mythology was clearly taking shape as early as the thirteenth century and was drawn upon both in the Scottish reply to Edward I’s submission to Boniface VIII and some years later in the opening paragraph of that masterly piece of diplomatic rhetoric, the Declaration of Arbroath of 1320.17 In fact, however, the myth was not fully formulated until much later in the fourteenth century when, between 1384 and 1387, John of Fordun, a chantry priest in the cathedral church of Aberdeen, compiled the earliest version of what was to become known as the Scotichronicon.18 Needless to say, Fordun was acutely conscious of the invidious implications of the British History and throughout his work was at pains to confound what he called ‘the foolish babbling of the British people’ whenever it impugned either the antiquity or the integrity of the Scottish kingdom.19 For a start, like many Scots since, he was outraged by the way the English used the term ‘Britain’ itself and applied it indiscriminately to mean either England or the whole island. Rightly perceiving that England’s political pretensions were rooted in this convenient — if not deliberate — linguistic confusion, he denied categorically that Brutus had ruled over and given his name to the entire British Isles. Rather, he insisted in no uncertain terms that the correct name for the whole island was in fact Albion, while Britain referred only to that

part of it — now known as England — where Brutus had actually ruled.20 With Brutus thus safely confined to the southern parts of Albion, his son Albanactus was rendered harmless and Fordun could move on to the other arguments which sustained the English imperial case. He gave them short shrift: Arthur’s allegedly pan-European empire was met with an eloquent (though puzzled) silence,21 while any examples of Scottish kings doing homage to their English counterparts were dismissed as involving only the lands they held in England and not their kingdom as a whole.22 Effective though it is, this forthright rebuttal of the case for English superiority constitutes only one aspect of Fordun’s assault on the British History. Equally significant is his attempt to develop an interpretation of Scotland’s own past which would free it once and for all from the incubus of the Brut tradition. As the main elements of Fordun’s story — not least his chronology — were to become fundamental to later Scottish historiography, it is worth briefly outlining them here.23 Thus, according to Fordun’s account, the progenitors of the Scottish race were a Greek prince named Gathelus (the Greeks did after all defeat the Trojans!) and the eponymous Scota, daughter of Pharaoh, whom Gathelus married circa 1500 BC, shortly before Moses delivered the children of Israel out of Egypt. In the wake of Pharaoh’s destruction in the Red Sea, Gathelus and Scota were forced to flee from Egypt and, after roaming the Mediterranean for a time, they eventually settled in Spain. From Spain, their descendants colonised first Ireland and then Dalriada (Argyll) in the hitherto uninhabited — that is, non-British — west of Scotland in the fifth century BC. From being a colony, Dalriada was made into an independent kingdom — replete with the hallowed Stone of Destiny — under Fergus I, son of Ferchard, in 330 BC. This kingdom, Fordun maintained, endured for seven centuries under forty–five largely anonymous kings until the Romans, in league with the Picts, drove the Scots into exile in AD 360. The breach, however, was only temporary and in 403 Fergus II, son of Erc, refounded the kingdom which in the eighth century was expanded to include that of the Picts and over which, despite the best endeavours of their English neighbours, the descendants of Fergus had reigned as independent monarchs down to Fordun’s own day. Clearly, this picturesque narrative, partly derived from traditional Irish sources,24 was a quite deliberate attempt to scotch the imperialist history emanating from the English court. The Scottish kingdom was, it implied, among the oldest in Europe and its independence — unlike that of England — was unsullied by either conquest or feudal submission. In effect, Fordun had elaborated a Scottish national epos which, paralleling that of Geoffrey of Monmouth, could be used to counter the latter’s Anglocentric interpretation of early British history. Not unexpectedly, therefore, the Scots found Fordun’s chronicle highly congenial, and north of the border the Scotichronicon held its own throughout the fifteenth and well into the sixteenth century.25 Fordun’s work, however, was not the last word on the subject. In 1527, Hector Boece, the distinguished first principal of the recently founded University of

Aberdeen, published his Scotorum Historiae, a quite remarkable work in which the Scottish national epos assumed its final and most extravagant form.26 Boece is rightly considered one of the leading Scottish humanists of the early sixteenth century. Yet as Samuel Johnson pronounced with perhaps pardonable exaggeration, the Scotorum Historiae was written at a time when humanists ‘were, for the most part, learning to speak rather than to think, and were therefore more studious of eloquence than of truth’.27 Although he wrote in elegant classical Latin, Boece betrays little hint of that scepticism with which some contemporary humanists — such as Polydore Vergil — were beginning to approach the medieval chronicles. Instead, Boece based his work squarely on that of Fordun, adopting the latter’s chronology wholesale and carefully following his predecessor’s painstaking refutation of the British History whenever it impugned the honour or integrity of his native realm.28 In this respect, in fact, Boece added little that was new. Where he ‘improved’ on Fordun was in his lengthy account of those obscure seven centuries between the alleged first foundation of the kingdom by Fergus I in the fourth century BC and its alleged refoundation by Fergus II in the fifth century AD. With very good reason, the Scottish kingdom having yet to come into existence, Fordun had left these centuries virtually blank. Boece, however, was rather more ambitious. Claiming like Geoffrey of Monmouth to have had access to sources which subsequently and mysteriously vanished, he proceeded not simply to name forty of Fordun’s forty-five anonymous early kings, but also to describe with a wealth of circumstantial detail both their warlike deeds and the workings of the polity over which they ruled.29 As we will see, it was from this totally fictitious part of Boece’s narrative that, later in the sixteenth century, George Buchanan was to draw those examples of resistance and tyrannicide which proved so useful as precedents for the deposition of Mary Stewart in 1567. It is unlikely, however, that Boece deliberately intended them as illustrations of any such inflammatory constitutional doctrines. The general tone of his chronicle suggests rather that they were meant to serve the more modest and essentially moral-cum-patriotic purpose of exemplifying the fate of vicious kings whose corrupt and cowardly behaviour posed a threat to the survival or stability of the realm.30 In fact, far from being a radical political tract, Boece’s chronicle is an intensely conservative celebration of those virtues which he believed had ensured the freedom of the Scottish kingdom since its very inception.31 Certainly, it is precisely this theme which lends the Scotorum Historiae its considerable narrative thrust. For according to Boece, when all Europe succumbed to the might of the Roman legions and groaned under the yoke of imperial tutelage, Scotland alone succeeded in preserving her freedom and, in a long and noble struggle, never once submitted to slavery and subjection. While the kings of the Britons became puppets of the Roman emperors and thereafter fell in rapid succession to the Saxons, the Danes and finally the Normans, the Scots — led by their illustrious race of kings — resisted the Romans, exterminated the Picts, briefly subjugated the Britons, repulsed the

Danes and for centuries refused to recognise the baseless claims to feudal superiority made by a succession of arrogant English monarchs. By our standards, of course, this is all thoroughly bad history. To Boece’s contemporaries, however, it proved a powerfully effective myth. Not only did it provide a fitting — if somewhat belated — riposte to the Brut chronicles published by Caxton, but it did so in terms which both echoed and reinforced the ideal of the freedom-loving Scottish patriot so eloquently propagated in John Barbour’s Bruce and Blind Hary’s Wallace.32 Not unexpectedly, therefore, the Scotorum Historiae proved immensely popular and remained the standard work in the field until the publication in 1582 of Buchanan’s Rerum Scoticarum Historia.33 Despite its obvious influence, however, even within Scotland the tradition Boece espoused was not without its critics. In 1521, a few years before Boece’s own work appeared, the great scholastic theologian John Mair (or Major) had entered the historical lists in a manner which was hardly calculated to please his fellow countrymen. If, for example, in his Historia Maioris Britanniae, Mair lambasted Caxton for speaking of the Scots ‘in language that held as many lies as it did words’, he nevertheless went on to ditch Gathelus and Scota — and much else besides — just as summarily as he ditched Brutus and Albanactus.34 As far as Mair was concerned, the legendary histories of both countries were ridiculous and, although he would have no truck with the English claim to superiority over Scotland, neither did he sympathise with the Scots’ xenophobic attitude to England. In fact, as the title of his book suggests, Mair was an unashamed advocate of union and looked forward to the creation of a British monarchy, not through war and conquest, but through a series of dynastic marriages — such as that of James IV to Margaret Tudor — which would in time unite the hitherto sovereign crowns of Scotland and England in the person of a single ruler.35 Meanwhile, however, Mair was content simply to argue that the two nations should do everything in their power to obliterate age-old animosities and live in peace and concord. To this end, he even attempted to persuade the Scots to adopt a British terminology which, defined without reference to Brutus and his wretched progeny, would provide a neutral nomenclature for use by all the island peoples. Thus he argued that because of their location in the same geographical landmass — Greater as opposed to Lesser Britain (i.e., Brittany) — both Scots and English were all also Britons. Either, he asserted, the original inhabitants of the island (now living in Wales) are the only Britons, or else all the people now inhabiting the island are Britons. As the former interpretation, he continued, is ‘against all common use of language’, it is the latter — ‘that all men born in Britain are Britons’ — which is more sensible and acceptable.36 Not everyone agreed: apparently unconvinced that British terminology could ever be anything other than Anglocentric, Boece was to follow Fordun in arguing that the correct name for the whole island was Albion, while Britain referred only to that part of it now inhabited by the English.37

As regards politics, however, although perhaps not altogether as regards language, history was on the side of John Mair rather than Hector Boece. Mair’s dream of dynastic union was of course eventually to be fulfilled when in 1603 James VI of Scotland fell heir also to the throne of England. Yet in the second quarter of the sixteenth century such an outcome looked less than likely. Indeed, in the 1530s, Henry VIII’s desperate search for a Tudor heir to his English throne set in motion a train of events with monumental and potentially highly divisive consequences for the British monarchies. The English break with Rome and the spread of Protestantism through her political establishment placed Scotland in a delicate but strategically crucial position on the European stage. Her diplomatic ties and confessional allegiance suddenly, if quite fortuitously, assumed unprecedented significance and much came to depend on whether she too would break with Rome and, severing the ancient alliance with Catholic France, realign herself with Protestant England. In this new context and particularly under Protestant influence, the idea of union was broadcast with renewed intensity and with far-reaching implications. As will become clear, however, it was not the union of equal partners envisaged by Mair. On the contrary, it was union based on the Scots’ ‘domestication’ within a revamped and explicitly Protestantised British History. That is, it was union based on the Scots’ acceptance of their historic position as a subject people owing allegiance to an English — or British — crown which was both Protestant and imperial. The crucial decade in the formation of this British unionist ideology was undoubtedly the 1540s. In English eyes, the death of James V in 1542 leaving as his sole heir the week-old Mary Stewart provided a golden opportunity to gain control of Scottish affairs through the betrothal of Mary to Henry VIII’s own son and heir, Prince Edward. The Scots were understandably suspicious and, although they initially agreed to the match, they later reneged, thus initiating the bloody conflict known appropriately enough as the ‘Rough Wooing’.38 To Henry himself, these Scottish wars seem to have been little more than a dynastic power-play. To many of his subjects, however, they assumed the character of a Protestant crusade and were prosecuted with a self-righteous ferocity born of the conviction that the Scots were obstructing a providentially arranged marriage which was part of a divine plan to overthrow the papal powers of darkness. This apocalyptic vision reached the peak of its intensity with the death of Henry VIII in 1547 and the accession of the ‘godly’ Edward VI under the protection of the duke of Somerset. The same year witnessed Somerset’s crushing defeat of the Scots at the battle of Pinkie and his subsequent occupation of the Lowlands. As we will see, the barrage of propaganda which accompanied the military campaign is ample testimony to the heightened expectations engendered — particularly, but not exclusively, among Englishmen — by the prospect of the creation of a Protestant British monarchy.39 Undoubtedly the most influential of the unionist tracts of the 1540s was An Epistle Exhortatorie, ostensibly written by Somerset himself, and addressed to the Scots in the year following his successful Pinkie campaign.40 In rhetoric which was to become characteristic of

unionist propaganda, Somerset declared that the premature demise of James V and his two male heirs in 1542, leaving the infant Mary as queen of Scots, was neither a ‘miracle’ nor the work of ‘blynd fortune’, but was rather a sign of God’s ‘infinite mercie and most inscrutable providence’.41 Such an opportunity for uniting the realms had not occurred for 800 years and Somerset accordingly urged the Scots to accept the manifest will of God, ‘to take the indifferent old name of Britaynes again’, and ‘to make of one Isle one realme, in love, amitie, Concorde, peace, and charitie’.42 After all, not only had God ‘in maner called us bothe unto it’, but union would have distinct advantages: ... wee twoo beyng made one by amitie, be moste hable to defende us against all nacions: and havyng the sea for wall, the mutuall love for garrison, and God for defence, should make so noble and wel agreyng Monarchic, that neither in peace wee maie bee ashamed, nor in warre affraied, of any worldely or forrein power.43

To reap the benefits which perpetual peace under a British monarchy would inevitably bring, the Scots had only to break their useless alliance with France, repudiate the usurped authority of Rome, and reaffirm their commitment to the marriage of Mary and Edward. Meanwhile, Somerset could only marvel that two peoples ‘annexed and ioyned in one Island ... so like in maner, forme, language, and all condicions as we are’ were nevertheless locked in ‘mortall warre’.44 Yet was it so very marvellous? Despite the prospect of peace and prosperity conjured up by Somerset, the Epistle was written in the wake of Pinkie and to the accompaniment of a threat of violent conquest. As he informed the still recalcitrant Scots: ‘you will not have peace, you will not have aliaunce, you will not have Concorde: and conquest commeth upon you whether you will or no’.45 Could Somerset be trusted any more than Henry VIII? Just as the claim to superiority was never far from Henry’s mind, so Somerset implied that, whatever the Scots did, that title could never be gainsaid.46 Moreover, in the same year as Somerset’s Epistle appeared, one Nicholas Bodrugan (alias Adams) published cum privilegio his Epitome of the title that the Kynges Maiestie of Englande hath to the Sovereigntie of Scotlande.47 Here the author appealed to the Scots (again, in characteristic phrase) to stop fighting ‘against the mother of their awne nacion: I meane this realme now called Englande the onely supreme seat of thempire of great Briteigne’ and then went on to demonstrate, in still more detail than Henry VIII’s Declaration, that Scotland had acknowledged English superiority since the days of Brutus and his sons.48 Advantageous though the marriage might have been to the Scots, in ideological terms the ‘Rough Wooing’ was prosecuted with a brash insensitivity to Scottish aspirations which was hardly calculated to advance the English cause. It was not, however, only Englishmen who had recourse to the British History to justify union. In fact, for our purposes, by far the most interesting tract to emerge from the conflict of the 1540s was penned by a Scotsman, James Henrisoun, who in 1547, on the eve of the Pinkie campaign, issued his Exhortacion to the Scottes to conforme themselfes to the

honorable, Expedient, & Godly Union betweene the two Realmes of Englande & Scotlande.49 As a Scot as well as an extremely eloquent advocate of union, it is perhaps not surprising that in the course of the Exhortacion Henrisoun employed arguments strikingly similar to those put forward a quarter of a century before by John Mair. Like Mair, for example, he believed it essential that ‘those hateful termes of Scottes & Englishemen’ should be ‘abolisshed and blotted oute for ever’ and that the inhabitants of the British Isles should ‘al agre in the onely title and name of Britons ... and the selfe realme, beeyng eftsones reduced into the fourme of one sole Monarchic, shalbee called Britayn’.50 Similarly, in order to support his case, he went to considerable lengths to refute the Scottish foundation legend as retold by Fordun and Boece. Dismissing ‘the new fonde fables of our Scottishe Poetes’ as good only ‘for norishyng division in the twoo realmes’, he went on — with no little arithmetical ingenuity — to calculate that the marriage between Gathelus and Scota was impossible, ‘the Bride beinge elder than ye Bridegroom by xii. C. and xl. yeres’.51 At this point, however, the similarities with Mair end. For Henrisoun now proceeded, not to treat the Brut legend in the same sceptical way, but to accept and manipulate it in order to prove what Mair had consistently denied: namely, the historicity of a British realm which included the kingdom of the Scots. Thus, following Galfridian tradition, Henrisoun retailed the story of Brutus and the division of the whole island among his three sons. He further insisted that at that time — and, indeed, for six centuries thereafter — there were no Scots inhabiting the island. From the very beginning, therefore, there was a single pre-eminent monarch in the British Isles and the original inhabitants were all Britons.52 Subsequently, however, Henrisoun was forced to concede that Britain was broken up into a number of kingdoms — including that of the Scots — with no recognised supreme overlord. As a result, he moved rapidly on, firstly to emphasise that all these kingdoms were in the end conquered by the Romans who brought ‘the whole islande in subieccion’; and secondly, to focus attention firmly on the heroic figure of Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor but also — and crucially — a king of the Britons.53 The belief that Constantine was of British birth and descent was part-and-parcel of the Brut legend, and Henrisoun was merely following Geoffrey of Monmouth in arguing that the emperor was the son of the Roman general Constantius who, through his marriage to Helen, the daughter and heir of Coel, king of the Britons, had gained possession of the British throne.54 To Henrisoun, this meant that Constantine’s claim to the kingship of Britain was doubly sure, for in him, he wrote: ... bothe titles, as wel that, whiche the Romaynes had by conquest, as also that, which his mother Helene had (as heire of Britayn) wer united & knit together, and he without al doubt or controversy, was very Emperor of al Britayn, whereby the island after long servitude, was at last (as it wer by Gods providence) restored to his former libertie and honor, themperor beyng begotten in Britayn, sonne of her, that was heire of Britayne, borne in Britayne, and create Emperor in Britayne.55

For all that Constantine’s British connection was a commonplace among the Brut chroniclers,

there is no mistaking the extreme importance which Henrisoun is here attaching to it. Nor, in fact, is the reason far to seek: after all, if in Constantine were united both Roman emperorship and British kingship, then arguably his successors in Britain fell heir not just to his kingdom but also to his imperial status. The importance of this imperial precedent, although perhaps not immediately apparent, is nevertheless hard to over-estimate. So far in this essay the term empire has been used in the modern (usually pejorative) sense of an aggregate of states owing allegiance through treaty or conquest to a single sovereign power. In medieval and particularly sixteenth-century political thought, however, the idea of empire had less to do with territorial aggrandisement than with assertions of national autonomy.56 In Scotland and England, as in other parts of Europe, the closed imperial crown was the visual equivalent of the Roman Law maxim rex in regno suo est imperator and was conventionally seen as symbolising the limited extent to which either the pope or the Holy Roman Emperor might interfere with the internal affairs of the realm.57 It is hardly surprising, therefore, that in the revolutionary atmosphere of the 1530s Constantine was cited as a precedent for the complete jurisdictional self-sufficiency — the imperial status — which the English crown claimed when Henry VIII repudiated Rome and personally assumed the headship of the church in England.58 There is no direct evidence that Henrisoun was familiar with the celebrated preamble to the Act in Restraint of Appeals to Rome (1533), that act in which it was resonantly declared that ‘this realm of England is an empire ... governed by one supreme head and king having the dignity and royal estate of the imperial crown of the same’.59 Nevertheless, it was clearly with the same idea of empire in mind that he asserted quite unequivocally that Constantine’s successors in Britain had always worn ‘a close crowne Emperiall, in token that the lande is an empire free in it selfe, & subject to no superior but GOD’.60 The Scotsman, however, did not have recourse to the Brut tradition simply to underwrite the English royal supremacy. He did so with the further aim of ensuring that Scotland was allowed to partake of the same imperial glory. Hence the centrality of Constantine to his interpretation of the past is founded firmly on the conviction — persistently reiterated — that ‘he had al Britayn in possession’: ... wherunto whether he came by Helene his mother, or by Constantius his father forceth not much: for it suffiseth for our purpose, to prove yt al Britayn, was under one Emperor, and beeyng under one Emperor, then was Scotlande and Englande but one Empire.61

Accordingly, the empire of Constantine’s successors, of Henry VIII and Edward VI, was not merely English, it was British. Scotland too was incorporated in the imperial crown given statutory recognition in the Act in Restraint of Appeals, and Scotsmen too could participate in the imperial and Protestant future which the breach with Rome inaugurated.62 Henrisoun, then, in order to fix Scotland securely within the orbit of a British imperial crown, chose to accept the English historiographical tradition which both Mair and the

medieval Scottish chroniclers had consistently rejected. To achieve his aim, he not only accepted the historicity of the Brutus legend and the Romans’ conquest of the whole island, but not surprisingly went on to endorse the numerous instances of homage ‘so exactelie set furthe’ in Henry VIII’s Declaration.63 His purpose, however, was not so much to justify English superiority per se, as to legitimise the concept of an imperial British realm and thereby to highlight the momentous historical import of the proposed marriage of Edward Tudor to Mary Stewart. For through the marriage, not only would the English king at last gain ‘his righteous possession of the whole monarchic of Britayn’, but the British realm would finally be recreated ‘as it was first, & yet still ought to be’.64 It would, moreover, be the consummation of a grand providential — and emphatically Protestant — design. As Henrisoun reminded his Scottish readers: ... by this calling of us into this unitie, proceding plainly from god him selfe, he woulde also unite and ioyne us in one religion. For how godly were it, yt as these two Realmes should grow into one, so should thei also agre in the concorde & unite of one religion, & the same ye pure, syncere & incorrupt religion of Christ, setting a part all fond supersticions, sophistications, & other thousandes of devilries brought in by the bishop of Rome & his creatures, wherby to geve glosse to their thinges & darknes to God’s true worde …65

This triumphant vision of a Protestant paradise, however, a vision shared by all the British unionists of the 1540s, was entirely predicated on the marriage of Edward and Mary: that ‘blessed meane and remedy’ which, according to Henrisoun, God had, ‘in these latter daies, provided ... for the glorie of his name, and for our wealth and commoditie’.66 Without doubt, this was a marriage of truly apocalyptic significance.67 Nor is it surprising that Henrisoun and his fellow unionists should have interpreted it as such. After all, imputing cosmic and eschatological meaning to contemporary events was common enough in sixteenth-century Europe and not least among Protestants who viewed their attack on that prophesied Antichrist — the papacy — as occurring in the latter days of the world and prefiguring the series of events which would shortly terminate in the Last Judgement.68 There was, therefore, nothing unnatural either in construing the proposed marriage as part of a divine plan to overthrow the powers of darkness or in being dismayed — as Henrisoun evidently was — at the Scots’ apostasy in the face of such an imminent cataclysm. Furthermore, in eschatological terms, Henrisoun’s emphasis on Constantine takes on still deeper significance. As Elizabeth was soon to discover, it was commonly held that the latter days would be dominated by a great Christian emperor, a godly prince modelled on Constantine, who would be instrumental in destroying the kingdom of Antichrist.69 Unlike Elizabeth, the sickly Edward VI was never cast (or miscast) in such a role. Nevertheless, Henrisoun’s clear call for the restoration of a Constantinian empire embracing both Scotland and England is redolent of apocalyptic meaning. It was a call, moreover, whose universal import was not to be stifled by parochial patriotic prejudice. If the Scots wished to save themselves from imminent destruction, they had at once to seize the opportunity of union in

an imperial realm strong enough to resist even the powerful forces of Antichrist. Needless to say, such a unionist ideology was a far cry from that promulgated by John Mair. To effect union and at the same time to further the Protestant faith, the Scots were now being asked to jettison their time-honoured belief in Scotland’s original and continuing autonomy and to accept rather her dependent status within a redefined British imperial framework. There was, moreover, no time to lose: what Arthur Williamson has aptly termed the ‘Edwardian Moment’70 — the providential opportunity to unite the realms without further bloodshed — would quickly pass and the Scots had therefore to seize their chance without demur or face the terrible prospect of a wrathful God. The Scots, however, did demur. Not only did they continue to resist Somerset, but in 1548 they conveyed their queen to France and to an eventual French marriage. The Edwardian Moment had passed. Unionist propaganda had failed to breach — perhaps, in fact, had merely strengthened — the Scots’ deep-rooted mistrust of England.71 The 1540s, however, by no means marked the end of the story. A decade or so later, in 1559, many of those involved in the rebellion of the Protestant Congregation against the Catholic and Francophile Scottish government were unionists of the same kidney as Henrisoun.72 Not least among them was John Knox himself who worked tirelessly to secure English help in 1559 and, once Elizabeth’s intervention had ensured the Protestants’ success, remained a consistent advocate of dynastic union with England until his death in 1572. But neither in 1559 nor in fact subsequently was unionism preached as openly or as belligerently as in the 1540s. Admittedly, the situation was complicated by the return of Mary Stewart — still a Catholic — to her realm in 1561. Yet even after her deposition in 1567 the idea of an imperial and Protestant British realm remained more of a secret hope than an openly proclaimed objective among Anglophile Scots. Why was this so? Why was the unionist case as developed by Henrisoun not more actively publicised and promoted? Undoubtedly, one reason was that Elizabeth, despite her subjects’ increasing attachment to the Constantinian image of empire, was anxious to stifle potentially subversive speculation about the future of the British monarchies.73 Another and in the present context equally pertinent reason, however, was that the majority of Scots remained extremely suspicious of the idea of union and that those Protestants who did support it were reluctant to make an issue of something which would inevitably raise yet again the spectre of English superiority.74 The ideological dilemma confronting Scottish Protestant unionists is apparent as early as 1559 in the propaganda issued by the rebellious Congregation.75 In order to win the support of their lukewarm fellow countrymen, the rebels were obliged to abandon their initial stance as godly Protestant crusaders and redescribe themselves as patriotic Scots intent on freeing the realm of the tyranny of France. Abruptly discarding Knox’s unfamiliar and probably uncongenial religious rhetoric, they adopted instead what might well be termed the language of the commonweal. This language — most readily characterised as one of patriotic

conservatism — was not only the normal medium of political discourse in sixteenth-century Scotland, but was also based on the fundamental premise that the Scottish kingdom was — and always had been — a free and autonomous realm. In other words, it was a language to which the Scottish national epos as elaborated by Fordun and Boece was an essential adjunct. Conversely, it was a language in which Henrisoun’s historical justification of union had no place at all. Wisely enough, therefore, the Protestant rebels confined their feverish speculation on dynastic alliances with England to their private correspondence, while publicly they proclaimed their undying allegiance to Mary Stewart and the commonweal and liberty of her realm. As this suggests, however, the Protestants’ attempts to arouse and exploit the Scots’ patriotic conservatism might easily play into the hands of their Catholic queen. For it raised expectations of an independent Scottish kingdom which only Mary herself — the one true successor to the throne of Fergus MacFerchard — could properly fulfil.76 That Mary ultimately proved to be a hopelessly inept ruler is beside the present point and need not concern us here. However, it is important to stress that, despite all her marital and extra-marital antics, the deeply conservative Scots remained extraordinarily reluctant to abandon the only legitimate adult ruler whom they had experienced since 1542. As Gordon Donaldson has recently confirmed, Mary’s biggest mistake was not her marriage to the feckless Darnley, nor even her escapade with the maverick Bothwell, but her flight to England after the inconclusive battle of Langside in 1568.77 Had she remained north of the border, it seems probable that sufficient Scots would have rallied to her cause to ensure her restoration to a throne from which, according to the rebels, she had not in fact been deposed at all, but which she had merely abdicated voluntarily in favour of her son, the infant James VI. This transparent fiction was doubtless aimed primarily at appeasing Elizabeth. It seems likely, however, that the rebels also hoped that it would assuage the conservative consciences of their fellow countrymen. Like the Congregation in 1559, the Confederate Lords in 1567 were faced with the problem of making armed resistance acceptable to a political community which, while it venerated kingship, had no very clear idea of how to deal with tyranny. There was, of course, a tradition of radical political speculation in Scotland, deriving from the conciliar era and finding its fullest expression in the writings of John Mair, which lent cautious sanction to the idea of resisting and ultimately deposing a tyrannical ruler. But there is little evidence that such radical views were accepted by the political community at large.78 Consequently, it was both easier and safer for the Confederate Lords to adhere publicly to the fiction of Mary’s abdication. Behind the scenes, however, George Buchanan was left to explore more fully the possibility of integrating Mair’s radical scholasticism with the conventional view of kingship embodied in the language of the commonweal. As his Rerum Scoticarum Historia was to show, this could be successfully accomplished — at least in part — through the medium of Boece’s ancient, but mythical, kings. Some years ago, both Buchanan’s character and his historical judgement were violently

assailed in an influential article by Hugh Trevor-Roper.79 In essence, Trevor-Roper argued that Buchanan was a vain and deceitful old fraud who, in the last years of an otherwise distinguished life, laboured over a history of Scotland which he knew was fundamentally wrongheaded, but which he was unable to abandon because it underwrote the radical political ideology he had developed to justify Mary’s deposition. Stripped of its rhetorical flourishes, Trevor-Roper’s case does retain some substance: Buchanan’s history certainly did owe much to that of Hector Boece and, as was suggested earlier, the reigns of many of the mythical kings described there were construed by Buchanan as illustrating the constitutionality of deposition and even of tyrannicide. What better way of persuading his compatriots of the legitimacy of his radical ideas than by demonstrating that they were inherent in a national myth whose validity they were unlikely to challenge?80 There was, however, a snag. As Trevor-Roper excitedly pointed out, it is clear from Buchanan’s vitriolic attack on him that the Scotsman was well aware that in 1572 the Welsh antiquary Humphrey Lhuyd had published a work — known in translation as The Breviary of Britayne — in which he denounced Boece as ‘a malicious falsifier without al shame or honestie’ and went on, quite justifiably, to deny the very existence of a Scottish kingdom, far less a line of over forty kings, before the fifth century AD.81 The historical underpinning of Buchanan’s political philosophy was effectively demolished and — or so Trevor-Roper triumphantly concluded — the ‘gullible rhetorician’ who had sunk ‘his intellectual capital in Boece and his wretched kings’ could salvage his pride only by savaging the unfortunate Lhuyd.82 There is, however, rather more to Buchanan’s assault on Lhuyd than this suggests or than Trevor-Roper was prepared to allow. After all, Buchanan’s political theory was founded, not in prescriptive right, not in the historicity of an ancient Scottish constitution, but quite simply in the law of nature.83 In this respect, the mythical kings were a convenience, not a necessity. They were a necessity, however, if the antiquity and autonomy of the Scottish kingdom were not finally to fall victim to the blandishments of the British History. For Humphrey Lhuyd, despite his scepticism about the Scottish past, was nevertheless a staunch upholder of Geoffrey of Monmouth and that same Brut tradition which Boece had sought to counter. Not only does the Breviary of Britayne lend tacit support to the Brutus legend, but it concludes with a series of encomia of early British kings culminating in Constantine and Arthur.84 Buchanan may well have been a vain and deceitful old fraud, but so too was Humphrey Lhuyd. There was more at stake in their feud than the Scotsman’s radical political principles. There was also his patriotic pride. Like so many of his Scottish predecessors, in writing his Historia, Buchanan was faced with the prospect of puncturing the inflated pretensions of a rampant British imperialism.85 By this time, of course, it was impossible for an urbane humanist of Buchanan’s stature to peddle a legend like that of Gathelus and Scota, and he very sensibly laid it quickly and quietly to rest.86 Predictably, with Humphrey Lhuyd as well as Geoffrey of Monmouth in

mind, his destruction of Brutus and his sons — that ‘most impudent falsehood’ — was a rather noisier and lengthier affair.87 His ridiculing of the foundation legends, however, was merely a prologue to a highly technical argument in which Buchanan deployed all his considerable linguistic and philological expertise to demonstrate that both Scots and Britons had much more prosaic origins among the tribes of ancient Gaul. In the course of this erudite analysis, the basis of the British History with all its imperial pretensions was effectively exploded.88 Thereafter, however, Buchanan’s critical sense deserted him entirely: he simply would not accept Lhuyd’s argument that the first seven centuries of Scottish history as retold by Boece were a fabrication. To be sure, Boece had occasionally overstepped the mark and appropriated to the Scots the exploits of other peoples, but on the crucial matter of chronology he was perfectly correct: the Scottish kingdom was founded by Fergus I in 330 BC and had had a continuous and independent existence, under a line of over one hundred sovereign kings, ever since that date.89 According to Buchanan, English chroniclers — from Monmouth to Lhuyd himself — had been seriously misled by the unwarranted assumption that the area referred to in early sources as ‘Britain’ designated the whole island rather than simply the Roman province south of Hadrian’s Wall.90 Not unexpectedly, therefore, the Scotsman chose to ignore English accounts of Arthur’s alleged British empire and dismissed Monmouth’s description of his heroic exploits abroad as bearing ‘not a shadow of resemblance to truth’.91 In short, following the path marked out by Fordun and Boece, Buchanan was intent on vindicating the autonomy of his native realm whenever it was threatened by the British History.92 Nevertheless, despite his vigorous endorsement of the Scottish national epos, it would be misleading to portray Buchanan as an unrepentant Anglophobe. The client of an Anglophile Scottish government and the tutor of a potential British king, Buchanan was prepared to look favourably on the idea of union with England.93 His views, however, were quite untinged with the apocalyptic urgency of Henrisoun — the Emperor Constantine barely figures in his chronicle94 — and clearly did not entail a denial of Scotland’s original and continuing autonomy. Like Mair, in fact, if Buchanan envisaged union, it was one of equal partners which would involve an explicit recognition of Scotland’s historic sovereign status. In this respect, for all his radicalism, Buchanan spoke in the same voice of patriotic conservatism as had echoed warningly in the ears of earlier Protestant unionists and which was still to be heard even as union was finally realised in 1603. Indeed, despite the radical gloss which had been added to Scotland’s early history, and despite that history’s use in a bitter ideological battle, the ancient line of kings remained the most potent available symbol of the kingdom’s uniqueness and integrity.95 The point is aptly illustrated by the publication in London immediately on Elizabeth’s death of an interesting little handbook entitled Certeine Matters concerning the Realme of Scotland. Written by a Scot, John Monipenny, and containing a ‘who’s who’ of the Scottish

landed elite together with a topographical description of the northern realm, the book was obviously intended to introduce the English to their new partners in union. It is surely significant, therefore, that Monipenny prefaced his breakdown of the Scottish political establishment with pen portraits of all 107 of James VI’s royal predecessors.96 Here was a timely reminder to the English, not only that their new king came of illustrious royal stock, but that the Scottish realm, founded by Fergus I in 330 BC, had had a free and independent existence ever since that date. The union of the Scottish and English crowns was to be seen, not as a re-creation of the empire of Brutus or Constantine or Arthur, but as the conjunction of two historic sovereign states. In their veneration of the ancient royal line and, by implication, in their rejection of the Anglocentrism of the British History, the Scots were virtually unanimous. Even the king’s ecclesiastical opponents rallied to the cause with the publication in 1602 of John Johnston’s Inscriptiones Historicae Regum Scotorum. Here were to be found not only engravings of all the Stewart kings of Scotland but Latin verses extolling the virtues (and deprecating the vices) of each and every one of the long line of Scottish kings. Johnston even went so far as to preface his work with a lengthy poem on Gathelus and the Scots legendary origins by no less a personage than Andrew Melville himself.97 Although not opposed to union as such, the presbyterians had no liking for the erastian church which Constantinian imperialism was seen to underwrite. For them, the mythical kings remained an essential counterweight to the ecclesiastical as well as the political prejudices built into the British History. Scottish protests, however, had little chance of effecting the desired change in English attitudes. Almost inevitably, the Union of the Crowns was construed in the south in the imperialist terms popularised by the British History.98 To Scots such as Sir Thomas Craig of Riccarton the outcome was profoundly disillusioning. In 1602, this great Scottish lawyer and philosopher of union felt obliged to write a weighty tome defending Scotland’s historic freedom from what he called the ‘Fooleries and Scurrilities’ contained in Holinshed’s chronicle of 1577.99 With vast erudition, the British History was once again taken to task and Brutus, Arthur and all the medieval precedents for homage were once again exposed as delusions of the English imperial mind.100 Predictably, however, despite the acuteness of his historical sense, Craig refused to abandon the long and illustrious line of Scottish kings. On the contrary, both in 1602 and subsequently, he vaunted them as a positive asset, not only to Scotland, but to a post-union England which could boast no such glorious royal — and hence national — lineage.101 Stung by Christopher Pigott’s sneering jibes about Scotland’s poverty, he reasoned that the Scots had other attributes — ‘the antiquity of their nation, for instance, an untarnished record of independence and unchallenged renown’ — which their new partners ought to take more seriously.102 Clearly, however, Craig was aware that the English were less than impressed by his royal master’s distinguished pedigree. Moreover, it was becoming equally clear that they were not prepared to countenance the creation of a truly

British realm on the lines first envisaged by Mair. After all, among many other things, that would require the writing of a truly British history. As Craig himself put it: ‘As far as possible the public annals of the two countries should be revised. Errors and irritating expressions must be expunged ... and a new history of Britain should be written with the utmost regard to accuracy’.103 The English, however, were not to be persuaded. Secure in the knowledge of their own election, their past already so flatteringly chronicled in the works of Foxe and Holinshed, they had no need or desire to rewrite their history to accommodate the Scots. For them, it was easier and much more satisfying to identify the new British king with Brutus, Arthur and Constantine than to greet him as the lineal descendant of Fergus MacFerchard.104 As for the Scots, bereft of the traditional focus of their independence, they would eventually find in the covenant an alternative (though not unambiguous) means of articulating their sense of national identity. In any case, when the king’s plans for closer union fell foul of the massive indifference of the English parliament, the claim to superiority lost much of its former significance — until, that is, it was briefly and spectacularly revived when the whole question of union was reopened in the years preceding 1707.105 The mythical kings, however, were by no means forgotten during the intervening years. In 1612, John Monipenny, indefatigable in his efforts to educate the English, published in London his Abridgement or Summarie of the Scots Chronicles. While English interest proved minimal, this epitome of Boece’s work was reprinted at least four times in seventeenth–century Scotland.106 One reprinting coincided with Charles I’s visit to Scotland in 1633, an event which inspired Edinburgh’s town council to commission the portrait painter, George Jamesone, to decorate the west end of the Tolbooth with ‘the pourtraites of 109 kings of Scotland’.107 The towering influence of George Buchanan also helped to preserve the memory of the ancient royal line. To the radicals of the covenanting era, Buchanan ranked next to the bible as a source of inspiration, and the mythical kings — or at least those who had ruled tyrannically — survived to stalk the closing pages of such works as Samuel Rutherford’s Lex, Rex.108 Ironically, however, after the Restoration it was not as illustrations of radical constitutional ideas, but as proof of the principle of indefeasible hereditary right, that the ancient kings attracted the passionate loyalty of royalists like Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh.109 And it was this same principle, allied to the presence in Edinburgh of the future James VII & II, which prompted the commissioning of the Holyroodhouse portraits. Not surprisingly, in the wake of the Glorious Revolution, it was only among the Jacobites that the kings retained any of their former totemic power. Paradoxically, however, it was in fact a Jacobite, Father Thomas Innes, who did most to destroy their credibility with the publication in 1729 of his justly celebrated Critical Essay. Yet even Innes, fine scholar though he was, was unwilling to deny the Stewarts some semblance of an immemorial pedigree. Having meticulously undermined the ancient line of Scottish kings, he substituted

the still older and lengthier line of the Pictish royal house.110 Perhaps fortunately, this resplendent genealogy had little future among the ‘enlightened’ North Britons who flourished in the wake of the ’45. NOTES 1. For details of the contract, see The Bannatyne Miscellany III (Bannatyne Club, 1855), 327–38. 2. On the development of national origin myths and their association with royal genealogies in Europe generally, see Susan Reynolds, ‘Medieval Origines Gentium and the Community of the Realm’, History, lxviii (1984), 375–90. On Scotland in particular, see Edward J. Cowan, ‘Myth and Identity in Early Medieval Scotland’, SHR, lxiii (1984), 111–35. 3. Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, ed. and trans. Lewis Thorpe (Harmondsworth, 1966). For a detailed analysis of Geoffrey’s work, see J. S. P. Tatlock, The Legendary History of Britain (Berkeley, 1950). 4. Apart from the fact that it was a rattling good varn, it may also have appealed to those Norman settlers who were of Breton origin. See the remarks in Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England (London, 1974–82), i, 205, and T. D. Kendrick, British Antiquity (London, 1950), 9–11. 5. The classic introduction to Geoffrey and his influence on English historiography is Kendrick, British Antiquity. See also Gransden, Historical Writing in England, i, 201ff, and ii, 73–77, 220ff, and Laura Keeler, Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Later Latin Chroniclers (Berkeley, 1946). 6. Sydney Anglo, ‘The British History in Early Tudor Propaganda’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, xliv (1961), 17–48, casts doubt on its significance as a royal propaganda weapon. 7. C. L. Kingsford, English Historical Literature in the Fifteenth Century (Oxford, 1913), 113ff. 8. On sixteenth–century English historiography generally, see F. J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino, 1967). On Polydore and his critics, see Denys Hay, Polydore Vergil (Oxford, 1952), 157ff, and Kendrick British Antiquity, 79–98. 9. William Haller, Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ and the Elect Nation (London, 1963). Haller’s thesis has been heavily criticised for stressing English election at the expense of the universalist framework of Foxe’s thinking; see for example Richard Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse (Appleford, 1978), Katharine Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain (Oxford, 1979), Paul Christianson, Reformers and Babylon (Toronto, 1978), and particularly V. N. Olsen, John Foxe and the Elizabethan Church (Berkeley, 1973). While there is some justice in such criticism, these works themselves seem to ignore Foxe’s contribution to the development of a political vocabulary in terms of which his contemporaries could (and did) conceive of England, if not as the elect nation, then certainly as an elect nation whose history clearly revealed the beneficent workings of divine providence. For a recent discussion of this, see Patrick Collinson, ‘A Chosen People? The English Church and the Reformation’, History Today, xxxvi (March 1986), 14–20. 10. Some of these implications are explored in Arthur H. Williamson, Scottish National Consciousness in the Age of James VI: The Apocalypse, the Union and the Shaping of Scotland’s Public Culture (Edinburgh, 1979), and in the same author’s ‘Scotland, Antichrist and the Invention of Great Britain’, in John Dwyer and others (eds.), New Perspectives on the Politics and Culture of Early Modem Scotland (Edinburgh, 1982), 34–58. The present essay is greatly indebted to Dr. Williamson’s pioneering work. 11. What follows is a composite account of the arguments of the medieval chroniclers. Inevitably they vary considerably in detail and often include points which, for convenience and clarity, are ignored here. For a brief summary of the English claim, one can do no better than examine Edward I’s response to the papal bull Scimus fili of 1299 (see next note). 12. For both these episodes, see E. L. G. Stones (ed.), Anglo-Scottish Relations 1174–1328: Some Selected Documents (Oxford, 1970), 192–219, 346–65. See also E. L. G. Stones, ‘The Appeal to History in Anglo-Scottish Relations between 1291–1401’, Archives, ix (1969), 11–21, 80–3. 13. See Gransden, Historical Writing in England, ii, 275–77. 14. The Declaration is reprinted as an appendix to J. A. H. Murray (ed.), The Complaynt of Scotlande (EETS, 1872), 191–206. 15. After dealing at some length with Brutus and his sons, the Declaration mentions merely as a matter of course the other landmarks in the British History’s account of Anglo–Scottish relations — ‘the death of Kyng Humbre, the actes of Dunwalde king of this realm, the division of Belyn & Brene, the victories of King Arthure’ — before picking up the story in AD 800 (ibid., 199–200).

16. Ibid., 198. 17. See the Processus Baldredi in W. F. Skene (ed.), Chronicles of the Picts, Chronicles of the Scots, and other Early Memorials of Scottish History (Edinburgh, 1867), 271–84, esp. 279–80; and James Fergusson (ed.). The Declaration of Arbroath 1320 (Edinburgh, 1970), 7. Elements of the myth were also employed in the Anglo-Scottish peace negotiations of 1321, see P. A. Linehan, ‘A Fourteenth-Century History of Anglo-Scottish Relations in a Spanish Manuscript’, BIHR, xlviii (1975), 106–22. For a full discussion of these documents, see Norman Reid, ‘The Political Role of the Monarchy in Scotland 1249–1328’ (Edinburgh University Ph.D. Thesis, 1984), 380ff. 18. For the few known biographical details, see John of Fordun, Chronica Gentis Scotorum, ed. W. F. Skene and trans. F. J. H. Skene (Edinburgh, 1871–72), i, xiiiff. 19. Ibid., ii, 21. 20. Ibid., ii, 5, 30–6. 21. Ibid., ii, 101–3. Fordun’s puzzlement is evident in the three different versions of the chapter in which he deals with Arthur. In the one referred to above, he is described as an illegitimate usurper and his empire is not mentioned. In one of the others, however, Geoffrey’s account of Arthur’s imperial exploits is given — only to be refuted on the grounds that they are mentioned by neither Bede nor Gildas (ibid., i, 111–2). 22. See, for example, ibid., ii, 250, 273, 300. Although forced to concede that William the Lion did do homage to the English king in 1174, Fordun is careful to document his release in 1189 from the obligations previously contracted (ibid., ii, 260–1, 267–8). 23. For what follows, see ibid., ii, 1, 6–7, 9–28, 67–8, 77–9 and 136ff. For the sake of clarity, I have simplified Fordun’s account and, where he gives alternative versions, adopted the one generally accepted by his disciples. 24. The fullest discussion of Fordun’s sources and how he manipulated them remains that of Skene in ibid., ii, xxix– lxxviii. On Scota and the origins’ myth, see in addition Cowan, ‘Myth and Identity’, 119ff, and William Matthews, ‘The Egyptians in Scotland: The Political History of a Myth’, Viator, i (1970), 289–306. 25. For Fordun’s influence on the development of late medieval Scottish historiography, see Marjorie Drexler, ‘Attitudes to Nationality in Scottish Historical Writing from Barbour to Boece’ (Edinburgh University Ph.D. Thesis, 1979). 26. For a contemporary Scots translation, see Thomas Maitland (ed.), The History and Chronicles of Scotland: Written in Latin by Hector Boece … and translated by John Bellenden ... (Edinburgh, 1821). Subsequent references are to this edition. 27. Quoted in W. Douglas Simpson, ‘Hector Boece’, University of Aberdeen Quatercentenary of the Death of Hector Boece (Aberdeen, 1937), 7–29, at 29. For further biographical details, see John Durkan, ‘Early Humanism and King’s College’, Aberdeen University Review, xlviii (1980), 259–79, esp. 260f. 28. At one point, Boece admits that large parts of his story are ‘richt discrepant fra the croniklis of Britonis maid be Galfrede’ (i.e., Geoffrey of Monmouth), but he goes on to declare that he believes it ‘mair sowndand to the verite, to follow mony provin and attentik authoris ..than to followe the said Galfrede, writand but ony testimonial of othir authoris, and singular in his awin opinioun’ (History and Chronicles, i, 285). Not surprisingly, therefore, he follows Fordun in confining Brutus to the southern part of Albion (ibid., i, xix–xxiii), in rejecting Geoffrey’s account of Arthur’s empire (ibid., ii, 82–3, 87), and in denying that Scottish kings ever did homage for anything other than their English lands (ibid., ii, 282, 308, 315– 6). 29. The names of many of Boece’s kings are in fact drawn from Fordun’s genealogy of David I, taken up to Japhet, son of Noah, via the two Ferguses and Gathelus (Fordun, Chronica, ii, 244–6). Apart from this, however, Fordun treats the early kings with great circumspection (see ibid., ii, 79). Boece’s main source for the additional material he supplies is a chronicle by the suspiciously named Veremundus. Its authenticity is a matter of debate, but Drexler (‘Attitudes to Nationality’, 232–4) argues plausibly that it was not simply Boece’s invention. 30. The constitutionalist interpretation of Boece’s chronicle stems from the strained attempt to argue that his newly discovered sources were deliberately concocted to justify James III’s deposition in 1488. The classic statement of this case — itself an attempt to damn George Buchanan and vindicate Mary Stewart and the principle of indefeasible hereditary right — is Thomas Innes, A Critical Essay on the Ancient Inhabitants of the Northern Parts of Britain or Scotland [1729] (Edinburgh, 1885), but is repeated in substance in J. B. Black, ‘Boece’s Scotorum Historiae’, in Quatercentenary of the Death of Hector Boece, 30–53. Although she does not comment on the James III connection, Drexler (‘Attitudes to Nationality’, 244–8) endorses a constitutionalist interpretation. My own view — that the deaths of the early kings were meant as moral precepts rather than constitutional precedents — is based on a reading of Boece which it is impossible fully to document here, but which is set out in Roger A. Mason, ‘Kingship and Commonweal: Political Thought and Ideology in Reformation Scotland’ (Edinburgh University Ph.D. Thesis, 1983), 97–108. It is worth pointing out, however, not only that

both Boece and Bellenden received royal pensions for their work — an unlikely event if they were advocating resistance — but also that there is no evidence that anyone actually interpreted Boece’s chronicle in a radical way before 1567. For similar views on the moral purpose of the Scotorum Historiae, see Durkan, ‘Early Humanism and King’s College’, 267–8, and A. A. M. Duncan, ‘Hector Boece and the Medieval Tradition’, in Scots Antiquaries and Historians (Abertay Historical Society, Dundee, 1972), 1–11, at 10–11. 31. The theme (reminiscent of Livy) of moral decline and regeneration is fundamental to Boece’s view of the Scottish past. Although not included in the original Latin version, it is well epitomised in a section prefaced by Bellenden to the body of his translation: ‘Ane prudent doctrine maid be the Auctore concerning the new Maneris and the Auld of Scottis’ (History and Chronicles, i, liv–lxii). 32. On the importance of this ideal, see G. W. S. Barrow, ‘The Idea of Freedom in Late Medieval Scotland’, IR, xxx (1979), 16–34. 33. For the various sixteenth-century editions and translations of the Scotorum Historiae, see Simpson, ‘Hector Boece’, Quatercentenary, 27–8. 34. See A History of Greater Britain ... 1521, ed. and trans. Archibald Constable (SHS, 1892), 1–4 (where the Brutus story is dismissed as ‘visionary’), 50–2 (where Gathelus and Scota are discounted as but a ‘fable’), 54–7 (where the mythical kings are reduced — somewhat arbitrarily! — to an anonymous fifteen), and 127–8, 143–4, 194, 287 (where Caxton — in fact Higden’s Polychronicon — is repeatedly taken to task for upholding the English claim to superiority). 35. For examples of Mair’s advocacy of peaceful union through marriage, see ibid., 41–2, 189–90, 217–8. 36. Ibid., 17–8. Although optimistic in thinking that he could free British terminology from Brut-ish connotations, Mair was correct in assuming (as even Fordun had grudgingly admitted a century and a half previously) that ‘Britain’ was commonly used in the later middle ages to denote the whole island as well as its southern part. On this generally, see Denys Hay, ‘The Use of the term “Great Britain” in the Middle Ages’, PSAS, lxxxix (1955–6), 56–66, reprinted in his Europe: The Emergence of an Idea (Edinburgh, 1968), 128–44. 37. Boece, History and Chronicles, i, xix, xxii. In many respects, of course, Boece’s chronicle ought to be read as a deliberate counterblast to what he must have considered Mair’s unpatriotic historical scepticism. 38. The Rough Wooing is the subject of a forthcoming book by Marcus Merriman. Meanwhile, for the background to what follows, see his ‘The Struggle for the Marriage of Mary Queen of Scots: English and French Intervention in Scotland 1543–1550’ (London University Ph.D. Thesis, 1975). 39. For a brief introductory survey of the pamphlet literature, see Marcus Merriman, ‘War and Propaganda during the “Rough Wooing” ’, Scottish Tradition, ix/x (1979–80), 20–30. For more detailed analyses, see Merriman, ‘Struggle for the Marriage of Mary Queen of Scots’, ch. 8, and Mason, ‘Kingship and Commonweal’, ch. 5. 40. Reprinted in Murray (ed.), Complaynt of Scotlande, 238–46. Although Somerset’s authorship cannot be ruled out, it seems probable that James Henrisoun (whose Exhortacion is discussed below) had a hand in its composition. 41. Ibid., 239–40. 42. Ibid., 241. 43. Ibid., 245. 44. Ibid., 239. 45. Ibid., 244. 46. Ibid., 242–3. 47. Published by the king’s printer Richard Grafton (London, 1548). The author’s true identity is doubtful, though Dr. Merriman has suggested Nicholas Adams, an English lawyer and member of parliament. 48. Bodrugan, Epitome, sig. Avv and passim. 49. Reprinted in Murray (ed.), Complaynt of Scotlande, 207–36. For details of Henrisoun’s fascinating career, see the essay by Marcus Merriman, below, pp. 85–112. 50. Henrisoun, Exhortacion, 230. 51. Ibid., 219–20, 222–3. 52. Ibid., 214–6. 53. Ibid., 217–8. 54. Ibid., 218–9; cf. Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain, 132ff. 55. Henrisoun, Exhortacion, 218. 56. On the general background to what follows, see Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modem Political Thought (Cambridge, 1978), i, 9–12, and ii, 85–9. Among other things, Skinner reviews the well-known controversy in Past and

Present between G. R. Elton and G. L. Harris. As will become clear, like Skinner, I take Elton to have presented the more convincing case as regards the revolutionary connotations acquired by imperial terminology in the 1530s. 57. In Scotland, James III was particularly keen on asserting his imperial rights: see Norman Macdougall, James III: A Political Study (Edinburgh, 1982), 98, and more generally, Leslie J. Macfarlane, William Elphinstone and the Kingdom of Scotland (Aberdeen, 1985), 40–4, 148f, 188–90, 330. On England, see Philip Grierson, ‘The Origins of the English Sovereign and the Symbolism of the Closed Crown’, British Numismatic Journal, xxxiii (1964), 118–34. 58. See Richard Koebner, “‘The Imperial Crown of this Realm”: Henry VIII, Constantine the Great and Polydore Vergil’, BIHR, xxvi (1953), 29–52. 59. G. R. Elton (ed.). The Tudor Constitution: Documents and Commentary (Cambridge, 1965), 344. 60. Henrisoun, Exhortation, 218. 61. Ibid., 218. 62. Although Henrisoun’s historical justification is uniquely elaborate, his references to an imperial British realm are not. Such phraseology is frequently used in the unionist propaganda of the 1540s. 63. Henrisoun, Exhortation, 225. 64. Ibid., 210, 234. 65. Ibid., 234. 66. Ibid., 212. 67. Apart from Somerset and Henrisoun, the best example of an apocalyptic interpretation of the marriage is the preface to William Patten’s The Expedition into Scotland [1548], reprinted in John Dalyell (ed.),Fragments of Scottish History (Edinburgh, 1798). 68. On the medieval background to the application of sacred prophecy to earthly events, see Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study of Joachism (Oxford, 1969). For its use in the sixteenth century, see the works cited in note 9 above. 69. In addition to the above, see Frances A. Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (Harmondsworth, 1977), 38ff. 70. Williamson, ‘Scotland, Antichrist and the Invention of Great Britain’, in Dwyer (ed.). New Perspectives, 39. 71. Scottish anti-unionist propaganda is meagre in comparison to the unionist literature commissioned by the English government, but see A. M. Stewart (ed.), The Complaynt of Scotland (STS, 1979), and William Lamb, Ane Resonyng, ed. R. J. Lyall (Aberdeen, 1985), for the two surviving examples. 72. See Williamson, Scottish National Consciousness, 3–15. 73. See Mortimer Levine, The Early Elizabethan Succession Question (Stanford, 1966), and Helen Stafford, James VI of Scotland and the Throne of England (New York, 1940). 74. Of course, as was later to become clear, many Scottish Protestant unionists were uneasy with the Constantinian model, not only because it presupposed English superiority, but also because it upheld the royal supremacy in the church. Union on such terms might therefore appear doubly unacceptable and it is hardly surprising that it was a Scot — John Napier of Merchiston — who issued the earliest and most devastating critique of the relationship between Constantine and English-British election. On this whole subject, see Williamson, Scottish National Consciousness, 16ff. 75. For full documentation of what follows, see Roger A. Mason, ‘Covenant and Commonweal: The Language of Politics in Reformation Scotland’, in Norman Macdougall (ed.), Church, Politics and Society: Scotland 1408–1929 (Edinburgh, 1983), 97–126. 76. For examples of Mary being identified with the race of kings, see the poems by George Buchanan (1558) and particularly Thomas Craig (1565) in Epithalamia Tria Mariana, ed. and trans. Francis Wrangham (Chester, 1837). 77. Gordon Donaldson, All the Queen’s Men: Power and Politics in Mary Stewart’s Scotland (London, 1983), 83–116. Cf. Jenny Wormald, Court, Kirk and Community: Scotland 1470–1625 (London, 1981), 143–4. 78. On Mair and his fellow radicals, see J. H. Burns, ‘The Conciliarist Tradition in Scotland’, SHR, xlii (1963), 89–104. For the view that their ideas were not commonly shared by the Scottish political community, see Mason, ‘Covenant and Commonweal’, in Macdougall (ed.), Church, Politics and Society, 110–1, and more generally my ‘Kingship, Tyranny and the Right to Resist in Fifteenth-Century Scotland’, SHR (forthcoming). 79. H. R. Trevor-Roper, ‘George Buchanan and the Ancient Scottish Constitution’, EHR, Supplement 3 (1966). For some judicious comments on Trevor–Roper’s unnecessarily hostile and frequently misleading attitude to Buchanan, see the review by G. W. S. Barrow in Annali della Fondazione italiana per la storia amministrativa, iv (1967), 653–5. 80. Buchanan may not in fact have been the first to see the potential of this strategy. The anti-Marian polemicist Robert

Sempill made good use of Boece’s history in two poems — Ane Declaratioun of the Lordis Iust Quarrell and Ane Exhortatioun to the Lords — written in the months just prior to Mary’s ‘abdication’ see James Cranstoun (ed.),Satirical Poems of the Time of the Reformation (STS, 1891–3), i, 48–51, 57–64. 81. See Humphrey Lhuyd, The Breviary of Britayne, trans. Thomas Twyne (London, 1573), fos. 38r–47r, for his attack on Boece. The work was originally published by Ortelius as Commentarioli Descriptionis Britannicae Fragmentum (Cologne, 1572). 82. Trevor-Roper, ‘Buchanan and the Ancient Constitution’, 28–9. 83. For an analysis of his political thought, se J. H. Burns, ‘The Political Ideas of George Buchanan’, SHR, xxx (1951), 60–8, and Roger A. Mason, ‘Rex Stoicus: George Buchanan, James VI and the Scottish Polity’, in Dwyer (ed.), New Perspectives, 9–33. 84. Lhuyd, Breviary of Britayne, fos. 49v, 89v–94v. His loyalties are made still clearer in his attack on Polydore Vergil — the traditional bugbear of Galfridian enthusiasts — who is treated no less venomously than Boece (e.g., ibid., fos. 84rff and 94r–v). 85. Although Lhuyd himself died before the Breviary saw print, the 1570s and ’80s witnessed a resurgence of interest in the British History and particularly in Arthur which Buchanan probably knew about through his connections with the Sidney circle. This took the form not only of literary efforts (culminating in Spenser’s Faerie Queen) to identify Elizabeth with Arthur, but also of attempts (notably those of John Dee) to justify English overseas expansion on the basis of Arthur’s alleged empire. See Kendrick, British Antiquity, 36–44, 93–8, 127–33; Charles B. Millican, Spenser and the Table Round (2nd. edn., London, 1967), esp. 37–105; Peter J. French, John Dee: The World of an Elizabethan Magus (London, 1972), 188–207; and J. E. Phillips, ‘George Buchanan and the Sidney Circle’, Huntington Library Quarterly, xii (1948–9), 23–55, esp. 49–54. Less austerely religious and not narrowly focused on the Antichristian papacy, to many people Arthur may have seemed a more appealing paradigm of English imperialism than Constantine. To Scots, however, he would have been no more acceptable and, in general, Scottish attitudes to Arthur are remarkably (if understandably) hostile; see Matthews, ‘Egyptians in Scotland’, 299, and R. H. Fletcher, The Arthurian Material in the Chronicles (New York, 1958), 241–9. Interestingly, however, both James IV and James V had children named Arthur—perhaps indicative of their respect for the early Tudors, but more likely a sign of their awareness that few lives stood between the Stewarts and the English throne and of their willingness to turn the British History to their own advantage. 86. George Buchanan, History of Scotland, ed. and trans. James Aikman (Glasgow, 1827), i, 76–8. 87. Ibid., i, 69–76. 88. Ibid., i, 79–116. 89. Ibid., i, 116–29, 149–58 and passim. 90. Ibid., i, 12–3, 121–2, 288. Buchanan occasionally follows Fordun and Boece in using Albion to denote the whole island, but usually he bows to common usage and refers to Britain. 91. Ibid., i, 238–44. Buchanan was, however, prepared to concede that Arthur was a king of exemplary virtue. 92. In addition, Buchanan shared Scottish hostility to the alleged medieval precedents for homage. Following Fordun and Boece, for example, he was careful to document William the Lion’s release from his feudal obligations and elsewhere dwelt on the deceitful arrogance of Edward I’s claim (ibid., i, 365f, 391f). 93. See, for example, ibid., i, 387, and ii, 284–7. See also his account of the Rough Wooing which is markedly favourable to the English cause (ibid., ii, 326ff). 94. Even then Buchanan simply dismisses him as Constantius’ illegitimate son by Helen ‘his concubine’ (ibid., i, 199). 95. Some indication of their importance in Scottish public life is perhaps provided by the fact that when James VI made his triumphal entry into Edinburgh in 1579 the Salt Tron was decorated with a genealogy of the kings of Scotland. Similarly, when his wife Anne of Denmark entered the capital in 1590 ‘all the kings heertofore of Scotland’ were once again on display. See Anna Jean Mill, Mediaeval Plays in Scotland (Edinburgh and London, 1927), 194, 204. Although the records do not make it entirely clear that these genealogies went all the way back to Fergus I, these pageants do provide a context and tradition for the 109 Jamesone portraits produced for the entry of Charles I in 1633 (see below, note 107). It has been tentatively suggested that the series of portraits of James I to V (now in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery) may have been painted for one of these earlier triumphal entries. See Duncan Thomson, Painting in Scotland 1570–1650 (Edinburgh, 1975), 20–1. 96. John Monipenny, Certeine Matters concerning the Realme of Scotland (London, 1603), sig. Blr–D2v. According to H. G. Aldis, A List of Books Printed in Scotland before 1700 (2nd. edn., Edinburgh, 1970), the work had previously been published in Scotland, possibly in 1594. Certainly, the same description of the kings had appeared in Sir John Skene’s

edition of The Lawes and Actes of Parliament (Edinburgh, 1597). 97. John Johnston, Inscriptiones Historicae Regum Scotorum ... Praefixus est Gathelus, sive de Gentis origine Fragmentum An. Melvini (Amsterdam, 1602). 98. The pamphlet literature generated by the Union of 1603 is much too vast to be commented on here, but see Bruce Galloway, The Union of England and Scotland 1603–1608 (Edinburgh, 1986), 30–57, and Bruce Galloway and Brian Levack (eds.), The Jacobean Union: six tracts of 1604 (SHS, 1985). 99. Sir Thomas Craig, Scotland’s Soveraignty Asserted... [1602], trans. George Ridpath (London, 1695), quote from p. 428. 100. Ibid., 34–44 (on Brutus), 109–22 (on Arthur), and 259ff (on post–Conquest claims to homage). Inevitably, Craig’s attack on the Galfridians involved a spirited defence of both Polydore Vergil and George Buchanan. 101. Sir Thomas Craig, De Unione Regnorum Britanniae Tractatus [1605], ed. and trans. C. S. Terry (SHS, 1909), 354ff. 102. Ibid., 357. 103. Ibid., 468. Similar sentiments were expressed by Francis Bacon: see James Spedding (ed.), The Letters and Life of Francis Bacon (London, 1861–74), iii, 250. 104. James himself did little to dampen such Brut-ish enthusiasm. As his first speech to the English parliament made abundantly clear, he was well schooled in the unionist rhetoric of Henrisoun and Somerset: see C. H. McIlwain (ed.), The Political Works of James I (Cambridge, Mass., 1918), 271–2; see also the proclamation of 1604, by which he assumed the title of king of Great Britain, in J. F. Larkin and L. P. Hughes (eds.), Stuart Royal Proclamations I: King James I (Oxford, 1973), 94–8. There is evidence too that the king was willing enough to associate his enlarged realm with that of Brutus and Arthur: see Spedding (ed.),Bacon’s Letters and Life, iii, 194, and S. T. Bindoff, ‘The Stuarts and their Style’, EHR, lx (1945), 192–216, at 205–6. Moreover, as Williamson has shown, he actively patronised émigré Scots like John Gordon (later dean of Salisbury) who for ecclesiastical as much as political reasons were keen to portray the new British king as Constantine redivivus: see Williamson, ‘Scotland, Antichrist and the Invention of Britain’, in Dwyer (ed.), New Perspectives, 44–5. 105. See William Ferguson, ‘Imperial Crowns: a neglected facet of the background to the Treaty of Union of 1707’, SHR, liii (1974), 22–44. 106. John Monipenny, The Abridgement or Summarie of the Scots Chronicles, with a Short description of their original from the coming of Gathelus ... with a true Chronologie of all their kings (London, 1612). The work was reprinted in 1633, 1650, 1662, and 1671. 107. Mill, Mediaeval Plays, 211, 216, 218. Some of Jamesone’s portraits have survived in private hands and a few examples are reproduced in Duncan Thomson, The Life and Art of George Jamesone (Oxford, 1974). 108. Samuel Rutherford, Lex, Rex (London, 1644), 440ff. 109. For this and what follows, see in particular Thomas I. Rae, ‘Historical Scepticism in Scotland before David Hume’, in R. F. Brissenden (ed.), Studies in the Eighteenth Century II (Canberra, 1973), 205–221. See also Douglas Duncan, Thomas Ruddiman: A Study in Scottish Scholarship of the Early Eighteenth Century (Edinburgh, 1965), 122–44. 110. Innes, Critical Essay, 105, 109–11.

