Scotland the Brief

Part 1: The Community of the Realm
8 Glorious Revolution, Deadly Decade

Cromwells rule in Scotland was, like all attempts to control the place in detail, punitively expensive, and the Commonwealth came to an end in 1660 when the General commanding the place, George Monck, lost patience with Cromwells incompetent son Richard and marched on London. The man he put back on the throne, Charles II, intelligent, cultivated, serially promiscuous and thoroughly untrustworthy, had experienced Scotland enough to dislike it intensely. He restored the parliament but ordered it about through a trusted Governor, first the Earl of Lauderdale and then his own crypto-catholic brother James.

Like his grandfather Charles was determined to bring bishops into the Kirk to supervise the Presbyterians, the unruliest of whom styled themselves the true Covenanters and after 1760 raised rebellion in south-western Scotland. Brutal guerrilla attacks and campaigns of repression ensued, recorded by Presbyterians like the Reverend Robert Wodrow and the creators of monuments to the martyrs, still to be found in lonely Galloway glens. More seriously, attempts by the tactless Prince James to impose his own ideas on Edinburgh society caused rebellions by the lawyers and academics of the town, and the emergence of a proto-nationalist in the shape of the soldier and political philosopher Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, who joined (and practically destroyed) the fruitless Monmouth rebellion against James in 1685. Fletcher represented the old Scots idea of an elective monarchy, but also the notion of a decentralised, non-imperial British polity. Circumstances were to force him into a minority.

The initiative to get rid of James came from England, not from Scotland. The Whig nobility appealed in 1688 to his brother-in-law Prince William of Orange, Statthalter of the Netherlands and his wife Mary, to displace the Catholic, and William landed at Torbay in Devon. James was too incompetent to raise any sort of counterforce in Scotland, and a Highland rising on his behalf petered out after its leader James Claverhouse, scourge of the Covenanters and now Viscount Dundee, was killed at Killiekrankie in 1689. Kirk and Parliament rejoiced in a specifically Scottish Glorious Revolution and the return of their liberties after more than a century of constriction, with the abolition of the hated Bishops and of the Lords of the Articles.

Then things started to go horribly wrong. The 1690s was a little ice age which had peculiarly devastating consequences for Scotland and its European trading partners. Trade to the north-east was drying up. There were famine years in 1693-8 in which thousands died, and poverty grew. In an attempt to break out, a bold speculator William Paterson, who had founded the Bank of England in 1695, founded the Bank of Scotland and the Company of Scotland trading to Africa and the Indies in 1695. This was part of an ingenious scheme to create a Scottish colony on the isthmus of Darien, over which a new road would link the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. 2000 colonists were sent out, in two expeditions, but England and Spain combined to isolate the Scots, the isthmus proved a fever-pit and only about 300 eventually returned, Paterson (remarkably enough) among them, to a country financially ruined by the enterprise.