On 24 January 1703/4, the Company of Scotland instructed the master of its ship Annandale, then in the Thames, to join the first convoy down the Channel and make his way to Glasgow.Footnote 1 With the fortunes of the company riding on the convoy, the War of Spanish Succession raging, and French privateers scouring the seas, this precaution was a sensible one. Things did not work out as the company envisaged, and the ship was seized by the English East India Company for its intent to break its monopoly. However, the instructions are significant, because historians are divided over the extent to which Scottish merchant ships would, or could, avail themselves of the Royal Navy's protection.
Considerable work has been done lately on trading networks, maritime communities, and connections, among which the Scots’ “empire of networks” has received a fair amount of attention.Footnote 2 Several scholars have pointed out that the emphasis on networks crossing seas and borders opens questions around the role of the stateFootnote 3—perhaps a necessary corrective to the state's dominance in maritime and especially naval historiography. However, the role of the state in Scotland's maritime history can hardly be described as dominant, with a navy so ephemeral that its vessels have been described as looming “dimly through the mists of time to vanish like phantom ships.”Footnote 4 James Grant's The Old Scots Navy from 1689 to 1710, the century-old solitary volume focused on the Scottish Royal Navy (hereafter simply Scottish navy) of the turn of the eighteenth century, may be contrasted with the more recent “golden age” of writing on the (English) Royal Navy.Footnote 5 However, exploration of the English navy's relationship with pre-union Scotland has often been limited to the problems it caused, with seizures of Scottish merchant ships and the question of press gangs the most prominent issues.Footnote 6 The question of naval security has been treated as very marginal in historiography on parliamentary union, largely as an adjunct to the economic case for union.
Such a position often misunderstands what trade defense was already available. This article looks at the Royal Navy as a service through the provision of convoy in the years immediately preceding the 1707 union, with particular emphasis on the North Sea region. I suggest that the relative neglect and sometimes confusing portrayal of convoy in the historiography perhaps derives from an adequacy that by the time of the union made it uncontroversial, with the Scottish navy covering flaws in English provision. I also suggest that Scots were already more deeply enmeshed in the English system of maritime security than has been often been credited. This view provides nuance to security questions around union; parliamentary union alone did not offer more than incremental improvements to a system of maritime security that was already in place, but it would secure that system, which would be imperiled should regal union collapse.
The literature on the Royal Navy largely ignores Scotland in this period, and convoys receive less attention than do battle fleets. Brian Lavery's monograph, the only general work on the Royal Navy and Scotland, makes no mention of convoys in the last years of the regal union, merely commenting on the “lawless atmosphere” for maritime trade.Footnote 7 J. D. Davies notes that the number of cruisers sent to Scotland rose dramatically after 1689, but he also argues that these were to deal with the Jacobite threat and were concentrated around the Hebrides where there was little trade.Footnote 8 Patrick Crowhurst's work on the eighteenth-century convoy system only mentions pre-union Scotland in relation to the Scots’ reputation for illegal trading.Footnote 9
In his study of the Union of 1707 and the circumstances leading up to it, Christopher Whatley writes, “neither the Dutch nor the English were prepared to provide naval escorts for the Scots, other than in exceptional circumstances and following specific requests.”Footnote 10 This assertion follows on from T. C. Smout, who stated that the English refused to provide convoy to the Scots.Footnote 11 Eric Graham, whose work constitutes the bedrock of recent writing on the Scottish merchant marine, does not specifically mention Royal Naval convoys or their lack. However, in juxtaposing his section on French privateers in 1702–1707 (in which he does not mention the Royal Navy and refers to Scotland as “defenceless”) with suggestions of significant improvements after the union, a picture emerges of nearly nonexistent convoy provision before union.Footnote 12
Allan Macinnes puts forward a contrary view. His broad thesis is that Scottish commercial networks were so successful in flouting or subverting English state power that England had to bring the “rogue state” into line. Although reliant on English and Dutch convoys, Scots also subverted them by slipping out early to avoid customs checks.Footnote 13 Steve Murdoch refutes the view that the Royal Navy excluded the Scots from defense, calling it a “particularistic reading of events”; if there was need, he maintains, “the Royal Navy would endeavour to oblige.” However, he gives few specifics on convoys, being concerned principally with Scottish privateers.Footnote 14 The result is that the historiography remains sufficiently confused that two contributors to the same volume take nearly opposite positions. Laura Stewart writes that Scottish merchants made use of English convoys, while Karin Bowie states that the English navy did not supply escort for Scottish shipping.Footnote 15 Only Murdoch's work really engages with the divergence of views on the issue.
Trade was political and “parasitic on the resources of the nation state,” so defense of trade was also political.Footnote 16 As such, in many of the foregoing works, convoy, or the lack thereof, serves to illustrate a point in the political landscape. In Whatley's view, the need for naval security was a reason to seek shelter in union, and convoys from 1706 were signs of Anne's government seeking to foster support for it.Footnote 17 In Graham's view, diverging interests meant naval neglect of Scotland by England, which drove discontent and division.Footnote 18 More broadly, divergences in the interests of the English and Scottish polities have been pointed to as the root of their political conflicts in the immediate run-up to union.