5 James Henrisoun and ‘Great Britain’: British Union and the Scottish Commonweal Marcus Merriman

It is appropriate to commence this contribution1 to a volume of essays on Scotland and England by invoking the name of that great ‘English’ historian, S. T. Bindoff,2 and by reminding readers of a past foray into the world of ‘British’ history, his article of 1945 on ‘The Stuarts and their Style’.3 This examined the attempt by James VI and I to have himself styled ‘King of Great Britain’ after his accession to the English throne and indeed can well be regarded as the rebirth, in this century, of interest in the regal union of 1603, a topic now so vividly alive on both sides of the Atlantic.4 While that article naturally focused on the period after 1603, Bindoff also explored previous uses of the term ‘Great Britain’. He made a number of telling discoveries which led him to emphasise the popularisation of the term over half a century before 1603. Although it was subsequently shown by Denys Hay that ‘Great Britain’ (or its Latin equivalent) occasionally occurred in medieval sources,5 nevertheless Bindoff’s general conclusion holds good. It was during the ‘Rough Wooing’ of 1544–50, the most sustained effort to bring Scotland under English rule since the time of Edward III, that the term ‘Great Britain’ entered current usage, as part of English propaganda in favour of the union of the two kingdoms through the marriage of Mary Queen of Scots to Edward VI of England. Bindoff’s conclusion about the adoption of the term ‘Great Britain’ in the 1540s is potently supported by the writings of James Henrisoun,6 who was one of the earliest and most enthusiastic proponents of British union in the 1540s. As such, in the summer of 1547 he produced An Exhortacion to the Scottes, to conforme them selfes to the honorable, expedient, and godly union betwene the twoo realmes of Englande and Scotlande.7 In this work Henrisoun referred some ninety-nine times to ‘Britain’ or ‘Britons’, but ‘Great Britain’ never once appears. A year later, however, in the next work which can be confidently ascribed to Henrisoun, ‘The Godly and Golden Book’8 (July 1548), things were very different indeed; the term ‘great bryttaine’ is consistently employed throughout (if at times

somewhat hesitantly — a point which will be discussed later). The shift in Henrisoun’s terminology neatly reflects the growing popularity of the term ‘Great Britain’ in the period 1547–48. If that were Henrisoun’s only significance for British history, he might be worth little more than a footnote.9 In fact, he richly deserves a detailed study, for several reasons. For a start, although both the Exhortacion and the ‘Godly and Golden Book’ were part of a flood of English propaganda tracts supporting the policy of the Protector Edward Seymour, duke of Somerset, Henrisoun was actually a Scot. He was one of a number who were so committed to the idea of Anglo–Scottish union that they voluntarily ‘assured’ with the English, accepted Henry VIII and then Edward VI as their lord, and swore to advance the cause of Mary’s marriage to Edward during the ‘Rough Wooing’.10 Although the majority of them assured out of fear or the hope of advancement, some did so because they had ‘tayn new apoynzionis of the scriptour’. Henrisoun was one of the latter; but while the others stayed in Scotland, he spent most of his time in London, where he was one of the ‘oratours of Ingland’ who ‘at there protectors instance hes set furtht ane buik quhair be thai intende to preue that Scotland vas ane colone of ingland quhen it vas fyrst inhabit’ — as one Scottish counter-attack to the unionist propaganda. The Complaynt of Scotland, put it.11 But Henrisoun was not simply a pro-English hack. He may in truth be classified with that loose group of English preachers and pamphlet-writers, apparently associated directly or indirectly with Somerset, whom some historians describe as ‘commonwealthmen’.12 Henrisoun’s writings, in fact, reveal a man whose commitment to the reformed faith and whose desire to advance the ‘common weale’ of his native land were such that he came to propose a programme of reform and regeneration quite unique for sixteenth-century Scotland, and more ambitious than anything proposed in contemporary England. It might even be argued that he was the only commonwealthman, that is to say the only one actually to work out what could be called a coherent commonwealth programme.13 As we shall see, moreover, Henrisoun maintained his ideals not only in his writings but also in his life. His eventful career is well worth studying in its own right, and when taken in conjunction with his written work makes him into one of the most interesting Scots — and Britons — of his day. It is indeed a shame that S. T. Bindoff never came across him, for he is just the sort of man with whom Bindoff was fascinated.14 James Henrisoun began his remarkable career in Edinburgh as a burgess and trader. He may have been a brother to George Henrisoun of Fordell, provost of the burgh in 1546–7, or perhaps brother to the schoolmaster Henry who had to flee to England in 1534 because of his heretical opinions; however, there are difficulties with both suggestions, complicated by the existence of at least two other Jameses, one a flesher, the other a maltman. But it doubtless was in Edinburgh that he gained considerable experience with the practical world of hard

cash, urban life and international trade. As early as 1527 he appears to have owned land on the south side of the High Street, between Bell’s Wynd and what is now known as Burnett’s Close; he also held part of the Burgh Muir.15 By the 1530s he was involved in a number of property transfers with Francis Aikman, a burgess who was a close colleague during this period of his life, and he occasionally conducted his business in Aikman’s premises on the north side of the High Street, near the yards of the Blackfriars: the Trinity College and Hospital.16 Both traded with the Low Countries: Henrisoun purchasing military supplies for the crown, Aikman importing drugs as apothecary to James V.17 This connection is important, for Aikman belonged to a select circle of Protestants in the burgh; he was one of the few to be recognised by Knox as having ‘the bruyte of knowledge’ there by the early 1540s.18 Two of his daughters were married to men who became part of the Protestant establishment in the town after 1559–60.19 Aikman is the one man in Edinburgh with whom it is certain that Henrisoun communicated after going to England in 1544, and it is very probable that Henrisoun had been a member of an Aikman ‘privy kirk’ or ‘house cell’ of Protestants well before then.20 Aikman and Henrisoun probably first became exposed to Protestant ideas, as supposedly did many of their fellows, through trade with the Low Countries. Certainly Henrisoun was active there. Ordinary commerce apart, the main focus of his activities centred on his desire to become Conservator of the Scottish privileges in the Netherlands. The Conservator acted as a factor for trade, gaining concessions, maintaining a chapel and handling such legal cases as arose; it was a prestigious post, carrying with it both honour and reward. But it was not yet firmly established in any one staple port; even as late as 1531 when Scottish privileges were spelt out in a commercial treaty between Charles V and James V, no fixed port had been determined and Scots traded wherever they could gain best concessions.21 Henrisoun saw here a chance for advancement and in the years before 1541 attempted to gain the post. As early as 1532, the then Conservator, John Moffat, was under assault both in Scotland and abroad.22 Initially foiled, Henrisoun returned to the attack when the Scottish burghs and crown began to move towards the settlement of trade in one staple port in the early 1540s. At first it seemed that Antwerp had won the concession; then Henrisoun almost single-handedly inspired the council of Middelburg to make a determined attempt to gain it. Henrisoun’s enthusiasm for Middelburg was doubtless based on his belief that should the staple be awarded to the town, of which he clearly had become a burgess, he would also become the Conservator.23 His adopted town eventually improved upon Antwerp’s conditions to the point that Henrisoun was able to gain the support of a number of Scottish burghs for the siting of the staple there.24 Edinburgh’s town council was particularly enthusiastic and went so far as to antagonise James V, who was being assiduously wooed by the powerful Netherlandish noble, Maximillian de Bourgogne, lord high admiral of Zeeland, a vigorous advocate for his own proprietary town of Veere, or Campveere, Middelburg’s neighbour on

the island of Walcheren, the outermost island of Zeeland. Veere lies on the north shore and Middelburg some four miles inland from Flushing, connected to the sea by an inland waterway. However, by August 1541 the crown was increasingly explicit in favour of Veere. Henrisoun made a strong attempt to place attractive counter-offers, so much so that the Edinburgh council continued to recommend Middelburg. The king, exasperated, declared on 29 August 1541 that henceforth all Scottish ships must go to Veere ‘and nane uther’; should Edinburgh prove ‘wilfull’, he promised to ‘provide remeid uther wayis’.25 By the end of the year Henrisoun had lost his case.26 Veere, however, enjoyed its success but briefly, for in less than three years war broke out between Charles V and Scotland and normal relations were not resumed until 1551. The war, which was to ruin trade with the Low Countries, was part of the Rough Wooing which followed the death of James V in December 1542. Initially, the king’s demise improved Henrisoun’s fortunes. The governor for the infant Mary Queen of Scots was James Hamilton, earl of Arran, and the early months of his regency were characterised by a policy of accepting an English marriage for the queen and of turning away from the staunchly Catholic and anti-English David Beaton, cardinal–archbishop of St. Andrews.27 It was during this early phase that Arran deliberately advanced a number of men known to be Protestants or who later became so publicly, including Aikman.28 On 16 January 1543, in his first fortnight as governor, Arran did reappoint Moffat as Conservator, but a week later Henrisoun received the grant, for life, as ‘conservatour of the privileges of the Scottis natioun in Flanderis, Seland, and in thai partis of the Emprior’. He quickly set about exercising his new powers, much to Moffat’s discomfiture.29 Arran’s flirtation with Protestantism, however, was to be brief; so was his encouragement of Henry’s plan to marry Edward to Mary. Although he agreed to the match by the treaty of Greenwich of 1 July 1543, he soon became reconciled to Beaton and, once the campaigning season had passed, rejected the marriage and began to harry reformers.30 By 22 March 1544, Henrisoun no longer held his cherished post, which was returned to Moffat.31 Scottish rejection of the English marriage led directly to war and Henry VIII in turn induced Charles V to prohibit Scottish trade in the Low Countries.32 By May 1544 most of the Scottish community in the Low Countries were in prison or had fled while an English army stood before Edinburgh. That army, under Edward Seymour, earl of Hertford, first took Leith, then attacked and burned a part of Edinburgh, including, it seems, Henrisoun’s house. During his time at Leith, Hertford entertained a number of Scots hostile to the regime, and it was doubtless then that Henrisoun, despairing of his prospects at home, presented himself to the future protector of Edward VI. When the army raised camp on 15 May, Henrisoun went with it, writing from Newcastle to warn Aikman that worse damage was to come to the burgh and instructing him not to repair his house, Tor we stand at ane evill poynt’.33

The next two years must have been dispiriting. Henrisoun may well have been encouraged by Hertford to think that in England his talents would be put to good effect. But he was trivially employed and his pension was not put on a regular basis until March 1546.34 Moreover, Henry VIII no longer seemed interested in what he had earlier called ‘our greate affayre of Scotland’ and was expending most of his energy and his treasure in France. By the end of the French war in June 1546, the Scottish marriage was no nearer fulfilment than it had been in December 1543. Henrisoun doubtless rejoiced over the assassination of Cardinal Beaton in May 1546, but elsewhere in his native country ‘kirkmen and resisters to godlynes’35 still flourished. However, with the death of Henry in January 1547, his situation again altered dramatically and Henrisoun quickly found himself in high places. When he gained control of English affairs, Somerset determined to make a more intelligent attack on Scotland, using the lessons he had learned over the previous four years in Scotland and in France. Clearly changes in warfare were necessary; no one was more aware of this than Somerset, who had seen most of his suggestions rejected by Henry and whose admirably executed invasions of 1544 and 1545 resulted in little worth the effort. The core of his new policy was the establishment of a series of strongholds in Scotland, manned by permanent garrisons, which would create an English ‘pale’ and thereby weaken the Scottish regency. This he began, with the interruption of the battle of Pinkie, in the autumn of 1547. That winter, when it became clear that a French army would soon aid the Scots, the pale was extended by the construction of a number of modern artillery fortifications in the south-east of the country and of one near Dundee.36 This was a sharp change from the methods of Henry VIII, and it sprang mainly from Somerset’s mind. However, in two areas Henrisoun almost certainly contributed to the protector’s thinking. In the first place, the English sought to increase the number and effectiveness of the ‘assured Scots’. In large measure (since most Scots collaborated only when they had to), the very policy of garrisons produced a dramatic increase in their numbers until July 1548, when French aid arrived. But the assured were also deliberately paid higher and more regular rewards, protected and given compensation for such losses as they sustained by helping England. Henrisoun made a number of suggestions concerning this policy and when the system began to collapse in 1549, he bitterly criticised Somerset’s failure to maintain these earlier supporters.37 But he had much more impact in a second area: the production of propaganda specifically aimed at a Scottish audience (‘targeting’ as it is termed in modern advertising parlance) in the hope of encouraging even more of them to fight for the marriage and to do so out of commitment rather than fear. During Henry’s time some propaganda had been published and more had been considered. But, for example, A Declaration, conteynyng the ivst cavses and consyderations, of this present warre with the Scottis, wherin alsoo appereth the trewe & right title, that the kinges most royall maiesty hath to the soueraynitie of Scotlande, printed in

late 1542, clearly had an English and continental audience in mind.38 Moreover, John Elder, the self-styled ‘Redshank Scot’ (i.e. from the Highlands), who had been forced to flee Dundee because of his reformed views, had presented Henry with a tract marvellously apt for a Scottish audience, vilifying Beaton, railing against the Roman church, denouncing the French alliance and arguing for union. Elder was pensioned and allowed to settle in London (where he and Henrisoun must have met and become colleagues), but his remarkable epistle was not printed.39 Somerset, however, deliberately engineered the mounting of a carefully orchestrated propaganda campaign which aimed at convincing Scots that union was not only rooted in history, but also practical and desirable. At least four pieces were drafted, printed by Richard Grafton, the government’s official publisher, and circulated in the course of a year and a half.40 Moreover Somerset cultivated and utilised a group of Scottish pensioners to implement this policy. It was here that Henrisoun was to be a most active collaborator, for his Exhortacion to the Scottes was the first and the longest tract in this campaign. It also marked a definite break with previous justifications and set the tone for subsequent appeals to the Scots. The Exhortacion appeared in the summer of 1547, before the Pinkie invasion. Throughout the work, Henrisoun kept before his readers the fact that he was a Scotsman, that he bore an ‘earnest zeale and vnfained affeccion towardes my countrey’, and argued that he sought to be less ‘a confounder of our liberties and fredomes then a conseruator (which name I had late)’.41 After an eloquent rehearsal of the horrors of war, Henrisoun reminded his compatriots that kings of England had a right and title to Scotland and urged them to read Henry VIII’s Declaration to see that case ‘so well proved’.42 By 1547 the English case had become a complex amalgam of justifications for their war. One was that the Scots were covenant breakers: they had signed the Greenwich treaties and now refused to honour that contract.43 Second — and the nub of the argument in the Declaration — was the line first put forward by Edward I, that Scottish kings had acknowledged English sovereignty many times in the past.44 But the third was the other Edwardian justification, proved in part by what was charmingly called ‘olde authentic stories’, that at its origin Britain was conquered whole by Brutus.45 As the Declaration summarised this prolix and convoluted argument: Concerynge histories, whiche be called witnesses of tymes, the lyght of trueth, and the lyfe of memorye, and fynally the conuenient way and meane, whereby thinges of antiquitie may be brought to mens knowlege, they shewe as playnly this matier as could be wyshed or required, with such a consent of writers, as coulde not agree vppon an vntruth .... According wherevnto we rede how Brutus, of whom the realme than callyd Brytayn toke fyrst that name (being before that tyme inhabited with gyaunts, people without order or ciuilitie) had thre sonnes; Locrine, Albanact, and Camber, and determinyng to haue the whole Isle within the Ocean sea to be after gouerned by them thre, appoynted Albanact to rule that nowe is called Scotland, Camber the parties of Wales, and Locrine that nowe is called Englande: vnto whom as being the elder sonne, the other two brothers shuld do homage, recognisynge and knowleagyng hym as theyr superior. Nowe consider if Brutus conquered all this Ilande, as the hystorye sayeth he dyd, and then in his owne tyme made this order of superioritie as of afore: Howe can there be a title diuised of a more playn begynninge, a more iuste begynninge, a more conuenient

begynninge for the order of this Ilande, at that tyme specially when the people were rude ...?46

This lay at the heart of a great origins debate which recently had reached a particular intensity both between, and within, England and Scotland. Polydore Vergil deprecated the Brutus origin myth in England, John Mair the countervailing Gathelus and Scota myth in Scotland. But other historians, such as Hall in England and Hector Boece across the border (both of whom were pensioned by their respective monarchs), stoutly and skilfully defended the nationalist versions. In England, as the passage above fully demonstrates, the Galfridian legend of Brutus and the whole convoluted range of myths collected together by Geoffrey of Monmouth still held sway. Scotsmen who wished to ingratiate themselves with the Henrician and Edwardian regimes thus had to make the proper noises, as John Elder did in his proposal to Henry VIII: Scotland, a part of your Highnes empyre of England, bifor the incummynge of Albanactus, Brutus secound sonne, was inhabitede, as we reide in aucient Yrische storeis, with gyauntes and wylde people…. But after the incummynge of Albanactus, he reducynge theame to ordour and ciuilitie, they changed the forsaid name, Eyryn veagg [little Ireland], and callid it Albon, and their owne names also, and callid theame Albonyghe ... that is to say, Scottische men, be drywyne from Albanactus, our first govemour and kynge.47

Elder confronted head-on the alternative Gathelus story which, he asserted, was invented by the ‘papistical, curside spiritualitie’. They drywithe Scotland and theame selfes, from a certane lady, namede Scota, which (as they alledge) come out of Egipte, a maraculous hote cuntreh, to recreatt hir self emonges theame in the colde ayre of Scotland, which they can not afferme be no probable auncient author.

Henrisoun also pasted together a remarkably trenchant, if somewhat diffuse, argument assaulting the myth of Gathelus. Even though he adhered ultimately to the Brut foundation, he seemed to get both the sequence and the timing right for the arrival of the Scots (and, before them, the Picts) into Albion. Henrisoun also went straight for Boece by name on several occasions to attack the fayned alligacions of the contrary part, which convey you from Pharao, the tyraunt of Egipt. And as it is to coniecture, if their willes might take place, thei would bryng you vnder the seruitude of Egypte again.48

He also demonstrated that his colleague Elder was not to have all the jokes (though he sometimes spoiled his own punchlines). Boece stated that the wandering Gathelus had landed in a place called Lusitania which thereafter was known as Tort of Gathelus’. Henrisoun however asserted (‘This is a greate stomble at thressholde of the dore’) that Portugal was not known as Lusitania until 1,000 years after the supposed arrival of Gathelus. Elsewhere he made particular play over the datings. The only possible time for the Moses-expelling Pharaoh who fathered Scota and gave her to Gathelus, he calculated to be the year of creation 2400. But if Gathelus was son to a Tyrant of Athens, his date had to be 3643:

This beinge true, here were a very vnfitte mariage betwene these two persones, the Bridegrome beinge elder [sic: he must have meant ‘younger’] then the Bride, by 1240 yeres. But some wiseman will saye, that folke liued long in those daies, yet can thei not denye, but she was to olde a mayde for so yonge a bachelar, whereby I can worse beleue, that they had any children, she beinge of suche yeares. So that to make this mariage frame, either Gathelus was elder then his father, or she was yonger than her brother by a thousande yeares at the leaste. And syns the tyme of Abraham, men by course of nature, haue not commonlie lyued much aboue a 100 yeares.49

But Henrisoun was not content merely to punch holes in others’ arguments. As the seminal work of Arthur Williamson and Roger Mason richly demonstrates, his grand vision was quite sweeping. He embraced the Galfridian legend so wholeheartedly because, in his imaginative and remarkable reworking of history, it heralded a potent apocalyptic regeneration of Scotland. The restoration of the age of Constantine would reunite two nations of ‘common ethnic blood’ to their true place in the world as a unique and chosen people. From this would flow profound social reforms and the restoration of the true faith. The great Constantine, wearer of an enclosed imperial crown and the first to employ the red cross emblem, was critically important to Henrisoun’s argument. His father had married St. Helen and he himself was born in Britain. So he united not only ancient Britain to which Helen was heir, but also that ‘whiche the Romaynes had by conquest’. He thus was Very Emperor of al Britayne’ as well as ‘of the whole worlde’: Now if Scottes wer then in Britayn (as our writers alledge) then wer thei subiectes to Constantine, because the stories be euident, that he had al Britayn in possession …: for it suffiseth for our purpose, to proue that al Britayn, was vnder one Emperor, and beeying vnder one Emperor, then was Scotlande and Englande but one Empire.50

Thus the marriage of Mary to Edward was one, as Mason puts it, ‘of truly apocalyptic significance’, a classic example of the imputation of ‘cosmic and eschatological meaning’ to a contemporary political issue.51 God himself woulde also vnite and ioyne vs in one religion. For howe godly were it, that as these two Realmes should grow into one, so should thei also agre in the concorde and vnite of one religion, and the same the pure, syncere and incorrupt religion of Christ, setting a part all the fonde supersticions, sophisticacions, and other thousandes of deuilries brought in by the bishop of Rome and his creatures.52

He then moved to contemporary history. Why did these present wars exist? Three culprits are blamed: Scotsmen, too mad or distracted to implement what had been agreed by their own parliament; the Roman clergy, ‘issuyng from the prince of darknesse, broughte vp in darkenes, and maynteined by darkenes’, everywhere begetters of ‘an unhappie babe, called contencion’; and lastly, ‘those, whom we cal our auncient frendes, where thei are in deede our auncient enemies’, the French. Much was made of the disadvantages of the French alliance. The French used the Scots only for their own sakes, ‘to make vs of their faccion against Englande’; the result was only too well known. For the alliance, Scots had become ‘as common hirelynges to a forrein nacion’ as members of the French king’s Scots Guard (and indeed Henrisoun’s contempt for them would be most improbably vindicated in 1551, a

story we shall come to below): By this he maketh vs silly soules beleue, that he hath vs in singuler trust when in deede, it is but a golden and glisteryng bayte, alluryng our simplicitie and credulitie, to that Iron hoke, that hath caught and killed afore now, the moste part of our auncestors, and now of late, no fewer of oure fathers, of our children, and of our kinsfolke while the Frenche lose not a man, but a fewe golden crounes. And yet our presidentes, for al the honor and aucthoritie, that thei be set in, doo serue but as Cyphers in Algorisme, to fill the place, and in stede of Jupiters blocke, sent to rule the Frogges, whereupon thei treade and leape, withoute feare and daunger.53

He also pointed out that the marriage had been accepted as recently as 1543, ‘not by our auncestors, but by our selfes, and to a prince now liuying, not in tyme oute of mynde’. Should the Scots continue to resist, they could expect either unending war or much worse when the English triumphed. The wars had so far yielded nothing but wretchedness: The countrey hath been ouer runne, spoyled and heried by Englishemen on the one side, and by our awne warremen or rather robbers on the other side (to speke nothyng of the plague of God) it would greue any harte, to thinke .... If Edenbrough, Lieth, Louthian, Mers or Tiuidale had tongues to speake, their loude complainte would perse the deafe eares.54

Such miseries proceeded from disunion, as did other ‘children of warre’: the inability of the labouring man to till his ground, the merchant to trade abroad, the government to ‘see to the good ordre of the commonwealth’. Scotsmen were confronted everywhere by ‘murders, robberies, spoyles, slaughters and desolacions’ which were the ‘sequel’ of disunion. The present war was an ‘unnaturall devysion’, a ‘civill warre’ between peoples who had been united in the beginning. ‘We were britons at the beginning,’ he declared, ‘come of one kind of lineage, under one monarchy’, and the new ‘one sole Monarchic, shalbee called Britayn’. In a resounding summation, he spelt out the core of his idealism: Herefore dare I boldly saie, if these twoo realmes wer brought vnder one Empire and govemaunce, wee should see an ende of al strief and warre, whiche will neuer come otherwise to passe. And then should wee haue this common weale of ours, beyng now out of all ordre, and in moste miserable state and condicion to bee moste happie and mooste florishing.55

As Sir Geoffrey Elton has ruefully commented, the impact of propaganda is notoriously difficult to assess with certainty56 and numerous cautious qualifications must punctuate any attempt to suggest the effect of Henrisoun’s single printed work. But subsequent pieces did follow his appeal to recent history and stressed the benefits of union, the dangers of French support and the lack of any viable alternative. The Proclamation which heralded the entry of the English army into Scotland in September 1547 made many of his points.57 So did An Epistle or exhortation, to vnitie & peace, sent from the Lorde Protector & others the kynges moste honorable counsaill of England To the Nobilitie, Gentlemen, and Commons, and al others the inhabitauntes of the Realme of Scotlande, dated 5 February 1548.58 Where Henrisoun argued that the two countries were ‘of one natyve tonge and bredd in one ile compassed with the see’, the Epistle reminded its readers, ‘of all the naciouns in the worlde, that nacioun only, besides Englande, which speaketh the same language, is Scotlande’.

Where Henrisoun pleaded for one empire to bring ‘an ende of al strief’, the Epistle spoke to those ‘who myndeth the peace and tranquilitie of both the Realmes, who willeth no conquest to bee had, but amitie and loue to bee established betwixte vs’. The Epistle, moreover, made very little of English claims to sovereignty and based its arguments on contemporary events and on a fairly logical debate over the practical and material merits of union. Henrisoun doubtless had a large hand in both these compositions: what Williamson calls Somerset having ‘an émigré Scot at his elbow’.59 In his 1547 Exhortation, for example, there is the passage: Thus beyng bothe our people and forces ioyned in one, we should be the more puyssaunt to inuade more strong to resist and defende. And our power beyng suche and so great, should be an occasion ... to make vs fre and sure from outward invasion wherof (peace beyng first betwene vs and Englande) should folowe peace with al others.60

In 1548 the Epistle trumpeted similarly: If we twoo beyng made one by amitie, bee moste hable to defende vs against all nacions: and havyng the sea for a wall, the mutuall loue for garrison, and God for defence, should make so noble and wel agreyng Monarchie, that neither in peace wee maie bee ashamed, nor in warre affraied, of any worldely or forrein power.61

Henrisoun also had made considerable use of the term ‘Britain’. There was perhaps nothing particularly new about this: it had a long history and was increasingly current in the sixteenth century: Mair and Erasmus both employed it and the Declaration even made one reference to ‘Brytayn’.62 But Henrisoun’s extensive use of the term may have given it a much wider currency within the context of the current war; certainly it was used more frequently after the publication of his work. The Proclamation spoke of ‘bothe the Realmes, to vnite theim togeders in one name by the name of Britons’; A prayer for victorie and Peace, printed in May 1548, asked God to have an especial eye ‘to this Isle of Britaigne’.63 When William Patten published his diary of the Pinkie campaign, also in mid-1548, he spoke of Edward VI as ‘a right Briton, both bred and born’ and quoted an epigram by Armigil Wade praising Somerset: Utque Angli, fusique tua gens effera Scotti Dextra, qua nunquam visa est victoria major Det DEUS imperium per te coeamus in unum: Simus et unanimes per secula cuncta Britanni. The English by your right hand defeated the wild people the Scots By a victory, greater than which never has been seen Let God give the order that through you we shall join in one And be united as the Britons through all the centuries.64

Other writers may also have been influenced by Henrisoun. For example, on 6 September 1547, a Londoner John Mardeley completed a long poem lamenting ‘the Ingratytude of our Countramen the scottes’ wherein he too drew on recent history to advocate that union would

lead to ‘our two Realmes [being] Joined in one masse’.65 He also made what was becoming a commonplace statement: Dothe not the Oceane sea inverounde us rounde both of one language, And Joyned to gether Apoyntede to inhabite one ground.

Mardeley, however, went further by arguing that Edward VI sought ‘to transpose two reagions, in to one great bretaigne’; in the execrable, if memorable, concluding couplets to his last stanzas he invited the Scots: but come to the fountaine and holsome springe Which ys noble Edwarde our most Royall kynge And fre withoute boundage with us to remaigne As in one hole kingdome callede greate breataigne.

Mardeley’s employment of ‘Great Britain’ is the first (if his own date of 6 September 1547 is to be credited) I have found for the 1540s. Very quickly it was used in negotiations with various Scots, for instance with the earl of Huntly in January 1548. The French translation of the articles put to him spoke of ‘ung empire quy sera diet et nommé tousjours l’empire de la Grande Bretaigne et le prince dominateur d’icelluy empereur de la Grande Bretaigne’.66 In February The Epistle spoke of ‘twoo brethren of one Islande of greate Britayn’ (its first appearance in print).67 Proposals put to the earl of Argyll in March stated: ‘both the realmes thus united, shal bere the name of Grete Britayn, which is no newe name but thold name to them booth’.68 Henrisoun, also now used the new buzz phrase in his ‘Godly and Golden Book’ in July. An Epitome of the title that the Kynges Maiestie of Englande, hath to the souereignitie of Scotlande, published later in the year, employed the term over twenty times, as in the ‘restitucion of the whole Empire and name of greate Briteigne’.69 Scots in Scotland also picked it up, if in a different sense; thus the writer of the Complaynt referred to a ‘kyng of grit bertanze, quhilk is nou callit ingland’.70 Caution, however, must be exercised; Henrisoun may have significantly influenced the vogue or he may only have reflected it. Nonetheless he certainly was present at and participated in one of those minor classic moments in the evolution of the language, when a term moves from a narrow elite into more widespread popular usage. What must be beyond all doubt is that Henrisoun did have a distinct influence on the content and tone of English propaganda in 1547–48. But it is less clear how widely Henrisoun’s work was actually read. One Scot, William Lamb, a Senator of the College of Justice, was so incensed by English propaganda that he penned a long, potent rebuttal of the Declaration and was just about to assault the Epistle when it would seem the war ended and his counterblast became redundant, but nowhere did he clearly identify Henrisoun’s powerful Exhortacion.71 Robert Wedderburn, vicar of Dundee, whose Complaynt of Scotland was a general patriotic counterblast against

the English, may have been speaking about Henrisoun when he sneered at those ‘oratouris of Ingland’ who tried to prove Scottish subservience, but he might equally be referring to the Nicholas Bodrugan, alias Adams, the stated author of The Epitome.72 Thereafter, no one appears to refer to Henrisoun’s tract at all.73 In some respects that does not matter, for it was Henrisoun himself who was most influenced by his Exhortacion. It, and his experience as Somerset’s ideasman, clearly encouraged him to think very seriously about the consequences of Anglo-Scottish union. During 1547–48 he must have been influenced in some measure by the social concern, however vacuous and ill-formed it may have been, evident during the protectorate, and Somerset himself may have talked with him on these matters; note that the concluding line of the ‘Godly’ book enjoined, ‘God to save the Protectour, by whom this was corrected and the speker defended’. Its full title was ‘The Godly and Golden Booke for concorde of England and Scotland: The godly thinges that James Henrisoun did wishe the Kinges Majestie of england to sett forth in his highnes name for the welth of both the realmes and by lake that our lordes of Scotland sent no commyssioun to sewe ther for all perryshed’. On 9 July 1548 Henrisoun submitted it to Cecil and Thynne for publication.74 It should be remembered that this tract was prepared, as were they all, as part of a war effort, the sixteenth-century equivalent of leaflet-dropping. Lamb, in a telling phrase, called the Declaration ‘Zour buik of weir’,75 and indeed all propaganda is, in a sense, a ‘weir buik’. The timing of the Exhortacion was clearly dictated by the impending Pinkie campaign of September 1547: Henrisoun warned that Somerset was coming ‘with a puissaunt and invincible’ army to punish all remaining in ‘stubburn and wilful disobedience’.76 Similarly, the Epistle was printed and circulated to coincide with a major assault on both the east and west borders in February 1548. The ‘Godly’ tract was obviously executed to accompany Shrewsbury’s invasion in August for the relief of Haddington, hence the otherwise curious references to ‘suche as bring victall to the campe shall have resonable prices’.77 Such mundane concerns were, however, buried deep in the text. The main thrust of the ‘Godly and Golden Book’ is masterfully captured in the rousing opening lines of the preface: What mysheif haith Insurged in realmes by Intestyn devision, what depopulacion haith ensewed in counteres by cyvill descencyouns what detestable morther haith been commyted in Cities by seperat faccounis And what calamitee hath ensewed in famous regions by domescitall discord and unnaturall contraversie Romme haith felte. Italy can testifie, Fraunce can beyr witnesse, Beam [Bohemia] can tell * Denmarke cann shew. And Inespeeciall these two noble Realmes of Englond and Scotlande beynge but one countrie can apperentlie declare and make demonstracioun.78

Such robust declamation would have done Shakespeare no disgrace, and indeed students of Tudor diction should catch some powerful echoes in the above passage, for Henrisoun plagiarised it straight from the preface to Richard Grafton’s 1548 edition of Edward Hall’s The vnion of the two noble and illustre famelies of Lancastre and Yorke (on which much of

Raphael Holinshed’s potent and highly influential account was based).79 All of the italicised words above are Hall’s, although at the point marked with an asterisk Henrisoun omitted ‘Scotlande maie write’. As he then took his audience through Ceasar and Pompey, the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, Burgundy and Orléans, Catholics and Adamites and how the Great Turk had amplified his dominions through European divisions, he followed Hall word for word. To be charitable, Henrisoun clearly was working under some pressure. The Haddington relief expedition was only decided on reluctantly (garrisons in modern fortifications were supposed to end the necessity for large armies in the field) and belatedly. That doubtless explains why Henrisoun leaped at the chance to preface his work with Hall’s majestic and resonant passage on the evils of civil division. But as he continued, he increasingly became his own man: But what mysery what morther what execrable plages haith this famous regyon of great bryttaine suffred by division of our moste renowmend howses of two kinges indwellers of the same, intitled the rose and thistle otherwyse the liberd and lyoun, as by the intestyn battelles that haith been in ether of them betwen brother and brother sonne, and father uncle and nevewe in the north as betwen the famous howses of Lancaster and Yorke named the Rede Rose and White in the sowth, which our wytte can not comprehend nor our tonge declare nor our penne fully set forth.

Further evidence for his rush can be seen later in the tract when first he wrote ‘through all this Ile of bryttain’, then immediately crossed out the last word and continued ‘great brittain’. However, all plagiarism then ceased and what flowed from his feverish pen was nothing less than a commonwealthman’s manifesto for the regeneration of Scotland. The focus of his pamphlet was not so much how England should win the war, but how it should proceed once the Scots had agreed to union. Although some of his prescriptions, such as the suggestion that the English and Scots should intermarry, were perhaps unremarkable, once he warmed to the subject he became increasingly radical. The nub of the argument was that England should direct a programme in Scotland which would improve justice, revive the church, succour the unfortunate, better agrarian conditions, aid the burghs and improve the economy. The result was something quite unique in the literature of sixteenth-century Scottish politics; indeed it almost reads like an ‘improvement’ tract of the eighteenth century. Justice, Henrisoun argued, must be swifter, fairer and more accessible. To this end, there should be established a general council ‘of certaine the moste godly and prudente men of both the realmes’ who would establish two sessions, one at Aberdeen and the other at Edinburgh. To ensure ‘that none shall perishe through Ignoraunce’, all laws and customs would be ‘prynted in there mother tonge’(conversely, all books against ‘the verite’ were to ‘be burnte and dystroyd forevere’). Furthermore, to prevent ‘the endlesse abhominable consistory lawes’, most cases should be heard ‘at home before there barons and parsons’. Henrisoun also had strong views on the state of the Scottish church. Many parish churches, he wrote, were ‘rent or fallinge down and the fruites thereof spent in whordom’;

most curates were ignorant; even bishops were unable to conduct divine service, ‘wherby the poor parishenars lakketh not onely informacion to morall vertu but also devyn wisdome’ and ‘by lakk wherof mony sowles perished in your Isles and Highlandes’ (further evidence, perhaps, that Henrisoun and John Elder met and compared notes in London during these years). These failings would be rectified by redirecting the temporalities of the churches, by the appointment of ‘honest Hyers’ and by bishops being forced to have suffragans until such time as they improved. Moreover, the almshouses and hospitals, which the churchmen had pulled down ‘for there lukers and profittes’, would be rebuilt. Each parish would care for ‘there awne syke and Impotente’. Bishops would be forced to maintain a free school in the major burgh in their diocese and the universities would be restored to the ‘devyne and morall doctryne’ of their founders. Scottish peasants rarely had any security of tenure. To this problem town-dweller Henrisoun also turned a sympathetic eye: Also, to the helpe of the poor labourers of the grounde, whos common welth is mischeffe and libertie mor servitude than was the Children of Israeli in Egipte, we will that the land which they possesse and occupye at this present be sett to them in few or longe taxes of the pryces they pay for them ... that they may plante and make policie and live like our substanciall commons and not as miserable cottardes, dailie charged to the warr and slaughter of there neyghboure.

Naturally when he turned to the burghs and the economy, he did so with an especial zeal. Some of his recommendations were commonplace, such as the prohibition of craftsmen passing ‘to the countre to dwell’, forcing them to buy land only within the burgh, and the injunction against the importation of goods already made locally. But in a more inventive vein, the union with England was intended to increase Scottish prosperity by means of direct assistance. One hundred fishing ships, with a hundred instructors, were to be given to the Scots ‘with all there apparell for wynnyng of your ryche fishenges that straungers gettes the holl profittes of’. New harbours would be constructed where needed. A hundred craftsmen, their wages paid for three years, would be sent to live in the burghs to teach the Scots how to be myners; cutters of mosse for makinge of mean landes of thos that be but marresse; makers of iron mylls, saw mylls and others; collyerdes; dighters of wull, websters, wallers, tappishers; makers of wursates and serges; workers in the stole; diers of skynnes and hides; as bowers, fletchers and such other.

Moreover, the English would help the Scots to exploit their gold, copper, iron and lead. Henrisoun even proposed that revenue could be generated for the commonwealth if they ‘garr draw the weste and easte seas togither so that portable wessels shall goo between upoun our charges’. Whence such remarkable ideas? As is the case with so many sixteenth-century thinkers, it is impossible to say with certainty. That is why it is so unfortunate that his early years are so shadowy and that we know nothing of his family, education and training. It is clear from the

Exhortacion that he was widely read in history and the classics and, when engaged on a particular point, could be highly critical (Gathelus’ age), original (his use of Constantine) and inventive (his concept of all Britons having what Mason calls ‘a common ethnic identity’). He may well have picked up various of his ideas in discussion with Elder, for both rejected the Boecian interpretation of Scotland’s origins and both were Protestants. But he was also widely experienced in the world of trade and money. Henrisoun’s letters to Somerset are laced with a galaxy of practical suggestions, ranging from the siting of fortifications to rates of pay and the parcelling out of land within the English pale. He also had a sense of global fiscal dimensions: his tantalisingly brief analysis of the wealth of Scotland in 1549 is one of the first that can be found with relatively hard numbers to it.80 In the 1550s he would continue to be interested in costing projects and augmenting revenues. How much of this arose from his experiences in the Netherlands one can but guess. His suggestions concerning justice, the church and burgh organisation reflected common preoccupations within Scottish and European society. It is hard, however, to find precedents for such schemes as economic aid, technical advisers and a Forth-Clyde canal (although he would have seen the one at Middelburg). For what it was worth, he must have been aware of what was being said by Englishmen such as Hales, Smith, Latimer, Turner, Becon, Hooper and Clement Armstrong during the late 1540s. But none of them had his clear analytic prescription or his detailed programme. However intoxicating he may have found the atmosphere at court earlier, the time of his usefulness in England was rapidly drawing to a close in the summer of 1548. By then, the war in Scotland was going against Somerset; Arran’s government, stiffened by considerable French aid, now had the capacity to counter-attack. Queen Mary had been betrothed to the dauphin and sent to France. The level of collaboration had fallen off dramatically. Somerset dropped the Scottish propaganda campaign and Henrisoun’s second tract was never printed. ‘Realmis’, as the Complaynt so trenchantly declared, ‘ar nocht conquest be buikis bot rather be bluid’.81 Henrisoun was no longer of use as a ‘principal persuader of my countrymen’; he, therefore, left the court and rode north to see what he could do there. What he found appalled him. Wherever he went within the pale during the summer of 1549, the assured Scots had been burned, spoiled and murdered, ‘extremities contrary to the Kinges Majestys epistle’, in which clearly he believed.82 As a result, he condemned almost every aspect of Somerset’s then conduct of the war in wide-ranging and vituperative memoranda and once he went so far as to warn the protector of restlessness among the people of England. But by September 1549 the long, angry and detailed petitions which he submitted could hardly pierce deaf ears in London as the protectorate juddered to its collapse. Once the war had ended, Henrisoun became deeply embittered and even threatened to

‘lament my mysfortouin by prent’.83 He was, he complained to Cecil, ‘left out of the peace’, abandoned by Somerset, unknown to the privy council. Like all pensioners, he had always complained that his lodgings were noisome, his grant inadequate and in arrears: ‘after a wealthye lyff, I am nocht commyt hyre to ane powre to lye’ (although it should be noted that the French ambassador would describe him in 1551 as ‘homme de qualité’).84 He was never granted the deanery (at Auckland in County Durham) or the land in Scotland which were his constant requests.85 Between March 1546 and July 1550 he had received £462 10s, but by the latter date his pension was much reduced.86 Certainly he had already suffered for his devotion to England, losing his burgess status and all his goods in Edinburgh by 1546, and then his land in Bell’s Wynd in 1549.87 Exiled and friendless, Henrisoun must have faced the future with deep misgivings. But then, quite suddenly, he was favoured by a piece of extraordinary good luck which saw him restored once more to a position of honour and respect. It is fairly certain that he began canvassing for support to enable him to return to Scotland in early 1551. Sometime in the spring he wrote to Mary of Guise, who was then in France, and he had interviews with the French ambassador in London, Jean de Pot, sieur de Chemaulx, before the dramatic events about to be recounted. He may well also have written to the earl of Huntly and to his brother, the archbishop of Glasgow, both of whom were also in France. Mary of Guise did reply, but with what encouragement is not clear.88 But high melodrama truly worthy of Dorothy Dunnett’s Crawford of Lymond saga89 then erupted and it rescued him. The story of Robert Stuart90 and James Henrisoun is one which Bindoff would have relished, involving murderous intent, rumour, deceit, conflicting evidence and high stakes. Just who Stuart was is still not clear, but he may have been a ‘Castilian’ (one of the gang which held St. Andrews castle after the assassination of Beaton in May 1546) who had been captured and enchained in the galleys by the French when they retook the place in July 1547. If so, he must subsequently have been freed, for he was almost certainly a member of the Scots Guard by 1551. According to Henrisoun, Stuart claimed to be related to the wife of Mary Queen of Scots’ cook (as well as to a servant of the count d’Aubigny, brother to the earl of Lennox, both of whom were to find themselves in hot water when the story broke), and thanks to this he had easy access to the kitchen. He thus had become knowledgeable about the little queen’s preferences, from frittered pears to her favourite meat. At some point, he clearly conceived that it would be a simple job to insert poison into her food. Just when (and by what route) Stuart arrived in England hoping to interest someone in this monstrous treason is not clear either, but it would seem he landed between two months and a fortnight before the very busy night of 19 April 1551 when his conspiracy broke into the open.91 If Warwick is to be believed, Stuart had approached him twice (once on his barge) with vague offers of something of the greatest importance for England, Scotland and France, but because the matter was so secret, had refused to be more specific, beyond pledging

loyalty and faithful service. According to Henrisoun — and Warwick’s account here does not directly contradict him — Stuart then sought him out on 17 April, thinking him to be a sound Englishman (‘que je fusse un bon Anglois’) familiar with the members of the council and with the duke himself. Stuart babbled his grand scheme to Henrisoun who asked him to write it down to make sure he did not forget anything. This Stuart could not do, being unable to write even his name (Henrisoun characterised him as ‘ne soit homme de grand savoir ni puissant’), but he promised to return with a written proposal. Henrisoun quickly (the 18th) went to Chemaulx, the French ambassador, and promised that he would give him something of the utmost importance the next day. But at 11 o’clock that night, perhaps coincidentally, he was arrested and lodged with the sheriff of London, his two servants being also separately jailed. Chemaulx sought him out the next day, the 20th, along with a herald of Scotland, in London with letters from Arran. To them, before the sheriff could silence him, Henrisoun blurted ‘à haut vox’ that the queen was in great danger because Stuart was going to poison her and had come to gain the support of Warwick and his council for such a conspiracy. At this juncture the plot thickens almost incomprehensibly, but the point is that Henrisoun was the man to sound the alarm. Stuart was immediately arrested, and by the 29th word of his murderous plot had reached the French court at Amboise. However much Warwick complicated the tale and cast suspicion on all sorts of people (Lennox was forced to proclaim a patent lie, that he never wanted to be king of Scotland), the accepted impression in France was that Henrisoun had saved the queen’s life. Chemaulx’s detailed report of 14 May may have been relatively neutral, but Henrisoun’s account of the 9th to Mary of Guise, which concluded with the plea that he be freed and allowed home, was clearly convincing. Stuart, who had confessed and had been transported to France,92 may well have substantiated the version of his fellow-Scot before he suffered, in Bindoff’s sonorous phrase, ‘the barbarous fate of the traitor’. No less a person than Ann de Montmorency, Henry II’s closest adviser, instructed Chemaulx on 13 June to demand that Henrisoun be freed (‘à expresse charge de Roi de requerir ledit Roi d’Angleterre de pardonner à Hérisson et le vouloir mettre en liberté’).93 High drama indeed.94 On 14 July, 1551, Somerset was detailed to meet Jacques d’Albon, seigneur de SaintAndré and marshal of France, at the gates to Hampton Court and then conduct him to the presence of King Edward VI. During the next fortnight and more the king and marshal were to meet on at least eight separate occasions, and by all accounts Edward was charmed by Saint André’s grace and wit.95 How much Somerset was charmed by the occasion is less clear, but he cannot have viewed the events of the summer of 1551 with equanimity. SaintAndré’s visit was a ceremonial, but nonetheless important, part of the Anglo-French rapprochement, which was initiated with the treaty of Boulogne of 24 March 1550 and

culminated in a series of treaties (Northampton and Norham) in 1551. By the first England surrendered Boulogne, Henry VIII’s prize from the war of 1544–46, and began to withdraw from Scotland. By the second the English were forced to renounce their claims to the marriage of Mary Queen of Scots, and to accept the betrothal of Edward and Elizabeth de Valois, Henry II’s eldest daughter. By the third a number of longstanding Anglo-Scottish border disputes were resolved.96 As part of this new friendship between two such old enemies, Henry II had already been invested with the Order of the Garter, and on 16 July Saint-André conferred the Order of Saint-Michel on Edward VI in an elaborate and impressive ceremony at Hampton Court. The investiture was not Somerset’s only reminder of how much things had changed since that heady Saturday when his magnificent victory at Pinkie had seemed to lay Scotland at his feet. Saint-André, either in his discussions with Edward or with members of the privy council, went out of his way to ask for the release of ‘James Harryson, Scottisheman nowe prisoner in one of the Counters’ of London.97 On 28 July, the council wrote to the sheriffs of London to see to the matter. Somerset was present at that council meeting (six months before his second fall and subsequent execution); one wonders what his emotions were. Henrisoun was finally released in early August, but only after the government had paid the Lord Mayor of London £20 10s 2d to cover the costs of his confinement.98 Once home, Henrisoun harvested numerous benefits and preferments. Arran granted him £100 in 1552.99 By 26 January 1553, he was a pensioner of Mary of Guise,100 and on 21 May 1554, within a month of her becoming regent, Henrisoun was appointed Conservator in the Low Countries.101 This was rehabilitation indeed; the grant even went so far as to say that he had held the post twice before and that it had been given to another only ‘in absence of the said James’. He continued his active interest in affairs, writing with some audacity to Middelburg in 1552 to ask for payment for his work for the town in 1541 and to encourage them to think again about gaining the staple.102 In 1555 he proposed to the queen regent a painless way by which the crown’s revenues could be augmented by £30,000.103 However, by then he clearly was ageing; on 19 February 1555 he had been forced to appoint a deputy to handle his duties in the Low Countries, since he could ‘nicht gudlie pas in thai partis’.104 In October, as a consolation, he was granted a post which seems to have been created especially for him, overseer-general of the crown’s ‘mynis, fischeingis ... and als of hir hienes cunye’.105 Still, he did not change his religious persuasion or his zest for the welfare of his country. Nowhere is this concern more evident than in his remarkable ‘articlis and ordinances concernyng the commoun weill of this burgh’ which he presented to the Edinburgh town council on 7 October 1552.106 Deploring the fact that citizens could not purchase their corn or fish without being rained on, he asked for permission to build proper markets so all ‘that cumis thairto sail stand dry’, the revenues from which would sustain him. He also sought to profit by the establishment of a ‘pastyme ground for the induellaris’ and further proposed the

construction of ‘an clerkis chalmer to wryte your actis in’ and the diversion of the Water of Leith to create ‘four fontainis our all pairtis of your toune’. It could be argued that these proposals, and one which would have speeded up the probate of merchants’ wills, simply reflected the ordinary and mundane (who likes being rained on?) concerns of any articulate town-dweller. A new tolbooth clearly was needed and construction began in 1560. Even his impossible scheme for diverting the Water of Leith was anticipated in 1521 by that other ardent unionist, John Mair.107 But in two of his suggestions, Henrisoun was typically innovative and drew tellingly on the practical and constructive ethos of his ‘Godly and Golden’ tract. Edinburgh, he argued, had a large number of sick and ‘nychtbouris dekeit be the weris’, but none of them could find succour owing to the degeneration of the hospitals within the town. As remedy he proposed ‘ane fair hospital suld be maid ... intertenyit with ane priest, ane surrigiane, ane medicinar, and xl beddis at vj d the day’. It could be built, he claimed, within seven years and, ever numerate, he made recommendations for its funding. He also suggested how ‘ane fair scule to mak pepill cum to the toun’ might be financed. As he lived out his declining years, James Henrisoun may on occasion have reflected on his life’s many and various excitements: he had led a cosmopolitan existence at home and abroad, he had taken the high road to London and sat at the elbow of the mighty, he had vigorously participated in great literary battles and he had saved the life of a monarch. Yet he may also have concluded that on balance it was a failure. No longer a burgess, or Conservator, his pension came from a Catholic regent who was successfully bringing to pass the utter antithesis of his labours in the 1540s: the marriage of Mary to Catholic France. But as the Reformation dawned, one wonders if he read An Admonition to England and Scotland to call them to repentence (1558) in which Anthony Gilby addressed the two countries as ‘Britaine (for of that name both rejoyseth)’ and enjoined them to make a ‘godlie conjunction’ whereby idolatry and superstition could be vanquished.108 If so, it would certainly have pleased him, for several of his arguments recurred there. And, of course, he must have taken particular pleasure from the triumph of the ‘incorrupt religion of christ’; indeed some of his ideas anticipated The First Book of Discipline.109 Once Edinburgh embraced reform, his two important suggestions were acted upon and became the core of the Protestant burgesses’ programme for the town’s regeneration.110 It seems that as early as 2 April 1561 he was appointed one of the three collectors for the poor in the south-east quarter of the burgh.111 In 1562 the ‘faithful brethren’ of the town, recognising the great need of ‘ane Hospitale to the pure’, made a detailed proposal for its building ‘for the nurisching of the pure, bline, lame and crepill’ and others who could not find work. Indeed, that year found him on a list of contributors for the hospital,112 on which construction began in 1567 on the site of the Blackfriars, the Trinity yards next to which he and Aikman had conducted business back in the 1530s. These are probably his last recorded

acts for his native town and he was dead, apparently, by 1570. But it may well have been his will which was being handled by two elders of the burgh on 28 October 1574: ‘the legasye leift be umqle James Henderson to the puirs of this burch’.113 The hospital did finally open in 1578 (although on a different site),114 and in time, of course, a most ‘fair scule’ indeed would also emerge from the Reformation. Had the Lord given him the years of Gathelus, he would have witnessed the regal union of 1603, not to mention the introduction of a piped water system into the city in 1676 flowing into five cisterns placed along the High Street. So too would he have seen the Forth-Clyde canal; there is little doubt how his acerbic eye would view its dismal condition today. James VI and I’s assumption of the style ‘King of Great Britain’ would have especially gratified him. Though he did not coin the term, his great and memorable Exhortacion was as powerful an argument as John Mair’s, and after ploughing through the stodge produced by that battery of writers who celebrated and defended it circa 1603, one returns to his robust, racy and redoubtable prose with a sense of true relief and gratitude. Certainly he went further than any other Briton of his day in pondering and articulating the need for and implications of union. At his core, James Henrisoun, of Edinburgh, of Middelburg and of London was a Scottish patriot who deeply loved his native land, whose British unionism arose firmly from his ‘earnest zeale and vnfained affeccion towardes my countrey’. Mary of Guise certainly recognised and applauded this essential loyalty; her grant in 1555 praised his services to Mary Queen of Scots ‘in conservatioun of hir hienes persoun the tyme he was in Ingland’, and she particularly remarked that he had always been ‘of gude mynd and purpois to serve hir grace in commown weill and effaris of hir realme at the utirmest of his power’.115 And so he had been, in his fashion, all of his active life. NOTES 1. This essay was originally written in 1975–76 and accepted for the Festschrift for Professor S. T. Bindoff: E. W. Ives and others (eds.) Wealth and Power in Tudor England (London, 1978). I wish to thank Professor Knecht for the close detailed editing he gave it then and for his many helpful suggestions. I am also happy to acknowledge similar painstaking assistance rendered by my colleague, Dr. Sandy Grant, during its subsequent revision for publication in the present volume. In particular I wish to thank the British Academy for its generous funding of my researches in French provincial archives which enabled me to discover the Pot correspondence in Bourges, discussed below. 2. S. T. Bindoff (1908–80) is chiefly remembered as the author of the immensely readable and remarkably durable Penguin text, Tudor England, which was first published in 1950 and is still in print, having sold something like a quarter of a million copies (the number comes from my correspondence with Penguin in 1981, but they admit it is a guesstimate). But Bindoff came to Tudor studies rather late and it could be argued that he was first a nineteenth-century historian, then a Dutch one and then a Scottish (or should one say British) one before he devoted himself to sixteenth-century English studies. See his obituary notices by Professors Joel Hurstfield and J. J. Scarisbrick in The Times. When World War II saw University College, London evacuated to the University College of North Wales, he was still working on what would be his first book, The Scheldt Question to 1839 (1945), which won him acclaim and membership of the Royal Dutch Historical Society. His first foray across the border was with ‘A Bogus Envoy from James I’, History, xxvii (1942), 15–37. It was what later would be recognised as vintage Bindoff. Taking an obscure incident, he unravelled with a

Sherlock Holmesian eye a complex web of evidence and deceit to present a fascinating story which he outlined earlier that year in a paper read to the Bangor branch of the Historical Association (to which he was devoted all of his working life). ‘Envoy’ concerned the shady career of Thomas Douglas, a son of William of Whittingehame, and Bindoff typically went to great pains to research a proper biography of the man: corresponding not only with William Angus, Keeper of the Registers and Records of Scotland at the Register House (who did a lot of footwork for him), but also with the Rev. James A. Laing, minister of Whittingehame. In 1604, Douglas had forged an instrument appointing him to be an ambassador of James I, on which he lived high in Germany until being found out, arrested and returned to London. Tried and found guilty in 1605, he then suffered ‘the barbarous fate of the traitor’ at Smithfield. A key element in Douglas’ entrapment was the fact that he had used a seal styling the king as ‘Magnae Britanniae ... Rex’, and that had a close bearing on the fact and the dating of his act of treason. Arising from this typically Bindoffian fascination with the iron logic of dates and the diplomatic form of documents came his interest in the Stuarts and their style (Bindoff, ‘Envoy’, especially 15–17 and 30, note 3). During the rest of the war, he fleshed out what became his article on the use of the term ‘Great Britain’. Bindoff’s research on the topic was massive and painstaking; in addition to obscure volumes of the HMC, he ploughed through APS, corresponded with colleagues in Dublin (unable due to wartime restrictions to travel there himself) and did considerable work in Wales, even to the extent of being able to cite The Oswestry Advertizer. 3. EHR, lx (1945), 192–216. 4. Amongst others, see G. Donaldson, ‘Foundations of Anglo-Scottish Union’, in S. T. Bindoff and others (eds.), Elizabethan Government & Society: Essays Presented to Sir John Neale (London, 1961), 282–314, reprinted in his Scottish Church History (Edinburgh, 1986); Brian P. Levack, ‘Toward a more perfect union: England, Scotland and the Constitution’, in B. C. Malament (ed.), After the Reformation: Essays in Honor of J. H. Hexter (Manchester, 1980), 57–74; Bruce Galloway, The Union of England and Scotland 1603–1608 (Edinburgh, 1986), the bibliography to which contains most of the recent publications. See also B. R. Galloway and B. P. Levack (eds.), The Jacobean Union: six tracts of 1604 (SHS, 1985). Just how wide the topic can be is demonstrated by W. Ferguson, ‘Imperial Crowns: a neglected facet of the background to the Treaty of Union of 1707’, SHR, liii (1974), 22–44. 5. D. Hay, ‘The Use of the Term “Great Britain” in the Middle Ages’, PSAS, lxxxix (1955–56), 55–66. 6. The generally accepted modern version is ‘Henderson’. The preface to the Exkortacion gives his name as ‘Harryson’, but both ‘Harrysone’ and ‘Harrison’ are catalogued. He signed himself variously, as they all did: ‘Henrisoun’ (SRO, Mary of Lorraine Corresp. 9 July 1555), ‘Henrisoun’ (SRO, E. 34/20), ‘Hewrisoun’ (PRO, SP 50/5, f. 42) and, infuriatingly ‘Hendersoun’ (Edin. City Rees.). But never with a ‘y’. As to the famous ‘Herisson’ or even ‘Hérisson’ (see below, note 91), we cannot say, owing to the apparent loss of that letter. Note that in French ‘hérisson’ is a hedgehog or gruff person. The form adopted here reflects his normal signature in most Scottish and English documents. 7. A Short Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland and Ireland, 1475–1640, ed. G. R. Redgrave and others, revised by W. A. Watson and F. S. Ferguson (London, 1976, 1986), no. 12857. The Exhortacion was reprinted in J. A. H. Murray (ed.), The Complaynt of Scotlande (EETS, 1872), 207–36. The new edition, edited by A. M. Stewart for the STS (1979), has a very full introduction to the topic and drops the ‘e’ off ‘Scotland’. Murray, however, was somewhat slipshod. He used the British Museum copy, which lacks its title page, and, unfortunately, had to rely on another’s inaccurate transcription of it, thus perpetuating countless errors over the years. The entry in Conyers Read, A Bibliography of British History: Tudor Period (Oxford, 1959), no. 5133, only almost got it and his name right. 8. PRO, SP 50/4, f. 128 (mostly reprinted in CSP Scot., i, 141–2). 9. Various people have footnoted him, largely in conjunction with either his connection with Middelburg (see below, notes 21, 101) or the poison plot of 1551 (see below, note 90). His single published work also attracted attention: J. Scott, A Bibliography of Works relating to Mary Queen of Scots, 1544–1700 (Edinburgh, 1896); Donaldson, ‘Anglo-Scottish Union’, n. 177 and his Scotland: James V–VII (Edinburgh, 1965), 78 (note 53). But when Pollard mentioned Henrisoun in his otherwise seminal England Under Protector Somerset (London, 1900), 175, note 1, he conflated the two works, which may explain Jordan making the same bungle sixty years later. I first spoke of him in 1968: M. H. Merriman, ‘The Assured Scots: Scottish collaborators with England during the Rough Wooing’, SHR, xlvii (1968), 10–34. W. K. Jordan, Edward VI: The Young King (London, 1968), 269–70, came across him in his somewhat garbled account of Somerset’s war and found him ‘fey’, but since his account contains the most elementary mistakes about Henrisoun’s career, it should not be treated seriously. M. L. Bush, The Government Policy of Protector Somerset (London, 1975), 10–11, briefly treats of him and with somewhat more respect. Also see Stewart (ed.), Complaynt, lix. A. H. Williamson gave Henrisoun’s long passage on Constantine pride of place in chapter 4 of his ultimately very rewarding Scottish National Consciousness in the Age of James

VI: the Apocalypse, the Union, and the Shaping of Scotland’s Public Culture (Edinburgh, 1979): 86 and see 102 and especially 178–79. Dr Michael Lynch then spoke of him in Edinburgh and the Reformation (Edinburgh, 1981), 72, 83–4, 215 and Williamson returned to Henrisoun even more tellingly in his important ‘Scotland, Antichrist and the Invention of Great Britain’, in J. Dwyer and others (eds.), New Perspectives on the Politics and Culture of early Modern Scotland (Edinburgh, 1982), 34–58, at 36–7. The most recent references to him (Roger Mason’s article above apart) are in Jennifer Loach, ‘The Marian Establishment and the Printing Press’, EHR, ci (1986), 135–48 at 143 (and note her reference to J. N. King, ‘Protector Somerset: Patron of the English Renaissance’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, lxx [1976], 307–31, at 313–14) and Galloway, Union of England and Scotland, 9, 13 at notes 25, 31. 10. The best available accounts of the ‘Rough Wooing’ are to be found in Donaldson, Scotland, James V–VI1, 26–29, 63– 82; J. J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII (London, 1968), 424–45; Bush, Protector Somerset, 7–39; Jordan, Edward VI: The Young King, 230–304. But reference should be had to M. H. Merriman, ‘The Struggle for the Marriage of Mary Queen of Scots: English and French Intervention in Scotland, 1543–1550’ (London University Ph.D. Thesis, 1974 [1975]). 11. Stewart (ed.), Complaynt, 64. 12. This is not the place for a comprehensive bibliography on the commonwealthmen debate. Bindoff (Tudor England, 129–34), however much he may have been a student of Pollard, had his reservations and can still be read with profit. Dr. Bush became profoundly sceptical about the term and the party when working on Protector Somerset (40–83): Becon, for example, like Latimer, ‘offered little constructive guidance on the righting of social wrongs’ (69). Professor Elton built on Bush’s perceptions to denounce the whole concept of either men or party: ‘Reform and the “commonwealth men” of Edward VI’s reign’, in P. Clark and others (eds.), The English Commonwealth, 1547–1640 (Leicester, 1979), 23–38. 13. I am grateful to Professor Sir Geoffrey Elton for first suggesting this to me. 14. Note that in 1944 he published a shortish article on Clement Armstrong’s ‘Treatises of the Commonweal’ in the Economic History Review, xiv (1944), 64–73. 15. Protocol Book of John Foular 1500–28 (Scot. Rec. Soc., 1953), nos. 839, 885; W. M. Bryce, The Burgh Muir of Edinburgh (Book of the Old Edinburgh Club, x, 1918), 74–75. 16. SRO, Foular Protocol Book, ii, ff 93–95, 110–111, 150–51, 171. 17. Accounts of the Lord High Treasurer of Scotland [TA], vii, 150, 297, 455; viii, 59, 93, 118–19, 122, 124; Registrum Secreti Sigilli [RSS], ii, no. 1162; W. S. Unger (ed.), Bronnen tot de Geschiendenis van Handel met Engeland, Schotland en Ierland, 1485–1558 (Rijks Gesch. Pub. no. 86, 1931), no. 685. 18. W. C. Dickinson (ed.), John Knox’s History of the Reformation in Scotland (London, 1949), i, 43. 19. M. Lynch, ‘The Two Edinburgh town councils of 1559–60’, SHR, liv (1975), 130, and his Edinburgh and the Reformation, 83–4. 20. See James Kirk, ‘The “Privy Kirks” and their Antecedents: The Hidden Face of Scottish Protestantism’, in W. J. Sheils and D. Wood (eds.). Voluntary Religion (Ecclesiastical History Society, 1986), 155–170. 21. M. P. Rooseboom, The Scottish Staple in the Netherlands (The Hague, 1910), 48–58; J. Davidson and A. Gray, The Scottish Staple at Veere (London, 1909), 148–58, 361–82. 22. Acts of the Lords of Council in Public Affairs, 1500–54, 379–80; and see RSS, ii, no. 1380. 23. Extracts from the Records of the Burgh of Edinburgh, ii, 105–107; Handel met Schotland, nos. 663, 741, no. 3. 24. Rooseboom, Scottish Staple, 54–58, appdx. 56, 57; Handel met Schotland, nos. 655–58, 666–67; Records of the Convention of Royal Burghs of Scotland, i, 517. 25. Edinburgh Extracts, ii, 108–109. 26. Rooseboom, Scottish Staple, 59–65; and see also Handel met Schotland, nos. 662, 675, 677–78, 681, 522, no. 1. 27. This story is told particularly well in M. Sanderson, Cardinal of Scotland: David Beaton c. 1494–1546 (Edinburgh, 1986), 153–64. 28. Ibid., 160–63; Merriman, ‘Assured Scots’, 22. 29. RSS, iii, nos. 36, 37, 48; Lords of Council in Public Affairs, 525. 30. Sanderson, Cardinal of Scotland, 165–81; Merriman, ‘Thesis’, 73–9, 88–90. 31. RSS, iii, no. 673. 32. Rooseboom, Scottish Staple, 65–72; Merriman, ‘Thesis’, 132–44. 33. LP, xix (1), nos. 472, 510; CSP Scot., i, no. 352; A. I. Cameron (ed.) Scottish Correspondence of Mary of Lorraine, (SHS, 1927), 93–94. Just where Henrisoun’s property or properties lay is not as clear as one would like. Bell’s Wynd is probably too far from the castle, which successfully defended the upper part of the town in May 1544, so that it is quite likely that Hertford’s fury did damage it. As late as 1570, he is noted as having owned before his death land on the north side

of the High Street (vicus regius) adjacent to a tenement owned by David Kinloch (a prominent Protestant) whose property had been burned and ruined by the English in 1544 and was still derelict then. Moreover, Kinloch’s property had been further wrecked ‘as a result of recent turbulent times’. RMS 1546–80, no. 2382. See also Lynch, Edinburgh, 303, 364. I am grateful to my colleague Dr. K. Stringer for untangling this charter for me. 34. LP, xxi (1), nos. 462, 643 (f. 83), 979; CSP Scot., i, nos. 352, 27 and cf. 141. 35. CSP Scot., i, no. 27. 36. Bush, Protector Somerset, 8–24. See my discussion of this in H. M. Colvin, The History of the King’s Works, iv (HMSO, 1983), 694–726. 37. Merriman, ‘Assured Scots’, 30–31. 38. STC, no. 9179, reprinted in Murray (ed.), Complaynt, 192–206. 39. Elder’s story is a complex one; see Merriman, ‘Assured Scots’, 21–2; also James Kirk, ‘The Jacobean Church in the Highlands, 1567–1625’, in L. Maclean (ed.), The Seventeenth Century in the Highlands (Inverness, 1986), 27, which nicely captures die flavour of the man. 40. M. H. Merriman, ‘War and Propaganda during the “Rough Wooing”’, Scottish Tradition, ix/x (1979–80), 20–30; ‘Thesis’, 236–57. 41. Murray (ed.), Complaynt, 225. Murray usually gives the correct pagination for the original printed version, to which it would be otiose to give references. 42. Ibid., 225. 43. Ibid., 227. See the efforts of a fellow collaborator to construct a powerful argument on this aspect by writing to Bucer: I. A. Muirhead, ‘M. Robert Lockhart’, Innes Review, xx (1971), 85–100. 44. Murray (ed.), Complaynt, 225–6. It is interesting that both The Declaration (198, 202) and Henrisoun (225, 227) laid stress on documents conserved and available for consultation in national archives. So too did William Lamb, discussed below, notes 70–1: see 33, 133, 141, 162–5. 45. Murray (ed.), Complaynt, 214–5, 225, 234. 46. Ibid., 198–9. 47. John Elder, ‘A Proposal for Uniting Scodand with England, addressed to Henry VIII’, in Bannatyne Miscellany I (Bannatyne Club, 1827), 11–12, calendared in LP, xviii (2), no. 539 (the date should be 1544). 48. Murray (ed.), Complaynt, 220 (all quotations are from an original copy of the Exhortacion, but Murray made only trivial errors). 49. Here, however, the original must be consulted; see Henrisoun, Exhortacion, e iiii (Murray (ed.), Complaynt, 222–3, and see note 1). 50. Murray (ed.), Complaynt, 218. 51. Mason, ‘Scotching the Brut’, above, pp. 70–1. 52. Murray (ed.), Complaynt, 234. 53. Ibid., 229. 54. Ibid., 209. 55. Ibid., 231. 56. G. R. Elton, Policy and Police (Cambridge, 1972), 207–208. 57. STC, no. 7811. The version in A. I. Cameron (ed.), Warrender Papers (SHS, 1931), 17, has many inadequacies and reference must be had to the original, in the possession of the Society of Antiquaries, London. 58. STC, nos. 9180–81, 22268–69; English version reprinted in Murray (ed.), Complaynt, 237–46. 59. Williamson, ‘The Invention of Great Britain’, 37. 60. Murray (ed.), Complaynt, 229–30. 61. Ibid., 245. 62. Hay, ‘“Great Britain”’, 55–66; Murray (ed.), Complaynt, 199. 63. STC, no. 16503; Magdalene College, Pepysian Library copy, Aiiir. 64. William Patten’s uses of the term are in The Expedicion into Scotlande of ... Edward, duke of Soomerset ... set out by way of diarie (London, 1548), reprinted with modern spelling in A. F. Pollard (ed.), Tudor Tracts (London, 1903), at 63 and 69. I again wish to record my appreciation for the help given me by Dr. Stringer in providing a translation for the epigram. The final ungainly version is my work, however. 65. Hatfield, Cecil Papers, vol. 137, ff. 136–43, at f. 142. 66. G. Lefevre-Pontalis (ed.), Correspondance politique de Odet de Selve (Paris, 1888), 268–70. Bindoff, incidentally,

also discovered (‘Style’, 201, footnote 1) this obscure reference (Lefevre-Pontalis’ index makes no mention of Great Britain). It seems curious that he did not consult CSP Scot, (the index to which does, if incompletely). 67. Murray (ed.), Complaynt, 239; cf. OED entry. Bindoff’s discovery is in ‘Style’, 201 and notes 2 and 3, although it has to be admitted that he made little of it. 68. But note that this item was inserted at the bottom of the page (PRO, SP 50/3, 184), clearly an afterthought, and that it is the sole mention of the term in those proposals (CSP Scot., i, no. 177). 69. STC, no. 3196; reprinted, but only in part, in Murray (ed.), Complaynt, 247–56, at 249. 70. William Lamb, Ane resonyng of ane Scottis and Inglis merchand betuix Rowand and Lionis &c, ed. R. J. Lyall (Aberdeen, 1985), 75. Murray (ed.), Complaynt, 86. Interestingly enough, contemporary French usage of ‘Great Britain’ also usually meant England. See G. Ascoli, La Grande Bretaigne devant l’opinion française (Paris, 1927), passim. 71. This aspect is complicated. Lamb was consistent that he intended to counter two of the English propaganda tracts. One is without shadow of a doubt the Declaration. He called the second focus of his counterblasts ‘ane vthir tractat sett furth and publish be Kyng Edwart and be the Protectour and counsell of Ingland ... prentit at Lundoun the ane thousand fyf hundreth fourty aucht zeiris’ (Lamb, Ane resonyng, ed. Lyall, 5), which must refer to Somerset’s Epistle. Note that Lamb remarks that it ‘is autentick because it is maid be the wisdome of Lundoun maturalie advysit, correctit and authorisate be the Protectoure and be Kyng Edwardis counsell’. But the matter is not as clear-cut as one would like. Later (17) he speaks of ‘the Exhortatioun for Vnioun of Scotland with Ingland’, which appears to be a powerful echo of Henrisoun’s An Exhortacion to the Scottes, to conforme them selfes to the honorable, expedient, and godly union betwene the twoo realmes of Englande and Scotlande and not An Epistle or exhortacion, to vnitie & peace, sent from the Lorde Protector & others the kynges moste honorable counsaill of England To the Nobilitie, Gentlemen, and Commons, and al others the inhabitauntes of the Realme of Scotlande. In his other reference to the second book (61) he speaks of the ‘Duik of Summersett in his Exhortatioun for vnioun of Scotland with Ingland [another haunting echo perhaps of Henrisoun] sayis be mony allegations that ane kyng, ane reulare in this land is best’. That, however, is much more Henrisoun’s line of reasoning in the Exhortacion. The Epistle hardly refers to that argument; nor does The Epitome all that much. It thus seems fairly likely that Lamb did have access to Henrisoun’s tract as well. If so, why did he not think it worthy of attack? We can never be sure, because he only got his disputing travellers as far as Paris when his manuscript ends ‘and also on the vthir buik etc.’ (171). 72. Stewart (ed.), Complaynt, 64–67. Wedderburn’s contemptuous reference to ‘profane propheseis of merlyne, and til vthir aid corruppit vaticinaris ... affermit in there rusty ryme’ suggests the Epitome by Nicholas Adams alias Bodrugan. The biography of Adams by R. Virgoe and A. D. K. Hawkyard is in S. T. Bindoff, The History of Parliament; The House of Commons (London, 1982), i, 294–5. 73. As to the later life of Henrisoun’s work before 1873, there does not seem to be any. The Latin edition of the Epistle was reprinted in Joannes Philippson Sleidanus, De Statu Religionis Carlo Quinti Caesaria (1555 and various editions thereafter, especially one in French in 1557 and two in English in 1560). It was also reprinted in Thomas Palfreyman, A paraphrase vppon the espitle of the holie apostle S. Paule to the Romanes (London, ?1572) (STC, no. 19137.5). It was thus readily available for quotation before, at and after 1603: Williamson, ‘Invention of Great Britain’, 37–8, and most especially his footnote 13 which covers all the ones I have found. See too Galloway and Levack, The Jacobean Union, ad indices, e.g. 29–30, 119–20. I have yet to find one firm reference to the Exhortation, further explanation for Bindoff’s oversight. 74. SP 50/4, 128–37; see 130 (CSP Scot., i, no. 285). 75. Lyall (ed.), Ane Resonyng, 87; cf. 101, 109, 123, 133. 76. Murray (ed.), Complaynt, 235. 77. PRO, SP/50/4, 137. 78. PRO, SP/50/4, 128. 79. Edward Hall, The vnion of the two noble and illustre families of Lancastre and Yorke (London, 1548), fo. 1. Just when Hall (or Halle) came out and in what form is a matter of delicate editorial debate. See the discussions in both C. Read, Bibliography of British History, no. 312, and the new STC (cited above), under ‘Halle, Edward’, no. 12721. 80. ‘The Revenues of the Crown worth £20,000 sterling a yeare beside treble as much, that might come by the Salt, mine, and fishes without hurt to the People, and beside theire 51 abbeys 13 Bishopricks Lordship of Sainct Jhone 40 Colleges 38 infeste Fryars the 11 observants not reckoned 2000 Parish Churches, and 2000 Chauntryes, or therby, that are worth declard about £140,000 sterling a yeare and of all other Reckoned to be double’. PRO, SP 50/5, f. 53 is an 18th century transcription poorly reprinted in CSP Scot., i, no. 357. That these figures are exaggerated is not relevant; the point is that he was counting. 81. Somerset’s personal commitment to unionist propaganda has been suspect for some time; Professor Bindoff first suggested such to me in 1964. See Bush, Protector Somerset, 10–11, 36–9; Merriman, ‘Thesis’, 252–4. Perhaps the clearest

proof of his crass expediency is the alacrity with which he readopted the sovereignty justification for the war in the autumn of 1548 (Merriman, ‘War Propaganda’, 19–20). The quote is from Stewart (ed.), Complaynt, 64. 82. BL, Cott., Calig., B vii, fos. 494–96 (folios are out of sequence); CSP Scot., i, no. 357. 83. CSP Scot., i, no. 352 (incorrectly dated). 84. A. Hiver de Beauvoir (ed.), Papiers des Pot de Rhodes, 1529–1648 (Paris, 1864), 64. This source is discussed below, note 91. 85. CSP Scot., i, nos. 27, 217. 86. LP, xxi (1), no. 462; APC, ii, 22–23, 169, 244, 271, 365; iii, 103. 87. RSS, iii, no. 1584; iv, no. 128; SRO, Alexander King Protocol Book, I, f. 51. 88. Hiver (ed.), Papiers des Pot, 58. 89. Indeed the central focus of the 432 pages of Queens’ Play (London, 1964), part II of her Francis Crawford of Lymond saga, is none other than Robert (Robin) Stuart (see below, note 94). 90. The story of Robert Stuart has been touched on by many, but not all. Antonia Fraser mentions it in Mary Queen of Scots (London, 1969), 78, as does Rosalind Marshall, Mary of Guise (London, 1977), 190. So, of course, does Bernerd C. Weber, whose very rare The Youth of Mary Queen of Scots (Philadelphia, 1940) has never received the critical appreciation that it deserves, 27–8; likewise the worthy Jane T. Stoddart, The Girlhood of Mary Queen of Scots (London, 1908), 51. Another undervalued work, E. Marianne H. McKerlie, Mary of Guise-Lorraine Queen of Scotland (London, 1931), 150–52, also records it, but no more gushily than Marshall does. Mignet, Histoire de Marie Stuart (Paris, 1851) missed it (note that the NLS copy was a gift from him to J. A. B. Teulet who figures in our story below), as did Martin Philippson, Histoire du Règne de Marie Stuart (Brussels, 1891). Agnes Strickland first mentioned it in her Lives of the Queens of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1850–59) and then gave more detail in her The Life of Mary Queen of Scots (London, 1873), 137–8. But although she caught Henrisoun’s involvement, she mangled a lot of the facts, as did the Rev. Joseph Stevenson even more so, Mary Stuart: A Narrative of the first eighteen years of her life (London, 1886), 109–15. See the criticisms made, not all of which hold water, in Hay Fleming’s — as ever — extended and acerbic footnote in his Mary Queen of Scots (London, 1891), 17, 200–201. 91. In essence there are three versions of what happened: on 9 May Henrisoun wrote to Mary of Guise his account of events; then there is the long report by Chemaulx, sent 14 May 1551 to Henry II and Montmorency, which detailed both his own findings and Northumberland’s account. These are all published in Hiver, Papiers des Pot, 58–60 and 61–68. There is also a great deal of luck in our being able to retell the story now. Most of the documents relating this incident were part of the diplomatic correspondence of Jean Pot, seigneur de Chemaulx, ambassador at London during 1550–51. Chemaulx’s receipt file was deposited by his descendants in what became les archives départmentales du Cher and were housed in the hôtel de ville in Bourges. In the early morning of 13 April 1859, the building caught fire. The subsequent inquest (Archives départmentales du Cher, 26M/8, report dated 20 April 1859) laid the blame on two structural faults. A roof beam for the muniment room was bedded into the wall just by the course of the chimney. Secondly, shelving installed for the records was affixed to that beam. When on a chilly night the gens d’armes in the guard room below, by the prison, stoked up their fire too much, the beam smouldered into flames which then ran along it and down shelving and, of course, over masses of tinder-dry paper. The result was a classic nineteenth-century urban conflagration involving almost the entire city: prelates including the cardinal-archbishop himself, the mayor, units of the national guard, over 2000 workmen and the prisoners who first raised the alarm, all of whom zealously pitched in. ‘Unfortunately’, as le Journal du Cher (Archives départmentales du Cher, côte Per 158; see also Courrier de Bourges, côte Per 149) reported, there was a lack of water: ‘les secours organisés rapidement et avec intelligence ont été malheureusement paralysés au début, par le manque de l’eau’. Thus a human chain had to be formed down to the river. But the delay and an extremely violent western wind doomed much of the building. Nobody was seriously hurt, except a young man who was run over by a wagon; fortunately this occurred just outside the Café des Arts: ‘On l’a transporté au café’. ‘Le dommage principal, et qui est pour ainsi dire irréparable, est la destruction à peu prés complète des archives renfermées dans le bâtiment.’ Actually, the loss was not total, but most of Pot’s correspondence perished and what remains is badly charred. Fortunately, however, Cher was blessed with a remarkable antiquarian and local historian, Auguste-Théodore, baron de Girardot, secrétaire général of the Nantes prefecture. Everything about his native province fascinated Girardot, from Celtic remains, to the Romans to the Revolution. In 1846, he had published in Paris a number of Chemaulx documents, Pièces inédites relatives à l’histoire d’Écosse conservées aux archives du département du Cher. It would appear that he came upon these at the instance of J. A. B. Teulet, who asked him for any Scottish material at Bourges, which then appeared in various forms in Teulet’s three monumental collections: Inventaire chonologique des documents relatifs à l’histoire d’ Écosse

conservés aux archives du royaume à Paris (Abbotsford Club, 1839); Papiers d’Etat ... relatifs à l’histoire de l’Écosse au XVIe siècle (Paris, 1852–60) and Relations politiques de la France et de l’Espagne avec l’Écosse au XVIe siècle (Paris, 1862). Teulet thanked him: ‘il a bien voulu choisir les plus intéressantes et en surveiller lui-même les copies’. This was particularly fortunate since Armand Baschet, commissioned by the Record Office to gamer material in France, prepared only a rudimentary catalogue of what he saw at Bourges: ‘Hérisson à Reyne d’Ecosse — longue lettre relative à une tentative d’empoisonnement sur la Reyne par un nommé Stuard’ (PRO, PRO 31/3/30). However, providence still is evident, for Girardot did not include in his batch of letters the one by Henrisoun, and thus none of Teulet’s great collections contains it. But luckily one of Girardot’s fellow-antiquarians was Monsieur le Président Alfred Hiver de Beauvoir. Like the baron, he loved his province and even wrote the guide to the region for the recently completed Central Railway, Itinéraire du voyageur sur le chemin de fer d’Orléans à Bourges (1848). In an active publishing career (ten books between 1857 and his death in 1868), Hiver tackled the Pot correspondence, Papiers des Pot de Rhodes, 1529–1648 (Paris, 1864), using his own transcriptions of the documents made before the great sinistre. Fortunately, he caught Henrisoun’s letter to Mary of Guise of 9 May 1551. Infuriatingly, however, once he communicated the Stuart affair, he stopped writing: ‘Le surplus de la lettre est sans intérêt. Jacques Hérisson prie la reine regente [sic] faire demander son élargissement par le Roi de France’. It is possible that parts of the letter still remain. A file of the Pot correspondence (‘détruits en partie par le feu’ and ‘en très mauvais état de conservation’) exists today (and indeed I did some editing of it), but I found nothing which looked like Henrisoun’s hand (he must have been able to write French) in 1980, and it has not been possible to make a microfilm of the file owing to the extreme fragility of the documents. It gives me great pleasure to record my gratitude for the extraordinary helpfulness of Madame G. Bailly and the staff at Bourges. 92. CSP Foreign Edward VI, nos. 332, 371. 93. Hiver, Papiers de Pot, 71–2. 94. As Dorothy Dunnett clearly appreciated. In her Queens’Play (1964), Brice Harisson (his brother Michael Hérison lived in Paris as a sculptor) was killed by Archer of the Scots Guard Robin Stewart when Stewart was being arrested by the sheriff of London (‘he brought the blade, like an axe in a shambles, upon the quailing body beneath’). Dunnett catches nicely the complicated web of deceits (encapsulated on 265, but see 240–316) and she clearly was familiar with the sources cited here. But it is all a delicious nonsense: Brice Henrisoun indeed; Stuart could not even write: his confession (Hiver, Papiers des Rhodes, 70) was signed by his mark. Nothing moreover in the documents suggests that Chemaulx’s wife disliked the strain of London entertaining. 95. W. K. Jordan (ed.), Chronicle of Edward VI (Ithaca, 1966), 67–75. 96. W. K. Jordan, Edward VI: The Threshold of Power (London, 1970), 116–55. 97. APC, iii, 318. 98. Ibid, 323, 327. 99. TA, x, 134. 100. SRO, E 34/20. 101. RSS, iv, no. 2743. The letter appointing him conservator still exists in the Ryksarchief in Zeeland at Middelburg; it is one of the few early documents to survive the bombing of the town in 1940 when, for example, virtually all of the material reprinted by Rooseboom, Scottish Staple, was lost. 102. Handel met Schotland, no. 882 and n. 3. 103. Mary of Lorraine Corresp., 402–403. 104. RSS, iv, no. 2927; Handel met Schotland, no. 908; cf. nos. 917, 921. See also RSS, v, n. 894. 105. RSS, iv, no. 3068. 106. Edinburgh Extracts, ii, 169–72. 107. Historia Majoris Britanniae (SHS, 1892), 28, 30. 108. Reprinted in D. Laing (ed.), The Works of John Knox (Edinburgh, 1846–64), iv, 541–70, at 553. There is some confusion as to the survival of this work; see STC and cf. BL catalogue. 109. I am indebted to Professor Donaldson for this comment. 110. M. Lynch, ‘The “faithful brethren” of Edinburgh: the acceptable face of Protestantism’, BIHR, li (1978), 194–9. Dr. Lynch (see below) gave me much helpful advice throughout the preparation of this article. 111. Edinburgh City Archives, Ms Co. Rees., iii, f. 77r (reprinted, but without names, in Edin. Rees., iii, 103). 112. Lynch, Edinburgh and the Reformation, 265; SRO, RH 9/14/8, f. 3V. 113. The will is in SRO, CH 2/1/450, 28 October 1574. All of these references were kindly supplied to me by Dr. Lynch. 114. Edinburgh, 1329–1929 (Edinburgh, 1929), 37–44; M. Wood, The Domestic Affairs of the Burgh, 1554–1589 (Book

of the Old Edinburgh Club, xv [1928]), 33–37. 115. RSS, iv, no. 3068.

