Like the legends surrounding the Stone of Scone, these are appeals to myths and historical fantasies. Scotland was never an exclusively Celtic nation: it included Anglo-Saxons, Normans, and Scandinavians from its first medieval beginnings. Likewise, the notion that its history as part of the British Empire is one of systematic abuse and exploitation is absurd: if anything, Scots have been overrepresented as part of its ruling establishment for more than two hundred years. The effort to turn Scots into Irishmen—trying to make them bitter and resentful about their links to Britain—does a disservice not only to historical truth, but to Scotland herself.
The great insight of the Scottish Enlightenment was to insist that human beings need to free themselves from myths and to see the world as it really is. This kind of intellectual liberation, they said, is required for living a free and active life. William Robertson, like Adam Smith and David Hume, cared deeply about human freedom and his homeland. Yet he does not even mention the Declaration of Arbroath in his History of Scotland—not because he was a brainwashed Anglophile, but because he saw it in historical context, as a well-worded defense of the old Scottish feudal regime by its oligarchic beneficiaries. Robertson and his generation of Scottish Whigs welcomed union because they were all too familiar with the Scotland that preceded it; their successors remained grateful for what union had accomplished. From Robertson and Reid to Dugald Stewart and Walter Scott, the Scottish mind understood that genuine human liberty was the by-product of a historical process that ground men like the Arbroath signers into dust—and would also have saved Thomas Aikenhead from the gallows.
That process was the making of the modern world—a process, for all its faults and failures, blind spots and injustices, in which Scotland and Scots have played a crucial part. As Scotland moves toward its new and uncertain future, it must not forget that achievement, any more than it should forget its earlier, premodern past.
As the first modern nation and culture, the Scots have by and large made the world a better place. They taught the world that true liberty requires a sense of personal obligation as well as individual rights. They showed how modern life can be spiritually as well as materially fulfilling. They showed how a respect for science and technology can combine with a love for the arts; how private affluence can enhance a sense of civic responsibility; how political and economic democracy can flourish side by side; and how a confidence in the future depends on a reverence for the past. The Scottish mind grasped how, in Hume’s words, “liberty is the perfection of civil society,” but “authority must be acknowledged essential to its very existence”; and how a strong faith in progress also requires a keen appreciation of its limitations.
Sources and Guide for Further Reading
Scottish history suffers from a profusion of very general surveys, a multitude of specialized studies and monographs, and not enough good books in between. Historians who write for a general audience tend to be drawn to the more romantic episodes in Scottish history, such as the life of Mary Queen of Scots and the Jacobite uprising of 1745. Go to any public library and these are the books you find on the Scottish shelf, along with a life or two of Robert the Bruce or William Wallace, and perhaps an older volume on Scotland during the English Civil War (such as John Buchan’s life of the Earl of Montrose, who raised the clans for Charles I in 1645).
In recent decades a trio of scholars have set out to correct this problem. Thomas Devine’s The Scottish Nation: A History, 1700–2000 (New York, 1999) is an invaluable guide to the economic and social history of modern Scotland. But Devine has also published useful books on topics as diverse as the Glasgow Tobacco Lords (in 1975), clan life in the Highlands after Culloden, and The Transformation of Rural Scotland (Edinburgh, 1994), and edited several more. Another model of scholarly industry is Professor Bruce Lenman at St. Andrews University, whose books such as The Jacobite Risings in Britain, 1689–1746 (London, 1980), The Jacobite Clans of the Great Glen (London, 1984), and Integration and Enlightenment: Scotland, 1746–1832 (London, 1981) offer an insightful and level-headed look at the evolution of eighteenth-century Scotland, on which I have relied for this book.
The late John Prebble spent a lifetime trying to uncover the forgotten tragic episodes of modern Scottish history and make them come alive for the modern reader. It is not going too far to say that his trilogy on the defeat of Highland Scotland—Culloden (London, 1961), The Highland Clearances (1963), and Glencoe: The Story of the Massacre (1966)—altered the face of Scottish historical writing and helped to fuel the flames of modern Scottish nationalism. Prebble did nothing to disguise his populist anti-English bias in his triology or his other books, such as The Darien Disaster (London, 1968) and his last book, The King’s Jaunt (London, 1999). The intelligent reader sets that bias aside when it gets to be too much, and simply enjoys the absorbing story and the wealth of vivid detail. Prebble also published a personal survey of Scottish history, The Lion in the North (New York, 1971). Every scholar working in the field owes Prebble, who was a journalist and not a professional historian, a debt of gratitude.