The union of the crowns was under particular strain from divergences over the issues of trade and war.Footnote 19 These issues met in the question of trade defense. The convoy situation had improved after a mid-1690s low, thanks to both Royal Navy and Scottish naval effort and, ironically, depended on an alignment of English and Scottish interests. English convoy was a benefit to the Scots deriving from the regal union, a counterpoint to the view prevalent by the first decade of the eighteenth century that the union was a more or less unmitigated disaster.Footnote 20
In pointing to convoy as an instrument in promoting union, Whatley reminds us that convoy was an act of state, albeit one that was routine; it therefore cannot escape the political context of the regal union. Smout maintains that “the Royal Navy still refused to provide the convoy services Scotland had every right to expect.” Contemporary Englishmen, however, might have questioned that right; from 1603, English politicians had been keen to assert the complete separateness of the two kingdoms, so Scotland could have no call on the English navy.Footnote 21 Such sentiment was blind to the fact of Scotland's being dragged into wars on the opposite principle that the two allegiances were inseparable.Footnote 22 These English wars, or from 1689, Dutch ones, have been acknowledged as vital context to the union.Footnote 23 If what eventually created the British state was “the transformation of English military power,” as Scott suggests, then convoys were part of that transformation, without necessarily being the use of “military power to coerce.”Footnote 24
CONVOYS TO SCOTLAND
To return to the Annandale affair, the Company of Scotland's ship missing its convoy proved unfortunate for another ship looking for convoy, the English Indiaman Worcester. Its seizure, the trial of its captain, Thomas Green, and two of his crew on trumped-up charges of piracy, and their hanging on the Leith sands in front of a huge crowd on 11 April 1705 were the nadir of the maritime relationship between England and Scotland.Footnote 25 It is less often related that Worcester, having lost the Dutch convoy she had been with from the Cape, was instructed by her owners to wait at Leith “unless you can gett a Man of Warr, either Dutch, Scotch or English.”Footnote 26 While the instructions for Annandale only show a Scottish intention to use an English convoy in English waters, those for Worcester illuminate two more points: first, that English merchants expected there to be convoys from Scotland, and second, that it did not matter which navy provided the escort.
The provision of convoy was mainly the responsibility of the Admiralty. In this period, the body generally referred to as the Admiralty was actually one of the prince's councils, as Queen Anne's husband, George of Denmark, held the office of lord high admiral of England from 1702 until 1708. He left most business to the council, which consisted initially of admirals George Rooke, David Mitchell, and George Churchill, with Mr. Richard Hill. It is perhaps noteworthy that Admiral Mitchell was a Scot.Footnote 27 However, he was an officer of the English navy, not a Scottish representative; apart from sharing a monarch, there was no formal link between Scotland and the Royal Navy. No Scottish money sustained English ships, and by this period, recruitment of Scottish sailors was entirely voluntary, with low take-up.Footnote 28
The Admiralty sent convoys to Scotland for various reasons, covering diverse trades, both English and Scottish. If the first year of the War of Spanish Succession is taken as an example, four convoys were sent that might have been useful for the Scots. In May 1702, HMS Worcester was to cruise off St. Abbs Head to inform ships of the newly declared state of war with France and escort them if necessary. Mary Galley was also sent to escort Scottish soldiers to Holland and to “give convoy to any other ships or vessells of her Majesties subjects or her allyes bound this way.”Footnote 29 In June, at the request of the Virginia Company, Sheerness was ordered to cruise off the Northern Isles until July and then escort “all others [ships] you shall meet” southwards.Footnote 30 The regular coal convoy from the Thames to Newcastle split in August so that Rye could escort colliers to Leith.Footnote 31 Then, in November, Mary Galley made another visit escorting Scottish ships from the Thames before joining Romney off St. Abbs Head waiting for inbound ships from Archangel to take them south.Footnote 32
A survey of Admiralty minutes between May 1702 and May 1707 suggests that some eighteen escorts were sent north of the border. The largest part of these was the five sent to pick up Scottish recruits for Marlborough's army. Four were convoys laid on for English trade to Russia through the White Sea. One was the outward leg of the interception of the Virginia trade mentioned above. The remaining eight were on behalf of Scottish interests, of which three were government business, escorting the goods of the high commissioner to the Scottish Parliament—leaving only five actually initiated on behalf of Scottish trade.Footnote 33 Some of these were, of course, designed for convoy the other way, notably the troop convoys to Holland. However, evidence suggests that these convoys did offer escort for Scottish ships on the northward leg. Edward Owen wrote that he had Scottish ships with him going north en route to Leith to pick up troops, and on other occasions an instruction to do so was actually in Admiralty orders.Footnote 34
More than half of these escorts were for English interests, though arguably they fulfilled a British purpose. However, it has to be emphasized that the original rationale for the convoy did not reduce the utility of these convoys to Scottish trade, as the navy rarely discriminated in whom it was convoying; references to “Her Majesty's Subjects” and allies or simply all ships were catch-all instructions facilitating Scottish use of convoys. Thus for the Scots (and the Admiralty), it was one of the advantages of the system that they sailed along the same routes as many English trades, reducing the need to argue for specific Scottish provision. Although often perceived as being laid on for sectional interests and referred to by names that would reinforce this perception (such as the “Russia Convoy” or “Eastland Convoy”), these were not exclusive sailings for a particular grouping of merchants. The Admiralty did not have the ships to respond individually to every request. Instead, different trades were combined if they lay in the same general direction.Footnote 35 The Russia convoy sometimes started out as a coal convoy to Newcastle. Conversely, in 1705, the Russia convoy sailed with trade to Hamburg, then to the Norwegian side of the North Sea, making it useless to Scots. However, as the Russia Company's agent, Mr. Collins, explained to the Admiralty, they preferred to stop at Shetland both sailing out and back.Footnote 36 This route made them potentially a very useful convoy for Scottish shippers, and occasionally captains noted a Scottish presence.Footnote 37
