The aim of this book is to reevaluate Scottish history between 1815 and 1820 and with it our understanding of popular radicalism, by considering not just radical politics but extraparliamentary politics generally. The title Spirit of the Union refers to the Glasgow newspaper that advocated radical political reform until it was shut down by the authorities in 1820. Gordon Pentland’s excellent, informative, and well-argued study includes a considerable amount of material related to the reform movements of 1816–17 and 1819–20, as well as a consideration of loyalism and events outside of Scotland. An essential part of Pentland’s argument is about placing these events in a satisfactory context, rather than discussing popular radicalism in isolation, which he maintains would exclude other groups that also constituted part of the political culture. His central theme is the extent to which politics was contested over the meaning and boundaries of the constitution. This is the second full-length study of the period of the “Radical War,” but unlike its predecessor, The Scottish Insurrection (Edinburgh, 2001) by Peter Berresford Ellis and Seumas Mac a’Ghobhainn, which treated this subject with a strongly nationalist agenda, Pentland offers a rather different interpretation of the general rising and the politics of post-1815 Scotland by placing them within a British context and arguing that radicals saw themselves as being part of a pan-British movement.

Pentland believes that the press played a key role for a movement with a chronically weak national leadership and organization, and it was through the press that a movement based predominantly in the west of Scotland could conceive of itself as a national one. He maintains that any discussion of popular politics in Scotland alone, and using just Scottish sources, is mistaken because the “ideological, rhetorical and organizational focus of popular politics was genuinely British in scope” (121). He further argues that the nationalist approach cannot be sustained because while radicals used the Scottish past to articulate their grievances, they did so within a “shared language of popular constitutionalism which was unionist in its implications” (123). He demonstrates that the movement, in both its organization and communication network, was British, and he also contends that one of the most compelling aspects of the popular campaign was its claim to represent the people and the nation, thereby highlighting the central flaw for the radical movement of this period: its chronic weakness at the national level. Pentland argues that the altered conditions of the postwar period not only shaped the radicalism but dominated political discourse.

Pentland suggests that the campaign opposing the continuation of income tax set the tenor of postwar politics, bringing together Whigs and the Scottish middle classes, in a critique over a wartime expedient extended into peacetime, and thereby bolstering a system of “old corruption,” which he maintains provided an “ideological, rhetorical and strategic model” (12) for radicals and constituted the central tenet of the radical platform. When the levels of distress started to rise in 1816, Pentland suggests that the greatest achievement of reformers was in explaining this in political terms and arguing that the remedy lay in parliamentary reform. He believes that the tension between constitutionalism and radicalism was a significant weakness but that the central problem for the radical movement was that its strength in local communities was not matched at the national level. He identifies the issue of taxation in the summer of 1819 as providing the key political context for the emergence of a mass reform movement expressing the radical critique that distress was due to taxation and a corrupt and unrepresentative Parliament.

Pentland believes that by this time tensions were beginning to appear within the movement, but the catalyst was the response to the events at “Peterloo,” after which politics became deeply polarized. He addresses various interpretations of the Radical War, including the contemporary one highlighting the role of spies and agents provocateurs, and argues that this is not supported by the evidence, but rather that the correspondence of the authorities reveals their lack of adequate intelligence. He also suggests that the wider political context in which the attempted rising emerged requires more serious consideration. Pentland argues that this leaves only two serious explanations for the rising and its failure. Either those prepared for insurgency were few in number, poorly organized, and their efforts were futile or—the crux of his argument—it was part of an abortive general rising encompassing central Scotland and the north of England, but organizational weaknesses, communication problems, and the general political context prevented radicals from gathering in full strength. Pentland believes that this explains the outcome of events. The rising was an abortive one because of the basic weakness at the national level.

In his conclusion, Pentland suggests that the rising contributed to a revitalized loyalism while demonstrating the fragility of a working-class movement attempting to organize itself nationally. He also suggests that in the aftermath of the rising, the treason trials and the Queen Caroline affair allowed both Whigs and Tories to raise wider questions about Scottish institutions and patriotism. He maintains that the real political significance of the Queen Caroline affair was its role in rehabilitating the popular vision of the nation in opposition to an antinational faction in a way very similar to the radical belief in an armed rising as the only way to rescue the people’s rights from a narrow elite. Pentland also maintains that the postrising period saw a changed political culture in which the focus of debate had shifted and the idea of reform became possible. Finally, he considers the legacy of the martyrs of 1820, a much contested subject, and how the memory of the rising and those involved was used at key moments in Scottish history.