Three other general works, all out of print, also deserve mention. Wallace Notestein’s very dated but still interesting The Scot in History (New Haven, 1947) touches some of my themes, but concentrates on the impact of the Scottish Reformation. Neil McCallum’s A Small Country: Scotland, 1700–1830 (Edinburgh, 1983) presents a series of vignettes and anecdotes relating to the rise of eighteenth-century Scotland, some of which found their way into this book. Iain Finlayson’s The Scots (London, 1987) tried to summarize the “Scottish national character” in broad and vivid strokes, and sometimes succeeded, although his chapters on Scotland as part of modern Britain no longer have much relevance in the age of devolution.
PROLOGUE
Details of the Thomas Aikenhead case can be found in A Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings, edited in thirty-three volumes by T. B. Howell in London in 1812, of which volume 13 contains information relating to the trial, including affadavits from the witnesses, Aikenhead’s petition to the Privy Council, and the letter from Lord Anstruther from which I drew the relevant quotations. The John Locke connection is found in volume 6 of The Correspondence of John Locke, E.S. de Beer, ed. (Oxford, 1981). The anecdote concerning Baron Polwarth in the family burial vault is from the second volume of Samuel Cowan’s The Lord Chancellors of England (Edinburgh, 1911). The Edinburgh town council’s resolutions are in Extracts from the Records of the Burgh of Edinburgh—1689 to 1701, H. Armet, ed. (Edinburgh, 1962). The full quotation from Henry Gray Graham on the famine of 1695 can be found in David Daiches’s biography of Andrew Fletcher (see Chapter Two, below).
CHAPTER ONE: THE NEW JERUSALEM
Rosalind K. Marshall is supposed to publish a new biography of John Knox, which is badly needed. Until then the reader must turn to Jasper Ridley’s John Knox (New York, 1968) and Stanford Reid’s 1974 biography of the same name. Roger Mason has also edited a brand-new edition of Knox’s political writings for the Cambridge History of Political Thought series, which is available in paperback along with George Buchanan in the same series. For a discussion of their revolutionary endorsement of popular sovereignty, see Quentin Skinner’s The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Volume 2: The Age of Reformation (Cambridge, 1978).
A highly readable account of the Scottish uprising against King Charles is in C. V. Wedgewood’s The King’s Peace, 1637–1641 (London, 1955; paperback edition 1969). A more scholarly one is David Stevenson’s The Scottish Revolution, 1637–1644: The Triumph of the Covenanters (New York, 1973). The expert on the post-Reformation “parish state” in Scotland is Rosiland Murchison, especially her essay on the Poor Law in People and Society in Scotland, volume 1 (Edinburgh, 1988), edited by Murchison and Thomas Devine.
The place of literacy in post-Reformation Scotland has prompted a great deal of debate and revision recently. The standard view takes statistical form in Professor Lawrence Stone’s classic article, “Literacy and Education in Engla
nd, 1640–1900,” published in Past & Present in 1969. The revisionist view is found in R. A. Huston’s Scottish Literacy and Scottish Identity 1600–1800 (Cambridge, 1985), which argues that the supposed Scottish bias toward literacy is a myth—an argument which for various reasons I find unconvincing. Another provocative thesis is found in Alexander Broadie’s The Tradition of Scottish Philosophy (Savage, MD, 1990), which argues for a deep continuity of Scottish thought from the Middle Ages all the way to the Enlightenment. See also George Davie’s The Democratic Intellect: Scotland and Her Universities in the Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh, 1961) for the lasting impact of the Scottish educational ideal. The evidence for the public library in Innerpeffay comes from Anand Chitnis’s The Scottish Enlightenment (London, 1976).
G. Whittington and I. D. White, An Historical Geography of Scotland (London, 1983), give a valuable overview of the changes in the Scottish economy from the sixteenth century to the eve of union, as do the relevant chapters in Thomas Devine’s The Scottish Nation, mentioned above. John Prebble’s The Darien Disaster provides all the relevant material on William Paterson’s ill-fated scheme, although a much older work, The Darien Venture (New York, 1926), still provides some interesting details—including the quotation from William Paterson on Panama as “the key of the universe.”