In the same spirit of combining trades, the majority of convoys to Leith were simply extensions of the regular coal convoys between the Tyne and Thames. This convoy route was one of the most important; between four and six ships were permanently assigned as escorts, divided into groups of two so that multiple convoys could sail simultaneously.Footnote 38 The huge size of the collier fleets along the English east coast, rarely less than seventy and sometimes hundreds of ships, means that a few Scottish vessels mixed in usually went unmentioned in logs and correspondence. It is thus difficult to tell how much use Scots made of English convoys. Only occasionally, on smaller convoys, did the escort commander provide a detailed account of his charges. One who did was Captain John Mitchell, whose 1704 return from the Baltic included twenty-five British ships, of which six were Scottish: two for Leith, and one each for St. Andrews, Glasgow, Wemyss, and Pittenweem.Footnote 39
The Admiralty's minutes show a fairly consistent picture of three or four convoys a year to or passing Scotland. They do not pick up on whether any convoys to or from Scotland sailed without orders from the Admiralty; at times, London had only a general idea of what ships were doing. If winds were right for sailing north from Tynemouth, not south (this was probably rare), then captains—or the governor of Tynemouth Castle, who sometimes directed warships—might be inclined to accommodate requests. On 20 January 1703, the Admiralty told Portland’s Captain James Jesson specifically not to escort Scottish ships from Tynemouth to Leith. Scottish ships were gathering in the Tyne, and Jesson might have escorted them on his own initiative, but the Admiralty was about to send Deptford and Winchelsea with the troop convoy, which could take Scottish ships north.Footnote 40 The next year, Captain John Edwards was reprimanded for sending Queenborough with a convoy to Leith without Admiralty orders, preempting another convoy to Scotland.Footnote 41
THE LIMITS OF ENGLISH CONVOY AND THE SCOTTISH NAVY
Convoys to Scotland did exist and were quite frequent, given that most foreign trades made do with one or two convoys a year. However, there were inadequacies in the system. The Royal Navy provision for Scotland largely relied upon accidents of geography: most Scottish trade sailed along the same routes as did large quantities of English trade, and two-thirds of Scottish ships trading overseas originated from the Forth, only fifty miles beyond the border, a short detour for any escorts.Footnote 42 A certain amount of regional trade with Europe also went via the Forth.Footnote 43 However, there was little convoy offered for Scottish regional centers, with only the Russia convoy consistent in traveling further north. It also left the significant Scottish coastal trade exposed; 85 per cent of ships landing goods at Dundee between 1696 and 1699 had come from another Scottish port.Footnote 44
A connected issue was an almost complete lack of cruisers—ships stationed in a particular area for local patrolling—assigned to Scotland.Footnote 45 These were important for convoys as well as patrol ships. Had cruisers been available, it would then have been possible for local authorities to form convoys as local needs dictated, without reference to the Admiralty, as was the situation in Ireland.Footnote 46 The Scottish Privy Council could occasionally persuade naval captains to act on their behalf even without instructions from the Admiralty—most notably, the frigates Sheerness and London Merchant had bombarded the Jacobite-held Bass Rock in 1692 while waiting to gather a convoy at Leith.Footnote 47 However, it was rare for warships to be idling at Leith; a glance at the list books showing where the Admiralty thought their ships were each month shows a very sparse picture for Scotland. Only the convoys carrying troops show up, while they waited to load.Footnote 48 To an extent, the Scottish Navy performed the role of cruisers for Scottish waters. (The role of Scottish frigates is covered below.) However, it was also the case that the escorts of convoys to Leith often turned around and left again immediately, some even having orders to do so “without coming to anchor if you can possibly avoid it.”Footnote 49 This was the flip side of the Admiralty's accommodation of the Scots; it worked because usually little time was wasted sailing to the Forth. A quick turn-around ensured the efficient running of the coal convoys.
Escorts could repair and revictual at Tynemouth, but there was no similar facility at Leith, where the Victualling Board had no contractor to supply ships. This choice was based on the expectation that there would not be large numbers of navy ships using the port, so it was a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. However, that Leith was, in the assessment of Captain John Price in 1695, “a most miserable place for victualling” largely related to higher prices than the Victualling Board would pay. This would remain a factor after union, when an attempt to set up victualling facilities at Leith proved to be a fiasco.Footnote 50
Convoy sailings between the Tyne and Thames were more frequent than those taking in Scotland, and Scots could use these by sailing to Tynemouth and waiting there for convoy to take them on southward. The Scottish navy's patrols were set up to facilitate this practice; their routine orders were to sail from Leith to Shetland, then gather trade from all harbors as they sailed southward again to Tynemouth before taking any homeward-bound ships from there north. On the west coast, there was a similar service from the Clyde to Dublin.Footnote 51 The build-up of Scottish ships mentioned earlier in relation to the Admiralty telling Jesson not to go north had occurred because although Scottish shippers would generally use English convoys to the Tyne and expect an onward Scottish convoy, in January 1703 the Scottish navy was not yet at sea.
