A History of Britain, Volume 2

by Simon Schama

  It was not a good sign that on the first days of the journey the fleet got separated in a dense fog off Orkney. But this would not be the worst or the last of its problems. In a much more serious sense, the Darien expedition had no idea where it was going. Its main source of intelligence, not only about the sea route but also about the conditions likely to face the fleet when and if it arrived, was a surgeon called Lionel Wafer who had served with the pirate Henry Morgan in the Caribbean. Wafer was impressively detailed with his information. Darien, he assured the projectors, was a paradise. The water was fresh; the game plentiful; the fish virtually jumped into the waiting pan. The climate was benign, the soil rich; corn grew thick and tall. The natives, governed by their grand ‘Emperor’, were friendly and peaceful and so vain that they spent much of their day combing their long dark hair. The Company swallowed the whole story. Together with the rest of their cargo, 10,000 combs were loaded on to the ships: wooden for the simple people, horn for the middling sort, pearl-inlaid for the Emperor and his courtiers. What else would be needed in New Caledonia? Some 2808 Presbyterian catechisms to convert the pagans and 380 Bibles for the settlers; 1440 good Scottish hats and a copious supply of wigs, without which no respectable Darienite could think of emigrating. They had, after all, been promised 50 cultivable acres (0.2 sq km) of paradise and inside three years a house built at the Company’s expense. Gentility was waiting in the balmy tropics. In no time at all they would be the lairds of the lagoon.

  Even before the expedition got anywhere near Darien the dream had turned into a nightmare. The ships were either becalmed or battered by violent storms on the eight-week journey across the Atlantic and south through the Caribbean. Crew and passengers died at the rate of five per week from the usual dysenteric diseases. When the settlers reached the ‘Golden Island’ pinpointed by Wafer as their ideal haven, their New Edinburgh, they discovered it was mostly a mosquito-infested swamp. And the natives apparently were not desperately awaiting their shipload of combs, or in fact anything else the Scots had to offer. There was no Emperor, no court, no realm: just feral pigs and spear fishermen. Aware they might be attacked at any minute by the Spanish, who evidently did not share the Scots’ view that Darien was ‘vacant’ land, those who had survived dysenteric fevers and had not gone down with malaria spent their time and energy in the sweltering, rain-soaked forest hacking out a primitive palisaded stockade and lugging enormous cannon into their bravely christened Fort St Andrew.

  By spring 1699, they were dying at the rate often a day. Though they had brought 14,000 needles, their clothes were hanging off them in stinking, mildewed rags. There was no ripe fruit hanging on the trees begging to be picked. The ‘game’ was elusive and the remains of their shipped supplies were alive with maggots. A handful of dried peas was shared out between five. The peas would then be skimmed for worms when boiled up. The beef, one of them wrote, ‘was as black as the sole of my foot and as rotten as the stump of a rotten boot’.

  Ten months after they had left Scotland, all they had to show for the great plan to build a New Caledonian free-trade fortune was a ditch 20 feet deep and 25 feet wide (6 x 8 m), still called by the Panamanians ‘Punta des Escoces’, Scotchmen’s Point. But there was no bustling New Edinburgh, no colony of thrifty, self-supporting farms; no tidy little harbour ready to welcome the incoming fleets, no portage industry set to haul chests across the neck of the isthmus; nothing in fact except a miserable collection of sodden, rat-infested grass huts, a dilapidated fort and 400 graves.

  Those who could summon the energy and the will left the hell-hole of Darien and limped home. A few weeks later a Spanish raiding party, thoughtfully encouraged by the English, burnt the huts and destroyed Fort St Andrew. So when a second expedition, oblivious of the fate of its predecessor, arrived in the winter of 1699 all it found were ruins, rapidly being repossessed by the rainforest. ‘Expecting to meet with our friends and countrymen,’ one of the new arrivals wrote, ‘we found nothing but a howling wilderness, the Colony deserted and gone, their huts all burnt, their fort for most part ruined, the ground which they had cleared adjoining the fort all overgrown with weeds, and we looked for Peace but no good came, and for a time of health and comfort, but beheld Trouble.’