CHAPTER TWO: A TRAP OF THEIR OWN MAKING
There are several books on the relations between England and Scotland before the Act of Union: the best is probably William Ferguson’s Scotland’s Relations with England: A Survey to 1707 (Edinburgh, 1977). The best book on the debate over union is by Charles Dand, The Mighty A fair (Edinburgh, 1972), which can be supplemented by information on the financial details in John Shaw’s The Political History of 18th Century Scotland (London, 1999) and P.W.J. Riley’s The Union of England and Scotland: A Study in Anglo-Scottish Politics of the Eighteenth Century (Manchester, 1979). The description of the opening ceremonies for the opening of the Scottish Parliament is from Frederick Watkeys’s Old Edinburgh, volume 1 (Boston, 1907).
David Daiches wrote a brilliant and vivid introduction for his Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun: Selected Political Writings (Edinburgh, 1979), which is not only a condensed biography of Fletcher but a fine summary of Scottish political history between the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to the Act of Union in 1707. However, Daiches must now be supplemented with Paul H. Scott’s full-length biography, Andrew Fletcher and the Treaty of Union (Edinburgh, 1992) and John Robertson’s edition of Andrew Fletcher: Political Works (Cambridge, 1997).
I made two slight modifications in the historical sequence in this chapter. Besides including the rituals of “the riding of Parliament,” which took place in 1703, my quotations for Fletcher’s arguments against the economic consequences of Union actually come from Fletcher’s An Account of a Conversation Concerning a Right Regulation of Government, published in 1704.
CHAPTER THREE: THE PROPER STUDY OF MANKIND I
Probably no figure in the history of the Enlightenment is more discussed in passing than Francis Hutcheson. Everyone acknowledges his enormous influence on both sides of the Atlantic, and on both sides of the English Channel; everyone admits his role as the founding father of the Scottish Enlightenment. But precisely because Hutcheson is such a useful foil for scholars who really want to talk about two even greater figures, Adam Smith and David Hume, and because his works now make (to be honest) tedious reading, the list of books dedicated to Hutcheson, and Hutcheson alone, is woefully short. We have to make due with W. R. Scott’s venerable biography, which first appeared more than one hundred years ago, and some excellent scholarly articles published in learned books and journals. The one that most influenced my approach to Hutcheson is by James Moore, “The Two Systems of Francis Hutcheson,” in Studies in the Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment, M. A. Stewart, ed. (Oxford, 1990). Chapters on Hutcheson by Donald Winch and Ian Ross in their books on Adam Smith are particularly useful as well (see Chapter Nine, below).
Hutcheson’s milieu in Dublin can be reconstructed from Scott, Francis Hutcheson, and M.A. Stewart’s illuminating article, “John Smith and the Molesworth Circle,” which appeared in 1987 in Eighteenth Century Ireland. Lord Islay’s role in the hiring of Hutcheson at Glasgow, and in Scottish academic politics generally, is covered in Roger Emerson’s “Politics and the Glasgow Professors, 1690–1800,” in The Glasgow Enlightenment, Andrew Hook and Richard Sher, eds. (East Linton, 1995).
Hutcheson’s writings suffer from the same neglect as the story of his life. Bernhard Fabian put together a facsimile reprint of the 1755 edition of Francis Hutcheson’s Collected Works, published in Hildesheim, Germany, in 1969. Excerpts of his writings are available in an inexpensive Everyman Classics paperback edition, and in Alexander Broadie’s selections of various authors in The Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 1999). A System of Moral Philosophy and An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, from which I quote extensively in this chapter, both exist in modern editions but are out of print. On the other hand, one of Hutcheson’s earliest and shortest treatises, his Remarks on [Bernard Mandeville’s] “Fable of the Bees,” which denounced Mandeville’s idea that private vices yield public benefits, does circulate in numerous versions, and can even be found on the Internet—again, since it serves as a foil for the economic theories of Adam Smith.