The very existence of the Scottish navy would seem powerful ammunition for the suggestion that English defense was inadequate. There is certainly some truth in this; a document supporting the 1695 bill to create the Scottish navy is filled with references to the “want of seasonable convoys.”Footnote 52 Lack of seasonable sailings were a general problem—Crowhurst cites an example of ships waiting eight months in nearby OstendFootnote 53—but the Scottish squadron was also a product of the particular circumstances of the mid-1690s. After the Jacobite war concluded in 1691, the Scots found themselves struggling to get Royal Navy forces sent for patrols. The Scottish Privy Council's requests met with little response; Centurion was sent in May 1693 to guard the Forth's trade but only stayed for a few months.Footnote 54 In October 1693 the Privy Council pleaded,Footnote 55 “Last year we had assurance given of two or three frigots to be sent to guard our firth and North coasts yet on this occasion we must now humbly intreat your majestie of that what was then promist.” The request had followed the failure of a naval bill in the Scottish Parliament.Footnote 56 A second attempt two years later was more successful, though the provision for three Thames-built frigates, Royal William (32 guns), Royal Mary (24), and Dumbarton Castle (24), was less generous than the five ships originally proposed, and even these three were thought “excessively dear.”Footnote 57 The reestablished Scottish force supplemented rather than replaced the Royal Navy. As Macinnes suggests of the Darien project legislated in the same session, it was hoped it would be “under protection of the common monarchy”; indeed, the Scottish navy's independent impact was talked down for that reason.Footnote 58 While politicians pointed to Scotland's lack of a navy even after it had bought one, its sailors pointed to its limited coastal range due to fears of foundering if sent further out!Footnote 59
Scotland's vulnerability and England's lack of response to it were due in large part to a change in the nature of naval warfare away from the regular big battles of the Anglo-Dutch wars and first years of the wars against Louis XIV toward commerce raiding and blockade; English naval policy struggled to meet this shift.Footnote 60 The French moved away from fleet warfare as financial crisis forced a transition to cheaper guerre de course, for which private investment was already booming, making 1693 and 1694 the worst years that English shipping suffered from trade warfare until the First World War.Footnote 61 The result of the crisis was the ambush of William III's English administration by the parliamentary opposition, which moved an amendment to the Land Tax bill on 17 January 1693/4 requiring the Admiralty to provide forty-three cruisers.Footnote 62 In the way that Conrad Russell suggests was typical of its position throughout the regal union, Westminster ignored Scotland when making up this legislation. In 1695, only one of Parliament's cruisers was “on the north west coast of Scotland,” although five were in the North Sea convoying the coal trade, the usual source for a convoy to Scotland.Footnote 63
The essential problem was that the England's navy, for so long preparing for a war of battle fleets, had a critical shortage of the frigates required for escorts and cruising, and no act of Parliament could solve this immediately. The shortage of suitable ships forced the Admiralty to avoid following the provisions of the act to the letter.Footnote 64 By specifying stations for a large proportion of the navy's frigates, Parliament had unintentionally but publicly ruled out an immediate response to Scotland's pleas for improved protection; it therefore provided the context to, and perhaps even prerequisite for, the creation of the Scottish navy. However, because these constraints were ultimately driven by the number of ships available, they were liable to change as new ships were launched. From the outbreak of the Nine Years’ War to 1693, fewer than eight new frigates on average a year were built, but from then until the Peace of Ryswick in 1697, nearly twenty were launched annually. Having started the war with forty-nine frigates, the Royal Navy thus ended it with 138.Footnote 65 The acute shortage of frigates forced the Scots to invest in their own squadron, but by the time it put to sea, the problem had been alleviated.
The results can be seen at the beginning of the War of Spanish Succession. In contrast to the situation a decade earlier, the Scottish government's request for cruisers in the Forth for early summer 1703 to cover for their own ships being unready resulted in Deptford and Nightingale being promptly dispatched. All the same, the way in which the request was expressed reflects Scottish expectations after the failures in the 1690s. James Ogilvy, Earl of Seafield, writing on behalf of the Scottish Privy Council, noted that “many complain that we are engaged in the war whenever England is and yet have no protection from their shipps.” He artfully disassociated the council from this dissatisfaction while underlining the political need for a deployment. In considering the request, Queen Anne thought it “necessary for the trade and commerce of both kingdoms.”Footnote 66 The perceived need to argue forcefully for defense in this case contrasts with the absence of such political justification from the council's applications for convoys. The sending of two frigates, Deptford and Nightingale, even for only a couple of months, was a much bigger commitment than a convoy. It is therefore the deployment of these frigates rather than the “conciliatory” use of convoys that best illustrates the supportive deployment of trade defense by Anne's government.Footnote 67 That said, the number of convoys was also slightly up in Anne's reign; 1696 and 1697 had seen three convoys apiece that would be useful to Scots, but perhaps significantly, none of these was specifically sent on behalf of Scots.Footnote 68
CONVOYS ABROAD
Some of the convoys within Scottish waters had ultimate destinations further afield. Only a relatively small proportion of Scottish maritime trade was with England, though it had risen in adversity during the Dutch wars, and the same may have happened during the French wars.Footnote 69 The Scots’ use of the broader network of English trade defense is a topic beyond the scope of this article. My focus is on ships for which Scotland was a point of destination or departure and so does not address the Scottish role in the tramp-trading of other parties’ goods, as with Scottish ship-ownership in parts of the Dutch Atlantic trade. Similarly, because the foundation of this article is Admiralty and captains’ correspondence, I note only those ships perceived by them to be Scottish. But as Murdoch says of Scottish Baltic networks, “Their unobtrusiveness appears to have been their success,” meaning that Scottish cargos in Dutch or Scandinavian shipping went unremarked, and so, too, did ships owned by merchants of Scottish origin flying a neutral Swedish or Danish flag by virtue their of residence there.Footnote 70 Figures from the Sound toll registers are therefore somewhat distorted, although of course Scottish “Swedes” may well have used convoys, somewhat offsetting the effect of this on the calculations relating to the Scottish use of Baltic convoys that follow. Baltic convoys are the core of this section, but those of the Scandinavian kingdoms’ own navies are ignored for the same reason, even though, to avoid clashes in the Channel, they were often routed round the north of Scotland.Footnote 71