6 Two Kingdoms or Three?: Ireland in Anglo-Scottish Relations in the Middle of the Sixteenth Century Jane E. A. Dawson

In recent years, historians have come to accept that the political history of seventeenthcentury Britain has a three-dimensional character.1 Since the kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland shared the same ruler after 1603, events in any one country inevitably produced repercussions in the other two. A more united Britain is seen to have resulted from the union of the Anglo-Scottish crowns. The period between the dynastic Union of 1603 and the political and administrative Union of 1707 is increasingly seen as the century of the three kingdoms. The work of David Stevenson in particular has made clear the crucial importance of Ireland for Scottish history and for Anglo-Scottish relations in the 1640s and 1650s.2 For the seventeenth century at least, a ‘British’ history is advancing against the consuming insularity, and even introspection, of English, Scottish and Irish historiography. Thus far, the sixteenth century remains relatively untouched by the new ‘British’ perspective.3 Its contours are still shaped by the historiographical insularity of the three countries. The resulting myopia continues to impoverish and distort the study of the period. This essay seeks to restore the British perspective and, in particular, to establish two distinct but related points concerning the second half of the sixteenth century. Firstly, that Ireland played a central role in Anglo-Scottish relations which therefore cannot simply be viewed as bilateral and running along an axis from London to Edinburgh. Secondly, while Ireland did much to influence diplomacy within the British mainland, Anglo-Scottish relations in turn determined the course of Irish history during this period. Even before the plantation of Ulster in the early seventeenth century, Ireland’s destiny was bound up with that of Scotland. Before the Union of the Crowns in 1603, there were already strong and wellestablished ties between Scotland and Ireland. Geography, culture and strategy all helped to bind the Scottish and Irish kingdoms together. The most obvious link was the simple geographical proximity of Ulster to Kintyre and Galloway. In the early modern centuries, the sea united rather than divided communities. Travel by water between the northern Irish coast and the

Western Scottish Islands and mainland was much easier than the journey by land between different areas within Ireland or Scotland. A second major unifying factor was the common language and culture of the two regions. During the sixteenth century, Gaeldom still kept one foot on each side of the Irish Sea. Gaelic society and institutions were to be found throughout Ireland and the Scottish Highlands and Islands. There was extensive interchange of bards, musicians and scholars between the two regions, and each area felt that it had more in common with its Gaelic counterpart than with its compatriots, the Lowland Scots or the Anglo-Irish.4 Ireland’s position as an invisible border between the two monarchies of England and Scotland was of greater immediate significance. The line of this sea-frontier remained illdefined, for it took until 1617 to decide whether Rathlin Island, lying between Antrim and Kintyre, belonged to Scotland or to Ireland.5 Despite this lack of precision, the existence of the frontier and the ease of access which it afforded to both England and Scotland gave Ireland considerable strategic importance. The kingdom of Ireland was the most vulnerable territory held by the Tudor monarchs. By comparison with the other English borders with France and Scotland, Ireland had no defences worthy of the name. It was also the area where royal control was weakest. Tudor Ireland was open to all levels of disruption, from simple troublemaking by native lords to full-scale invasion by a foreign enemy. In the eyes of contemporaries the gravest danger was not the conquest of Ireland itself, but its potential as a stepping-stone for an assault on the British mainland. This threat was neatly summed up in the proverb which the papal legate David Wolfe related to the Spanish king: He that will England win, Let him in Ireland begin.6

Ireland could just as easily pose a threat to the kingdom of Scotland, as Alasdair MacColla would demonstrate in the next century. MacColla brought Irish Gaelic troops to Scotland and with the marquis of Montrose fought a brilliant campaign through the Highlands in 1644–5 for the royalist cause.7 Unless the fervent wish of one English Lord Deputy that Ireland ‘be sunk in the sea’ were miraculously to be granted, it seemed unlikely that the major strategic danger which Ireland presented to the British mainland would ever be reduced.8 Although none of these general factors was new to the monarchs of Tudor England or Stewart Scotland, they were given particular importance by two changes in the mid-sixteenth century: the adoption by the English government of a policy of conquest and colonisation of Ireland, and a diplomatic revolution in 1559–60 which ended centuries of Anglo-Scottish rivalry and conflict and instead made the two countries friends. The combined impact of these two changes was to increase Ireland’s importance enormously and to make it a key issue in Anglo-Scottish relations.

I The English policy of conquest in Ireland has received much attention in recent years. Brendan Bradshaw has demonstrated that a major change of policy occurred in 1556.9 It marked the end of the ‘liberal revolution’ which had begun in 1541 with Henry VIII’s assumption of the title ‘King of Ireland’. That revolution had sought to extend English authority over the whole of the new sovereign kingdom of Ireland and not just the feudal lordship of the Pale. Its architects, the Lord Deputy Sir Anthony St. Leger and the AngloIrishman Sir Thomas Cusack, had hoped to establish royal control over the Gaelic lordships by conciliation and consent. Their policy of surrender and regrant was designed to redefine the relationship between the crown and the Gaelic lords and to replace the Gaelic tenurial system with the English one, thereby achieving greater stability both within the whole kingdom and within individual lordships. The gradual assimilation of the Irishry (the area under the Gaelic political and legal systems10) by this method would create a single political entity under the English crown instead of the old division between the Anglo-Irish and Gaelic communities. The attempt at liberal reform was replaced in 1556 by the radical solution of conquest and colonisation of Gaelic Ireland, though the final and precise formulation of this new policy had to await the appointment of Sir Henry Sidney as Lord Deputy in 1565.11 The change of direction in 1556 brought certain Irish problems into very sharp focus. Despite its preoccupation with the colonisation of Leix and Offaly, the two midland counties closest to the Pale, the English government in Dublin was acutely aware of the problems which it faced in the north of Ireland.12 Although these difficulties were linked together, they fall into three broad categories: the presence of Scottish mercenaries in Ireland, the independence of Ulster, and the power of the MacDonnells of Antrim. Unless these three interrelated problems were dealt with satisfactorily, it would be impossible to conquer and colonise the whole kingdom of Ireland. All three problems, moreover, directly involved Scotland. In the sixteenth century, there were two different types of Scottish mercenary in Ireland: the gallowglass and the redshank.13 The gallowglasses, who had been coming to Ireland since the middle of the thirteenth century, were long-term settlers. They were bands of professional soldiers, such as the MacSweeneys, attached to the Irish Gaelic chiefs who paid them in land and kind for their military services. The redshanks also came from the Western Isles, but only hired out their services for short periods, usually just one fighting season, and then returned home. Together these soldiers provided the backbone of the fighting forces of the Gaelic chieftains and were the basis of their successful resistance to the English. If the conquest of Ireland were to be achieved, then the English needed to beat the gallowglasses in battle and prevent or reduce the supply of redshank reinforcements, tasks which would require considerable influence in the Scottish Highlands and Islands. The second problem concerned Ulster, the province of Ireland where the authority of the

Dublin government was weakest.14 It was dominated by two families, the O’Neills of Tyrone and the O’Donnells of Tyrconnell (the present county of Donegal). The O’Donnells exhibited a greater sense of political purpose than most of the other Gaelic lords of Ireland and possessed far wider international connections. In particular, they were in frequent contact with the English court in London, with the Scottish king in Edinburgh and with the clan chiefs in the Western Highlands of Scotland.15 The O’Donnells were the great traditional rivals of the O’Neills and were involved in a long-running dispute with them over the tribute of the O’Dogherty lordship of Inishowen and the border area between Tyrone and Donegal. From their base at Dungannon castle, the O’Neills dominated central Ulster, either immediately or through their vassals, like the O’Cahans, and so were able to control the present-day counties of Londonderry and Armagh. As traditional kings of the whole of Ulster, they claimed tribute from all the sub-kings or ‘ur-ríghthe’ of the region.16 This enabled the O’Neills to exercise a general overlordship over a very wide area of the north of Ireland, in addition to that part which they controlled directly. This included the counties of Cavan and Fermanagh, most of county Antrim and part of county Down. Any attempt by the O’Neills to expand westwards was blocked by the O’Donnells. To the east, however, those lordships which had been powerful in the fifteenth century, such as the O’Neills of Clandeboy and the MacQuillans of the Route, were now in decline and beset by the encroachments of the MacDonnells. Throughout the sixteenth century, the policies of the Dublin government towards the whole of the northern part of Ireland were dictated by its relations with the O’Neills of Tyrone and their rivals the O’Donnells. In 1541, during the ‘liberal revolution’, Con O’Neill had surrendered to the English crown and in return had been made the first earl of Tyrone. Even this limited subservience seemed unlikely to survive his death which was bound to provoke a succession crisis between the rival claimants to Con’s dual position as Gaelic lord, the O’Neill, and English noble, the earl of Tyrone. Two different methods of inheritance would then come into open conflict: the Gaelic custom of tanistry or elective succession for the title of the O’Neill, and the English rules of feudal primogeniture for the earldom. The English government tried to support Matthew, who had been named by Con as his eldest son, against another son, Shane, the tanist who had already been chosen as the successor by the ruling O’Neill ‘derbfine’ or kindred.17 When Shane did succeed in 1559, he refused to be subservient to the Dublin administration which had tried to block his succession. Shane the Proud, who was never modest about his achievements or status, regarded himself as the king of all Ulster and gloried in his dignity as the O’Neill. He could muster considerable military might to enforce his authority, and his raids posed a constant threat to his neighbours and to the English Pale.18 Such an independent and assertively Gaelic Ulster provided the obvious focus for any major Irish rising against English rule. If Ireland were to be conquered completely, Ulster would have to be subdued.19 Reducing the province by force would be extremely difficult, as it was

subsequently to prove. Scottish assistance could make the task of conquest much easier, for the Scots could blockade the coast and prevent reinforcements arriving from the Isles. They could also attack Tyrone from the north and east with redshank troops who would be far better suited than English levies to the Ulster terrain and style of warfare.20 As well as complicating the political situation in Ulster, the MacDonnells presented the Dublin government with its third problem.21 This southern branch of the great Clan Donald or Clan Ian Mor dominated the north channel between Scotland and Ireland. The MacDonnells, or MacDonalds in the Scottish version of their name, held sway over Kintyre, Jura and Islay from their castle at Dunyveg in Islay. They also had lands across the water in Antrim. Because of their Scottish origins and territories, the MacDonnells owed allegiance to the Scottish crown and were regarded by both the English and Gaelic communities in Ireland as foreigners. They had first acquired land in Antrim at the very end of the fourteenth century through the Bisset inheritance, and from their original settlement in the Glens they spread into the Route. Throughout the sixteenth century they continued to expand their territory by force and before 1571 were the most successful plantation in Ireland.22 Their pressure upon Irish families, notably the MacQuillans whom they sought to displace, produced continual raiding and feuding in Antrim. It was extremely difficult for the Lord Deputy in Dublin to stop the influx of the MacDonnells or to control those who came to settle. The English authorities lacked a permanent military presence in Antrim to overawe the Scots. By contrast, the MacDonnells could call upon their Scottish clansmen for help in times of trouble. If the weather were clear, a beacon message could bring reinforcements the twenty miles from Kintyre within a day.23 If capture or defeat seemed imminent in Ireland, the MacDonnells could simply take ship to their Scottish territories. This meant that if the MacDonnells were to be brought under English control, Scottish co-operation would be essential. Scotland’s assistance would ease each of the problems facing the government in Dublin, but it could not be expected whilst Anglo-Scottish hostility persisted. In 1556, when war between the two countries had been imminent, it was Scottish hostility and the ‘auld alliance’ with France which had made the problem of the Antrim Scots seem so pressing. As part of the new and radical programme for Ireland, the English government had decided to expel the MacDonnells from the whole of Ulster.24 The Irish parliament, meeting in 1557, passed an act ‘against the bringing in of Scots, retaining of them and marrying with them’, which was aimed at the Scottish mercenaries in general and the MacDonnells in particular.25 More direct action was taken when military expeditions were mounted in 1557 and again in 1558 against MacDonnell power in Antrim.26 The Anglo-French war which began in June 1557 inevitably involved Scotland, France’s ally. In the Irish context, the war magnified the threat from the Ulster Scots who had previously co-operated with the French. There was little military activity on the Anglo-Scottish land border which made the sea frontier between Scotland and Ireland a more likely troublespot. After the fall of Calais to the French in January 1558, the

English were particularly afraid that the French, using their Scottish base, would invade Ireland with MacDonnell help as they had planned to do in 1550.27 For a time this threat seemed very real. The Lord Justice of Ireland, Sir Henry Sidney, reported that the country’s defences were in a lamentable state and added gloomily that if an invasion did come he believed that the Gaelic lords would support it.28 In the event, the only invasion to take place was an English expedition into western Scotland. The Lord Deputy, the earl of Sussex, left Dublin with a small force and sailed to Kintyre and Arran where he burnt the MacDonnells’ homeland. The expedition was not a resounding success. It was disabled by a severe storm and the ships were so badly damaged they were unable to return to the Isles to finish the destruction of MacDonnell property. During the voyage, the soldiers had picked up a sickness which ensured that the follow-up campaign against the MacDonnells in Antrim came to an equally inglorious conclusion. By the end of 1558, the Lord Deputy seemed little nearer his goal of expelling the Ulster Scots.29 The fate of Sussex’s foray into the Scottish Isles highlighted the problems which beset the Dublin government when it attempted to expel the MacDonnells. The Lord Deputy had failed to make any major inroad into MacDonnell power in Antrim, even when he exerted his military and naval might. Since he could maintain little permanent pressure upon the MacDonnells in Antrim, and even less on their strongholds in Kintyre and the Isles, his chances of chasing them from Ulster completely appeared remote.30 Yet within eighteen months help became available from Scotland. The change was the result of the diplomatic revolution of 1559–60 which ended the auld alliance between Scotland and France and inaugurated a new era of friendship between London and Edinburgh. II The death of Mary Tudor in November 1558 had two major repercussions for AngloScottish relations. Firstly, it gave Mary Queen of Scots a strong claim to the English throne, either as next in line of succession or even as the actual ruler if Queen Elizabeth were regarded as illegitimate. Encouraged by her father-in-law King Henry II of France, Mary advertised her claim by adopting the coats of arms of England and Ireland, even placing them upon her dinner service, a gesture which infuriated Elizabeth.31 Secondly, Elizabeth’s Protestant settlement of religion revived the links which had previously developed in Scotland between Protestantism and friendship with England. Simultaneously, the Scottish regent, Mary of Guise, abandoned her policy of conciliation towards the Scottish Protestants. The unexpected death of Henry II in July 1559 had brought his young son Francis and Mary Queen of Scots to the French throne and with them the growing influence of Mary’s uncles, the Guise family, who favoured a ‘forward’ policy in Scotland. In the summer of 1559, it seemed likely to English observers that the French would suppress the Scottish Protestants,

gain complete control over the whole country and then turn their attention towards England. Scottish resistance to French domination led by the Lords of the Congregation had little prospect of success unless it received foreign aid, and an appeal was made to England for help. Having been persuaded by William Cecil, after a long struggle, of the immediate threat to English security and even to her own position, Elizabeth agreed to send troops and ships north to help the Lords of the Congregation.32 The new allies achieved their aim of freeing Scotland from French domination, though the task proved more difficult than either had anticipated. In July 1560 the Treaty of Edinburgh was signed by the English and French ambassadors and the troops from both nations were withdrawn. The ‘Concessions’ made by Francis and Mary to their Scottish subjects ensured that the Lords of the Congregation took charge of the Scottish administration. By the summer of 1560 the diplomatic revolution was complete and Anglo-Scottish amity seemed assured.33 One source of the rapprochement between the two countries was England’s novel treatment of the Scots. In sharp contrast to previous expeditions, English troops left Scotland as quickly as possible and there was no attempt to extract concessions from the Lords of the Congregation or to garrison key fortifications. In the Treaty of Berwick, concluded on 27 February 1560, the Scots were undoubtedly supplicants begging for help, but there was only one clause which was exclusively to England’s advantage. It ran: the erle of Argyill sail imploy his force and guid will wher he salbe requyred by the quenis majestie to reduce the north partis of yrland to the perfyt obedience of england conform to ane mutuall and reciprok contract to be past betwix the lord depute of yrland ... and the said erle.34

The English offer of assistance for the Lords of the Congregation was generous, but not entirely altruistic: they did want to be rewarded for their intervention in Scotland. The English did not try to guarantee their domination of Scotland nor did they make any major demands of their northern neighbours. In a startling change of direction they moved their requests from Scotland to Ireland and sought repayment of the debt in Ulster.35 By seeking Scottish help in the north of Ireland, the English transformed the relationship between the three kingdoms.36 The attempt to exploit Anglo-Scottish friendship in an Irish context was an entirely new departure. It indicated that the English privy council, and in particular Elizabeth’s principal minister, William Cecil, were developing a strategy which encompassed the whole of the British Isles.37 The Edinburgh government was in practice unable to assist its new English friends. It was incapable of contributing to a solution of the three problems which faced the Lord Deputy of Ireland — the Scottish mercenaries, the independence of Ulster and the MacDonnells of Antrim — because it lacked sufficient authority to enforce its own will beyond the Highland line. Throughout the sixteenth century, the gap between the Highlands and Lowlands of Scotland had increased and it had become more difficult for the two societies to co-exist

peacefully.38 A recognition of this difference between the ‘barbaric’ Highlands and the ‘civilised’ Lowlands can be found in the arrangements made by Mary Queen of Scots for a proposed progress through Argyll in 1563. She decided that the whole court should ‘go native’ and wear Highland dress, in a similar spirit to Queen Victoria’s adoption of tartan and her residence at Balmoral. But this prospect so daunted the English ambassador that he begged William Cecil to arrange for a temporary recall for him and thereby avoid having to traipse around the country in a saffron shirt and a Highland plaid!39 The direct political threat which the Highlands had posed to the Scottish monarchy had seemingly been removed by the destruction of the Lordship of the Isles in 1493.40 This led to the break-up of the Clan Donald, especially after the death, in 1546, of Donald Dubh, the last chief of the MacDonalds to be recognised by the entire clan. James MacDonnell of Dunyveg and the Glens failed in his bid to succeed Donald Dubh and retained the allegiance of the southern part of the clan only.41 During the 1550s and 1560s, James instead became increasingly involved in the affairs of the MacDonnells in Antrim. This tended to divert his attention and resources away from his Scottish territories and, in particular, from the bitter dispute with the MacLeans over the Rhinns of Islay which was to prove so disastrous for his clan.42 The Scottish crown had attempted to retain at least nominal control over the Highlands by employing the local territorial magnates. In the north, the task of enforcing royal policy had been delegated to the Gordon earls of Huntly, and in the south and west to the Campbell earls of Argyll. As the English government was most concerned about the Western Highlands and Islands, it naturally looked to the earl of Argyll for help. His dual role as a Highland chief and a Lowland lord made him an ideal candidate for English purposes. The rise to power of the Campbells had been swift and dramatic. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries they had shown themselves to be masters of ‘the art of aggressive feudalism’. Through marriage alliances, bonds, treaties and their employment as crown agents, they had built up an impressive power base in the west of Scotland.43 Their territorial and political influence spread out from their main stronghold at Lorne south to the Clyde, north to the Great Glen, east to Perthshire and west to Iona and the Isles. The most successful exponent of Campbell expansion in the sixteenth century was Archibald, fifth earl of Argyll, who had succeeded to the title in 1558. He was a convinced Protestant and was a leading member of the Lords of the Congregation from the very beginning of the revolt against the regent and the French.44 The events of the Scottish revolution of 1559–60 had a major personal effect upon the earl who was extremely grateful to the English for their help in expelling the French and establishing Protestantism. His gratitude and the sense of personal obligation it engendered made Argyll only too willing to be of service to the English queen.45 The earl was in a unique position to provide substantial and perhaps decisive assistance to the English in Ireland. In a purely Irish context, Argyll’s

importance was twofold. Since he dominated western Scotland, he could intervene in nearby Ulster with considerable ease and with the benefit of local knowledge. A few years earlier, he had personally led the expedition which had helped Calvagh to defeat his father, Manus O’Donnell, by destroying the castles and subduing the countryside of Tyrconnell.46 Through their links with the O’Donnells and the two other major families, the O’Neills and the MacDonnells, the Campbells were already involved in Ulster politics. Their position would be legitimised and strengthened if they became the allies of the English government in Ireland. As England’s trusted agent, Argyll would probably be able to take over and control the trade in redshanks between Ireland and the Scottish Isles, resulting in a massive increase in Campbell power throughout the Western Isles. However, the fact that Argyll felt secure enough to make extensive offers to Queen Elizabeth provides the best indication of the dominance which he had already achieved within that region. Secondly, and more importantly, Argyll was powerful in a way that very few Scottish nobles and certainly no English aristocrat could rival: he could put up to 5,000 skilled fighting men into the field. The very sophistication of the Tudor political system and the ‘domestication’ of the English aristocracy ensured that a private army of such a size could not be mustered even by the most powerful English magnate. Within England this was certainly desirable and was an important source of the power of the Tudor monarchy. But at the same time it was a major drawback in Ireland where, outside the Pale, English government depended upon armed force. With the Tudors anxious to conquer Ireland on the cheap, what the Lord Deputies really needed to carry out their instructions was a private army. No Lord Deputy had the wealth or the resources to provide such an army, and any attempt to build one around the troops sent over to Ireland by the crown was treated with the gravest suspicion in London and stopped as quickly as possible.47 In addition to its existence and availability, Argyll’s private army had two further advantages for Queen Elizabeth. His redshanks were cheap, and they fought in exactly the same way as the Irish. The difficult terrain and conditions in Ulster, together with the lack of any experience of Gaelic methods of warfare, had severely hampered the military expeditions of the English Lord Deputies. The earl of Argyll, however, from his own resources was able to offer the English queen a large, cheap army which could fight effectively in Ulster. Argyll’s offers of service presented Elizabeth and her ministers with a golden opportunity. In one of his slightly pompous letters of advice. Sir Nicholas Throckmorton pressed the point upon his royal mistress. He explained that The Queen may perceive that she has now good opportunity to go through with her affairs at home, and also to give good order to Ireland, and assure those parts of that realm that lie towards Scotland. To bring which to pass there is no means so ready as by entertaining a good amity with Scotland; and though the means may seem somewhat costly, yet the good framing of Ireland, which has lain long rough hewn, and the winning of a nation to her which has been of long time so cumbersome to the realm, will far counterpoise the charges.48

No time was therefore lost in negotiating the actual agreement between the English government and the earl of Argyll anticipated in the Treaty of Berwick. On 2 April 1560, William Cecil wrote a detailed memorandum setting out English needs in Ireland and sent this to Argyll.49 By 19 July, a formal contract had been drawn up covering the terms of the earl’s proposed service in Ulster.50 This agreement embodied Cecil’s ideas and was the practical expression of his British strategy. The secretary had finalised the details during private discussions with the earl while he had been in Scotland negotiating the Treaty of Edinburgh in June and July 1560. The contract aimed to secure Argyll’s help in two distinct ways: direct military assistance against Shane O’Neill and peaceful persuasion of his own Campbell relatives in Ireland, notably the MacDonnells and Calvagh O’Donnell. In return, Argyll was offered specialised military help, harquebusiers and heavy cannon, if he should need it against any of his own enemies in western Scotland.51 The 3,000 redshanks whom the earl promised to bring over to Ireland himself would treble the Lord Deputy’s military force. They would be used against Shane O’Neill who was ‘plane disobedient to ye quenis majestie and hir depute quha can not be brot in bot be force’. Such a major increase in Elizabeth’s military power in Ireland, at a relatively low cost, should have made the subjugation of Ulster feasible.52 The task of defeating O’Neill would be made still easier if Argyll could secure the help of his old friend Calvagh O’Donnell, who was the second husband of his stepmother, Catherine MacLean. Calvagh, who had been assisted by the earl when he had seized control of the O’Donnells from Manus, his father, held sway in Tyrconnell and so was Shane’s western neighbour. The usual friction between the O’Donnells and the O’Neills flared up again when Shane claimed tribute from Calvagh. Argyll promised to mediate between the English government and O’Donnell, whom it regarded as ‘na plane rebell yit is he not obedient to ye lord depute’. With Dublin and Calvagh reconciled, O’Donnell’s forces could be used as part of a concerted attack upon Shane from all sides. Another of Argyll’s relatives fell into this intermediate category of those who ‘cumis not to civilite or obedience’.53 James MacDonnell was married to the earl’s sister, Lady Agnes Campbell, and the English were most anxious that Argyll should make his brother-in-law co-operate with the Dublin administration. The proposed settlement involved English recognition of MacDonnell territory in Antrim in return for which Sorley Boy, James’s youngest brother, would become an English subject and James’s deputy in Ireland.54 It was also hoped to use the MacDonnells of Antrim against Shane. In the summer of 1560 it appeared that the task of bringing the whole of northern Ireland under the direct control of the English crown was within reach. Thanks to its new ally, the earl of Argyll, it seemed only a matter of time before the region ‘be set in good order’.55

III Despite such rapid progress, there was now a remarkable reluctance to exploit Argyll’s good offices and offer of troops. An attack on Shane O’Neill had been planned for the autumn of 1560. The earl had left Edinburgh on 24 August and gone into Argyll to await a summons from Sussex, recently promoted to Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Argyll travelled around the western Highlands for several months that autumn, probably collecting troops for service in Ulster. But no message came from the earl of Sussex who had, in fact, made a peace with O’Neill though he neglected to inform Argyll of this. Although upset by this cavalier treatment, Argyll remained on excellent terms with the English government.56 The peace with Shane did not last and Sussex’s subsequent attempts to bring Shane to obedience were all equally unsuccessful. On those occasions when he had actually managed to persuade the queen to allow him to use force against Shane, Sussex did not call upon the earl of Argyll’s redshanks. The limited military expeditions, major concessions and even the prolonged exposure to Queen Elizabeth’s charm at the English court all failed to reduce Shane the Proud to the subservience of a loyal subject of the crown.57 Despite Argyll’s willingness, nothing substantial was achieved in Ulster, or even seriously attempted, during the first half of the 1560s. Such an outcome makes the failure to call upon Argyll even more puzzling, and no direct evidence has survived which might solve the mystery. It is clear that Elizabeth was extremely anxious to reduce expenditure in Ireland to the minimum and might have vetoed the use of Argyll’s men simply on the grounds of cost, arguing that any additional expenditure, however important, was unacceptable. After 1560 the queen rapidly lost any enthusiasm she might have had for a military conquest of Ulster. Her Lieutenant, whose aggressive intentions towards Shane O’Neill were never in doubt, spent the years between 1560 and his eventual recall in 1564 begging to be relieved of his post. Sussex’s authority had been undermined by a sustained barrage of criticism of his administration from the Anglo-Irish community and their allies at the English court. This vicious infighting made Sussex’s schemes to justify himself and his handling of Irish affairs more wild and self-centred, which in turn reduced their chances of success.58 It is possible that the Lord Lieutenant resented his exclusion from the negotiations with Argyll and was therefore unwilling to co-operate with the earl. Sussex’s notorious pride and his need for a resounding success to silence his critics would also have made him unwilling to share the glory of defeating Shane. Whatever the reason, Argyll and his redshanks were not called over to Ireland, and when Sussex departed, the situation in Ulster was even worse than when he had arrived. By 1565 Shane O’Neill’s position was more powerful and menacing to the Dublin government than ever before. A similar lassitude characterised the English government’s dealings with Argyll’s Irish relations, Calvagh O’Donnell and James MacDonnell. Calvagh had been reconciled to the

Dublin government and was offered the earldom of Tyrconnell. Before he could be ennobled, Shane O’Neill captured Calvagh and his wife in May 1561 and held them prisoner for three years. It was rumoured that Catherine had betrayed her husband to O’Neill and she certainly became Shane’s mistress and bore him several sons.59 The fallacious stories which were circulated around England and Scotland alleging that Shane kept her in chains were probably an attempt to salve poor O’Donnell’s pride.60 The luckless Calvagh lost his land as well as his wife and was forced to recognise Shane as his overlord. His kinsmen Argyll had urged the English government to negotiate with Shane for Calvagh’s release from captivity.61 But O’Donnell’s loyalty to the Dublin administration received scant reward and he was kept waiting until 1566 before being restored to Tyrconnell.62 Until that time Shane controlled the whole of northern Ireland and Calvagh O’Donnell was effectively removed from Ulster politics. Argyll’s problems with his other kinsmen, the MacDonnells, were even greater. Between 1560 and 1565 the earl did everything possible to promote a lasting settlement between the English government and his brother-in-law, James MacDonnell. On 2 July 1560, immediately after signing the contract with the English, Argyll had entered into a bond of maintenance and manrent with James MacDonnell. In return for certain concessions, MacDonnell promised Argyll to resist any invasion by Frenchmen. As the French had signed a treaty a few weeks before withdrawing their troops from Scotland, MacDonnell’s promise almost certainly referred to Ireland where French interference was still feared.63 During the next five years there were numerous discussions in Edinburgh between James MacDonnell, Argyll and the English ambassador, Thomas Randolph.64 In addition two special envoys, William Hutchinson in 1561 and Captain William Piers in 1563, were sent from Ireland to finalise the terms of an agreement.65 In all these negotiations Argyll used his influence to force concessions from James, and by the beginning of 1565 the earl had assured Randolph that his kinsman ‘will be honest whether he will or no’.66 Even with all the efforts and pressure from the earl of Argyll, a final settlement between Dublin and the MacDonnells was not reached in the 1560s; indeed, it had to wait until 1586 when Sorley Boy became an English subject.67 The fault was by no means all on the Scottish side, for within the English government there was a certain lack of political will to reach an agreement with the MacDonnells. It sprang from Elizabeth’s deep-rooted distrust of any foreign infiltration into Ireland and her desire to revert to the old policy of expelling the Antrim Scots altogether. From the middle of the 1560s this policy became associated with the schemes to plant the Ulster coastline with English settlers.68 The one area where Argyll’s endeavours for his English friends can be judged an unqualified success was in the provision of accurate information about the situation in Ulster and the Isles. The earl was usually better informed than the administration in Dublin about events in northern Ireland and regularly relayed news to London via the English ambassador

in Edinburgh. Shane O’Neill frequently sent messages, letters and ambassadors to Argyll, who passed all these communications to Randolph after he had translated them from the Gaelic so that the English ambassador and his court could read them.69 As well as keeping in very close contact with Randolph, the earl corresponded directly with Queen Elizabeth, Cecil and the Lord Lieutenant and privy council of Ireland, but to no avail. Letters and messages proved to be a substitute for action rather than a prelude to it. By 1565, although Argyll had been involved in prolonged negotiations, particularly with the MacDonnells, little had actually been achieved and his greatest asset, the 3,000 redshanks, had never left Scotland. The English government had failed to exploit a unique opportunity of bringing Ulster under English control and in this way facilitate the eventual conquest of the whole of Ireland. After 1565 the offer of Argyll’s help was withdrawn, and with it the chance for the conquest of Ulster by proxy. IV The failure to exploit Argyll’s help was particularly significant because of a revolution in Anglo-Scottish diplomacy in 1565, which transformed the earl’s position and, in particular, his attitude towards England. Mary Queen of Scots’ marriage to Lord Darnley in July 1565 provoked a breakdown in relations between London and Edinburgh. The wedding also brought fears of a Catholic revival in Scotland and aroused misgivings about the rise of Darnley’s family, the Lennox Stewarts. Both concerns worried the earl of Moray, Argyll’s close friend and fellow Protestant. Moray and his supporters looked to England for assistance, but it was not forthcoming. They drifted into rebellion and in the summer of 1565 were driven into exile by Mary Queen of Scots in the Chaseabout Raid.70 Argyll had supported Moray’s rebellion, but instead of fleeing across the border into England after the Chaseabout Raid, the earl had simply retreated to the west where he was virtually impregnable. The new king and queen did not even try to follow him into his own territory.71 From Dunoon, Argyll wrote to his friends on the Irish privy council to enlist their support in putting Moray’s case before Queen Elizabeth. In his messages to Adam Loftus, archbishop of Armagh, the earl was prepared to offer 4,000 troops to serve in Ireland at his own expense in return for English support for Moray.72 But these efforts to save Moray’s cause were unsuccessful, for Elizabeth was impervious to all pleas on his behalf. Even worse, Argyll learned that his friend had been publicly humiliated by the queen simply to bolster England’s shaky international position.73 These events transformed Argyll’s attitude towards the English and their government in Ireland, turning his friendship into open hostility. The year 1565 also saw the re-emergence of serious conflict in Ulster.74 Shane O’Neill’s increasing power and independence were again worrying Dublin and London. On 2 May at Glenshesk, Shane had inflicted a crushing defeat upon the MacDonnells, capturing both

James and Sorley Boy. James soon died of his wounds, which left the southern branch of Clan Donald without a recognised leader.75 Shane now posed a serious threat to the Dublin regime. He controlled the whole of the north of Ireland, having eliminated the threat from his two principal rivals in Ulster, the O’Donnells in the west and the MacDonnells in the east. Shane had also extended his influence to the south and south-west of Ulster and was now able to raid the Pale with impunity. In a quite unprecedented move for a Gaelic chief, Shane had armed his ‘unfree’ tenants and was thus able to bring as many as 5,000 men into the field.76 By 1565 O’Neill was in open rebellion against the English and had become a source of international embarrassment to the Elizabethan government. Shane tried, without a great deal of success, to interest Charles IX of France and the powerful Guise family in his cause.77 The most promising source of foreign help was always Mary Queen of Scots. Equally, the obvious link between Shane and the Scottish queen was the earl of Argyll.78 O’Neill reopened negotiations with Argyll, who welcomed these discussions because he himself was now implacably hostile towards the English. The earl promoted Shane’s cause at the Scottish court, and by the summer of 1566 it seemed as if, thanks to his efforts, Mary had taken O’Neill into her protection and that Campbell redshanks would shortly be sent over to Ulster to serve him against the English.79 While at the Scottish court seeking aid, Shane’s servant had been protected by Argyll. When news of this reached the English government, Shane, quite unperturbed, produced a most ingenious excuse. According to O’Neill his man went to Scotland to show off his hairstyle, ‘the monstrus glibbe [long strand of hair hanging over the forehead] which he ware uppon his hedde’. Sir Henry Sidney, the new Lord Deputy, was rightly sceptical and concluded that ‘All this confirmeth my opinion of great confederacy and combinacion of the Skottes and Shane’. He asked William Cecil to warn the queen that if she were not careful she would lose Ireland as her sister Mary had lost Calais.80 Sidney had deliberately chosen Cecil for his message, believing that he was particularly well qualified to appreciate the gravity of the situation. The joining together of the newly hostile Scotland with rebellious Ulster reawakened the threat of an attack upon England from within the British Isles which Cecil had worked so hard to banish in 1560.81 In an attempt to avert the danger posed by this ‘cankrid, dangerous rebell’, as Elizabeth called Shane, Sidney led a military expedition into Ulster in the autumn of 1566.82 He was able to put Calvagh O’Donnell back in Tyrconnell; but the unfortunate Calvagh was prevented from enjoying his restoration or helping the English against O’Neill. Within a month he was dead, having fallen from his horse in a fit, and his brother Hugh became chief of the O’Donnells.83 Sidney marched through Tyrone and established a garrison at Derry under Colonel Edward Randolph, but he was unable to bring Shane to an open and decisive battle.84 O’Neill was weakened but not defeated. Fortunately for the English, Sidney’s work was completed for him, first by the O’Donnells and then by the MacDonnells. In May 1567

Shane raided Tyrconnell in an attempt to take advantage of the weakness of the O’Donnells following the death of their leader and the forced evacuation of the garrison at Derry.85 The new chief, Hugh, inspired his small force and at Farsetmore routed Shane’s vastly superior numbers, forcing the O’Neill to flee for his life. Inexplicably, Shane decided to turn to the Antrim Scots and, during the tense negotiations which followed, the MacDonnells cut him to pieces, pickled his head and sent it in a pipkin to Dublin where it was placed on a spike above the town walls.86 Shane’s demise was a welcome relief to the English government. The two leaders in northern Ireland who had worried them most, James MacDonnell and Shane O’Neill, were now dead, and it was hoped that the conquest and colonisation of Ulster would soon be achieved.87 Such optimism unfortunately overlooked the fact that neither Shane nor James had been defeated by the English themselves. It also ignored the much greater changes which had taken place in the relationships of the three kingdoms of Britain. The friendship between England, Scotland and Ireland which had characterised the first half of the 1560s had disappeared. It was replaced by a short period of outright hostility between Scotland and both the Tudor kingdoms which in Ireland led to Scottish encouragement and support for Shane O’Neill. The death of Shane and the domestic upheavals in Scotland surrounding the abdication of Mary Queen of Scots removed the immediate threat of a major Scottish military expedition to Ulster. But the re-establishment of good relations in 1567 between the English government and the king’s party in Scotland did not restore Scottish co-operation in Ulster. The split within Scottish domestic politics between the supporters of Mary Queen of Scots and those upholding the authority of the baby king, James VI, ensured that there were two separate Scottish policies towards Ireland. The Irish policy of the king’s party, in line with their friendship with, and dependence upon, the English government, was amicable but ineffectual. By contrast, the policy of the queen’s party, directed by Argyll, was uniformly hostile towards the English whether they were in Dublin or in London. After what he regarded as England’s treachery in 1565, Argyll had withdrawn his offer to serve in Ireland.88 For the rest of his life the earl was suspicious of the English and of those among his Scottish friends who continued to pursue an Anglophile policy. This new stance was one reason why Argyll became a fervent supporter of Mary Queen of Scots in the civil wars of 1567–73 when the earl of Moray and most of his former colleagues supported the king’s party. Despite his dramatic political realignment, Argyll remained deeply committed to his Protestant faith. Even John Knox, who from 1566 was on the other side of the political divide, had to admit that on this point the earl could not be faulted, though he added, ‘God be merciful to his other offences’.89 Argyll used his own powerful position in Ireland as a bargaining counter on behalf of the queen’s party in their negotiations with the English.90 His co-operation in Ulster was still available but only at the cost of substantial concessions. After Mary Queen of Scots’ flight into England in 1568, for example, Argyll demanded that

Elizabeth should not merely release the Scottish queen, but actually help her to regain her throne. If this were not done, he threatened to employ his military might against the English in Ulster. What had been freely offered between 1560 and 1565 was now only to be had at a very heavy cost. It was a price which Queen Elizabeth was not prepared to pay, though, to the horror of most of her advisers, she toyed with the idea of restoring Mary to her Scottish throne.91 As a result, in the period after 1567, as in the time of complete Anglo-Scottish hostility between 1565–7, Argyll’s influence in Ulster was used against the English interest. During that time the government of Scotland was largely in the hands of the king’s party, but despite their success in the civil war they were unable to control Argyll and in particular his relations with Ireland. This meant that Anglo-Scottish relations, which were close and amicable, were out of alignment with the hostile contacts between Scotland and the English government in Ireland. That this was so was due entirely to the powerful and independent earl of Argyll. The friendly, but weak, regents in Edinburgh listened sympathetically to English complaints about Argyll’s actions in Ireland, but they could do little to remedy them. The Dublin government was very slow to appreciate the significance of this change in the relationships of the three kingdoms of Britain. It seems to have believed that the main obstacle to the subjugation of Ulster had been removed with the death of Shane O’Neill and that Lord Deputy Sidney and his forces could complete the task without outside assistance. They did not recognise that their plans for the conquest and colonisation of Ulster were virtually impossible without the active co-operation or at least the benevolent neutrality of Argyll, who remained the key to any conquest of the north. The dramatic change in Argyll’s attitude in 1565 ensured that the apparently golden opportunity provided by the weakness of both the O’Neills and the MacDonnells, for which the Dublin government had been working since 1556, could not be exploited. The effects of Argyll’s new attitude are apparent in two examples: in his support of the MacDonnells and in the marriage of Lady Agnes Campbell to Turlough Luineach O’Neill. Instead of attempting to control the MacDonnells, Argyll now supported them against the Dublin government. His backing allowed them to recover from their defeat at Glenshesk and, with Sorley Boy taking over control in Antrim, to re-emerge as a serious threat to the English.92 The Lord Deputy’s task was made more difficult when Elizabeth reverted to her old policy of expelling the Ulster Scots. Sidney agreed in principle with his mistress and regarded Scotland as the origin of the mischief of this country [Ireland] ... I neither think any of that race or nation meet to be admitted as tenants or inhabitors of any part of this realm nor yet do judge that they will abstain from infesting the same as much as they may.93

In practice, the Lord Deputy was acutely aware of the cost and difficulty of banishing the Scots. After protracted discussions at the English court, Sidney was provided with financial

and military resources for a major effort in Ulster in 1567–8. But he was not given sufficient men and funds to construct the chain of fortifications across Ulster which he regarded as essential.94 With the limited military and naval forces at his disposal, Sidney could not seal off Ulster from Scotland and thereby prevent Argyll aiding the MacDonnells. By 1571 the situation had deteriorated so badly that the north was in danger to be utterly lost, for the Scots be already in such numbers and fortifying upon her majesty’s land, and manuring the same, that if they be suffered they will shortly look into the English pale.95

The Dublin government now had to contend not only with the encroachments of the MacDonnells within Ireland, but with a hostile sea frontier with Scotland as well. In Cecil’s memorable phrase, the Scots were holding ‘the keys of her majesty’s realm’.96 Since he could not exploit the initial weakness of the MacDonnells, Sidney needed to control the O’Neill lordship if any progress were to be made in the north. On his journey through Ulster in June 1567, he had secured the submission of Shane’s successor as the O’Neill, Turlough Luineach.97 Turlough was an entirely different character from his predecessor.98 He immediately apologised to the Lord Deputy for adopting the title of the O’Neill, but beneath his seeming passivity Turlough pursued exactly the same goal as Shane: an independent Ulster controlled by the O’Neills. His conciliatory methods were the very opposite of Shane’s direct aggression, yet Turlough’s choice of bride should have made his intentions quite clear to the English government. He married the ubiquitous Lady Agnes Campbell, Argyll’s sister and James MacDonnell’s widow. Once again the earl’s changed attitude crucially affected Ulster politics. Through her previous marriage Lady Agnes was already involved in northern Ireland. Argyll did experience a certain amount of difficulty in persuading his sister to marry the heir to her late husband’s murderer, but by settling the feud, the match had its advantages for her, and Turlough had not been exactly loyal to Shane. Lady Agnes Campbell was a far more determined and forceful character than her third husband, Turlough, and she was able to use her influence over him to pursue her own policies and thereby safeguard the inheritance of her children by James MacDonnell.99 One of those children, Finola the Dark Daughter, was betrothed to the other Ulster chief, Hugh O’Donnell. Both mother and daughter were to bring large numbers of redshanks as their dowries. This was a very sinister development for, as one English expert warned, ‘300 Skottes are harder to be vanquysshed than 600 Yrysh men’.100 By arranging these marriages and by providing the dowries of mercenaries which accompanied them, Argyll had supplied the two principal Irish chiefs in the north with the military forces which enabled them to preserve their independence from Dublin and to frustrate all England’s plans for the conquest and colonisation of Ulster. The joint celebration of the marriages of Agnes and Finola was delayed for over a year by events in Scotland. It had originally been planned for April 1568, but finally took place on

Rathlin Island in August 1569.101 Those festivities witnessed the start of an important reconciliation between the old rivals, the O’Neills and the O’Donnells. This friendship was eventually to unite all Ulster against the English in the 1590s. Finola’s hatred of the English was the decisive influence upon her son, Hugh Roe O’Donnell, and was to make him the supporter of Hugh O’Neill, earl of Tyrone in the Nine Years’ War.102 The marriages of Agnes and Finola showed that Argyll’s threats of intervention in Ulster still had to be taken seriously. Both the male and the female members of the Campbell family were capable of making a great deal of trouble for the English in Ireland. Indeed, by 1569 the Lady Agnes and Finola were so feared that they were identified as the cause of most of the woes of that kingdom. They were accused of being trayners of all scotts into Ireland, as allso conveighers of all commodities oute of the realme, so that by these twoo woomen arriseth all mischief against thinglishe Pale.103

V Many of the difficulties which the Dublin government subsequently faced in the north can be attributed to the transformation of Argyll’s attitude in 1565, when his friendship towards England was suddenly replaced by hostility. In the longer term, his antagonism delayed the English conquest and colonisation of Ulster and, in consequence, of Ireland until the very end of Elizabeth’s reign. The attempts at private-enterprise colonisation of north-eastern Ulster made in the 1570s by Sir Thomas Smith and the earl of Essex proved disastrous. There could be no successful colonisation because there had not been a prior military conquest.104 The three most powerful families in Ulster — the O’Neills, the O’Donnells and the MacDonnells — still retained formidable independent forces based upon the redshanks whom Argyll had sent to serve them. In particular, the marriage of Agnes to Turlough had guaranteed that, after Shane’s death, the O’Neill lordship would remain strong enough to resist English encroachment. It made a mockery of Elizabeth’s distribution to English colonists of O’Neill lands theoretically in royal hands after Shane’s attainder.105 Although Turlough never himself took the offensive against the Dublin government, after his abdication in 1593 his successor Hugh, earl of Tyrone, certainly did. Tyrone’s rebellion, the Nine Years’ War, which lasted from 1595–1603, was the most serious the Elizabethan government ever faced.106 Such sustained Irish resistance was only possible because it rested securely upon the militarised O’Neill lordship of Ulster, which Turlough had kept intact even though his laziness and lack of organisation had prevented him from using it.107 The final military subjugation of Ulster and Ireland had to await the defeat of O’Neill and O’Donnell which was only accomplished in 1603 while Elizabeth lay dying.108 The Scottish connection and the redshanks who embodied it were, therefore, of crucial importance for the course of Irish history during the second half of the sixteenth century. In

particular, the intervention of Argyll both delayed and fundamentally altered the nature of the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland. His actions in Ulster were, in their turn, reactions to events in the entirely different arena of Anglo-Scottish diplomacy. The earl’s behaviour was largely determined by English policy towards Scotland on two specific occasions: Elizabeth’s intervention in 1559–60 to support the Lords of the Congregation and then her failure in 1565 to intervene on Moray’s behalf in the Chaseabout Raid. Anglo-Scottish relations and Argyll’s activities in Ireland were thus inextricably commingled. Throughout his life the earl operated within the sphere of British politics and used his power-base in the Scottish Highlands to exert political influence in Edinburgh and even in London. Even after 1568 his goal — the release of Mary Queen of Scots from her English prison and her restoration to the Scottish throne — was at the heart of English and Scottish domestic politics. At no point in his career did Argyll contemplate the revival of the ‘Lordship of the Isles’ or the creation of an independent Gaelic kingdom which would stand aloof from Scotland and England. This deep involvement in Anglo-Scottish politics became the most important and enduring characteristic of the mighty Campbell family over the next two centuries. Since the Campbells never turned their back on British politics, they ensured that the whole of the Scottish Highlands would be drawn into that arena, whether it wanted to be there or not. In the same way that Argyll’s involvement in Anglo-Scottish diplomacy stopped Scottish Gaeldom from taking the lead, so his intervention in Ireland also helped to prevent an Irishled Gaelic state. The consequences of Argyll’s career became fully apparent during the Nine Years’ War. The leader of that revolt, Tyrone, also moved in two separate worlds — Gaelic and English — but neither extended to Scotland. Like Argyll, Tyrone also chose involvement in, and confrontation with, the English-speaking world rather than withdrawal into a separate Gaelic community. Under the strains of war his cause was forced to become a Catholic crusade to liberate the whole kingdom of Ireland. Tyrone called on all the Irish for support, both Gaels and Anglo-Irish, appealing to them on national and religious grounds instead of the old cry for Gaelic solidarity. As a result, when he looked abroad for help to expel the English, he turned to the south and Catholic Spain and not north to the Gaelic Highlands. His rebellion demonstrated that, at the end of the sixteenth century, the split within Gaeldom into distinct Scottish and Irish components was already underway and the Gaelic international was disintegrating. This fissure was primarily caused by the fifth earl of Argyll, whose political legacy was to ensure that there would never be a fourth, Gaelic, polity within the three kingdoms of early modern Britain. NOTES 1. I am most grateful to Brendan Bradshaw, Bruce Lenman, Jenny Wormald and Hiram Morgan for their helpful

comments on an earlier draft of this article. My thanks also go to the Librarian of Trinity College, Dublin for permission to consult and quote from the theses cited in notes 9 and 19. 2. D. Stevenson, Alasdair MacColla and the Highland Problem in the Seventeenth Century (Edinburgh, 1980), his Scottish Covenanters and Irish Confederates (Belfast, 1981), and his The Century of the Three Kingdoms’, History Today, xxxv (March 1985), 28–33. 3. Though it is now ten years since J. G. A. Pocock’s article ‘British History: A Plea for a New Subject’, JMH, xlvii (1975), 601–28. From a different, but complementary, point of view, S. G. Ellis has also been trying to introduce a British perspective: ‘England in the Tudor State’, Historical Journal, xxvi (1983), 201–12. 4. In his epistle to the reader of his translation into Gaelic of the Book of Common Order, John Carswell treated ‘the Gaels of Scotland and Ireland’ as one race, with a common language and history, R. L. Thomson (ed.), ‘Foirm na nUrmuidheadh’, Scottish Gaelic Text Society, xi (1970), 179. Also see D. S. Thomson, ‘Gaelic Learned Orders and Literati in Medieval Scotland’, Scottish Studies, xii (1968), 57–78; J. Macinnes, ‘Gaelic Poetry and Historical Tradition’, in The Middle Ages in the Highlands (Inverness Field Club, 1981), 142–63. In 1555 an Irish poet visited Argyll and wrote a panegyric extolling the joys of living in the earl’s household: W. J. Watson, ‘Classic Gaelic Poetry of Panegyric in Scotland’, Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness, xxix (1914–19), 199–200. 5. Stevenson, Alasdair MacColla, 23. 6. Quoted in C. Falls, Elizabeth’s Irish Wars (London, 1950), 9. 7. See Stevenson, Alasdair MacColla. The Bruces’ invasion of Ireland from Scotland in 1315–18 had shown how the Scots could exploit Irish weakness. 8. ‘There may indeed ensue that which her Majesty of late had just cause to fear, and being now quelled by the good agreement made in Scotland, and the disability of the French, is not unlike, if time serve, hereafter to be revived. This danger is in my sight so fearful, the matter, if it be attempted by a foreign power and aided by civil faction, so easy to be compassed, and the resisting thereof so difficult, as I am forced by duty to give advice that it should in time be prevented, not so much for the care I have of Ireland, which I have often wished to be sunk in the sea, as for that if the French should set foot therein, they should not only have such an entry into Scotland as her Majesty could not resist, but also by the commodity of the havens here and Calais now in their possession, they should take utterly from England all kind of peaceable traffic by sea, whereby would ensue such a ruin to England as I am afeared to think on.’ ‘The opinion of the earl of Sussex’, 11 September 1560, Calendar of the Carew Manuscripts preserved in the archiepiscopal library at Lambeth, 1515–1624 [Carew MSS] (London, 1867–73), i, 302. 9. B. Bradshaw, The Irish Constitutional Revolution of the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1979), part III. Starting from a different set of premises, C. Brady also views 1556 as a turning point in English policy towards Ireland: ‘The government of Ireland c. 1540–1583’ (Dublin University Ph.D. Thesis, 1980), i, 112–71, 240–51; see also S. G. Ellis, Tudor Ireland (London, 1985), ch. 8. 10. For definitions of the Englishry and Irishry, see Bradshaw, Irish Constitutional Revolution, 14–21. 11. See N. Canny, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: A Pattern Established 1565–76 (Hassocks, Sussex, 1976). 12. See R. Dunlop, ‘Sixteenth-century Schemes for the Plantation of Ulster’, SHR, xxii (1924), 52, 54. 13. The best treatment of the whole mercenary problem remains G. A. Hayes-McCoy, Scots Mercenary Forces in Ireland (1565–1603) (London, 1937). Also see A. McKerral, ‘West Highland Mercenaries in Ireland’, SHR, xxx (1951), 1–14. 14. For general descriptions of Ulster families and politics, see K. Nicholls, Gaelic and Gaelicised Ireland in the Middle Ages (Dublin, 1972), 127–40; T. W. Moody, F. X. Martin and F. J. Byrne (eds.) A New History of Ireland [NHI] (Oxford, 1978f), iii, 15–18, and genealogical tables, Vol. ix. 15. B. Bradshaw, ‘Manus “the Magnificent”: O’Donnell as Renaissance Prince’, in A. Cosgrove and D. MacCartney (eds.), Studies in Irish History presented to R. Dudley Edwards (Dublin, 1979), 15–36. 16. For an explanation of the Gaelic social system, see G. A. Hayes-McCoy, ‘Gaelic society in Ireland in the late sixteenth century’. Historical Studies, iv (1963), 45–61. For the list of tribute claimed by the O’Neill, see M. Dillon (ed.), ‘Ceart Uí Néill’, Studia Celtica, i (1966), 1–17. 17. Hayes-McCoy, ‘Gaelic society’, 47; NHI, iii, 72, 79. 18. For a description of Shane, see Hayes-McCoy, Scots Mercenaries, 77–8. 19. The crucial importance of Ulster in the conquest of Ireland was clearly appreciated by the English. The earl of Sussex, for example, declared in April 1557 that, if the north were subdued, ‘the realm is more than three parts settled’: quoted in D. White, ‘Tudor Plantations in Ireland before 15715 (Dublin University Ph.D. Thesis, 1968), i, 372. 20. Randolph to Cecil, 12 October 1561, BL Cotton MS Calig. B.9 n.f. 174.

21. See G. Hill, The MacDonnells of Antrim (Belfast, 1873), chs. 1, 2, 4. 22. White, ‘Tudor Plantations’, ii, 422. 23. Falls, Irish Wars, 78. 24. See the ‘Notes for Sussex’ and ‘A present remedy for the reformation of the north’, 27 April 1556, H. C. Hamilton and others (eds.), Calendar of state papers relating to Ireland 1509–1670 [CSP Ireld.] (London, 1860–1912), i, 133–4, nos. 11, 13. 25. Printed in C. Maxwell, Irish history from contemporary sources, 1509–1610 (London, 1923), 298–9. 26. See S. Doran, ‘The Political Career of Thomas Radcliffe, Third Earl of Sussex’, (London University Ph.D. Thesis, 1977), chs. 2, 3. 27. See D. Potter, ‘French Intrigue in Ireland during the Reign of Henri II, 1547–1559’, International History Review, v (1983), 159–80. 28. Sidney to Sussex, 26 February 1558; Sidney to the Queen, 1 March 1558, CSP Ireld., i, 142, nos. 14, 16; Ellis, Tudor Ireland, 237. 29. Sussex’s reports 3, 6, 31 October 1558, CSP Ireld., i, 149–50, nos. 70, 71, 75. Also see R. Bagwell, Ireland under the Tudors (London, 1963 edn.), i, 410–12. 30. This was acknowledged in Sussex’s instructions, 17 July 1559, Carew MSS, i, 284–5. 31. Cecil to Sadler and Croft, 12 November 1559, J. Stevenson and others (eds.), Calendar of state papers, foreign, Elizabeth [CSP For.] (London, 1863–1950), 1559–60, 105. 32. C. Read, Mr. Secretary Cecil and Queen Elizabeth (London, 1965 edn.), ch. 7; W. MacCaffrey, The Shaping of the Elizabethan Regime (London, 1969), ch. 4. 33. Read, Mr. Secretary Cecil, ch. 8; G. Donaldson, Scotland: James V—James VII (Edinburgh, 1965), ch. 6. 34. This clause in the Treaty has been overlooked principally because it is not included in the précis printed in the J. Bain and others (eds.), Calendar of the state papers relating to Scotland and Mary Queen of Scots 1547–1603 [CSP Scot.] (Edinburgh, 1898–1969), i, 323–4. In the CSP For., 1559–60, 413–5, this clause is briefly summarised. The quotation is taken from BL Cotton MS Calig. B.9. f. 34. 35. The first indication of the change comes in the queen’s letter to Norfolk, 15 February 1560, printed in S. Haynes and W. Murdin (eds.). Collection of state papers ... left by William Cecil, Lord Burghley (London, 1740–59), i, 244. Even by this early date Argyll had already agreed to help the English in northern Ireland. 36. King Henry VIII’s attempt to use Scottish and Irish Gaelic mercenaries in 1545–6 for his Scottish campaigns was a very different type of enterprise from the one attempted in 1560. It was not based upon Anglo-Scottish friendship, quite the opposite as England and Scotland were at war at the time. Donald Dubh MacDonald, acknowledged as the Lord of the Isles by the Scottish Highlanders, was treated as an independent prince and ally of the English king: see W. C. Mackenzie, The Highlands and Isles of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1949 edn.), 133–40; and see below, n. 41. 37. See my forthcoming article, ‘William Cecil and the British context in early Elizabethan foreign policy, 1558–68’. 38. See J. Wormald, Court, Kirk and Community: Scotland 1470–1625 (London, 1981), 39–40, 61–3, 164–5. 39. Randolph to Cecil, 13 June 1563, CSP Scot., ii, 13. 40. D. Gregory, The History of the Western Highlands and Isles of Scotland (London, 1881), chs. 1–4; J. Bannerman, ‘The Lordship of the Isles: Historical Background’, in K. Steer and J. Bannerman (eds.), Late Medieval Monumental Sculpture in the West Highlands (Edinburgh, 1977), 201–13; and his ‘The Lordship of the Isles’, in J. M. Brown (ed.), Scottish Society in the Fifteenth Century (London, 1977), 209–40. 41. Donald Dubh died at Drogheda and was buried with great pomp in Ireland. In 1545 he had made a treaty with Henry VIII against the Scottish regent and it was planned to invade Scotland from Ireland as part of the ‘Rough Wooing’: Gregory, History of the Western Highlands, 170–76. 42. E. Cowan, ‘Clanship, kinship and the Campbell acquisition of Islay’, SHR, lviii (1979), 132–57, and A. McKerral, Kintyre in the Seventeenth Century (Edinburgh, 1948), 1–22. 43. The quotation is taken from Stevenson, Alasdair MacColla, 14; also see Donaldson, James V — James VII, 13–14, and J. Wormald, Lords and Men in Scotland (Edinburgh, 1985), Argyll Bonds of Manrent, 177–98; Bannerman, ‘Lordship of the Isles: Historical Background’, 21–2. An example of the way in which Campbell power was increased through peaceful means can be found in the settlement of the dispute over the very important wardship of Mary MacLeod of Dunvegan: Collectanea de Rebus Albanicis (Iona Club, 1847), i, 91–2, 137–50; I. F. Grant, The MacLeods (London, 1959), 117–27. 44. G. Donaldson, All the Queen’s Men (London, 1983), 27, 31–2.

45. For examples, see Argyll to Cecil, 20 April 1560, CSP Scot., i, 468; Queen Elizabeth to Argyll, 4 September 1560, ibid., i, 477. 46. In 1555, Master Archibald, as he then was, led ‘a great body of Scots to desolate and ravage Tirconnell’: J. O’Donevan (ed.), Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland by the Four Masters (Dublin, 1851), v, 1541. Also see the bond of manrent made between Calvagh O’Donnell and Archibald, 4th earl, 13 July 1555, Wormald, Lords and Men, 184. 47. The earl of Sussex had placed his own men in charge of the royal troops in Ireland but Sir Nicholas Arnold had been sent by the queen to make a rigorous enquiry into the army musters which discredited Sussex’s military establishment: Ellis, Tudor Ireland, 236, 242. 48. 31 March 1561, CSP For., 1561–62, 43. 49. This interesting and little-known document is in the NLS, Denmilne State Papers, Advocates MSS 33.1.1, I, No. 2. 50. The contract is in three parts: a) What Argyll would receive from Queen Elizabeth; b) What Argyll would take in hand in Ulster; c) The names of those in Ulster who are disobedient or not fully obedient, and what to do about them: PRO SP 63/2, fos. 58–60. 51. This appears to be a case of providing Argyll with the technological superiority within western Scotland which would enable him to overawe any rival. The earl seemed to have had a particular fondness for cannon. When helping Calvagh O’Connell (see above, n. 46), ‘he brought with him a gun called Gonna-Cam (the Crooked Gun) by which Newcastle in Inishowen and the castle of Eanach were demolished’: Annals of the Four Masters, v, 1541. 52. In 1559, 1, 500 English troops were stationed in Ireland: Falls, Irish Wars, 47. The queen agreed to pay Argyll’s redshanks whilst they were in Ireland, but the cost of raising and transporting them would be met by Argyll. The rates of pay for the redshanks were left to be settled at a later date but they would probably have been much less than those paid to English soldiers. 53. Both quotations are taken from PRO SP 63/2, f. 60. 54. When his brother Colla MacDonnell died in 1558, James MacDonnell offered the lordship of the Route to his younger brothers, Angus and Alexander, but they both refused and so it passed to the youngest, Sorley Boy. The name Sorley Boy is an Anglicisation of Somerled or Somhairle Buidhe, which means ‘Yellow-haired summer soldier’ or ‘viking’: Hill, MacDonnells, 7, 120, 123. An indenture was made between Queen Elizabeth and James MacDonnell on 20 January 1561, HMC, Salisbury, 13, 57. 55. The quotation is taken from Cecil’s Memorandum, 2 April 1560: see n. 49. 56. Queen Elizabeth ordered Sussex to proceed against O’Neill in her instructions to the earl of 15 and 21 August 1560: CSP Ireld., i, 161, nos. 30, 31. For Argyll’s movements, see Randolph to Cecil, 25 August 1560, CSP Scot., i, 469–73; Argyll to Randolph, 30 September 1560, ibid., i, 487; Randolph to Cecil, 11 October 1560, ibid., i, 487; Argyll to Randolph, 7 November 1560, ibid., i, 492; Randolph to Cecil, 23 December, 1560, ibid., i, 498–9. Later both William Maitland of Lethington, the Scottish secretary, and Randolph wrote to Cecil complaining that Argyll had received no communication from Sussex and asking for some assurance of good will for the Scottish earl: 6 February 1561, ibid., i, 509–16. 57. There have been varying verdicts on Sussex’s military expeditions against Shane: Bagwell is dismissive (chs. 20, 21), but Falls and Doran are much more sympathetic (Irish Wars, 86–99; ‘Sussex’, 30–84). For the deep impression which Shane made during his visit to the English court in January 1562, see J. Hogan, ‘Shane O’Neill comes to the Court of Elizabeth’, in S. Pender (ed.), Essays and studies presented to Professor Tadhg Ua Donnchadha (Torna) (Cork, 1947), 154–70. 58. For the queen’s Irish policy between 1560–5, see Brady, ‘The government of Ireland’, i, 130–70; Ellis, Tudor Ireland, 234–49; White, ‘Tudor Plantations’, i, chs. 10 and ii, 11–13; Doran, ‘Sussex’, chs. 2, 3; Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, ch 2. 59. Catherine’s marriage to Calvagh was in severe difficulties before they were captured: Randolph to Cecil, 23 December 1560, CSP Scot., i, 498–9. The allegation against Catherine was made by Lord Justice Fitzwilliams in his letter to Cecil, 30 May 1561, CSP Ireld., i, 172, No. 84. In taking Catherine as his wife or mistress, Shane put away another Catherine, the daughter of James MacDonnell, an action which did not please her father: Randolph to Cecil, 22 January 1563, CSP Scot., i, 678. The sons of Catherine and Shane, Hugh Gavelagh, Art and Sean Og (1st), were to be important in later Ulster politics and drew in their MacLean kinsmen: Hayes-McCoy, Scots Mercenaries, 150–2, 194–6. In 1589 Hugh, earl of Tyrone, hanged Hugh Gavelagh, which ensured that he did not receive any MacLean assistance during his rebellion: ibid., 199–202, 238, 377; Falls, Irish Wars, 82. 60. Randolph to Cecil, 24 December 1564, CSP Scot., ii, 110–111. 61. For examples, see Argyll to Cecil, 12 February 1562, CSP Scot., i, 603–4; Randolph to Cecil, 26 May 1562, ibid., i, 626–7. 62. Calvagh set out his plight in a supplication to the earl of Leicester, 21 May 1565, CSP Ireld., i, 261, No. 47.

63. Wormald, Lords and Men, 109, 184–5. 64. For examples, see Randolph to Cecil, 16 December 1562, CSP Scot., i, 671–3; 24 December 1564, PRO SP 52/9, fos. 199–200. 65. Hutchinson’s Instructions: 27 April 1561, PRO SP 63/3, fos. 161–2; Articles agreed with James MacDonnell, 7 April enclosed in Piers’ report, 11 April 1563, SP 63/8, fos. 65–7; cf. James MacDonnell to Randolph, 16 April 1563, CSP Scot., ii, 7. 66. Randolph to Cecil, 13 January 1565, PRO SP 52/10, fo. 6. 67. On 14 April 1573 Sorley had been granted letters patent of denization, but he did not make a full submission and peace with the English government until 11 February 1586: Hill, MacDonnells, 153–5, 181. 68. White, ‘Tudor Plantations’, ii, chs. 15–17. 69. One of O’Neill’s ambassadors brought a letter to Argyll in August 1560. He had ‘walked a foote owte of Ereland hyther alone; his diet by resone of the lengethe of his yornaye so fayled hym, that he was fayne to leeve hys safron shyrte in gage’. The remainder of the Irishman’s attire was in little better condition, so the earl gave him new clothes, lodged him in the chimney nook and supplied him with his favourite tipple of aqua vitae and milk. This hospitality was not a sign of support for O’Neill but Argyll’s attempt to bring the man ‘to God or more civility’: Randolph to Cecil, 25 August 1560, CSP Scot., i, 469. 70. See my article, ‘Mary Queen of Scots, Lord Darnley and Anglo-Scottish Relations in 1565’, International History Review, viii (1986), 1–24. 71. John Knox believed that the reason for such caution in October 1565 was that the lord of Argyll ‘had his people always armed, whereof his neighbours were afraid especially the inhabitants of Atholl and Lennox’: W. C. Dickinson (ed.), History of the Reformation (Edinburgh, 1949), ii, 168. 72. Argyll to Loftus, 18 November 1565 (three letters, also including a copy, now lost, of the ‘Protestation of the Scots Nobility and Congregation’), PRO SP 63/15, fos. 172, 174, 178. The offer of troops was given verbally by the bearer of the letters: Loftus to Leicester, 13 December 1565, SP 63/15, f. 170. There was also a series of counterfeit letters, one from the Irish privy council to Argyll, 4 August 1565, SP 63/15, f. 176; and another from the duke of Châtelherault and Argyll to Loftus, 27 September 1565, SP 63/15, f. 117; see Loftus to Leicester, 20 November 1565, SP 63/15, f. 115; and Loftus to Cecil, 13 December 1565, SP 63/15, f. 168. The forgeries probably originated from O’Neill who wanted to know whether Argyll and James MacDonnell were coming to Ireland to attack him. 73. In front of the French ambassador, Queen Elizabeth roundly rebuked the earl of Moray for his rebellion: privy council to Sir Thomas Smith, 23 October 1565, CSP Scot., ii, 287. Argyll’s reaction to the news was recorded by Randolph: to Cecil, 19 November 1565, PRO SP 52/11, fos. 198–200. 74. The spring of 1565 saw a major review of Irish policy with lengthy debates in the privy council concerning the earl of Sussex’s administration and the terms of appointment for his successor, Sir Henry Sidney: Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, ch. 3. 75. The news of the battle reached Edinburgh by 11 May (Randolph to Cecil, PRO SP 52/10, fos. 108–9) rather earlier than it got to Dublin (Fitzwilliams to Cecil, 16 May 1565, SP 63/13, f. 96). Fitzwilliams feared that Shane had been made ‘mad proud of thys vyctory’: also see Hill, MacDonnells, 132–9. The English had frequently incited Shane to attack the Ulster Scots: see, for example, O’Neill to Lord Justice and Council, 18 August 1564, CSP Ireld., i, 244, no. 76; and the bond of the northern Irish chiefs made to expel foreigners, c. 1560–5, printed in Hayes-McCoy, Scots Mercenaries, App. 2, 347–9. 76. NHI, iii, 84–6. 77. O’Neill to Charles IX and the Cardinal of Lorraine, 25 April 1566, PRO SP 63/17, fos. 92, 94. 78. Mary Queen of Scots was anxious to use O’Neill against Queen Elizabeth and asked Argyll to help and entertain Shane as best he could: 31 March 1566, A. Macdonald (ed.), Letters to the Argyll Family (Maitland Club, 50, 1839), 5–6. 79. See Instructions to Henry Killigrew, special ambassador to Mary Queen of Scots, 13–15 June 1566, PRO SP 52/12, fos. 150–6; Randolph to Cecil, 14 June 1566, CSP Scot., ii, 285–6. 80. Sidney to Cecil, 9 June 1566, PRO SP 63/18, f. 18, printed in A. Collins (ed.), Letters and memorials of state ... written and collected by Sir Henry Sidney etc. (London, 1746), i, 11–12. 81. In a memo dated 1567 Cecil had identified the central problem facing Ulster, ‘how both the foreign enemy of Scotland and the inward rebel shall hereafter be avoided’: quoted in White, ‘Tudor Plantations’, ii, 293. 82. Elizabeth to Sidney, 28 March 1566, PRO SP 63/16, f. 206. Sidney had written to Leicester on 1 March about O’Neill: ‘I believe Lucifer was never pufit up with more pryde nor ambytyon than that Onele ys and ... he ys the dangerust man and most lyke to bring the hole estate of thys land into subvercyon and to subiectyon ether of hym self or sum forreyn

prynce’: SP 63/16, f. 84. 83. Indenture between Calvagh O’Donnell and Sidney, 20 October 1566, Carew MSS, i, 373–5. For Calvagh’s death, see Bagwell, ii, 111. A similar tragedy struck Shane Maguire who was also killed just as he was about to be restored to his territory of Fermanagh: ibid., ii, 109, and Sidney’s views in his Memoir of government in Ireland, printed in Ulster Journal of Archaeology, 1st series, iii-vi (1855–8), here iii, 39–42 (hereafter Sidney, Memoir). 84. Sidney and others to Elizabeth, 12 November 1566, CSP Ireld., i, 317, no. 43. 85. The evacuation of Derry was caused first by the loss of its commander, Colonel Edward Randolph (the older brother of Thomas Randolph, the English ambassador in Edinburgh), who was the only fatal casualty in a skirmish on 12 November (Sidney, Memoir, iii, 41), then by a fire which destroyed the fort. The garrison had also suffered badly from poor provisioning and sickness. As the fort at Derry had been very expensive — swallowing about half of the costs of the whole expedition — the queen seems to have been relieved at her providential delivery from further expense: White, ‘Tudor Plantations’, ii, 229–56. 86. Sidney, Memoir, iii, 91; Thomas Lancaster to Cecil, 31 May 1567, CSP Ireld., i, 334, no. 97; Fitzwilliams to Cecil, 10 June 1567, ibid., 335, no. 8; Hill, MacDonnells, 140–6. For a reassessment of the circumstances of Shane’s death, see C. Brady, ‘The Killing of Shane O’Neill: Some New Evidence’, Irish Sword, xv (1982–3), 116–23. The battle of Farsetmore is described in detail in G. A. Hayes-McCoy, Irish Battles (London, 1969), 68–86. 87. The mood in London and Dublin was wildly optimistic: ‘the Irish Council seem to have expected little less than a millenium now that the arch-disturber was removed’: Bagwell, ii, 119. For the way Shane’s death transformed Elizabeth’s attitude towards Sidney, see Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, 60–1; Brady, ‘The government of Ireland’, 190–6. 88. See M. Lee, James Stewart, earl of Moray (Westport, Conn., 1971 edn.), 156, 175, 199–200. Queen Elizabeth was well aware of Argyll’s change: see her letter to Randolph, 23 May 1566, CSP Scot., ii, 279. 89. Knox, History, i, 138; and for the parties in the civil war, see Donaldson, All the Queen’s Men, chs. 5–6. 90. For example, Randolph to Cecil, 26 May 1566, CSP Scot., ii, 281–2; Sir John Foster to Cecil, 13 October 1566 (not 1565 as in the Calendar), PRO SP 59/10, fo. 121; Captain Piers to Sidney, 15 December 1566, SP 63/19, fo. 147. 91. Elizabeth to Argyll, 14 August 1568, CSP Scot., ii, 477–8; Argyll to Elizabeth, 24 August 1568, ibid., ii, 488; Sidney to Cecil, 12 November 1568, CSP Ireld., i, 393, no. 18. The proposals for the release of Mary Queen of Scots contained a clause in which Mary promised to stop Scots going to Ireland without licence and also to give up a castle to the English either in Kintyre or Galloway (7 May 1570, CSP Scot., iii, 162–4). Mary agreed to these conditions in October 1570: ibid., iii, 371; Bagwell, ii, 149–50. For the discussions in the English privy council, see C. Read, Lord Burghley and Queen Elizabeth (London, 1965 edn.), ch. 1. 92. Spurred on by his sister, Lady Agnes Campbell, Argyll had asked O’Neill for the release of James MacDonnell: O’Neill to Elizabeth, 28 July 1565, CSP Ireld., i, 268, no. 32. The earl was prepared to travel in force to Ulster (Randolph to Cecil, 13 June 1566, PRO SP 52/12, fo. 144). His participation was cancelled because at that stage Mary Queen of Scots did not want to offend Elizabeth: William Maitland of Lethington to Cecil, 4 October 1566, CSP Scot., ii, 300–1; Hill, MacDonnells, 146–8. 93. Sidney to Cecil, 8 November (not 12th as in the Calendar) 1568, CSP Ireld., i, 393, no. 18, quoted by White, ‘Tudor Plantations’, ii, 336–7. Elizabeth’s determination ‘to suffer no Scots to have habitation or abode in Ireland’ was conveyed to Sidney on 16 January 1567: T. O’Laidhin (ed.), Sidney state papers 1565–70 (Irish Manuscripts Commission, Dublin, 1962), 47–52. 94. Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, 62, 64–5; White, ‘Tudor Plantations’, ii, ch. 18. 95. Piers to Cecil, 25 March 1571, CSP Ireld., i, 441, no. 41, quoted by White, ‘Tudor Plantations’, ii, 401. Piers was deliberately exaggerating the gravity of the situation as the letter was meant for the eyes of the court. 96. Cecil to Sidney, 11 March 1567, CSP Ireld., i, 328, no. 44, quoted in White, ‘Tudor Plantations’, ii, 257. The close link between keeping the narrow sea channel between Scotland and Ireland, sending a pinnace (a small, shallow-draught vessel equipped with both oars and sails) to patrol the coast and stopping the earl of Argyll’s aid was made in Cecil’s memorandum, 30 May 1566, PRO SP 63/17, fos. 209–10; T. Glasgow, ‘The Elizabethan Navy in Ireland’, The Irish Sword, xxix (1966), 291–309. Sidney had emphasised the need to fortify Rathlin Island, ‘for it is the very staple and baiting-place of the Scots’, 8 November 1568, see above n. 85. It was relatively easy to capture the island but very difficult to hold it. This point had been made in an interesting scheme proposed, as a means of obtaining their pardon, by two pirates, Fetiplace and Johnson, who knew the coast very well: 1 April 1563, CSP Scot., ii, 1. In a much more gruesome fashion, the same problem was demonstrated by the earl of Essex’s massacre of all the Scots on Rathlin on 26 July 1575, and even this bloodbath did not mean that the island could be kept in English hands: Hayes-McCoy, Scots Mercenaries, 120.