CHAPTER FOUR: THE PROPER STUDY OF MANKIND II
From a biographical point of view, Lord Kames fares much better. Two modern biographies exist, William Lehmann’s Henry Home, Lord Kames and the Scottish Enlightenment (The Hague, 1971) and Ian Ross’s Lord Kames and the Scotland of His Day (Oxford, 1972), which is the better of the two. Even the 1814 biography by Alexander Fraser Tytler of Woodhouselee bears rereading, especially for its discussion of his fellow judges on the Court of Session. There is also invaluable information in Ernest Mossner’s The Life of David Hume (see Chapter Eight, below).
Kames’s writings, unfortunately, have fared even worse than Hutcheson’s. A modern edition of Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion appeared some years ago. Otherwise, if you want to read Historical Law Tracts or Sketches on the History of Man, you will need to visit a large university library.
The main theme of these chapters is the origins of the Scottish Enlightenment. The old classic on the subject is Gladys Bryson’s Man and Society: The Scottish Enquiry of the Eighteenth Century (Princeton, 1945) but the illustrated volume edited by David Daiches, Peter Jones, and Jean Jones, Hotbed of Genius: The Scottish Enlightenment, 1730–1790 (Edinburgh, 1986), might be a better place to begin, while Anand Chitnis’s The Scottish Enlightenment (mentioned above, Chapter One) still offers the best account of the social background to this amazing episode in the history of European culture. The now-famous collection of essays in Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, I. Hont and M. Ignatieff, eds. (Cambridge, 1983), have shaped my own approach: David Lieberman’s essay in that collection, “The Legal Needs of a Commercial Society: The Jurisprudence of Lord Kames,” was important to this chapter, as well. Robert Wokler, “Apes and Races in the Scottish Enlightenment: Monboddo and Kames on the Nature of Man,” in Peter Jones’s edited volume, Philosophy and Science in the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 1988), covers Kames’s views on race and history. The Joseph Knight case deserves more attention than it gets: my description is from Ross’s biography of Kames.
CHAPTER FIVE: A LAND DIVIDED
Neil Macallum’s A Small Country offers interesting details on Edinburgh in the early eighteenth century, as does A. J. Youngson’s The Making of Classical Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1966). The Works of Adam Petrie, The Scottish Chesterfield (Edinburgh, 1877) offers up the rich material of Petrie’s guides to civilized comportment.
The standard work on the Scottish-English “culture wars” of the eighteenth century is David Daiches’s The Paradox of Scottish Culture (Oxford, 1964). The journals and correspondence of James Boswell, however, provide plenty of material
for analyzing this problem; the volumes edited by Frederick Pottle and William Wimsatt, especially Boswell’s London Journal, 1762–1763 (New York, 1950), Boswell For the Defence, 1769–1774 (New York, 1959), and James Boswell: The Earlier Years, 1740–1769 (New York, 1966), are very useful—as well as fun reading. Boswell’s fantasy of upbraiding Rousseau in broad Scots comes out of The Earlier Years. A fascinating article on Scots, “A Corrupt Dialect of English?” by Brian Osborne, appeared in Highlander magazine in May/June 1998. The quotation from Robertson that starts this discussion is from the second volume of the 1811 edition of his History of Scotland.
My interpretation of Highland society and culture has been decisively shaped by two works by Bruce Lenman, The Jacobite Clans of the Great Glen, 1650–1784 (London, 1984) and The Jacobite Risings in Britain, supplemented by Thomas Devine’s Clanship to Crofter’s War: The Social Transformation of the Scottish Highlands (Manchester, 1994), R. A. Dodgson, “The Nature of Scottish Clans,” in R.A. Huston and I. D. White’s Scottish Society, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 1989), and I. F. Grant and Hugh Cheape’s Periods in Highland History (London, 1987). The account of Coll MacDonnell of Barrisdale is from Frank McLynn’s The Jacobites (London, 1985), as is the quotation from Cassius Dio that opens the chapter. The story of Big Archie MacPhail comes out of John Prebble’s Glencoe, which like its companion volume, Culloden, gives an especially vivid picture of Highland life.
Prebble also discusses Duncan Forbes of Culloden and his quizzical view of his Highland neighbors; so does Robert Clyde in From Rebel to Hero: The Image of the Highlander 1745–1830 (East Lothian, 1995), and both can be supplemented with George Menary’s vintage biography, The Life and Letters of Duncan Forbes of Culloden (London, 1936).
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