In the 1680s, the destination of choice for ships departing Scottish ports was the United Provinces of the Netherlands, 41 percent, followed by England, 13 percent; Norway, 12 percent; France 10 percent; and the Baltic, 6 percent.Footnote 72 Much of that Scottish trade with the Dutch went through the staple port of Veere. This trade actually provided its own convoy; the staple contract of 1675 stipulated that in wartime a warship would be sent annually by the Zeeland Admiralty to convoy trade from the Forth.Footnote 73 This Dutch provision presumably meant that Scots were less likely to use the Royal Navy's convoys, but its troop convoys also sailed to the Netherlands. Both the English and Dutch convoys usually sailed in spring, the start of the season for both trading and the campaigning of armies, so they occasionally combined. An example of this was the departure from Leith on 10 May 1706 of a combined convoy of forty-one ships escorted by the Royal Navy's Bonadventure and Strombolo, along with the Zeeland Admiralty's Gorinchem, Starrenburg, and Mercurius. Footnote 74
The convoy of Baltic trade in 1706 has attracted more scholarly attention than most of the convoys of this period. Whatley suggests that providing it was part of the process of gathering support for union.Footnote 75 Sir Edward Whitaker was to escort trade from Elsinore (Helsingør) to Leith and then detach two frigates to send the English ships south, while the rest of his squadron was to go north with the Russia convoy, then headed from London to Leith.Footnote 76 Since Whitaker was already in the Baltic when the Scots’ request reached the Admiralty, and the planned interaction with the Russia convoy suggests he would have had to go to Scottish waters anyway, this was not necessarily a particular service to the Scots. However, this convoy is more interesting for what did not happen rather than what did. A letter had first gone to James Stewart, the lord advocate, applying for convoy by the Scottish frigates. Stewart passed it on to the Scottish Privy Council suggesting that an English warship be added to the Scots’ own. However, the council rejected it, as “our frigots cannot be wanting to defend our coasts now”; the application was then sent on to the queen, and so having been written on 13 April, it finally reached the Admiralty on 22 July!Footnote 77 The refusal to commit the Scottish frigates abroad underlines their purpose as a force for local defense, rarely allowed to go far. The extraordinarily convoluted process in this case was not necessarily typical, as Scottish merchants could simply turn up in person at the Admiralty and ask for a convoy and get one, as happened on 11 August 1702.Footnote 78
It is unlikely that the Scottish Baltic merchants appreciated getting the convoy; it had taken three months to arrange and would have sailed regardless of their application, and so they could have used it anyway. They had been seeking not an English convoy but a Scottish one. This was the first time an application for convoy of the Baltic trade by the Scottish frigates appears in the minutes of the Scottish Privy Council. The changing dynamics of British trade with the Baltic suggest an explanation: Scottish trade with the Baltic appeared to be going through a rough patch compared to the period of 1698 to 1700. Scottish passages of the Sound into the Baltic, 1701–1707, dipped by 16 percent, which was perhaps offset by ships reflagging as Swedes or Danes.Footnote 79 However, English trade collapsed—72 percent down in the same period, bringing Scottish trade above the English for the first time.Footnote 80 Asking in particular for the Scottish frigates would have allowed Scots to maintain their direct passage, avoiding a detour south to English ports. The Scottish Baltic traders’ application may also relate to the events of the previous October when the homeward English Baltic convoy had been overwhelmed by Marc-Antoine de Saint-Pol-Hécourt's squadron.Footnote 81 While hardly a great advertisement for the English convoys, it was a reason to seek protection, and since on that occasion the escort had been three large frigates, between them mounting 140 guns, this also explains the suggestion that English support would be needed if the two Scottish frigates (with only fifty-six guns between them) were to go.
It would be a mistake to assume that because this was the first Baltic convoy requested by the Scots, they did not use the regular English convoy for the Baltic; Scots were often a substantial contingent. Mitchell's 1704 convoy has already been mentioned, but his unusually detailed list is not the only evidence of Scottish use of the English Baltic convoys. Captain Jesson of Portland was in command for the 1702 and 1703 sailings, which on his watch sailed to and from the Humber. On both occasions, he noted Scots in his convoy from the Sound back home, up to a dozen in 1702. In 1703, he wrote that he was escorting thirty-six ships, “most of them Sweeds & Scotch.” Jesson heard that Saint-Pol's squadron was in Norwegian waters, and closer investigation revealed the ships under French colors to be the Salisbury, Lowestoft, and Milford—a testament to the losses suffered by convoy escorts in the previous war. Jesson opted not to risk sailing. The resulting stalemate was eventually broken by the arrival of a second Royal Navy squadron.Footnote 82
Jesson also noted that a Scottish ship sailing independently had been captured, a reminder that most ships, whether Scottish or English, went unescorted, particularly on a route like the Baltic that had only an annual convoy.Footnote 83 The six Scots sailing westward with Mitchell's 1704 convoy made up only 14 percent of the total Scottish westward passages that year, half the equivalent figure for the nineteen English at 28 percent. Jesson's more general statements are difficult to pin down with accuracy, but if read as ten for 1702, would give 22 percent, and if twelve for 1703, then 34 percent—a participation rate even higher than that of the English.Footnote 84 These figures at least indicate that Scottish use of the Baltic convoy was not dramatically lower than that of their English competitors.
