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An ever-unstable union
Charles II might be proclaimed king of Scotland, and Scottish law and the Kirk were in place, but all was not calm north of the border. The new king was a sincere searcher after peace, but his peace was diplomatic rather than constitutional. A Scottish royal commissioner and privy council were installed in Edinburgh, answerable to London. Then in 1661 came an inflammatory requirement that all Scottish clergy renounce the 1638 National Covenant. Just as Catholics and Protestants remained at each other’s throats in Ireland, so did episcopal Protestants feud with Presbyterians in Scotland. This was not peace. Bands of armed Covenanters roamed the countryside, falling on any clergy they considered unsound.
Charles II never revisited Scotland after the Restoration, declaring that ‘Presbytery is no religion for gentlemen’. He appointed a raft of Scottish bishops, leading to Presbyterian uprisings in 1666 and 1679. He even appointed his openly Catholic brother and heir James as lord high commissioner in Edinburgh. James’s arrival led to a revolt from the new Earl of Argyll in 1685, co-ordinated with an anti-Catholic revolt in south-west England by Charles II’s illegitimate eldest son, the Duke of Monmouth. Both were quickly suppressed, Monmouth’s ending in the last pitched battle on English soil at Sedgemoor in Somerset.
In Ireland, Royalists had in 1660 tried to steal a march on England by inviting Charles II come via them on his way to England. Charles wisely declined. But he summoned a new Dublin parliament, mostly composed of supporters of the Anglican Church of Ireland, estimated to represent less than 20 per cent of the Irish population. Pledges of toleration given at Breda were then overridden by a 1662 Irish proclamation outlawing ‘all meetings by papists, Presbyterians, Independents and separatists’. Though this was largely ignored, as in Scotland the Dublin parliament remained subordinate to a London royal appointee, a lieutenant in council. Nothing in the Restoration was as emphatically ‘restored’ as Ireland’s Anglican Protestant ascendancy.
Cromwell’s Irish expulsions and land expropriations were not reversed. By the end of the seventeenth century, these resulted in Catholic landownership plummeting from 90 per cent before the plantations of the 1600s to just 20 per cent in 1685. The chief beneficiary of this upheaval was Dublin, whose population of expropriated refugees helped make it, at 60,000, the second largest city of the British Isles.
England’s government of its domestic empire under the Stuarts became ever more centralised. Edicts poured from Whitehall to the privy councils in Dublin and Edinburgh. When James took the throne as James II (r.1685–8) there was a hiatus. He was a confessed Roman Catholic and his Declaration of Indulgence freed worship for Catholics and certain Nonconformists. This could have been of great importance to Ireland. But in 1688 the birth to James of a (presumed Catholic) son and heir supplanted the succession of James’s Protestant daughter Mary. A sustained Catholic monarchy was now likely, reopening every Protestant wound. James was duly toppled that year in the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of Whig peers in collusion with Mary’s husband, the Dutch William of Orange.
A very Irish revolution
The invasion of England by the Dutch in 1688 imported many of the conflicts still blighting Europe after the Thirty Years War. William’s marriage to Mary had been intended by him to forestall any alliance between a possibly Catholic England and William’s enemy France. The 1688 invasion and coup restored that security but did nothing to resolve relations between England, Scotland and Ireland, bedevilled as they were by the ongoing religious divide that continued to vex Europe.
Ireland still had a mostly Protestant parliament ruling a population that was four-fifths Catholic. Scotland had a Protestant population but with extensive loyalty to the (Catholic) Stuart exiles now gathering in Paris. William thus had good reason to fear encirclement by forces with whom Louis XIV of France might make common cause. In this sense the Dutch leader had merely moved the Netherlands border west into the Irish Sea.
Ireland’s lord deputy at the time was the Catholic Earl of Tyrconnell, appointed by James II. Under James, he had admitted Catholics to the Dublin parliament and army, and he now refused to acknowledge William’s seizure of the English throne. In March 1689 James sailed for Ireland in French ships and with French troops. The Irish under Tyrconnell rallied to his flag, rekindling the fires of the 1641 civil war. Ireland was again in revolt against the English crown. To William this was precisely his most immediate danger.
On landing in Ireland, James’s army marched north to besiege the Protestants in Londonderry, whither thousands of plantation settlers had fled from the surrounding countryside. Here they were kept at bay by a militia known as the Apprentice Boys, to be forever celebrated as heroes of Ulster history. In Dublin, the parliament was in two minds. James was acknowledged as king, but by a parliament eager to rid itself of Poynings’ Law and re-establish its confederate independence. James was intent on invading England, but did not want to lose his previous authority in Ireland in the process.
William responded by himself setting sail for Ireland in June 1690 with a force of 36,000 troops. He and James met at the Battle of the Boyne north of Dublin in a contest typical of seventeenth-century Europe. The two armies were largely composed of mercenaries and the outcome was thus determined in large part by the financial resources of either side. William led a coalition of English, Dutch, Danes and French Huguenots. James led Irish, French, Belgians and Germans. William won the day, and James fled back to France, never to return.