97. CSP Ireld., i, 337, no. 22; Sidney, Memoirs, iii, 92–3. 98. It is difficult to imagine Shane O’Neill being accidentally ‘shot by a Jester while sitting at supper with his new spouse’: Sidney to privy council, 26 October 1569, CSP Ireld., i, 421–2, no. 70. For Turlough’s character, see Hayes-McCoy, Scots Mercenaries, 78, 84, 97–8. 99. Subsequently a doubt was raised, probably by Sorley Boy, about the legitimacy of Agnes’ marriage to James MacDonnell and therefore of their offspring: Hayes-McCoy, Scots Mercenaries, 41, 105–6; Stevenson, Alasdair MacColla, 309. 100. Knollys to Cecil, 29 May 1566, PRO SP 63/17, fo. 203. There are two different sets of figures for the number of troops brought by the Lady Agnes. Piers reported 1,000 men (Piers to Lord Chancellor, 5 August 1569, CSP Ireld., i, 415, no. 30), but John Douglas, Sidney’s Scottish agent, who was probably more accurate, said that 400–500 men had come from Argyll (Campbells) and 700 from Kintyre (MacDonnells): Douglas to Cecil, 15 August 1569, CSP Scot., ii, 669. 101. The delay of the marriages was caused by the escape from captivity of Mary Queen of Scots and her subsequent defeat at Langside on 13 May 1568. Throughout the next year Argyll was heavily involved in the Scottish civil war. 102. Finola’s defence of her son’s position in Tyrconnell was made possible by the continuous support of her Scottish mercenaries: Hayes-McCoy, Scots Mercenaries, 196–7, 207–8. Hugh Roe’s use of Scottish redshanks was important in the defeat of Sir John Chichester near Carrickfergus in November 1597 and the great Irish victory at Yellow Ford on 14 August 1598: Falls, Irish Wars, 82–3. 103. This was the opinion of John Smith who submitted ‘Advice for the Realme of Ireland’, printed in Hayes-McCoy, Scots Mercenaries, App. 1, 345–7. In 1570 the earl of Argyll’s interference in Ulster was regarded as sufficiently serious for an attempt to be made to enlist Donald Gormeson MacDonald of Sleat and the MacDonalds of Skye to serve against him. The English proposal was approved by Regent Lennox but not accepted by Donald Gormeson: CSP Scot., iii, 349; ibid., iv, 135; CSP Ireld., i, 434, no. 83; Hayes-McCoy, Scots Mercenaries, 114–5. In 1597 Denis Campbell, Dean of Limerick, stated that during the previous thirty years the redshanks employed in the O’Neill lordship had nearly all been Campbells: J. Robertson (ed.), ‘Observations ... for the West Isles of Scotland’, in Maitland Club Miscellany IV (Maitland Club, 1847), 53. 104. See R. Dunlop, ‘Sixteenth-Century Schemes for the Plantation of Ulster’, SHR, xxii (1924), 51–60, 115–126, 199– 212; and H. Morgan, ‘The Colonial Venture of Sir Thomas Smith in Ulster, 1571–1575’, Historical Journal, xxviii (1985), 261–78; Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, 66–92. 105. The Act (11 Elizabeth sess. 3, c.1.) containing O’Neill’s retrospective attainder was passed on 11 March 1569 in the Irish parliament: NHI, iii, 93. The escheated lands were the legal basis for the grants made to the Ulster colonists: Dunlop, ‘Sixteenth-Century Schemes’, 117. 106. Turlough had missed a golden opportunity during the Munster rebellion of 1568–73: Hayes-McCoy, Scots Mercenaries, 107. For Tyrone’s rebellion, see NHI, iii, 118–41. 107. Hayes-McCoy, Scots Mercenaries, 108. For Tyrone’s use of Ulster as an organised base of operations, see HayesMcCoy, ‘Gaelic Society’, 57–8. 108. Although the military conquest was completed in 1603 and peace made at the Treaty of Mellifont, the dramatic social and political changes in Ulster only came after the Flight of the Earls in 1607: See N. Canny, ‘Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, and the Changing Face of Gaelic Ulster’, Studia Hibernica, x (1970), 7–35.

7 The Price of Friendship: The ‘Well Affected’ and English Economic Clientage in Scotland before 1603 Keith M. Brown

I The peaceful Anglo-Scottish relations which persisted throughout the contemporaneous reigns of James VI and Elizabeth I rested on three pillars: a shared Protestant religion, the Stewart claim to the English throne, and the maintenance by England of a friendly party in Scotland. At least that is how historians have commonly explained the transformation in the relationship between the two British kingdoms during the latter half of the sixteenth century.1 Yet while the religious and dynastic aspects of this change have been seriously discussed by generations of historians, the mercenary elements have been largely unexplored. Certainly there has been plenty of comment on the role money — or the lack of it — played in Scottish politics and English diplomacy. Conyers Read, who was something of a rarity among English historians in that he, like the Elizabethans, paid serious attention to Scotland, put a good deal of emphasis on cash. He shared Secretary Walsingham’s belief that ‘Money would do anything with that nation [Scotland]’.2 This view has since been repeated by G. R. Elton who commented that ‘Elizabeth’s parsimony made it impossible to bind the Scots nobles firmly to the English interest by the only means they acknowledged — frequent bribes’.3 These two themes of English meanness and Scottish venality have in fact a long pedigree, and were widely reported at the time. But that does not make them true, and English historians in particular have tended to follow in a tradition which has its origins in the frustrations Tudor politicians underwent in dealing with the Scots. How else could one explain the behaviour of people who claimed to be friends but who so persistently refused to see the world through English eyes? Scottish greed, born of poverty, and the racial failings of an inferior nation provided an easy answer. For their part the Scots nurtured grievances fed by unrealistic estimates of English wealth, and unreasonable expectations of how they might gain access to it. What they essentially wanted was to be able to pursue independent policies, free from

English meddling, and have Queen Elizabeth pay them for doing so. But from a Scottish point of view there was no reason why Elizabeth should not be persuaded to pay up. Englishmen might see this as unprincipled, and as a source of tension within the ideologically committed ranks of Protestantism, but to Scots it was a means of underlining their freedom from English clientage, and of making a profit at the same time. Underlying this attitude was a persistent unease on both sides over the new-found friendship between the two countries, an unease which often casts a shadow over the widely held belief that the Scottish Reformation of 1560 had permanently altered Anglo-Scottish relations. Thus, G. D. Ramsay in an essay misleadingly entitled ‘The Foreign Policy of Elizabeth I’, cavalierly dismisses Scotland with the claim that by 1560, or at the latest by 1568, Elizabeth had done all she needed to do there and had ‘achieved her purpose’.4 A. G. R. Smith is a little more cautious, and certainly better informed, but he too implies that English interests in Scotland, which had been established by the ‘pro-English Protestant ascendancy’ in 1560, were secure by the mid-1580s.5 The problem with this interpretation is that on the one hand it does not take serious enough account of Counter-Reformation ambitions within Scotland, while on the other it equates the interests of Scottish Protestants and of the Stewart dynasty with English interests.6 Yet as one sympathetic privy councillor told an English agent in 1589, many Scots were afraid that if King James cut of the faceyon of Spayne and frustrate a(ll) hoope and ayde that way too, is he not th(en) in the mercy of Ingland to be used as you lyst, and who knowes how that wilbe?7

Nor were suspicions of this nature exclusive to the Scots. At the height of the crisis caused by the Spanish Armada in 1588 Gilbert Gifford warned Walsingham that ‘England will find Scotland, old Scotland still, and traiterous in the greatest need’.8 Even as late as 1600 an Englishman could still write of ‘an old beggarly enemy, the Scot’.9 The stereotyped image that Englishmen had of the Scots, as violent, uncivilised, poor and rapacious, took a very long time to dispel — indeed one wonders if it ever has been laid to rest — and it was certainly very much alive when James VI ascended the throne of England.10 Yet the typology allowed for gradations in a spectrum which ranged from the most inveterate papist, through the ranks of religiously uncommitted rogues and hucksters, to the ‘well affected’: those Scottish Protestants who almost approximated to their superior English counterparts, the godly English gentlemen. Those men, the ‘well affected’, formed the basis of the English party in Scotland. Of course, there never was any formal party. In 1593 Lord Burgh was sent north to cobble together a faction of Anglophiles by persuading them to subscribe to a band, as ‘this manner of action is not strange in Scotland, for it is very usual there to make bands of mutual defence and offence’.11 That was true enough, but as those best informed on domestic Scottish politics also knew, the factions created by these bands were notoriously pragmatic and short-lived.12 Hence the English obsession with lists of ‘well

affected’, ‘affected’, ‘unaffected’ and ‘ill affected’ noblemen in Scotland.13 These lists reveal no more than a skeleton of political affiliations on a limited number of issues, but they do provide a useful starting point for anyone trying to pin down the Anglophiles among the Scottish nobility. From them one can roughly estimate that the English party included between twelve and fifteen peers out of a total of fifty-three in the mid-1570s.14 From that high point it declined fairly rapidly over the next decade, but while some of the losses were to the Spanish party, it became increasingly the case that ‘The most part of our nobility are in effect neutrals, and disposed to follow the King’s course’.15 It was these neutrals, including the king himself, who created the greatest difficulties for the English government, particularly for those steeped in the rhetoric of international Protestantism. Of course among the leaders of Scottish society there was no shortage of those who had adopted a fortress Britain mentality towards the threat from Catholic Europe. Even a fairly non-apocalyptic statesman like Sir John Maitland of Thirlestane could enthuse about a common British Front in such a way as to sound completely genuine: If this microcosme of Britannye, seperat from the continent world, naturallye joyned by situatioun and language, and most happelye be religioun, shalbe by the indisolubill amitye of the two princes sincerelye conserved in unioun, the antechristian confederatis shall never be abill to effectuat thair bloodye and godles intentions.16

No doubt Lord Burghley was encouraged by this letter, but, like Maitland, he knew very well that the interests of the princes concerned could not always be suppressed for the sake of the common cause. Even among the most solidly Protestant Scottish kindreds, the Douglases, Erskines, Ruthvens and Lyons, there was always an understandable reluctance simply to accept the English view of how Protestantism might best be served. It was said of the deeply religious eighth earl of Angus that he was ‘wholly at the Queen of England’s devotion, and whatsoever she will command him to do, he will do it’,17 but a succession of royal servants constantly warned the queen that the loyalty of good men ought not to be taken for granted. Certainly there were men in Scotland naturally inclined towards friendship with England, but that friendship had to be cultivated. In 1593 Sir Robert Bowes, who knew Scotland better than any other Elizabethan diplomat, lectured Burghley on this point: Whilst Sir Francis Walsingham lived I was advised to encourage young noblemen and gentlemen to bestow their ‘young years’ rather in England than other foreign countries to the intent their good affections might be better trained and devoted to our sovereign and realm.18

However, even with encouragement from the English government, the attractions of the continent proved greater than those of the Elizabethan court, and consequently a large number of young Scottish noblemen were converted to Catholicism.19 There was, however, a less subtle approach which fitted better English preconceptions about the Scots. Thus William Fowler could be quite confident of his fellow countrymen’s answer to the rhetorical question ‘what is it that a Scot will not do for money?’20 Yet it has to

be admitted that this view was not only held by the English. In 1573 a Spanish source commented that ‘The disloyalty and falseness of Scotsmen are notorious, and they will do anything for money’, and a few years later another Spaniard, Bernadino de Mendoza, described them as ‘naturally fickle and faithless’.21 In 1577 the papal nuncio in France, Antonio Maria Salviati, reported a conversation he had had with Louis, cardinal de Guise, in which the latter had assured him that a plot to kidnap James VI could be carried out as ‘all that remained was to corrupt those grandees that are about the Prince, wherein there would be no difficulty, that nation being even as the German in that respect’.22 What the Scots also shared with the Germans was a reputation for providing good mercenaries, and one suspects that it was on the activities of these hired companies that this venal tradition attained such widespread acceptance rather than on the behaviour of the political elite within Scotland. Yet there is no denying that the political loyalties of the uncertain and the uncommitted can always be swayed by financial inducements. During a nadir in English influence in Scotland, in 1584, a report advised the government that: In all ages, when the Kings of England could not be assured of the favour of the Kings of Scotland, they wer ‘entertained’ some of the nobility of Scotland to be their friends, thinking it very necessary and profitable to their estate.23

Six years before this Bowes had pointed out that while hard times — caused by high inflation, falling rents, and the losses incurred during the civil war — might suggest that it was a buyer’s market, the queen should not be slow to corner it: Yet I doubt what liberal offers of other Princes may work in their bare estates, over-charged with late expenses, especially when they shall see that they make a profitable market, and I fear that no great inwardness shall be found in them when they find her majesty’s liberality coming slowly to those who ‘use not often at the fayrest call to stowpe to empty lure’.24

Henry Killigrew similarly recognised that the Scots could hardly be blamed for demanding some material sign of English goodwill: Want thereof, by appearance, will endanger the loss of their good affections, and drive them back again in time to their [England’s] old enemies. Where then shall the fault lie? What answer can be made to the people and States of a realm in any danger, [if] war or hurt ensue for neglecting this matter?25

The point was, however, that even if the Scots were a shower of scoundrels, English security was so dependent on peace with this northern neighbour that arguments about morality or economy were entirely secondary. As Killigrew reminded Christopher Hatton in 1574, ‘who so wold Ingland wyan, at Scotland he must first begynn’,26 or, in Walsingham’s more prosaic language, Scotland was ‘the postern gate to any mischief or peril that might befall this realm’.27 There was, therefore, a strong case for economic clientage in Scotland. Here one returns to the related theme of English meanness. Oddly enough, most of the evidence for this is found in English sources. While Lord Burghley was, in his capacity as treasurer, one of those who advocated a cautious use of money, he had grumbled as much as

anyone else at Elizabeth’s lack of investment in the king’s party during the Marian civil war.28 Throughout the rest of the 1570s the government received a stream of warnings on this same theme, and when in 1581 the earl of Sussex commented, with obvious irritation, that ‘her majesty has overslipped her best opportunity to prevent all ill meaning there’, and that it was ‘too late to wish that things had been done which be not done’,29 it was the judicious use of money that he had in mind. When the Ruthven Raid in the summer of 1582 restored the hard-line Protestant lords to power the queen was handed an undeserved and unexpected second chance in Scotland. Sir Walter Mildmay, an experienced bureaucrat with a keen eye for economy, forcefully argued that to repeat the errors committed during the Morton regency ‘might be accounted a marvellous oversight, and sparing of charge that way is a small point of husbandry’.30 Bowes adopted a similar approach to the problem, and was scornful of the ‘untimely sparing’ and ‘present husbandry [that] shal at length be found lyke the huswifry of Calais’. In fact he eventually asked to be recalled rather than dishonour himself and cause ‘discomfort to good men’. He was scathing of his government, and warned that ‘if we will needs save our money we must perforce lose their friendship’.31 Secretary Walsingham fully concurred with this view. In 1583 he told Burghley in a letter that ‘They [the Scots] have been often fed with fair promises ... God open her majesty’s eyes to see her peril and not to prefer Treasure before safety’.32 Four years later he was still grumbling to Leicester that for the sake of ‘a little charge’ Scotland was ‘altogether neglected, whence all our mischief is like to come’.33 Not surprisingly, English agents in Scotland wrote to the secretary: ‘Would God it were in your hands to amend it’.34 In 1590 George Nicolson was probably the author of a letter to Walsingham about the difficulty of getting a mere £10 (sterling unless £ Scots is indicated) for Lord Hamilton, one of the most loyal of the Anglophile lords in Scotland: This liberalitie will entertaine him with contentment and do some service. Nevertheless being so well warned by you how such motions are taken and imbraced, I dare not make any mention therof in my letters coming to her Majesteis sight before I shall receive better comfort from you of better successe then I hope for: and therefore I have chosen in this manner to commend this matter to you, praying you to direct me therein as you think good.35

Hamilton never did get the £10. In 1595 Nicolson, a very keen advocate of pensions — in fact he seems to have seen himself as a broker of sorts for the Scottish nobility, though not a very good one — experienced similar problems in trying to get money for the earl of Argyll. When his master, Sir Robert Bowes, sent him £20 for the earl, Nicolson was utterly incredulous. ‘It seems you plainly mistake his place and degree,’ he chided,36 but the reprimand was misplaced as the mistake was the queen’s. Clearly Elizabeth did not think that the Scots were worth much more than this. And it was, on the whole, a question of value for money rather than simple tight-fistedness. Thus, by contrast, in 1587 the French counts of Soisson and Montpensier were given 18,000 crowns to win them over to Henry of Navarre.37 It was hardly surprising that men in Scotland said that ‘England cares no further than the serving of their own turn’.38

II The victory of the king’s party in 1573 and its dominance by the overbearing Regent Morton provided Elizabeth with the kind of security in the north which she had been searching for since the commencement of her reign. It had certainly justified the expensive military commitment in 1560 and again in 1573. Morton’s willingness to maintain a close friendship with the queen also proved a worthwhile return on the subsidies which Elizabeth had forwarded to his party during the war, such as the £5,000 ‘loan’ to the Regent Moray in 1569, or the £1,000 granted to the Regent Mar in 1571.39 All England had to do after 1573 was to protect her investment. But it was here that disagreements arose between the queen, and to some extent Burghley, who argued that Morton had no alternative but to dance to her tune, and a powerful body of diplomats and privy councillors, of whom Walsingham was the most determined, who advocated the continuation of regular subsidies. Henry Killigrew enthusiastically lobbied for the adoption of the latter policy even before the surrender of Edinburgh castle in the spring of 1573, and he confidently asserted that £1,200 p.a. would be enough ‘to content them and keep this country at her majesty’s devotion’. This sum would be spread among seven recipients ranging from Morton who would get £500 p.a. to Alexander Hay who would receive 50 marks p.a.40 A year later Killigrew was sent back into Scotland with specific instructions to say nothing to the Scots about pensions, but he did submit another proposal for subsidies which he had costed at £2,000 p.a. He was probably the author of an anonymous list of twenty-three persons ‘thought fit to be interteyned’ at a combined price of £2,663 5s p.a.41 Such sums were certainly affordable from the English point of view without being derisory. A pension of £100-£200 p.a. for a nobleman in the 1570s, representing between £700 and £1,400 Scots, would have been a useful supplement to incomes in a financially depressing decade when noble debt was averaging around £1,000 Scots.42 However, while the high numbers of noblemen in Scotland did mean that average incomes were low in comparison to those of English noblemen, the Scots did have their fair share of very rich men among the greater magnates and lords. Thus William Keith, fourth Earl Marischal, had at his death in 1581 an income which was reputed to be in the region of £180,000 Scots (£22,500), and, while he was the richest man in the kingdom, the point remains that not all Scottish noblemen were poverty-stricken.43 One can therefore give some credence to Killigrew’s story that the earl of Argyll told him he would rather have £200 from Queen Elizabeth than 2,000 crowns from France as he could afford to accept the lesser sum from a party who largely shared his political and religious outlook.44 In the end no-one received anything. Killigrew asked to be recalled, and prophesied the revival of French fortunes in Scotland, with a consequent increase in military spending on the defence of the borders. Walsingham too was deeply pessimistic, and warned Elizabeth that her policy would persuade her friends in Scotland that ‘your Majesty hath them in contempt’,

which was not far off the mark.45 It was 1577 before Elizabeth began to take Morton’s pleas for support seriously, but by then Walsingham feared that ‘by the overslipping of the time’ it was already too late, and that what goodwill the queen had had in Scotland was gone.46 In fact while it was the growing French threat that had prompted this reconsideration of policy, it was Don John’s defeat of the Dutch at Gembloux in January 1578 which generated sufficient panic for Thomas Randolph to be sent north to shore up Morton’s shaky position. Randolph was assured that ‘her majesty will not stick at money, considering how much it stands upon her to assure Scotland to her’, while Bowes was given £2,000 to be bestowed on those ‘meetest to be entertained for her [Elizabeth’s] service’.47 However, the money arrived too late to prevent Morton being forced to demit the regency following a palace coup at Stirling which was inspired entirely by domestic politics, but which did threaten seriously to undermine English influence in Scotland.48 Fortunately, from England’s point of view, Morton quickly regained control of the king, while Bowes’ astute diplomacy over the summer of 1578 effected a compromise agreement between the earl and his rivals. However, without the office of regent Morton was even more dependent on his wits and the patronage available to him than before. But Elizabeth once again refused to subsidise him and he not unnaturally thought ‘his long service is overlooked’.49 Instead Elizabeth had agreed to finance Dutch resistance to Philip II — she had been keeping the Dutch at bay earlier in the year by telling them that her intervention in Scotland was already too costly50 — and in the summer of 1578 she agreed to underwrite a loan for £100,000.51 In principle the decision to allocate the major part of English resources to the continent was right; Scotland was not directly threatened by Spain, and France appeared to be content to abide by the 1560 Treaty of Edinburgh since internal troubles left Henry III with no real alternative. However, the total neglect of Morton, which infuriated Walsingham,52 was a mistake, as it forced the earl to acquire patronage through the timehonoured Scottish practice of confiscations based on dubious pretexts. In this instance the victims were the Hamilton family, but more important than their fall in 1579 was the fact that Morton was forced to share the spoils with his rivals who had, since the arrival of Esmé Stewart, begun to take on the complexion of a Franco-Marian party. By the spring of 1580 the queen could see that Morton really was wavering, and over the summer she, Burghley, and Walsingham finally agreed in secret to allocate money for Scotland, the secrecy being particularly important in order not to offend France. However, instead of funding Morton himself, Bowes was given a mere £500 with which to purchase the captains of Edinburgh and Dumbarton castles — which commanded the two major deepwater ports in Scotland — and to persuade other neutrals to cling to the former regent.53 A great deal more than that would be required for ‘the subversion of many incommodoties and other enterprises’ for, as Morton himself pointed out, money was now required to maintain a guard as well as friendly councillors at court since none ‘be pleased to tarry at Court at his own expenses’.54 Bowes

estimated that £2,000 would be enough,55 a figure similar to Killigrew’s estimates some years previously, but Elizabeth had decided to risk losing Morton, placing her faith instead in a French marriage alliance with the duke of Alençon. Certainly money could have been found for Scotland, as in August 1581 she agreed to a £30,000 subsidy for Alençon, half of which was immediately handed over.56 By then Morton was dead., having been executed in June, the Guise-backed Esmé Stewart was dominant in Scotland, and, in response to Morton’s arrest at the end of 1580, the English government had been panicked into spending £10,000 reinforcing the Berwick garrison, just as Henry Killigrew had predicted back in 1574.57 In 1578 Scotland ceased to be a satellite state of England’s, while in 1581–2 Esmé Stewart, first duke of Lennox, brought the kingdom to the edge of outright enmity with her southern neighbour. The very sudden lunge back towards the English camp following the Ruthven Raid in August 1582 was wholly fortuitous for Queen Elizabeth, and gave her yet another opportunity to establish a secure Anglophile party in Scotland. In the context of the collapse of the Alençon marriage proposals, the successful reconquest which the duke of Parma had launched in the southern Netherlands, and the very real scare which Lennox’s presence in Scotland had caused, one would have expected the queen to give way to those advocating immediate and substantial support for the radical Protestant faction which had seized control of King James. It was immediately apparent to Sir George Carey, Sir Walter Mildmay and Robert Bowes who were ordered into Scotland after the coup that the new government’s brittle composition, narrow support, and its unacceptability to the king would make it very short-lived indeed unless a flow of English gold could keep it on its feet.58 James himself owed £45,376 Scots to his treasurer, William Ruthven, first earl of Gowrie, a leading member of the new regime, and rich though he was, Gowrie was unable and unwilling to go on financing the king.59 What Bowes was actually given was £1,000, and very tight restrictions were placed on his use of the sum.60 Even without these limitations the amount was short of the 2,000 marks Bowes and his colleagues had promised Gowrie shortly after their arrival in Scotland. The £1,000 was finally paid over, but as a loan from Bowes — the Scots never seemed to realise that while the name of the creditor was a pretence, the fact that it was a loan was not —and it was February 1583 before the remaining £366 13s 4d was delivered. That it was delivered at all was due to the presence by then of a French embassy in Edinburgh, and for once Elizabeth exceeded herself by authorising a further £200 to purchase gold chains, presumably for Gowrie and Colonel William Stewart, the captain of the king’s guard.61 The quarrelsome French embassy talked about gold but in fact carried largely empty coffers. However, the effect of their visit was to excite both the Scottish and English courts, and to persuade Walsingham, who had been deeply pessimistic (again!) since the beginning of the year, to try once more to force a change in policy. At the beginning of March he convened a meeting with Burghley, Mildmay and Chancellor Bromley, and persuaded them

to back him in advising the queen to spend £10,000 p.a. on Scottish pensions. Half of this would go to James, 5,000 marks would be divided among Anglophile noblemen, and the remaining 2,500 marks would pay for the upkeep of a permanent embassy. This, or even a fraction of this amount, would probably have guaranteed the survival of the Ruthven regime, and with it an early agreement on an Anglo-Scottish league. But, as Burghley probably foresaw when he gave his assent, Elizabeth immediately vetoed her councillors as ‘she utterly misliked ... the casting of her into charges’.62 By this time the Scots had themselves decided to take the initiative, and in May Colonel Stewart led an embassy to London to ask for a pension for the king. Walsingham was in little doubt that it would be a fruitless journey, and that ‘they shall be returned home with little satisfaction which may breed an unrecoverable alienation’.63 Elizabeth was instinctively parsimonious, especially when dealing with the Scots, but she also seems to have calculated that the imprisoned Queen Mary and the leverage which the succession question gave her would together keep James in check whatever happened in Scotland. Thus, in spite of strenuous efforts by Leicester and Walsingham to persuade her to change her mind, the embassy returned home without a pension, and with no subsidy to allow Gowrie to continue acting as a creditor to the king, or to allow Colonel Stewart to maintain his disgruntled guards. Elizabeth even refused to pay Bowes £700 which he had personally loaned the Scots, and it was left to Walsingham to promise redress. The secretary was also burdened with advancing £200 to Colonel Stewart to cover his London expenses, although Bowes was optimistically instructed to see that this was recovered in Edinburgh.64 Not surprisingly, the Ruthven government fell in July 1583 in a palace coup facilitated by Colonel Stewart and his guards. The price of such meanness was the initially very hostile and always very tough Arran government which lasted until its overthrow in an English-backed coup in October 1585. Following Arran’s removal, Thomas Randolph once again pressed for pensions for friendly lords and crown servants, and some of the £1,500 which Walsingham distributed in Scotland during 1587–8 may have gone to clients.65 However, the queen’s aversion to pensions had by this time been reinforced by the belief that she could make a pensioner of the king himself, and leave it to James to reward his own subjects. Walsingham disagreed with this, and James’s lenient treatment of the Brig O’Dee rebels in 1589 certainly seemed to justify his reservations about the king’s trustworthiness.66 A number of English agents campaigned unsuccessfully for the maintenance of Chancellor Maitland, ‘the best affected of all towards England’. Maitland’s own vow ‘never to cost her [Elizabeth] a groat’ was clearly intended to enhance his market value, and it was galling for the chancellor when men ‘thought he was the Queenis pencioner, whereof he was clere’. While he was never as wholly bent on pleasing Elizabeth as Morton had been, Maitland, like the earl before him, was deserving of better treatment. In 1589 he was rightly furious when his nephew returned from London without a gold chain valued at 300 crowns which had been promised him.67 James Hudson,

an English merchant who did a lot of business in Edinburgh and who also dealt in intelligence matters, passed on the incredulity that some Scots expressed over England’s shoddy treatment of her friends: ‘But’, saeth one, ‘why doe you noct only seik and deall and keip frendship and intelygence with him whome you sei relegeous and able to live of him self, and haeth credit and frends and will not be a marchand as others have bein: for them that offer your service or pleasuer for gaens seace or ells ar as redy to be bowcht ... You buy men dear that can do you no good, and will seik tham that can do all you require.’68

What Hudson was drawing attention to was the distinction between genuine Protestant Anglophiles like Maitland who ought to have been rewarded, and mercenaries like Francis Stewart, fifth earl of Bothwell, who offered his services free of charge while dropping heavy hints about the queen’s ‘owne benevolence ... for the releif of his estate, and to supplie some part of that which he might have had at other princes’ hands’.69 However, Elizabeth knew very well what the distinctions were, but had calculated that men like Maitland had only limited room to manoeuvre anyway, while the likes of Bothwell could be strung along with vague promises and cheap baubles, like the Edinburgh-made French plate she sent him in 1590, ‘the fashion wherof is such as will make a great show, though not so much in value’.70 As one might expect, such a policy ensured that even among those who favoured the league with England there was little goodwill towards the queen, and it probably contributed towards the survival of a dangerous and militant Catholic party into the mid-1590s. III Crucial to all English policy-making in Scotland was good information. Some of this could be expected to come from reliable political allies within Scotland, and English ambassadors there obviously kept their ears close to the ground. However, there was also an important role in this for paid informants. As was the case elsewhere in Europe, Burghley and Walsingham created an effective network of intelligence gatherers in Scotland, some of whom were native Scots, others of whom were Englishmen living in Scotland. Just how organised this ‘network’ was is difficult to estimate, and one suspects that when Bowes boasted that the Spanish Blanks were exposed as a result of his creating something akin to an intelligence cell in the west of Scotland, he was simply trying to impress his superiors.71 Nor were the men engaged in this activity necessarily secretive about it. In 1600 Sir James Sempill of Beltrees — who had collaborated with the king in writing Basilikon Doron — returned from an embassy to London to tell James that ‘your public service now ceased unto me, I am to entreat your majesty in one point as her Majesty’s agent’.72 James knew very well that Sempill, along with others like James Hudson and his chamber servant Roger Aston, both of whom were English, were passing on intelligence. In fact by 1598 Aston had to warn Cecil that ‘The King has very good intelligence out of England, by what means I know not

yet’.73 By the end of the decade it is doubtful if Cecil was hearing anything that James did not want him to hear. Twenty years earlier a spy’s life had not been so easy, and Bowes had reported that ‘It is now thought as dangerous in Scotland to confer with an Englishman as “to rubbe on the infected with the plague” and most men fly English company’.74 Even as late as 1593 when James had made a great show of suppressing spying, Burghley had warned Bowes to be more protective of his intelligence sources ‘lest the King or others should charge them with being mercenaries to England’.75 And, of course, there was a degree of ignominy associated with the whole business, even if disapproval was only for public consumption, or in partisan interests. Thus Sir Lewis Bellenden, the justice clerk, told Archibald Douglas ‘to remember that you are ane Scottisman cometh of that race that was wonte to preferre the honoure of theire sovereigne and cuntrey to all the rest of the worlde’.76 Not surprisingly, such danger and dishonour could be made palatable if the price was right. Yet it would be wrong to imagine that men only dealt in intelligence for profit; that was clearly not true, and ideological factors should also be taken into account. John Colville, who deserted the ministry to take up a more actively political career, assured Cecil in 1599 that ‘I am resolved withersoever I go to be a faithfull Englishman’.77 Here Colville was buttering up his patron, and he did later convert to Catholicism, but the bitterness and desperation of his later life were the product of years of being badly treated by those he endeavoured to serve. Of his earlier Protestantism and Anglophile views there is no doubt. However, money was never very far from the surface in the relationship between such men and the English government, often for the very practical reason that they had no other source of income, as was the case with both Colville and Douglas. In 1590 Thomas Murray, the king’s furrier, wrote to Walsingham that he wanted him to authorise an arrangement between himself and Bowes similar to the one he had had with the previous ambassador, or he would ‘become ane plane Spanizarde’. He asked that: the samyn be allowit as mekill man that is imployit in our countray, and mak accompt of me as ane of the nobilitie, for I sail never be forfaltit in parliament to writt sua familiar unto zour lordschip.78

Aston also tried to get better terms, this time from Cecil in 1599, and he warned that ‘I shall be constrained for want of mean to leave my place and service and to withdraw myself to some quiet life ... if there is no better consideration had of me’.79 Concern about the frequency and size of rewards was shared by those responsible for distributing them in Scotland. In 1583 Bowes had raised the issue with Walsingham, only to be told to cut his costs, and consequently it was hardly surprising that the English government was unprepared for the fall of the Ruthven regime.80 A decade later Bowes was still complaining about this, and he told Burghley that Nicolson’s efforts to uncover more about the activities of the Spanish faction were being hampered by ‘the defection of intelligencers espying his empty hands’.81 Nicolson himself warned Bowes in 1595 that ‘your intelligencers weary of their

labours without your accustomed rewards, which you must repair or give up with them’.82 Much of this was, of course, to be expected, and those who controlled the purse strings knew better than to give in to every demand, or to believe every story that was passed on to them. Nevertheless, no-one made a fortune selling information to the English, and there was some truth in Francis Mowbray’s advice to his cousin Philip Mowbray to take himself off to Spain as dealing in intelligence for England was ‘dangerous and nothing profitable’.83 Yet English diplomacy does seem to have been adequately funded at most levels.84 Ambassadors in Scotland were paid 40/- per day — some £730 p.a. — which was less than on the continent, but by no means a poor salary. Like ambassadors and agents elsewhere those in Scotland complained a great deal about money. William Asheby, who was only paid 30/- per day, grumbled that his allowance was totally inadequate in ‘the beggerlist dearest countrie in Europe for a stranger to (l)ive’, and George Nicolson’s attempts to get an increase in his salary were sharply rebutted by Cecil who told him that ‘you apprehend you own estate amiss. You are there but a paid agent. For the time you have 15s a day well paid you’. In fact he had 13s 4d per day, or £243 6s 8d p.a.85 On top of this the ambassadors and agents operated expense accounts which included intelligence costs, and on the whole the government was again relatively fair and prompt in settling these accounts. It did, however, set some sort of upper limit for intelligence which never quite satisfied the ambassadors’ own estimates of what was required. Clearly there were times when these men were expected to dip into their own private income, and one criticism made of Asheby was that he was less able to do this. Hence Hudson’s advice to Walsingham to send someone with ‘more wit and liberallitie’ in future.86 The actual amount spent on intelligence is very difficult to uncover. When in France in 1570–3 Walsingham had £20 per month to disburse, and when he became secretary he seems to have increased this so that Henry Cobham averaged £43 per month in 1579–83. In the Netherlands Dr. Thomas Wilson averaged £24 per month during a five-month period in 1574–5.87 As one might expect, costs were lower in Scotland. Sir William Drury paid out £110 in a little over six months in 1573 — roughly £17 (£119 Scots) per month — Killigrew had a mere £50 ‘espial money’ for eleven months in 1572–3, and had £25 for each of his missions in 1574 and 1575.88 By the 1590s the amounts had risen very little, and their value, once inflation is accounted for, may have fallen. In 1590 Bowes had two accounts, one for £119 and the other for £316 13s 4d; he claimed £52 for ‘intelligencers and rewards to several persons’ for the period November 1596 to March 1597 (£13 [£130 Scots] per month); in July Sir Robert Cecil was given £250 for use in Scotland; and an account of Nicolson’s for six months in 1601 included £136 13s 4d for intelligence (almost £23 [£276 Scots] per month).89 What the ‘intelligencers’ received varied according to their rank and the kind of information to which they could gain access. Undoubtedly the highest rewards went to Archibald Douglas and the master of Gray who were so instrumental in preparing the ground

for Mary’s execution. Both of them had at one time sought money from France, and were notoriously untrustworthy, but they were highly capable men. Douglas was rumoured to have received £4,000 from Elizabeth in 1585, but he only admitted to sharing £2,500 with Gray. A year later Douglas was granted a pension of £200 p.a., he was loaned money by Walsingham, and in 1593 the queen gave him gifts of £100 and £200. However, Douglas was effectively an exile, forced to live in London, and wholly dependent on Elizabeth. His difficulties with creditors do not suggest that his labours and his sacrifices were highly rewarded.90 Apart from Gray, whose affairs remain something of a mystery, the others were all less important, and were paid irregularly when they could render service. In 1590 Mr. Andrew Knox, the minister who two years later exposed the Spanish Blanks, received 400 crowns, and he was still on the payroll in 1597 when he was paid £100.91 John Campbell of Lawers earned 100 angels for information relevant to Irish affairs in 1595,92 and John Auchincross, the principal agent of Sir Lauchlan MacLean of Duart, had £35 in gold in 1595 and £30 a year later for similar work.93 Aston was given £100 in 1596, and this may have been his annual fee,94 and Nicolson paid Sempill of Beltrees £83 6s 8d and Thomas Douglas £53 6s 8d out of his biannual account in 1601.95 Given the status of most of these men, and the rate of exchange — 10:1 by the mid-1590s — these were fairly substantial payments. IV Another type of client available to the English was the political dissident, particularly the exile who was forced to seek the queen’s protection. In contrast to aiding friendly governments this gave Elizabeth an opportunity to encourage opposition to hostile ones, like the Lennox regime of 1581–2, and the Arran regime of 1583–5. The road to political asylum in England was, of course, a well-trodden one by the reign of James VI. Yet a friendly reception there was by no means guaranteed. Irritated by delays in getting a warrant to abide in England at his own charge in 1592, Patrick, master of Gray, wrote haughtily to Mr. Thomas Miller that: If Mr. Secretary Walsingham were alive, or yet my gossip, they could bear witness that for good will at least I deserve no less of her majesty and estate of England than the benefit juris gentium hospitalitas, which is not refused among Turks.96

As an Anglophile who had been of good service for some years Gray had a right to feel aggrieved, but twenty years earlier it had been Elizabeth’s enemies, the defeated Marians, who had found themselves writing to her asking for her favour. That men like the fifth earl of Huntly, the fifth Lord Hume, Sir Robert Melville and Sir Richard Maitland should write to the queen was a measure of her enormous influence in Scotland during the Morton regency.97 After 1580 political dissidents in Scotland were just as likely to be friends of England, especially in the first half of the decade. Admittedly, the Hamilton brothers. Lord John and

Lord Claud, who each spent long periods of their exile (1579–85) in England, had been Marians, and the family had strong links with France, but Lord John was heir to the Scottish throne and they were worth cultivating. Yet while the brothers were protected from extradition, they were less than happy with the reception they initially received in England. It was June 1581 before Lord John had reason to thank the queen for ‘a seemly pension’, and further delays in paying it prompted Walsingham to write to Cobham, telling him that ‘this matter of pensions is very unwillingly harkened to’, and that ‘we had more need to offer pensions to others than to reject those that offer themselves to be entertained’.98 Less politically docile, and certainly more committed to Anglophile and Protestant policies, were the younger earls of Angus and Mar, and Thomas Lyon, master of Glamis. These men were the political heirs of Morton, and provided the core of opposition to both Lennox and Arran. In 1581 Angus, who fled south after Morton’s execution, was ‘kindly received and honourably entertained by the bountifull liberality of that worthy Queen Elizabeth’. However, his second exile, after the fall of the Ruthven government, was less comfortable, and he and the other lords found themselves confined to Newcastle where the ‘English allowance was spare enough, and oftentimes very slowly furnished unto them’.99 Once the exiles were restored in the autumn of 1585, they proved less amenable to England than had been hoped. Lord Hunsdon, who had opposed their entertainment, took great pleasure in pointedly telling Walsingham that ‘Her majesty now sees how well her money was bestowed upon those two earls and the rest’.100 Yet Walsingham was not in the least surprised by the former exiles’ coolness towards England because ‘they were here had in contempt’.101 After 1585 the only politically significant nobleman to seek shelter in England was the earl of Bothwell. Elizabeth clearly saw through Bothwell’s feigned devotion, but she found him a useful tool with which to put pressure on James, and she repeatedly ignored the king’s furious demands that the earl be handed over to him. As Walsingham himself had pointed out a decade before, the queen had no basis in international law for her behaviour, and she herself adopted a high-handed tone when successfully demanding the return for execution of the earl of Northumberland in 1572 and Rory O’Rourke in 1591.102 Nor was the sustenance of exiles a particularly productive exercise, except in 1585, but it did provide the queen with a useful means of irritating James when the occasion required it. What made exiles and dissidents of such limited usefulness — apart from the fact that they were a risky investment — was Elizabeth’s own distaste for fomenting rebellion. After the success of the raid on Stirling she wrote to James assuring him that she had known nothing about the plans of the exiled lords, and as evidence of this she told him that ‘yow shall finde that fewe Princes will agree to constraint of theire equalles much less with compulsion of theire subjects’.103 Of course, on this occasion she had agreed, as James very well knew, but Elizabeth was extremely uncomfortable about the whole business, and her

letter to James really did express her opinion on the subject, even if reasons of state at times overruled her personal prejudices. When Bothwell staged a palace coup in 1593 her dilemma was again apparent as she accepted his offers of service while condemning his means of acquiring power. When the earl once again found himself an outlaw she severely reprimanded her ambassador, Lord Zouche, for giving Bothwell £400 on security of a jewel and some plate. She angrily denounced this ingenuous ploy ‘unless you can make such distinctions as that he who lends money upon pawn, or whatsoever, is not as well the author of an action as he who freely gives it’. She was prepared to allow that ‘rewards follow precedent actions’, and she expressed the view that ‘It is not money that we respect, but soundness of the action’. In other words, she subscribed to the fairly conventional Protestant idea that rebellion had to be self-legitimating before she would give aid to the rebels.104 This caused her servants the same kind of problems in Scotland that they encountered in trying to get aid for the Dutch rebels. Thus, for example, Walsingham was forbidden to proceed with a plot in 1583 which would have ensured that James was ‘bridled and forced’ into English clientage.105 Cecil, who understood and even shared his mistress’s scruples in a way Walsingham could never have done, faced this dilemma when considering whether to back Bothwell’s plans for a coup. ‘It may be answered that it is not the first like attempt in Scotland,’ he wrote, ‘But it is not examples that make things lawful; but it is the rule of honourable respects between kings, and the absolute duties to sovereigns.’106 Elizabeth had no intention of throwing money away on desperate schemes, and she did overcome her objections when the occasion was particularly apposite, or when there were no alternatives, but this tension in attitudes to covert activities was an important limiting factor which has to be borne in mind. In practice, Elizabeth spent very little in promoting political dissidents to take action in Scotland. The exception was 1581, in the aftermath of Morton’s arrest, and that was a costly disaster. The complete rout of Morton’s faction at the end of 1580 left Elizabeth with no friends at all in the Scottish government, and the very real prospect of a revival of French interests there. The initial response on England’s part was to make military preparations on the border, while encouraging insurrection within Scotland, and to this end Randolph approached Morton’s friends and ‘privily warneth them to assay by Armes what they could not effect by other meanes, promissing both men and money out of England’. However, when the Lennox government began to make its own military preparations for defending the kingdom, and as it became clear to Randolph that there was insufficient support for a counter-coup, he advised that the queen cut her losses and back away from confrontation. This counsel prevailed, and ‘the armie of Ingland scaillit’. The whole exercise cost Elizabeth £10,000, and instead of saving Morton, the military threats were ‘rather the cause to haist his wrak’.107 Efforts to use Morton’s nephew, the earl of Angus, as a means to destabilise the new government were equally unsuccessful. Angus was given £200 and half a last of gunpowder

(a thousand pounds) with which to reinforce Tantallon, and he did lead some raids into the south-west of Scotland. A number of border kindreds were also encouraged to help him by the distribution of £400 among them. But in the end this attempt to provoke a border incident and suck the English army into the conflict fizzled out, leaving Walsingham to face a severe reprimand.108 Having had her fingers badly burned in the early months of 1581, Elizabeth was even less inclined to favour supporting schemes to restore Angus and the other exiles. After Morton’s execution in May, Angus went to London where he continued to press for money, but to no avail.109 Nor did the Ruthven raiders receive any aid in advance of their coup. After their fall Walsingham tried repeatedly to persuade the queen to back action against Arran, but could get nothing in the latter half of 1583, or to help the attempted insurrection at Stirling in the spring of 1584 when the plotters ‘in vaine ... expected aide out of England’. William Davison was given £1,000 in April 1584, but this arrived too late to be of assistance, as, one suspects, it was intended to.110 Eighteen months later money was forwarded to the exiled lords and to their allies in Scotland before the successful overthrow of the Arran government.111 While some funds may have reached Bothwell before his 1594 raid on Leith, this appears to have been the last serious attempt by England to finance active opposition to James VI.112 V After the signing of the Anglo-Scottish League in 1586 Elizabeth’s policy was to try and make James into a client prince through the manipulation of the pension she paid him — some £58,000 between 1586–1603 — and thus allow him to act as the broker of the English party in Scotland. In this she had far less success than is often admitted, and James proved an able manipulator of events himself. However, discussion of the king’s annuity, as James preferred to call it, deserves separate analysis, and the only point to be made here is that the fact that James was paid a pension did dry up the trickle of money that was reaching his subjects from England. But it did not do so entirely. Apart from the flirtation with Bothwell in the early 1590s, and the money paid to spies, Elizabeth did contemplate buying herself supporters in the west of Scotland who could render military assistance in Ireland. There was a long history of seeking Scottish co-operation in Ireland during Elizabeth’s reign, but here too the queen’s distrust of the Scots, and her reluctance to pay them anything, poisoned the relationship. Negotiations with Sir Lauchlan MacLean of Duart and Archibald, seventh earl of Argyll, dragged on for at least ten years before MacLean sent his agent to agree a ‘strict contract’ with Cecil in the summer of 1595. MacLean’s servant claimed that ‘my master will not seek gear, for that is not his honour, which he esteems more than gear’, but MacLean himself made it clear that he did not expect to ‘lose commodity’ by refusing the earl of Tyrone’s silver. For her part Elizabeth asked Argyll ‘how we might satisfy you’ and offered

MacLean a pension, but would not agree terms with the earl at all, and still owed MacLean money when he was killed in 1598.113 Here too James stepped in to scoop up the market with a privy council act of June 1601 forbidding all aid to Tyrone in return for an additional £2,000 p.a. being added to his annuity.114 There were some other limited sources for pensions available. However, France and Spain were no more willing than England to pour money into Scotland, and those seeking aid from those quarters were on the whole genuinely committed to Catholic counter-reform, the Marian cause, or an old-fashioned French foreign policy; few of them were mercenaries. Charles IX did give some help to the Marians during the civil war, but apart from a few isolated individuals, and some rather spurious rumours, there was no serious French investment in Scotland at all after 1573. Lennox probably did receive some money from the Guise family and from the exiled bishop of Glasgow during his time in Scotland, and the French embassy of 1583 did create something of a stir both north and south of the border. However, Elizabeth correctly guessed that there was no substance to these fears.115 From about 1582 Spanish interest in Scotland grew, and cardinal de Granvelle believed that a strong enough party could be created on the cheap ‘as, being needy, a little will content them’. He advised King Philip to agree to Mary’s recommendations on who to pension on condition that the cost should not exceed 12,000 ducats p. a. ‘which I think would be money well spent’.116 Yet Scotland was never more than a backdoor to England in Spanish thinking, and while cash was sent to Catholic noblemen in 1588 and again in the early 1590s, these men were bitterly disappointed by Spain’s refusal to treat Scotland by itself as a worthwhile battleground. (Incidentally the rebellion by the Catholic lords in 1594 produced an investment in Scotland of £6,000 by Elizabeth and at least 10,000 crowns by the papacy, a total of around £100,000 Scots.117 Given the limited destructiveness of the campaign this must have produced a small profit!) Spain also maintained a small number of what Mendoza referred to as ‘your Majesty’s Scotch pensioners’, most of whom were probably spies or exiles. A list does exist of those in Spanish pay in Scotland in 1589, but apart from the earl of Bothwell who was reputedly paid 300 ducats a month (around £75) out of a budget of 1400 ducats a month, most of these were fairly unimportant.118 In conclusion, it is difficult to find evidence to sustain the view that money had a very great influence in determining Scotland’s domestic politics or international friendships in this period. Apart from the king’s annuity — and it was clearly tied up with the dynastic issue of the succession — there was very little foreign investment in Scotland. One can certainly find instances where money tipped the scales within Scotland, but domestic politics were largely determined by a combination of bloodfeuds and religion. English gold, and Spanish and French for that matter, is something of a non-issue in this context. Queen Elizabeth might have made Scotland more secure for English purposes if she had not been so mean in the 1570s, but the Scots may just as easily have taken her money and pursued their own policies

anyway, as James was to do after 1586. That the Scots tried to exploit their position is incontestable and understandable, but there is little evidence of them sacrificing religious, ideological, dynastic, or strategic considerations to Mammon. It was only the servants of these great kingdoms of England, France, and Spain who believed that the Scots could be easily bought. James VI once raised the issue of honour when discussing the king of Denmark’s French pension with one of his courtiers. When James, who clearly had his own relationship with Elizabeth in mind, suggested that the Danish king had dishonoured himself, Sir James Melville of Halhill replied in terms which are resonant with the assumptions of a kin-based society. The shame, he suggested, lay with the king of France ‘wha mon bye his kyndnes’.119 NOTES 1. For a basic bibliography, W. Ferguson, Scotland’s Relations with England: A Survey to 1707 (Edinburgh, 1977), 74–96; G. Donaldson, Scotland: James V — James VII (Edinburgh, 1971); G. Donaldson, All the Queen’s Men: Power and Politics in Mary Stewart’s Scotland (London, 1983); M. Lee, James Stewart earl of Moray: A Political Study of the Reformation in Scotland (New York, 1953); M. Lee, John Maitland of Thirlestane and the Foundation of Stewart Despotism in Scotland (Princeton, 1959); G. Hewitt, Scotland under Morton 1572–80 (Edinburgh, 1982); H. G. Stafford, James VI of Scotland and the Throne of England (New York, 1940); D. H. Willson, King James VI and I (London, 1956); C. Read, Mr. Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth (Oxford, 1925); C. Read, Lord Burghley and Queen Elizabeth (London, 1960). 2. Read, Walsingham, ii, 120. See too ibid., 185: ‘Scottish support was always at the disposal of the highest bidder’; and Burghley, 453: ‘In English eyes the sovereign remedy for all Scottish ills was money’. 3. G. R. Elton, England under the Tudors (London, 1956), 299. Scottish historians have also accepted that there was a ‘time-honoured English policy of subsidising an aristocratic faction’, Lee, John Maitland of Thirlestane, 40. 4. G. D. Ramsay, ‘The Foreign Policy of Elizabeth I’, in C. Haigh (ed.), The Reign of Elizabeth I (London, 1984), 150. 5. A. G. R. Smith, The Emergence of a Nation State: The Commonwealth of England, 1529–1660 (New York, 1984), 159. 6. The Counter-Reformation in Scotland has never been satisfactorily researched, but for some useful insights, see J. R. Elder, Spanish Influences in Scottish History (Glasgow, 1920). 7. J. Bain and others (eds.), Calendar of the State Papers Relating to Scotland and Mary, Queen of Scots, 1547–1603 [CSP Scot.] (Edinburgh, 1898–1969), x, 16. The major problem facing Scotland was, as this source recognised, that France was ‘troubled by present warres’, thus making it difficult to avoid English clientage. 8. R. Lemon and M. A. E. Green (eds.). Calendar of State Papers, Domestic 1581–1590 [CSP Domestic] (London, 1856– 72), 525. 9. CSP Domestic, Addenda, 1580–1625, 407. 10. See, for example, J. M. Wormald, ‘Gunpowder, Treason and Scots’, Journal of British Studies, xxiv (1985), 157–162. 11. CSP Scot., xi, 45. 12. See J. M. Wormald, Lords and Men in Scotland: Bonds of Manrent, 1442–1603 (Edinburgh, 1985), 143–56; K. M. Brown, Bloodfeud in Scotland, 1573–1625: Violence, Justice and Politics in an Early Modern Society (Edinburgh, 1986), 108–182; Donaldson, Allthe Queen’s Men, especially his comment, which is amply demonstrated throughout, that since 1560, or even from the 1540s, ‘few Scots were steadily committed to a consistent party or faction’. 13. The most important of these can be found in C. Rodgers (ed.), Estimate of the Scottish Nobility During the Minority of James the Sixth (London, 1873). 14. CSP Scot., v, 1–2, 252–5, 329. These are also found in the Estimate. This was essentially the core of the king’s party of the civil war, and was chiefly built around the family bonds of the Douglas, Erskine, Lyon and Ruthven families. For details of this, see Donaldson, All the Queen’s Men. 15. CSP Scot., vii, 577. And Randolph’s comment in 1586 that ‘The English part seems small and weak, but is

strengthened at this time by the King’s favour towards England’. Ibid., ix, 169. The latest estimate was completed by John Colville in 1602, and reported that excluding minors, there were 22 Protestant noblemen of whom 9 were activists and 27 Catholics of whom 11 were activists, Estimate, 77–9. 16. CSP Scot., x, 377–8. Maitland’s language here was clearly chosen for effect, but the ideas he was espousing were familiar enough among his contemporaries; see A. H. Williamson, Scottish National Consciousness in the Age of James VI (Edinburgh, 1979). For an exploration of the wider historical context, see G. Donaldson, ‘Foundations of Anglo-Scottish Union’ reprinted in his Scottish Church History (Edinburgh, 1985), 137–63. 17. CSP Scot., v, 624–5. This recommendation was by Lord Hunsdon in 1581. One finds similar letters written by Roger Aston on behalf of Colonel William Stewart in 1582, by Sir Robert Bowes for Sir Richard Cockburn in 1594 and Sir John Carmichael in 1597, and by James Hudson for Sir Walter Scott of Buccleuch in 1599, ibid., vi, 138–9; xi, 388; xii, 528–9; xiii, pt. 1, 448–9. There were also disagreements among those entrusted with making these evaluations. Thus Thomas Fowler thought that the earl of Bothwell ‘wolde joyne with divells’ to harm England, while both William Asheby and Sir Richard Wigmore thought he would be a loyal and formidable ally, ibid., x, 73, 193–4, 243. Noblemen also offered themselves in service and Elizabeth’s goodwill was passed on to Angus in 1581, the earl of Gowrie in 1583, and Sir Walter Stewart, prior of Blantyre in 1597. Favour was refused to Lord Herries in 1600. Ibid., v, 626; vi, 460; xii, 481; xiii, pt. 2, 674. 18. Ibid., xi, 177. Bowes was trying to get the young earls of Cassillis, Menteith and Gowrie to go to London. 19. For example, a few years before this, Bowes had recommended that the young Lord Sanquhar be enticed to the English court as he passed through England en route to the continent in order that ‘this nobleman, being younge and of the religion, shalbe drawen to some good course of life and for her majesteis service and benefitt on the West Borders’. Ibid., x, 403. Sanquhar was invited to court, but carried on to Europe instead where he became a Catholic. Ibid., 443–4. For the minimal English influences on noble education, see Donaldson, ‘Foundations of Anglo-Scottish Union’, 148–51. One other advantage of attracting the Scots south was commercial, as Bowes pointed out when asking for a licence for Menteith. However, in the case of Sanquhar, he thought that he should ‘rather seek to get a good wife and repair the waste of his inheritance than travel to foreign countries at this season’. Cecil also experienced the consequences of impecunious Scottish noblemen going abroad when in 1599 Lord Hume turned up in London, having been on the continent, and asked him for a loan in order that he could purchase clothes for himself before being presented to the queen and to pay for his journey home. CSP Scot., x, 403, 443–4; xi, 177; xiii, pt. 1, 462. 20. Ibid., x, 19. 21. M. A. S. Hume (ed.), Calendar of Letters and State Papers, Spanish, Elizabeth [CSP Spanish] (London, 1892–99), ii, 458, 646. 22. J. M. Rigg (ed.). Calendar of State Papers, Rome [CSP Rome] (London, 1916–26), ii, 518. 23. CSP Scot., x, 101–2; the example cited is that of Henry VIII and Archibald, sixth earl of Angus. And see M. H. Merriman, ‘The assured Scots: Scottish collaborators with England during the Rough Wooing’, SHR, xlvii (1968), 10–34. 24. CSP Scot., v, 326–7. He also wrote that ‘words are of no price in Scotland’ ibid., 522. 25. Ibid., 7. 26. Ibid., 7. 27. Ibid., x, 19. The ‘postern gate’ was a common analogy among Englishmen when thinking of Scotland, e.g. J. Stevenson and others (eds.), Calendar of State Papers, Foreign, Elizabeth [CSP Foreign] (London, 1863–1950), 1578–79, 182. 28. CSP Scot., iv, 273. 29. Ibid., v, 572. 30. Ibid., vi, 166. 31. Ibid., 187, 225–6. 32. Read, Walsingham, ii, 186. 33. Ibid., 189. 34. CSP Scot., x, 84. These men were not slow to blame the queen. In the later 1580s, Roger Aston wrote of Maitland’s failure to stop the progress of Catholics at the Scottish court: ‘her majesty was the cause thereof in that no care was taken either of him or others who were most willing to run her course, so that of recently he was forced to provide for his own safety’. Ibid., ix, 646. The problem with this Anglocentric view is that it makes no allowance for the fact that James appears to have wanted a strong Catholic presence around him, and that religious loyalties did not necessarily reflect themselves in attitudes to Scottish foreign policy.

35. Ibid., x, 858–9. 36. Ibid., xi, 652. 37. Read, Burghley, 384. 38. CSP Scot., xii, 24. 39. CSP Scot., ii, 603; iv, 3; Spanish sources believed that Moray was negotiating a 30,000 crowns p. a. pension at his death in 1570 and Elizabeth was prepared to subsidise the king’s party to the tune of £1,500 p.a.; CSP Spanish, ii, 235, 238. 40. CSP Scot., iv, 518–19, 531–2, 538; this includes his details of a cheaper package which would cost £1,000 p.a. 41. CSP Foreign, 1571–1574, 502–3; CSP Scot., v, 1, 7. 42. SRO, Edinburgh Commissary Court, CC/8/3–7. 43. Sir J. Balfour (ed.), The Scots Peerage (Edinburgh, 1904–14), vi, 48. Marischal’s income was five times that of the average English nobleman’s in 1602 when it stood at £3,020: P. Williams, The Tudor Regime (Oxford, 1979), 98. 44. CSP Foreign, 1572–1574, 279. 2,000 French crowns were worth around £650. 45. Ibid., 523; CSP Scot., v, 112–13. Killigrew returned in 1575 but again without any money: Ibid., 152. This was in spite of Walsingham’s efforts, Read, Walsingham, ii, 133, 137, 141, the secretary having been a keen advocate of pensions in Scotland from at least 1572. Ibid., 124. 46. Ibid., 143. In August 1577 Walsingham told Burghley that the queen had agreed to pensions, CSP Domestic, 1547– 1580, 554. 47. CSP Scot., v, 270–1. Morton was in no doubt that support for himself was at the mercy of continental events, Registrum Honorum De Morton (Bannatyne Club, 1853), i, 89. 48. For a more complete discussion of the context of these events, see Hewitt, Scotland under Morton, 44–6, 168–180. 49. CSP Scot., v, 327. 50. CSP Foreign, 1578–1579, 204. 51. Read, Burghley, 194. 52. CSP Foreign, 1578–1579, 171–3. 53. CSP Domestic 1547–1580, 672; CSP Scot., v, 399–400, 409–10, 421, 429, 443. 54. Ibid., 413, 425. Morton himself supplied a list of those he thought should be pensioned: Ibid., 385–6. 55. Ibid., 450, and see too 413–14, 424, 435, 449–50. 56. Read, Burghley, 268. He received a further £10,000 in February 1582 with a promise of another £50,000. 57. CSP Scot., vi, 184–5. For Morton’s relations with England in general, see Hewitt, Scotland under Morton, 168–84; M. Lee, ‘The fall of the Regent Morton: a problem in satellite diplomacy’, JMH, xxviii (1956), 111–29. 58. CSP Scot., vi, 166, 179, 181, 187. Bowes wrote to the queen herself to express the hope that she would proceed with ‘the support and welfare of the King and thankful reward to noblemen and other good members of this realm’. Original Letters of Mr. John Colville 1582–1603 (Bannatyne Club, 1858), 13–14. 59. R. S. Brydon, ‘The Finances of James VI, 1567–16035 (Edinburgh University Ph.D. Thesis, 1925), 43–6. Gowrie had borrowed 40,000 merks on security of his own lands. 60. CSP Scot., vi, 187, 225–6, 230. 61. Ibid., 232–3, 286–7, 290, 295, 299, 303, 405–6. 62. CSP Domestic 1581–1590, 93; CSP Scot., vi, 316–17. Elizabeth had already expressed the view that Bowes’ reports were designed ‘to have drawn some treasure from her coffers’: Ibid., 310. 63. Read, Walsingham, ii, 182. 64. Read, Burghley, 283. Among the loans Bowes made was £100 to help pay for the embassy itself: Ibid., 405–6, 409. 65. CSP Scot., viii, 281; xi, 38. 66. Ibid., vii, 254. 67. Ibid., ix, 591, 608, 646, 655, 679–80; x, 19, 72, 823. 68. Ibid., x, 65, and see too ix, 679–80, 702, 706; x, 19, 84 on efforts to get aid for Maitland. 69. Ibid., 282–3. 70. CSP Domestic 1581–1590, 643. 71. CSP Scot., xi, 29. 72. Ibid., xiii, pt. 2, 635. 73. Ibid., xiii, pt. 1, 218. 74. Ibid., v, 578. 75. Ibid., xi, 19–20.

76. Ibid., ix, 497. Maitland also commented caustically to Walsingham on ‘mercinaires quha levis thair [London] at zour charges, and sellis zow their intelligence deare aneuche’: ibid., x, 64. 77. Ibid., xiii, pt. 1, 534–5. 78. Ibid., x, 228. 79. For this and other complaints by Aston: ibid., xii, 7–9, 440; xiii, pt. 1, 209–10, 810–11, 522. 80. Ibid., vi, 680. 81. Ibid., x, 666. 82. Ibid., xi, 584. 83. Ibid., xiii, pt. 2, 890. 84. G. M. Bell, ‘Elizabethan Diplomatic Compensation: its Nature and Practice’, Journal of British History, xx (1981), 1– 25. 85. For Asheby, CSP Scot., ix, 606; x, 77–8; and Nicolson, ibid., xiii, pt. 1, 258 and see too ibid., 165, 188, 276, 324. According to Bell the highest salaries were between £4–£6 per day and were paid to aristocratic ambassadors on high profile embassies: ‘Elizabethan Diplomatic Compensation’, 3. 86. CSP Scot., x, 79–80. 87. Bell, ‘Elizabethan Diplomatic Compensation’, 708. 88. Ibid., 8; CSP Foreign 1572–1574, 396. This was probably a minimum amount. 89. CSP Scot., x, 444; xii, 553; xiii, pt. 2, 838–9; CSP Domestic 1581–1590, 663; CSP Domestic 1594–1597, 458. 90. CSP Scot., x, 65, 141; HMC, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquis of Salisbury (London, 1888- ), iii, 135. For Douglas’s debts to Walsingham and others, see ibid., iv, 35, 489, and for his earlier attempts to get a pension, CSP Spanish, iii, 404. 91. CSP Scot., x, 444; xiii, pt. 1, 74. 92. Ibid., xi, 655. 93. Ibid., xi, 664; xii, 214. 94. Ibid., xii, 154. 95. Ibid., xiii, pt. 2, 838–9. 96. Ibid., v 744–5 97. Ibid., v, 13, 21–2, 28, 32–3, 41–4, 46–7, 333. 98. For the Hamiltons’ financial arrangements, see ibid., 446–7, 463, 489, 532; vi, 401–2; Read, Walsingham, ii, 173–4; CSP Foreign 1579–1580, 293–4; CSP Foreign 1581–1582, 205–6, 209, 661; CSP Foreign 1582, 71–2, 462. Claud Hamilton also had a pension, reputedly of £500 p.a.: D. Calderwood, The History of the Kirk of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1842), iv, 208. After 1585 Lord John remained staunchly Protestant and eventually pro-English while Lord Claud, who was a Catholic, was an active member of the Spanish party. 99. CSP Scot., vi, 31, 37, 44, 62–3, 147; vii, 192–3, 287, 512–13, 532–3, 542–6, 685–6; Read, Burghley, 281; Read, Walsingham, ii, 179; D. Hume, A General History of Scotland from the year 767 to the Death of King James (London, 1657), 361, 393. 100. CSP Scot., ix, 507. 101. Ibid., viii, 417. However, they did remain moderately pro-English and in 1589 Asheby reported that these lords (with the exception of Angus who died in 1588) ‘are not (for)getfell of the favoures thei receaved in England’: ibid., ix, 679. 102. For James’s fury at Elizabeth’s protection of Bothwell, see e.g., CSP Scot., xi, 312–13. Bothwell exacerbated the situation by writing to James that if he forsook the Protestant religion ‘I shalbe one of the first to withdrawe from your Majestie and to adhere to the Queene of England, the most gratious instrument of God, and the ornament of the Christian worlde’: J. Bain (ed.). Calendar of Letters and Papers relating to the Affaires of the Borders of England and Scotland (Edinburgh, 1894–96), i, 481–4, 490–2. In 1584 Walsingham had commented to Davison that England could not justify the position over the Scottish exiles: ibid., vii, 129–30. Elizabeth had even offered to try the Hamiltons in England: ibid., v, 460, 472. The contrast with Northumberland and O’Rourke was made by James himself and the handing over of the latter was very unpopular, especially in Glasgow which was concerned about the Irish trade, and where it was said that ‘the King was bought with Inglish angelles’: ibid., x, 495–6, 505. 103. Ibid., viii, 152. 104. Ibid., xi, 278–9, and see Cecil’s letter, ibid., 266–7. This view was consistent with John Calvin; see N. M. Sutherland, ‘Calvinism and the Conspiracy of Amboise’, History, xlvii (1962), 122, 137. 105. CSP Scot., vi, 612–13, 618, 625, 636.

106. Ibid., xi, 281–2. In April 1584 John Colville tried to explain this attitude to his brother: ‘this estait [England] has never interrit in deling wyth Scotland sen her majestes coronation befor yai persavit ane honorabell partie upon ye feildis, men tending ane innocent and just cause ...’ Hence English military intervention in 1573, but in 1581 the queen ‘fund none to concur wyth hir at yat tyme’, and was forced to disband her army, ‘quhische giffis hir terrour to commit ye lyck error in tyme cumming’. Colville was therefore critical of the exiled lords who ‘ly still in ye myre unsturring, expecting till sum freind passing by vail pull yane out’. The effect of this, he thought, was to persuade the English that ‘thai ether diffyrd in the equite of yair cause orellis are bewitcheid and sensles, and yat yai can feill na thing till thier be led to ye skewlis as wes ye poor Erll of Mortoun’: ibid., vii, 63–5. 107. CSP Scot., vi, 184–5: William Camden, Annals, or the history of the most renowned and victorious Princess Elizabeth, late Queen of England, trans. R. Norton (London, 1635), 230; Sir J. Melville, Memoirs of His Own Life, 1549–93 (Bannatyne and Maitland Clubs, 1827), 266; T. Thomson (ed.). The Historie and Life of King James the Sext [Historie] (Bannatyne Club, 1823), 183. 108. CSP Scot., v, 581, 585, 646–50, 676–7, 680, 684–5; Historie, 184; C. Cross, The Puritan Earl, The Life of Henry Hastings Third Earl of Huntingdon, 1536–1595 (London, 1966), 208–11; Lee, ‘The Fall of the Regent Morton’; Hewitt, Scotland under Morton, 189–96; Read, Burghley, 233–4. 109. Read, Walsingham, ii, 179. Angus was supposed to have asked for 4,000 crowns for each earl and 2,000 crowns for each baron who participated in a coup. 110. CSP Scot., vi, 685; Camden, Annals, 260. It was left to Bowes to inform the lords that no money was forthcoming, which news ‘lies coldly in their stomachs not digested’: CSP Scot., vii, 60. See too ibid., 68–9, 70–1, 92–3. 111. CSP Scot., xi, 58. Money was given to the master of Gray when he was in England, and a further 600 angels was sent to him after his return home. Lord Maxwell, who was in open rebellion, was also sent aid: Read, Walsingham, ii, 201, 251; J. Bain (ed.), The Hamilton Papers, letters and papers illustrating the political relations of England and Scotland in the sixteenth century (Edinburgh, 1890–2), ii, 654, 705; Camden, Annals, 280; Historie, 206. For the broader political context, see Lee, John Maitland of Thirlestane, 47–8, 51–3, 61–76. 112. There is little direct evidence for Bothwell, but it was widely believed that he received aid; see e.g. Historie, 301, which was probably written by John Colville, a close associate of the earl at the time. The problem with all these payments is that they were paid out of the secret service fund, and records were not necessarily kept of the recipients of cash. From June 1588 Walsingham had £500 per quarter, although larger sums also appear to have been put at his and Burghley’s disposal, e.g. CSP Domestic 1581–1590, 209, 636, 666, 689. 113. In 1585 Edward Wotton had estimated that MacLean could be employed for £200 p.a: CSP Scot., viii, 79, 116. For further negotiations with him and Argyll, ibid., x, 488–9.591–2; xi, 482, 591–2, 647–9, 651–2. After the near disaster in the summer of 1595 when some of the island clans did cross to Ireland to help the rebels, there was a more serious attempt made to get MacLean’s help: ibid., xi, 688; xii, 14–16, 26–7. However, Cecil tried to knock the price down and MacLean’s reward of 1,000 crowns was repeatedly delayed, but half of this was paid over, and in May 1596 he was promised £150 p.a., but none of this seems to have been paid: ibid., xi, 684–5, xii, 17, 19–20, 90, 144–5, 151, 165, 168–71, 173, 187, 219, 241; xiii, pt. 1, 120–1, 203–4, 246–9, 255, 257. The English government continued to try and attract Argyll’s co-operation, ibid., xii, 185–7, 198–9, and negotiated mercenary contracts with other Scots, e.g. Sir Duncan Campbell of Glenorchy in 1598, Colonel William Stewart in 1600 and John Auchincross in the same year: ibid., xiii, pt. 1, 229, 627, 724. Obviously this is only a sketchy outline of a subject that deserves research in its own right. 114. Ibid., 826; J. H. Burton and others (eds.). The Register of the Privy Council of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1877–98), vi, 252–3. 115. In 1572, for example, Charles IX sent 3,000 livres to Scotland: Read, Walsingham, ii, 126–7. But Hume of Godscroft was right to comment that the French only ‘sent some small supply of Moneyes’, History, 325. During the war sums were also sent by Spain and from Mary’s own French income: CSP Foreign 1572–1574, 305. After the war there were rumours of ‘very fair offers, the which were not heard of these many years’, and a figure, grossly exaggerated, of 300,000 French crowns was bandied about, CSP Scot., v, 7, 73, 109. Lennox may have received 10,000 crowns from the exiled bishop of Glasgow in 1582, CSP Foreign 1582, 474, but the French embassy of 1582–3 seems to have had little concrete to offer in spite of the high hopes it inspired, and neither Elizabeth nor Mendoza believed the French were willing to invest in Scotland: ibid., vi, 300–2; Read, Walsingham, ii, 190–1; CSP Spanish, iii, 451. Later in the year, after the fall of the Ruthven government, de Mayneville was urged to return to Scotland ‘but with plenty of cash’: ibid., 489. However, while rumours of French money continued to circulate until 1586, Sir Edward Stafford was right to comment three years earlier that Henry III had no intention of giving in to Guise pressure, ‘so that, for Scotland men of judgement here [France] more fear Spain,

which hath both purse and goodwill, than France who hath neither’: CSP Foreign 1583, 163–4. 116. For Granvelle’s comments: CSP Spanish, iii, 309–10, 383. For Mary’s own ideas on this, ibid., 258, 393, and Mendoza’s evaluation, ibid., 293, and Philip’s response, ibid., 401, 403, 436. 117. It is unclear just how much money the Catholic powers invested in Scotland between 1587–94 when there were a series of rebellions in the south-west and north-east. Patrick, master of Gray, who had himself been a recipient of French gold, wrote in a ‘Short Discourse, Wherein Is Set Downe The Verie Treuth Of The King of Spaine His Designe Against This Hole Ile’ that Philip II sent Jesuits ‘to corrupt with the gould sundry noblemen and gentellmen’: Letters and Papers Relating to Patrick Master of Gray,(Bannatyne Club, 1835), 180. Certainly money was forwarded to Catholic lords on a number of occasions, although the amounts, 10,000 crowns being the largest payment, were never enough to fulfil their needs. See the relevant volumes of CSP Scot., and CSP Spanish. By 1596 Robert Bowes had ceased to be concerned about rumours of Spanish gold, and chose to treat lightly stories of 100,000 crowns being on the way from Spain, CSP Scot., xii, 215. 118. Ibid., x, 225. The dating of this list which was drawn up by Colville is uncertain, and may belong to a later period when Bothwell was in Spanish service as an exile. Bothwell had reputedly received 1,000 crowns in 1589 at the time of the Brig O’Dee rebellion. This was sufficient to keep 1, 300 footmen in arms for a month, the rate in the rebel army being 50/per month, but there is no evidence that it was put to this purpose: ibid., 27, 586. For Mendoza’s comment: CSP Spanish, iv, 436. Most of the Scots receiving Spanish pensions seem to have been in Spanish service abroad like Sir John Seton of Barnes whose pension was 2,000 crowns p. a. and who had a position as gentleman of Philip II’s chamber: Sir Richard Maitland and Alexander Viscount Kingston, The History of the House of Seytoun (Maitland Club, 1829), 61. 119. Melville, Memoirs, 341.