If the 1706 Baltic convoy does not actually show the Royal Navy going out of its way to accommodate the Scots, it does show once again how its existing commitments could be useful to the Scots. Scotland had little trade with Southern Europe, but what there was could make use of Royal Naval commitments. An engraving by Wenceslaus Hollar, a Bohemian engraver resident in London, shows an engagement in 1669 between the Mary Rose and six Algerine corsairs, with the Mary Rose interposing itself between them and a Scottish merchantman bound for Cadiz.Footnote 85 Considerable English naval effort had been expended in the 1670s to reach an agreement with the regencies of the Barbary Coast, which gave the subjects of the Stuart monarchy written protections from attack by Barbary corsairs. Some of these treaties explicitly covered Scots, while in others their protection was “equally intended.”Footnote 86
A substantial element of Scottish overseas trade, however, could not use the protection of English convoys, because in English eyes, if not necessarily those of the Scots, it was illegal trade. The most significant trade that had to risk sailing alone was with France; at a tenth of sailings in the 1680s, mostly trading in valuable wines, this was a significant trade to have stopped because of the war. Despite an embargo, in practice much trade continued, as Siobhan Talbott has shown. Indeed, the embargo and the retaliatory measures taken by the French effectively stopped English trade, leaving a vacuum for the Scots to fill.Footnote 87 Through most years of the wars against Louis XIV, this trade was vulnerable to the Royal Navy, whose captains were instructed to seize all vessels belonging to states at war with France if they were caught sailing to or from French dominions. This was the case until 15 March 1704/5, when strict prohibition was lifted in favor of regulation by the issuance of passes.Footnote 88 Before that date, going anywhere near a convoy would have been risky for Scottish vessels trading with France; even after, there were no convoys to France, though protection might be sought for part of the voyage. On the other hand, Talbott shows that French authorities issued considerable numbers of passports for Scots, who were then far less likely to be taken by French privateers.Footnote 89
The second element of Scottish overseas trade that was theoretically excluded from convoy was that with the English colonies. Under the Navigation Acts of 1660 and 1663, only English ships with English crew could trade with the colonies, and most colonial commodities could only be traded in English markets. However, Scots exploited loopholes to build up a considerable trade, most significantly in tobacco between the Chesapeake and Clyde. Despite the trade being legally dubious, Allan Macinnes says that Scots did use convoys over the Atlantic, slipping out as they neared British waters.Footnote 90 This trade was of great value but used few ships; the 300,000 pounds of tobacco directly imported only added up to a half dozen shiploads.Footnote 91 The Royal Navy's presence in the Chesapeake has been described as “a branch of the revenue service,” but Douglas Bradburn emphasizes that this presence followed demand from shippers rather than an active move by the Admiralty to secure its money supply.Footnote 92 Scottish tobacco merchants would not be knocking on the doors of the Admiralty for convoy because of their vulnerability to seizure; during the Jacobite War, a number of Royal Navy ships had used the Clyde as a base, and this led to a couple of seizures of Scottish ships illegally trading with the colonies by Navy frigates on the basis of the Navigation Acts.Footnote 93 The real boom in Scottish colonial trade would only occur after the union made it legal, providing “the safe institutional environment needed for sustained commercial expansion,” not to mention the physical security of convoy.Footnote 94
DEFENSE OF TRADE IN CONTEMPORARY DISCOURSES
The prohibitions on trade with the colonies and France were the result of English mercantilist and war policy. Nevertheless, English mercantilism did not wreck Royal Naval protection of Scottish trade more generally. Therefore, where mercantilism and trade had a prominent part in contemporary discourse, defense of Scottish trade is more conspicuous by its absence. Because the convoy system melding English and Scottish naval provision was relatively successful and thus uncontroversial, a measure of the strength of Scottish adherence to the English system of maritime security can only be gleaned by the steady course it maintained while the storm of controversy over the question of union raged nearby.
While there are differences of emphasis over how important the economy was to the passing of the Act of Union, there is general agreement that English mercantilism through the Navigation Acts was damaging to Scotland and that the desire for free trade was a driver for union.Footnote 95 Since mercantilism posits that trade is essentially a zero-sum game, Scottish gain must be English loss, so it might be assumed that English merchants would work to prevent Scots getting convoy. English trade interests had considerable support in Parliament that could be mobilized against the Scots, and Graham draws a line from this support to Admiralty policy.Footnote 96 However, the English government did not consistently follow a mercantilist policy.Footnote 97 A cautionary note over parliamentary influence on the detail of naval policy should be sounded by the 1694 legislation alluded to earlier. Although this act had a major effect on the possibility of extra Scottish trade defense, it did not mention Scotland, and the necessity of legislative intervention showed that the parliamentary appointees on the Admiralty Board did not in fact exert control of naval deployments to the benefit of the trading interests in Parliament.