  Back in Scotland, when the full extent of the disaster at Darien sank in, it assumed the magnitude of a national trauma. The futile venture had eaten up a full quarter of Scotland’s liquid capital. But the most serious casualty of the fiasco was the last best hope of a national regeneration. That hope – of Scotland going it alone and outflanking the English trading empire – disappeared in the morass of Darien. Self-reproach for any naïveté about the expedition disappeared in an immediate wave of intense anger and hatred against the bullying English who had doomed it to disaster. The Governor of Jamaica, it was known, had issued a proclamation actually forbidding English colonists, merchants or seamen from giving any assistance to the beleaguered Darienites, however desperate their plight. Direct collusion with the Spanish was suspected. In the inflamed atmosphere, counter-actions were taken in the economic war, allowing Scots to trade with an enemy of England in time of war. When the Worcester, a ship believed to have harassed the Darienites, was caught in port at Leith, its captain and two of its crew were summarily tried as ‘pirates’ and hanged, to rejoicing in the streets.

  But revenge was not a viable strategy for the future. Scotland had come to an obvious fork in the road ahead, and the serious day when it had to choose could not be postponed much longer. It could slog on, becoming ever more impoverished and isolated, even perhaps defying England by calling back the Stuart child born in 1688 to reign as James VIII of Scotland. But this would be tantamount to a declaration of war, and there was no guarantee that the French would prove any more reliable or more powerful an ally than they had been in the past. The new war that had broken out in Europe suggested that the armies of Louis XIV were less invincible than the ceiling murals in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles would suggest. The alternative, however bleak for those cherishing Scotland’s independence, was union. By no means all of the governing class or even the people were uniformly hostile to it. A proposal had been tabled in 1689 but had been rejected by the English Convention Parliament. After the Darien fiasco, however, a large section of the nobility, especially those with cross-border economic interests and property, and many of the commercial and professional classes of the Lowlands, had come to accept that some sort of closer association was needed and even desirable. The best option would be a federation, the two kingdoms retaining their separate political identities. But by the middle of the first decade of the eighteenth century, the Scots were not going to be allowed the luxury of prolonged consideration.

  For war and the succession had made Scotland’s allegiance a critical issue for the English government. In 1702 William III had died after being thrown from his horse when it stumbled over a molehill. His sister-in-law, Anne, optimistically celebrated as ‘the teeming princess of Denmark’, had not, alas, made good on the promise. For Anne came to the throne after five infant deaths, at least thirteen miscarriages and two episodes of pseudocyesis. The chances of her producing a surviving heir were assessed pessimistically. Her last surviving son, Prince William Henry of Gloucester, had died in 1700 at the age of eleven. Threatened with the undoing of 1688 and the jeopardizing of a Protestant succession, with the Act of Settlement of 1701 the Whig defenders of the Revolution had gone as far afield as Sophia, Electress of Hanover, daughter of Charles I’s sister, to pre-empt the much more obvious Catholic James Edward Stuart (not to mention 56 other Catholic heirs). A sign of their determination to avoid a Jacobite restoration was the passage in 1706 of the Regency Act, establishing an emergency Council of State following the queen’s death and pending the arrival of the Hanoverian successor. So with England at war with James’s patron and protector, Louis XIV, it now became even more imperative for the security of the realm that Scotland be made to sign on to the Hanoverian succession. Chivvied along, the Scott
ish parliament at first demurred, insisting on making its own separate arrangements for the throne of Scotland. An ugly economic war looked likely, perhaps a prelude to the real thing. In 1705, an Alien Act was passed in Westminster, shutting down most of the cross-border trade and deeming any Scots in England to be foreign subjects.

