In 1907, on the 200th anniversary of the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707, the story of the making of the union seemed straightforward enough. Scots looked on the union in a generally positive light, and historians lauded the farsightedness of its Scottish architects.Footnote 1 Half a century or so later, however, historians began to promulgate a very different view of union.Footnote 2 The tone of this new work was anything but celebratory, and pro-unionist politicians were witheringly depicted as devoid of principle, courage, and vision. In the new interpretation, the union was a corrupt bargain; it was also a victory for political management and English political determination.

Explaining why the terms of the debate shifted at this point is not difficult. The influence of changing political conditions in Scotland and the growth of nationalist feeling were important factors. However, the debate also reflected the pressure of the then-fashionable approach to writing eighteenth-century political history, pioneered by Sir Lewis Namier, which dismissed ideology and public opinion as important factors in political life. A picture of union as a triumph of managerial politics in a political world drained of ideology and peopled by politicians unembarrassed in their pursuit of self-interest was very much one shaped by Namierite perspectives and methodology. The cynical view (if we can call it that) did not, however, carry all that came before it. Rather, sharp new lines of division were drawn owing to T. C. Smout's seminal work on Scottish trade in the decades before the union.Footnote 3 Smout's account suggested the importance of powerful economic motives for embracing union in Scotland at the end of the seventeenth century, most obviously the squeezing of traditional markets for exports caused by the strengthening of mercantilist barriers to trade in continental Europe and a growing dependency on English markets, especially with respect to black cattle and linen exports. Smout's view of union was consequently less hostile. He was skeptical about the extent of popular hostility to union and less certain about whether it was even possible to say definitively why particular individuals voted in the ways they did in the crucial votes in the Scottish parliament.Footnote 4

The interpretative fissures that opened up in the 1960s and 1970s have continued to shape more recent work on the union, albeit with several important new emphases reflecting changing historical agendas. With Namierism now a subject for historiography courses rather than a direct influence on research and writing, the role of ideology and argument has been subject to much closer examination, while new Atlantic perspectives have served to refocus attention on the broader imperial background to union.Footnote 5 Alongside the latter but not always running on quite the same track, union has also been viewed in terms of European perspectives on state formation in the early modern period.Footnote 6 Debates on the economic contexts for union have continued, although the focus has often been, first, on taking stock of the condition of the Scottish economy in the later seventeenth century rather than on how perceptions of these conditions shaped attitudes toward union and, second, on the economic impact of the treaty. Implicit nevertheless in these discussions has been the issue of whether union was made necessary by economic weakness and vulnerability.Footnote 7 The issue of corruption in motivating voting behavior in the Scottish parliament has been subject to further scrutiny, aided in one case by computer analysis of votes cast.Footnote 8

The latest round of publications on the union, many of them written explicitly to mark its 300th anniversary, offer no new consensus on the making of the union, although given the current political climate in Scotland this is unsurprising.Footnote 9 It is a nice irony that in the actual month of the tercentenary, a minority Scottish National Party administration took power in Edinburgh. Within the new works, in fact, older disagreements have been either sharpened or formulated in different terms. However, the contested terrain has in some ways narrowed, and the lines of division have become more subtle than they were in the past. At the same time, historians have strongly reemphasized the centrality of ideology and principle to current understanding of the union. One work views the union's Scottish architects more sympathetically, while another regards them as inept rather than corrupt. There is a new focus too on the influence of public opinion during the critical votes in 1705–6, as well as on the importance of Jacobitism as a factor motivating both support for and resistance to union, both in Parliament and beyond. Indeed, the specter and reality of Jacobitism may well emerge as a central influence on events and perceptions in Scotland in 1705–6. Political and religious divisions within Scottish society were instrumental in the forging of union; one might well argue indeed that, ultimately, domestic debates on union resolved into divergent views of what was the national interest. These views, to greater or lesser extents, were informed by perceptions of events not just in Scotland but in a Europe confronting the threat of French “universal monarchy,” a threat that carried menacing consequences for European Protestantism and the balance of European military, political, and economic power. Against the background of the War of the Spanish Succession, which Britain joined in 1702, Louis XIV's drive for European and global hegemony was readily seen as representing a direct challenge to Scottish and British national interests and integrity.

The new histories of union, therefore, link directly to important wider debates in British and Atlantic history about the nature of political divisions in British society at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the European and imperial dimensions to political identities and argument as well as patterns of state formation, and the role of public opinion in the later Stuart period. The best of these contributions suggest several ways in which Scotland might be better integrated into a series of broader narratives about political change in the British Isles at the beginning of the eighteenth century.

Christopher Whatley and Allan Macinnes provide the most ambitious new interpretations of the union and its place in Scottish and British history. Both authors’ new books contain distinctly novel elements in their accounts of how union was made; and, in their different ways, both are controversial. They are also built on the foundations of formidable industry in the archives. One of the great qualities of Whatley's previous work and of this present one is the sense of history being written on the basis of deep consideration of an enormously diverse body of evidence. This allows him to continually shift the perspective of the narrative from locality to locality and from individual to institution. All parts of Scotland appear as Whatley takes stock of the nation in the years immediately preceding and on the eve of the union. Macinnes has similarly consulted a vast array of material, including some from American and other overseas archives. It is irritating (and unhelpful), therefore, that his publisher, Cambridge University Press, has allowed cumulative footnotes. These often comprise strings of references to archival sources that give little sense of what specific documents are being referred to or what they actually contain. In the case of material from the Loudon papers in the Huntington Library, which are heavily drawn on, we are given only a box number. This makes it much more difficult to assess the substance of some striking propositions put forward in the book.