Nor did mercantilism have the detrimental effects on convoy provision that might be expected. This can best be shown by a petition made during the abortive negotiations for an Anglo-Scottish trade agreement in 1668. South Shields salt makers sought to head off naval support for a proposed drop in duty on Scottish salt (the navy was a large consumer of salt) by suggesting that if they were ruined, the navy would have to provide more trade defense because “there must be a convoy from Newcastle for the coales and a convoy from Scotland and other places for the salt.”Footnote 98 The salt makers’ argument rested on the false premise that convoys to Newcastle and Scotland were mutually exclusive, when they were actually complementary. The salt makers’ expectation that if Scottish fortunes improved they themselves would lose is clearly mercantilist, yet they did not take the logical step and demand that Scotland be denied convoys. They expected that greater Scottish trade would mean the Scots would get greater convoy protection.
This is not to deny that English interests had an influence on convoy provision. Scottish convoys being an extension of the frequent but very important coal convoy was both a blessing and a curse for Scots; if an escort to Leith delayed the onward trip from the Tyne, there would be English complaints. In July 1703, a visit to the Admiralty by the lord mayor of London resulted in the delay of escort of Scots from Tynemouth to Leith by a couple of weeks when the Admiralty prioritized an immediate southward coal convoy. Whether the Admiralty resisted or gave in to such demands was dependent on the naval situation and who was asking; asked in 1704 to provide a convoy for the Earl of Tweeddale's goods, they initially demurred, “considering the clamor that frequently attended the Newcastle convoy,” but reversed their position as the queen intervened.Footnote 99 The Scots were one lobby amongst many, and possibly disadvantaged by distance, less able to apply direct pressure.
The fine detail of Scottish convoys shunted around on English whims could easily have been worked into the critiques of the political state of affairs between the two nations, but defense of trade only features in the pamphlet debate occasionally and then in a general way. Those who opposed parliamentary union stressed Scotland's honor as a nation, its long history of sovereignty, and its martial reputation.Footnote 100 In such a context, the provision of convoys by either the English or Dutch could only be an embarrassment. Complaints about the navy focused on its use of Scottish seamen rather than on convoy.Footnote 101 Andrew Fletcher, an eloquent opponent of union, was unusual in mentioning that if only Scottish merchants would forgo trading with the enemies of the Grand Alliance, they would be able to benefit from English or Dutch convoy as things stood.Footnote 102 Those opponents of union who, like Fletcher, argued their case in print were generally not actually supporters of the status quo.Footnote 103 So while the present provision of convoys was a reasonable argument supporting the regal union, in practice few chose to use it.
The principal arguments of the unionists were the benefits of free trade and security that union would bring. On the face of it, this was the sort of territory that would bring convoys to the fore of discussion. However, there was also an incentive to either denigrate or ignore the current arrangements so as to suggest the greatest chances of improvement. The Scottish navy in particular was practically edited out of existence as pamphleteers wrote that Scotland was “without force to protect its commerce” but with union the Royal Navy would be “ours as well as theirs, and protect our ships in Peace and War.”Footnote 104 Unionists also focused on areas where the Navigation Acts prevented the Scots taking advantage of English naval power; suggestions that “Scots ships in all places of the world shall have protection and assistance from English ships” were directed at the lack of a broader naval force to open markets in a closed mercantile world.Footnote 105 If such statements about the lack of naval power abroad inadvertently gave the incorrect impression that there was no protection in home waters either, that was no harm to the unionist cause.
That the navy, and defense of trade in particular, were minor features of the debate might be taken as meaning that nobody cared. Certainly, Scots were less interested in naval power than were the English, as the long years when they made no attempt to support their own naval forces demonstrate. Yet the whole debate was suffused with economic issues with a maritime bearing, from the Navigation Acts to “visions of piscatorial plenty” in the fisheries.Footnote 106 The minimal impact of naval themes ancillary to those maritime economic issues represents an equilibrium reached in the half-dozen years or so before union; political debate is usually driven by the failure of the status quo, and improvements in naval protection compared to the 1690s meant that it was not a failure. Much credit belongs to the diminutive Scottish squadron. An English traveler, Joseph Taylor, used the denizens of Edinburgh talking up their navy “in the superlative degree” as an opportunity to mock it. However, the high opinion of the squadron Taylor found can be put alongside the Scottish government's endorsement that “every body is satisfied of how great use our Frigots have been to our trade,” and between them these views are indicative of a broad satisfaction.Footnote 107 At the same time, it has been argued that the threat from French privateers was less than has sometimes been portrayed.Footnote 108
Those endorsements contrast with the English situation, where Lord Haversham complained of the Royal Navy leaving “our Coasts exposed, and our trade exposed.”Footnote 109 Nobody could seriously suggest that Scottish trade was better protected than was the English, but insecurity was relative and perception of it fluid; there could be a big gap between the perception of damage in trade warfare and the actual scale of it.Footnote 110 Scots’ perceptions could have been colored by their worse experience in the 1690s, but may simply reflect the inexact grasp of the issue of maritime security in a pre-statistical age. The language used to describe the problem of French privateers, though often redolent with menace, usually gives no hint of either countermeasures or change over time. Plague was a commonly used metaphor, as in the complaint that “this ffirth is soe pested with priviteirs, that noe ship goes.”Footnote 111 Compare this with another worry of “the danger from small privateers that infest us.”Footnote 112 The two are similar in language but come from completely different contexts; the first was a letter written by Banff baillies to James Ogilvy as solicitor-general in 1693, the second a Scottish Privy Council minute of 6 June 1706. By that later date, the Scottish navy was at sea patrolling at full strength, and the minute supported continuing such patrols.