  The blackmail worked. In 1706 commissioners from the two parliaments, not just the English but (in response to an astonishing proposal by the Duke of Hamilton) also the Scots chosen by Queen Anne’s government, met in separate rooms to consider a union of realms. The two sides never confronted each other face to face, communicating only through messengers. In the streets of Edinburgh and Glasgow there were riots. Daniel Defoe, ex-bankrupt, who had got out of prison by volunteering his services to Robert Harley as a spy and (in various guises – a ‘fish merchant’ in Glasgow, a ‘wool manufacturer’ in Aberdeen) a propagandist for union, became alarmed in Edinburgh in October 1706. ‘I had not been Long There,’ he wrote back to Harley, ‘but I heard a Great Noise and looking Out Saw a Terrible Multitude Come up the High Street with a Drum at the head of them shouting and swearing and Cryeing Out all Scotland would stand together. No Union. No Union. English Dogs . . . and the like. I Can not say to you I had no apprehensions.’ The crowd broke down the doors of one of the treaty commissioners, Sir Patrick Johnson, with a sledgehammer, terrorizing him and his wife until ‘the lady in despair and fright came to the window with two candles’ calling for the Town Guard.

  Defoe may have been a paid secret agent of the English government, but there is no doubt that he was sincerely committed to his mission of persuasion. His Six Essays at Removing National Prejudices Against a Union with Scotland, published in 1706–7, scornfully satirized those in both countries who liked to boast of the purity of their race, when in fact, Defoe argued, the history of Britain was a history of happy mongrelism and had been all the better for it. Paterson, the Scots founder of the Bank of England and the Darien projector, was one of his close friends, and Defoe’s vision of a British future was of a free and natural movement of men, goods and ideas across the borders of the old enemy kingdoms. The new Great Britain was supposed to end, once and for all, the endless history of sorrow and bloodshed that had come between England and Scotland. These kinds of sentiments, however well meaning, probably converted very few. Palms needed to be greased before the deed could be done, though on what scale remains difficult to determine. Sums of money were certainly distributed to secure the necessary votes for passage of the Union Bill through the Scottish parliament, and promises of landed estates were certainly dangled before obliging Scottish peers. But in the currency of early eighteenth-century politics, no decisions got taken without these kinds of lures, and some of the cash clearly went to Scotsmen who continued to vote against the union. As far as enthusiasts like Defoe were concerned, the biggest sweetener of all was above board and public. To make the union of the two National Debts more palatable, the English parliament had voted to offer £398,085. 10s. – the precise ‘Equivalent’ of all the losses incurred on the Darien expedition. For those still suffering the disastrous consequences of their unfortunate investment, this was not a trivial compensation.

  In the winter of 1706 it needed just six weeks for the Act of Union to go through Westminster, ten for Holyrood. There were still hold-outs against it, unable to bear the loss of Scottish independence, however grim the alternatives and however improved the economic outlook. Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, for one, bitterly opposed the union as a conspiracy to defraud Scotland of its liberty; and before the juggernaut rolled over him, John Hamilton, second Baron Belhaven, delivered in parliament on 2 November 1706 a Shakespearean lament for his country: ‘Like Caesar sitting in the midst of our Senate attending the final blow . . . looking about her covering herself with her royal garment and breathing her last’. Like other pro-unionists, Defoe mocked the melodrama uttered by the ‘rough, fat, black, noisy man more like a butcher than a lord’. But he was honest enough to admit (in private) that ‘a firmer union of policy with less union of affection has hardly been known in the whole world’. And he would eventually sympathize with Belhaven’s sadness, visit him in prison, befriend and console him.