Whatley and Macinnes disagree on much about the union, but on one matter they speak in unison: principle and debate mattered in the making of the union, and union was not simply or mainly the product of bribery and intimidation on the part of the English. “Our story,” Whatley forthrightly declares, “is as much about persistence and principle as patronage and political prostitution.”Footnote 10 Macinnes is similarly blunt: writing about the diaries of Colonel William Dalrymple of Glenure, commissioner for the Shire of Ayr, which cover the last two sessions of the Scottish parliament, he states, “His diaries reveal that political incorporation with England was neither a foregone conclusion nor an unsophisticated exercise in political management. At the same time, his diaries disclose that issues of principle were not sidelined by the manipulative political influences that purportedly dominated the last session of the Scottish Estates.”Footnote 11 Whatley and Macinnes also agree that the pro-unionist leadership showed great skill and tactical sophistication in steering the articles of union through the Scottish parliament in late 1706. Conversely, the anti-unionists were poorly led and deeply divided, a theme that surfaces in several of the other new works on union. Politically outmaneuvered, the anti-unionists failed to derail the treaty as much because of their incoherence and divisions as because of the leverage, of different kinds, exerted by English ministers.

Responsibility for this state of affairs rests, in the first place, with the fourth duke of Hamilton, leader of the anti-unionists. Hamilton had emerged at the head of the “Country” opposition to the Court interest in the 1690s. During 1705–6, he repeatedly showed indecision and prevarication on issues of tactics. Odder still, it was he who proposed on 1 September 1705 to the Scottish parliament that Queen Anne should nominate the commissioners for the negotiation of the treaty, a move that, in effect, sold the political pass to the pro-unionists. George Lockhart of Carnwarth, the Jacobite MP and a Scottish commissioner for the negotiation of the Treaty of Union in 1706, was later to date Scotland's “ruine” from this point. Hamilton had indebted estates in Lancashire, as well as his own distant claim to the Scottish throne. This has naturally led to speculation, although there is no direct proof (although why would there be?), that Robert Harley, the secretary of state in London, was able to constrain Hamilton's actions during the crucial months of negotiation and parliamentary passage of the treaty. A few additional pieces of evidence have come to light regarding Hamilton's strange behavior. Whatley cites letters from the duke from July and December 1704 that indicate that at this point, in private at least, he was prepared to concede the advantages of uniting the kingdoms of Scotland and England.Footnote 12 This included an “entire” union, which he considered to be probably inevitable. He was also personally prepared to support union if the conditions were right, and, probably more crucially, he was to be given a significant role in the process. By 1705, the game Hamilton was playing was, it appears, devoid of any genuine conviction apart from keeping open his options and not jeopardizing his relations with Queen Anne. It is hardly any wonder that his conduct can seem ambivalent as well as ineffectual.

Hamilton's unconvincing leadership was, nevertheless, but one part of a bigger picture of anti-unionist weakness and disarray. Anti-unionists did not necessarily lack alternatives to union, although even this is debatable; but what they could not do was speak with a single voice. The main reason was political differences. The anti-unionists were an unstable amalgam of Jacobites—or Cavaliers, as they were usually known at the time—and Presbyterians of different stripes, including republican reformers such as Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun. At crucial moments in 1706, Hamilton and the Cavaliers found themselves divided by the issue of the succession. For example, in December, Hamilton effectively killed a planned mass lobby of Parliament by insisting that any address to Queen Anne regarding the extent of public antipathy to the union should include acceptance of the Hanoverian Succession. Presbyterian anti-unionists, meanwhile, were acutely sensitive to the widely made accusation that their opposition to the union would simply open the way to a Stuart restoration. Glasgow minister Robert Wodrow's declaration, “It's for a Lamentation that our road and yrs lyes now together, but I am persuaded we will not go far together,” captures the sense of unnaturalness and tension at the heart of the opposition.Footnote 13 They are words on which some nationalist historians of union would do well to reflect.

Whatley goes furthest, however, in his insistence on the importance of principle in the forging of the pro-union cause, and on this rests a major part of the originality of his book. What leads him in part to this conclusion is a database that he and his research assistant, Derek Patrick, constructed of the MPs who voted on the Treaty of Union. Included in this database are their voting records in the thirty divisions for which there is a record during 1706–7 and the date at which they first sat during the fifteen sessions of William's and Anne's parliaments. Traced through this database (now deposited with the National Archives of Scotland in Edinburgh) is the sometimes complex political journey of a Revolution Whig interest. Many of these individuals had been in exile in the Low Countries in the 1670s and 1680s, had keenly supported William's invasion of 1689, and would eventually embody the pro-union cause in 1706. Whatley also discerns persistence on the part of a significant number of individuals in the promotion of union from 1689, not “confederal” or “federal” union but incorporating union. This group included three men who were appointed commissioners for union in 1689, 1702, and 1706—Adam Cockburn of Ormiston, James Ogilvie, first earl of Seafield, and John Dalrymple, first earl of Stair from 1703—as well as twelve men who were commissioners in both 1702 and 1706.

Time and again, Whatley presents a positive view of the conduct of pro-unionist Scottish politicians preceding and during the treaty negotiations and its passage through the Scottish parliament, including several who have tended to attract, in his view unfairly, notably negative judgments. While the duke of Queensberry, who led the pro-unionists, may have lacked deeply ingrained political principles, Whatley rescues Stair, to take only one very prominent example, from the condescension of often nationalist-inspired condemnation of the architects of union. Regularly denounced for his role in the Glencoe massacre, he is described by Whatley as a “tireless worker” for union from 1689 and as a “highly effective” advocate of union in the Scottish parliament in 1706–7; he was also a committed supporter of the Revolution interest and an opponent of the Jacobites.Footnote 14 In Patrick and Whatley's view, too many historians have drawn uncritically on George Lockhart's deeply negative pen portraits of unionist politicians, contained in his Memoirs, first published anonymously in 1714. Lockhart was probably selected as a commissioner because he was the son-in-law of the English Whig Junto member, the duke of Wharton. A copy of the Memoirs was later annotated on three separate occasions by John Clerk of Penicuik, almost certainly as part of the preparation for the writing of his own history of the union. Member of Scottish parliament for the burgh of Whithorn from 1702, Clerk was a pro-union commissioner. His comments show just how far Lockhart's support for the Stuarts affected his judgments of individuals, or, perhaps more fairly, how things could look very different from another point on the political spectrum. Clerk, it is true, was a follower of Queensberry—Macinnes calls him at one point, rather dismissively, a “carpet bagger”—but he was also a thoughtful, intensely patriotic man, qualities evident in his music and in his later interest in antiquities.Footnote 15 Since Clerk came from a firmly Presbyterian family background, it is perhaps significant that his unionism was of a notably pragmatic, even reluctant, sort.