Scottish maritime security had improved, at least enough to avoid its raising a clamor, but privateers were still a threat. And for merchant masters, convoys were something of a burden; they imposed long delays while waiting for an escort or for trade to gather and led to a glut in the market upon their arrival, so they were disliked even in later periods with a well-honed, more efficient system.Footnote 113 Scottish masters were also particularly concerned about searches for contraband, the possibility of having men pressed, or in extreme cases, having their ship seized while waiting for convoy.Footnote 114 These tensions, but also the merchants’ commitment to Royal Naval convoys, can be seen in incidents surrounding the 1705 troop convoy. On 4 and 5 March, while the convoy was preparing, Lieutenant Edward Thompson deployed the pinnace of its escort, Winchester, to search merchant ships arriving at Leith. The Scots bridled at being searched and having their cargo disrupted. There was abusive language on both sides, and musket shots were fired by the navy.Footnote 115 Thompson could not have picked a worse moment: on the second day of his searches, Captain Thomas Green and the crew of the Indiaman Worcester were charged with piracy, focusing the anger of the Edinburgh mob on the economic injustices inflicted upon them by the English mercantilist system.Footnote 116 With passions at a peak, the aggrieved masters made sure that Winchester’s captain, Robert Hughes, was summoned before the Scottish Privy Council to account for his lieutenant's actions. Unwisely, Hughes failed to appear, pleading illness, resulting in a standoff while the council tried to force his appearance by using soldiers to arrest his crew when they went ashore. Hughes finally cleared things up with the council two weeks later. He was convinced that delay was the purpose of what he called the “fountain of complaint” that had seen him summoned in the first place. It was Hughes's view that his convoy was in such demand that merchants who were not ready to leave had sabotaged his quick departure.Footnote 117
The contretemps between Hughes and the Privy Council marked a low point in Royal Naval relations with the Scottish government and Scottish merchant shippers, but it is important to look beyond the complaints and arrests. The naval relationship appeared close to breakdown, but Scottish actions told a different story. Councilors voted to disembark the troops from Hughes's convoy but did not carry through the threat; they would still have to sail later if “her Majesty may be pleased to order some other of her ships to carry over the recruits.”Footnote 118 Note that Hughes might be removed but the navy would not be; there was no thought that a Scottish frigate might be the escort. The Royal Navy was part of the political landscape to which the councilors were committed, and so too merchant masters; excluding the troop transports, Hughes's convoy took twenty-one merchant ships south. Merchant shippers were voting with their feet for Royal Naval convoy. As the Scottish Royal Mary had been preparing to sail, there was a choice to wait for a Scottish escort.Footnote 119 The merchant shippers did not make that choice, and the reason is obvious; they might not get along with Hughes, but Winchester was a fifty-gun ship, twice Royal Mary’s number, with a broadside about five times the weight of metal – a difference in the level of protection that was persuasive and in this instance vital, as the convoy was attacked by four French privateers off Flamborough Head.Footnote 120
A divergence over trade and mercantilism has obscured shared interests in trade defense. The Admiralty's interest in covering the maximum amount of trade with the most efficient use of ship time meant that provision for Scotland, if only as far as Leith, fitted perfectly within its priorities. That provision was greatly assisted by geography, but geography will only take politics so far. Spain and Portugal, for example, may seem a natural geographic unit, but the union of their crowns between 1580 and 1640 was shorter than that of Scotland with England. One of the reasons for the collapse of that union was Spain's naval failure that exposed Portugal's trade and colonies.Footnote 121 In making that break with Spain, the Portuguese could look back on a history of independent naval power that the Scots did not have.
Robert I. Frost has written that scholarship on unions of disparate polities under one prince “often looks at the issue in terms of resistance to state-building, and underestimates the extent to which political communities engaged with the political realities of composite states and the opportunities they could afford.”Footnote 122 Hughes's convoy, coming at the point of maximum political tension, ultimately shows that all the stakeholders in Scottish trade defense were clear-eyed about the advantages of English convoy. As John Robertson points out, few Scots considered breaking the link with England; the debate was over what form union took.Footnote 123 Convoy, and naval defense more generally, gave strength to that link, as Scots were more deeply tied into the British system of maritime security than has often been acknowledged. Whatley points to naval defense as part of the broader security argument for union, and it was, but without any prescription as to what form union might take. Regal union had recently provided an improving picture of protection but offered little guarantee. Parliamentary union offered the prospect of some influence from the inside, avoiding the problem of 1694; when losses in the Channel brought convoy legislation back to Parliament in 1708, Scotland came away with a handful of cruiser deployments despite the debate focusing on the other end of the British Isles.Footnote 124 On the other hand, regal union had afforded the opportunity to provide a local solution to the flaws in Royal Navy provision. As such, maritime security as an element in the decision of 1707 was not entirely weighted to one side, a complexity hardly touched upon by the treatment of naval affairs in accounts of the creation of Britain.