8 The Early Covenanters and the Federal Union of Britain David Stevenson

Much has been written about the question of the union of Scotland and England in the period 1603–1707. But the problem has been largely ignored for one crucial period, that of 1637–51 when the covenanters ruled Scotland.1 This is partly the result of attention being concentrated on the attempts of the covenanters to achieve religious unity. It is understandable that this should be the case, for it was religious issues which aroused most controversy, but exclusive concentration on them has tended to hide the fact that for the covenanters religious unity was intended only to be one of the strands of a wider union. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the question of union was of central importance to the covenanters, and that they undertook a sustained attempt to redefine the terms of the union of Scotland with England in order to protect Scotland’s interests. Problems, however, arise from the word ‘union’ itself. Firstly, it could be used in the seventeenth century to mean no more than alliance, co-operation, or friendship. Can we be sure that the covenanters did not use the word merely in this sense? Secondly, historians looking at the union problem in Britain under the Union of the Crowns know that ultimately a solution is to be found in a parliamentary, incorporating, union; they therefore tend to ignore proposals that would have led to other forms of union, either dismissing them as insignificant or refusing to allow that ‘union’ is an appropriate word to use in discussing them. On the first point, the convenanters certainly used the word ‘union’ at times to denote alliance and friendship; but it is clear that they also frequently meant more than this, as is seen by the contexts in which they used the word and by the concrete proposals they made under the heading of ‘union’. Doubtless in their minds the distinction between alliance and political union was not clear cut, one definition merging imperceptibly into the other and the same word being used of both: frequently they used it to cover close alliance and political union simultaneously. Turning to modern definitions of union, with reference to states, ‘formation or incorporation into a single state, kingdom or political entity, usually with one

central legislature’2 does not include what the covenanters sought. But the definition of federal union as ‘that form of government in which two or more states constitute a political unity while remaining more or less independent in their internal affairs’ seems to describe accurately what the covenanters were seeking. The essentials of the union sought by the covenanters were: a) The continuation of the Union of the Crowns. b) Autonomy for each kingdom in most internal affairs, and the retention of separate parliaments in England and Scotland. c) Close consultation and co-operation between the two kingdoms in matters of joint concern, institutionalised through meetings of commissioners of both parliaments, or (after 1647) through strong representation of each nation on the privy council of the other and at court. The covenanters saw this at first as primarily a way of checking royal power, but later as a way to limit the power of the over-mighty English parliament. d) Joint control of action in foreign affairs and trade, making the kingdom of Britain a single political unit so far as foreign nations were concerned. e) The establishment of free trade between Scotland and England. f) Uniformity in religion, with each kingdom retaining its separate church, though these were to be uniform in government. These attempts to add other elements of union to the personal Union of the Crowns are clearly in one sense moves towards closer union between the kingdoms. But of course in one important respect the covenanters, up to 1647 at least, were seeking to weaken the union which already existed. The 1603 union had united executive power within Britain in the hands of a single monarch, whereas the reforms proposed by the covenanters were designed to check and limit this power, partly by strengthening the internal political institutions of the two kingdoms and partly by creating new links between these institutions. Thus the covenanters wished to weaken some aspects of union, and strengthen others. Why did the covenanters seek such radical changes in the type of union that bound the kingdoms together? The problem of union in Britain was that of geographical neighbours with many similarities and common interests, already linked by the Union of the Crowns. Few could contemplate complete separation. Yet the two kingdoms differed too much in history and traditions, in customs and manners, in society, constitution, law and religion for complete amalgamation.3 What type of union, in these circumstances, would best serve the interests of both kingdoms? The Union of the Crowns was of course merely personal, the result of dynastic accident — though some hailed it as a happy dispensation, indicating the divine will for the future of Britain as well as being of practical value to both kingdoms.4 Early efforts by James VI and I to bring about closer union had failed. But as James and

Charles I became increasingly Anglicised, they began to unite the kingdoms more closely not by any formal act of union but by Anglicising Scotland. Seeing differences between kingdoms with a common ruler as anachronistic, they worked to lessen them. Inevitably they chose England as the model. Not only was England by far the larger, the richer, the more populous and the more powerful of the two, it had much else to lead a monarch to prefer it: the rule of law was more firmly established, the king more readily obeyed. Scotland undoubtedly gained by the Union of the Crowns, above all in security, by being united with a major power. Scots were flattered to see their fellow countryman on the English throne, and hoped for an era of peace and prosperity. But as James and Charles became English in manner, outlook and policy, satisfaction with the union tended to give way to suspicion of the policies and methods of government it had introduced. Scotland’s identity was threatened with absorption by her great neighbour. Instead of helping to protect Scotland the union seemed to be slowly destroying her. Union had deprived many of the nobility of the centre of their social and political life, and of opportunities of influencing the king and his policies, by depriving Scotland of her royal court. Union was enabling absentee kings to introduce foreign influences and institutions, undermining especially her religion. It was such Anglicising policies in religion and contempt for the feelings of the nobility that were mainly responsible for driving Scotland to rebellion in 1637.5 One might have expected the covenanters simply to denounce the union, since by strengthening the hand of the monarchy and Anglicising the king it had led to the introduction of unpopular policies in Scotland. But the covenanters were well aware of Scotland’s weakness; they could not hope to defy Charles I successfully if he had England united behind him. The covenanters therefore appealed to the people of England, trying to win their support by arguing that Scotland’s cause was the same as that of the king’s English opponents. To demand the breaking of the union would have been widely regarded in England as a threat to her interests, and thus aroused hostility to the Scots. In any case, the covenanters never seem to have considered any alternative to continued union in some form. No doubt this was partly because, from their point of view, a breach of the union was simply impossible. They were committed to monarchy in principle, and could not conceive of any alternative to Charles I continuing to rule in Scotland (whatever limitations might be placed on his power). The continuation of the Union of the Crowns was therefore taken for granted. The Union of the Crowns had failed to protect Scotland’s interests, but the cure for this was not no union but a different union. The implications of the covenanters’ revolt for the future of the union emerged only gradually. The demands they made for reforms grew steadily as it emerged that the king’s word was not to be trusted. As was to happen later in England, demands for change in royal policy broadened into demands for some control over policy making and implementation, and over the king’s advisers, through constitutional changes in both church and state. But for

the covenanters such changes in Scotland alone could not be sufficient. Similar changes would have to be made to control royal power in England before they could feel safe. Thus the king’s obstinacy and untrustworthiness, and his willingness to use English resources against his native kingdom, drove the covenanters to rethink the union to guarantee their position. If presbyterianism was to be safe in Scotland, bishops would have to be abolished in England. Constitutional changes in Scotland would have to be safeguarded by similar ones in England, and by new links between the countries at other levels than that of the monarchy.6 In 1639, as war between king and covenanters approached, royalist propaganda tried to present the quarrel as a national one. This the covenanters vigorously denied. They insisted that they had no quarrel with the English; the two nations in one island were ‘once at variance, but now happily reconciled and tied together by the most strict Bonds, which We desire rather to encrease than diminish’. Thus the covenanters declared their faith in union, and they went on to appeal for the first time beyond the king to the English parliament, expressing their confidence that if it was summoned and judged their cause it would find in their favour.7 When, after a brief truce, it became clear late in 1639 that a new military confrontation with the king was all but inevitable, the covenanters again turned to explaining their standpoint to the English. They had no wish to break ties with England; on the contrary, it was to them ‘a ground of many hopes, that the two Nations so long, and so far divided before, are in our time straitly joyned, not only by naturall union in one Iland, but also spirituall in one Religion, civill under one Head, morall in the mutuall interchange of so many duties of love: And domesticall, by marriages and allyances’.8 A remonstrance to the parliament of England, issued in April 1640, was more explicit about union. Of all the great blessings that God had bestowed on the island, next to Christian faith ‘the Union of the two Kingdomes, under one Head, doth by many degrees exceed all other that fall in the reckoning’. But union and the strength it brought had not been used to the best advantage, and wicked men worked to divide king from people and one kingdom from the other. The cause of the Scots was not theirs alone; if they submitted to servitude this would be dangerous to England’s liberties, as both countries were under one king. Therefore the covenanters expected support from England so ‘that in our Union they [the enemies of both kingdoms] may be crushed who in our division have builded their hopes’. Enemies were trying to stir up a national quarrel; the covenanters were acting to prevent this and ‘by a seasonable remeidy, provide for the safetie of our selves and posteritie. The readiest meane for the present that come in our consideration in [sic, for ‘is’] this, that as when the treatie of the Union was intended [in 1604–7], but did not take effect, the two parliaments did sit, and did appoint their commissioners to treat thereanent (with expresse reservation of their own Lawes and Liberties) and to report their proceedings back againe to them that sent them’. The covenanters therefore suggested that the king appoint English parliamentary commissioners

to meet Scots ones to judge the equity of their demands.9 Thus a quarrel betwen the kingdoms was to be averted by contacts between the two parliaments. This is the first mention of one of the main ways in which the covenanters were to press for closer union in the coming years; links between parliaments through ‘conservators of the peace’ or ‘militia commissioners’. When in the summer of 1640 the covenanters resolved to march into England to force the king to agree to their demands, they worked hard to justify their ‘expedition’. Again it was emphasised that the covenanters sought to strengthen the links between the nations.10 But by now the covenanters were determined that any settlement should include changes in England as well as Scotland: ‘We put little doubt bot we shall get for our selves fair enough conditions; bot it will be to our great regrate, if we gett not all the King’s dominions to our happinesse’.11 The motives behind the demands for changes in England were mixed, but above all was the belief that they were necessary for Scotland’s future security. Priority was given to religion, but here to genuine religious zeal and belief that the threat to Scotland’s religion had originated in the English bishops was added the consideration that interfering in religion in England was easier to justify than interfering in civil affairs, as religion obviously transcended national boundaries. Moreover, demands for religious change south of the border were partly politically motivated, as the covenanters were to indicate in December 1640 when they began their charges against Archbishop Laud by stating that ‘Novatiouns in religioun ... ar vniuersallie acknoulegit to be the mane causs of commotiouns in kingdoms and states’.12 When negotiations opened at Ripon in October 1640, after the covenanters had occupied the north of England, they made it clear that they would insist on changes in England and in the relations between the two countries. They negotiated with English peers, not with the king himself, and demanded the summoning of the English parliament ‘which is conceived to be the only mean of settling both Nations in a firm Peace’,13 and they would only agree to a temporary cessation of arms, insisting that a peace treaty be transferred to London so it could be negotiated with parliament. Scots commissioners arrived in London in November 1640. They at first concealed the demands that they intended to make concerning union in a vaguely worded final demand, that the king agree to all particulars necessary to establish a stable peace, without fear of ‘molestation and undoing from year to year, as our Adversaries shall take advantage’.14 Secret instructions listed demands to be made under this clause once other articles had been settled. Parliaments were to meet in each country at least every two or three years to try wrongs committed by either country against the other; they would appoint commissioners to consider such disputes and to try differences between the king and his subjects. Between meetings of the parliaments Conservatores pacis were to preserve the peace between the

nations. Neither kingdom was, without the consent of its parliament, to raise an army against the other, and neither was to make war on the other without giving three months’ notice. Scots were to serve about the king’s person, some of them in chief places. The prince of Wales was not to marry without the consent of both kingdoms. A common confession of faith for both kingdoms was to be agreed upon.15 It had not yet, it seems, been decided to demand full unity of religion and uniformity of church government, though the ministers among the Scots commissioners in London preached outspokenly against bishops and other corruptions.16 Within a few months, however, the covenanters widened their demands; the treaty negotiations were proceeding successfully and this led them to believe they could achieve more than they had originally hoped for. By February 1641 all their first seven demands had been settled and they were ready to proceed to the eighth, ‘for ane happie and durable peace which is the cheefest of all our desyres And wnto which all the former sevine articles being now agreid wpon are as many preparations’.17 But before their new demands were made public there occurred a crisis which damaged their chances of having them conceded.18 The Scots had at first been hailed as giving England the chance to assert her liberties, but in time many got tired of the Scots. Rumours began to circulate in London that, having got what they wanted, they would desert their English allies, taking no further interest in prosecuting Laud and the earl of Strafford or in attacking episcopacy.19 To counter this the Scots commissioners drew up bitter attacks on episcopacy and the two ‘firebrands’.20 Not only did this infuriate the king, it also roused the indignation of many members of parliament. They felt the Scots were openly interfering in purely English affairs, and the feeling was growing that it was disgraceful for reformation in England to be dependent on a Scottish army.21 The Scots were taken by surprise by such reactions, but they responded by explaining that as to English affairs they desired ‘to have no further hand but in so far as they may concern us and the peace betwixt the two Kingdoms’. But they also promised to present proposals ‘for settling of a firm and happy peace and nearer union betwixt the two Kingdoms’.22 Thus even in disclaiming any intention of interfering in purely internal English matters, the covenanters laid claim to a say in matters which concerned Scotland, so their reassurances did little to decrease suspicion of them. Nonetheless, the commissioners proceeded in March to make their eighth demand, seeking redefinition of many aspects of the relationship between the two kingdoms. Their first proposal was for unity in religion and uniformity in church government. In the present context what is most interesting is that the demand was presented ‘as a speciall meane to conserve peace in his Majesties Dominions’. Religion should be a bond of unity. The Scots wanted not a ‘cessation of armes for a time, but peace for ever; and not peace onely, but a perfect amity and a more neere union than before’. They acted ‘not from any sauciness, or presumptious intentions to reform England’ but to prevent their own reformation being destroyed from England, and to please God.23

Union in church matters was thus seen as an aid to union in general, as contributing to national security, as well as being justified on purely religious grounds. The covenanters’ religious proposals met with a cool response. The king told them not to meddle with reformation in England; they replied that this was necessary if there was to be a durable peace,24 uniformity of church government being ‘one principall meanes of a continued peace between the two Nations’.25 As for the English parliament, it long put off any reply, and the Scots were forced in the end to be content with a very vague undertaking that conformity of church government was desirable and would be proceeded with ‘in due tyme’.26 The covenanters’ demands for union in civil matters were also now much more extensive than those of November 1640. Most of the proposals then made were repeated and amplified, and new ones were added. Scots of respect, entrusted by Scotland, were to hold places about the king, the queen and the prince of Wales. Neither country was to declare war on a foreign state without the consent of the other. Citizens of one country were to be regarded as naturalised in the other. Free trade was to be established between England and Scotland, and they were to co-operate in commercial matters.27 In moving towards such a civil union the covenanters were only slightly more successful than in religious matters. In the peace treaty Charles and the English parliament agreed that commissioners (conservators of the peace) should be appointed by the parliaments of the two countries to discuss matters of mutual interest and prevent disputes between them. Neither country would, without the consent of its parliament, raise forces against, or make war on, the other. Three months’ notice would be given of any such breach between the nations. Each country would assist the other against common enemies. Provision was made (though only in vague terms) for the employment of Scotsmen about the king and his family, and for frequent visits to Scotland by the king and the prince.28 But other proposals intended to bring the countries into a closer relationship met with a less favourable response. Suggestions that foreign war and alliances should require joint consent, that each country should assist the other in case of invasion, were left unsettled. So were Scots requests for free trade and commercial co-operation. Instead these matters were referred to further consideration by commissioners of both countries.29 Settlement of such matters was thus delayed partly because there had not been time to discuss them fully, but the main reason was clearly that the English parliament was not interested in the Scots proposals. Revising the union seemed vital to the covenanters, but parliament saw little point in it for England. So the first major attempt of the covenanters (1640–1) to reform the union was largely a failure. The English parliament was interested in friendly relations with Scotland, but not in a revision of the terms of the union. The covenanters followed up the peace treaty by promptly appointing conservators of the peace and commissioners to negotiate on the articles referred to further consideration.30 The English

parliament failed to appoint conservators and showed little interest in further negotiations. Yet events continued to prove to the covenanters how essential to Scotland’s security a new union was. As England drifted into civil war in 1642 it was impossible for the covenanters to regard it as being no concern of theirs. If the king was victorious their position in Scotland would be precarious, while victory for parliament would probably bring them security. The covenanters at first tried to avert, and then to end, the English civil war by offering to mediate. Parliament thanked them; the king told them to mind their own business.31 But the Scots persisted, doubtless encouraged by a declaration from the English parliament read to the general assembly of the kirk in August 1642 which played skilfully on Scots desires for reform of the union. It talked of the kingdoms being already ‘united by so many and so near bonds and tyes, as well Spirituall as Civill’, and of hopes of a settlement in England out of which ‘there will also most undoubtedly result a most firme and stable Union between the two Kingdomes of England and Scotland, which ... we shall by all good wayes and meanes, upon all occasions, labour to preserve and maintain’.32 Later in August, at the request of the commissioners of the kirk, the Scots privy council summoned the conservators of the peace to meet for the first time.33 They assembled on 23 September and declared that they had power to try to mediate in England.34 The English parliament accepted the conservators’ offer; the king would give no direct answer, though he was now ready to appeal to the covenanters for help. To gain such help both sides were now prepared to declare their intentions of furthering religious unity and uniformity of church government. The English parliament first appealed openly for military aid in November 1642, stressing that the Scots had ‘invited us to a nearer and higher Degree of Union’ in religion and church government and holding out hopes that this would be achieved.35 A positive response from Scotland was delayed by the fact that the conservators were still trying to mediate. Only after it became clear in April 1643 that the king would not recognise their right to intervene in English affairs did the covenanters turn to negotiations with the English parliament.36 The convention of estates met in Edinburgh in June, primarily to negotiate an alliance with the English parliament (though this was not admitted). But a treaty with the English was delayed by the reluctance of the house of lords to send commissioners to Scotland, and by political divisions over the conduct of the war. The Lords did agree to appoint commissioners to conserve the peace and commissioners to complete the 1641 treaty,37 as a gesture of goodwill to the Scots. Similarly the request which both houses sent to the convention in June inviting it to send commissioners to attend the assembly of divines (the Westminster Assembly, which was to advise parliament on reformation of religion) helped to prepare the way for military alliance.38 At last in July the Lords agreed to send commissioners to Scotland to negotiate a military alliance. The commissioners were also given power to consider articles for the security and

defence of the religion and liberties of both kingdoms, ‘whereby the Assistance and Union betwixt the Two nations may be made more beneficiall and effectual’.39 But while parliament gave its commissioners detailed instructions about military matters, nothing specific was said about the other articles, and the ambiguities of the word ‘union’ meant that the English could claim only to mean ‘alliance’. What parliament would have liked was simply a military treaty. Provision for reworking the union was made only because it was likely that the Scots would insist on it. That such concessions were necessary the English commissioners found immediately on their arrival in Scotland. Robert Baillie’s comment ‘The English were for a civill League, we for a religious Covenant’40 has often been quoted, and the Scots did indeed insist on agreement on the Solemn League and Covenant before they would negotiate a military treaty. Yet Baillie’s comment is misleading if it is taken to mean that the new agreement was solely concerned with religion. In fact, as its title clearly indicates, it was a civil league as well as a religious covenant. The Solemn League and Covenant states its aims as the glory of God, the honour and happiness of the king, and the liberty, peace and safety of the two kingdoms. Of its six articles only two (admittedly the first two) are solely concerned with religion; they include a declaration in favour of ‘the nearest conjunction and uniformity’ of religion, church government and worship. The other four articles are mainly concerned with constitutional matters and relations between the kingdoms. Article five binds signatories to preserve the peace lately concluded between the kingdoms so that they ‘may remaine conjoyned in a firme peace and unione to all posterity’. By article six they were never to agree ‘to be divided and withdrawn from this blessed Union and conjunction’.41 Thus the Solemn League and Covenant mentions union, but in general terms and without much emphasis. If, as has been argued, negotiations on union were so important to the covenanters, why does this not figure more prominently here? The answer probably lies in the nature of the new league and covenant as a compromise. It is well known that ambiguity was allowed to creep into the clause dealing with religious reform in England, such changes being designed to commit the English parliament less closely to reformation on Scottish lines than the covenanters intended. It seems likely that in a similar way the English commissioners sought to avoid any specific commitments about union. In the draft Solemn League and Covenant clause five had been a promise to ‘inviolablie observe the articles of the late treattie of peace ... to the end that this blissed peace may be perpetuall to all posteritie’.42 This specific reference to the 1641 treaty, with its provision for conservators and negotiations on other aspects of union, was watered down in the final version approved by the English parliament to the vague reference, cited above, to preserving the peace lately concluded. The covenanters were willing to accept such changes since they were confident that their

army would quickly win the English civil war for parliament, and that this would enable them to dominate any peace settlement. Believing that this was necessary for Scotland’s security, they made no allowance for English resentment at such interference. Robert Baillie hoped that Scots commissioners in London ‘would get the guiding of all the affairs both of this State and Church’43 — which was exactly what many English feared. As in 1640–1, the Scots soon found that the English had little interest in new forms of union. The commissioners of the kirk attending the Westminster Assembly found that there was little hope of immediate action on uniformity of church government, though at first both English and Scots were willing to avoid confrontation on the issue as both realised that winning the war against the king must have the first priority.44 The Scots civil commissioners had been instructed to work jointly with the English parliament for peace ‘And for the better effecting heirof ye shall by all meanes strengthen the happie begune vnione’,45 but they found little enthusiasm for this. There was much controversy over the running of the war and the part the Scots should have in it. Eventually a committee of both kingdoms was set up with power to order and direct the war. But even though the Scots commissioners were greatly outnumbered by English, many in the English parliament had opposed giving even this nominal role to the Scots, as they wished to ‘avoid the Scots’ power over us’.46 However, the covenanters remained confident that once their army brought victory they would have everything their own way. This was why the failure of their army to win any dramatic victory was so bitter to them.47 Too much had been expected of the Scots army; though it played a major part in winning the war for parliament, its achievements were regarded as disappointing, and the successes of Montrose’s royalist rising in Scotland soon forced the covenanters to weaken their army in England, further diminishing their reputation there.48 Even in 1644, the first year of their intervention in England, the covenanters began to be disillusioned with their allies. Whereas to parliament the first priority in negotiations lay in obtaining constitutional concessions from the king, the Scots seemed to be more interested in religious ones. The reasons for this emphasis by the Scots were the same as in 1640–1 — religious arguments; the needs of security based on religious unity; the fact that parliament needed no encouragement in seeking concessions in constitutional affairs. In addition a new motive slowly emerged. The achievement of constitutional liberties by parliament did not seem to be guaranteeing a regime in England which sympathised with the demands of the Scots for redefinition of the union. They had assumed too easily that once the power of parliament was firmly established in England the evils of the Union of the Crowns would be quickly rectified, the king’s power to abuse the union being removed. Might it now turn out, as disputes with the English parliament grew, that too little power in the hands of the king in England would be just as dangerous to Scots’ interests as too much had been? Would not some compromise peace with the king, which did not give parliament unlimited power in civil matters, be safer for Scotland?

The growing differences between the allies became clear in debates over peace proposals. The more the Scots pressed their views, the more they found themselves disliked. And of course the more they were disliked, the more they felt that Scotland’s security required that they insist on their demands. But as yet there was no hint of a quarrel between the two nations; the war still had to be won. Parliament was therefore ready to humour its Scots allies, and agreed on opening negotiations with the king. Peace proposals sent to Charles in November 1644 reflected the wishes of the Scots. There was strong emphasis on the need for ‘union’. As well as asking for unity and uniformity in religion and church government, the proposals laid down that the raising and commanding of armed forces in England and Scotland were to be controlled by commissioners appointed by the respective parliaments. Up to one third of the Scots commissioners were to sit and vote with the English ones in matters concerning Scotland, and vice versa. All the commissioners of the two kingdoms would meet together to settle matters concerning the preserving of the peace between them and the king, breaches of the peace between the two kingdoms, resisting of invasion or rebellion in either kingdom, and directing the war in Ireland. The making of war or peace with foreign states was to require the joint consent of both parliaments. Tutors and governors for the king’s children were to be chosen by both parliaments, who would supervise their education and marriage. Agreement was also to be reached on the matters which had not been settled by the 1641 treaty.49 Thus the conservators of the 1641 treaty were to be transformed into joint militia commissioners of both kingdoms, and given control of all armed forces. The Scots proposals of 1641 for a united British foreign policy were accepted, while free trade and commercial co-operation were to be considered again. Negotiations on these propositions were held at Uxbridge early in 1645, but broke down as the concessions offered by the king satisfied neither the Scots nor parliament. In the months that followed, tensions between the allies continued to increase. By mid-1645 it was obvious that Scots influence and power was declining. The English New Model Army had been created and was dominated by Independents with no love of the Scots and their religion; at Naseby in June it won a decisive victory. Meanwhile, in Scotland, Montrose’s victories continued; the covenanters began to fear that credit for winning the war in England would go entirely to the Independents.50 For fear of this they again began to press for a negotiated peace with the king.51 Relations between the nominal allies were by this time so strained that some parliamentarians were said to have rejoiced at Montrose’s victory over the covenanters at Kilsyth,52 hoping this would ‘rid England of “our brethren” [the Scots army], who otherwise might not so easily be got out of England’.53 When the covenanters requested English help against Montrose,54 many Englishmen hoped that the Scots would instead withdraw their whole army from England to deal with him.55 By now rumours were circulating that the Scots intended to make a separate peace with

the king, without consulting the English parliament.56 By March 1646 such negotiations had gone far enough for the Scots to promise to receive the king in honour and respect if he came to their army, provided he accepted the propositions of Uxbridge.57 Alliance with parliament had failed to bring about the close links, amounting to loose federal union, which would provide Scotland with security within Britain. Parliament no longer seemed to have any interest in military co-operation and other aspects of joint action by the kingdoms as had been provided for in the propositions of Uxbridge.58 The Scots had therefore concluded that it might be better to turn to the king to gain terms which would give Scotland security. Now he had been defeated in war, might he not prove more flexible than the victorious parliament? For the moment, however, the Scots continued also to negotiate with parliament. On 3 February 1646 the Scots commissioners in London were urged to continue with the work of settling religion and peace, and preserving the ‘union’ with England. The Uxbridge propositions were to be the foundation of a well-grounded peace and ‘a firme vnioune betuixt the kingdomes’. The proposition on the militia was to be urged as ‘the best and surest way for conservation of a dureable peace and vnitie betuix the king and his kingdomes and of each kingdome with other’. If this was not acceptable to the English parliament, it was to be proposed that the militia should be settled by the king with the advice of the parliaments of the two kingdoms separately. In other words, if there was not to be direct co-operation between the two parliaments in controlling armed forces, then the covenanters wanted the king to be involved in their control, rather than to leave it in the hands of the two parliaments separately. Moreover, if the English parliament insisted on altering the Uxbridge militia article, the Scots commissioners were then to ask that one third of ‘places of trust and offices’ about the king and his family should be held by Scotsmen; that one third of the English and Irish privy councils should be composed of Scotsmen; and reciprocally one third of the Scots privy council be English. Scots should be declared capable of holding all offices in England. Free trade between the two kingdoms should be established, and foreign treaties negotiated jointly. Illogically, the Scots parliament then added that these extra demands were to be made even if the militia article was not altered.59 Some of these demands are merely revivals of old ones, but those guaranteeing Scots representation in offices and on the privy councils are clearly (like the proposal that the king be involved in control of the militia) indicative of the covenanters’ conclusion that, if Scots interests were to be protected, a renegotiated union between the kingdoms might have to be based more on the king and his councils than on links between parliaments. A few weeks later the English parliament at last produced its new peace proposals. These justified the worst fears of the Scots, and thus their turning towards the king. The proposals claimed to uphold the 1641 treaty and the Solemn League and Covenant, but no specific proposals were made for reform of the union. The Scots commissioners complained on 16

March: ‘we cannot bot observe, that the most materiall Additions, Omissions, and Alterations ... betwixt these and the [Uxbridge] Propositions formerly agreed upon doe trench upon the joynt Interests of both Kingdomes, and tending to the lewsing of the Bands, and weakening of the Sinewes, of our happy Union’. Control of the militia was to be in the hands of the two parliaments separately. Nothing was said of conservators, or of joint consultation over making war or peace with foreign states, or of joint control of the education and marriage of the king’s children.60 Pleas by the Scots for the peace terms to be changed had little effect. They argued that ‘our greatest security and saifty is in the conjunction of our counsels and forces’; ‘that which may Unite ws most, is to be preferred’. Provision must be made for mutual security. The English replied that they would never make war on Scotland; the Scots aptly retorted that the king had raised an English army against them in 1640. The English claimed that the less intermixture of counsel there was, the less occasion there would be for discord between the kingdoms: ‘the keeping the Governments distinct, is better than intermixture’. If there was ‘a full Union’(presumably an incorporating one in which Scotland would, in effect, surrender her parliament), then co-operation over militia would be best. But while the kingdoms ‘are not totally one’, it was best to keep their counsels separate. Unavailingly the Scots denied the logic of this. If full union was desirable (as all admitted), then surely partial union was the next best thing, and certainly better than nothing.61 Disagreements came to a head after papers concerning the peace proposals were published with a preface by a Scot, David Buchanan, demonstrating how the new proposals differed from the propositions of Uxbridge.62 The English parliament reacted strongly, ordering that the preface be burnt by the common hangman.63 The Commons then issued an outspoken declaration showing they had no intention of compromising with the Scots. No mention was made of union, and it was made clear that no right by the Scots to interfere in English affairs would be admitted. As to the Solemn League and Covenant, ‘no Interpretation of it (so far as it concerns the Kingdom of England) shall by any be endeavoured to be imposed on us, other than we ourselves do know to be suitable to the first just Ends for which it was agreed’.64 The Scots commissioners gloomily concluded that there was no possibility of agreeing satisfactory peace proposals with parliament.65 So it came about that in May 1646 the king fled to the Scots army in England. The covenanters at first greeted this as a major triumph; once they and the king agreed on terms for a peace, parliament would be forced to make concessions. But it soon became obvious that they had miscalculated. The king would not make the concessions in religion which the covenanters regarded as essential, and parliament reacted with fury to their receiving him in their army. The Commons voted that the disposal of Charles was a matter for the English parliament alone, and that parliament had no further need for the Scottish army in England.66 In these circumstances the covenanters had little choice but to try to patch up relations with

parliament. To do this they, not parliament, were forced to make concessions over peace proposals,67 though the marquis of Argyll still pleaded for a new union: ‘lett us hould fast that Union which is soe happily established betwixt us; and lett nothing make us againe Two, who are soe many Wayes One; all of One Language, in One Island, all under One King, One in Religion, yea. One in Covenant; soe that in Effect wee differ in nothing but in the Name (as Brethren doe), which I wish were alsoe removed... for I dare say, not the greatest Kingdome in the Earth can prejudice both, soe much as One of them may doe the other’.68 The propositions agreed with parliament, soon to be presented to the king at Newcastle, had at least been altered in some ways from those the Scots had found so offensive in February. Conservators of the peace were revived and were to meet jointly. Control of the militia was to be in the hands of each parliament separately, but only for twenty years, not indefinitely. Negotiations would be held on the matters referred to further consideration by the 1641 treaty.69 The king, however, would give no satisfactory answer to the new propositions, so the Scots reluctantly abandoned him to parliament and withdrew their army from England in January 1647. The covenanters continued to insist that Charles, now the prisoner of the English parliament, accept the propositions of Newcastle, but in September 1647 he indicated that he found the New Model Army’s peace terms, the Heads of Proposals, more acceptable.70 This horrified the Scots;71 a peace dominated by an English army hostile to both Scots and presbyterianism was anathema to the covenanters. Proposals put forward by the English parliament in December, the Four Bills, were no more attractive to the Scots,72 who rejected them as prejudicial to religion, the crown, union and the interests of both kingdoms.73 By this time an alliance of moderate covenanters and royalists was emerging in power in Scotland, as disillusionment with the English parliament led to growing sympathy for the king. In December 1647 they negotiated a secret treaty with him, the Engagement. Presbyterian church government was to be established in England for three years only in the first instance; although most of the Engagers undoubtedly intended that it would then be made permanent in a final settlement, this was a major concession to the king. In return the Engagers got the assurances which the Scots had long sought about union: ‘His Majesty, according to the intention of his father, shall endeavour a complete union of the kingdoms, so as they may be one under His Majesty and his posterity; and, if that cannot be speedily effected, that all liberties, privileges, concerning commerce, traffic, and manufactories peculiar to the subjects of either nation, shall be common to the subjects of both kingdoms without distinction; and that there be a communication of mutual capacity of all other privileges of the subject in the two kingdoms’. In return for such concessions the Scots agreed to help the king implement the treaty, sending an army into England if necessary.74 Additional articles, separate from the main treaty, were based on part of the instructions of February 1646 to the Scottish commissioners in London. Scots were to be employed equally

with English in all foreign negotiations and treaties. Scots were to sit on the English privy council, and English on the Scots one. One third of those in places of trust and offices about the king and his family were to be Scots. The king and Prince Charles, or at least one of them, were to reside in Scotland frequently.75 Thus the Engagers tried by agreement with the king to settle a new union with England which would protect Scotland. Yet of course the first result of the treaty was the severing of the remaining ties which ‘intermixed’ the governments of the two kingdoms. In January 1648 the English parliament abolished the committee of both kingdoms;76 its power and influence had long been insignificant but its abolition was nonetheless important, being symbolic of the failure of Scots attempts to develop alliance between the two parliaments into a new form of permanent union.77 The attempt of the Engagers to impose a new union collapsed with the defeat of their army at Preston in August 1648. In Scotland the extreme covenanters who had opposed them, the kirk party, seized power. Ideally they would no doubt have liked to continue to seek union through increasing links with the English parliament, but the political and religious complexion of the latter made this unrealistic. The English now insisted that the invasion had nullified all treaties between the two countries. The only formal link between the two was now the Union of the Crowns; and that was soon broken by the execution of Charles I and the abolition of monarchy in England. Thus the last link of union between the two countries was destroyed. Partly through outraged nationalist sentiment at the execution, partly through determination to continue the union, the Scots parliament at once proclaimed Charles II not just king of Scotland, but of England and Ireland as well. But this revived Union of the Crowns was to be based not on royal power, but on the institution of monarchy, for though the Scots were prompt to proclaim Charles II they stipulated that before he be admitted to the exercise of his royal dignity he must give satisfaction concerning security of religion, the union between the two kingdoms, and the peace of Scotland, all according to the Solemn League and Covenant.78 The arrival of Charles II in Scotland (after signing the covenant) in 1650 immediately provoked English invasion. Thus the Scots at last got a new union, but one which was much closer than they had ever bargained for, in the form of the Cromwellian Union following English conquest. The covenanters had at last forced England to accept their argument that union was vital to mutual security, but only by themselves threatening England’s security. But instead of a union designed to protect Scotland’s interests within Britain, they got a union based on subjection to England. The wheel had come full circle. The covenanters had revolted (in part at least) to prevent what they saw as an unequal union leading to the Anglicisation of Scotland. They had tried to add to the Union of the Crowns other strands of union, based on links between the two parliaments. When this failed in the face of English indifference (1640–1, 1643–6) they had turned rather desperately to the king for help in

redefining the union (1647–51). The failure of this in turn led to complete incorporating union arising from English conquest. At times the covenanters had talked of complete union, of abolishing all distinctions, even of name, between the two countries. Yet in the specific proposals they made they never went nearly so far. Thus they demanded unity of religion, but only uniformity of church government. The two countries were to have the same kind of church government, but the two churches were nonetheless to remain separate. Similarly in civil affairs the covenanters never specifically proposed an ‘incorporating’ union in which the two parliaments would become one. Closer union would provide security for the constitutional and religious revolutions they had achieved in Scotland. But too close a union would destroy their security. The two countries involved were so unequal in size, in population and wealth that England and her interests would inevitably predominate in an incorporating union. Therefore Scotland had to retain her own parliament and church, however close links were to be with their English counterparts. In other words, it was to be a loose federal union. That the covenanters should propose a federal political structure for Britain was hardly surprising, given Scotland’s grievances and the fact that federal ideas formed a longestablished strand in European political thought. In the context of Switzerland, Calvin had favoured the federation of city-republics for ‘self defence and other common purposes’. At the beginning of the seventeenth century Johannes Althusius, a German Calvinist, had built on Calvin’s ideas to interpret all political relationships in terms of bonds of contractual union,79 and in 1638 Archibald Johnston of Wariston, the fanatical ideologue of the covenanting movement, was busy studying the work of Althusius.80 Religion and politics clearly go hand in hand here; Calvin had favoured federations of churches, as well as of states, and the ideas of covenants between God and man and between a man and his fellow men which inspired the covenanters are obviously closely related to such political ideas. Indeed the Latin for ‘covenant’ is foedus, a treaty or compact creating a ‘federal’ relationship.81 The federal union of Britain was to be the civil equivalent of the covenanted Britain the covenanters also sought to achieve, and the examples of the United Provinces (which had won their independence from Spain, the greatest European power of the day) and of Switzerland indicated that federal systems could successfully resist royal protagonists of sovereign power and centralisation such as Charles I. Unfortunately, however, while federal union, close but not too close, recommended itself to the Scots, the English parliament showed no interest in it — except as a means to gain the help of the covenanters. What seemed equal union to the covenanters seemed most unequal to the English, since the two countries differed so much. Would not an equal union be one in which England predominated by right of her superior wealth and population? What seemed equal union to the Scots seemed (with some justification) to the English to be Scottish interference in English affairs.

In the 1640s and again at the end of the century Scots wishes for partial, federal, union met with English demands for all or nothing. Eventually Scotland accepted that she could not impose her concept of union on her neighbour. They were only to get the security and the commercial privileges they sought once they were ready to accept full parliamentary union and abandon their plans for religious union. Moreover, in order to bring about a new union the Scots not only had to modify their terms, they had to make England interested enough in union to act, and events showed that this was only brought about when Scotland presented a threat to England’s security. Full union was only achieved in the 1650s when the threat posed by Scotland provoked English conquest. Similarly in 1707, though in very different circumstances, full union was only achieved because the weakness of the position of Scotland led her to accept full union, while the threat to England’s security posed by Scotland’s actions forced the English into giving priority to redefining the relationship between the kingdoms. Throughout the seventeenth century Scotland’s position had been too weak to impose federal union; only in the 1650s and after 1700 was it so weak that she would accept full union as better than nothing, and the 1640s had seen the most sustained attempt of the century to bring about an ‘equal’ union (as she saw it) by Scotland. NOTES 1. An exception to this generalisation is provided by the work of C. L. Hamilton. In several short notes he has stressed that the covenanters were primarily seeking security in their negotiations with the king and English parliament: ‘The Basis for Scottish Efforts to Create a Reformed Church in England, 1640–1’, Church History, xxx (1961), 171–8; ‘The AngloScottish Negotiations of 1640–1’, SHR, xli (1962), 84–6; ‘Anglo-Scottish Militia Negotiations, March-April 1646’, SHR, xlii (1963), 86–8. For my own views on the topic, see D. Stevenson, The Scottish Revolution, 1637–44 (Newton Abbot, 1973), Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Scotland, 1644–51 (London, 1977), and ‘The Century of the Three Kingdoms’, History Today, xxxv (March 1985), 28–33. 2. Definitions quoted in this paragraph are taken from The Oxford English Dictionary under ‘Federal’ and ‘Union’. For a suggestion that the covenanters’ ideas on reform of the union were very similar to those put forward by the Liberal Party in the Devolution debate of the 1970s, see D. Stevenson, ‘When British Federalism Failed’, The Scotsman, 6 Nov. 1976. 3. For some increasing similarities between the two countries, see G. Donaldson, ‘Foundations of Anglo-Scottish Union’, in his Scottish Church History (Edinburgh, 1985), 137–63. 4. For some of the most important contributions to the union debate in the early seventeenth century, see B. R. Galloway and B. P. Levack (eds.), The Jacobean Union: Six Tracts of 1604 (SHS, 1985) and Sir Thomas Craig, De Unione Regnorum Britanniae Tractatus (SHS, 1909). W. Ferguson, Scotland’s Relations with England: A Survey to 1707 (Edinburgh, 1977), 99, dismisses the pro-union literature as merely sycophantic propaganda inspired by James VI, but there was clearly much more to it than this — an ideal of a united Britain which had its roots deep in the past. For discussion of some important aspects of this, see A. H. Williamson, Scottish National Consciousness in the Age of James VI (Edinburgh, 1979) and ‘Scotland, Antichrist and the invention of Great Britain’, in J. Dwyer and others (eds.). New Perspectives on the Politics and Culture of Early Modern Scotland (Edinburgh, 1982), 34–54, though unfortunately in both works the style renders the argument difficult to follow. 5. For some of the stresses caused by union and attitudes to it, see C. V. Wedgwood, ‘Anglo-Scottish Relations, 1603– 40’, TRHS, 4th series, xxxii (1950), 31–48, and Ferguson, Scotland’s Relations with England, 97–116. 6. H. Trevor-Roper, ‘Scotland and the Puritan Revolution’, in his Religion, the Reformation and Social Change (London, 1967), 392–4, 399–411, has stressed that what made the Scots interfere in England time after time in the 1640s was the desire to export their revolution and thus gain security, but he interprets this entirely in religious terms. For an attack on his

ideas concerning Anglo-Scottish relations in this period, see D. Stevenson, ‘Professor Trevor-Roper and the Scottish Revolution’, History Today, xxx (February 1980), 34–40. For other accounts of relations between the kingdoms in the 1640s, see Ferguson, Scotland’s Relations with England, 113–36, and L. Kaplan, Politics and Religion during the English Revolution: The Scots and the Long Parliament, 1643–1645 (New York, 1976). For the importance of Irish issues in AngloScottish relations (a matter not considered here), see D. Stevenson, Scottish Covenanters and Irish Confederates (Belfast, 1981). 7. J. Rushworth (ed.) Historical Collections (London, 1659–1701), II, i, 798–802. 8. A True Representation of the Proceedings of the Kingdome of Scotland since the Late Pacification. By the Estates of the Kingdome … ([Edinburgh], 1640), pt. 2, 51. 9. A Remonstrance Concerning the present Troubles, From the Meeting of the Estates of the Kingdome of Scotland, Aprill 16 unto the Parliament of England ([Edinburgh], 1640), 1, 2–3, 4–5, 22, 25–6. 10. Rushworth, Collections, II, ii, 1223–7. 11. R. Baillie, Letters and Journals (Bannatyne Club, 1841–2), i, 258. 12. J. Spalding, Memorialls of the Trubles (Spalding Club, 1850–1), i, 363–4. 13. G. Burnet, The Memoires of the Lives and Actions of James and William Dukes of Hamilton (London, 1677), 177. 14. Ibid., 177. 15. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic [CSPD], 1640–1 (London, 1882), 244–6; Hamilton, ‘Anglo-Scottish Negotiations of 1640–1’, 84. 16. J. D. Ogilvie, ‘Church Union in 16415, Records of the Scottish Church History Society [RSCHS], i (1926), 149. See also W. S. Hudson, ‘The Scottish Effort to Presbyterianise the Church of England during the Early Months of the Long Parliament’, Church History, viii (1939), 255–82. 17. T. Thomson and C. Innes (eds.). Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland [APS], (Edinburgh, 1814–75), v, 340. 18. Baillie, Letters, i, 275–6. 19. Ibid., i, 305; D. Dalrymple, Lord Hailes (ed.), Memorials and Letters relating to the History of Britain in the Reign of Charles the First (Glasgow, 1766), 107–9. 20. Spalding, Memorialls, ii, 9–10. 21. S. R. Gardiner, History of England, (London, 1883–4), ix, 297. 22. J. D. Ogilvie, ‘The Story of a Broadside of 16415, Proceedings of the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society, xii (1921– 5), 81. 23. Hamilton, ‘The Basis for Scottish Efforts to Create a Reformed Church in England, 1640–1’, 174–5; W. M. Hetherington, History of the Westminster Assembly of Divines (Edinburgh, 1843), 376–84. 24. Ogilvie, ‘Church Union in 1641’, 156. 25. Ogilvie, ‘Story of a Broadside’, 83. 26. Ogilvie, ‘Church Union in 16415, 157; APS, v, 340. 27. CSPD, 1640–1, 513–14. 28. APS, v, 340, 341, 342–3. 29. Hamilton, ‘Anglo-Scottish Negotiations of 1640–1’, 84–5; APS, v, 344–5. 30. Ibid., v, 404–5. 31. Register of the Privy Council of Scotland [RPCS], 1638–43 (Edinburgh, 1906), 163, 198, 248–51, 256–9, 260–5. 32. A. Peterkin (ed.). Records of the Kirk of Scotland... from the year 1638 (Edinburgh, 1838), 323–4. 33. RPCS, 1638–43, 316; Burnet, Hamilton, 195, 197–9, 200–1. 34. SRO, PA. 14/2, Proceedings of the Scots Commissioners for Conserving the Articles of the Treaty, 1642–3, pp. 1–6; The Proceedings of the Commissioners ... for Conserving the Articles of the Treaty and Peace ... ([Edinburgh], 1643), 5–10. 35. Journals of the House of Lords [LJ], v, 430–1. 36. SRO, PA. 14/2, 13–15, 20, 26–36, 41–4; Baillie, Letters, ii, 66–7; Rushworth, Collections, III, ii, 399–406. 37. Journals of the House of Commons [CJ], iii, 66, 92, 110, 113, 121, 132; LJ, vi, 25, 32, 38, 55–6, 60, 97, 99; Baillie, Letters, ii, 79. 38. APS, VI, i, 13–14. 39. LJ, vi, 140–2. 40. Baillie, Letters, ii, 90. 41. APS, VI, i, 150–1. 42. Ibid., VI, i, 42.

43. Baillie, Letters, ii, 106. 44. L. Kaplan, ‘Presbyterians and Independents in 1643’, EHR, lxxxiv (1969), 251–2; Baillie, Letters, ii, 117. 45. APS, VI, i, 70–1. 46. V. Pearl, ‘Oliver St John and the “Middle Group” in the Long Parliament’, EHR, lxxxi (1966), 494, 498, 508–9, 513, 514; W. Notestein, ‘The Establishment of the Committee of Both Kingdoms’, American Historical Review, xvii (1912), 477–95; Baillie, Letters, ii, 141–2. For the Scots members of the committee, see L. Mulligan, ‘The Scottish Alliance and the Committee of Both Kingdoms, 1644–6’, Historical Studies, xiv (1970), 173–88. 47. Baillie, Letters, ii, 156, 166. 48. Ibid., ii, 234; C. V. Wedgwood, ‘The Covenanters in the First Civil War’, SHR, xxxix (1960), 10–12. 49. S. R. Gardiner (ed.). Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution (3rd ed., Oxford, 1958), 275–86. 50. Baillie, Letters, ii, 294. 51. LJ, vii, 442–3. 52. [D. Buchanan], Truth its Manifest: or a short and true relation of divers main passages of things ... (London, 1645), 110–11. 53. CSPD, 1645–7 (London, 1892), pp. xviii, 130. 54. A Speech of the ... Earle of Louden ... to a Grand Committee of both Houses of Parliament, upon the 12 of September, 1645 (London, 1645). 55. M. W. Meikle (ed.). Correspondence of the Scots Commissioners in London, 1644–6 (Roxburghe Club, 1917), 117– 19. 56. Ibid., 82–3; LJ, vii, 639. 57. J. G. Fotheringham (ed.), The Diplomatic Correspondence of Jean de Montereul ... (SHS, 1898–9), i, 163–4; Gardiner, Civil War, iii, 73–6. 58. Hamilton,’ Anglo-Scottish Militia Negotiations’, 86; Baillie, Letters, ii, 348; Meikle, Correspondence, 139. 59. APS, VI, i, 575–9. For additional Instructions of 10 February, see SRO, PA. 13/4, Register of Instructions to the Scots Commissioners in London, 1644–6, fos. 42–43v. 60. LJ, viii, 217–19; Hamilton, ‘Anglo-Scottish Militia Negotiations’, 86–7; Baillie, Letters, ii, 348. 61. SRO, PA.13/5, Register of Negotiations, 1643–7, fos. 301–303; Hamilton, ‘Anglo-Scottish Militia Negotiations’, 87– 8. 62. Some Papers of the Commissioners of Scotland, given in lately to the Houses of Parliament concerning the Propositions of Peace (London, 1646), 1–4. 63. Meikle, Correspondence, 173–4, 176; LJ, viii, 272, 274, 276, 277, 281; Baillie, Letters, ii, 366–7. 64. CJ, iv, 513–15. 65. Meikle, Correspondence, 175, 177. 66. CJ, iv, 537–8, 551. 67. SRO, PA. 13/4, fo. 44v; Meikle, Correspondence, 194–6; Baillie, Letters, ii, 376; LJ, viii, 393–4. 68. Ibid., viii, 392–3. 69. Gardiner, Constitutional Documents, 290–306; LJ, viii, 237–9. 70. Gardiner, Constitutional Documents, 326–7. 71. Ibid., 316–26. 72. Ibid., 335–47. 73. CSPD, 1645–7, 582–3. 74. Gardiner, Constitutional Documents, 347–52. 75. Ibid., 353. 76. CJ, v, 416. 77. Baillie, Letters, iii, 32–3. 78. APS, VI, ii, 157, 161. 79. F. S. Carney (ed.), The Politics of Johannes Althusius (London, 1965), viii–xi. 80. G. M. Paul (ed.). Diary of Sir Archibald Johnston of Wariston, 1632–1639 (SHS, 1911), 348 & n., 408. 81. When the Solemn League and Covenant was printed in Latin in 1643, ‘league and covenant’ was translated simply as foedus.

9 The Solemn League and Covenant Edward J. Cowan

And I will make them one nation in the land upon the mountains of Israel; and one king shall be king to them all: and they shall be no more two nations, neither shall they be divided into two kingdoms any more at all: neither shall they defile themselves any more with their idols, nor with their detestable things, nor with any of their transgressions: but I will save them out of all their dwelling places wherein they have sinned, and will cleanse them: so shall they be my people, and I will be their God ... Moreover I will make a covenant of peace with them; and it shall be an everlasting covenant with them: and I will place them, and multiply them, and will set my sanctuary in the midst of them for evermore. Ezekiel, xxxvii, 22, 23, 26.

In the dark days of 1660, when it was clear that things were definitely falling apart, a group of ministers which included such luminaries as Samuel Rutherford and James Guthry issued A Testimony to the Truth of Jesus Christ as manifested in Scotland in a vain attempt to ensure that some part of the centre might hold. The Testimony recalled the subscription of the National Covenant in 1581, a reference to the Negative Confession. As renewed in 1590, the covenant reflected ‘one of the purest and brightest shining candlesticks among the churches of Christ’. Such beauty and glory were soon eclipsed by Jacobean prelacy which was first challenged in the renewal of the National Covenant in 1638 and then, through God’s favour, smashed at the Glasgow Assembly of the same year. In 1641 the Scottish Reformation was fully established and at last ratified and confirmed both by king and parliament. Subsequently the Scots, concerned about the plight of their brethren in England, were most willing to assist when requested for help against the ‘common enemy’ by entering into a Solemn League and Covenant, ‘for the matter just and warrantable, ‘for the ends necessary and commendable, for the time seasonable and for the parties honourable’. The Solemn League of 1643 was sworn ‘by the whole body of Scotland from the highest to the lowest’ and was accepted by multitudes in England and Ireland as well.1 The Solemn League has received much less attention than the Covenant of 1638. Robert Baillie saw it as a momentous and crucial development marking ‘a new period and crise

[turning point] which these hundred years hes exercised thir dominions’. For him the covenant’s chief aim was the propagation of Scottish church discipline, a suggestion which most commentators have followed quite uncritically.2 Over eighty years ago Hay Fleming lamented that ‘no Englishman can distinguish the National Covenant from the Solemn League’ but he had to admit that ‘many Scotchmen are in the same case’.3 If the critical situation has improved immeasurably since Fleming wrote,4 confusion still persists because the negotiations which culminated in the League are shrouded in obscurity. The precise details of how the first British covenant was forged by English and Scottish representatives in August 1643 will probably never be uncovered. To borrow Johnston of Wariston’s graphic metaphor, the Scots had already manufactured ‘God’s dishclout to scoure the vessels of his sanctuarie from the filthiness of the ceremonies’.5 The cleansing operation was now to be extended to the whole of the British Isles at a unique moment in British history. In the event the ‘dishclout’ patched together in the form of the Solemn League proved inadequate for the task of scouring two disparate vessels shaped by different histories, institutions, and religious experiences. The boldness of vision behind the covenant greatly exceeded its realisation; it was rooted, not in religious revelation, but rather in political pragmatism and military expediency. This essay offers a modest contribution towards the need for more research on the Solemn League.6 It will discuss the context and creation of the covenant, stressing in particular the role, hitherto overlooked, of Archibald Campbell, marquis of Argyll. It will sample contemporary attitudes towards the covenant in both Scotland and England and it will challenge the received view that the Scots were intent upon imposing their presbyterian polity upon England. Finally it will suggest reasons for concluding that, far from advancing union between the two kingdoms, the covenant actually served to drive them further apart in the context of a dialogue that was initiated before 1603 and which continued until 1707. The covenant of 1643 declared that the citizens of Scotland, England and Ireland ‘living under one king, being of one reformed religion’ had entered into a mutual and solemn league and covenant ‘for the preservation of ourselves and our religion from utter ruin and destruction’. Signatories swore to preserve the reformed religion of Scotland and to advance the reformation of religion in England and Ireland ‘according to the Word of God and the example of the best reformed churches’ as well as to bring the churches in the three kingdoms ‘to the nearest conjunction and uniformity in religion, confession of faith, form of church government, directory for worship and catechising’. They undertook the extirpation of popery and prelacy, to preserve and defend parliamentary rights and the king’s person, and to purge the kingdoms of malignants or hinderers of reformation. They swore to maintain a ‘firm peace and union’ and concluded with a non-divisive clause.7 On the day the covenant was approved the covenanters began to organise the levy of the army for service in England, although it was to be another three months before all the details about Scottish military

assistance were worked out. The covenant was a response to the eruption of the English civil war in 1642. Charles had departed Scotland in November the previous year, ‘a contented king from a contented people’, having conceded every single constitutional and religious demand made by the radical party. In his absence Scottish affairs were almost totally dominated, between November 1641 and September 1643, by Archibald Campbell, eighth earl and first (and only) marquis of Argyll, MacCailein Mór Mor, chief of Clan Campbell and the most powerful noble in Scotland. The extent to which this individual was involved in the negotiations leading to the Solemn League has not, perhaps, been adequately recognised. When the English commissioners, after some delay, eventually arrived in Edinburgh to commence negotiations they were led by Sir Harry Vane the Younger, a man who had been cured of his ‘extravagancies’, or puritan predilections, through a stint as Governor of Massachusetts at the tender age of twenty-three and who was rapidly acquiring a reputation as one of the leading Independents. In him, religion apart, Argyll was to discern a kindred spirit, one characterised by his biographer as ‘possessed of a subtle mind’, as well as a ruthlessness and an essential radicalism ‘with an intelligence and adroitness in manoeuvre which marked him out from his fellow members’.8 It might be added that the similar styles and instincts of the two men were such that they strenuously wrote down as little as possible, so concealing their thoughts and actions from contemporaries and posterity alike.9 Vane was the man who, according to Clarendon, hoodwinked the Scots in the matter of the Solemn League: ‘he who contributed most to it ... the principal contriver of it and the man by whom the committee in Scotland was entirely and stupidly governed ... He was chosen to cozen and deceive a whole nation which excelled in craft and dissembling; this he did with notable pregnancy and dexterity’.10 If there is doubt about the substantial accuracy of this report, there can be none about the worthiness of Vane’s opposite number who was not himself entirely guiltless of cozening and deception. Vane later wrote, in a gallows speech which he was not permitted to deliver, that Argyll ‘whose memory I honour was with myself at the beginning and making of the solemn league and covenant’, a statement which the bishop of Derry understood to prove that ‘the father and mother of the covenant’ were Argyll and Vane.11 Argyll was as happy operating backstage as he was before the footlights; his lack of visibility in the Solemn League negotiations should not be permitted to belie his allpervasive influence. From the time that Charles departed Scotland until the middle of June 1643, Argyll was in almost constant attendance at meetings of the privy council, occasionally standing in as president for his kinsman. Chancellor Loudoun, with whom he co-operated closely at all times. On the very day of Charles’ departure (18 November) he was appointed to a commission on the suppression of the Irish rebellion. Next day, council received a communication from the English parliament urging that 5,000 Scots be dispatched

immediately to Ireland. Not a week passed during the next eighteen months when Argyll failed to discuss the Irish question. He was quite clearly gripped by old fears, now become a certainty, that the MacDonalds would use the upheaval of rebellion to attack Campbell territories. He was among those empowered to seize Clyde ships for the transportation of the army, and he was personally involved in every aspect of the military response to the Irish crisis, from the supply of ammunition and biscuit to organising relief for refugees from the war zone. Indeed council indicated, doubtless with his own partisan prompting, that Argyll’s advice be taken ‘for the accelerating and more speedie prosecution of the bussines’.12 Charles, anxious to disabuse the dubious of any notion that he might somehow be linked with the Irish confederates, invited Argyll to travel south ‘since the perfyte knawledge wee have of his affection and fidelitie assureth us of his best endevors and advyce in all our services now in hand’. Such a visit was opposed and actively discouraged by parliament because of reports that support for Charles was growing in Scotland. It was thought that the royalists would exploit the absence of Argyll (and of Loudoun who was to accompany him) to their own advantage.13 While parliament obviously looked to Argyll as the man most able to contain the situation in Scotland, it does not follow that he sided with parliament from the beginning.14 In the event the visit was postponed but Charles continued to hope that Argyll would repay his recent favours and concessions with loyalty. Such expectations were not entirely groundless; Argyll protested that he would endeavour ‘in any thing that may serve his Majesty’s true honour and happiness which truly is dearer to me than my life and fortune’. His concern was to safeguard the settlement which Charles had agreed at Edinburgh, and he was obviously dismayed by the news coming out of England of the strife between king and parliament. Charles had returned to a kingdom over which he was slowly but inexorably losing his grip. Early in January in his abortive attempt to arrest the five members of the Commons he, in the words of William Lilly, ‘utterly lost himself and left scarce a possibility of reconcilement’. The rift widened over poisonous suspicions about the relationship between the king and Irish Catholics. Trained bands and naval barges protested the royal actions, so forcing Charles to quit Whitehall. Argyll, as he told Hamilton, greatly regretted that matters were ‘at so great a height of contradiction’ between king and parliament: I am loth to give my judgment in matters that I know not perfectly; yet, for any thing I do know, I think his Majesty hardly dealt with. Always I hold it no ways good policy at this time to use violent remedies when the people’s humours are so aloft; but rather seem guiding than be forced to guide, and advise on it at a more convenient time, for it can neither be for his Majesty’s honour nor advantage to make himself head of any party, which some study too much; yet I fear our brethern there fall too much on the other extremity and all extremes are hurtful; therefore I heartily wish you could light on the mid-way that all matters be brought to a happy conclusion for his Majesty’s honour, and contentment of his people, which joined bring peace, but divided, we can expect little quiet.

The letter was a typical Argyll production counselling moderation, betraying a healthy

suspicion of popular humour, advising at all times the middle way and advocating ‘seem guiding’ which might almost have been his personal creed. He was to return to the theme a month later — ‘I think the power of princes is best maintained when least used and so I ever wish his Majesty may guide than dispute’.15 Argyll’s strategy was thus to play a waiting game in the wings of the great English stage. Scottish neutrality might yet prove the key to English salvation while, equally, a premature commitment to either side might jeopardise the Scottish settlement at the hands of the eventual victor. In December 1641 the council had sent commissioners to London to discuss the Irish crisis. Johnston of Wariston was of their number. They were instructed to advance the unity of Scotland and England by all lawful means to the glory of God and for the peace of the church and state in both kingdoms. Wariston fulfilled his remit by advocating the abolition of episcopacy and the establishment of presbyterianism in England.16 By the time Argyll participated in the St. Andrews Assembly of July-August 1642 the ministers and elders were promoting the extension of the presbyterian crusade to England with all haste. Argyll appeared solely in his capacity as ruling elder for Inveraray, but Baillie emphasised that he attended every session ‘and did give most and best advice in every purpose came by hand’.17 The rhetorical exchanges of these months created a context for the covenant of 1643. A declaration from the English parliament addressed to the Assembly rejoiced in the ‘near bonds and ties as well spiritual and civil between the church and kingdoms’ of both nations and advocated such reformation of the English church ‘as shall be most agreeable to God’s word’.18 The terminology anticipated the spirit, if not the letter, of the Solemn League as did the Assembly’s reply which noted that the Scots had been trying to reform the English church ever since 1566. It reiterated the Scottish desire that ‘in all His Majesty’s dominions there might be one confession of faith, one directory of worship, one public catechism and one form of kirk government’. Prelacy must be rooted out.19 A letter was also received from certain English ministers ‘showing their desire of presbyterian government and a full union with our church’, a communication received with jubilation by the Scottish ‘watch-men upon the walls of Jerusalem’.20 Council promptly accepted the Assembly’s petition urging uniformity of church government in England, Scotland and Ireland. Clearly many believed that if Charles triumphed in England the Scottish ecclesiastical establishment would be threatened. The English parliament, in turn, gratefully welcomed the commitment to uniformity, implying a willingness to follow the Scottish example in securing reformation and referring to the ‘national covenant’ between the two kingdoms.21 Argyll’s greatest concern was the deteriorating situation in England which led both sides to face each other across an ideological chasm at Edgehill on 23 October where a marginal victory for the royalists convinced their opponents that ultimate success might depend upon military reinforcements from Scotland. He greatly regretted the king’s apparent eagerness for

battle, ‘for in my judgement he should be wiser to press a treaty being in a posture to fight, than to urge fighting; for the event of a battle is very uncertain, and God knows what the consequence may be ...’ Cautious as ever, he counselled that like good physicians it would be best ‘to minister no physic when the disease is at the crisis but wait patiently for the event of it and then the effect will give occasion for any necessary or useful remedy if the disease be not incurable which I pray God avert’.22 On 7 November council received a missive from parliament indicating that Charles was recruiting papists into his army and openly requesting Scottish military aid against ‘the common enemy of the religion and liberty of both nations’. It also received a letter from Charles, conveyed by his secretary of state Lanark, complaining of parliament’s ‘misrepresentations’.23 As council debated the propriety of publishing the royal letter, certain differences between the members clearly emerged, Lanark and Hamilton supporting publication, Argyll, Loudoun and Balmerino demanding that parliament’s communication be given similar treatment. When Lanark revealed that the king had ordered the printing of his letter, Argyll hotly responded that ‘they sate there to good purpose if every message was a command’, whereupon he and Lanark ‘let fly at one another for a while with much eagerness’. Balmerino muttered darkly about ‘the bishops’ way — they procured orders from the king without advice and then charged all who offered better counsel with disobedience’. In the protracted wrangle which followed, Argyll and Balmerino tried to delay the vote until council was better attended while others argued that both documents should be published, only Alexander Lindsay, Lord Balcarres, holding out for printing parliament’s piece alone. Throughout, Argyll and Loudoun ‘showed themselves plainly against the king’.24 In the event it was decided by eleven votes to nine to print only Charles’s letter though an amendment delayed full discussion of its contents until a later occasion. Argyll had been defeated and it was with some embarrassment that he heard from John Pickering, a parliamentary agent in Edinburgh, that parliament would be extremely sensitive on this issue. The marquis also received an official communication complaining that royalist literature was openly published in Scotland although parliament forbade the printing of anti-covenanting pieces.25 Charles’s letter furnished council with an emotive rehearsal of parliament’s escalating demands and actions. He slid over the employment of Catholics and appealed for support. The document had considerable impact. ‘Our gibberish is now turned to braide Scotch and all the pulpits ring of it’, Pickering told Pym. ‘The printing of the king’s letter hath awakned those that have bene asleep ever since the pacificatione. The coales now want only blowing from England and this kingdom will be soon on fire.’ Such was the public outrage, such the talk of a Scottish army marching into England to rescue its king from the clutches of the papists, that Pickering thought that if Pym and his colleagues failed to act quickly, events in Scotland might overtake them.26 There may have been an element of double-talk in all of this since Pickering wrote to several parliamentarians at this time with the same message

obviously designed to goad them into action. On the other hand the last thing Pym wanted was an independent Scottish army invading England to aid the king. Argyll could not have been happy about the general furore and popular hysteria which was generated. The covenanters recognised that he no longer controlled the council, and fearing the suppression of their ‘best patriots’ they, as in 1637 and 1642, flooded into Edinburgh well armed with petitions to apply such pressure as was required. Rothes once observed that petition or protestation was the ‘most ordinary and humble and legal way’ for the ‘meanest subjects’ to protest decisions of assembly or parliament, ‘whersoever they are not fully heard’, a right grounded ‘on the law of nature and nations’.27 While Argyll might not have cared for this cornerstone of the Scottish democratic process, he certainly showed himself an adroit manipulator of the public sentiment it represented. The question of the print, as well as being debated in pulpit and council was also discussed by the commission of assembly and the conservators of the peace (established by the Treaty of London in 1641). The covenanters petitioned the conservators to print parliament’s declaration and to suppress other royal papers in Lanark’s possession. The conservators in turn petitioned council to that effect and on 10 January it agreed to publish the paper from parliament. At the same meeting the ‘Cross Petition’, a counter-petition from those of royalist sympathy so called because it ‘crossed’ the covenanters’ petition, was also discussed, but to no avail since a majority of the discussants was hostile. The commissioners of assembly supported a proposal urging the king to call a parliament and to sever himself from all Catholics. Further proposals included religious uniformity in the three kingdoms and an immediate general assembly.28 In those frantic weeks of petition and counter-petition Argyll’s thinking had undergone a radical shift doubtless sparked by news of the royalist victory at Edgehill. He moved from a position of neutrality and conciliation to one of marked sympathy for parliament. He had betrayed signs of losing his hold on the situation and he had perhaps failed to perceive the depth of public hostility towards Charles. Through his policy of mediation and the middle way he had, as he came to realise, been supporting despotism. It was the old Charles who dictated which documents would be printed by council. Argyll fully understood for the first time that Scotland could not hope to remain neutral in the matter of the English civil war, a struggle which aimed, according to parliamentary propaganda, to secure the same rights and privileges as the Scots had won in 1641. Scotland was indeed ‘obliged to endeavour a reformatione in England’.29 He was still so suspect in the south that there were fears for his safety. When the conservators appointed Loudoun, Henderson and Robert Barclay (Argyll’s former tutor) to negotiate a treaty with their counterparts in England, Baillie told Wariston: ‘if a treatie must be, by all means keep Argyll at home, else you put us all in evident hazard’.30 The conservators enjoyed little success in negotiations with Charles at Oxford. The king flatly rejected an Argyll-inspired suggestion communicated by Loudoun that he trade