None of this is to say that pursuit of personal advantage was not an important feature of political life in Scotland in this period or that it did not influence the conduct of Scottish politicians. The second duke of Argyll's blatant grasp at offices, titles, and advancement in the army in return for his support of union is well known. His “price” for helping support union in 1705 was a high one, according to Macinnes, amounting to forty-five military and civil places of profit, an English peerage for himself, and a Scottish one for his brother, as well as indemnification and reimbursement for his past services as the queen's commissioner in 1705.Footnote 16 On the other hand, Argyll's support for union also reflected his political background and convictions. His grandfather had been executed for his role in the rebellion against James VII in 1685, while his father had, admittedly after a period of support for James, earned himself a dukedom through his service to William III. Born in England, Argyll was, like his father, a firm Revolution man, committed to fighting for the Protestant cause in Europe and the Protestant Succession in Britain. Politicians of this period expected to gain advantage from office and in return for their support of the court, but it would be wrong to adopt a too cynical or one-dimensional view of their motivations.

Whatley's revisionist case bites deepest in relation to the squadrone. A band of perhaps twenty-five politicians—several of the leaders of whom, notably the earl of Marchmont, had close links to the Whig Junto south of the border—they were crucial to the balance of votes in the 1706 parliamentary session, and their support was vital to the passage of the Treaty of Union through the Scottish parliament. As Patrick and Whatley note, in a parliament of around 200 active members, the court could rely on around ninety supporters. The critical vote to approve the first article of the Treaty of Union was carried by 116 votes to eighty-three; had the squadrone voted against it, the proposal would have been defeated. Previous accounts have argued, or implied at the very least, that the cause and cost of this support was the promise of favor after 1707 but also the promise that they might, as nominees of the directors of the Company of Scotland, be given control of the disbursement of the equivalent payments to investors in the Darien scheme, the failed attempt to establish an entrepôt for the East and West Indies trade on the Isthmus of Panama. Only this, it has been suggested, can explain their “swift and comprehensive change of mind.”Footnote 17 One problem with this thesis is that, as Whatley points out, prominent party adherents, the dukes of Montrose and Roxburghe, had no claim to the equivalent payments. But more significantly, there is strong evidence that, by the end of 1705, squadrone members were already coming around to the view that union presented the best and only way to secure the gains of 1689, the Presbyterian settlement in the Church of Scotland, and Scottish economic well-being, and several had supported union for rather longer. With their roots “deep within the Revolution,” fear of a Jacobite alternative propelled them, a fear fueled by their memories and experiences of life under James VII, but they also had the capacity to lift their field of vision to encompass European power politics and developments. They were patriots—they had, for example, invested heavily in the ill-fated Darien project and had fought in the 1701–2 parliament for the right of the Company of Scotland to exist—but their vision of the national interest would, under the circumstances of 1705–6, lead them away from independence and toward union.

As is often the case, it is the correspondence of an individual from the second rank of politicians, Captain William Bennet of Grubbet, that allows some of the best insights into the thinking of members of the squadrone. In May 1704, Bennet wrote to another squadrone adherent that, “above all things, we should study union” and that this should be done not only as a matter of party advantage but also with an eye to the queen's honor and the good of the country. In early 1706 he declared that the nation's happiness depended on achieving “ane thorough union,” which would sink the hopes of those who were opposed to it and who were “keeping open doors, against certain events,” by which he meant the return of the Stuarts. Like other squadrone members, he was alert to the economic advantage present in union, including compensation for the Darien disaster. Two continuous themes in his conduct and outlook were, however, his loyalty to the Revolution and his conviction that the confessional divide in political life might make English Whigs his natural allies. He was, for example, with the Dutch fleet when it landed at Brixham in early November 1688, and he was one of the deputation of around 100 Scottish lords and gentlemen who assembled at Whitehall at the beginning of 1689 to pay homage to William of Orange. In 1715, when crisis enveloped the new Hanoverian dynasty, he obtained prints of George I and his family and distributed them in the Borders. A good British as well as Scottish Whig, he wrote in April 1706 that the union would be “most important, for the happinese of our neighbours.”Footnote 18 To be sure, not every adherent of the squadrone saw things in exactly these terms. Widely shared, however, was a fear that transcended party interest, namely, the possibility of the return of the Stuarts and their “unnatural” religion. George Baillie of Jerviswood, who is rather better known owing to the published edition of his correspondence, may have been an advocate of federal union, but the main advantage he could see in incorporation was that it would forever “cut off” the Jacobites’ hopes of a restoration. For many pro-unionists, including the squadrone, the alternative to union that they feared and wished to prevent was a return to Stuart rule.

Unionists were, therefore, not necessarily or even primarily timeservers who had eyes on only their own private interests or party advantage. Those who negotiated the treaty in London in 1706—the commissioners who in the past have been derided as tools of Harley and the Whig Junto—were, on Whatley's account, men who remained clear-sighted about the Scottish national interest. Union negotiations, after all, had failed in 1702 precisely because the terms on offer from the English did not meet Scottish interests or wishes. In 1706, the situation was different, reflecting how far the English would go to reach an agreement and that they were prepared to make concessions to reach one. In this context, the key was the preparedness to offer compensation for the investors in the failed Darien scheme. Macinnes has reached a very different view of the achievements of the Scottish commissioners in 1706, for reasons that will become clear below.