  Brutal and peremptory though the process may have been, the union was not a crude annexation. The Scottish Kirk retained its own identity and governance, the two systems of law were largely kept separate, and no changes were made to Scotland’s universities, burghs and hereditary criminal jurisdictions. The parliament at Holyrood was to be done away with, by voting for its own abolition, but Scotland was to have 45 members in the Commons and 16 elected, so-called representative peers. The first set of MPs was elected by the Scottish parliament in 1707, but from 1708 general elections were held in the Scottish constituencies. To the dismay of some, the number of MPs had dropped dramatically from 157 to 45, but this might seem less of an outrage against a representative system when one considers that for much of the eighteenth century the entire Scottish electorate numbered only some 2600 in a population of one and a quarter of a million. What Scotland lost in 1707 was certainly not a democracy. But still it had been a true political nation, a place in the world. And now as the Chancellor of Scotland, James Ogilvy, Earl of Seafield, said as he signed the Act of Union, ‘There’s ane end of ane auld sang.’

  If one of those new Scottish members of parliament wanted a heartening vision of the Britain to which he had become attached – with whatever measure of reluctance or enthusiasm – all he had to do was take himself down-river to Greenwich to the handsome new Royal Naval Hospital. Christopher Wren’s twin, colonnaded pavilions could not help but put the traveller in mind of the Cour Royale, the grandiose approach to Versailles. But at Greenwich the approach was by way of the Thames, and the vista, as befitted an institution of charity, was public and not blocked off by grandiose screens and grilles. Inside the Great Hall facing the chapel, the invidious contrasts with French autocracy continued in the ceiling allegory painted by James Thornhill: the first great visual manifesto of the post-1688 monarchy. The allusions to the most famous allegories of the baroque monarchies – Rubens’ apotheosis of James I at Whitehall and Le Brun’s fawning celebration of the Sun King, Louis XIV, at Versailles – were glaring, the better to mark the differences between despots and constitutional monarchs. On Thornhill’s ceiling, Apollo had changed sides from the vainglorious absolutist to William and Mary, the champions of Protestant freedom. Louis had taken things from the peoples of Europe: territories, cities, farms. But William was a giver, restoring to a duly grateful continent the cap of Liberty, while the arch-enemy (thinly disguised as Arbitrary Power) lies trampled beneath his feet. The invidious comparisons are trumpeted throughout the allegory. Over there, the curses of serfdom, popery and blind superstition. Over here, the wisdom of the arts and sciences to guide the omniscient, benevolent king. Over there, the Jesuits, over here, Newton. It would be these milder but sterling virtues that would make Britain great: Prudence, Temperance and Charity.

  The blessings of charity are personified in the apparently venerable presence of the most senior pensioner in the Hospital, the reputedly ninety-seven-year-old John Wall (who in fact was constantly in trouble with the authorities for his filthy language and incorrigible drunkenness). But then it is vain to look to allegories to tell the truth. The image of the new Great Britain – peacefully devoted to toleration and freedom – was at odds with the historical reality of a state transformed by nearly three decades of war into an immense and formidable military machine. During the Restoration, the English army seldom consisted of more than 15,000 men. By the end of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713, there were over 90,000 men in the army and more than 40,000 in the navy (although by 1715 this had dropped to a peace-time force of 32,000). Military spending – more than £5 million a year during the Nine Years’ War, 1689–97 and over £7 million a year during the War of the Spanish Succession – had almost doubled, rising from £36 million to £65 million. By 1710, military spendin
g had swallowed up almost 10 per cent of Britain’s entire national income. To build a single first-rate ship would cost between £30,000 and £40,000. Keeping soldiers in the field and ships on the high seas, and supplying them with adequate victuals and munitions had added £40 million to the National Debt and created another kind of army – which would not be demobilized once the fighting had stopped: bond-holders, tax-assessors and accountants; customs-and-excise men, thousands upon thousands of them. By the end of the wars, Britons were being taxed twice as heavily, per capita, as their French counterparts, a burden that would only get heavier as the relentlessly martial eighteenth century rumbled on.

  Bureaucratic, militarized and heavily taxed though post-revolution Britain was, there was one feature of the Greenwich myth that was true. While Louis XIV could simply decide how much money was needed for his campaigns and then decree the funds into the treasury, in Britain the monarch and his ministers had to ask for it. So whether he liked it or not – and assuredly William did not – he and his successors had no choice but to go to parliament to fund their wars.