Scottish military support for a presbyterian establishment in England. MacCailein, aware of the way the wind was blowing, approached Montrose whose offers of royal service had once again been rejected, with a promise to pay all of his considerable debts and the offer of a commission as lieutenant general of the covenanting army. The sincerity of Argyll’s intentions was doubted — ‘understanding Scots say Argyll is of his own nature implacable yet he is so subtle he can hugely dissemble’ — but Montrose was the only potential leader of the king’s party in Scotland. The die was not yet cast; some accommodation might yet be possible.31 Alas for MacCailein Mór Mor, Montrose, after suitable reflection, refused. Since Charles failed to respond to the covenanters’ demand for a parliament, Argyll resolved to summon a convention of estates. He raised the matter at a joint meeting of the council, the conservators of the peace and the commissioners for common burdens (appointed by the 1641 parliament to oversee taxation anomalies created by the Bishops’ Wars). There was immediately a wrangle about whether such a meeting could vote to indict a convention but the matter was carried. It was Argyll’s intention that the convention should discuss the military options open to the Scots. Charles initially opposed the convention but on the advice of Hamilton and Lanark he permitted it to meet. Through Lanark the king assured his subjects that he intended to adhere to the 1641 settlement but his words rang hollow when news broke early in June 1643 of the so-called Antrim plot by which the earl of Antrim, Montrose, the Gordons and the earl of Nithsdale were to launch a three-pronged attack on the kingdom of the covenant.32 Any lingering doubters were now driven into Argyll’s camp, for here was proof that Charles intended to use Catholics against his English and Scottish subjects. So general was the concern that the contentious convention was heavily attended. Hamilton and Lanark vainly argued that the convention must accept limitations on its power defined by the king. Argyll disagreed, claiming that the convention derived its authority from council, conservators and commissioners. When representatives voted on an act of constitution formally defining the powers of convention on 26 June, Argyll carried the day despite the opposition of a majority of the nobility. Hamilton, possessed of the anachronistic belief that to control the nobility was to control any Scottish representative assembly, was soundly defeated. A ‘lawfull, free and full convention’ was constituted with ‘power to treat, consult and determine in all matters that shall be proposed unto thame als freelie and amplie as any convention quhilk hes beene within this kingdome at any time bygane’.33 Argyll’s policy of uneasy neutrality was finally consigned to oblivion. He was now free to orchestrate support for the English parliament. The ubiquitous and ever-attentive Baillie34 remains the best guide to proceedings in the Edinburgh Assembly. On 1 August he, together with the minister David Dick and a few others, met in Wariston’s chambers to plan strategy. In addition to discussing who should sit on which committees ‘our greatest concern was for the Moderator. We foresaw great business

were in hand: strangers were to be present: mynds of many brethren were exasperate’. When Alexander Henderson was chosen as moderator Baillie had every reason to feel some embarrassment — ‘it was small credit to us, who so oft were necessitate to imploy one man’. Henderson had, since 1638, proved himself to be the presiding genius in the covenanting propaganda department. From National Covenant to Solemn League dozens of brilliantly argued pamphlets, declarations and letters flowed from his pen; his contribution was as massive as it was unrivalled. Henderson was to chair the proceedings ‘with some little austere severitie, as it was necessare, and became his persone well’. He presumably it was who cautioned members of the Assembly ‘to be more grave than ordinare; and so indeed all was carried to the end with much more awe and gravitie than usual’. The English commissioners, in addition to Vane, included Stephen Marshall, ‘the Geneva Bull’, and his son-in-law, Philip Nye, a leading Independent. According to Baillie, Marshall and Vane were ‘the drawers of all their writes’. Argyll’s part in the negotiations is unknown, but given his recent activity it is impossible to believe that it was anything less than considerable. Both sets of negotiators, whatever their personal preferences, were under strong pressure from their respective ecclesiastical factions. Also, given the rhetorical exchanges between the two countries during the previous year, each side must have had a shrewd appreciation of the demands and concessions that could be expected from the other. The ‘brethren of the Kirk of England’ in a strongly emotive appeal to the Assembly declared: ‘surely if ever a poor church were ready to be swallowed up by Satan and his instruments we are that church’. The forces of Antichrist threatened all reformed churches. They begged for tears, prayers and advice on the ‘happiest course for the unity of the protestant partie more firmly that we may all serve God with one consent and stand up against Anti-christ as one man’.35 This impassioned plea reduced many of the Assembly to tears and doubtless reinforced the devout in their desire to advance reformation in England. Baillie was initially among those who favoured mediation between both sides in England ‘without siding altogether with parliament’ until disabused of such a course by Wariston who ‘alone showed the vanity of that motion and the impossibility of it’. Wariston later recorded his gratitude to God for having employed him in drafting the Solemn League,36 a statement which may imply that Henderson was not solely responsible for the draft covenant. The document proved contentious — ‘we were not like to agree on the frame’. Clarendon, no admirer of Vane, alleged that Sir Harry ‘carefully considered the covenant and after he had altered and changed many expressions in it, and made them doubtful enough to bear many interpretations, he and his fellow-commissioners signed the whole treaty’.37 The same authority plausibly alleged that Vane totally dominated any debate in which he participated. In later tradition Vane demanded that ‘the whole [be] called a league as well as a covenant and argued it almost all night and at last carried it’,38 a point that clearly featured in some of the ‘hard debates’ noted by Baillie and which must lie at the heart of his oft-quoted

statement, ‘the English were for a civil league, we for a religious covenant’. Furthermore Vane’s contentious modifications to the wording of the covenant convinced the Scots that he was seeking to keep ‘a door open in England to Independency’. At the end of his life Sir Harry applauded the nature and spirit of the covenant but deplored ‘the rigid way of prosecuting it and the oppressing uniformity that hath been endeavored by it’.39 The original draft committed the signatories to ‘the preservation of the true protestant reformed religion in the church of Scotland in doctrine, worship, discipline and government according to the word of God and the reformation of religion in the church of England according to the same holy word and the example of the best reformed churches’. After Vane’s amendments the latter half of the passage read ‘the reformation of religion in the kingdoms of England and Ireland in doctrine etc ... according to the word of God and the example of the best reformed churches’.40 The ‘same holy word’ which had inspired the Scottish reformation was to be dropped in favour of the more neutral, and it must be stressed, more ambiguous, ‘word of God’. That Vane’s cynicism did not go far enough is indicated by the alterations later demanded by the Westminster Assembly and the House of Commons. The Westminster divines (notably Dr. Cornelius Burgess) could not accept, any more than could Sir Simonds D’Ewes of the Commons, that the Scottish church had been reformed ‘according to the word of God’. The divines compromised by qualifying the wording with an oath ‘as far as in my conscience I shall conceive it to be according to the word of God’. The Commons, which had commissioned the Westminster Assembly in a bid to control such reformation as might transpire, threw out ‘true protestant’ and substituted the offensive ‘word of God’ clause so that the first part of the statement now read ‘the preservation of the reformed religion in the church of Scotland in doctrine, etc. ... against our common enemies’.41 The English assembly and parliament thus conspired with Vane to exorcise the divinity of the Scottish reformation. It was clearly English understanding that their acceptance of the final version of the Solemn League excluded any recognition of, or commitment to, the superiority of the Scottish experience. The Scottish commissioners originally took the alterations ‘in evil part’ but were persuaded that they were ‘for the better’.42 They would later discover, if they did not already know, that the ‘word of God’ differed in Scotland and England. As Gardiner long ago indicated, the clause had figured in the Grand Remonstrance.43 It later returned to haunt Wariston who was baited by Vane boasting of having ‘drolled and cajoled us in Scotland ... by putting in the Covenant the clause “according to the word of God” to make and cast all loose’. God alone knew ‘with what simplicity of heart we walked in that business of the Covenant which the other made loose that it might only serve as a politik engyn for a tyme and then layd aside’.44 Though this episode took place many years later, Wariston’s report may confirm Clarendon’s claim that Vane laughed at the Scots in 1643 ‘as much as ever he did afterwards’,45 that his detestation of presbyterians did indeed

lead him to open the door to the Independents in England. Clarendon, however, despised the Scots with greater vehemence than he did Vane and he clearly underestimated the hardheadedness of their negotiators. Henderson and his colleagues realised full well that this covenant was not born of revelation. It is quite likely, for example, that Ireland was deliberately omitted from the first draft as a calculated bargaining counter since the Scots had earlier considered it for ‘perfect reformation’. It is equally possible that in the wake of atrocity stories weekly emanating from that unhappy country the Scottish presbyterians considered Ireland completely beyond redemption but, as the negotiators may well have all along calculated, it was inserted upon English insistence. By 1643 the covenanters had wide experience of committees, drafts and negotiations; they were hardly so gullible as to accept a document of which they did not approve.46 It has even been suggested that the loose phraseology was a compromise introduced by Henderson.47 At the very least he approved Vane’s amendments. The whole problem evaporates when it is realised that despite all contrary appearances and the oft-repeated assertions of historians, the Scots were scrupulous in trying to avoid the impression that they were attempting to impose their own reformation upon England. Most commentators have remarked on the speed with which the Solemn League and Covenant was agreed. It took the English commissioners eighteen days to sail from London to Leith, ten days to draft the covenant and a further nine to conclude a treaty by which a Scottish army was to be sent to England. By 14 September it had been approved by the House of Commons, four days later by the Lords and on 25 September it was subscribed by the English House. The document was then returned to Scotland for subscription on 13 October, ‘the day of the right hand of the Most High’.48 Although Baillie claimed that ‘we were not willing to precipitat a bussinesse of such consequence’, Gilbert Burnet attested that some of the observers were surprised that a matter of such importance was carried through with such little deliberation or debate. Rather more serious was his allegation that ‘all their consciences [were] of such a size so exactly to agree as the several wheels of a clock, which made all apprehend there was some first mover that directed all those other motions; this by the one party was imputed to God’s extraordinary providence, but by others to the power and policy of the leaders and the simplicity and fear of the rest’.49 At the opening of the Assembly attempts to place other names on the leet for moderator were blocked, much to the annoyance of ‘diverse who knew not the secreit, and considered not the necessitie of the times’.50 Henry Guthry believed that debate was censored. He himself was condemned as a ‘rotten malignant’ for asking in the Assembly whether the English commissioners would be as prompt to state what they would put in place of episcopacy as they were to remove it. According to him Mathew Brisbane, minister of Erskine, desired that some days might be allowed for reflection and this was refused.51 Haste was indeed of the essence. John Pym had been asked to communicate his thoughts

on church uniformity ‘quickly’ and a declaration from the Lords and Commons advocated speedy resolution ‘concerning the deliverance of this kingdom from the present dangers’.52 Although the need for haste cannot be disputed, too many commentators seem to have been of the opinion that the situation of the English parliament was more parlous than that of the Scots — that there was greater urgency on its side. That view is difficult to sustain since the situation was equally pressing in both countries. Ever since 1638 Argyll had feared and expected an invasion from Ireland.53 Even as the two sides negotiated in Edinburgh the participants were acutely aware that the hordes of Antichrist were swarming on the shores of the Emerald Isle and that Scotland was just as likely to be attacked as England. The covenant was undoubtedly a response to the concerns and contingencies of the moment; it was an exercise in pragmatism and profound faith, in religion and realpolitik. The league was ‘solemn’ in the medieval sense of ‘sacred’, a conceit which many found heretical as well as treasonable. To Montrose it was ‘a traitorous and damnable covenant’.54 Menteith observed that lawful leagues could only be made between sovereign princes; though both nations embarked in the same ship, they could not reach port without a pilot. He believed that the people and clergy desired the destruction of episcopacy and the establishment of presbyterianism, while the nobility and gentry were more concerned about politics.55 Gordon of Ruthven saw it as symptomatic of an ‘unlawfull, ambitious and uncureable combustion’ which challenged ‘the only compleat and heaven-imitating rule of monarchie’, an institution now threatened with being transformed into a ravenous, devouring, atheistical, turbulent and all-confused anarchy.56 Lord Somerville wrote that the covenant was so detestable that its very memory together with its authors and promoters would be hated forever since it generated the greatest rebellion ever known in England and Scotland.57 In February 1644 Argyll summarised the covenant as being concerned with ‘preservation and reformation of religion, true honour and happiness of the king and the public peace and liberty of his dominions’.58 If that assessment was not altogether untrue, neither was it strictly accurate. The opening section of the covenant discusses the dire state of religion; the first clause commits the signatories to religious uniformity and the second to the extirpation of popery and prelacy. It is only in the third clause that the preservation and defence of the king are mentioned, and at that, only after the signatories have sworn preservation of the rights and privileges of parliament and the liberties of kingdoms. In the fourth — on the rooting out of malignants — one such type, mentioned in passing, is the malignant who divides his king from the people. The fifth clause celebrating the happy peace brought about by parliaments contains no mention of the king who is again barely noticed in the last clause. He is excluded entirely in the final flourish which expresses the hope that the present British experience will serve to encourage ‘other Christian churches, groaning under, or in danger of, the yoke of anti-christian tyranny, to join in the same or like association and covenant to the glory of God, the enlargement of the kingdom of Jesus Christ, and the peace and tranquillity of

Christian kingdoms and commonwealths’. The 1643 league is much more of a kingless covenant than that of 1638. The king is present, only just, but the document is mainly concerned with church (or religion) and parliament. The royalists were correct — it was a treasonable document, but it was produced by people of two nations who believed that their king had committed treason against them. It was made for England but manufactured in Scotland from native raw materials of covenant and constitutional reform; it was radical for Scotland but absolutely revolutionary for England. Furthermore it could be exported to the other countries of Christendom. Baillie was not mistaken when, perceptive as ever, he distinguished the covenant as marking ‘a new period and crise’. The Solemn League truly marks a watershed in British history, distinguishing a political divide which much later would be enshrined in the terms Whig and Tory. The deliberations between Vane, Argyll, Henderson, Marshall and the others jettisoned the last trappings of medieval kingship in response to Stewart absolutism and asserted the British subject’s right to liberty. Throughout the negotiations and in the preceding months the Scots had behaved like respectable elder brothers anxious to educate and encourage their younger English siblings in the ways of religious perfection. England could now achieve ‘perfect reformation’ as had the Scots, according to their myth, in the ‘popular and parliamentary’ movement of 1560. England would now receive assistance to secure the same constitutional and religious concessions as the Scots had won, through their own initiative, in 1641. The notion that Scotland might provide precedent and example for England ran counter to History and, of course, History was to reject it, but the Solemn League enshrines one of the few brief moments of truly British history in a union which sublimated religious and political aspirations in a declaration of war upon the common enemy, the king. One anonymous English writer friendly to the cause observed that at first the covenant seemed a ‘hard morsel’ to digest but he did eventually manage to swallow it.59 Not all were so easily persuaded. It was objected that English signatories undertook to maintain the discipline of Scotland — ‘a bold oath, not one of ten amongst you that understands what he swears. What have you to do with Scotland, their religion their discipline; let them look to themselves and you to yourselves. It is against the laws and constitutions of kingdoms that you should meddle with their matters or they with yours’. On the latter point it was objected that Elizabeth sent the Scots aid (at the time of Reformation) without infringing the laws of God, of charity, of the Christian community or the laws of Man. Understanding was not essential to subscription since the bible commands all to swear the covenant but does not distinguish those whose ignorance might render them unfit.60 Those who objected to taking up arms against the king were advised to distinguish between the man and the office. As king he can command nothing but what the law commands and then he must be obeyed. As a man he may be corrupted by poor judgement and passion — ‘herein he is the best subject that

disobeys him’.61 It is worth noting that the idea of the covenant was not unknown in certain English circles. The Westminster Assembly claimed that the substance of the Solemn League was anticipated in parliament’s Solemn Protestation of 5 May 1641.62 Baillie, indeed, described the protestation as ‘our Scottish Covenant’.63 There was further reference to the English covenant in the summer of 1643.64 Nonetheless it is obvious that the concept of the covenant was much less familiar in England than it was in Scotland. Another English apologist who penned The Three Kingdoms’ Healing Plaister instructed his readers on the difference between civil and religious covenants. The civil is that between man and man — ‘such a covenant is made between the kings of England and the Commons to maintain their lawes and liberty of which God is judge’. The religious covenant is a divine and sacred ordinance of God, made before God, or with God; ‘it is an ordinance and is everlasting as well under the gospell as under the law. God himself was the author of it. It is as ancient as man and of use as long as men indure, so long as fidelity is to be cherished among men and so long as men shall be conformable to God’s will (which is forever)’. The writer argued that the covenant would not be breached even if the two kingdoms did not agree on government. ‘It is more necessary to us at this time than ever it was to the Nation of the Jewes and of greater utility if rightly done and well performed’.65 An anonymous royalist pamphleteer scorned the absence of law in the entire covenant: ‘You may see by that how they mean to govern. Tis cleare the purpose is to leave the people at liberty to kill the king’s person and to trample on his authority’.66 There are dozens of pamphlets which debate the rights and wrongs of the issue. The foregoing is merely a sampling but it is quite clear that contemporary argument anticipated the later historiographical debate to which the covenant has been subjected. The covenanters took considerable pains to refute the charge that they were intent upon imposing their own reformation on England. In 1640 Henderson produced a paper on the Lawfulness of the Expedition into England in which he anticipated that if the Scots succeeded, Scotland would experience a second reformation and England would be reformed according to the wishes of the Protestant party in England.67 If he was a little vague on this occasion, he was quite explicit on this issue the following year: As we account it no less than usurpation and presumption for one kingdom or church, were it never so mighty and glorious to give laws and rules of reformation to another free and independent church and kingdom ... so we have not been so forgetful of ourselves who are the lesser, and of England which is the greater kingdom, as to suffer any such arrogant and presumptuous thought to enter into our minds ... We do not presume to propound the government of the Church of Scotland as a pattern for the Church of England but do only represent in all modesty these few considerations according to the trust committed to us.68

Indeed he went further, for only a couple of months before the English parliament established what became the Westminster Assembly, he cautioned against a Scottish decision on the

confession of faith, directory of worship, form of church government and catechism until it was known what would transpire in England and Ireland ‘where I still wait for a reformation and uniformity with us — but this must be brought to passe by common consent, and we are not to conceave that they will embrace our forme, but a new forme must be set downe for us all and in my opinione some men sett apairt sometime for that work ...’69 George Gillespie later told the divines that the Scots were not ‘presuming to prescribe anything to you, but were willing to receive as well as offer light’ and to enter free debate.70 All too often the Solemn League and the Westminster Assembly have been regarded as completely separate but the Scottish leadership well understood that the fine print in their covenant would be worked out in London. Although few Scots participated in the Westminster debates, the stature of men like Henderson, Rutherford or George Gillespie (who spoke so frequently that he allegedly returned home with an English accent) was such that they had an influence upon the outcome vastly out of proportion to their numbers. The true lifespan of the Solemn League extended only a little beyond the Westminster Assembly which concluded its business in 1647. The Engagement of December that year and the subsequent campaign which ended at Preston in August 1648 destroyed the civil league forever. Although there were those who continued to advocate a renewal of the covenant in 1648 and for many decades to come, even Samuel Rutherford and his colleagues recognised that not all parts of the covenant were of equal weight, some clauses being religious, others purely civil, nor were all the articles to be considered of the same nature, ‘some of them being absolute and binding absolutely, others being conditional and binding conditionally only ...’71 The question of whether the Solemn League advanced the cause of union is complex and it is necessary to place the problem in a wider context. It has been well said that ‘in the whole period down to 1603 religion probably did more than anything to foster the consciousness of common aims and a common destiny’.72 Elizabethan England appeared to hold out the promise of the ideal of the Godly Ruler, yet presbyterian opposition to James VI ensured that he could never fulfil that role. The skirmishes of James’s English reign led to open revolt against his son when it became clear that, in Baillie’s wonderfully evocative phrase, Charles was attempting to administer the Scottish kirk like ‘a pendicle of the diocese of York’.73 The covenanters, however, never forgot the Protestant debt to England. A manifesto of 1639, for example, made the point that if the covenanters were successful in securing constitutional reform and their ecclesiastical demands, ‘the Englishes would one day reap the fruits thereof and who knew how soon’.74 When the covenanters invaded England in 1640 they took care to stress their common cause with the English.75 In January 1643 a number of royalists signed the ‘Cross Petition’ which urged the re-establishment of royal authority and the continuation of ‘that happy union betwixt the two kingdoms which can never be conceived to be intended to weaken the head, whereby it is knit together’. Significantly they described themselves as

‘we British subjects’ who hoped that unity of church government might strengthen the civil union.76 The response to the Cross Petition is of the greatest interest in the context of union. One pamphlet attacking the petition was almost certainly written by Henderson. The piece sensibly pointed out that unity in religion and uniformity in covenant were not novel suggestions but it made a most interesting observation which pointed forward to the need for a new covenant. The National Covenant, it was claimed, is qualified by expresse limitations and restrictions to this kirk and kingdome, to the Religion, Lawes and Liberties of Scotland, therefore can no more be extended ... to the lawes and Liberties of England unto which we are strangers than the Kirk of England can judge of our lawes and determine our differences, the two kingdoms being still independent and not subordinate to one another but parallel.77

To argue anything else would have been to commit the sins of James and Charles in seeking to impose the tyranny of prelacy upon the two kingdoms. That the covenanters were well aware of the potential irony in their situation is illustrated by a piece of doggerel published by George Lauder in 1641. Lauder reviewed the history of the Scottish and English churches since the reformation. On the one hand he condemned James VI: For to make both one as was his ayme Hee laboured to make them both the same.

On the other hand he predicted that if Charles would concede the demands of the Scottish parliament in 1641 then, So shall great Brittaine prosper and his raigne Bring to this isle the golden age agayne.78

Lauder, like Henderson, was acutely aware that the covenanters must avoid the charge of which they accused James and Charles: namely the tyrannical imposition of alien religion. Union in the person of the monarch equated with ecclesiastical despotism, the very issue which united the co-religionists in Scotland and England in their struggle against the king. To be British was to be royalist; to be royalist was to be British. The covenanters appear to have been scrupulous in avoiding any references which might provoke alternative interpretations. A paper which supplemented the Solemn League explained the new covenant as a revival of the Anglo-Scottish alliance which had existed at the time of the Scottish Reformation and the Armada. The two countries sailed in one ship. If religion was destroyed in one kingdom, it must inevitably suffer in the other. English episcopacy had caused the Troubles in Scotland. The Scots were now asked to strike terror into the kingdom of Antichrist which would receive a considerable wound from this ‘holy union’. As the tribes of Reuben and Gad crossed the Jordan in order to place their brethren in possession of the Promised Land, the Scots would once again invade England ‘to drive out

the Canaanites and recover the liberty of the gospel’. They were not imposing anything upon England; rather they were assisting their brothers.79 It is instructive briefly to consider the addresses to the Commons made by both Nye and Henderson on 25 September. Nye was presumably more inspiring than when he performed in Edinburgh a month earlier.80 He predicted that the Solemn League would advance Christ’s kingdom upon earth and ‘make Jerusalem once more the praise of the whole world’. Both England and Scotland had already striven to their utmost. Further effort was now required so that the three kingdoms might be born again in the great engagement of the covenant which would inspire other reformed churches to further reformation and would destroy inferior leagues concocted on behalf of popery and prelacy: ‘As this is the last oath you are likely to take in this kind so it is our last refuge’. Covenant-breakers were the worst of heathens; the oath was truly sacred. Reformation is always an immense undertaking which always generates ‘great stirre and opposition’. It was complained of the Apostles that they were men who would turn the world upside down; Solemn Leaguers would be similarly libelled. As he reached his conclusion he counselled humility, prudence, gentleness and meekness. Possibly his recent experience in Scotland was not far from his mind when he added: I have not observed any disputes carried on with more bitterness in men’s writings, and with a more unsanctified heat of spirit, yea and by godly men too, than in contraversies about discipline, church government, ceremonies and the like. Surely to argue about Government with such ungoverned passions, to argue for Reformation with a spirit so unreformed is uncomely. Let us remember that too much heat as well as too much coldness may harden in their wayes and hinder reformation.81

If Nye was largely concerned to inform his audience about what a covenant actually was, Henderson appeared as the elder statesman well versed in covenanting rhetoric. Men must not remain silent in this great undertaking: It is the best work of faith to join in covenant with God, the best work of love and Christian communion, the best work of the best zeal to join in covenant for reformation against the enemies of God and religion, the best work of true loyalty to join in covenant for the preservation of our king and superiors, the best proof of natural affection to join for the defence of native country, liberties and laws.

Previous covenants did not go far enough — ‘they went not on thoroughly to enter in a Solemn Covenant’. He cited the experience of Scotland as an example, not as a model. The overweening ambition of the prelates made them set one foot on the neck of the church and the other on the neck of the state. Eventually the people were delivered from tyranny and slavery by the Lord, and from small beginnings the movement grew. The present covenant was dictated by Necessitas. Necessity has within it a kind of sovereignty and is a law above all laws. The king had ignored Scottish supplications. Deliberations at Edinburgh had brought forth the covenant — ‘the mainfold necessity demanded by Nature, Religion, Loyalty and Love’. Once it has been advertised to other reformed churches it will be ‘no other than the beginning of a Jubilee and joyful deliverance from the Anti-christian yoke and

tyranny’.82 Neither Nye nor Henderson mentions the civil league nor is there the slightest reference to union. Both concentrate exclusively upon the covenant which Nye seems compelled to explain. Henderson, on the other hand, stresses that he offers the example but not the model of the Scottish experience. The delivery of these two speeches may be seen as the high point of the Covenanting Revolution. Effectively that revolution had been achieved in November 1641; the Scottish revolutionaries came unstuck when they attempted to export that revolution to England. Henderson was probably fully aware that the English had not thought out the great enterprise upon which they had embarked when he cautioned in his speech that Scotland’s cause originated in small beginnings. The Scots had been debating and writing about reformation and the legality of resistance since the 1550s. The view in Scotland was that England had never achieved true reformation. The Scottish debate had intensified in the Melvillian period, in the opposition to James VI and, of course, in the heady years of the National Covenant. Yet perhaps it was the covenant most of all which gave them pause for thought. As Arthur Williamson, Roger Mason and others83 have demonstrated, the covenanting ideal had been around for some considerable time by 1643, but neither the National Covenanters nor the Solemn Leaguers in their propaganda ever appealed to a Scottish covenant earlier than 1581, namely the King’s Confession. The very designation of that document underlines its significance; it was the first ‘covenant’ into which the king and the whole nation had been deemed to enter. Mason has recently shown that the reformers of the 1550s shifted their rhetoric from that of the covenant to that of the commonweal.84 Yet the major inspiration in Scottish thinking about the covenant (and this is the subject of another essay) derived ultimately from the covenant of Heinrich Bullinger with its explicit idea of double reformation — reformation of religion but also reformation of civil society.85 Clearly in the immediate approach to 1560 its supporters had difficulty in debating double reformation but they did launch such a programme in the 1560s. There was much talk in the aftermath of the Solemn League of the purging of society, of the problems which had assailed it in its uncovenanted state, and so on, but Scottish institutions were still too different from English ones for the covenant to operate in both countries. They could join in a civil league but they could not unite in a civil covenant. The ‘one nation in the land upon the mountains of Israel’ was still a very faint beam on a very far horizon in 1643 and, of course, in the longer historical term the ideal proved totally elusive. The Solemn League looked to union only in the sense of holy union of the type which had existed, for some, during the reign of Elizabeth. All of this is not to deny that the Solemn League and Covenant represents a moment of supreme importance in British history: ‘Surelie it was a great act of faith in God and hudge courage and unheard of compassion that moved our nation to hazard their own peace and venture their lives and all for to save a people irrecoverablie ruined both in their own and all

the world’s eyes’.86 Despite the promise of 1643 the decade was to demonstrate that while ‘God’s great dishclout’ might scour the filthiness of the ceremonies, it could not cleanse the legacy of Time. NOTES 1. A Testimony To the Truth of Jesus Christ or To the Doctrine, Worship, Discipline and Government of the Kirk of Scotland ... (Edinburgh, 1660), 1–15. 2. Robert Baillie, The Letters and Journals, ed. D. Laing (Edinburgh, 1841–2), ii, 90, 103. 3. D. Hay Fleming, The Story of the Scottish Covenants in Outline (Edinburgh, 1904), v. 4. See S. W. Carruthers, ‘The Solemn League and Covenant: Its Text and Translation’, Records of the Scottish Church History Society, v (1938), 238–51; C. V. Wedgwood, The King’s War 1641–1647 (London, 1958), 239–41; David Stevenson, The Scottish Revolution 1637–44: The Triumph of the Covenanters (Newton Abbot, 1973), 283–93; Lawrence Kaplan, Politics and Religion During the English Revolution: The Scots and the Long Parliament 1643–1645 (New York, 1976), xx– xxi; William Ferguson, Scotland’s Relations with England: A Survey to 1707 (Edinburgh, 1977), 126–8; Walter Makey, The Church of the Covenant 1637–51 (Edinburgh, 1979), 68–70. Hugh Watt, The Solemn League and Covenant’, in Recalling the Scottish Covenants (London, 1946), is quite useless. Discussions of the covenant figure in the many nineteenth-century biographies of the main protagonists. Two other useful accounts which pre-date Fleming are Alexander Peterkin, Records of the Kirk of Scotland Vol. I (Edinburgh, 1838), 341–395, and S. R. Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War (London, 1893), i, 226–236. Despite the best efforts of all of these authors (and probably this one too) the critical literature on the Solemn League is disappointing and sadly deficient. 5. G. M. Paul (ed.), Diary of Archibald Johnston of Wariston 1632–1639 (SHS, 1911), 335. 6. Ferguson, Scotland’s Relations, 127; Violet A. Rowe, Sir Harry Vane the Younger (London, 1970), 23n; Makey, Church of the Covenant, 69. 7. T. Thomson and C. Innes (eds.), Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland [APS] (London, 1814–75), VI, i, 150. 8. Rowe, Sir Harry Vane, 32; John Willcock, Life of Sir Henry Vane the Younger: Statesman and Mystic (London, 1913), 124–5. Willcock, who was also the biographer of Argyll, has some shrewd observations on the similarities between the two men. 9. I do not share Walter Makey’s reading of Baillie — ‘as the moment of crisis approached, Argyll receded into the shadows’, Church of the Covenant, 69. It is inconceivable that Argyll was not privy to the most secret of negotiations while the testimony of Vane (see below) suggests that he was. Baillie, Letters, ii, 85, names Argyll at the head of the list of noblemen who attended the Assembly each morning and the Convention in the afternoon. Argyll is also the first named by Henry Guthry on a list of Henderson’s assessors: Memoirs of Henry Guthry Late Bishop of Dunkeld in Scotland (London, 1702), 118. It was Argyll’s style to be everywhere and nowhere. 10. E. Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England begun in the year 1641, ed. W. D. Macray (Oxford, 1888), vi, 266–7. 11. HMC, Hastings, iv, 134; Willcock, Life of Vane, 130. 12. RPC, vii, 43, 149, 152–3, 171, 190–1, 196. 13. Ibid., vii, 211; HMC, XII Cowper, ii, 308. 14. Lawrence Kaplan, ‘Steps to War: the Scots and Parliament 1642–3’, Journal of British Studies, ix (1969–70), 53. 15. Philip Hardwicke, 2nd Earl of York, Miscellaneous State Papers 1561–1776 (London, 1778), iii, 23–6. 16. RPC, vii, 163. 17. Baillie, Letters, ii, 46–7. 18. Peterkin, Records, 324. 19. Ibid., 324–6. 20. Ibid., 329. 21. RPC, vii, 314, 317–8. 22. Hardwicke, State Papers, iii, 35. 23. RPC, vii, 359–363. 24. Gilbert Burnet, Memoires of the Lives and Actions of James and William Dukes of Hamilton and Castleherald

(London, 1678), 204–5; Baillie, Letters, 58–60; Stevenson, Scottish Revolution, 256–7. 25. HMC, 21 Hamilton Supp., 63. 26. HMC, 21 Hamilton Supp., 65–7. 27. John, Earl of Rothes, A Relation of Proceedings Concerning the Affairs of the Kirk of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1835), 119. 28. RPC, vii, 372–4; Burnet, Dukes of Hamilton, 206–9; HMC, Portland XIII, App. Pt. 1, 86. 29. HMC, 21 Hamilton Supp., 65. 30. Baillie, Letters, ii, 42. 31. Thomas Carte, A Collection of Original Letters and Papers Concerning the Affairs of England from 1641 to 1660 (London, 1739), i, 20; George Wishart, The Memoirs of James Marquis of Montrose 1639–1650, ed. A. D. Murdoch and H. F. M. Simpson (London, 1893), 25; Baillie, Letters, ii, 74. 32. Baillie, Letters, ii, 80; RPC, vii, 442–4. 33. APS, VI, i, 6. 34. Baillie, Letters, ii, 81–101. 35. John Spalding, Memorials of the Trubles in Scotland and England 1624–1645 (Aberdeen, 1850), ii, 260–2. 36. D. Hay Fleming (ed.), Diary of Sir Archibald Johnston of Wariston Vol. II 1650–1654 (SHS, 1919), 72. 37. Clarendon, History, vii, 221. 38. James K. Hosmer, The Life of Sir Harry Vane Governor of Massachusetts Bay and Leader of the Long Parliament (Boston, 1898), 181, quoting Lawrence Echard. Rowe, Sir Harry Vane, 24, considers that, on balance, reports that Vane dominated the proceedings are probably accurate. 39. Hosmer, Vane, 185. The same point is made in Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials Vol. VI (London, 1810), 197. 40. APS, VI, i, 42, 150. 41. Kaplan, Politics and Religion, xx–xxi; Stevenson, Scottish Revolution, 288. 42. Baillie, Letters, ii, 102. 43. Gardiner, Great Civil War, i, 230n. 44. J. D. Ogilvie (ed.). Diary of Sir Archibald Johnston of Wariston Vol. Ill 1655–1660 (SHS, 1940), 171, 158. This was in January 1660. One discussion with Vane prompted Johnston to reflect: ‘pity my simplicity preyed upon by subtilty of uthers. In dealing with nimble, witty, untender men diffedence is necessary to a statesman’ (p. 127). 45. Clarendon, History, vii, 216. 46. Cf. Burnet, Hamiltons, 240, on the alterations: ‘the Scots either perceived not this change or were glad to get it carried on at any rate’. 47. Ferguson, Scotland’s Relations, 127. 48. Stevenson, Scottish Revolution, 287–90; Robert Low Orr, Alexander Henderson Churchman and Covenanter (London, 1919), 312. 49. Burnet, Hamiltons, 239–40. 50. Baillie, Letters, ii, 84. 51. Guthry, Memoirs, 117–9. Guthry claims that Henderson ‘paused a long time’ after Guthry’s discourse ‘and at last made no direct reply to it’. The obvious implication is that Henderson somehow failed in his duty as moderator but the passage can equally be interpreted to suggest that he was awaiting responses. Many allegedly later acknowledged that they agreed with Guthry’s point but there were no seconders. Such is the nature of committees. 52. Baillie, Letters, ii, 89; CSPD, 1641–3, 475–6. 53. Edward J. Cowan, Montrose: For Covenant and King (London, 1977), 49–50. 54. Mark Napier, Memorials of Montrose and His Times (Edinburgh, 1848), ii, 120. See also i, 221–2. 55. Robert Mentet (Menteith) of Salmonet, The History of the Troubles of Great Britain, trans. James Ogilvie (London, 1735), 149–50. 56. Patrick Gordon of Ruthven, A Short Abridgement of Britane’s Distemper MDCXXXIX to MDCLIX (Aberdeen, 1844), 40. 57. James eleventh Lord Somerville, Memorie of the Somervilles (Edinburgh, 1815), ii, 214–6. 58. CSPD, 1644, 31–2. 59. Quoted Orr, Henderson, 312. 60. The Solemne League and Covenant of Three Kingdomes Cleared to the Conscience of Everyman who is not Willingly

Blind or Wilfully Obstinate ... (London, 1643), 1–3. 61. England’s Covenant Proved Lawfull and Necessary … (London, 1643), 15. 62. John Rushworth, Historical Collections, 4 parts in 7 vols. (London, 1659–1701), Pt. Ill Vol. ii, 476. 63. Baillie, Letters, i, 351. 64. Wayne R. Spear, ‘Covenanted Uniformity in Religion: The Influence of the Scottish Commissioners upon die Ecclesiology of the Westminster Assembly’ (Pittsburg University Ph.D. Thesis, 1976), 49–50. 65. The Three Kingdomes Healing Plaister (London, 1643), 1–2, 7–8, 13. 66. Cited by Rowe, Sir Harry Vane, 25n. 67. Orr, Henderson, 314. 68. Orr, Henderson, 257–61, 314. Guthry, Memoirs, 116, probably overstates the case when he says that ‘Henderson was enclin’d that we should have rested with our own Reformation which the king had confirmed and not to have meddled with the English’, but when the Assembly accepted Henderson as moderator it also accepted his well-known views. 69. Baillie, Letters, ii, 2. 70. George Gillespie, Aaron’s Rod Blossoming (London, 1646), i. 71. A Testimony To the Truth of Jesus Christ, 18. 72. Gordon Donaldson, ‘Foundations of Anglo-Scottish Union’, in S. T. Bindoff and others (eds.), Elizabethan Government and Society: Essays Presented to Sir John Neale (London, 1961), 286. 73. Baillie, Letters, i, 2. On this see Edward J. Cowan, ‘The Union of the Crowns and the Crisis of the Constitution in 17th Century Scotland’, in S. Dyrvik and others (eds.), The Satellite State (Bergen, 1979), 121–140. 74. J. Gordon of Rothiemay, History of Scots Affairs from MDCXXXVII to MDCLXI, ed. J. Robertson and G. Grub (Aberdeen, 1841), ii, 193. 75. Spaldings Memorialls, i, 330–1. 76. Burnet, Hamiltons, 206–9. 77. A Declaration Against a Crosse Petition (Edinburgh, 1643), 11–12. 78. G. L. (George Lauder), Caledonia’s Covenant or Ane Panegyrick to the World (1641), 3, 10. 79. Mentet, Troubles, 148–9. 80. ‘Mr Nye did not please. His voice was clamorous: he touched neither in prayer nor preaching the common bussinesse: he read much out of his paper book’: Baillie, Letters, ii, 97. 81. Speeches Delivered Before the Subscribing of the Covenant (Edinburgh, 1643), 1–14. 82. Ibid., 15–22. 83. Arthur Williamson, Scottish National Consciousness in the Age of James VI (Edinburgh, 1979), passim; Roger Mason, ‘Covenant and Commonweal: the language of politics in Reformation Scotland’, in Norman Macdougall (ed.), Church, Politics and Society: Scotland 1408–1929 (Edinburgh, 1983). 84. Mason, ‘Covenant and Commonweal’. 85. J. Wayne Baker, Heinrich Bullinger and the Covenant: The Other Reformed Tradition (Athens, Ohio, 1980), esp. 100–101. 86. Baillie, Letters, ii, 99–100.

10 Andrew Fletcher’s Vision of Union John Robertson

The name of Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun is a byword for Scottish patriotism. Whether they were impressed or alarmed by his learning, his republicanism, his fierce and violent temper, contemporaries were agreed that his loyalty to his country was paramount and incorruptible. His fierce pride in being a Scot was never hidden; and his passionate protests against the betrayal of his country in the last Scottish parliaments, culminating in his exasperated opposition to the Treaty of Union of 1707, have ensured him a lasting reputation.1 Yet if Fletcher’s patriotism was exemplary, and his opposition to the Union Treaty insuperable, there is equally no denying that he was in favour of a degree of union between Scotland and England. A commitment to union is expressed in the earliest work attributed to Fletcher, A Letter to a Member of the Convention of States in Scotland (1689) (an attribution which may be correct), and in the last, the State of the Controversy betwixt United and Separate Parliaments (1706) (an attribution more commonly accepted, but which I am inclined to doubt).2 And the commitment is given form and substance in the writings known to be by Fletcher, those collected in The Political Works of Andrew Fletcher.3 Fletcher advanced three schemes involving union between Scotland and England. First, there is the plan for a joint Scottish and English militia, set out in the Discourse of Government with relation to Militias (1698). The plan provided for four separate militia camps in Britain, three in England and one in Scotland; all the young men of the two countries would be obliged to serve, those of quality and estate being given greater responsibility. The force was to be raised by the parliaments of the two nations, but Fletcher implied that it would be under the unified command of one monarch.4 The second scheme entailing union is the programme of Limitations which Fletcher advanced in the speeches he delivered to the Scottish parliament of 1703, and afterwards published as Speeches by a Member of the Parliament which began at Edinburgh the 6th of May 1703. These Limitations, which would be appended to the Act of Security by which the Scots were to settle the succession to their throne after the reigning Queen Anne, were designed to place

specific restrictions on the power of a future Scottish monarch who was also monarch of England. They were not, Fletcher made clear, ‘limitations upon any prince, who shall only be king of Scotland, nor do any way tend to separate us from England; but calculated merely to this end, that so long as we continue to be under the same prince with our neighbour nation, we may be free from the influence of English councils and ministers ...’5 It is true that in subsequent speeches Fletcher moved that if the queen died without heir, Scotland’s throne should be separated from England’s.6 But Fletcher left no doubt that this was a measure of last resort, by no means desirable. As he observed in his last certain work, written shortly afterwards, An Account of a Conversation Concerning the Right Regulation of Governments (1706), ‘in a state of separation from England, my country would be perpetually involved in bloody and destructive wars’. This remark followed the exposition of the third of his schemes involving union, his plan for a ‘union and league’ of the three kingdoms of Scotland, England and Ireland as part of a comprehensive reform of government throughout Europe.7 The fact of Fletcher’s commitment to a degree of union is thus clear. But for what purposes did Fletcher put forward these schemes? What was the relation between the various schemes? And what were his sources of inspiration? To these, the really interesting questions, answers have so far been limited in number and scope. In this essay, therefore, I would like to advance some answers. I shall consider in turn each of the three schemes referred to, but will give less weight to those of the militia and the Limitations. The militia scheme has already received a good deal of attention, from myself and others. The Limitations may well deserve more attention than I propose to give them; but I wish to caution against overemphasis on their significance in Fletcher’s thought. To help explain this point, I shall make a digression to consider the counter-arguments of the advocates of full, incorporating union. Thereafter, however, the essay will return to Fletcher, and will focus on the third scheme of union, that of the Account of a Conversation. A closer examination of this work, of the nature and inspiration of its proposals, I shall suggest, opens up horizons altogether wider and more exotic than those that can be associated with the Limitations. It is the Account of a Conversation which reveals that Fletcher had nothing less than a vision of union. Fletcher’s proposal for a militia followed from the remarkable essay in historical analysis with which he opened the Discourse of Government. Everywhere on the continent of Europe, he explained, the years around 1500 had seen ‘a total alteration in the way of living’, and hence of government. The introduction of new luxuries and pleasures had led the people to abandon the baronial militias of the middle ages, militias which had secured the sword in the hands of the subject; in their stead had arisen standing mercenary forces which gave the power of the sword to princes. By the greatest good fortune, Scotland and England had so far been exempt from this process. Scotland had simply been too poor to afford a permanent army; and this, coupled with the absence of continental possessions to defend and the weakness of their kings, had diminished the incentive for the English to acquire one. Fletcher

was afraid, however, that this fortunate immunity was about to be lost. The present king, William, was determined to maintain an army in peacetime, and it was evident that he viewed Scotland in particular as a reservoir of men. Both countries thus stood in imminent danger of falling under ‘a French fashion of monarchy’, a despotism which would inevitably presage the onset of corruption, the decay of trade, and the decline of London to the condition of Paris, ‘reduced to a peddling trade, serving only to foment the luxury of a court’.8 It was to meet this danger that Fletcher proposed his militia. It was to be a defence for the whole island: in simple strategic terms, Fletcher recognised, England and Scotland must act as one, and co-ordinate their forces. Fletcher did not preclude intervention by this force in the affairs of Europe: detachments might do periods of service with allies. But he was clear that the proper contribution of the two nations to ‘the balance of Europe’ was through the fleet. ‘The sea is the only empire which can naturally belong to us. Conquest is not our interest, much less to consume our people and treasure in conquering for others.’9 At the same time, the emphasis on strategic unity was qualified by the stipulation that the Scottish parliament would be responsible for the separate Scottish camp. No less important, the camps would combat moral corruption, providing the youth of the two countries with ‘as great a school of virtue as of military discipline’.10 Fletcher’s conception of a militia was clearly inspired by the classical republican or civic tradition in early modern political thought, the tradition which ran back to Machiavelli, and which had been Anglicised by James Harrington. The pamphlet itself was first written as a contribution to the great ‘Standing Army Controversy’ of 1697–98, when Harrington’s English disciples assailed William’s armies in the name of liberty, virtue and citizenship.11 But there are important respects in which Fletcher’s thinking on the militia question distinguished him from Harrington and his English followers. Fletcher’s comparative historical perspective was unparalleled among English writers, who concentrated on English examples; and Fletcher used this perspective to dramatise the peculiar predicament of Scotland. Because of its poverty, Scotland would suffer far more heavily than England if it had to support a standing army. The establishment of a militia in Scotland, therefore, was imperative not only to avert despotism, but to contribute to a whole programme of economic, social and political regeneration.12 A second point of difference concerned empire. Harrington had framed Oceana as a ‘commonwealth for increase’, and had explicitly proposed that Marpesia (Scotland) should be treated as the first target of such increase. Fletcher treated Scotland and England as equally independent nations, and was emphatic that conquest was contrary to their interest. In suggesting that their only natural empire was the sea, Fletcher was closer to contemporary English anti-army writers, who had likewise abandoned Harrington’s territorial ambitions.13 But here too Fletcher had a specifically Scottish interest: his strong support in 1698 for the Scottish Darien scheme made it plain that he did not think in terms of a single British commercial empire.

A programme for Scotland’s economic development and social reconstruction was set out by Fletcher in the same year as his militia plan, when he responded to the country’s mounting economic crisis in the Two Discourses Concerning the Affairs of Scotland (1698). The opportunity to propound his ideas for political reform came a little later, in the Scottish parliament of 1703. Enraged by the presumption of the English Act of Settlement (1701), and set to consider its own Act of Security, this parliament offered fertile ground for Fletcher’s programme of Limitations. In his Speeches, Fletcher introduced and justified the Limitations by a scathing attack on the existing Union of the Crowns. By that union, he maintained, Scotland had simply been subordinated to the English court and to English ministers. It was the English court which was responsible for the failure of the Darien scheme, for the drain of Scotland’s wealth to the south, for the blatant exploitation of Scottish manpower in service in English and Dutch armies, in a word, for ‘our poverty, misery and dependence’. But Fletcher did not blame the English only. Under the Union of the Crowns Scottish ministers had allowed themselves to be bribed into subservience to English interests, and the younger sons of the Scottish nobility and gentry had prostituted themselves as soldiers of fortune, instead of improving their country. If the Union of the Crowns had reduced Scotland to a condition ‘more like a conquered province, than a free independent people’, the fault lay as much within Scotland as at the English court.14 The Limitations, accordingly, were to retrieve this condition by securing, under a common monarchy with England, the integrity of Scotland’s separate legislative, executive and judicial institutions and militia, and by providing, through regular elections, for the Scots’ active participation in these institutions. Only by establishing the necessary institutions on such a firm base and by ensuring commitment to them would Scotland’s freedom and independence be upheld. In proposing the Limitations, Fletcher expressly referred to the Scottish past, to ‘our ancient constitution’ and to the liberties enjoyed by ‘our ancestors’ before the Union of the Crowns. More precisely, as William Ferguson has pointed out, Fletcher’s Limitations seem to follow closely the programme of legislation passed in the revolutionary covenanter parliament of 1641.15 Such an inspiration would have been natural enough. The concept of Limitations was consistent with the doctrine of mixed monarchy, which set the crown within rather than above the constitution. Popular among Calvinists across Europe, since it both legitimised checks on the powers of the crown and left the church independent of the secular authorities, the doctrine of mixed monarchy had been given particularly radical expression by the Scots covenanters in their demands on Charles I at the outset of the civil war.16 By evoking this past, Limitations offered Fletcher well-understood instruments for curbing the British monarchy in the interests of Scotland’s political independence. Nonetheless, there are grounds for questioning the extent of Fletcher’s commitment to this national tradition. The first doubts are raised by Fletcher’s presentation of the Limitations. On the one hand, he was noticeably vague in his references to the ancient constitution and the

liberties in existence before the Union of the Crowns; the earliest statute he cited was passed in the first parliament of Charles II. On the other hand, Fletcher was anything but vague in his references to the covenanters whose programme he appeared to reproduce. The extension of the prerogative to the overthrow of the ancient constitution might have been chiefly the work of ‘the prelatical party’; but ‘the peevish, imprudent and detestable conduct of the Presbyterians, who opposed these principles only in others’, had rooted them more deeply in the nation. For Fletcher there was no example in ‘the uncharitable and insupportable humour and ridiculous conduct of bigots of any sort’.17 Such diffidence towards the ancient constitution and disdain for the covenanters suggest that Fletcher recognised the existence of real difficulties in the way of constructing his constitutional programme on such foundations. As Scottish thinkers had long been aware, the nation’s pretensions to an ancient constitution were thin. Its records were notoriously few and interrupted, and its histories consisted for the most part of successive tales of martial deeds and misdeeds.18 The most tangible expression of an ancient right to place limitations on the monarchy was the ideal of the ‘Community of the Realm’, formulated in the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320 and subsequently harnessed to the Calvinist cause by George Buchanan in his De Iure Regni apud Scotos (1579) and Rerum Scoticarum Historia (1582). But Buchanan’s understanding of that ideal, Roger Mason has argued, was rather moral than institutional, relying on the martial qualities of the nobility more than on formal constitutional restraints to check evil or misguided kings.19 In Buchanan, and still more in the ample pages of the covenanter Samuel Rutherford’s Lex, Rex (1644), limitations were also set in the framework of an elaborate theory of the divine derivation of political authority, and of the consequent right of resistance.20 These were not perspectives congenial to Fletcher, who distanced himself from the martial past and insisted that a nation’s liberty and virtue depended on sound institutions, and in whose writing the divine was noticeable by its absence.21 It is unlikely, then, that Fletcher’s Limitations were meant to be a simple restatement of covenanter mixed monarchism. Other works suggest that he was inclined towards a more strictly classical form of republicanism. His conception of a militia was that of a classical republican. A similarly classical outlook is manifest in the programme of economic and social reform which he elaborated in the Two Discourses Concerning Scotland, Bizarre and draconian as his proposals for a form of agrarian law for landowners and domestic servitude for the labouring poor might seem, they made sense as an exemplary application of republican principles of social subordination and the moral responsibility of rulers for their inferiors.22 The Limitations themselves incorporated a proposal for a militia; and by provision for balloting rather than voting in elections to parliament and the council, they sought to give effect to the republican principle that all who were qualified should be liable to serve the public. Though Fletcher never suggested dispensing with the monarch, he seems by such means to have sought a constitution as republican as possible within the framework of mixed

monarchy.23 Whatever the inspiration of Fletcher’s Limitations, however, there is good reason not to confine the analysis of Fletcher’s political thinking to them. The general invocation of ancient constitutional liberties might be enough to appeal to a parliament united in national outrage; and Fletcher’s programme did achieve a striking measure of initial success. Important articles from the Limitations were embodied in the Acts of Security and of Peace and War passed in 1703. But in the longer run, the case for Limitations was not as strong as it first seemed. It was open to serious objections; and as tempers cooled, and government concessions abated the crisis and complicated the issues, the supporters of a full, incorporating union with England gradually pressed these objections home. The arguments of the incorporating unionists are not often taken seriously by historians, and on the constitutional side they have been almost wholly ignored. Obsessed by the evidence of English bribery, some historians have simply refused to consider the arguments as anything but time-serving self-justificatory ‘propaganda’.24 But this seems to me naively narrowminded, and to have resulted in the overlooking of some rather striking and sophisticated argument. Two proponents of incorporating union in particular stand out, William Seton of Pitmedden and George Mackenzie, Viscount Tarbat and, from 1703, first earl of Cromarty. Both of these were committed to incorporating union as early as 1700; and both remained constant in this commitment through the political vicissitudes which followed. Such recognition as the incorporating unionists have received has been for their economic arguments.25 These centred on the need to secure free trade with England and its colonies as the condition of Scotland’s economic development, since free trade would enable the Scots to exploit the price advantage of their agricultural produce, manufactures and fisheries. The disastrous failure of the Darien Scheme greatly strengthened this case: however dastardly the English had been, it was clear that the Scots had little prospect of creating their own closed colonial market. Both Seton and Cromarty adopted this argument from the outset, Seton in his The Interest of Scotland in Three Essays (1700), Cromarty in Parainesis Pacifica; or a perswasive to the Union of Britain (1702). Significantly, Cromarty addressed this part of his argument to the English, acknowledging that they would have to be persuaded that an influx of cheap Scottish goods was to their advantage. By a union the English would have access to cheap Scottish coal and salt, and would obtain the Highland cattle so beneficial to their feeders, and linen cloth and coarse stocking for their country people, much cheaper than now. The implication, however, was that the benefit to Scotland would be even greater.26 Once the English government showed itself willing to concede free trade, first as the price of excluding most of Fletcher’s Limitations from the Act of Security, and then in return for parliamentary union, the confidence of the Scottish incorporating unionists grew. On the English side they now had only to reassure doubters that the two economies would be complementary, a task which Defoe was happy to undertake for them.27 The Scots,

meanwhile, could be alternately impressed with the opportunities which a free-trading union offered, and threatened with the consequences if the offer was spumed. Seton dwelt on the opportunities in his pamphlet of 1706, Scotland’s Great Advantages by an Union with England; but he also reminded members of parliament, in his speech on the First Article of the Treaty, that commerce must have a force to protect it, protection which could only come from England.28 Cromarty’s later pamphlets emphasised the threat, suggesting that England could not be expected to grant free trade without a full union, and that in any incomplete union England’s interest would lie in keeping Scotland poor.29 The incorporating unionists did not by any means have it all their own way. There were protectionist alternatives to free trade, which suggested that Scotland could pursue an independent course of self-generated development. The most significant of these were John Law’s scheme for a Land Bank to provide credit for development, and the proposal of a Council of Trade, which was debated at length in the parliament of 1705.30 But the free trade argument was at once simple and plausible, and by 1706 at least, the protectionists seem to have lost the initiative. If the incorporating unionists were confident of their economic arguments, they were still more confident of their constitutional case. This confidence was founded on a ruthless assessment of the alternatives, not only the existing Union of the Crowns and the previous state of separation, but also the proposed Limitations. The Union of the Crowns, Seton and Cromarty concurred, was indeed ‘a very ill state’. But only its great inconveniences could have led men to look back to what Cromarty in 1706 graphically called ‘the Egyptian fleshpot of a divided lot’. The Scots need only reflect upon the former horrid wars, rapines, robberies, invasions, incursions, murders, exiles, imprisonments, even of our sovereigns, of which our ancient histories, while we were in a separate state, give us many and sad examples

to see what renewed separation would bring. Seton’s speech on the First Article of the Union Treaty made the same point, in language no less forceful.31 Equally, Seton and Cromarty dismissed the case for union with limitations and separate parliaments. The examples of Sweden and Denmark, Castile and Aragon, Spain and Portugal were against the success of such partial unions. Most critical, not all the limitations could prevent the weaker of the kingdoms being neglected in a conflict of interests, nor any treaty of confederation be proof against revision by the stronger.32 Against these alternatives, Seton and Cromarty urged the advantages of a complete, incorporating union. At the outset, in his Interest of Scotland in Three Essays, Seton took this to mean the uniting of both governments and parliaments in one body politic, and envisaged such union extending to the legal systems and churches (whose systems of government, he argued in the first of the three essays, were properly indifferent).33 Cromarty, in Parainesis Pacifica, spoke of being united in one body, under one head, ‘by a perpetual identifying oneness’. But he was prepared to exclude the systems of private law and the churches.34

Neither, however, developed the sort of general, reflective definition of union given a century before by Sir Thomas Craig and other Scottish advocates of closer union between the two nations at the time of James VI’s accession to the English throne.35 Rather, as the issue became focused on the proposal for a union of parliaments, Seton and Cromarty concentrated on two points: the location of sovereignty and the communication of rights. On the point of sovereignty, the Scots were consistently clear and thoroughgoing, far clearer and more thoroughgoing, to my knowledge, than their English counterparts. Seton went straight to the point in 1700, in his Interest of Scotland; and in 1706 he devoted his speech on the Third Article of the Union Treaty to a lucid exposition of the concept and its implications. For his part, Cromarty devoted a separate pamphlet, A Friendly Return to a Letter Concerning Sir George Mackenzie’s and Sir John Nisbet’s Observation and Responce on the Matter of the Union (1706) to a discussion of the subject. Against an opinion derived from Sir George Mackenzie, Seton and Cromarty insisted that the estates were, with the monarch, historically and logically sovereign in Scotland. The government not being a ‘Polish aristocracy’ or a ‘common democracy’, members of the estates were not delegates, bound to refer back to their constituents. The estates and the crown were the supreme legislative power, and in consequence they were perfectly entitled to change the constitution.36 For the rights that would be communicated in an incorporating union, the Scots invoked the authority of Grotius. The favoured passage, cited by Seton, Clerk and Defoe, was from the De Iure Belli ac Pads Book II, chapter ix, section 9: ‘what if two nations be united?’ The passage reads (in the 1738 translation): But if two nations be united, the rights of neither of them shall be lost, but become common, as the Sabins first, and afterwards the Albans, were incorporated with the Romans, and so were they made one state, as Livy expresses it. The same may also be judged of kingdoms which are really and truly united, and not only by a Treaty of Alliance, or because they have but one Prince.37

But where Defoe tried to argue that the Treaty of Union would be superior to the parliament of Britain, and could not be broken without dissolving the constitution, the Scots simply accepted that the result of such a communication of rights would be to place full sovereign power in the new united parliament.38 Thus armed with an uninhibited definition of sovereignty and the authority of Grotius, Seton and Cromarty moved boldly forward onto their opponents’ chosen ground. Incorporating union, they insisted, would secure, not sacrifice, Scotland’s liberty and independence. Considering liberty, Seton qualified the doctrine of sovereignty to the extent of postulating that there were ‘fundamentals in nature, to wit liberty and property’, which no parliament could destroy. But hitherto, he argued, these fundamentals had been but weakly defended in Scotland, whereas the people of England had in all ages been ‘noble assertors of the rights of the subject’. Only by parliamentary union, therefore, could the Scots secure the liberty which was essential to real independence and economic improvement.39 Cromarty,

meanwhile, maintained that incorporating union would strengthen Scotland’s independence in two ways. In entering the union, the Scots would not cease to be a people; but by accepting the ‘mother name’ of Britain, they would declare themselves the equal of the English.40 At the same time, the passage of sovereign power to one British parliament would actually leave the Scots with more scope to manage their own affairs. Not only would they preserve their own legal system, but the disappearance of the Scottish parliament would remove the opportunity for political faction within Scotland, and hence for interference by English ministers. ‘Scotland will then and thereby be free of the fears and jealousies of English influence; and no Englishman or men will nourish a vain desire of having it.’41 A paradoxical but shrewd prognosis, it is a claim which well illustrates the confidence of the incorporating unionists.42 One more of their arguments should be noticed. This was the contribution which, they believed, a united Scotland and England would make to maintaining the balance of power in Europe, and in particular to restraining the ambitions of France. In his Interest of Scotland Seton pointed to the imminent danger of France enlarging its empire with the territories of the Spanish monarchy; and Cromarty blamed the previous division of Scotland and England for the failure to stifle Spanish and French pretensions to universal monarchy.43 Neither Seton nor Cromarty was as assertively imperial on the part of Britain as Craig had been a century before, when he had compared the potential of a united Britain with that of the contemporary Spanish monarchy.44 But both clearly believed that without an incorporating union Britain would be unable to guarantee the European balance of power. Such was the case which the incorporating unionists advanced as a counter to Fletcher’s Limitations. It was not all-conquering. The demand for Limitations continued to be heard, from Fletcher and others, to the end; and it was supplemented by the elaboration of the case for ‘Confederate or Federal union’ in successive treatises on The Rights and Interests of the Two British Monarchies (1703, 1706) by James Hodges. Hodges recognised that the issue of sovereignty was crucial. At present, he urged, it lay, under God, in the whole people of Scotland; but under an incorporating union the Scots would be deprived of ‘all capacity to contradict the governing power to which they have effectively submitted all those their separate rights, without reserve’.45 In response, however, Hodges was unable to specify exactly what form of federal union he had in mind. In itself, he admitted, the term ‘Federal Union’ might mean anything from a simple alliance to a constitution such as that of the United Provinces.46 But the treatise in which he proposed to set out the articles of a federal union between England and Scotland was never published.47 The incorporating unionists having — perhaps unexpectedly — grasped the nettle of sovereignty, their case proved extremely difficult to match; and Hodges and other like-minded pamphleteers were increasingly thrown onto the defensive.48 By the time the final treaty had been negotiated, in 1706, and was awaiting the last

meeting of the Scottish parliament, opponents had been reduced to an assortment of shifts. The author of An Essay upon the Union (1706), attributed to James Hodges, accepted that a union between Scotland and England must be considered incorporating rather than confederate, but strove to maintain that incorporating union was still compatible with separate parliaments — a claim which earned him the ridicule of Cromarty for defying the logic of sovereignty.49 In other pamphlets both Hodges and George Ridpath warned of the dangers of war, and consequent foreign invasion, if a settlement was not concluded; but neither seriously suggested that Scotland should fight.50 More determined — or more desperate — than these was the Jacobite Patrick Abercromby, who argued in The Advantages of the Act of Security (1706) that the Scots should simply stand by their Act of Security, and leave open the succession. He was prepared to renew the old alliance with France, and published a translation of the French History of the Campagnes of 1548 and 1549 (wars which followed the first English proposal of union) to illustrate his case.51 The author of the State of the Controversy betwixt United and Separate Parliaments would not go so far; but he too claimed (as Fletcher had never previously done) that if there was no alternative to an incorporating union but separation, then a separate Scotland would be protected by the European balance of power.52 The debate ended with the last Scottish parliament’s consideration of the Union Treaty, in November and December 1706. By then it was evident that the argument proper was over. The major speech in opposition to the treaty was, famously, the earl of Belhaven’s ‘Mother Caledonia’ oration. But this was an elaborate rhetorical lament, in which Belhaven bewailed the fallen state of the Scottish spirit, its loss of family pride and martial vigour, while offering no alternative whatever to the union proposed. In all its engaging dottiness, Belhaven’s speech effectively conceded the success of the incorporating unionists’ case.53 The incorporating unionists did not of course win the argument on intellectual merit alone. The cause of the union rode on the back of mounting English political pressure, sharpened by the implicit threat of military force and sweetened by judicious bribes. In the end, there was practically no alternative. But the incorporating unionist writers had made two major contributions to this result. They had made it as difficult as they could for their opponents to present a credible alternative; and they had given many Scots (at least among the ruling landed classes) strong reasons, political as well as economic, for wanting the Union on their own behalf. It was an achievement which has been little appreciated by historians, and which subsequent opponents of the Union have unwisely ignored. One contemporary, however, appears to have appreciated the achievement: in his last work, I shall now argue, Andrew Fletcher set himself to counter the case for incorporating union by constructing a visionary alternative of his own. An Account of a Conversation Concerning a Right Regulation of Governments for the Common Good of Mankind. In a Letter to the Marquiss of Montrose, the Earls of Rothes,

Roxburg and Haddington, from London the first of December 1703 was published in Edinburgh in 1704. Addressed to the young Scottish nobles who had supported Fletcher in the parliament of 1703, the pamphlet recounts a conversation which Fletcher chanced to have in London with the earl of Cromarty, Sir Edward Seymour and Sir Christopher Musgrave. The last two were English Tories. Seymour was on the Court wing of the party, an authority on the constitution and a vigorous Scotophobe who had been on the abortive commission to negotiate a union in 1702. Musgrave, by contrast, was a Country Tory, from Westmorland, with a reputation (not altogether justified) for opposition to the court.54 In some form the conversation may well have taken place. Fletcher’s account of it is strikingly vivid, with many realistic touches: at one point Seymour and Fletcher broke off to trade insults about the battles of Pinkie and Bannockburn.55 But we should be wary of taking the Account of a Conversation at face value. If these four men did meet, the occasion was ben trovato; and as I shall now seek to show, the conversation followed a deliberate, carefully directed course. The conversation was opened by the earl of Cromarty, whose rooms gave a full view of the Thames and the city of London, praising ‘the finest river, and the greatest city in the world’. Musgrave joined in, praising London’s healthy, protected situation and plenitude of provisions, while Fletcher complimented the peace in which the inhabitants lived, and the liberty they enjoyed in matters civil and religious. Further words about the pleasures of the city, however, set off an entirely opposite train of thought in Musgrave, who now lamented the corruption introduced by ‘so many thousands of prostitutes’, by the ‘city gamesters, stockjobbers, jockies and wagerers’. The bad manners of the city corrupted all those within it, not least those sent up to represent the country in parliament. ‘In a word’ — Musgrave ended — ‘this city abounds with all manner of temptations to evil: extreme poverty, excessive riches, great pleasures, infinite bad examples.’ At this point Seymour came up the stairs: introduced to Fletcher, he promptly launched into the Scot for ‘framing utopias and new models of government, under the name of limitations’, assisted by young men of only twenty-two or twenty-three, who could be expected to possess neither experience nor prudence. Fletcher, in reply, vigorously defended the virtue of youth, as not yet having been corrupted or habituated to bad customs.’56 The middle part of the Account of a Conversation was devoted to a discussion of Fletcher’s Limitations and Cromarty’s idea of union. Goaded by Seymour, Fletcher justified his Limitations by a further denunciation of the Union of the Crowns, its impoverishment of Scotland and corruption of Scottish ministers. He contended that restrictions similar to his on princely authority had formerly existed in ‘most of the limited monarchies of Europe’; but he now made no specific reference to the ancient Scottish constitution. To the objection emphasised by the incorporating unionists, that Limitations would be no protection against a prince assisted by ‘the power and riches of a far greater nation’, he retorted that any such action by the English would be highly dangerous, inviting intervention by another power.

When Cromarty intervened to suggest that a union of the two nations would remedy all these inconveniences, Fletcher countered with a sharp critique of the economic arguments of the incorporating unionists. Such a union, Fletcher believed, would leave Scotland poorer than ever. Its money would be drained to the south, by the non-residence of its nobility and gentry, leaving no stock for trade. Cromarty’s argument that Scotland’s cheap and plentiful labour would make it the centre for manufacturing for export was unfounded, since English labour was cheaper and more tractable. As the case of Wales showed, a union with England would not automatically enable wealth to circulate to remote areas. It was no argument to say that the names of Scotland and England would be lost in Britain: what was important was the interest of those who continued to live in Scotland.57 But it was Ireland which provided Fletcher with his most striking counterargument to Cromarty. The recent severe restrictions placed by England on Irish trade showed clearly enough what Scotland could expect if its trade began to thrive after a union. Although the Irish claimed to be part of a union, the English had treated them as a conquered nation. The Scots, Fletcher inferred, could only ensure that a treaty of union they made was not afterwards regarded as a conquest by England if the treaty was guaranteed by a third nation. The objection, voiced by Musgrave, Fletcher’s main interlocutor at this point, that the example of the Roman Republic proved guarantees to be inapplicable to incorporating unions of nations was met with a decisive answer from Fletcher. Rome, he stated, had admitted neighbouring nations to incorporating union only after it had conquered them.58 This was Fletcher at his most acute. The trade and status of Ireland had been the subject of vigorous debate in the 1690s, and the English case, advanced by John Cary, William Atwood and others, was precisely that the Irish advantage of lower costs should be cut off, and their constitutional dependence made clear.59 So much for the commercial opportunity which an incorporating union would bring the poorer country. So much too for the mutual communication of rights in such a union. Fletcher’s observation that Rome had conquered its neighbours was a direct rebuttal of that opinion of Grotius on which the incorporating unionists set such store. The last part of the Account of a Conversation began with Fletcher developing a much more general argument against the injustice of concentrating wealth and power. The wealth amassed in trading cities left vast tracts of good land uncultivated and depopulated. There should therefore be a more equal distribution of riches than trade and commerce will allow. Trade is not the only thing to be considered in the government of nations: and justice is due, even in point of trade, from one nation to another.60

Concentrations of power provoked disorder and war: Rome, greatest of all, incessantly disturbed its neighbours for 700 years. To prevent all such concentrations, Fletcher would propose a wholly new division of European government. Europe, he explained to his

astonished auditors, naturally divided into ten geographical areas, from the islands of Britain and Ireland to Macedonia, Thessaly and the islands of the Aegean. Each of these natural areas might in turn be divided between ten or twelve sovereign cities and their surrounding territories. Challenged by Seymour to admit that by sovereign cities he meant republics, Fletcher replied that he saw the cities rather as ‘the capitals of sovereign and independent kingdoms or countries’, united under one monarch for defence. The scheme, he argued, would have two great benefits. On the one hand, it would distribute government to cities of moderate extent, which would encourage virtue in administration and the improvement of all the arts and sciences. In particular, it would effectively diminish the excessive power and size of London (an implication which drew a furious protest from Seymour, in the authentic tones of metropolitan chauvinism). On the other hand, and above all, the balance within and between the unions of cities would bring peace and justice between nations. Wars might not entirely cease, but with so exact a balance of power they would certainly diminish, and conquest would be impossible. In sum, it was a scheme which would establish governments such as ‘are of all others the best to preserve mankind, as well from great and destructive wars, as from corruption of manners, and most proper to give to every part of the world that just share in the government of themselves which is due to them’. Challenged once more by Seymour, Fletcher admitted that he had been led to these things by his own country in particular, but he believed that they had no other tendency than ‘to render, not only my own country, but all mankind as happy as the imperfections of human nature will admit’. He was just going on to identify the twelve cities into which Britain might be divided (naming Stirling and Inverness from Scotland), when the conversation broke off for dinner.61 The boldest and most intriguing of all Fletcher’s schemes, the plan for the reform of European government set out in the Account of a Conversation, has never been satisfactorily explained. Perhaps this is because it is too readily described as a utopia. Surely it was not a serious contribution to the union debate, but the jeu d’esprit of an intelligent man who knows that he has lost the real argument, and consoles himself by indulging his eccentric imagination: no wonder Cromarty and his English guests broke off for dinner.62 That the Account of a Conversation leaves a utopian impression is not to be denied. Indeed there are several indications that Fletcher constructed the work so as to make such an impression. The very realism of the conversation, the praise of London and its situation with which the work opens, the discussion of the age of political wisdom — were these not meant to recall the artfully constructed dialogue, the description of the city of Amaurota (itself an idealisation of London) and the celebrated Dialogue of Counsel of Thomas More’s Utopia? But this only makes it the more desirable to explain Fletcher’s work. More’s Utopia was of course a jeu d’esprit, but it was also, as scholars constantly rediscover, an extraordinarily complex intellectual artifice. The Account of a Conversation may not match the achievement of that model; but Fletcher would not have had such apparently self-conscious recourse to the

devices of utopianism without interesting purpose. In what follows, I shall examine the relation of the plan for Europe to Fletcher’s other schemes for Anglo-Scottish union, and, at greater length, the plan’s likely sources of inspiration. Once these are appreciated, Fletcher’s purposes may seem more serious, if not less visionary. The plan for the reform of government throughout Europe sets the two specifically British schemes for union in a much broader framework. Returning to his starting-point in the Discourse of Government, Fletcher now makes it clear that as Scotland’s predicament was only fully revealed in European historical perspective, so the solution to its predicament must be sought on a comparably European plane. Earlier indications that the development of London and the balance of power in Europe bear directly on Scotland are confirmed. To secure Scotland’s liberty and independence requires more than raising a militia and implementing the institutional reforms of the Limitations. There must also be a stop to London’s degeneration into a courtly metropolis, and a positive redistribution of its wealth and power to Scotland, Ireland and northern and western England. This in turn will only be achieved if the causes of such metropolitan concentrations of wealth and power — economic aggrandizement, war and conquest — are tackled through the establishment of a new international political order, one which enshrines the principles of justice and of the balance of power. Unless reform spans Europe, monarchs with their courts and capitals, their taxes and standing armies will continue to treat smaller states as their provinces, however such states seek to defend their individual liberty and independence. What inspired Fletcher to think in such ambitious terms is less immediately clear. Fletcher himself claimed to be aware of no precedent for his plan, unless it was the constitution of the Achaian League in ancient Greece.63 But such a profession was a characteristic conceit of utopian writing, and need not be taken at face value. One way round that disclaimer, I shall now argue, is to turn back to a hitherto neglected earlier work of Fletcher’s: the Discorso delle Cose di Spagna, written in Italian and published in 1698 in Edinburgh, but bearing the imprint ‘Napoli’.64 Responding to the imminently expected crisis over the Spanish succession, the Discorso delle Cose di Spagna professed to show how the old Spanish aspiration to the empire of the world might be renewed. Though no country was so well situated to command the world as Spain, the opportunity created by Ferdinand and Charles V had until now been wasted, and the resources of Spain, the Indies and the European provinces drained away. The Discorso demonstrated, however, that a new succession, if accompanied by the shedding of some existing provinces and the acquisition of strategic new ones, could yet restore Spain, without others even noticing, to the empire of the world, to universal monarchy. When noticed at all itself, the Discorso delle Cose di Spagna has been dismissed as an oddity, of no relevance to Fletcher’s Scottish concerns.65 But this seems shortsighted. Fletcher was not odd in seeing the Spanish succession crisis as an opportunity for the renewal

of the aspiration to universal monarchy: the same possibility was canvassed by the English economic and political writer Charles Davenant, who in 1701 published Essays Upon the Balance of Power and Upon Universal Monarchy.66 Moreover, as we have seen, Fletcher regarded Scotland’s concerns as intimately bound up with Europe. What obviously are unusual about the Discorso are its language and its imprint. I believe, however, that it is precisely these which supply the key to unlock the significance of the work. ‘Napoli’, Naples: what connection might the austere, secular-minded Fletcher have wished to establish with that teeming, priest-ridden, feckless city? A sufficient answer for present purposes is provided by one individual: Tommaso Campanella, the Calabrian-born Dominican friar and millenarian revolutionary, ‘Platonist enragé’, utopian and author of De Monarchia Hispanica. As with all Campanella’s works, the history of the De Monarchia Hispanica is dark and difficult, complicated in particular by the interpolation into the text of several passages from Botero’s Della Ragion di Stato. According to Firpo, Campanella’s bibliographer, the work was written between April 1600 and June 1601, shortly after Campanella began his long imprisonment in Naples. The interpolations, though supplementing rather than altering Campanella’s argument, were almost certainly made by another, perhaps Scioppio, who probably also transmitted a manuscript to Besold for its first publication, in German translation, in 1620. The Latin version (which Fletcher had in his library) appeared in 1640; and there was an English translation in 1654.67 In the De Monarchia Hispanica, the king of Spain was invited to fulfil God’s promise, revealed in the prophets, to create a universal monarchy on earth. Acting with the prudence of reason of state, but always under the guidance of the pope, the king of Spain should be able so to direct the resources of his dominions, order his peoples, confuse his enemies and reproduce his own seed as gradually to subdue each of the independent provinces and kingdoms of Europe until peace and religious uniformity were established under his sole empire.68 If Campanella had hoped that this fantastic vision would secure his release from his Neapolitan dungeon, he was disappointed. But the De Monorchia Hispanica was nonetheless a remarkable formulation of an ideal that can be traced back in a direct line to the late thirteenth century, if not to ancient Rome — the claim of one ruler to be Dominus Mundi. A claim at once legal and metaphysical, it had been deployed by Frederick II of Sicily and later by Dante against the pretensions of the papacy to universal temporal as well as spiritual power. The ideal had flowered again early in the sixteenth century, in a Spanish guise, as the historian Pedro Mexia, the jurist Michel de Ulcurrunum and the Erasmians Alfonso de Guevara and Alfonso Valdes sought to portray Charles V as the universal emperor who would give peace to the world.69 Nearly a century later, Campanella succeeded in giving the ideal a fresh twist. In the De Monorchia Hispanica, the pope, hitherto regarded as a rival, was turned into an active collaborator with imperial authority, joining in a common crusade against the heretic. At the same time, and with the help of the interpolator, the fashionable