If political principle provides, therefore, a vital, if at times easily obscured, thread in the making of the union in Scotland, another is furnished by the growing importance and centrality of discourses of “political economy,” which from the later seventeenth century were fast becoming one of the main ways in which relations between the different nations of the British Isles were perceived and discussed.Footnote 19 Macinnes and Whatley both argue very forcefully, and in distinctively new ways, that the economy and economic issues lay at the heart of contemporary thinking and debates about union. Ultimately, they would also agree, I think, that it is against these debates and issues that union must be assessed. But if they agree on this, on nearly everything else in relation to the economic causes of union they disagree profoundly.

Whatley's case in this context is the more familiar, having a lineage that stretches at least as far back as Smout's work on trade and union, referred to above, and represents a further development of arguments that he has advanced elsewhere.Footnote 20 To put matters simply, a combination of structural economic weaknesses (an adverse balance of trade with all but England, an underdeveloped and low-skill manufacturing sector, limited domestic demand, and a chronic shortage of specie), a series of economic body blows in the 1690s (war, famine, the failure of the Darien scheme), and an enfeebled Scottish state made union appear to be a compelling solution to Scottish economic travails. What is at stake here is partly how we should assess Scottish economic progress in the later seventeenth century and the impact of the disasters of the 1690s but also how far Scotland had (or rather had not) recovered from these after 1700. Whatley's account makes for grisly, uncomfortable reading. There are bright spots, but they are few and very often turn out not to be particularly bright at all. Perhaps most strikingly, it was not simply that the effects of the interconnected crises of the 1690s were more grave, debilitating, and persistent than some historians have assumed but that the economic picture remained bleak in 1705, with the acute and chronic shortage of specie not the least of the difficulties.

The point, too, is that Scots were increasingly self-conscious about these economic difficulties, reflecting also a politics of “economic modernization” that had waxed more strongly from the 1690s, continued into the 1700s, and of which in some ways union was the culmination.Footnote 21 We have long known, following the work of Smout, that trade was the strongest card in the pro-unionist hand in 1705–6, but never before have such strong connections been made between votes for union and perceptions of economic weakness. In 1705, the Scottish parliament created a committee on trade that sought to grapple with the challenge of finding ways to tackle this problem. Whatley points out that the vast majority of MPs who sat on that committee voted for union in 1706—fifteen of twenty-one consistently voting in favor—although whether that is why they did so is of course open to debate. Indisputable, however, is that article 4, on free trade, gained the largest majority of any of the articles of the treaty in the Scottish parliament. Many who opposed union, certainly from the Whig Presbyterian side, could fully recognize the need for free trade; what they could not accept was incorporating union as the price.

Whatley's case is based on the accumulation of a huge amount of evidence and a long-term immersion in Scottish economic history. Indeed, he was an economic historian first and has in more recent years become something rather more than that. His case, therefore, is not easily dismissed, and yet this is precisely what Macinnes wishes to do in Union and Empire. According to Macinnes, on the eve of union, the Scottish economy possessed a capacity for growth and development that Whatley has contrived to overlook. Moreover, if Whatley's book is controversial for its positive view of the creation of the union, it is principally because of what Macinnes says about the Scottish economy, together with the verdict that this then leads him to reach about the Treaty of Union, that his volume will or should create equal debate. It is also controversial for other reasons, which we will come to later.

In fairness, at this point I should say that I find Whatley's conclusions about the economic causes of union more persuasive, and I will try to say why in the course of what follows. In part, however, Macinnes is developing a view of Scottish economic conditions and prospects that has much in common with one previously articulated by T. M. Devine.Footnote 22 On this account, the effects of the 1690s are acknowledged to have been severe, but they should not, or so the argument runs, disguise an underlying economic health and dynamism in the later seventeenth century. Domestic economic conditions are only part of Macinnes's story, however. As important is the adoption of an imperial perspective on the issue. Macinnes portrays an adaptable, creative Scottish mercantile class that before 1707 was already exploiting the opportunities presented by empire for developing new trading networks and opportunities despite the English Navigation Acts. They were creating, in short, an empire by stealth. They did so through a variety of means, not least by adopting practices commonly associated with the Dutch, most notably in their involvement in the tramping trade—that is, in transporting goods between countries as carriers. What this added up to, in Macinnes's view, or so he declares at one point, was a “burgeoning commercial economy not necessarily best served by connection to England or by union.”Footnote 23

Yet in what sense can he mean this? And how far has he substantiated his case? Another central plank in Whatley's case is the argument that in an era of major European warfare and “bellicose mercantilism,” a weak state would always find it extremely difficult to provide a stable basis for economic progress. This was, after all, one of the main lessons of the failure of the Darien scheme. Scots might dream in the later seventeenth century of an independent empire while they were also infiltrating the English one, but they lacked the financial and military muscle to bring this about. In 1681, James, duke of York, then in Edinburgh because of the Exclusion Crisis raging in England, established the Committee for Trade, which reported that the only effective way for Scotland to manage the pressures of mercantilism and growing dependence on English markets was either to seek closer union with its southern neighbor or to develop overseas colonies. From this perspective, the failure of Darien brought union that much closer. By pointing to private enrichment, Macinnes does not really answer this point, perhaps because he does not think he needs to given what else he says. However, if not a connection to England by means of a union, then one to what or where? Macinnes's principal answer appears to be a connection to the Dutch, although he acknowledges that the Dutch had little interest in this. He writes elsewhere, in relation to Darien, “For the Scots, the Darien fiasco was an expensive demonstration of the need for purposeful British collaboration.”Footnote 24 The message is muddied if not inconsistent. Pamphleteers, such as the Jacobite Patrick Abercromby, might speculate about connections to the United Provinces or even to France, but this did not make these realistic options. The real issue here, as John Pocock has suggested elsewhere, may be why the English could not countenance anything less than unitary sovereignty.Footnote 25