As William returned to London, an Irish civil war resumed between James’s Catholic supporters, so-called Jacobites, and William’s remaining troops and Irish Protestant irregulars concentrated in the north. Civilians both north and south paid a terrible price until, in 1691, with the Jacobite cause defeated, the Treaty of Limerick sought some kind of reconciliation. It supposedly returned formerly Catholic lands to their owners in return for oaths of obedience. As in the earlier flight of the earls, more than 20,000 Irish soldiers were allowed to leave and take refuge in France. Dubbed the ‘Wild Geese’, they were to appear as mercenaries in Catholic armies across Europe.
London again found it impossible to honour agreements it reached with the Irish – or the Scots. Limerick’s promise of Catholic tolerance and land restitution was a dead letter almost as soon as it was signed. Catholics were still forbidden to build churches and forced to worship in the open air, at what were called ‘hedge masses’. Above all, they were banned from buying land. Catholic landholding now fell to just 5 per cent of Ireland. Access to public office of any sort required an oath denying the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. Poynings’ Law remained in place. The Protestants were in the ascendant. Dublin proceeded to emerge as one of Europe’s most elegant eighteenth-century cities.
Scotland: empire into union
No sooner had the Limerick treaty been signed than Scotland too saw how tentative was any hope that Restoration might improve relations with London. In 1689, a year after the coronation in London of William and Mary (r.1689–1702), a spontaneous Jacobite uprising took place in favour of James II by professedly Catholic Highlanders. It was suppressed by Presbyterian troops from Edinburgh. In the course of this suppression in 1692, a group of Campbells slaughtered a settlement of their ancestral foes, the MacDonalds, in their huts in Glencoe. The Massacre of Glencoe, though of just thirty or so people, came to symbolise the barbarism of the Highlands and the longevity of the clan fissures. It was later commemorated as such by Sir Walter Scott: ‘Each chord should imprecations fling /Till startled Scotland loud should ring/ Revenge for blood and treachery!’
The crude reality was that to eighteenth-century English strategists, Scottish and Irish borders were ‘England’s back door’, and one that seemed always ajar. Across Europe the Counter-Reformation was recovering from the Thirty Years War and pushing forward the boundaries of a Catholic revival. Protestantism still regarded itself as insecure. In Ireland and Scotland Catholics had a monarch in waiting in Paris and knew they could count on support from France and Spain, theoretically drawing on armies much larger than England’s. At the height of the 1640s rebellion, Tyrconnell had even pondered offering Ireland as a subject state of France, as Scotland had notionally and briefly been under Mary Queen of Scots.
The English Parliament reacted with a policy of belt and braces. By the Act of Settlement of 1701, it vested in itself the right to determine the succession to the throne. It also declared that the monarch could never be a Catholic. This meant searching the Stuart line back over what proved to be fifty-seven Catholics in line of hereditary succession to find a Protestant to succeed William and then Anne (r.1702–14). The candidate turned out to be a distant relative of Henry VII, the German Electress Sophia of Hanover, followed by her son George.
In addition, the English Parliament reversed its previous opposition to union with Scotland under James I and now voted for it. This time it was the Scottish parliament that was less sure. Insofar as can be judged, Scottish opinion was overwhelmingly hostile to union. The assembled burghs were opposed and there were riots in Edinburgh and Glasgow. The Highlands were strongly against.
There followed a duel of two parliaments, with Scotland reeling from seven years of severe famine and starvation in the 1690s and England threatening the Scots with alien status and trade barriers in the absence of union. English negotiators offered Edinburgh retention of its judicial system and of its Presbyterian version of Protestantism and its Kirk. The key to a deal lay in trade. In 1699 Scotland was shocked by the failure of a Scottish trading colony at Darien in Central America. This was attributed to trade rivalry and even sabotage by English ships accused of denying the colonists aid. Hundreds died and thousands of Scots lost their savings.
Under the union agreement England would pay compensation to the Darien investors – though not the families of the dead – and the Scottish exchequer would receive the sum of £400,000. In addition, existing customs dues between the two countries would be abolished and free trade established. Scotland was still reluctant but a flurry of last-minute bribes to Scottish parliamentarians resulted in them narrowly agreeing to dissolve themselves. They would join Wales in sending MPs to London. The Edinburgh parliament would be disbanded.
The Act of Union was signed in 1707 by a delighted new monarch, Queen Anne, who hoped that ‘two nations might become in time one people’. Forty-five Scottish MPs set off for Westminster and Scotland was declared one nation with England and Wales, to be named Great Britain. Article I of the act stipulated bluntly that the union under a single Parliament should last ‘for ever after’. The Lord Privy Seal remarked, ‘There’s an end of an auld sang.’