Machiavellian or Tacitist doctrine of reason of state was recruited into the service of universal monarchy. The result was a vision of imperial, universal monarchy more ambitious, more terrifying than any yet dreamed of. The imperial ideal had, however, prompted vigorous counter-arguments almost from the first. Two lines of criticism in particular emerged in the fourteenth century. One was developed by the great reforming Italian jurists Bartolus and Baldus. Thinking principally of the Italian cities, they presented the constituent states of the empire as at least de facto each civitas sibi princeps, possessed of suprema potestas — in effect, independent sovereign power. The other line of criticism, early developed by the Neapolitan jurist De Isernia, appealed to ius naturale above the ius civilis, and argued that the former justified the overthrow of empire established by conquest.70 At the start of the seventeenth century, at the same time as Campanella was transforming the imperial ideal, these two lines of counter-argument were brought together by Grotius. In the De Iure Belli ac Pacis (1623), the great Dutch jurist set out to establish the principles of a peaceful international order. Given man’s limited but natural sociability, Grotius argued, it should be possible for independent sovereign states to reach agreements to respect each other’s rights and refrain from unjust war. Later in the century this Grotian approach to international law was further developed by the German jurists, Pufendorf and Leibniz. Meanwhile another approach to international peace was being elaborated by French writers, anxious to defend their monarchy against Spanish-Habsburg imperialism. In Emeric Crucé’s Le Nouveau Cynée (1623) and then, more influentially, in the ‘Grand Dessein’ of Henry IV, printed in the Mémoires of the due de Sully, this approach envisaged a redrawing of Europe’s frontiers to create a stable pattern of monarchies and territorial republics, with provision for international arbitration of disputes. Here, almost certainly, is the context in which both the Discorso delle Cose di Spagna and the Account of a Conversation should be read. More, perhaps, than any of the continental opponents of universal monarchy, Fletcher responded directly to the menace of Campanella. The Discorso, with its imprint ‘Napoli’, was Fletcher’s ironic restatement of Campanella’s vision, exposing not only its frightful dimensions, but also its continuing potency. The Account of a Conversation, in turn, was Fletcher’s answer to the Campanellan nightmare. In place of a Europe tyrannised, indoctrinated and exploited by a single universal monarchy, it projected a Europe divided into a multitude of sovereign cities and kingdoms, each enjoying its own government and culture and the fruits of its own resources. In place of a Europe at the mercy of an empire dedicated to conquest, it projected a Europe of commensurate territorial unions, maintaining a peaceful balance of power. To construct this answer to Campanella, Fletcher drew on both of the main contemporary alternatives to universal monarchy. After the French, he suggested a new division of territories across Europe, radicalising the idea by drawing boundary lines on geographical

rather than political or dynastic criteria. But Fletcher did not adopt the French idea of an institutional mechanism for international arbitration.71 Rather, the principles on which he would regulate relations between states were those of the jurists. Negatively, the jurists’ concept of the ‘province’ as a dependency of a superior power identified the condition from which Fletcher would preserve the smaller states of Europe.72 Positively, Fletcher sought to develop the possibility, canvassed by the jurists, that free, sovereign states or cities (civitates possessed of libertas and imperium) might come together in perpetual alliance (in foedere perpetuo). Grotius had allowed the possibility of such alliances, whose participants might acknowledge a single king, in his discussion of supreme power in Book I Chapter 3 of the De Iure Belli ac Pacis.73 But the fullest discussion of the subject, and perhaps the likeliest source for Fletcher’s ideal, was a dissertation by Pufendorf, De Systematibus Civitatum. Characterising such alliances as ‘systems of states’, Pufendorf held that they might consist either of sovereign states under a single king, as the Low Countries had been under the Spanish kings or Britain was under the Stuarts, or simply of sovereign states reaching an agreement among themselves, in the manner of the United Provinces of the Netherlands or the Cantons of Switzerland. Pufendorf had even suggested that such systems were most suitable for republican states (civitates aristocraticae et democraticae), and that the best example of such a system was the Achaian League.74 To suggest that this was Fletcher’s source is not to imply that he accepted every principle of Pufendorf’s jurisprudence: the Scot’s remarks about the justice due between nations in trade suggest an understanding of justice more distributive than Grotius or Pufendorf permitted. But the specific idea of unions of sovereign states was of juristic, even Pufendorfian, origin. It was thus Fletcher’s remarkable achievement in the Account of a Conversation to have articulated such a juristic model of a European state system in the rhetorical guise of a utopia. Out of Pufendorf, by way of More, Fletcher had fashioned a vision of European government to match Campanella’s vision of universal monarchy. The achievement amply vindicates Fletcher’s claim to have sought the happiness, not only of his own country, but of all mankind. But Fletcher also assured Seymour that his own country remained his first concern: and in its immediate Scottish context the Account of a Conversation had to answer the incorporating unionists as well as Campanella. This it can now be seen to have done, in two ways. In the first place, the work enabled Fletcher to set the dangers of an incorporating union in an unusually dramatic light. Since the Discourse of Government, Fletcher had insisted that the predicament of Scotland should be understood in European perspective; in the Account of a Conversation that perspective was extended to make it clear that incorporating union would only intensify Scotland’s provincial dependence on England. Not a communication of rights but virtually a conquest, incorporating union would reinforce the metropolitan pre-eminence of London, and create a still more imperial monarchy. Far from strengthening the balance of power in Europe, as the incorporating

unionists liked to believe, a Britain so united would itself be a force for war. The second way in which the Account of a Conversation answered the incorporating unionists was more constructive. It suggested a way round what had become one of the strongest elements of the incorporating unionist case: the argument for the necessity of a sovereign power. Though Fletcher still affirmed his commitment to Limitations, he could not deny that as an offshoot of the doctrine of mixed monarchy they were inconsistent with the identification of sovereign power. But through the plan for European government, Fletcher was able to turn the concept of sovereignty against the incorporating unionists. Deploying the jurists’ idea of perpetual alliances or systems of sovereign states, he showed how sovereignty could be distributed rather than concentrated. Granted the necessity of a sovereign power, there was, he could demonstrate, no necessary connection between sovereignty and the centralisation of power and resources in large states and metropolitan capitals. It was perfectly possible to envisage the diffusion of sovereignty among many smaller states, each of which would then be able to realise the ancient republican ideal of freedom and selfgovernment. In the first decade of the eighteenth century the prospects of actually realising such a diffusion of sovereignty were no doubt remote. The arguments of the incorporating unionists were, after all, backed by the wealth and temptations of London, and by the standing armies of the crown; and these in turn were but the local manifestations of a European pattern in which metropolitan and military power was being concentrated in great monarchies. But if Fletcher’s plan for the reform of government in Europe was simply a vision, it had still served its purpose: it had demonstrated that there was a coherent alternative to incorporating union.75 NOTES 1. There are two biographies of Fletcher, the first of which, G. W. T. Omond, Fletcher of Saltoun (Edinburgh, 1897), though brief, is the best; it includes contemporary opinions of the man. The other, W. C. Mackenzie, Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, His Life and Times (Edinburgh, 1935), is fuller but not more substantial. His popular reputation continues to be cultivated by bodies such as the Scottish National Party and the Saltire Society; and it informed the recent edition of his Selected Political Writings and Speeches, ed. David Daiches (Edinburgh, 1979). 2. A Letter to a Member of the Convention of States in Scotland. By a Lover of his Religion and Country, 1689. In this a union with England is described as ‘an unspeakable advantage, which would redound to all sorts of people, and would be the only means to support an impoverished and sinking nation’ (6–7). The pamphlet also comments on the frustration, as a result of the accession of William to the British crowns, of the designs of the king of France, ‘who had proposed nothing less to himself than an universal monarchy, whom the strictest Leagues and Contracts cannot bind, but without regard to God or man threatens all his neighbours with utter desolation’ (7). State of the Controversy betwixt United and Separate Parliaments (1706): this was attributed to Fletcher and reprinted by Sir John Dalrymple in his Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland, Volume II [i.e. III] (Edinburgh, 1788), Appendix III, 55–84, Dalrymple having given his reasons for the attribution in Appendix II, 37–9. It has been edited and reprinted anew by P. H. Scott in a Saltire Society Pamphlet, New Series no. 3, 1982; Scott adduces no new arguments for the attribution. My doubts about the attribution are prompted by its absence from the lists of Fletcher’s works at the end of his manuscript Library Catalogue: NLS, MS 17863. The fullest of these lists, headed ‘Left in the Green Drawer of my Cabinet Sept. 1708’, includes all the writings later collected in the Political Works, and ‘12 Letters’. These could have been copies of the Letter to a Member of the Convention; but I know of no other

evidence for that attribution. For positive evidence of Fletcher’s endorsement of a union in 1689, see the letter quoted by T. C. Smout, ‘The Road to Union’, in Geoffrey Holmes (ed.), Britain after the Glorious Revolution 1689–1714 (London, 1969), 183–4. 3. The Political Works of Andrew Fletcher, Esq. (London, 1732; repr. 1737). A third edition was published in Glasgow in 1749. Subsequent references will be to the 1732 edition, cited as Political Works, and, for convenience, to the modern Selected Political Writings and Speeches (referred to in note 1), cited as Selected Writings. 4. A Discourse of Government with relation to Militias (Edinburgh, 1698), Political Works, 53–65, Selected Writings, 20– 4. 5. Speeches by a Member of the Parliament which began at Edinburgh the 6th of May, 1703 (Edinburgh, 1703). Political Works, 281–90, Selected Writings, 74–7. (Speeches iii & iv). 6. Speeches, v, xiv. Political Works, 303, 348, Selected Writings, 82, 99. 7. An Account of a Conversation Concerning a Right Regulation of Governments for the common Good of Mankind (Edinburgh, 1704), Political Works, 423–48 (quot. on p. 446), Selected Writings, 127–37 (quot. on p. 136). 8. Discourse of Government, Political Works, 1–42, 67–9, Selected Writings, 1–18, 25–6. 9. Discourse of Government, Political Works, 65–6, Selected Writings, 24–5. 10. Discourse of Government, Political Works, 64–5, Selected Writings, 24. 11. The first edition of the pamphlet, which did not include the militia plan, was entitled: A Discourse concerning Militias and Standing Armies; with relation to the Past and Present Governments of Europe and of England in particular (London, 1697). On Fletcher in the context of the neo-Harringtonians and the Standing Army Controversy: J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Machiavelli, Harrington and English Political Ideologies in the Eighteenth Century’, in his Politics, Language and Time (London, 1972), 138–40; and The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975), 427–35. On the Controversy more generally: L. G. Schwoerer, ‘No Standing Armies!’ The AntiArmy Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Baltimore and London, 1974), 155–87. 12. John Robertson, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue (Edinburgh, 1985), 30–1. 13. Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 441–12, discussing Davenant. 14. Speeches, ii, Political Works, 270–5, Selected Writings, 70–2. On younger sons as soldiers of fortune: Two Discourses Concerning the Affairs of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1698), The First Discourse, Political Works, 98–9, Selected Writings, 37. 15. William Ferguson, Scotland’s Relations with England: a Survey to 1707 (Edinburgh, 1977), 190–2. 16. On Scottish mixed monarchism, the — rather elliptical — remarks of M. J. Mendle, ‘Politics and Political Thought 1640–1642’, in Conrad Russell (ed.), The Origins of the English Civil War (London, 1973), 226–30. 17. Speeches, iii, xi, Political Works, 277–8, 316–18, Selected Writings, 73, 87–8. 18. A. H. Williamson, Scottish National Consciousness in the Age of James VI (Edinburgh, 1979), 6–8. 19. R. A. Mason, ‘Rex Stoicus: George Buchanan, James VI and the Scottish Polity’, in John Dwyer and others (eds.). New Perspectives on the Politics and Culture of Early Modern Scotland (Edinburgh, 1982). 20. Samuel Rutherford, Lex, Rex (London, 1644). For an introductory survey of the political thought of the covenanters, I. M. Smart, ‘The Political Ideas of the Scottish Covenanters 1638–88’, History of Political Thought, i (1980). 21. A good indication of what a fully-fledged ancient constitutional and covenanter case for Limitations would look like is provided by another contribution to the debate in 1703: An Historical Account of the Ancient Rights and Power of the Parliament of Scotland (1703; repr. Aberdeen 1823). Occasionally attributed to Andrew Fletcher, this was in fact by George Ridpath. Ridpath was intelligent enough to recognise the difficulties. He admitted the defects of the records; and he acknowledged the need to prove that the ancestors had been ‘men of counsel as well as courage’ (4). But try as he might to elaborate on the constitution, with frequent references to Buchanan, and a number of arguments recalling Rutherford, Ridpath would not deny — indeed he boasted — that the origin and survival of the Scottish estates’ sovereign powers were due to the military independence of the nobility, ‘who waded through seas of blood, and gloriously ventured their lives and estates in defence of their liberty, against domestic tyrants and foreign invaders’ (8). Fletcher may have known that the century and a half before the Union of the Crowns was by no means as bad as the histories painted it — that the Scottish political community under the early Stewarts was, as Jenny Wormald has argued,Court, Kirk and Community: Scotland 1470–1625 (London, 1981), both cohesive and vigorous. But the established categories of Scottish historical discourse, pitting martial nobles and godly magistrates against wicked kings (and a still wickeder queen), made this impossible to articulate, or even, perhaps, recognise. 22. Such an interpretation of the Two Discourses Concerning Scotland is developed in my ‘The Scottish Enlightenment at the Limits of the Civic Tradition’, in I. Hont and M. Ignatieff (eds.), Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in

the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1983), 142–6. 23. Another possible source of inspiration for Fletcher was Dutch republicanism. The republicanism of De Witt and earlier of Oldenbarneveldt and their associates was not diluted by mixed monarchism, but was aristocratic and explicitly hostile to kingship. Since Fletcher spent periods of his exiles in the 1680s in Amsterdam, it is inconceivable that he was ignorant of this Dutch tradition. But as yet nothing is known that can shed light on this potentially very interesting connection. 24. The bribery was uncovered by William Ferguson in ‘The Making of the Treaty of Union of 1707’, SHR, xliii (1964) — a classic of righteous indignation: it naturally coloured Ferguson’s fuller account of the Union in Scotland’s Relations with England: a Survey to 1707. But Ferguson is generous by comparison with P. W. J. Riley, whose The Union of England and Scotland (Manchester, 1978) treats all the arguments with equal contempt. Every political manoeuvre is faithfully recorded, every idea impartially scorned. 25. T. C. Smout, ‘The Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707, I. The Economic Background’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, xvi (1964). 26. [William Seton of Pitmedden,] The Interest of Scotland in Three Essays (1700; 2nd ed., London, 1702), II ‘The Union of Scotland and England into one Monarchy’, 57; [George Mackenzie, earl of Cromarty,] Parainesis Pacifica; or, a perswasive to the Union of Britain (Edinburgh, 1702; repr. London 1702), 7–9, 13–15. 27. [Daniel Defoe,] An Essay at Removing National Prejudices against a Union with Scotland, Part II (London, 1706). 28. [William Seton of Pitmedden,] Scotland’s Great Advantages by an Union with England: Showen in a Letter from the Country, to a Member of Parliament, 1706; A Speech in Parliament the second day of November 1706. By William Seton of Pitmedden Junior, on the first article of the Treaty of Union (Edinburgh, 1706), repr. in Daniel Defoe, The History of the Union between England and Scotland (London, 1786), 313–4. 29. [George Mackenzie, earl of Cromarty,] [Speech in the Parliament of Scotland upon the Union and upon Limitations] (n.d. [1705?]), 9. The pamphlet is without a title: that given is ascribed to it by the National Library of Scotland, which, however, misdates it to 1702/3. A Second Letter on the British Union [1706], 5–11. Cromarty no longer argued, as he had done in 1702, that a bare alliance ought to be enough for the English to grant freedom of trade to the Scots: Parainesis Pacifica, 13–15. 30. J. M. Low, ‘A Regional Example of the Mercantilist Theory of Economic Policy’, The Manchester School, 21, 1 (1953). 31. [George Mackenzie, earl of Cromarty,] A Letter from E.C. to E.W. Concerning the Union [Edinburgh, 1706,] 4; A Letter to a Member of Parliament upon the 19th Article of the Treaty of Union between the two kingdoms of Scotland and England (1706), 4. Speech ... by William Seton ... on the first article of the Treaty, in Defoe, History of the Union, 314, 316. 32. [Cromarty], Parainesis Pacifica, 4–5; A Second Letter on the British Union, 1–2, 17–18. Seton, Scotland’s Great Advantages, 7–8; Speech on the first article of the Treaty, in Defoe, History of the Union, 314–5. 33. [Seton,] The Interest of Scotland, Essay II, 41–9, Essay I, ‘The true Original and Indifferency of Church Government’. 34. [Cromarty], Parainesis Pacifica, 10, 18–19, 21–3. 35. Sir Thomas Craig, De Unione Regnorum Britanniae Tractatus, ed. and trans. C. S. Terry (SHS, 1909); and the three Scottish tracts printed in B. R. Galloway and B. P. Levack (eds.). The Jacobean Union: Six Tracts of 1604 (SHS, 1985). The claim by the editors of these tracts that ‘most of the arguments advanced in the great debate of 1700–7 first appeared, at least in tentative form, in the union tracts of the early seventeenth century’ (xliv) seems questionable. 36. [Seton,] The Interest of Scotland, Essay II, 42–6; Speech by William Seton of Pitmedden Junior, the 18th of November 1706, on the Third Article of the Union, repr. in Defoe, The History of the Union, 360–2. [George Mackenzie, earl of Cromarty,] A Friendly Return to a Letter Concerning Sir George Mackenzie’s and Sir John Nisbet’s Observation and Responce on the Matter of the Union (1706). 37. Hugo Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace, in Three Books ... translated into English. To which are added, all the large notes of Mr J. Barbeyrac (London, 1738), 266. Cited in: the Speech by William Seton on the Third Article of the Union, in Defoe, History of the Union, 362; [Sir John Clerk of Penicuik,] A Letter to a friend, Giving an Account how the Treaty of Union has been received here. And Wherein are contained, Answers to the most material objections against it (Edinburgh, 1706), 10; [Daniel Defoe,] A Fourth Essay at Removing National Prejudices; with Some Reply to Mr Hodges and some other Authors, who have printed their Objections against an Union with England (1706), 42. Cromarty cited Grotius to the same effect in Parainesis Pacifica, 9. 38. [Daniel Defoe,] An Essay at Removing National Prejudices Against an Union with England. Part III (1706), 26; as

against [Cromarty,] A Friendly Return, Letter Fourth, 7. 39. [Seton,] Speeches on the First and Third Articles of the Union, in Defoe, History of the Union, 316, 361–2; Scotland’s Great Advantages, 5, 11–12. 40. [Cromarty,] Parainesis Pacifica, 4; A Letter from E. C. to E. W., 5–7. Like some earlier Scottish unionists, Cromarty evidently supposed that a British identity could be adopted to Scotland’s advantage: on these, Williamson, Scottish National Consciousness, esp. ch. 1, and the essays by Roger Mason and Marcus Merriman in this volume. 41. [Cromarty], ASecond Letter, 14–16; A Letter upon the Nineteenth Article of the Treaty of Union, 4–8. 42. On the extent to which the Scots were politically self-managing in the eighteenth century: Alexander Murdoch, ‘The People Above’: Politics and Administration in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh, 1980). 43. [Seton,] The Interest of Scotland, Essay II, 59–60; [Cromarty,] A Letter from E.C. to E.W., 3. 44. Craig, De Unione Regnorum Britanniae, 262. 45. [James Hodges,] The Rights and Interests of the Two British Monarchies, Inquir’d into, and Clear’d; with a special respect to An United or Separate State, Treatise I (London, 1703) 3; also 40–51, and Treatise III (London, 1706), 62–75. 46. [Hodges,] Rights and Interests, Treatise I, 3–4:’... the word Union in this Federal sense, is a general term of a very large comprehension, tho’ restrained to the amicable compacts, relations and obligations of kingdoms and states to one another. Being applicable to all the various treaties of alliance, agreements, confederations, and settlements of mutual interest, which their joint concerns, in an undeterminable multitude of contingencies, may happen to incline or oblige them to’. No wonder Cromarty concluded: ‘That thing call’d a Federal Union, being apparently so ambulatory and changeable, by the nature of treaties, and consequently so unfixt and weak a ligament for a perpetual union ... I let it ly so’. A Friendly Return, Letter Fourth, 6–7. 47. This was to have been Treatise II of the Rights and Interests. Hodges claimed (Treatise I, Preface) that it had been written in 1702; but Treatise III appeared with an Advertisement stating that the author had thought fit to defer its publication. 48. The Scottish incorporating unionists might have been expected to follow Defoe in attempting to obscure the final destination of sovereignty in the union. But the dangers of evading the issue of the location of sovereignty had been made clear by Grotius, and still more by Hobbes: taking the point, the incorporating unionists successfully turned the issue against their opponents. 49. [James Hodges,] An Essay upon the Union (London, 1706); Cromarty, A Friendly Return, Letter Fourth, 7. 50. [James Hodges,] War Betwixt the Two British Kingdoms Consider’d, and the dangerous Circumstances of Each with regard thereto lay’d open (London, 1705); George Ridpath, The Reducing of Scotland by Arms, and annexing it to England as a Province, considered (London; repr. Edinburgh, 1705). 51. [Patrick Abercromby,] The Advantages of the Act of Security, Compar’d with these of the Intended Union (1706); [Patrick Abercromby, transl.] The History of the Campagnes of 1548 and 1549, Being an Exact Account of the Martial Expeditions perform’d in those days by the Scots and French on the one side, and by the English and their foreign auxiliaries on the other, by Mons. Beaugue, printed at Paris in 1556, with an Introductory Preface by the Translator (1707). The point of this History was that it illustrated the opposition to what was generally agreed to have been the most favourable of all offers of union from England. 52. State of the Controversy betwixt United and Separate Parliaments (1706), repr. in Dalrymple, Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol III, 84. 53. Speech by Lord Belhaven the 2nd of November 1706 on the First Article of the Union, in Defoe, History of the Union, 317–28. On which see Robertson, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue, 44–6. 54. On Seymour and Musgrave; Dictionary of National Biography. 55. Account of a Conversation, Political Works, 412–13, Selected Writings, 123–4. 56. Account of a Conversation, Political Works, 365–83, Selected Writings, 106–13. 57. Account of a Conversation, Political Works, 384–403, Selected Writings, 113–20. 58. Account of a Conversation, Political Works, 403–9, Selected Writings, 120–22. 59. The constitutional implications of the Irish debate for the position of Scotland are discussed by William Ferguson. ‘Imperial Crowns: a neglected facet of the background to the Treaty of Union of 1707’, SHR, liii (1974). 60. Account of a Conversation, Political Works, 416–18, Selected Writings, 125–6. 61. Account of a Conversation, Political Works, 420–48, Selected Writings, 126–137 (quotations on pp. 435, 446; 132, 136). 62. As Christopher Smout put it to me.

63. Account of a Conversation, Political Works, 436, Selected Writings, 132. 64. Discorso delle Cose di Spagna (Napoli, 1698), reprinted in the Political Works in 1732 and 1737, and in an English translation in the. Political Works of 1749. It is not in the Selected Writings. The evidence on its place of publication is considered by R. A. S. Macfie in ‘A Bibliography of Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun’, Publications of the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society, iv (1901), 117–18. The typographical similarity between the Discorso and the other Discourses of 1698, and the unusual italic type, point strongly to the works having been printed under Fletcher’s personal direction, in Edinburgh. The lists in his Library Catalogue indicating that Fletcher possessed large numbers of his own pamphlets, some bound, some stitched, some in quires, seem to confirm this suggestion. 65. Hence its exclusion by Daiches from the Selected Writings, justified on pp. xxiv–v of the introduction. 66. Published in Three Essays (the other being An Essay Upon the Right Way of Making War, Peace and Alliances) (1701), repr. in The Political and Commercial Works of Charles Davenant, ed. Sir Charles Whitworth, M.P. (London, 1771), Vol. III. 67. L. Firpo, Bibliografia degli scritti di Tommaso Campanella (Torino, 1940), 56–67. The De Monarchia Hispanica is in Fletcher’s Library Catalogue, NLS MS. 17863. By itself this is not proof that Fletcher must have had the work in mind; nor is absence of a work from his library proof that he could not have read it. The Catalogue, and such late correspondence as has survived about his book-buying, suggest that this was a collector’s library more than a working library; and we do not know when he bought most of the books. Possession of a book, however, is obviously an indication that he knew it. 68. The English edition is entitled: A Discourse Touching the Spanish Monarchy. Laying down directions and practices whereby the king of Spain may attain to an Universal Monarchy, written by Tho. Campanella, newly translated [by Edmund Chilmead] (London, 1654). 69. On Frederick II, Dante and Charles V: Frances Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1975), Part I; and on the Spanish: J. A. Femandez-Santamaria, The State, War and Peace: Spanish Political Thought in the Renaissance 1516–59 (Cambridge, 1977), ch. 2. 70. J. P. Canning, ‘Ideas of the State in 13th and 14th-Century Commentators on the Roman Law’, TRHS, 5th series, xxxiii (1983). 71. The ‘Grand Dessein’ of Henry IV divided Europe into fifteen dominions, composed of six hereditary and five elective kingdoms and four territorial republics: Mémoires ou OEconomies Royales d’Estat Domestiques, Politiques et Militaires de Henry le Grand, par Maximilian de Bethune, due du Sully, Tome IV (Paris, 1664), 77–89. Fletcher’s library contained both Sully’s Mémoires and Crucée’s Le Nouveau Cynée. 72. Of obvious Roman origin, the concept of ‘province’ was used in this sense by Grotius, Rights of War and Peace, I. iii. 7, p. 63, and by Pufendorf, De Iure Naturae et Gentium (1672), translated into English as Of the Law of Nature and Nations (London, 1703), VII. v. 16, p. 185; but perhaps most clearly by Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), ch. 22. Hence the force of Fletcher’s claim that Scotland had been made a ‘conquered province’. 73. Grotius,Rights of War and Peace, I. iii. 7, 21, on pp. 63, 94–8. As the passage quoted in the text above, p. 210, implies, such alliances are distinct from unions involving a communication of rights. 74. De Systematibus Civitatum is one of the Dissertationes Academiae (Upsala, 1677), a collection also published under the title Politica Inculpata, authore Samuele Pufendorfio (Londini Scanomm, 1679). The Politica Inculpata is listed in Fletcher’s Library Catalogue, and his own copy is now in Edinburgh University Library. The dissertation is listed on the title page with the name of a student, Daniel Christiemin, Suecus; but Jean Barbeyrac treats the dissertation as Pufendorf’s work: Le Droit de la Nature et des Gens, traduit par Jean Barbeyrac, avec des notes du traducteur (Amsterdam, 1706), Tome II, 255n. The dissertation was, as Barbeyrac observed, an enlargement of Book VII, ch. V, sections 16–21 of the De Iure Naturae et Gentium. The concept of ‘systems’ derived from Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 22; Barbeyrac preferred to translate it as ‘Etats composez’, to make clearer the distinction from individual ‘Etats simples’. Fletcher’s library contained a sizeable collection of the works of both Grotius and Pufendorf, including the De Iure Belli ac Pacis (1631 and several later editions) and the De Iure Naturae et Gentium (1698 edition). He also had Hobbes’ Leviathan in English (1651) and Latin (1670). 75. I am most grateful to Christopher Smout and Jenny Wormald for comments on the first version of this essay. Proofreading provides the opportunity to add that there may be more to be said about Fletcher’s choice of the imprint ‘Napoli’ for his Discorso delle Cose di Spagna. While an implicit reference to Campanella offers a sufficient explanation of the choice for the purposes of the present essay, research recently begun in Naples itself suggests the existence of a possible later Neopolitan context too.

11 Politics, Politeness and the Anglicisation of early EighteenthCentury Scottish Culture Nicholas Phillipson

I The Scottish Enlightenment has always made Scottish intellectuals uneasy. In spite of the glamorous intellectual reputation it has given their country, it has always seemed to be connected with the commercialisation of Scottish society, its incorporation into the English state and lost national identity. Disgruntled evangelicals from Witherspoon to James McCosh disliked the apparent materialism of the Enlightenment and criticised its philosophers for reducing religion to manners, trivialising the metaphysical needs of ordinary people in the process and consigning them to life on a lunar landscape which offered them little prospect of happiness in this world or assurance of salvation in the next.1 For patriotically-minded critics from Francis Jeffrey’s day to our own the seeds of corruption have lain in Anglicisation rather than in commerce and have been evident in the emasculation of the Scottish language and in epic and occasionally edifying encounters of Scottish writers with the serpent of English gentility.2 When Thomas Carlyle spoke of the Scottish Enlightenment as a phenomenon in which ‘there was nothing truly Scottish, nothing indigenous’, when he spoke of the literati as writers who were ‘so clear and well-ordered, yet so totally destitute to all appearance, of any patriotic affection, nay of any human affection whatever’, he spoke a language which intellectual patriots have used ever since.3 In fact it was this polite, laodicean literati which first told the story of the rise and progress of the arts and sciences in eighteenth-century Scotland in these terms, although not, significantly, with the same Ossianic overtones. Their story remains one of the most important and neglected legacies of the Enlightenment to modern Scotland and, moreover, provides one of the best points of entry to its intellectual history. The story was first told by the young Edinburgh literati of the 1750s who wanted to explain the origins of the newly-found political stability, economic growth and cultural

activity of their own age.4 So far from finding its roots in the Union of 1707, they believed that they were to be found in the Glorious Revolution which began that massive exercise in reconstituting the institutional fabric of the Scottish state which had continued until their own age. They argued that if Scotland had been a poor and inconsiderable nation during the seventeenth century, ill-equipped to pursue trade, commerce and learning, that was because its development had been fatally distorted by the Union of the Crowns. This had had the disastrous effect of extending the powers of the king and the nobility, placing the country in ‘a strange equivocal position, little better than a conquered province’. The first stage in restoring Scottish liberties had taken place at the Revolution which had limited the power of the king but not, unfortunately, that of the nobility. The powers of parliament had been extended and the people had been encouraged ‘to form more extensive plans of commerce, of industry, and of politics’ as William Robertson put it. But it had needed the Union to break the power of the nobility, to secure private property and to establish the civil liberty that was necessary in order to release that ‘sudden spirit of reform’ and ‘that proliferation of schemes designed to advance the public interest’ which was characteristic of the modern age. Here and elsewhere, the literati took it for granted that Scotland’s public interest lay in advancing the progress of commerce. It was axiomatic that the general tendency of commerce was to civilise and to extend human happiness. On the other hand the history of Scotland since the Revolution had made it abundantly clear that it was impossible for a small and underdeveloped country to generate commerce without acquiring the civil and military resources needed to secure private property and overseas trade, and that, in the case of Scotland, could not be done independently of England. The Union had given Scotland the opportunity of easing Scotland’s transition from its feudal to its commercial state and it had given patriots the task of equipping their country with the institutions it needed for a commercial age. For moderate presbyterians, this meant developing a church which would exist in a consensual rather than an adversarial relationship with civil society.5 For lawyers it meant realigning the feudal and civilian law of Scotland in relation to that of England and both in relation to the specific juristic needs of a commercial polity, something Lord Chancellor Hardwicke called ‘improving and perfecting the Union’.6 For those concerned with government and politics, it meant ensuring that Scots had free access to the court, to the ministry and to parliament; ensuring that they exploited the potential advantages that had been opened up to Scotland by the Union; and ensuring that protests against English obstruction to the progress of the Union were loud and effective.7 As the first Edinburgh Review of 1755–6 put it: If countries have had their ages with respect to improvement. North Britain may be considered as in a state of early youth guided and supported by the more mature strength of her kindred country.

There remained the problem of providing the country with a civic culture fit for a modern

age. Poets from Allan Ramsay’s day to Scott’s saw themselves as Bards with the job of providing their country with a modern literature to close the gap between the literary culture of the past and the modern age. David Hume, like other philosophers, was at pains to apply his science of man to the needs of modern citizens and modern society by means of polite essays and discourses devoted to reviewing the moral, political, religious and literary problems of the age. University reformers and professors set out to provide new styles of teaching to prepare their students for public life in church and state, and they took great trouble to ensure that the needs of moral science were never divorced from those of practical morality and from the all-important business of advancing the public interest. In fact, it was the historic achievement of the Scots to have created a philosophical and literary culture of great complexity which was designed to explain the metaphysical, moral, political, religious and historical foundations on which commercial civilisation itself was founded and would teach men and women how to live virtuous and happy lives. And it was a tribute to their success in doing so that this Scottish enlightened culture was to exercise an astonishing influence on the west in the age of the American, French and Industrial Revolutions. For that careful and perspicacious observer, Dugald Stewart, the intellectual origins of this story were to be found in ‘the constant influx of information and liberality from abroad’ which had always characterised Scotland’s intellectual life.8 But what is particularly interesting in the present context is the intense interest Scots showed in importing whole systems of foreign knowledge at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But of what did that influx consist? It seems clear that the central theme in the intellectual history of the universities in this period is the introduction of Dutch models of university education — the Leiden medical curriculum and the natural jurisprudence of Grotius and Pufendorf in particular — and their adaptation to suit Scottish educational needs. However, it is also clear that the process of adaptation could be very radical indeed. For example, Glaswegian professors transformed the language of natural jurisprudence in the early decades of the century.9 Moreover, as we shall see in the course of this essay, two distinctively English languages, classical republican political thought and Addisonian politeness, took on new leases of life as each was transferred from a rich society to a poor one and adapted to the needs of an intensely patriotic community which wanted to discover the true nature of the public interest of their country within the framework of the new extended British polity. In this particular case ‘Anglicising’ Scottish culture was to be more than a story of establishing the hegemony of a metropolitan over a provincial civic culture. It was to mean providing modern Britain with a new civic culture fit for a commercial age and providing a critique of that of England in the process. It is a story which begins before the Union of 1707 with one of the Union’s most celebrated opponents, Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun. And it ends in the 1750s with David Hume’s final statement of the principles of his Science of Man.

II Throughout the eighteenth century, Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun had a formidable reputation as a republican and a patriot who had opposed the Anglo-Scottish Union. His Political Works, mostly written between 1697 and 1703, were reprinted in colonial America and even in revolutionary France as well as in Britain, and the language in which he was to articulate the problems of preserving Scottish independence was to exercise a profound influence on the civic morality of Scotland from his own day to ours. Paradoxically, all of this was done by adapting the distinctive vocabulary of the English classical republicans to Scottish needs at a moment of unparalleled crisis in its history.10 How, Fletcher asked, could liberty be preserved in the new extended monarchies of the modern age? It was, he thought, a problem which could be brought into focus by examining what were generally agreed to be the particular problems of contemporary Scotland: political faction, the condition of agriculture, the declension of trade, the luxury and oppressiveness of the nobility, the idleness of the poor, the outflow of labour and capital to England and, above all, the perpetual interference of the English in Scottish affairs. Fletcher’s analysis of the condition of Scotland was designed to show that these complex and intractable problems could be explained in terms of a single cause, the dependence of Scotland upon the English crown. For the Union of the Crowns was the cause of all, comprehends them all, and is the band that ties up the bundle. If we break this, they will drop and fall to the ground; if not, this band will straighten us more and more, till we shall be no longer a people (80).

The answer lay in radical constitutional reform by means of an Act of Security which would place limitations on the powers of the crown, restore the independence of the Scots parliament and create a new constitutional balance between the crown and parliament which would be favourable to liberty. This would make a general reformation of Scottish society possible. A newly-constituted parliament would be able to establish a militia, promote the growth of trade and manufacture, redistribute land and put the poor to work. All of this would secure the social fabric of a poor nation whose independence had been threatened by the rise of commerce. This summary, which does no justice at all to the complexity and subtlety of Fletcher’s analysis, presents him as a ‘practical’ reformer, concerned with the ‘realities’ of contemporary politics. But his preoccupation with questions of liberty, virtue and corruption establishes him as a classical republican whose intellectual roots are to be found in the writings of Machiavelli, Harrington and the Anglo-Irish republicans of the 1680s and 90s.11 Like all classical republicans, Fletcher saw human nature in neo-stoic terms. Men (women do not feature at all in their vocabulary) were sociable but restless and ambitious, animated by a love of power, glory and liberty. A society of such men could not possibly be secure and free unless its governors were able to devise political mechanisms which would ensure that their

subjects’ love of glory was diverted from the pursuit of their private interests to that of the public. Machiavelli thought that would only happen if the citizens of such a state had the right to bear arms to defend its independence from its enemies. The quest for military glory would unlock a spirit of patriotism which would teach citizens that civic as well as military virtue was needed to secure the liberty and independence of the state. But how could that be done? The writings of Polybius and the experience of history showed that each pure form of government — monarchy, aristocracy and democracy — would in time become corrupt and self-interested. In the last resort, corruption could only be avoided by means of a mixed constitution in which the interests of the one, few and many checked and balanced each other. A mixed constitution of this sort was, so the Machiavellians taught, an essential condition for the preservation of liberty in a republic. As John Pocock has shown, James Harrington’s historic achievement was to have adapted a political language, designed for a city state, to an extended, post-feudal polity like England.12 In Oceana (1656), written after the rise of the New Model Army and the fall of the English monarchy, Harrington had shown that, if the preservation of liberty depended upon the sword, the distribution of military power in any state was a function of the distribution of property. In the feudal age, England had been free because military power had rested in the hands of a baronage which had held the power of the king in check. But this balance had recently been destroyed. Feudal tenures had declined, the gentry had been emancipated from their state of vassalage, and the monarchy had been destroyed by an army of gentry which had created the Cromwellian republic whose framework Harrington had discussed in Oceana. However, Harrington had not foreseen the possibility that the monarchy and the power of the aristocracy might be restored. Nor had he foreseen the transformational effects of commerce on the political life of modern England. It was clear to Fletcher and Harrington’s other disciples that in an age of technologically-advanced international warfare unless the military resources of the gentry were properly mobilised, the king would be obliged to raise armies of mercenaries to defend the realm, extending his power, upsetting the balance of the constitution and placing liberty in jeopardy. For English republicans the answer lay in developing the existing system of county militias. Fletcher, who was an ex-mercenary and an avid student of modern warfare, thought that this would not do.13 Instead, he proposed a massive reorganisation of English government on Cromwellian lines. Britain would be divided into five huge militia camps of which Scotland would be one. These camps would have the primary task of training up an advanced modern army. However, as David Hume once put it, such camps would also be ‘the true mothers of cities’ and provide the foundations for an entirely new system of civil government.14 Power would pass from London and the court to the regions, establishing a new balance of power which would be favourable to liberty. Preserving the independence of these regions would thus be a precondition for

preserving liberty in a modern, extended polity like Britain. Patriotism had come to mean more than defending the realm from its enemies. It now meant preserving the independence of its regions as well. Fletcher had helped to provide classical republicanism with a new conception of patriotism in response to the needs of a modern age. And it was one which was to remain at the heart of the vocabulary of Scottish politics from that time to this. No English or Irish republican of the 1690s understood the transformational powers of commerce so well as Fletcher or realised how wide and deep a gulf had opened up between the political culture of the feudal and the modern age. No matter how attractive gothic constitutions might appear to be as models of a free polity, ‘I do less pretend that the present governments can be restored to the constitution before-mentioned. The following discourse will show the impossibility of it’ (4). In a terse, brilliant analysis he went on to show how commerce had destroyed the moral as well as the political fabric of gothic civilisation. With the rise and progress of the arts and sciences the feudal baronage had begun to pursue luxury instead of military glory. That had meant abandoning the Spartan austerity of a feudal way of life for one of conspicuous consumption. The consequences had been momentous. They had commuted their traditional responsibilities for defending the realm for a tax on their estates to pay for mercenary armies. They had sold off feudal tenures and rack-rented their estates in order to pay for a new and expensive way of life, emancipating the gentry and, in Scotland at least, reducing the peasantry to a state of penury and idleness. Commerce had destroyed the political fabric of gothic society and gothic liberty with it. Could liberty be preserved in an age of commerce? Some English classical republicans doubted it. Others thought that a restored and radical nobility or even the merchants of London would be able to restrain the power of the court. But Fletcher did not agree.15 Like Thomas More (a thinker to whom he owed important debts) he despised and feared the nobility as much as the crown, the Scottish nobility and the Highland chiefs in particular. Indeed rack-renting and the idleness and savagery to which the chiefs had reduced their people were, Fletcher thought, the principle causes of Scotland’s present state of abject poverty (96). Harrington had realised that the power of the nobility of the remoter regions of Oceana posed a threat to its liberty and had thought that one of the first tasks of its government would be to send armies to destroy them. Fletcher disagreed. In his model, the job of dealing with the nobility was for the new civil governments of the regions. But just as he had no faith in the ability of English county militias to provide advanced armies, so he had little faith in the ability of the existing Scottish parliament to deal with Scotland’s present needs and with the problem of the nobility in particular. That was why an Act of Security was so badly needed, for it would release the virtue of the parliamentary gentry and turn parliament into an institution which was capable of passing the quite extraordinarily complicated agrarian reforms needed to control the effects of aristocratic corruption and put the poor to work. And that was something which Fletcher quite explicitly associated with

destroying the feudal basis of agriculture and turning it into a cash-based, improvementorientated activity. As he observed: The condition then of this country, chiefly by this abuse of racking the lands, is brought to such extremity, as makes all the commonality miserable, and the landlords, if possible, the greater slaves, before they can get their rents and reduce them into money. And because this evil is arrived to a greater height with us, than I believe was ever known in any other place; and that, as I have said, we are in no disposition to practise the methods of most other countries, I think we ought to find out some new one which may surmount all difficulties, since in things of this nature divers methods may be proposed very practicable, and much better than any that hitherto have been in use (61–2, 58–65).

That done, a virtuous parliament would be in a position to encourage trade and manufactures by mercantilist means and make sure that they served the public interest. In other words, Fletcher’s virtuous parliament was to be a mechanism for removing the last traces of feudalism from Scotland and ensuring that commerce would advance the cause of liberty. Indeed there was no reason why the new militia camps should not become centres of politeness as well. As he put it: ... so many different seats of government will highly encourage virtue. For all the same offices that belong to a great kingdom must be in each of them; with this difference, that the offices of such a kingdom being always burdened with more business than any one man can rightly execute, most things are abandoned to the rapacity of servants; and the extravagant profits of all great officers plunge them into all manner of luxury, and debauch them from doing good: whereas the offices of these lesser governments extending only over a moderate number of people, will be duly executed, and many men have occasions put into their hands of doing good to their fellow citizens. So many different seats of government will highly tend to the improvement of all arts and sciences; and afford great variety of entertainment to all foreigners and others of a curious and inquisitive genius, as the ancient cities of Greece did (136).

Thus for a Fletcherian the preservation of liberty, independence and the advancement of commerce were all part of the same enterprise, one that we may define for the purposes of this discussion as adapting the language of classical republicanism to Scottish needs. Fletcher opposed an incorporating union with England because it lacked the constitutional apparatus needed to prevent the sort of corruption that had its roots in a bleak, neo-stoic view of human behaviour. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that Fletcher’s thinking left important marks on those who supported the Union as well as those who opposed it. Unionists defended the Union on the Fletcherian grounds that it would secure the country’s independence, break the power of the nobility and usher in the rule of a gentry whose virtue would be released by the pursuit of commerce and the extension of industry and employment. However, they believed that all of this could best be accomplished within the beneficent framework of a parliamentary union. For the English and Scots would both realise that it was in the interest of the new British state not to obstruct the development of commerce in the poor but volatile northern kingdom. As William Seton of Pitmedden, the court’s chief parliamentary spokesman and a former disciple of Fletcher, observed, such a union would work because it would increase the prosperity and security of both kingdoms and it would be perfectly easy for ‘a skilful physician’ to iron out any quarrels between

them.16 In other words, the good judgement of sensible statesmen in England and Scotland who were capable of recognising the true nature of the public interest of the new British polity would be enough to underwrite the progress of commerce in Scotland. The civil, not the military virtues would preserve liberty in a commercial age. Fletcher understood these arguments perfectly well and thought them naive. One of the interlocutors in his fascinating utopian Account of a Conversation observes: ‘It will certainly be to our interest ... to observe the conditions on which we unite with Scotland. Do you think, replied I, that you always follow your interest? I must acknowledge, said he, not always. Then, said I, if at any time you should depart from your true interest in this matter, we shall want a guarantee and find none’(122). In fact, he objected to what was to be a crucial principle of eighteenth-century politeness, that in an age of commerce, the good judgement of citizens and legislators in calculating their own interests and that of the state was more important in enabling them to adjust to the pressures of a commercial world than the rigid constitutional mechanisms so beloved of the classical republicans. And it is to the history of the process by which this essentially English language of politeness was introduced into the vocabulary of Scottish civic morality that we now turn. III It is a curious and important coincidence that the passage of the Union coincided with a major revolution in the language of English politeness which was carried out by the third earl of Shaftesbury and those seminal moral journalists Joseph Addison and Richard Steele whose Tatler and Spectator essays were first published between 1709 and 1713 and would be endlessly reprinted, extracted and imitated throughout the Anglo-Saxon world during the eighteenth century.17 As Lawrence Klein has shown, all three deeply distrusted modern ideas of politeness because they seemed to encourage ordinary men and women to divorce their social from their moral behaviour.18 As classical moralists, they realised that ordinary social behaviour was competitive and ruled by a desire to win social approval, or at least to avoid shame. But modern politeness had come to mean little more than pursuing fashion and social approval to the complete disregard of common sense, integrity and fairness — those attributes Ciceronians summed up as honestas. As Mr. Spectator put it: ‘there is hardly that person to be found who is not more concerned for the reputation of wit and sense, than of honesty and virtue’(Spectator no. 6). What then was true politeness? ‘I lay it down ... for a Rule’, says Mr. Spectator’s Sir Roger de Coverley, that the whole Man is to move together, that every Action of any Importance is to have a Prospect of publick Good; and that the general Tendency of our indifferent Actions ought to be agreeable to the Dictates of Reason, of Religion, of good Breeding; without this, a Man ... is hopping instead of walking, he is not in his entire and proper Motion’ (ibid.).

It was Addison and Steele’s historic achievement to have found out how to put a stop to hopping by adapting the language of Ciceronian morality to suit the needs of ordinary men and women engaged in the business of ordinary life. And that meant showing them how to acquire the self-confidence and sense of virtue that came from the belief that they were able to conduct themselves in the modern world with integrity and propriety. But exactly how could these Ciceronian virtues be acquired? Cicero himself had been silent on the matter. Shaftesbury, with his eye on the needs of the aristocratic virtuoso, had shown how the mind could be cultivated by the pursuit of beauty and perfection in the company of a few select companions. Addison and Steele were less exclusive and their highly practical advice, designed to link the pursuit of morality to the business of common life, was to broaden contemporary conceptions of morality and to lay the foundations of a new, neo-Ciceronian language of morality which was to be of the utmost importance to forming the civic culture of modern Britain.19 Mr. Spectator believed that ideas of liberty, virtue and good citizenship ‘should reach every individual of a people’ (Spectator no. 287), not just those with landed property and political rights. They were embodied in a ‘frame of mind’ which could be acquired by anyone who felt that his sense of personal independence or ego was being undermined and wanted to restore it. In the past, ideas of dependence had characterised relationships between masters and slaves, lords and vassals and now could all too easily corrupt relations between merchants and customers, patrons and protégés. More subtly and dangerously, they could take the form of making men and women slaves of fashion, superstition, prejudice and the appetites (interestingly and significantly, they said nothing about political dependence). An independent frame of mind could best be acquired by cultivating the arts of friendship. True durable friendships were forged outside the world of business or fashion in the neutral territory of the salon or the coffee-house. In such company one was with equals and it was easy to learn the virtues of tolerance, and detachment and the pleasures of consensus. What is more, one would quickly acquire a more extensive view of one’s own interests and those of others. Friendship, in other words, was the mother of Addisonian politeness and the source of the good judgement on which a happy, useful and virtuous life depended. Conversation was the essential skill Mr. Spectator sought to inculcate, of as much importance to his conception of moral education as eloquence had been to Cicero and to Renaissance humanists. Conversation was the bond which joined men and women together in society, and by practising it they could learn to cultivate the moderation and restraint that made true friendship possible and made it possible for individuals to function cheerfully and efficiently in ordinary life. And while the sense of ego that was released in the process lacked the heroic, libertarian qualities of the civic virtue of the classical republican, it nevertheless enabled ordinary citizens to behave with decorum and decency, or what Addison called propriety. It made them good neighbours as well as good friends and enabled them to acquire

what Mr. Spectator (or rather, Eustace Budgell) called ‘civil virtue’ (Spectator no. 248). It was a gentle philosophy which presupposed that the liberty and property of the subject were protected by a matchless constitution and a largely beneficent form of government. And it rested on the Ciceronian belief that, under the rule of law, the routines of ordinary life would be enough to regulate human appetites and direct them to a proper view of one’s interests and duties. For in Mr. Spectator’s world, conversation and friendship had replaced military training as the skill which was best suited to preserving the interests of subjects in an age of commerce. The coffee-house, not the militia camp, had become the foundation on which the liberty and happiness of the citizen depended. To repeat, spectatorial morality penetrated every comer of the Anglo-Saxon world and it would have been astonishing if it had failed to reach Scotland. In Edinburgh the Tatler and Spectator were reprinted as soon as they had appeared in London, and were discussed and imitated by city wits in magazines like The Tatler of the North.20 More interestingly, spectatorial morality was to have a profound influence on the writing of the most important literary hero of early eighteenth-century Edinburgh, Allan Ramsay the Elder, who saw it as an important intellectual resource for regenerating Scottish poetry. His masterpiece, The Gentle Shepherd (1725), soon became known as ‘the National Pastorale’ and proved to be an extraordinarily popular attempt to construct a portrait of a quintessentially Scottish rustic community which was bound together by the bonds of spectatorial morality.21 In other words, Addisonian politeness seemed perfectly compatible with the preservation of traditional life. But the intellectual activities of Edinburgh’s wits pale into insignificance beside those of David Hume, who knew them well. He was to transform the language of Addisonian politeness by showing that it could be turned into a vehicle of science and used to derive an entirely new account of the principles of human nature and of the principles of commerce which could, in turn, be applied critically to his own contemporaries’ understanding of the public affairs of their country. As such, he was able to show them how to think of their own interests and those of the public in an age of commerce. And he also showed the crucial importance of politeness in preserving them. IV Addison had set out to show anxious men and women how to reorganise their conduct by bringing their morals and manners into alignment and becoming adaptable, virtuous agents in the process. Hume liked Addison’s essays but found them ‘triffling’, no doubt because they failed to take account of the principles of human nature which explained why his prescriptions were so agreeable and easy to follow.22 The questions Hume raised were metaphysical and demanded an enquiry into the nature of the cognitive world. Only then would human beings be able to understand the principles which regulated their behaviour and

learn how to control it. For Hume believed that unless men and women were able to bring their manners and morals into alignment with a true understanding of the metaphysical principles on which all thought rested, the revolution in the language of politeness Shaftesbury and Addison had begun would never be completed. And without such a revolution it would be impossible for the citizens of a modern state to comprehend the nature of the transformation through which their civilisation was passing and learn how commerce could serve their interests rather than undermine them. Hume’s contemporaries invariably thought of him as a radical or pyrrhonian sceptic whose philosophy struck at the foundations of knowledge and threatened to unsettle the authority of existing ideas of religious and moral duty. Hume on the other hand thought of himself as a philosopher who had placed the study of human behaviour on empirical foundations and had given mankind the knowledge that would give them genuine power over themselves and their environment for the first time. In fact, as recent studies of Hume’s scepticism have shown, scepticism and science were integrally linked in Hume’s philosophy and, above all, in the metaphysics on which his science of man was founded.23 For Hume, pyrrhonian scepticism was more than a technique for extirpating philosophical error or for cleansing the mind of superstition, zealotry or idées fixes. It could be used to investigate the contents of the mind and to analyse the process by which the ideas of which it was composed were constructed and deconstructed. Hume presented human beings as agents who existed in a state of constant mental activity, constantly responding to impulses from the senses and from the passions, constantly forming ideas about the external world and those desires and aversions which made action possible. His analysis also demonstrated the importance of ‘the imagination or understanding, call it what you please’ in forming these ideas and the role of powers of associating ideas and responding to the ideas of others (sympathy) in regulating the process.24 Above all, his analysis demonstrated the power of custom, ‘the great guide of human life’, in providing our ideas with stability and making thought and action possible: Without the influence of custom, we should be entirely ignorant of every matter of fact beyond what is immediately present to the memory and senses. We should never know how to adjust means to ends, or to employ our natural powers in the production of any effect. There would be an end at once of all action, as well as of the chief part of speculation.25

All of this made it devastatingly clear that, while it was absolutely impossible to be sure which ideas embodied adequate representations of the world and of our true interests and which did not, it was equally impossible not to make judgements about which of these ideas should be used as a guide to action and which should not. Nature, said Hume, in a classic remark, By an absolute and uncontrollable necessity, has determin’d us to judge, as well as to breathe and feel.26

Christians had always believed that the power of making such judgements derived from

the powers of reason or faith that had been bestowed on man by God and allowed them to recognise the nature of his providence and his instructions to men. Hume denied that this capacity for making judgements belonged to an essentially private world of Christian belief. For ‘a correct judgement’, Hume observed, ‘avoiding all distant and high enquiries, confines itself to common life, and to such subjects as fall under daily practice and experience; leaving the more sublime topics to the embellishments of poets and orators, or to the arts of priests and politicians’.27 For its roots lay in the need of passionate and sociable human beings to be able to make sense of the world and learn how best to pursue their interests within it. It was, in other words, a biological necessity, essential for the conduct of ordinary life. This conclusion led him, famously, to conclude that Christianity had ambushed the mind of western man, imprisoning him in a cognitive world which reduced morality and politics to theology, and ideas of human duty to the needs of a life hereafter, not to those of common life. It was thus the task of the moralist to release mankind from its metaphysical bondage and to restore the study of morality to the world of common life, where it properly belonged. And that in the last resort was a matter of teaching men and women to understand and cultivate the power of judgement upon which all human thought and action depended. For Hume, the story of making judgements was a story about human beings’ encounters with common life and, as recent Wittgenstinian commentators have pointed out, in the last resort, that was a matter of language.28 For it was by using language that human beings acquired the metaphysical knowledge that made all other forms of knowledge possible. And it was by extending our use of moral, political, aesthetic and religious language that we were able to extend our metaphysical understanding and so learn to acquire more extensive views of ourselves, others, God and nature. Thus The more we converse with mankind, and the greater social intercourse we maintain, the more shall we be familiarized to those general preferences and distinctions, without which our conversation and discourse could scarcely be rendered intelligible to each other. Every man’s interest is peculiar to himself, and the aversions and desires, which result from it, cannot be supposed to affect others in a like degree. General language, therefore, being formed for general use, must be moulded on some more general views, and must affix the epithets of praise or blame, in conformity to sentiments, which arise from the general interests of the community.29

In other words, only by extending our experience could we extend our knowledge and only by extending our knowledge could we acquire new ideas of ourselves, our interests and the best ways of pursuing them. Like Addison, Hume was greatly interested in the mechanical process by which linguistic skills were acquired and he too thought that it could be described in terms of conversation, friendship and the restraint and moderation that made it possible. It was, he remarked, a matter of learning that pleasant art of ‘mutual deference or civility which leads us to resign our inclination to those of our companion, and curb and conceal that presumption and arrogance so natural to the human mind’.30 For it was Hume’s central contention that these were not simply the principles of polite Addisonian conversation and

morality but of sociable living itself. Hume’s pyrrhonian scepticism had transformed the language of Addisonian politeness. Addison had believed that the complexities of living in a world of commerce had brought about a disjunction between the manners and morals of ordinary men and women. Addisonian politeness had been presented as a mechanism for reintegrating the modern citizen’s moral and social self and of overcoming a form of alienation which commerce had brought with it. Hume on the other hand had shown that the true source of modern man’s alienation lay in Christianity, not commerce. For Christian religion, founded on premises which had no roots in common life, deflected men’s attention from their ordinary needs to those of an imaginary life hereafter, thus rendering the guidance of ordinary life uncertain and insecure. Such thinking could only confuse men’s thinking about their interests and the best way to pursue them. And like Fletcher, although for very different reasons, he was to argue that if the true nature of commerce was properly understood, citizens and governments alike would realise that its natural tendency was to civilise, not corrupt, and that it would extend the virtue and happiness of mankind. For Hume the key to understanding the civilising tendency of commerce stemmed from his presumptions about the supreme importance of language and good judgement in forming just ideas of our interests. If our ideas were formed by language and if our happiness depended on good judgement, it followed that the more stable a system of language was, the more reliable our understanding of the world would be and the better would be our power of judgement. But linguistic stability presupposed social stability, and it was only once the principles of social stability were understood that mankind could hope to learn the true nature of the civilising powers of commerce. It was in this context that Hume turned to the origins of our ideas of morality, justice and a public interest. He began with a striking paradox: so far from being the foundation stones on which men’s ideas of justice and the public interest rested, the natural tendency of our moral instincts was to generate social insecurity and disorder. He thought that it was a matter of common observation that, while men were selfregarding by nature and only capable of limited benevolence in their dealings with others, they possessed, or rather, acquired, general ideas of morality and justice which were, apparently, fixed, regular and compelling in their operation and of the utmost importance in maintaining the fabric of a society. Hume’s discussion of the process by which men acquired such general ideas is long and exceedingly complex and most of the mechanics were removed from later accounts, more one suspects on account of the necessary density and complexity of the argument than because of any incoherence in it. But it is here, above all, that one can see the language of Addisonian politeness deepened, transformed and turned into a vehicle for a purely secular science of man. Hume described the natural qualities of benevolence and selfishness which Shaftesburian and Hobbesian moralists ascribed to human nature like this:

Men are in a great measure, govern’d by interest, and ... even when they extend their concern beyond themselves, ’tis not to any great distance; nor is it usual for them in common life to look farther than their nearest friends and acquaintances.31

Thus ‘our natural uncultivated ideas of morality, instead of providing a remedy for the partiality of our affections, do rather conform themselves to that partiality and give it an additional force and influence’.32 In a state of relative scarcity, when there was competition for the fruits of the earth, that desire was compelling and potentially catastrophic for society: This avidity alone, of acquiring goods and possessions for ourselves and our nearest friends, is insatiable, perpetual, universal and directly destructive of society.33

The conclusion was inescapable. An idea of justice presupposed that individuals had learned that it was in their long-term interest to restrain those natural instincts in order to serve those of a public composed of strangers. But such a course of action could not possibly satisfy an individual’s sense of interest unless he was reasonably sure that others were calculating theirs in the same way; as Hume put it: ‘’tis only on the expectation of this, that our moderation and abstinence are founded’.34 Thus the roots of an individual’s idea of justice lay in the family, in his experience of ‘company and conversation’, and in his awareness of the utility of general rules to prevent those disagreements over possessions which threatened to disrupt social order.35 As such, they arose ‘naturally, tho’ necessarily, from education and human convention’36 whose character Hume described in a classic metaphor, which underscores the importance of Addisonian morality to his understanding of the science of man in the sharpest form: Thus, two men pull the oar of a boat by common convention for common interest, without any promise or contract. Thus gold and silver are made the measures of exchange; thus speech and words and language are fixed by human convention and agreement.37

The implications were unmistakable. The origins of the ‘cautious jealous virtue of justice’ and of our idea of a public interest to which our own was directly related, lay in a desire to enjoy our possessions in security.38 What is more, this secular and commutative idea of justice showed up the fundamental incoherence and, indeed, danger of the ideas of distributive justice that lay at the heart of much Christian and radical thinking. This was why Hume reserved some of his sharpest criticism of levelling on the grounds that formal attempts to redistribute property could only undermine the foundations of all social order: Fanatics may suppose, that dominion is founded on grace and that saints alone inherit the earthy but the civil magistrate very justly puts these sublime theorists on the same footing with common robbers, and teaches them by the severest discipline, that a rule, which in speculation, may seem the most advantageous to society, may yet be found, in practice, totally pernicious and destructive.39

Hume’s discussion of justice lies at the heart of his entire system of polite civic morality, and it was a singularly and disturbingly radical one. Acquiring a language of justice and

learning to think of its rules as fixed, inflexible and absolutely necessary to the maintenance of society and the linguistic conventions on which all human happiness ultimately depended: all of this had been presented as a difficult, testing and crucial experience to which every member of civilised society was exposed. What is more, Humean experience taught that the virtue of justice was ‘jealous and defensive’. It was rooted in the recognition of every member of society, that the single interest that linked them was the desire for absolute security in the enjoyment of their possessions — or what they came to think of as their ‘property’ — no matter how unequal its distribution might be. Under these circumstances, it was Hume’s thoroughly Hobbesian belief, as critics have frequently pointed out, that even a pauper, ruinously indebted to a rich man, understood the justice of his creditor’s demand for the repayment of his debt, in spite of the disastrous personal consequences of doing so. Some critics have thought that Hume’s discussion of justice becomes incoherent at this point: how could it possibly be in the public interest to ruin a pauper for a trivial sum and throw him on the charity of society? But this criticism surely misses the point.40 For Hume’s analysis showed that cognitively, both debtor and creditor were linked by the knowledge that the interests of society and thus, indirectly, their own, depended on the inflexible observance of the rules of justice. However, it was presumably a matter of judgement on the part of the creditor whether or not to take the debtor into court and, if he did so, whether or not to insist on the execution of a verdict given in his favour. As every Ciceronian knew and, as Hume reminded his readers, all human beings were able to recognise the virtue that was inherent in such qualities as generosity, fairness and humanity, when they were exercised thoughtfully and mindfully of the public interest. What is more, such behaviour was, as Hume pointed out, reinforced by the approval that such actions received from ‘a judicious spectator’. In other words, equity was a matter of morality, not justice, and the way in which it was exercised depended upon the judgement of the citizen, not on that of the judge. In Hume’s judgement, the boundaries between public and private morality had shifted. It meant that politeness, so far from being an ornamental accomplishment, was now presented as a skill which was of the utmost importance to the maintenance of the social order and the pursuit of human happiness. Just how essential good judgement was to the preservation of the public interest in the peculiar condition of the modern world with its complex extended monarchies, becomes clear in the Essays Moral and Political of 1741 and 1742. Here Hume was able to show that in ordinary life men’s ideas of interest were transmitted ‘as it were by contagion through the whole club or knot of companions’. In the case of ‘an enormous monarchy’, which might well be divided by geography and different laws, manners and religions, its culture was therefore necessarily pluralistic.41 What was more, the history of modern Britain had shown how deeply factionalised its politics had become and how many different views about the public interest had developed.42 And such diversity, all too often inflamed by party zealotry, meant that there was a constant threat to the constitution and the security of ordinary life.

How, then, could the true nature of the public interest be determined? Hume could see that it was impossible to view one particular constitution or one particular conception of the public interest as inherently more ‘rational’ than any other. Like any classical republican, he was preoccupied with the problem of ensuring that modern Britain had a system of government that would last for as long as possible. And that was something which was only possible if the maximum number of interest groups within society clearly recognised that their own interests could best be preserved by being identified with those of the public and with the preservation of the rules of justice. In the last resort, of course, that was a matter of preserving the authority of government on which the security of the rules of justice depended. However, it was also a matter of ensuring that citizens acquired discriminating ideas about the public interest, which recognised the necessary diversity of mankind’s ideas of their interests in the necessarily pluralistic framework of a modern polity. That in turn meant acquiring more extensive views of human nature and human interests than those in which they had been raised, something to which Shaftesburian and Addisonian moralists had always attached great importance. Hume thought that the lucky few, like the readers of his Essays and Enquiries, could learn the lesson the polite way, by cultivating the liberal arts. For these presented human behaviour in all its variety, furnishing those who practised them with fruitful subjects for reflection and serious conversation. ‘Our judgement will strengthen by this exercise’, Hume wrote. ‘We shall form juster notions of life’. Our taste for discriminating friendship would be whetted and, in the process, the interests of society itself would be served.43 But this was advice for an elite. So far as ordinary men and women were concerned, nothing would do more to refine their powers of judgement and their ideas of public interest than encouraging the spread of commerce, something which Hume discussed in his Political Essays of 1752. For commerce would have the effect of generating labour and the social activity on which all civilised living depended. It would release men from the confines of tradition, providing them with new and more extensive views of ordinary life. It would allow them to improve their powers of judgement in their dealings with other men and help them to understand better their own interests and duties. Like Fletcher and, indeed, like all Scottish political writers of the period, Hume attached great importance to the role of commerce in extending industry and employment and, while he could not share Fletcher’s belief that all men had a natural right to industry, he did recognise that ‘There is no craving or demand of the human mind more constant and insatiable than that for exercise and employment and this desire seems the foundation of most of our passions and pursuits’.44 Such a powerful passion could only work for the public good and help to ensure stability if governments were able to maximise opportunities for industry, and it was Hume’s cardinal point that commercial civilisation was uniquely well equipped for this purpose. Improvements in trade, manufactures and commerce had, Hume observed, a

natural disposition to extend employment and sociability, for ‘industry, knowledge and humanity are linked by an indissoluble chain’ extending men’s ideas of their interests, serving to secure the authority of government and the rules of justice upon which the stability and happiness of human society depended.45 Like Fletcher, Hume was also deeply preoccupied with the problem of maintaining employment in the remoter and poorer countries and regions of the world of commerce. As Istvan Hont has shown, Hume used some of his most concentrated and profound economic argument to show how, in a free international market, the mechanisms of international trade and finance would naturally work to secure an equitable distribution of resources between rich and poor countries and between the rich and poor regions of the same polity. A constitution which secured the rules of justice by creating an equitable balance between court and country and by minimising the opportunities for political faction and government extravagance would provide the best political conditions for ensuring the spread of commerce.46 Only then would men and women be able to acquire the politeness that would provide them with ideas of interest and morality which derived from common life and not from the church. Only then would they possess the skills needed to preserve liberty and happiness in a modern polity. Hume addressed himself to this problem most directly in one of his last essays, ‘The Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’. Like Fletcher, he insisted on the importance of local communities, dominated by substantial men of property in providing the foundation stones for such a government and for preventing the sort of concentration of power in a capital city that could threaten liberty and prosperity in remoter regions. As he had put it in 1741, small communities were ‘more susceptible both of reason and order’ than larger communities, and in them ‘the public interest may be pursued with some method and constancy’.47 As such he thought of each of the counties of his perfect commonwealth as ‘a kind of republic within itself’ charged with the business of managing local civil and ecclesiastical affairs and for organising a militia.48 In such small communities it would be possible to activate the participatory virtues that both the classical republicans and the Addisonians commended. These communities were to be the foundations of Hume’s perfect commonwealth. Government was to be concentrated in the hands of a senate and executive committees which were drawn from the ranks of county representatives. They were carefully designed to make sure that there was a community of interest between court and country and that the danger of factionalising national politics was minimalised. Hume thought that his commonwealth had ‘all the advantages of both a great and a little commonwealth’, securing maximum participation in public affairs, and minimising the risk of faction.49 Such a constitution would create the conditions necessary to secure the rules of justice and encourage the spread of the commerce and politeness on which the liberty and happiness of a modern polity depended. As such, Hume thought it would ‘flourish for many ages without pretending to bestow on any work of man, that immortality which the Almighty seems to have refused to his own

productions’.50 Hume’s plan for a perfect commonwealth, which deserves more attention than it can be given here, completed his transformation of the language of Addisonian politeness. No-one before, no-one after, would lay such stress on the role of politeness in teaching modern men and women how to understand their interests and secure them within the framework of a commercial polity. Hume had shown that the roots of politeness lay in the principles of human nature and of common life, and that their cultivation was a natural means — the only means, in fact — of advancing human happiness. Like Fletcher he had shown that an age of commerce required new ideas of virtue and new institutions to release them. If politeness was the authentic source of civic virtue in a commercial polity, commerce was, by its very nature, that form of civilisation which was best able to release that sense of virtue and secure the happiness of the greatest number of men and women; and a properly managed commercial polity would thus be best able to last indefinitely. All of this threw the inadequacies of English political thought into relief although time prevents proper discussion of Fletcher and Hume’s role as critics of what Duncan Forbes has splendidly called ‘vulgar whiggery’.51 Like Fletcher, Hume fully understood the transformational effects that commerce and the rise of enormous monarchies had wrought on the fabric of contemporary life. And he too clearly saw the need for a radical re-evaluation of the political thought of contemporary England. Both saw that English political thought had been fatally distorted by an obsession with England’s feudal past and with institutions which were supposed to be enshrined in an ancient constitution. As Fletcher sourly put it: For the generality of all ranks of men are cheated by words and names; and provided the ancient terms and outward forms of any government be retained, let the nature of it be never so much altered, they continue to dream that they shall still enjoy their former liberty, and are not to be awakened till it prove too late.52

But Hume was a far more radical critic of English political thought. If Fletcher had refused to be deluded by the example of gothic constitutions like those so beloved of English radicals, Hume refused to be deluded by the example of Fletcher’s beloved classical republics and disagreed fundamentally with his neo-stoic view of human nature. His perfect commonwealth was founded on the principles of justice, politeness and civil, not civic virtue. Politeness derived from industry and learning and, released by active participation in the common life of a commercial polity, would preserve the interests of citizens and the state and gradually extend the resources of the language in which human affairs were discussed and acted out, rendering life more consistent and regular and human happiness more secure. In Hume’s hands, Addisonian politeness, so far from imposing an alien ethical code on a subject Scottish people, had been transformed into a vehicle of political science which was designed to bring about a wholesale reform of the political culture of England.

V But a discussion of the relationship between Fletcher’s new classical republicanism and Hume’s preoccupation with Addisonian politeness raises important questions about the relationship between their thought, that of English and Irish contemporaries and that of Francis Hutcheson who has often been plausibly regarded as the father of the Scottish Enlightenment. What is more, it raises equally important questions about the relationship between this peculiarly Scottish enquiry and the later writing of Smith, Ferguson, Millar, Reid and Stewart. But these questions take us far beyond the very limited agenda that was set at the beginning of this essay. For our original concern was with classic Scottish preoccupations with the relationship between Enlightenment and ‘Anglicisation’ and with the connections which were made by contemporaries and have often been overlooked by modern historians, between Anglicisation and the commercialisation of Scottish society. And the main purpose of this discussion has been to show that if Anglicisation means anything at all in this context, it means the radical, even revolutionary, transformation of two recognisably English languages concerned with civic morality into vehicles for understanding and regulating peculiarly Scottish problems. Even although Fletcher and Hume belonged to different generations and worked from significantly different views of human nature, they could both agree that these two languages were of value, not because they were English, but because they were usable, if highly imperfect, resources for understanding the political problems of a pluralistic, extended monarchy like that of Britain. Fletcher thought that the cultivation of martial virtue was the only way to ensure that commerce would be a means of preserving the fabric of a free polity. Hume thought that politeness acquired by cultivating the business of common life and, perhaps, the liberal arts would be enough to secure property and industry and release those participatory virtues that flourished best in a regular government in an age of commerce. Since their day, we have become accustomed to think of war, politeness and the liberal arts as the secular skills which have done most to shape the Scottish character. That we do so is due to the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment and to the process of Anglicisation which is so much a part of it.53 NOTES 1. J. Witherspoon, Ecclesiastical Characteristics (Edinburgh, 1853). J. McCosh, The Scottish Philosophy, Biographical, Expository, Critical from Hutcheson to Hamilton (New York, 1875). But the theme is continually repeated throughout his voluminous writings. See also my ‘Evangelist of Common Sense’, Times Literary Supplement, November 1981. 2. D. Craig, Scottish Literature and the Scottish People 1680–1830 (London, 1961). 3. Edinburgh Review, no. 96 (1828), 288–9. 4. What follows derives from the following sources: The Edinburgh Review (1755–56), preface; Proposals for carrying on certain public works in the City of Edinburgh, 1752 (new edn., Edinburgh, 1982); W. Robertson, The History of Scotland during the Reigns of Queen Mary and of King James VI till his accession to the Crown of England (1759), Book VIII,

conclusion. These views acquired canonical status in Walter Scott’s account of the history of Scotland whose enduring influence on popular Scottish historiography has never been given its due. 5. Our understanding of moderatism has recently been transformed by R. B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 1985). We are now able to see how drastically its history has been distorted by the writings of their evangelical rivals. 6. A. F. Tytler of Woodhouselee, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Hon. Henry Home of Kames (Edinburgh, 1814), i, 295. 7. A. Murdoch, ‘The People Above’: Politics and Administration in mid-Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh, 1980). 8. Sir William Hamilton (ed.),The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart (Edinburgh, 1854), i, 551. 9. N. T. Phillipson, ‘The Pursuit of Virtue in Scottish University Education: Dugald Stewart and Scottish Moral Philosophy in the Enlightenment’, in N. T. Phillipson (ed.), Universities, Society and the Future (Edinburgh, 1983), 82–109. J. Moore and M. Silverthorne, ‘Natural Society and Natural Rights in the Moral Philosophy of Gershom Carmichael’, in V. Hope (ed.),Philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 1984). See also the same authors’ ‘Gershom Carmichael and the Natural Jurisprudence Tradition in Eighteenth-Century Scotland’, in I. Hont and M. Ignatieff (eds.), Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1983), 73–87. 10. All references to Fletcher’s works are to David Daiches (ed.), Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun: Selected Political Writings and Speeches (Edinburgh, 1979). For convenience sake, page references are included in the text of the paper. The framework for a modern account of the transmission of classical republican political thought to the Anglo-Saxon world has been established by J. G. A. Pocock in the following works: Politics, Language and Time (New York, 1971), ch. 4; The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975); and The Political Works of James Harrington (Cambridge, 1977), 1–154. John Robertson has discussed Fletcher’s political theory in relation to the union debate and Scottish discourse on government in ‘The Scottish Enlightenment at the Limits of the Civic Tradition’, in Hont and Ignatieff (ed.), Wealth and Virtue, 137–78. See also his contribution to the present volume. The view of Fletcher presented here is an extended but modified version of the views the present writer outlined in two essays: ‘The Scottish Enlightenment’, in R. Porter and M. Teich (ed.), The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge, 1981), and ‘Hume as Moralist: A Social Historian’s Perspective’, in S. C. Brown (ed.), Philosophers of the Enlightenment (Brighton, 1979). The view presented here diverges somewhat from that of Pocock and Robertson. 11. In addition to Pocock’s works cited above, see C. Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthmen (Cambridge, Mass., 1958). Fletcher’s relations with Irish republicans, whose works he knew well, have yet to be explored. For the moral epistemology of classical republican thought, see A. Hirschmann’s classic The Passions and the Interests (Princeton, 1976). 12. Pocock (ed.). Political Works of Harrington, 1–154. 13. Fletcher’s enormous and carefully assembled library has unfortunately been dispersed. Some indication of its size and of the vast range of Fletcher’s learning is evident from two book-lists in the Saltoun MSS: NLS MSS 17862–3. 14. D. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford, 1967), 540–1. Henceforth cited as Treatise. 15. Pocock (ed.), Political Works of Harrington, 1–154. 16. [W. Seton], ‘Scotland’s Great Advantages by a Union with England. Shown in a letter from the Country to a Member of Parliament, 1706’, in Sir Walter Scott (ed.), A Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts ... (2nd. edn., London, 1814), xii, 519–24. This view of the union debate differs somewhat from that of John Robertson in the works cited above (note 10). 17. See the introduction to Donald F. Bond’s edition of The Spectator (Oxford, 1965). 18. L. Klein, The Rise of Politeness in England, 1660–1715 (University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, 1985), and M. G. Ketcham, Transparent Designs: Reading, Performance and Form in the ‘Spectator’ Papers (Athens, Ga., 1985). 19. See my ‘Scottish Enlightenment’ and ‘Hume as Moralist’ (note 10 above). See also J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History (Cambridge, 1985), esp. ch. 11. 20. See my ‘Culture and Society in the Eighteenth-Century Province: the Case of Edinburgh and the Scottish Enlightenment’, in L. Stone (ed.), The University in Society (Princeton, 1974), ii, 407–48. 21. The Addisonian dimensions of Ramsay’s poetry and his status as a civic moralist have yet to be explored. See my ‘Culture and Society’ (note 20 above) and I. G. Brown’s excellent Poet and Painter: Allan Ramsay, Father and Son 1684– 1984 (NLS, Edinburgh, 1984). 22. J. Y. T. Greig (ed.), The Letters of David Hume (Oxford, 1952), ii, 257. What follows greatly develops and modifies an argument presented in my ‘Hume as Moralist’. 23. R. Popkin, ‘David Hume: His Pyrrhonism and his Critique of Pyrrhonism’, in V. C. Chappell (ed.), Hume (New York, 1966). R. J. Fogelin, Hume’s Skepticism in the Treatise of Human Nature (London, 1985). There are helpful discussions in

the following: J. Immerwarh, ‘A Skeptic’s Progress: Hume’s Preference for the First Enquiry’, in D. F. Norton, N. Capaldi and W. Robison (eds.), McGill Hume Studies (San Diego, 1979); J. Farr, ‘Hume, Hermeneutics and History’, History and Theory, xvii (1978), 285–310. The views presented here owe much to D. W. Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life (Chicago, 1984). 24. Treatise, 440. 25. D. Hume, Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford, 1966), 44–5. Henceforth cited as Enquiries. 26. Ibid., 183. 27. Ibid., 162. 28. See especially Livingston’s helpful discussion of Hume’s commitment to ‘the deep linguistic conventions of common life’ in his Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life, esp. chs. 3–4. 29. Enquiries, 228–9. 30. D. Hume, Essays Moral, Political and Literary (Oxford, 1966), 127. Henceforth cited as Essays. ‘Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences’. 31. Treatise, 534. 32. Ibid., 489. 33. Ibid., 491–2. 34. Ibid., 490. 35. Ibid., 489, 497–8. 36. Ibid., 433. 37. Enquiries, 306. But the classic source is Treatise, Book III, Section 2. 38. Enquiries, 184. ‘Common interest and utility’, Hume remarked, ‘beget infallibly a standard of right and wrong among the parties concerned.’ Ibid., 211. 39. Ibid., 193. 40. The literature on Hume’s discussion of justice is voluminous and the critique referred to above is various and extensive. The discussion here disagrees with two in particular: D. Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics (Cambridge, 1975), 88–9, and K. Haakonssen, The Science of a Legislator: the Natural Jurisprudence of David Hume and Adam Smith (Cambridge, 1981). Both discussions, however, are influenced by particular philosophical preoccupations which lie outside the range of a historian’s concerns. 41. Essays, 208: ‘Of National Characters’. 42. The subject of the central essays of the first volume of Essays Moral and Political. 43. Essays, 5–7: ‘Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion’. 44. Ibid., 309: ‘Of Interest’. See also ibid., 150: ‘The Stoic’. 45. Ibid., 278: ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’. 46. I. Hont, ‘The “rich country–poor country” debate in Scottish Classical Political Economy’, in Hont and Ignatieff (eds.). Wealth and Virtue, 271–315. 47. Essays, 33: ‘Of the First Principles of Government’. 48. Ibid., 506: ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’. 49. Ibid., 511. 50. Ibid., 515. 51. Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics, 143. Forbes’ study remains the essential point of departure for all serious work on Hume’s politics. 52. Fletcher,Selected Writings, 3. 53. I am very grateful indeed to David Fate Norton for generous and helpful comments on this paper.