Ultimately, the debate between Whatley and Macinnes about the economic causes resolves into one about the robustness of the evidence or data on which their respective portrayals of economic conditions are based. Macinnes is clear that official data cannot tell the full story. As he asserts, “The institutional perspectives of government, incorporated burghs, colonial companies and even merchant houses present a far from complete and an overly pessimistic picture.”Footnote 26 He dismisses claims of indebtedness and straitened conditions on the part of royal burghs as special pleading—they aimed to reduce the quota of the cess tax levied through the Convention of Royal Burghs—although Whatley makes the telling point that the reports of these conditions were often drawn up not by the burghs themselves but by visitors appointed by the convention. In any case, Whatley does not deny there were areas of progress; the issue is how to assess these relative to an overall picture. As Macinnes is perfectly aware, much of the commercial activity he wishes to emphasize is unquantifiable since it was illegitimate. However, some sense of scale would help, as would some concrete evidence of how this might have led to capital accumulation and recycling, which then helped impart a new dynamism to the Scottish economy. Macinnes, to be fair, is cognizant of the latter gap in his argument. As it is, he appears to rely heavily on a relatively small number of merchants’ letter books that survive in the Court of Sessions productions series (CS 96) in the National Archives of Scotland. He does cite new data from the Danish archives that relate to the Baltic trade from three years in the 1680s. Since trading fortunes appear to have fluctuated sharply and the 1680s were a moment of relative economic buoyancy, it is not clear how much we can extrapolate from these when looking at the period as a whole. At best, the case for optimism is currently unproven. Moreover, even supposing that the positive view of the economy were correct, would this necessarily negate Whatley's view, insofar as what ultimately mattered, so far as union was concerned, were contemporary perceptions?

For most contemporaries, as already emphasized, the case for free trade seemed irrefutable, hence the size of the majority in Parliament on article 4 of the treaty. Optimism about a future without free trade was in very short supply in 1705–6, which is not to say that arguments about the likely economic impact of union were all in one direction. Clearly, they were not, hence in part the divided views of the royal burghs, too often presented in starkly simple terms as opposed. Indeed, read alongside each other, Whatley's and Macinnes's accounts of the union highlight once again the uncomfortable choice facing the Scots in 1705–6. Union offered free trade but also higher taxes and English competition in the manufacturing sector. There were also the outstanding issues of whether Irish and Scottish economic interests, which were less complementary, could be reconciled within the reshaped British Isles and, related to this, whether Scottish interests would be adequately defended and supported in a Westminster parliament in which Scottish representation was heavily outnumbered by the English. There is some evidence that by 1706, if not slightly earlier, the onslaught of anti-unionist propaganda was weakening the economic case for union. As Whatley notes, the posture of many burghs that lined up against the union was essentially defensive and introspective, beset with doubt and anxiety about what union might bring in relation to their economic fortunes, a stance that reflected the battering they had taken in recent years. As Whatley notes, in one of his most striking conclusions, “[The] condition of the burghs was probably worse in the years immediately prior to the point at which negotiations for union began than at any time within living memory.”Footnote 27

Economic factors therefore offered powerful reasons to embrace union as the only available path to Scottish economic renewal in 1705–6. This does not necessarily mean that the treaty as negotiated and ratified necessarily best served Scottish commercial interests. Macinnes's view is emphatically that it did not, and he cites various reasons for this. The rising or lesser equivalent, which provided for an annual payment of £2,000 over seven years for investment in Scottish manufactures and fishing, was, he suggests, a delusion in that it depended on Scots paying for this through heavier taxes. (Whatley sees no disingenuousness here since the architects of union assumed that union would create greater Scottish prosperity.) Similarly, Scots may have been granted access to English domestic and imperial markets, but they were forced to give up the Company of Scotland. Macinnes also hints that more could have been squeezed from the English in the negotiations. His reasons for believing this are arresting. One is the existence of a memorial from 1705, which may have been written by Lord Somers, that laid out much more generous terms than those that were, in the event, agreed on in 1706. Why this memorial was drawn up and what its status was are issues that are sidestepped, and on its own it is hardly compelling evidence of English flexibility. The memorial, it is worth noting, sketched a federal union. However, whatever the flexibility of the English commissioners, on incorporation they were immovable. In recognition of this central fact about union in 1706, the Scottish commissioners did not even bother to contest it at the start of the negotiations.

Ultimately, however, what underpins Macinnes's negative view of the treaty is his judgment that English motivations for union were much stronger than how they are often represented; the Scots had, in short, stronger cards to play in 1706 than they appeared to be aware of. Usually what is emphasized in this context is that, for the English, security was the main impetus to union. Continued Scottish independence—given the pressing problems of political management in Scotland from 1703, the failure to resolve to English satisfaction the issue of the succession, and the possibility that Scotland would be used by France as a back door to create trouble for England in the context of a major European war—had come to represent an acute threat to English stability and international aims. To this Macinnes adds a further factor: the desire of English ministers and politicians to shore up the basis of the English fiscal-military state, under threat from Scottish interloping, and to add Scottish numbers and expertise to English national power in the fight against Louis XIV's France. Had the Scots recognized the proper strength of their hand, they would have pushed for better terms, or so the argument runs, although exactly what these terms might have been is never made explicit.