Not many Scots sang it with pleasure, aware that the dismantling of Scottish home rule had relied on ‘the Darien bribe’. To Scots of most political and religious persuasions it was the nadir of a humiliation dating back to Edward I, the more shocking as Scotland’s parliament had corruptly assented to it. One vocal critic, Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, objected to Scotland becoming ‘subservient to the designs of the court of England … We have appeared to the rest of the world more like a conquered province than a free independent people.’ The poet Robbie Burns (1759–96) later uttered a retrospective lament: ‘The English steel we could disdain/ Secure in valour’s station;/ But English gold has been our bane –/ Such a parcel of rogues in a nation.’ Burns’s setting of the song ‘Auld Lang’s Syne’ is said to echo a similar nostalgia, with ‘auld acquaintance been forgot, and never brought to mind’.
Angry in a different way were the Irish. The title of Great Britain clearly excluded them, leaving them to all appearances as an offshore colony. Jonathan Swift wrote to his friend Esther Johnson (‘Stella’), ‘I never will call it Britain. Pray don’t call it Britain … pox on the modern phrase, Great Britain.’ The Irish came to treat the phrase as toxic, and many refuse to use it to this day. They have had their way. Great Britain does not include Ireland – or most certainly did not after the eighteenth century – not even the present Northern Ireland.
The Stuarts’ last gasp: the ’15 and the ’45
Within eight years, continuing Scottish opposition to the Act of Union went critical. Support for James II’s Paris-based son James Stuart (1688–1766) was widespread in Scotland, as well as in some Tory circles in London. Had he renounced his Catholicism on Anne’s death in 1714, he would almost certainly have gained the throne. He did not do so, and threw in his lot with Scottish anti-unionists.
The Whig government in London was already treating Scottish MPs at Westminster with contempt. They were told that, like Wales, they represented ‘now but a county of England’. Daniel Defoe, London’s agent in Edinburgh, reported back, ‘I never saw a nation so universally wild … it seems in a perfect gangrene of the temper.’ When he visited the Highlands he was advised to pretend to be a Frenchman. Such a climate fed Jacobite dreams of a glorious Stuart return, if not to the throne of England at least to that of Scotland.
With George I’s accession, James Stuart decided in 1715 to sail for Scotland, to raise the clans and invade England, being assured of an uprising in his favour. This expectation was short-lived. The clans split for and against him. The Frasers, Gordons, Sutherlands and Mackays stayed with the Hanoverians, with the Campbells under the Duke of Argyll as their leader. James was supported by the Highland MacGregors, Macleans, MacDonalds and Camerons. The Jacobite cause prospered briefly under the Earl of Mar, but the rebels delayed in Perth and were attacked with customary savagery by the Campbells. As government troops from London began to arrive, desultory skirmishes took place until eventually the rebels abandoned Perth and went home. Spasmodic uprisings occurred in Northumberland and the West Country, but James fled back to France.
London’s reaction was fierce and familiar. Its army rounded up hundreds of Jacobites and condemned them to indentured labour in the West Indies. Orders formally to dissolve the clans now came from London. The carrying of arms was banned in Scotland, as was the Gaelic tongue in schools. Roads were built by a new Scottish military commander, General George Wade, to aid the movement of a new Highland regiment – half composed of Campbells – for ‘disarming the Highlanders, hindering rebels and attainting persons for inhabiting that part of the kingdom’. It was later to be called the Black Watch.
This was not sufficient. Thirty years later, in 1745, the curtain rose on the final act of the Stuart tragedy. James Stuart’s glamorous son Charles, ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’, undeterred by his father’s misfortunes and again buoyed by French support, landed in the Hebrides to again raise the flag of revolt. As before, MacDonalds, Macleans and Camerons came out in support. Unlike his father, Charles acted with speed, marching south and entering Edinburgh to an ecstatic crowd, which duly acclaimed him king. Had he halted at that point and rested content with the Scottish crown, Scottish history might have been different. He did not.
The prince sped south, with allies dwindling as he went. He was so confident of Welsh aid that he sent the prominent Royalist Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn a letter pleading, ‘I am persuaded that you will not break my expectations’. Sir Watkin thought twice and broke them. It was said of Welsh Royalists that they were ‘always ready to raise a glass rather than a sword’.
Charles reached Derby before a panic-stricken London realised that he presented a real danger. George II (r.1727–60) even contemplated flight to his family home in Germany. The English army was made of sterner stuff, and the 5,000 Jacobites soon faced a force of 30,000 men. Charles’s officers told him that to reach London would be impossible and, though he pleaded to stand and fight, in December 1745 he returned north.
Here the Jacobites wintered in Inverness, but there was no security. The Duke of Cumberland, his troops armed with modern muskets and artillery, hunted down an army that had little more than claymores. In April 1746, on the field of Culloden outside Inverness, Cumberland massacred the Highlanders, leaving Charles to flee, in the words of the song, ‘over the sea to Skye’. He left for that eternal Scottish refuge, France and oblivion.
Cumberland exacted a savage revenge, despite pleas from Scottish moderates for mercy and reconciliation. Under instructions from London to smash the clan system, Cumberland executed, deported or evicted dissident clan chiefs and expropriated their land. Dr Johnson, though no fan of Scotland, commented that ‘to govern peaceably by having no subjects is an expedient that argues no great profundity’. Highland culture was to be eradicated, Gaelic, tartans and bagpipes were forbidden. The pipes were declared ‘weapons of war’.