12 The Scottish ‘Jacobins’, Scottish Nationalism and the British Union John D. Brims

In the opinion of Henry Meikle, whose Scotland and the French Revolution remains the best history of the Scottish ‘Jacobins’ available in print, there was no question of Scottish nationalism having any significant contribution to make to the Scottish democratic movement of the 1790s. In his account of the Scottish Society of the Friends of the People, a loose-knit organisation of popular societies which between its formation in July 1792 and its virtual collapse in May 1794 led the Scottish campaign for a democratic system of government, there is no reference to any dissatisfaction with the incorporating union and no discussion of the societies’ views on the future relationship between a democratic Scotland and England. When, in the later chapters of his book, Meikle came to discuss revolutionary France’s interest in establishing an independent Scottish republic and the energetic efforts of Thomas Muir (1765–1799), one of the leading Scots democrats, to encourage that interest, he ridiculed French misunderstanding of Scottish history1 and attributed Muir’s revolutionary nationalism to mental illness.2 The argument while implicit was nevertheless clear. The Scottish ‘Jacobins’ were convinced of the benefits of the Union of 1707 and had no desire to re-establish a separate Scottish state. This view was seemingly accepted without question until 1956 when the correspondence of some leading Scottish reformers with Charles Grey (1764–1845), second earl Grey, was published in the Scottish Historical Review. Among this correspondence was a letter of Basil Douglas, Lord Daer (1763–1794), the eldest son of the fourth earl of Selkirk, which, Edward Hughes argued, suggested a ‘distinctly nationalist prong in the movement’.3 This letter and Muir’s memoranda to the French Directory formed the basis for Peter Berresford Ellis and Seamus Mac a’Ghobhainn’s contention that the leaders of the Scottish Friends of the People ‘were republican almost to a man’ and ‘quite open in advocating the repeal of the Union with England’.4 This nationalist interpretation has gained some limited academic approval in recent years. James D. Young has written of ‘the deep rooted and extensive nationalism of the Scottish plebeians’ in the late eighteenth century

and of the ‘nationalist-cum-Jacobin’ sentiments of the United Scotsmen,5 while Hamish Henderson has recently asserted that ‘Scottish democrats like Lord Daer ... were ... unequivocally in favour of the recovery of Scottish national sovereignty’.6 Other historians, however, have remained unconvinced of the validity of the nationalist interpretation. William Ferguson, T. C. Smout and Bruce Lenman make no reference to any nationalist objectives or sentiments in their respective discussions of the Scots ‘Jacobins’,7 while Malcolm Thomis and Peter Holt argue that, in rejecting Thomas Muir’s ‘republican and nationalist’ stance, the Scottish Friends of the People committed their movement to ‘a peaceful reform of Westminster’.8 It would seem at first sight to be an easy matter to resolve this controversy, if such it may be called, for the societies of the Friends of the People, which sprang up across Lowland Scotland during the latter half of 1792, invariably published resolutions declaring their political principles. What is immediately striking about these resolutions is not only the studious moderation of their content and tone but also the complete absence of any reference or allusion to what might be termed the ‘national question’. Reasons of space and consideration for the reader likewise dictate that the evidence cannot be rehearsed here in full, but a representative sample may be given. When, on 26 July 1792, representatives from the shadowy ‘Societies of the Friends for General Reform’ and the burgh reform movement met together at Fortune’s Tavern in Edinburgh, they decided to form ‘a General Association of the whole people, to petition and insist upon an equal representation of the Citizens at large’. To that purpose the meeting resolved to form itself ‘into a permanent Society under the appellation of the Associated Friends of the People’, and declared that ‘the object of this Association [was] to attempt by all constitutional means, the attainment, first, of an equal Representation of the People; and, second, of a more limited duration of Parliamentary Delegation’.9 The Fortune’s Tavern resolutions provided a model for those of many of the other societies which were formed subsequently. The Dundee Society of the Friends of the Constitution, for example, unanimously resolved on 17 September 1792 that ‘the great object of this Society [was] to obtain, by Constitutional means, a Reform in the present very inadequate state of the Representation of the People, and also a more limited duration of Parliaments’,10 while the delegate meeting of the United Societies of Paisley associated for Parliamentary Reform declared on 2 November 1792 that the objectives of the societies were ‘to endeavour, by all lawful means, the attainment of an equal representation of the people in Parliament, and a short duration of that delegation’.11 It would, however, be foolish simply to accept these resolutions at their face value, for the Scottish Friends of the People could be most discreet about their objectives when they believed that discretion might suit their purpose. It seems clear, for example, that the Scottish Friends of the People were committed to obtaining universal manhood suffrage at a period when they were still publicly proclaiming their objective to be ‘equal representation’.

Throughout 1792 and into the early months of 1793 the Scots societies were happy to retain this delightfully vague expression because it proclaimed their constitutionalism in the face of loyalist and government charges of Jacobinism, helped them to maintain a useful working relationship with the London Friends of the People who were expected to co-ordinate the petitioning campaign and present the resultant petitions to parliament, and kept their door open for the sort of reformers they were keen to recruit but who would have been scared off by a declaration in favour of universal manhood suffrage. It was only when the Scottish Friends of the People began seriously to suspect the real motives and intentions of the London society and to realise that the burgh and county reformers might be immovable in their opposition to joining the campaign for radical parliamentary reform that they became slightly less guarded, if hardly open, in stating what their objective might be. On 14 December 1792 the Edinburgh Gazetteer, a pro-reform newspaper owned by Captain William Johnston, one of the leading lights of the Edinburgh Friends of the People, published an essay which explained that ‘equality’ meant that ‘every person [sic] ... may equally have a voice in the election of those who make the laws by which he is affected in his liberty, his life, or his property’.12 Two days previously, Thomas Muir had told the first national convention of the Scottish Friends of the People that ‘the great object we ought to have in view is equal representation; that every man, who is twenty one years of age, who is not insane, under influence, or a criminal, should have a voice in the election of his representatives’.13 Familiarity with the privately expressed views of the radicals left conservative observers in no doubt that the Scottish Friends of the People were proposing the revolutionary measure of universal manhood suffrage under the constitutionalist cover of ‘equal representation’. A ‘Querist’ wrote an open letter to the Paisley United Societies asking what they meant by equal representation, and rhetorically enquiring, ‘if it is, as some of your brethren say in conversation, that every male of 21 years of age shall have a vote’, whether such a scheme, ‘which has no foundation in what you call the principles of the Constitution, would not be subversive of it, and would not, notwithstanding your professed attachment to our present form of government, effect a complete revolution?’14 The same theme was taken up in late November or early December 1792 by ‘A Burgher of Edinburgh’ who wrote a short loyalist pamphlet entitled A Letter to Mr Hugh Bell, Chairman of the Convention of Delegates. The author mischievously claimed that the letter had been written in order ‘to learn what the Friends of the People mean by an equal representation’ and, after referring to and quoting from Paineite ‘essays and dissertations in the newspapers’, slyly enquired, ‘Are the opinions and tenets of Mr Paine and the reforming societies the same [and] what is the ultimatum of the reformers?’15 Candid answers to those questions would have involved the Scottish Friends of the People in some potentially harmful admissions and consequently were not then forthcoming. It was only with the loss of all hope of winning over the county and burgh

reformers, the rejection of the societies’ petitions by the House of Commons on 7 May 1793, and the decision of the Whig Friends of the People and their friends to abandon active campaigning for reform, that the Scottish Friends of the People resolved to nail their democratic colours to the mast.16 Were there also moves afoot to persuade the movement to adopt policies which might lead to the restoration of Scottish statehood? At least two historians seem to think so, for, according to Thomis and Holt, the first national convention of the Scottish Friends of the People in December 1792 witnessed a decisive clash between the republican nationalist and unionist reformist wings of the movement.17 Certainly, if there was an ‘underground’ nationalist wing of the Scottish movement, then one might expect it to surface during the first convention, for by December 1792 some of the members of the societies had begun to lose whatever faith they may have had in the leadership of the Whig Friends of the People, despair of recruiting the county and burgh reformers to their cause, and press for a radical change in policy. Among those arguing for such a change was Thomas Muir. In a speech in support of his own motion of 21 November 1792 that the Edinburgh delegate committee call a national convention of the Scottish societies, Muir argued that ‘the general of an army might as well propose to storm an enemy’s trenches by detaching small parties to fire platoons at the distance of a week, as a Friend of the People might imagine that Parochial or even County Associations could obtain a civil reception on such a subject [i.e. reform] in the British House of Commons’.18 Only a national convention, it was claimed, could exert enough pressure to persuade the legislature to look favourably upon their petitions. The implications of Muir’s argument were clear. Petitions, however representative of public opinion they might be, were insufficient; they had to be backed by a national convention and, implicitly, by the threat of revolution. Muir’s ideas were remarkably similar to those being aired in Ireland at the same time. In late 1792 Dr. William Drennan (1754–1820), the chairman of the Dublin Society of United Irishmen, pressed the Ulster radicals to hold a provincial convention at Dungannon which would ‘embody and ascertain public opinion’.19 At first he urged that the convention should not adjourn until reform had been granted, but by early January 1793 he had modified his position, recommending that the convention should appoint a ‘permanent executive committee’ with powers to call a national convention as ‘a final measure’ if the Irish parliament refused to pass a reform bill.20 At some point in 1792 Thomas Muir established a correspondence with Archibald Hamilton Rowan (1751–1834), the secretary of the Dublin Society of United Irishmen, and in the period immediately preceding the first Scottish convention this correspondence, Hamilton Rowan tells us, ‘became more frequent’.21 It is almost certain that among the subjects discussed by the two men was the forthcoming address from the Dublin society to the first Scottish convention. The address of the Dublin Society of United Irishmen, which Thomas Muir presented to

the convention on 12 December 1792, was regarded in Ulster as a masterpiece, for it ‘attacked’ the Scots ‘on their weak side’22 by appealing to their notoriously exaggerated national pride. Had the Dublin society contented themselves with referring to Scotland as ‘a Country so respectable for her attainments in Science, in Arts, and in Arms; for men of literary eminence, for the Intelligence and Morality of her people’, and with appealing for international radical solidarity on the grounds that ‘those puerile antipathies so unworthy of the Manhood of Nations’ should be cast off, then all might have been well.23 The Irish radicals, however, went on to record their joy ‘that you do not consider yourselves as merged and melted down into another Country but that in this great national question you are still Scotland — the land where Buchanan wrote, and Fletcher spoke, and Wallace fought’, and to refer to Scotland rising ‘to Distinction not by a calm contented secret wish for a Reform in Parliament but by openly, actively, and urgently willing it with the unity and Energy of an Embodied nation’. For good measure, the Dublin addressers added, in a phrase redolent of Paine, that ‘it is not the Constitution but the People which ought to be inviolable’. No sooner had Muir risen to present the address than Lt. Col. William Dalrymple of Cleland and Fordell (c. 1748–1794), a Foxite Whig and member of the Stair family,24 and Hugh Bell, a prosperous Edinburgh brewer and active burgh reformer,25 ‘protested against it being read, as, in their opinion, it contained Treason, or at least misprision of Treason’.26 This pre-emptive move had little support, and Muir was permitted to read the address and move that it should lie on the table preparatory to an answer being drawn up by the convention. Muir’s advocacy seems to have won the address few friends, for, with the exception of Alexander Aitchison, an Edinburgh medical student,27 who seconded Muir’s motion, no-one appears to have been prepared to support the address at this stage. Led by Robert Forsyth of Redhouse (1766–1846), an advocate of humble origins from Lanarkshire,28 Richard Fowler, an English medical student at the University of Edinburgh,29 Lord Daer, and Lt. Col. Dalrymple, the opposition to the address was both determined and successful, and the convention decided to ‘pass to the order of the day’ .30 The evening session of the convention, however, saw the issue, apparently dead and buried, resurrected. As in the earlier debate, argument centred on the propriety and legality of the address, with Muir defending its constitutionality and Dalrymple, Bell, Fowler, Daer, Forsyth, and John Morthland of Rindmuir (d.1807), a Foxite advocate ‘of real abilities’,31 arguing ‘against meddling with it’.32 In the event, Muir bowed to his opponents, and agreed to withdraw the address and return it to Drennan in order that ‘the passages objected to ... might be smoothed’.33 The next day, in Muir’s absence, ‘Mr Drummond and a country delegate renewed the subject of the Irish Address’, but to no avail, Dalrymple pointing out that ‘he understood it to be withdrawn’.34 Thus, while it was Muir who brought forward the business, other delegates were prepared, after studying the text of the address and listening to the arguments on both sides, to give him their support. Indeed, that the question of the address was raised three

times in all suggests that those who favoured answering it were not an insignificant minority of the delegates and that they held hopes of winning over a majority. The convention, in throwing out the address, was rejecting not only an alliance with the United Irishmen but also the republican nationalism to which that address appealed. Muir’s correspondence with Hamilton Rowan, which doubtless would have shed some light on his motives in bringing forward the address in the convention, has unfortunately been lost, but it is tempting to see Muir’s influence behind the United Irishmen’s decision to appeal to the Scottish republican tradition. There was no likelihood that Drennan and Hamilton Rowan would have concluded from reading the publications of the Scottish Friends of the People that the Scots reformers cherished the memory and ideas of Buchanan, Fletcher and Wallace, and there is no evidence of any communication between the Scots and Irish reformers at this period apart from that between Hamilton Rowan and Muir. In short, if the Dublin society had not got the idea from Muir that the convention might be full of latter-day Fletchers of Saltoun, it is difficult to see from who else they may have got it. There is, moreover, some positive, if tenuous, evidence which suggests that, even at this relatively early stage in his political career, Muir was not unsympathetic to nationalist ideas. In this connection, it is interesting to note that when Muir argued at the first convention that the movement should rest its claims on historical rather than natural rights, he ostentatiously avoided basing his argument on the Anglo-Saxon precedents so beloved of many other Scots radicals and sought instead to justify his position by appealing to the supposed principles of the ancient Scottish constitution. He argued that the movement should seek only to restore the ancient constitution, stating that ‘he could prove that both England and Scotland were once possessed of a free Constitution’35 and claiming, so Aitchison tells us, ‘that the freedom of Scotland was equally ancient’ with that of England.36 And here an odd point arises. Aitchison, who seconded Muir’s motion that the address lie on the table, contended that the movement should base its historical arguments on the very Anglo-Saxonism rejected by Muir, stating ‘that by the English Constitution so long ago as the days of King Alfred, every free man had a vote in choosing his representatives’ and arguing that ‘as one people [since the Union of 1707] we are entitled to the same privileges’ as the English.37 Clearly, the debate over the Irish address cannot be regarded as a straightforward confrontation between unionist and nationalist radical reformers. Nevertheless, it is equally clear that, while Muir apparently said nothing in defence of the address which touched directly on Scotland’s constitutional relationship with England, at least some of his opponents saw the alarming spectre of Scottish nationalism haunting the whole business, with Fowler for one complaining that the address ‘contained high treason against the Union betwixt England and Scotland’.38 It is of course possible that Fowler and his friends were merely concerned with pointing out to their more naive colleagues the treasonable construction which the government’s law officers might place upon a Scottish reply to such an address, but it is also possible that their

intervention was motivated by the desire to alert the convention to Muir’s artful attempt to manoeuvre the movement into an alliance which might ultimately lead to the adoption of republican nationalist policies. In short, it may have been Muir’s calculation rather than naivety which alarmed them. Shortly after the convention adjourned Lord Daer, who had been ‘against the paper being answered or even lying on the table’,39 wrote to Charles Grey warning of the danger from radical nationalism, outlining the Scottish nationalists’ powerful critique of the constitutional settlement of 1707, and stating that ‘the Friends of Liberty in Scotland have almost universally been enemies to Union with England’.40 Daer’s anxious communication was prompted by an earlier letter, of 13 January 1793, from Grey to William Skirving, the secretary of the Edinburgh Friends of the People, which stated that ‘our supporters [in England] are not sufficiently numerous to render the attempt to procure petitions at present adviseable’,41 and was clearly intended to convince Grey of the necessity of commencing the petitioning campaign in England. There must be some suspicion that Daer deliberately exaggerated both the strength of nationalist feeling in Scotland and the likelihood of the Scots radicals ‘bidding you farewell’, but it is hard to believe that Daer’s warnings were without foundation. Three months or so before the first convention assembled, James Thomson Callender, an Edinburgh messenger and writer42 who as a clerk in the Sasine Office had gained first-hand experience of the squalid corruption of Scottish government,43 published a savage attack upon the unreformed political system. He described Scotland as a conquered province of England and claimed that Scottish M.P.s behaved accordingly as the servile tools of English misgovemment. ‘The people of Scotland’, he wrote, are, on all occasions, foolish enough to interest themselves in the good or bad fortune of an English minister; though it does not appear that we have more influence with such a minister, than with the cabinet of Japan. To England we were for many centuries a hostile, and we are still considered by them as a foreign, and in effect a conquered nation. It is true, that we elect very near a twelfth part of the British House of Commons; but our representatives have no title to vote, or act in a separate body. Every statute proceeds upon the majority of the voices of the whole compound assembly. What, therefore, can forty five persons accomplish, when opposed by five hundred and thirteen? They feel the total insignificance of their situation and behave accordingly.44

The economic consequences of Scotland’s political servility had been devastating. British industrial taxation policy, in the view of this nationalist radical, had been dictated by the desire of ‘our southern masters’ to destroy Scottish industry. The distilleries had been almost destroyed, the manufacture of starch had been driven to the verge of extinction, and the manufacturers of paper, printed calicoes, malt liquors, and glass had been harassed by vexatious methods of exacting the revenue.45 ‘It seems’, he stated, to have been long a maxim of the monopolising directors, of our southern masters, to extirpate as fast as possible every manufacture in this country that interferes with their own ... Let us look around this insulted country, and say, on what manufacture except the linen, government has not fastened its bloody fangs.46

However, if political nationalism had a more important place in the history of the Scottish Friends of the People than Meikle for one would allow, it was far from holding the central position which others, most notably Berresford Ellis and Mac a’Ghobhainn, have argued for it. With the exception of Callender’s Political Progress of Britain, no radical pamphlet or handbill argued the nationalist case, while no society of the Friends of the People published resolutions or declarations which either explicitly or implicitly criticised the union with England. Radical publications tended to refer not to Scotland, the Scottish constitution, and Scottish rights, but to Britain, the British constitution, and British rights. More tellingly perhaps, in view of the demonstrated ability of the movement to be somewhat disingenuous in some of its public pronouncements, both the small amount of extant radical correspondence and the more copious evidence of the surviving spies’ reports on the activities and opinions of the Scottish Friends of the People strongly suggest that the private opinions of the radical reformers on this subject were not markedly different from those expressed in public. Moreover, loyalist writers, who were usually none too fussy about picking up sticks to beat the radicals with, did not accuse the Scottish Friends of the People of conspiring to subvert the Anglo-Scottish union. Thus, although some radicals may have desired the restoration of Scotland’s independence and some leaders, such as Muir, may have hoped to manoeuvre the movement into accepting republican nationalist objectives, the overwhelming bulk of the evidence suggests that their views had little support within the movement. Throughout their relatively short history the Scottish Friends of the People sought to democratise the political process within the framework of the British union. At first sight radical indifference to nationalist arguments may appear surprising. The sovereignty of the nation or, to express the idea in a slightly different way, the right of nations to self-determination, was after all an integral part of the political ideology associated with the French Revolution. Moreover, the ancient national antagonisms which divided Scots and English were, even after more than eighty years of parliamentary union, far from dead. These antagonisms were, in part at least, kept alive in Scotland by the folk memory of Scotland’s long struggle against its aggressive and imperious southern neighbour and by the popular publications which reinforced that memory. Blind Hary’s Wallace, a fifteenth–century poem of epic proportions and chauvinist content which recounted the stirring history of Sir William Wallace’s heroic struggles against the English occupying forces in the 1290s, was, numerous commentators averred, the favourite book of ‘the vulgar’ in late eighteenth-century Scotland.47 The effect of this work in strengthening the common people’s sense of national identity and their distrust of the English is testified to by Robert Burns, who related that it ‘poured a Scottish prejudice in my veins which will boil along there till the flood gates of life shut’.48 Such ‘prejudice’ could lead to the sort of unpleasantness experienced in 1795 by a young English traveller in Scotland, who, having crossed from the south to the north side of the river Forth, asked for directions to a number of places on the south side of the river and

had to endure ‘the Hissings, Hootings, and Reflections on myself and Country’ of the local ‘Swinish Multitude’ until the ferry was ready to return him to South Queensferry .49 Other antagonisms of more recent origin and a religious nature also served to reinforce the Scottish common people’s traditional hostility towards England. Many, perhaps most, presbyterian Scots regarded the church of England as an engine of tyrannical power designed ‘to support the state of lordly prelates, and other dignitaries, as the creatures and fit tools of the crown’,50 and some undoubtedly feared that union with ‘prelatical erastian England’ threatened their civil and religious liberties. The Rev. Archibald Bruce (1746–1816), the Antiburgher Professor of Divinity and minister of Whitburn, probably expressed the view of many presbyterian Scots of different denominations when he wrote that ‘the fear that filled the breasts of many of the best friends of presbytery at the time of the Union of the two kingdoms, that the church of Scotland might one time or other be oppressed, if not overturned, by the superior power and predominant influence of the Southern establishment, was far from being visionary’.51 Such fears were justified, Bruce and others of like mind claimed, by the imposition of the sacramental test of the Anglican church upon members of the church of Scotland holding offices under the crown in England, by the requirement that Scottish witnesses appearing in English law courts be sworn in ‘by the superstitious mode of touching and kissing the gospels’, by the Patronage Act of 1712 which re-introduced the highly unpopular system of lay patronage in the church of Scotland, by the imposition of the oath of Supremacy on Scottish members of parliament, and by ‘the late extraordinary movements and violent measures of the present [i.e. Pitt’s] administration’ which threatened to overturn all civil and religious liberty and return Scotland ‘to all the horrors of the days of the Charleses’.52 Yet, despite presbyterian distrust of ‘prelatical erastian England’ and the partial survival of ancient national animosities, few Scots appear to have had any desire to sever their country’s constitutional ties with England. The limited appeal of the nationalist ideas outlined by such as Callender and Daer should surprise no-one. England rarely imposed legislation upon Scotland and, union or no union, the traditional Scottish governing classes retained a firm grip on the reins and profits of political power.53 Thus, whatever the failings of the political system in Scotland, the tendency among the more radically-minded Scots was to blame not the Union of 1707 but the landed classes. When Scottish reformers criticised the Union of 1707, it was invariably the ‘aristocratic’ nature of the political settlement rather than the principle of Anglo-Scottish union which was attacked. For example, an anonymous pamphleteer claimed in 1782 that Since the year 1707 you have been excluded that proportion of liberty which hath been enjoyed by England, in consequence of a compact made by your fathers ....A despotic aristocracy has continued since that period to controul and overawe you, and with all that boast of liberty, which hath been so loud and clamarous, the middle and lower ranks of this country have hardly been able to taste the sweets of freedom. The members of an aristocracy have monopolised the blessings of government, and carefully retained in their pay a chosen band of their inferiors, who have celebrated the praises of a

government, the benefits of which were confined to themselves and their employers.54

In the opinion of this same pamphleteer, as in that of most other Scottish reformers, the solution to Scotland’s political woes was for the ‘men of Scotland’ to assert their rights as ‘free-born Britons’, secure a House of Commons responsive and responsible to the peoples of Britain, and thus overturn the power of an aristocracy which had saddled them with heavy taxes, ‘oppressive and intolerable’ laws, and established a tyranny rivalling that in Turkey.55 When, to give a second example, the polymathic radical James Tytler (1745-1804) sought to convince the Edinburgh Friends of the People to petition the king rather than the House of Commons for parliamentary reform, he denounced the House of Commons not because it was a largely foreign legislature which could not be expected to respond to Scottish needs and desires but because it was composed of a ‘vile junto of aristocrats’. It was ‘the monstrous power of the landholders’, he told his readers, ‘that you have to combat’.56 Relatively few of the Scottish Friends of the People agreed with Tytler’s preference for petitioning the king, but virtually all agreed that parliamentary reform offered the most likely route to the democratic millennium. While some Scots radicals were discussing as early as November 1792 the possibility of civil war and the chances of obtaining fraternal assistance from the armies of revolutionary France,57 such discussion was not encouraged by a movement which had committed itself to constitutional reform. The decision to adopt a reformist rather than a revolutionary strategy was based, in part at least, on the movement’s confidence not only in its own ability to mobilise support in Scotland but also in that of its English counterpart to educate and organise public opinion south of the border. It soon became apparent, however, that this confidence was misplaced. Confronted during the early months of 1793 with a series of state trials and with loyalist intimidation and harassment, an increasingly embattled movement went into retreat. Attendance at radical meetings slumped, membership subscriptions remained unpaid, the output of radical propaganda slowed to a trickle, and, as sales and advertisement revenue fell, the pro-reform Edinburgh Gazetteer and Caledonian Chronicle headed towards bankruptcy and closure.58 In these circumstances it was hardly surprising that the efforts of the Scottish Friends of the People to subject the House of Commons to an overwhelming barrage of reform petitions were less than successful. Only twenty-one petitions in favour of reform were dispatched from Scotland to London in support of Charles Grey’s motion for the House of Commons to appoint a committee of enquiry into the state of parliamentary representation.59 While the massive sizes of the Edinburgh and Glasgow petitions apparently ‘caught a good deal of attention’,60 the total number of subscribers rendered ridiculous any claim that they provided proof of the Scottish nation’s desire for parliamentary reform. Yet, in comparison with the outcome of the English campaign, the achievement of the Scots radicals could be viewed as a triumph. Only fourteen petitions were presented to the House of Commons from England.61 The predictable result of the failure of the radical reformers to put their ‘representatives’ under any pressure

was the crushing defeat of Grey’s motion.62 In the weeks following on the disaster of 7 May those radicals who had not given up the struggle in despair began to turn their minds to how best their cause and morale could be revived. The initiative came from Thomas Hardy (1752–1832), the secretary of the London Corresponding Society, who wrote to William Skirving of the Edinburgh Friends of the People on 17 May 1793 requesting ‘a renewal of correspondence, and a more intimate cooperation’, and urging that their societies should ‘unite ... not only with each other, but with every society throughout the nation’. With the failure of their petitions, he added, ‘our attention must ... be turned to some more effectual means; from your society we would willingly learn them, and you, on your part, may depend upon our adopting the firmest measures provided they are constitutional’.63 Skirving responded enthusiastically, informing Hardy that ‘I know of no greater service I can do to my country, than to promote the union you so wisely desire’. He agreed that they would have to turn to ‘more effectual means of reform’, arguing that neither rational argument nor weight of numbers behind their petitions had won over men’s minds. ‘What then’, he added, ‘is to be hoped for from repetition?’ The way forward, Skirving concluded, was for the peoples of England and Scotland to unite in ‘one great and indivisible family’, reject the unsatisfactory leadership of the London Friends of the People, and, relying on their own judgement and resolution, perfect their organisation and decide upon ‘the extent of Reform we ought to seek’.64 Other English societies followed the lead of the London Corresponding Society, and on 1 June a happy Skirving informed Daniel Stuart, the secretary of the near moribund London Friends of the People, that ‘I had very agreeable communications yesterday and the day before from Sheffield, Leeds and some other places both in England and Irland [sic]65 which give the pleasing hope that instead of being discouraged by the late disappointments the friends of substantial reform are only roused by a deeper conviction of the absolute necessity of it’.66 Skirving’s hopes were further raised when, in early July, a letter was received from the Nottingham radicals stating that The Nottingham Society (anxious for the promotion of parliamentary Reform to which they apprehend their present Governors will never accede but from necessity) are desirous of entering into a closer union and more general Correspondence with the respective Societies of similar Institution in Great Britain: they conceive that on this union only, depends their strength and consequence, and that without a general Co-operation they shall never be able to compel an attention to their just and reasonable demands, without resorting to Confusion and Anarchy, which it is their primary object to avoid.67

These sentiments were entirely in accord with those of the Edinburgh secretary, and Skirving replied agreeing that ‘without a general Convention the most respectable partial meetings, the most convincing representation and the most forcible petitions will be in vain’. Only the ‘union of counsels and union of wills’, he wrote, would induce ‘the present invincible phalanx of mercenaries’ to concede reform.68 Skirving concluded by exhorting the Nottingham radicals to organise an English convention, but there can be no doubt that what

he, and his English correspondents, really had in mind was a British convention which would declare for universal suffrage and annual parliaments. While it had been agreed at the conclusion of the second convention of the Scottish Friends of the People oh 3 May 1793 to hold another in the following October, Skirving’s tardiness in issuing invitations to the English societies ensured that the third convention was an exclusively Scottish affair. Despite the absence of English delegates, however, the Scottish Friends of the People pressed ahead with business and, by their resolutions, confirmed the major policy changes discussed during the summer by Skirving and his English correspondents. Having first agreed to petition the House of Commons for universal manhood suffrage and annual parliamentary elections, the convention went on to debate the motion of Gordon Murray, a delegate from the Edinburgh Operative Society, that Skirving be instructed ‘to communicate our sentiments to the societys for reform in England and to Exhort them to unite together ... as unity and firmness is the only thing ... that will ever give our Cause that proper force and weight which is requisite to answer our purpose’.69 Virtually the last act of the convention before it dispersed on 1 November 1793 was to resolve ‘unanimously’ to ‘express its ardent desire to cultivate a more close union with England’.70 Shortly after the convention dispersed, the English delegates began arriving in Edinburgh. Skirving wasted no time in recalling the delegates. On 7 November he wrote to the Scottish societies requesting them to have their delegates in Edinburgh by the nineteenth of the same month in order ‘to establish an Indissoluble Fraternity between the two nations, and to adopt those Measures which, at this awful period, may have a tendency to save the Country’.71 One of the first motions to come before the recalled convention was ‘that a committee be furthwith appointed to consider the means, and draw up the outlines of a plan of general union and corporation between the two nations in their constitutional pursuit of a thorough parliamentary reform’.72 This motion, which was moved by Maurice Margarot (1745–1815) of the London Corresponding Society,73 was passed immediately and unanimously, but the necessity of drawing up rules for ‘the internal government of the convention’ caused the election of the Committee of Union, as it was called, to be postponed until 21 November. A thirteen-man Committee of Union having been elected, the delegates then debated the whole issue of Anglo-Scottish radical unity at some length.74 Two days later, on 23 November 1793, ‘the great question about the Union of the People of the two nations’ was again discussed and ‘agreed to without a dissenting voice’.75 A symbolic gesture of unity was thought appropriate, and upon the motion of Alexander Scott, the editor of the Edinburgh Gazetteer, the delegates rose up and shook hands ‘as a proof of the union betwixt England and Scotland, which are now joined as Britain’.76 In this euphoric mood the convention was only too willing to agree that henceforth it ‘should be styled the British Convention of the Delegates of the People, Associated to obtain Universal Suffrage, and Annual Parliaments’.77 The reaction of the Scottish democrats to the failure of the petitioning campaign of

January–May 1793 raises a number of important questions. In the first place, why did the Scottish Friends of the People decide to embrace those English radicals whose policies they had previously considered dangerously imprudent78 and whom they had therefore kept politely at arm’s length? The answer is to be found partly in the Scottish radicals’ increasing disillusionment with the Foxite Whigs and partly in their hopelessly exaggerated estimate of the strength of English radicalism. In the opinion of radicals like Skirving, the irresolute leadership provided by the Whiggish London Friends of the People had been responsible for the failure of the movement to expand or even maintain its strength in the early months of 1793 and for the consequent failure of the petitioning campaign. The Foxite Whigs were, in the bitter view of those who had fought a long battle against Foxite demands for a cessation of radical campaigning,79 insincere factious men who had sought to use the movement for their own ends or, at best, an ‘aristocracy for the good of the people’ from whom nothing could now be expected.80 Both English and Scottish radicals agreed that success depended upon unity and the adoption of ‘firm measures’ which would restore the movement’s morale and strength and force the government into making concessions. Unity was essential because Old Corruption was a British beast whose formidable power could only be overcome by the combined efforts of the English and Scottish peoples. ‘If either you in England or we in Scotland, should attempt separately the reform which we seek to obtain’, wrote Skirving, ‘we should by so doing only expose our weakness and manifest our ignorance of the corruption which opposes our important undertaking’.81 In writing of the weakness of their current situation, Skirving was apparently thinking more of Scotland than of England, for he went on to declare that ‘if we were in the same independent state of mind as the people of England, we should be able to take the lead’.82 Skirving’s misjudgement of the strength of English radicalism, which may ironically be contrasted with the English radicals’ estimation of their own weakness and the relative strength of the Scots,83 was apparently widely shared. As early as January 1793, Lord Daer was commenting on the curious ... error which prevails amongst the supporters of freedom in every place in England and Scotland where I have been, That the declared friends of Reform are more numerous every where else. Our folk here are astonished at your [i.e., Charles Grey’s] information that you are not innumerable about London.84

Even after the stark failure of the English societies to stimulate any popular enthusiasm for the petitioning campaign, the Scots remained wilfully blind to the weakness of English radicalism and were apparently happy to accept as an accurate statement of fact Maurice Margarot’s disgracefully irresponsible misrepresentation of the situation south of the border. Addressing the general committee of the Edinburgh Friends of the People on 6 November 1793, the recently arrived emissary of the London Corresponding Society informed his audience that ‘the societies in London were very numerous ...[,] in some parts of England whole towns were reformers’, and in Sheffield and its neighbourhood alone there were

50,000 radicals.85 ‘If we could get a convention of England and Scotland called’, he concluded, ‘we might represent 6 or 7 hundred thousand males, which is a majority of all the adults in the kingdom, and ministry would not dare to refuse our rights’.86 This was just what the Scots radicals wanted to hear. With a desperation born of their abject failure to pressurise parliament with their earlier petitions and subsequently strengthened by their alarm at the progress of a ‘despotism’ seemingly heralded by the Irish Convention Act and the recent trials of Muir and Thomas Fyshe Palmer (1747–1802),87 the Scots radicals seized the opportunity of combining with their apparently powerful English friends to compel that previously ‘invincible phalanx of mercenaries’ to grant their demands. The proposed alliance, however, was clearly perceived by the radicals concerned to be something more than an ad hoc response to a particular set of political circumstances. It was seen as an agreement in principle to unite the ‘people’ or ‘nations’ of Scotland and England in order to create a new British nation which would impose its will upon a British state whose creation had robbed the nations of many of their traditional liberties. In the view of Alexander Callander, a student of the University of Edinburgh and a delegate from the Canongate No. 1 & 2 United Societies,88 the delegates were engaged in a unique political experiment involving ‘the free and voluntary union of the people of two countries to recover their common rights’. These rights, he continued, had been taken from the Scottish and English nations at the time of the Union of the Crowns, ‘for no sooner had James got himself seated on both thrones, than he began to violate the liberties both of the English and the Scotch and used every endeavour to render himself absolute’.89 Joseph Gerrald (1763–1796), the grandiloquent delegate from the London Corresponding Society, agreed that it was in the period following the accession of James VI to the English throne in 1603 That the greatest encroachments began to be made on public liberty’,90 but others sought to emphasise the significance of the ‘aristocratic’ Union of 1707 in the history of British ‘despotism’. One such was James Mitchell of the Paisley Friends of Reform who contrasted the ‘noble transaction’ being undertaken by the Scottish and English radicals with those ‘pretended unions ... between the aristrocracy of nations, by whom the people have been clashed together like two herds of cattle’.91 There was, however, no real significance in the historical disagreement between Callander and Mitchell. All radicals were agreed that the existing British state denied them their rights, and all but the most determined of Scottish nationalists concurred with Lord Daer in believing that ‘a closer Union of the Nations’ would not only place Scotland ‘in a much better situation’ by ending that ‘misery which is perhaps inevitable to a lesser & remote country in a junction where the Governing powers are united but the Nations are not’, but also free England ‘from that vermin from this country who infect your court, your parliament and every establishment’.92 The hopes of the radicals, however, were soon dashed. Far from laying the foundations for the future triumph of British democracy, the proceedings of the British Convention only

succeeded in provoking the authorities into clearing the building site. The prompt and hardheaded response of the authorities, in forcibly dispersing the convention, arresting its leaders, partly suspending the operation of the Act anent Wrongous Imprisonment of 1701, and encouraging the loyalist well-to-do to form Volunteer companies in defence of the constitution, produced its intended result. A dispirited, harassed, and apparently divided Scottish radical movement broke up in disarray.93 The extension to Scotland of the infamously repressive ‘Two Acts’ of 1795, which greatly expanded the scope of the treason laws and placed draconian restrictions on the right of political assembly, was therefore not only unnecessary but also dangerous in that it virtually forced any future revival of radical activity in Scotland to be directed along revolutionary lines. And so it fell out. By the summer of 1797, against a background of allied military and diplomatic setbacks which had established France as the master of continental Europe, financial crisis, economic recession, and the secession of the Foxite opposition from parliament following the rejection of their motions for peace and reform, the United Scotsmen, a secret revolutionary organisation modelled on the United Irishmen, began to establish a significant presence in the old radical strongholds of Lowland Scotland. The activities of the United Scotsmen, as befitted an organisation intent upon the violent overthrow of the state, were shrouded in secrecy, and it is therefore now a matter of some difficulty to reconstruct their history. What is clear, however, is that they were not Scottish nationalists. The judicial declarations of apprehended United Scotsmen, the indictments levelled against them, the evidence given by witnesses at their trials, and the information supplied by government informers about them do not suggest that they had any intention of severing the parliamentary union between Scotland and England. Moreover, there is no mention of any nationalist aspirations in either The Resolutions and Constitution of the Society of United Scotsmen or in the ideological handbook produced by George Mealmaker (1768–1808), one of the leading United Scotsmen, entitled The Moral and Political Catechism of Man.94 Indeed, it is surely significant that the United Scotsmen’s oath called upon prospective members to swear that they would persevere in endeavouring ‘to form a brotherhood of affection amongst Britons of every description’ and ‘to obtain an equal, full and adequate Representation of all the People in Great Britain’.95 However, while the United Scotsmen were not committed Scottish nationalists, they, like their colleagues in Ireland and England, were committed to seeking assistance from a French government which was becoming attracted to the idea of destroying the power of its most determined enemy by dismantling the British state and erecting in its place separate English, Scottish, and Irish republics. Among those urging the Directory to adopt such a policy was Thomas Muir, who, after some extraordinary adventures,96 had arrived in Paris in December 1797. Unable because of ill-health to serve the French republic with his sword, Muir resolved instead to serve it with his pen.97 He explained to the Directory how all the powers and

corrupt arts of English government had been employed since the Union of the Crowns to forge Scotland’s chains, how through a century of ‘blood and tears’ the Scottish presbyterians had struggled for liberty and national independence, and how the English government had finally purchased Scotland’s liberty in 1707 for the scornful sum of £200,000. Since the parliamentary union, Muir argued, the Scottish nobility, intelligentsia, and established church had been corrupted, the national representation debased, commerce embarrassed, industry plagued and in some cases ruined, religious liberty ‘infamously violated’, and the national education system poisoned. Scotland asked for liberty, justice, and vengeance, and, he concluded, if the French government should provide officers, munitions, and money, one hundred thousand patriots would rise in support of an independent Scottish republic.98 Muir’s hugely optimistic assessment of the strength of republican nationalist feeling in Scotland seems to have been given a sympathetic reception in the corridors of French power, for in January 1798 the British government received a secret intelligence report informing them that the Directory had decided, in the event of a successful outcome to their struggle against Great Britain and Ireland, to establish separate republics in Scotland, England, and Ireland.99 The British authorities, clearly believing that this information was far more likely to increase the British peoples’ hatred of France than to encourage the growth of Scottish republican nationalism, leaked the contents of the report to the newspaper press.100 Whatever the impact upon the nation at large, the news that France intended to set up a ‘distinct, separate and independent’ Scottish republic did not discomfit the United Scotsmen. Far from reeling back in horror at the prospect of a Scottish republic, the United Scotsmen continued to prepare to join with the French in the liberation of their nation. The conclusion is clear. The constitutional relationship between Scotland and England was for most, if certainly not all, Scottish ‘Jacobins’ a matter of small importance. The great majority, it would seem, were neither Scottish nationalists nor unionists. They were Scottish democrats whose object was to destroy the Old Regime and transfer political power to ordinary Scottish people, and whose choice of strategy and tactics was largely influenced by their assessment of the opportunities presented by the changing political circumstances they found themselves in. NOTES 1. H. W. Meikle, Scotland and the French Revolution (Glasgow, 1912), 172. 2. Ibid., 176. 3. E. Hughes, ‘The Scottish Reform Movement and Charles Grey, 1792–1794: some fresh correspondence’, SHR, xxxv (1956), 26. 4. P. Berresford Ellis and S. Mac a’Ghobhainn, The Scottish Insurrection of 1820 (London, 1970), 56. 5. J. D. Young, The Rousing of the Scottish Working Class (London, 1979), 42, 52–53. 6. The Scotsman, 11 July 1986, p. 14, columns C–F. 7. W. Ferguson, Scotland: 1689 to the Present (Edinburgh and London, 1968), 248–263; T. C. Smout, A History of the

Scottish People 1560–1830 (London, 1969), 442–445; B. Lenman, Integration, Enlightenment, and Industrialization: Scotland 1746–1832 (London, 1981), 100–104. 8. M. I. Thomis and P. Holt, Threats of Revolution in Britain 1789–1848 (London and Basingstoke, 1977), 10. 9. The Minute Book of the Edinburgh Society of the Friends of the People, 9 August 1792. SRO Justiciary Records. Small Papers. Main Series. JC 26/280. The declaration and resolutions of the meeting were published widely. See, for example, The Caledonian Mercury, 28 July 1792. 10. The Caledonian Mercury, 4 October 1792. 11. Ibid., 5 November 1792. 12. The Edinburgh Gazetteer, 14 December 1792. 13. Spy’s reports on the proceedings of the first convention of the Scottish Friends of the People. SRO Home Office Correspondence (Scotland). RH2/4/66, ff. 366–367. 14. The Glasgow Courier, 3 January 1793. 15. Anon., A Letter to Mr Hugh Bell, Chairman of the Convention of Delegates (Edinburgh, 1792), 3–7. 16. See above, pp. 256–258. 17. Thomis and Holt, Threats of Revolution, 10. 18. The Glasgow Advertiser and Evening Intelligencer, 23–26 November 1792. 19. R. B. McDowell, Ireland in the Age of Imperialism and Revolution 1760–1801 (Oxford, 1979), 425. 20. D. A. Chart (ed.), The Drennan Letters, being a selection from the correspondence which passed between William Drennan, M.D. and his brother-in-law and sister Samuel and Martha McTier during the years 1776–1819 (Belfast, 1931), 133–134. 21. W. H. Drummond, Autobiography of Archibald Hamilton Rowan, Esq. with Additions and Illustrations by William Hamilton Drummond, D.D., M.R.I.A. (Dublin, 1840), 170. 22. Chart (ed.), Drennan Letters, 103. 23. Address from the Society of United Irishmen in Dublin to the Delegates for Reform in Scotland, 23 November 1792. SRO Home Office Correspondence (Scotland). RH2/4/67, ff. 393–398. 24. Sir J. Balfour Paul, The Scots Peerage; founded on Wood’s edition of Sir Robert Douglas’ Peerage of Scotland, containing an historical and genealogical account of the nobility of that kingdom, vol. viii (Edinburgh, 1911), 120–122, 158–159. 25. ‘Mr Hugh Bell, brewer in Edinburgh’ was appointed to the Standing Committee of the Burgh Reformers in August 1789. The Caledonian Mercury, 24 August 1789. 26. Spy’s reports on the proceedings of the first convention of the Scottish Friends of the People. SRO Home Office Correspondence (Scotland). RH2/4/66, f. 351. 27. T. J. Howell, A Complete Collection of State Trials arid Proceedings for High Treason and other Crimes and Misdemeanours from the Earliest Period to the Year 1783, with Notes and Other Illustrations: compiled by T. B. Howell, Esq., F.R.S., F.S.A. and continued from the Year 1783 to the Present Time: by Thomas Jones Howell, Esq. [State Trials], xxiii (London, 1817), column 481. 28. Sir F. J. Grant (ed.), ‘The Faculty of Advocates in Scotland 1532–1943 with genealogical notes’, Scottish Record Society, Old Series, lxxvi (1944), 75. 29. State Trials, xxiii, column 128. List of the Graduates in Medicine in the University of Edinburgh, from MDCCV to MDCCCLXVI (Edinburgh, 1867), 24. 30. Spy’s reports on the proceedings of the first convention of the Scottish Friends of the People. SRO Home Office Correspondence (Scotland). RH2/4/66, f. 353. 31. C. E. Adam (ed.). View of the Political State of Scotland in the last century. A confidential report on the political opinions, family connections, or personal circumstances of the 2662 county voters in 1788 (Edinburgh, 1887), 215. 32. Spy’s reports on the proceedings of the first convention of the Scottish Friends of the People. SRO Home Office Correspondence (Scotland). RH2/4/66, ff. 366–369. 33. Ibid., RH2/4/66, f. 369. 34. Ibid., RH2/4/67, f. 383. 35. Ibid., RH2/4/66, f. 356. 36. Ibid., RH2/4/66, f. 357. 37. Ibid., RH2/4/66, f. 357. 38. Ibid., RH2/4/66. f. 368.

39. Ibid., RH2/4/66, f. 352. 40. Lord Daer to Charles Grey, 17 January 1793. University of Durham. 2nd Earl Grey’s Papers. Papers on Parliamentary Reform. 41. Quoted in Lord Daer to Charles Grey, 17 January 1793. Ibid. 42. State Trials, xxiii, column 83. 43. J. Thomson Callender to Andrew Stuart, 5 December 1789. NLS Andrew Stuart’s Papers. MS 8261, ff. 59–69. 44. The Political Progress of Britain; or an impartial account of the principal abuses in the Government of this country, from the Revolution in 1688. The whole tending to prove the ruinous consequences of the popular System of War and Conquest,‘The World’s Mad Business’. Part First (Edinburgh, 1792), 9. This pamphlet, the second part of which never appeared, was published anonymously. 45. Ibid., 10–11. 46. Ibid., 11. 47. R. Heron, Observations made on a Journey through the Western Counties of Scotland; in the Autumn of MDCCXCII. Relating to the Scenery, Antiquities, Customs, Manners, Population, Agriculture, Manufactures, Commerce, Political Condition, and Literature of these Parts (Perth, 1793), ii, 398. See also G. Robertson, Rural Recollections; or, the progress of Improvement in Agriculture and Rural Affairs (Irvine, 1829), 98, and R. Fergusson, The Works of Robert Fergusson. To which is prefixed a sketch of the author’s life (London, 1807), 23. 48. J. de Lancey Ferguson, The Letters of Robert Burns (Oxford, 1931), 106. 49. P. Barber, ‘Journal of a Traveller in Scotland, 1795–1796’, SHR, xxxvi (1957), 35–36. 50. A. Bruce, A Historico–Politico–Ecclesiastical Dissertation on the Supremacy of Civil Powers in Matters of Religion; Particularly the Ecclesiastical Supremacy Annexed to the English Crown (Edinburgh, 1802), vii–viii. 51. Ibid., 134–135. 52. Ibid., 103–105, 135. 53. N. T. Phillipson, ‘Scottish Public Opinion and the Union in the Age of the Association’, in N. T. Phillipson and R. Mitchison (eds.), Scotland in the Age of Improvement (Edinburgh, 1970), 141–2. 54. Anon., An Address to the People of Scotland, on Ecclesiastical and Civil Liberty (Edinburgh, 1782), 19–20. The authorship of this work has been attributed to the Rev. Patrick Bannerman (1715–1790), Minister of Saltoun (East Lothian). 55. Ibid., 20–22. 56. State Trials, xxiii, column 3. 57. William Peddie to Robert Purves, 21 November 1792. SRO Home Office Correspondence (Scotland), RH2/4/68, f. 69. 58. J. D. Brims, ‘The Scottish Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution’ (Edinburgh University Ph.D. Thesis, 1983), 389–405. 59. The Journals of the House of Commons, xlviii, 729–738. 60. Norman Macleod to William Skirving, 11 May 1793. SRO Justiciary Records. Small Papers. Main Series. JC26/280. 61. The Journals of the House of Commons, xlviii, 723–743. 62. The Parliamentary History of England, from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, xxx, column 925. 63. State Trials, xxiv, column 36. 64. Ibid., columns 37–40. 65. This is almost certainly a reference to the Address of the Four Societies of United Irishmen of Belfast to the Assembly of Delegates from the Societies of Friends of the People at Edinburgh, May 1793. The Belfast United Irishmen expressed their pleasure at the political awakening of Scotland and urged the Scots to persevere in their cause. ‘It is worthy of Men’, the address stated, ‘worthy of you. And ye will not abandon it! We know the Conflict is arduous, but where the public Good is the end — Success is sure.’ The address is to be found in the Justiciary Records. Small Papers. Main Series. JC26/276. 66. William Skirving to Daniel Stuart, 1 June 1793. SRO Justiciary Records. Small Papers. Main Series. JC26/280. 67. Henry Shipley to William Skirving, 6 July 1793. SRO Justiciary Records. Small Papers. Main Series. JC26/269. 68. Copy, or draft, of Skirving’s reply to Shipley, undated. SRO Justiciary Records. Small Papers. Main Series. JC26/269. 69. Undated motion of Gordon Murray. SRO Justiciary Records. Small Papers. Main Series. JC26/280. 70. State Trials, xxiii, column 413. 71. William Skirving to the Delegates to the General Convention, 7 November 1793. SRO Justiciary Records. Small Papers. Main Series. JC26/280.

72. State Trials, xxiii, column 417. 73. J.B. [an anonymous Government spy] to William Scott, 19 November 1793. SRO Home Office Correspondence (Scotland). RH2/4/73, ff. 200–204. 74. State Trials, xxiii, columns 445–451. 75. J.B. to William Scott, undated. SRO Home Office Correspondence (Scotland). RH2/4/72, ff. 109–110. 76. State Trials, xxiii, columns 426–427. 77. Ibid., columns 427, 452–453. 78. For example, the Scottish societies refused to join their English colleagues in sending congratulatory addresses to the French National Convention during the autumn of 1792. Captain William Johnston of the Edinburgh Friends of the People politely informed the London Corresponding Society that their proposed address was likely to be ‘productive of mischief and misconstruction at home’. William Johnston to Thomas Hardy, 31 October 1792. PRO Treasury Solicitor’s Papers. TS11/954/3498. 79. As early as 2 January 1793 leading Foxites, such as John Morthland, were urging the societies to ‘ly by till they would see the issue of their petition to parliament’. J.B. to R. Dundas, 3 January 1793. SRO Home Office Correspondence (Scotland). RH2/4/68, ff. 17–22. 80. William Skirving to Thomas Hardy, 25 May 1793. Printed in State Trials, xxiv, column 38. 81. Ibid., column 37. 82. Ibid., column 38. 83. Several of the English provincial societies gave up the struggle and passed quietly out of existence, while Thomas Hardy of the London Corresponding Society seriously considered moving that the LCS suspend its proceedings for three months. A. Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the age of the French Revolution (London, 1979), 282. It was the weakness of the English movement which persuaded Hardy to write to Skirving proffering the leadership of the British movement to the Scots radicals. 84. Lord Daer to Charles Grey, 17 January 1793. University of Durham. 2nd Earl Grey’s Papers. Papers on Parliamentary Reform. 85. State Trials, xxiii, column 414. Matthew Campbell Brown, the former actor who served as a delegate from the Sheffield Constitutional Society to the British Convention, claimed to represent ‘not much under 5,000’ members. Ibid., xxiii, column 446. 86. Ibid., 414. 87. The Irish Convention Act of July 1793 prohibited the summoning of any representative or delegate assembly other than the Irish parliament itself. Muir was sentenced to fourteen years’ transportation on 31 August 1793, while Palmer was sentenced to seven years’ transportation on 13 September 1793. 88. State Trials, xxiii, columns 392, 686. 89. Ibid., xxiii, column 447. 90. Ibid., xxiii, column 447. 91. The Edinburgh Gazetteer, 19 November 1793. Mitchell was addressing a meeting of the Paisley Friends of Reform. 92. Lord Daer to Charles Grey, 17 January 1793. University of Durham. 2nd Earl Grey’s Papers. Papers on Parliamentary Reform. 93. Brims, ‘Scottish Democratic Movement’, 559–61. 94. Copies of the Resolutions and Constitution of the Society of United Scotsmen and the Moral and Political Catechism of Man may be found in SRO Home Office Correspondence (Scotland). RH2/4/83, ff. 23–26, and 27–40. 95. Resolutions and Constitution of the Society of United Scotsmen. Ibid. 96. The best account of Muir’s life between sailing for Botany Bay in April 1794 and arriving in France in December 1797 is to be found in C. Bewley, Muir of Huntershill (Oxford, 1981), Chs. 8–11. 97. Thomas Muir to the Directory, 1 Prairial, an 5. Ministère des Relations Extérieures, Archives Diplomatiques, Paris. Correspondence Politique (Angleterre). Vol. 590, f. 321. 98. Memorial of Thomas Muir, endorsed ‘1797 Ecosse’. Ministère des Relations Extérieures, Archives Diplomatiques, Paris. Mémoires et Documents. Vol. 2, f. 153 et seq. 99. Secret Intelligence from France, January 1798. HMC Report on the Manuscripts of J. B. Fortescue, Esq., preserved at Dropmore, vol. iv (London, 1905), 70. 100. The Herald and Chronicle, 7 May 1798.

Index

Abercromby, Patrick, 211 Act anent Wrongous Imprisonment (1701), 260 Act of Security (1704), 203, 205–6, 207, 229, 231 Act of Settlement (1701), 205–6 Addison, Joseph, 228; influence on David Hume, 233ff. Albion, 63, 66, 91 Alexander III, king of Scots, 13, 51 Althusius, Johannes, 177 Angus, Archibald Douglas, eighth earl of, 141, 151–4 Arbroath, Declaration of (1320), 40, 63 Argyll, Archibald Campbell, fifth earl of, and Ireland, 120; and Anglo-Scottish diplomacy in 1560s, 120ff., 130–1 Argyll, Archibald Campbell, seventh earl of, 143, 144, 154 Argyll, Archibald Campbell, eighth earl and first marquis of, character of, 183–4; and Irish affairs, 184–5; and Solemn League and Covenant, 186ff. Arran, James Hamilton, second earl of, 88, 99, 100 Arran, James Stewart, earl of, 147, 151, 153–4 Arthur, king of the Britons, 61, 62, 63, 75–6 Atwood, William, 214 Baillie, Robert, 170, 171, 182–3, 186, 188, 189, 190, 192, 193 Balcarres, Alexander Lindsay, second lord and first earl of, 187 Bale, John, 61 Ballads, 19–20, 29 Balliol, John, 6, 14 Balmerino, James Elphinstone, second lord, 187 Bannockburn, battle of (1314), 51, 212 Barbour, John, The Bruce, 65 Barons’ Wars (1260s), 10 Beaton, Cardinal David, 88, 89 Belhaven, John Hamilton, second Lord, 212 Berwick, 20–1; and Edward I, 8, 11, 13, 15; and Anglo–Scottish trade, 24–6; Treaty of (1560), 119, 121 Bishops’ Wars (1639–40), 165–6, 189 Blind Hary, Wallace, 65, 254 Bloodfeud, 44–5, 48–9, 155. See also Kinship Bodrugan, Nicholas, 68, 95 Boece, Hector, 66, 68, 72, 76, 90; Scotorum Historiae, 64–5; and George Buchanan, 73–4 Boniface VIII, 7, 62, 63 Book of Discipline, First, 103 Borders (Anglo–Scottish), balladry, 19–20, 29; and national allegiances in middle ages, 22–4, 28–30; and trade, 24–7; and religious culture, 28–9. See also Frontier

Bothwell, James Hepburn, fourth earl of, 72 Bothwell, Francis Stewart, fifth earl of, 148, 152–3, 155 Boulogne, Treaty of (1550), 101 Bower, Walter, 37 Bowes, Sir Robert, missions to Scotland, 14 Iff. Britain (Great Britain), sixteenth–century attitudes to, 61–2, 67ff., 74–7, 141; and royal style after 1603, 85, 103; use of term in 1540s, 94–5, 97; and Ireland in sixteenth century, 113ff., 154; and covenanting attitudes to, 170ff., 183ff., 196–7; and union debates of 1707, 208ff; Anglicisation of in eighteenth century, 226–8, 243–4; in thought of Scottish democrats, 254ff. See also Union; Empire ‘British History, The’, Anglocentrism of, 61ff; attacked by Scottish chroniclers, 63–6, 74; used by sixteenth-century Protestant unionists, 68–70, 75–6, 90–2. See also Monmouth, Geoffrey of Bruce, Rev. Archibald, 254–5 Bruce, Robert, see Robert I, king of Scots Brutus, 61, 62, 63, 66, 68–9, 75–6, 90 Buchanan, George, 76, 207,–250, 251; Rerum Scoticarum Historia, 65, 73–5 Callender, James Thomson, 253, 255 Calvin, John, 177 Campanella, Tommaso, 216–9 Campbell, family of, 46, 120, 130, 184. See also Argyll, earls of Carlyle, Thomas, 226 Caxton, William, 61, 66 Cecil, William (Lord Burghley), 96, 126; and British diplomatic strategy, 118–9, 130–1; and fifth earl of Argyll, 121ff; and English party in late sixteenth-century Scotland, 139ff. Charles I, king of Great Britain, 76; and covenanters, 163ff., 183ff. Charles II, king of Great Britain, 60, 206; and covenanters, 176–7 Charles IX, king of France, 154 Clarendon, Edward Hyde, earl of, 184, 190 Colonialism, English in Scotland under Edward I, 6ff., 15–6; and Wales, 13, 15; and Ireland, 14, 15; Irish-Scots in Dalriada, 60 Commonwealthmen, 86, 98–9 Congregation, lords of the, 71–2, 73, 118–9, 120, 130 Constantine the Great, Emperor, 69–71, 75, 76, 92, 98 Covenant, 76, 198; National Covenant (1638), 182–3, 193, 196; Solemn League and Covenant (1643), 170ff., 182ff., 189ff. Covenanters, 206; idea of union among, 163ff., 182ff; Treaty of Ripon (1641), 167ff., 175, 188; Westminster Assembly, 170, 171, 190–1, 194, 195; relations with English parliament, 172ff., 189ff; and the Engagement, 175–6, 195; Whiggamores, 176 Craig, Sir Thomas, 75–6, 209, 211 Cromarty, George Mackenzie, first earl of, 208–11, 212ff. Cromwell, Oliver, 176–7, 230 Daer, Basil Douglas, Lord, 247, 251, 252–3, 255, 260 Dalrymple, Lt. Col. William of Cleland and Fordell, 251 Darien Scheme, 205–6 Darnley, Henry Stewart, Lord, 72, 125 Davenant, Charles, 216 David II, king of Scots, 20, 21, 40, 41, 51 Defoe, Daniel, 210 Douglas, family of, 44–5, 141; and James II, 35. See also Angus and Morton, earls of Drennan, Dr. William, 250, 251 Dublin Society of United Irishmen, 250–2

Edgehill, battle of (1643), 186, 188 Edinburgh, 12, 27, 86–7, 144; Treaty of (1560), 119, 121, 145 Edward I, king of England, 38, 51; claim to Scotland, 6–7, 15, 62, 63, 90; granting of Scottish land to Englishmen, 7ff; garrisoning of Scotland, 13; ecclesiastical policy in Scotland, 13–4; failure of ‘colonial’ policy in Scotland, 15–6 Edward II, king of England, 10, 15 Edward III, king of England, 20, 21, 40, 41, 85 Edward IV, king of England, 21–2 Edward V, king of England, 34 Edward VI, king of England, 67, 70, 101; proposed marriage to Mary Queen of Scots, 85, 87ff. Elder, John, 89, 90–1, 97 Elizabeth I, queen of England, 71, 143; and Ireland, 118ff., 154; and Britain, 130–1; and English party in Scotland, 139ff. Empire (imperialism), and English monarchy in middle ages, 62–3; and Protestant unionists in 1540s, 67ff., 92; in Elizabethan England, 74–6. See also Britain; Colonialism; Union Engagement, The (1647), 175–6, 195 Erskine, family of, 141. See also Mar, earls of Fergus I, king of Scots, 60, 64, 65, 72, 74, 75–6 Fergus II, king of Scots, 64, 65 Ferguson, Adam, 243 Fletcher, Andrew of Saltoun, 250, 251–2; vision of union, 203ff., 228ff; Discourse of Government (1698), 203, 204–5, 215; Two Discourses (1698), 205, 207; Discorso delle Cose di Spagna (1698), 216–9; Speeches (1703), 203, 206; Account of a Conversation (1706), 204, 212ff., 218, 219, 232–3; and David Hume, 241–3 Fordun, John of, 63–4, 66, 68, 72 Foxe, John, 61, 76 Frontier, in American history, 18; in medieval Europe, 18–9; frontier society, 19; Anglo-Scottish frontier society, 19ff; and central government, 29–30. See also Borders Gascony, and Edward I, 6, 12, 15; and Gascon Ordinances (1289), 7 Gathelus, 64, 66, 68, 75, 90–1, 98, 103 Gilby, Anthony, 103 Glasgow Assembly (1638), 182 Glorious Revolution (1689), 226–7 Gordon, family of, 46, 120, 189. See also Huntly, earls of Gowrie, William Ruthven, first earl of, 146–7 Grafton, Richard, 61, 89 Great Cause, The, 6, 51 Greenwich, Treaties of (1543), 88, 90 Grey, Charles, second Earl, 247, 252–3, 256 Grotius, Hugo, 210, 217–9, 228 Guisborough, Walter of, 8 Guise, family of, 118, 146, 154 Guise, Mary of, 99, 101–2, 103 Guthry, James, 182 Hall, Edward, 61, 90, 96–7 Hamilton, family of, 46, 145. See also Arran, earls of Hamilton, Lord Claud, 151 Hamilton, James, third marquis and first duke of, 187, 189 Hamilton, Lord John, 143, 151 Hamilton Rowan, Archibald, 250–2 Hardy, Thomas, 256 Hardyng, John, 62 Harlaw, battle of (1411), 35

Harrington, James, 205, 229–30 Henderson, Alexander, 188, 189, 191, 193, 195, 196, 197–8 Henrisoun, James, early career, 86–8; and Somerset, 89ff; and plot to kill Mary Queen of Scots, 99ff; Exhortaction, 68–71, 85–6, 89–93, 96, 103; ‘The Godly and Golden Book’, 85–6, 95–99, 102; ‘Articles and Ordinances’, 102–3 Henry I, king of England, 40 Henry II, king of France, 101, 118 Henry III, king of France, 145 Henry IV, king of England, 20, 25, 41, 62 Henry V, king of England, 25, 62 Henry VI, king of England, 25, 34, 35–6, 62 Henry VII, king of England, 21–2, 24, 39 Henry VIII, king of England, 86, 101; Declaration (1542), 63, 68, 70, 89, 90–1; and Anglo-Scottish union, 66–7; and idea of empire, 69–70; and Rough Wooing, 88ff; and Ireland, 114 Hodges, James, 211 Holinshed, Raphael, 61, 75–6, 96 Hume, David, 227, 228, 235; attitude to Addisonian politeness, 235ff; on justice, 239–41; and classical republicanism, 241– 3; and Anglicisation, 243–4 Huntly, George Gordon, fifth earl of, 151 Hutcheson, Francis, 243 Innes, Father Thomas, 77 Ireland, and Edward I, 6, 7, 12, 14, 15; and origins of Scots, 64; and sixteenth-century Anglo-Scottish relations, 113ff., 154; and covenanters, 172, 184–5, 191–2; and union debates of 1707, 213–4; and Scottish Friends of the People, 250ff. James I, king of Scots, 23, 34 James II, king of Scots, 26, 29, 35 James III, king of Scots, 34–5, 36, 40, 41 James IV, king of Scots, 28, 35, 66 James V, king of Scots, 63, 67, 87, 88 James VI and I, king of Great Britain, 73, 75, 127, 196, 198, 260; adoption of style ‘king of Great Britain’, 85, 106; and Elizabeth I, 139ff., 154ff; Basilikon Doron, 148; and union, 164–5 James VII and II, king of Great Britain, 60, 77 Jamesone, George, 76 Jeffrey, Francis, 226 Johnston, Archibald of Wariston, 177, 183, 186, 188, 189, 190–1 Johnston, John, 75 Kenilworth, Dictum of (1266), 10, 15 Kennedy, family of, 46 Ker, family of, 27–8 Killigrew, Sir Henry, missions to Scotland, 142ff. Kilsyth, battle of (1645), 173 Kingship, in medieval Scotland and England, 35ff; mystique of, 40; and royal patronage, 40ff; and aristocracy, 35–6, 42ff; and historical mythologies, 60ff. Kinship, 46–8, 155. See also Bloodfeud Knox, John, 71, 87, 127 Lamb, William, 95 Lanark, William Hamilton, first earl of, 187, 189 Langside, battle of (1568), 72 Langtoft, Pierre, 7, 15 Laud, Archbishop William, 167

Lennox, Esmé Stewart, first duke of, 145–6, 151 Lhuyd, Humphrey, 73–4 London, Treaty of (1641), 167ff., 175, 188 Lordship of the Isles, 35, 119–20, 130 Loudoun, John Campbell, first earl of, 184, 185, 187, 188 Lyon, family of, 141 MacColla, Alasdair, 114 McCosh, James, 226 MacDonald, family of, 119–20 MacDonnell, family of, 115ff. Mackenzie, Sir George of Rosehaugh, 77, 210 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 205, 217, 229 Magna Carta, 38, 40 Mair, John, 68, 71, 73, 90, 102, 103; Historia Maioris Britanniae (1521), 65–7 Maitland, Sir John of Thirlestane, 141, 147–8 Manrent, bonds of, 47–8 Mar, John Erskine, first earl of, 144 Mar, John Erskine, second earl of, 151–2 Mardeley, John, 94–5 Margaret, Maid of Norway, 6 Marischal, William Keith, fourth Earl, 144 Mary Queen of Scots, 65, 72, 103; proposed marriage to Edward VI, 67ff., 70, 85; regency of, 88; claim to English throne, 118; marriage to Darnley, 125 Mary Tudor, queen of England, 118 Melville, Andrew, 75 Melville, Sir James of Halhill, 155 Millar, John, 243 Monipenny, John, 75, 76 Monmouth, Geoffrey of, 65, 68–9, 74, 90–2; History of the Kings of Britain, 60–1, 62 Montrose, James Graham, fifth earl and first marquis of, 171, 173, 188–9, 192 Moray, James Stewart, earl of, 125, 130, 144 More, Sir Thomas, 215, 218, 231 Morton, James Douglas, fourth earl of, 143, 144–5, 153 Muir, Thomas, and Friends of the People, 247, 248, 249; and Dublin Society of United Irishmen, 250–2; trial of, 259; and United Scotsmen, 260ff; in France, 261–2 Musgrave, Sir Christopher, 212ff. Naseby, battle of (1645), 173 Negative Confession (1581), 182, 198 O’Neill, family of, 116ff. Ordinance of 1305, 7, 10, 15 Paine, Thomas, 249 Patten, William, 94 Philip II, king of Spain, 145, 155 Piccolomini, Aeneas Sylvius, 19, 26–7 Pinkie, battle of (1547), 68, 89, 90, 96, 101, 212 Preston, battle of (1648), 176 Pufendorf, Samuel, 217, 218, 228 Pym, John, 187, 192 Ramsay, Allan, 227, 235

Randolph, Sir Thomas, 145, 147 Reid, Thomas, 243 Richard II, king of England, 34, 40 Richard III, king of England, 34 Ridpath, George, 211 Ripon, Treaty of (1641), 167 Robert I, king of Scots, 9, 10, 16, 40, 51 Robert II, king of Scots, 40, 44 Robert III, king of Scots, 34, 37, 62 Robertson, William, 227 Rothes, John Leslie, sixth earl of, 187 Rough Wooing, The, 67, 85–6, 88ff. Rutherford, Samuel, 76, 182, 195, 207 Ruthven, family of, 141. See also Gowrie, earls of Ruthven Raid, 143, 146, 153 Scota, 64, 66, 68, 90–1 Scott, Sir Walter, 227 Scottish Society of the Friends of the People, republicanism and nationalism of, 247–9; First National Convention of, 249– 50; republicanism of, 253–4; nationalism of, 254–7; attitude to England, 257–60 Seton, William of Pitmedden, 208–11, 232 Seymour, Sir Edward, 212ff., 219 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of, 233, 235, 238 Sidney, Sir Henry, 115, 117, 126, 128 Skirving, William, 256–7, 257–8 Smith, Adam, 243 Somerset, Edward Seymour, duke of, 71, 86, 101; Epistle Exhortatorie, 67–8, 93– 5, 96; and Rough Wooing, 88ff. Steele, Richard, influence on David Hume, 233ff. Stewart, Dugald, 228, 243 Stewart, Esmé, see Lennox, duke of Stewart, Colonel William, 146–7 Stirling Raid (1584), 144, 152 Throckmorton, Sir Nicholas, 121 ‘Two Acts’ (1795), 260 Tytler, James, 255–6 Ulster, 113, 115ff., 250 Union of the Crowns (1603), 19, 61, 75–6, 113, 140, 163–5, 166, 172, 176, 183, 196, 206, 209, 227, 229, 260, 261 Union of Parliaments (1707), 62, 76, 113, 178, 183, 208ff., 226–7, 247, 252, 255, 260 Union of Scotland and England (general), by dynastic marriage, 66, 70, 85–6, 88ff; sixteenth-century Protestant ideology of, 67ff., 90ff; and Scottish Reformation, 71–2; and Rough Wooing, 88ff; league of 1586, 154, 197, 199; and covenanters, 163ff., 182ff., 196–9; federal ideas of, 163–4, 177–8, 211; Cromwellian, 176–7, 230; attitude of Andrew Fletcher to, 203ff., 228ff; and debates of 1707, 208ff; and Anglicisation of post-union Britain, 226ff; attitude of Scottish ‘Jacobins’ to, 254ff. United Scotsmen, 260–2 Uxbridge, Propositions of (1645), 172–4 Vane, Sir Harry, 184, 189, 190–1, 193 Vergil, Polydore, 61, 64, 90 Wales, 213; and Edward I, 6, 7, 13, 15

Walsingham, Sir Francis, and English party in Scotland, 139ff. Wars of Independence, 19, 20, 29, 51 Wars of the Roses, 35–6, 37, 41, 49, 50–1 Wedderburn, Robert, Complaynt of Scotland, 86, 95, 99 Westminster Assembly, 170, 171, 190–1, 194, 195 William of Orange, king of Great Britain, 204, 205 Witherspoon, John, 226 Witt, Jacob de, 60 Wyntoun, Andrew, 21