The English dimension to union is usually passed over quickly by historians, so Macinnes's careful attention to this is very welcome. His ambition to set union within the context of patterns of English state formation in a period of accelerated state development owing to war is hugely stimulating, suggesting as it does a hitherto largely overlooked Scottish dimension to the process. However, his case is, as with quite a lot of his arguments, difficult to evaluate. Sometimes this is because of a somewhat unclear writing style or the drawing of distinctions—between, for example, advocates of landed enterprise and advocates of trade—the historical significance of which is somewhat elusive, at least to me. A deeper issue, however, is not whether colonial officials or the Board of Trade were concerned about Scottish interloping in the empire (they clearly were) or whether there were anxious debates about the impact of emigration on English power and prosperity (again, there were) but the extent of their influence on attitudes toward union among English politicians and officials. Similarly, his account of the changing fiscal basis of the English state after 1689—its increasing dependence on indirect taxes and public borrowing—is amply supported by other accounts of English state formation in this period, but again one wonders how precisely and how much this influenced the calculations of Whig ministers determined to enact union. Macinnes elsewhere acknowledges that to many south of the border, union may have been a less pressing matter than other issues—for example, the battle between the old and the new East India companies or indeed the conditions of war and diplomacy in Europe. Brendan Simms has recently argued forcefully for the “primacy of foreign policy” in English and then (after 1707) British politics in the eighteenth century; the Union of 1707, just as with the later Anglo-Irish union of 1800, can readily be fitted within this overarching interpretative framework.Footnote 28

Whatley's unionists were hardheaded, thoughtful men who took considerable personal risks to bring about a union that they thought would serve Scotland's and, for some of them, Britain's best interests. For Macinnes, these same men contrived to bring about a union that was fundamentally pro-English and reactionary. As we have seen, such divergent conclusions partly reflect very different views of the economic contexts for union, but they also, in Macinnes's case, reflect a vision of union that is as much the end of the story as the beginning—in brief, the betrayal or defeat of a radical Presbyterian vision of liberty. The first part of Macinnes's book comprises a discussion of notions of union and empire as they developed from the union of the crowns across the seventeenth century. He terms one such notion “Gothic,” which expressed a narrow English imperialism and the dependency of Scotland and indeed Ireland and upheld the supremacy of the English parliament and common law. This was in competition with what Macinnes terms “Britannic” and “Scottish” notions of empire. The Britannic conception was associated with the Stuart kings and pictured Britain as “something more than England.” The Scottish conception was an aristocratic republican alternative to incorporation, which looked to confederation and decentralization of political power as the means to establish Scottish equality within a reconfigured British state and empire. What happened in 1705–6 was a pragmatic tempering of this Gothic posture by English ministers but no fundamental divergence from it. Macinnes, in this context, is also presenting union very deliberately in the context of the multiple patterns of early modern state formation present within the British Isles across the seventeenth century.

In a number of very important senses, his conclusion about the character of union is entirely persuasive and certainly captures the fundamental truth that union for the English, unlike for the Scots, regardless of what the treaty might appear to say, represented no fundamental rupturing of the constitutional or national fabric. The latter is also how union was sometimes presented somewhat maladroitly to the Scots. But to say that the English agenda was supreme in 1706 seems to me to push the case too far, or at least it misses (or perhaps rather deliberately passes over) the extent to which—within limits, certainly—Scottish interests as defined and urged by Scots shaped the treaty. And if a major element of the English agenda was security and power, was this, in any case, simply an English agenda or rather one that some Scotsmen, admittedly not a great many, could perceive as compatible with their view of Scottish interests? Jacobites would have no doubt answered this negatively, but moderate Presbyterians could and did reach a different conclusion. Macinnes calls for a “holistic” view of union, one that includes empire, but he says relatively little about Europe and the impact of the battle between Protestantism and Catholicism beyond the British Isles on Scottish attitudes and indeed conceptions of empire. Empire, for Macinnes, is seen primarily (although not exclusively) in the context of triangular relations between England, Scotland, and Ireland and not in terms of a Protestant, anti-French dynamic such as that in Owen Stanwood's recent Journal of British Studies article on the Glorious Revolution in the North American colonies.Footnote 29 We are still some way from understanding fully what role both Atlantic and European connections played in shaping debates about union, although we will now have a much stronger sense of their relevance.

In some ways, these differences between Whatley and Macinnes represent, as we have already seen, a new iteration of long-standing divisions among historians on how to represent union, but their perspectives also differ in crucial ways. Whatley's main focus is domestic conditions and experiences, although he also emphasizes European influences on Scottish perceptions, thinking, and culture in the later seventeenth century and in the period immediately surrounding the union. By contrast, Macinnes begins his narrative in 1603, and it encompasses developments in the whole of the British Isles, including Ireland, and in the imperial sphere.

In keeping with these divergent perspectives, Whatley has one further ambition, one that is shared by several other of the recent works on union—namely, to examine what union meant to the Scottish people. Public opinion has become, in short, a serious topic of investigation for historians of the union. One might argue that it is remarkable that it has taken until now for historians to take up this challenge, although, to be fair, it has not been entirely neglected. John Young, for example, wrote an important essay a few years ago on the impact of anti-union addresses from the west of Scotland.Footnote 30 Nevertheless, the shadow of Namier's influence has been a long one in this context. There is a perception in the field that although there may have been a popular dimension to the politics of union, it had very limited influence (if any indeed) on the making and passage of the Treaty of Union, and this perception has probably deterred some historians from taking up the challenge. Argyll's comment that the addresses were of no more use than to make kites with has too often been cited in this context, without it being pointed out that his comment was made in the context of bitter arguments about the political and constitutional significance of public opinion in relation to the making of the union.

The story that emerges about public opinion and the making of the union is common to several of the new works. From the 1690s, primed by the anger generated by the failure of the Darien scheme and stimulated by the emergent “Country” opposition or party led by the duke of Hamilton, Scottish political culture was transformed by the emergence of new modes of public politics—crowd protests, pamphleteering, and addressing. The debates, addresses, and crowd activity in 1706 represented the culmination of this development. Whatley and Karin Bowie argue persuasively that the mobilization of anti-union sentiment closely influenced the deliberations of the Scottish parliament in 1706, in particular, in terms of a series of amendments or explications passed regarding specific articles of the Treaty of Union.Footnote 31 One of the most intriguing examples was the passage of an amendment to article 24 stating that the Scottish regalia and Scottish records, rolls, and registers were to be kept in Scotland. This was a direct response to rumors circulated by anti-unionists that the ancient Scottish crown, supposedly used to crown Robert the Bruce, was to be transported south of the border and melted down. The best known act is the one passed to allay concerns about the integrity and security of the Presbyterian Church under incorporation, which was appended to the treaty. The fact that a significant number of MPs voted against the inclinations of their constituents expressed in addresses, that many of the addresses reflected the influence of opposition magnates, and that contemporary constitutional views accorded no independent influence to public opinion can easily mislead about the impact of the “people” on the political process. The Scottish architects of union used concession, and not just of the politically powerful, as one of the ways to secure the passage of the treaty. To this degree, what happened in the Scottish parliament mattered profoundly, and the amendments and explications of the treaty were astute and necessary changes.

If public opinion mattered, therefore, it is also evident that it was more fluid than previous accounts have tended to indicate. Bowie intriguingly suggests that the onslaught of pro-union propaganda, organized in part from London and in which William Paterson and Daniel Defoe were prominent, began to induce greater flexibility and to change some individuals’ minds by 1706. The common factor here seems to have been religious moderation or a relative indifference to religious forms; such propaganda was going to work only on those ready or willing to be convinced of the need to change their minds. Not only Bowie but also Whatley and Jeffrey Stephen emphasize the fluidity of opinion. The hardening and radicalization of anti-union opinion in 1706 may well have alienated moderates and pushed them toward a more flexible posture. This was yet another way in which the anti-union opposition was rife with tensions and division; mob activity could easily be counterproductive, causing members of Parliament to close ranks against harassment and intimidation from without and alienating the elites, including ministers of the church. Bowie also highlights the complex interrelationship between opposition politicians and their allies and expressions of anti-union opinion and demonstrations. As she very reasonably argues, some direction from above—how much is often rather unclear—does not mean that popular anti-union sentiment was not genuine or did not arise from deeply held convictions. Nevertheless, her work does suggest some important limitations to anti-union sentiment, geographic and social. Reactions were reasonably well documented in Edinburgh and Glasgow, but much less so in other burghs. Bowie's account is quite heavily reliant on Defoe's History, and it is a pity that she did not attempt to reconstruct reactions in other places less commonly mentioned in this context, although one suspects that the evidence may be sparse. Even in the west and southwest, as Stephen points out, incidents of public disorder and anti-union protest were limited, and in most places they were entirely absent.Footnote 32

If there existed, therefore, a broadening public sphere in Scottish political culture in the later seventeenth century, one that expanded significantly during the union debates, what remains less clear is how we might picture this development relative to the rest of the British Isles or indeed elsewhere in Europe. Partly, this is because the character of this emerging Scottish public sphere remains somewhat imprecisely delineated. Nowhere, for example, in Bowie's book is there a systematic examination of the social composition and organizational bases of the anti-union crowds of the capital and Glasgow. She offers plenty of hints—apprentices and younger tradesmen in the Edinburgh crowds, for example—but no sustained discussion. Stephen remarks that the mob in Edinburgh on 23 October 1706 was “chaotic, confused and lacking in coordination,” but did it really lack leadership from within, even if it did not have leadership from major political figures, notably Hamilton?Footnote 33 Whatley and Patrick allude in this context to the activities of several actors: Catholics from the Scots College in Paris, Jacobite agents, the Edinburgh town council (which was anxious about the potentially damaging economic impact of union on the capital), and even “the government itself, seeking a reason to justify calling upon the military to defend Parliament.”Footnote 34 There is scope too for some sort of quantitative analysis of the pamphlet debate, including numbers of editions and circulations (where these are known). Who were most pamphlets aimed at—parliamentarians, gentry, or a broader cross section of society? In what form were they published, in terms of length, style, and price? Such a quantitative analysis might allow a clearer comparison with Ireland and England in this period. Bowie insists quite rightly on the need for specificity and proper attentiveness to national distinctiveness in investigations of the early modern public sphere, but a comparative framework is not incompatible with this. Oddly, she urges in her introduction that the “Scottish case” was “a unique moment of development with relevance in a European and British context.”Footnote 35 What this relevance was is never really explored, apart from its contribution to the nature and passage of the Treaty of Union. Peter Lake and Steve Pincus have recently emphasized that the story of the development of the English public sphere in the early modern period is not the same as that for Ireland and Scotland.Footnote 36 Developments in Scotland in the 1690s almost certainly had shallower foundations than, say, those in England. Bowie refers to the existence of at least six coffeehouses in Edinburgh between 1699 and 1707 and one in Glasgow in 1706. Is this a large number? What about away from the two main cities? Whatley mentions very large numbers of anti-union clubs, but we learn nothing about these either in the work of Bowie or, indeed, in that of Whatley. Nor do we ever really enter the taverns or coffee rooms that were such important sites of political discussion. Is this because there are no sources that might illuminate the political culture taking root, however temporarily, in these places? Which were more important in shaping opinion—sermons, pamphlets, or, indeed, newsletters and newspapers? Bowie tends to spend the most time examining the contents of specific pamphlets, although she certainly acknowledges the power of the pulpit and religious issues in provoking popular responses and actions. Whatley refers to and discusses at various points broadsheets, verse, and song, as well as prints.

This brings us inevitably to the role of the Kirk and the pulpit in shaping public responses to the union in Scotland. It is commonplace to suggest that union might have failed had the Kirk opposed it. Its opposition was, in the event, headed off by the Act of Security guaranteeing its status, which was passed by the Scottish parliament and appended to the treaty along with a similar act passed by the Westminster parliament pertaining to the Church of England. In his very impressive first book, Stephen furnishes a fuller explanation than the one that has hitherto existed for the stance adopted by ministers and why they did not lead an anti-union protest. The answer, put simply, is the very narrow construction they placed on their role during the period of the negotiation and passage of the Treaty of Union—namely, defense of the status and position of the Kirk. This resulted in either a de facto acceptance of union or a determination to see that if union came about it would be one that protected the essential interests of the Kirk. It also meant that the majority of ministers were, whatever some contemporaries might allege, neither in favor of nor opposed to union. Stephen cites some fascinating evidence that many ministers deliberately and studiously steered clear of state or civil issues in their sermons in 1706. He also sounds a skeptical note about contemporary allegations that anti-union ministers were behind some of the most notorious episodes of anti-union crowd activity in 1706. Defoe claimed that a sermon by Glasgow minister James Clark incited a riot in 1706, an accusation that the minister was able to refute convincingly at the time. As Stephen emphasizes, only a very small minority of presbyteries and synods produced anti-union addresses, while parish addresses were not in any sense products of the church. This might indicate the relative autonomy of anti-union opinion, where it manifested itself, but also, again, some of the very real limitations regarding its scope. And if we follow Whatley's arguments in the final chapter of his book, insofar as union became the focus for more widespread popular hostility, this may well have been because of the short-term impact of union and, in particular, the intense and long-lasting antipathy toward the hoards of new tax officials who came north after 1707. This current of opinion and combustible mood made the 1715 Jacobite rebellion very menacing to the Hanoverian regime in Scotland.

If union provoked, then, more complex responses in Scotland than is sometimes assumed, there can, of course, be no doubt that within some communities hostility toward it was profound. Defoe, famously, was struck by the formidably fierce demeanor of the Edinburgh anti-union crowds. More alarming for the authorities, however, was the possibility of popular armed resistance to union. Their anxieties on this score were genuine enough; they were also very reasonable given the rumors and misinformation circulating at the time, together with the paucity of the forces for law and order at their command. In late October, English troops were stationed on the Scottish border and in Ulster in case of trouble. It is sometimes argued that this was for intimidatory purposes, but as Whatley points out, such troops, had they been used, would have been under the orders of the duke of Queensberry and the immediate command of the earl of Leven. In reality, the duke of Hamilton and his formidable mother were unlikely leaders of an armed revolt. Although they did sponsor the arming of the local population in the west, this was under the terms of the 1704 Act of Security; when the relevant clause was suspended (in late November 1706), the dowager duchess ordered the cessation of this activity. Rumors of a rising in the west were rife in November. There is no evidence of any organized rising, however, and the band that did gather, apparently spontaneously, initially comprised forty-nine men, later rising to around eighty. Stephen also dismisses reports of an armed rising involving the Cameronians and the Jacobites, partly on the grounds that the existing evidence is unreliable and contradictory but also because such an alliance was prima facie extremely improbable on political and theological grounds. Clerk dismissed as absurd Lockhart's notion that such an alliance was possible.Footnote 37 One group that was prepared to resort to arms was the Hebronites, a radical wing of the Covenanters led by John Hepburn that was behind the famous burning of the articles of union at Dumfries in November 1706, but not in conjunction with the Jacobites. The evidence, moreover, that the Jacobites had plans to rise is equivocal at best, in that on receipt of the news of the act of Parliament forbidding such gatherings, the duke of Atholl, like the Hamiltons, ordered all armed musters by his men to stop until further notice. There was much talk about risings, some of which may well have originated from Jacobites, but the evidence for concerted plans is flimsy, and it is again striking that pro-unionists used the Jacobite card, seemingly quite effectively, to defuse potential armed opposition among, for example, the Hebronites.

Several of the old simplicities about the union look, thus, much less secure after 2007. That the articles of union negotiated in London in 1706 provoked a strong and hostile popular patriotic reaction is not in doubt; what is debatable is the depth and scope of this reaction, and there is evidence of opinions shifting in response to debate on the treaty and pro-union propaganda. Union no longer looks like an episode purely in high politics but one in which debate mattered, and not just in Parliament and among the political elites but beyond its walls and throughout a sizable cross section of society. Such conclusions are not entirely novel, of course, but they have never before been demonstrated so clearly and persuasively. What also emerge, only more clearly than before, are the uncertainties and dilemmas that confronted the public and politicians alike in 1706. Some of these stemmed from very reasonable doubts and questions about how Scotland and Scottish interests would fare under incorporation. The new centrality of discourses of political economy in political debate could offer no ready succor or assurance. But the challenges and anxieties also stemmed from political and religious fissures within Scottish society and their interaction with broader European power politics and religious battles. If anything, this seems to me to be perhaps the main lesson of several of these new works, one that some historians have in the past been very reluctant to absorb. Union was certainly not an easy choice, but it was one that some Scots could embrace, however hesitantly. They could do so, moreover, for principled reasons. As Stephen writes, “Arguments that union would provide a bulwark against the Pretender, France and popery, that it would make Britain the bulwark of the Protestant cause and secure their rights, liberties and property … were persuasive.”Footnote 38 Whatley notes that a fundamental division within Presbyterianism may well have been between those whose horizons stretched beyond their own church or nation and those of whom this was not true. Or, to put this slightly differently, one division was between those who were preoccupied with pursuit of the true reformation, in Scotland and indeed in Britain, and those who saw in French aggrandizement and the specter of a Stuart restoration a greater and more immediate threat to the political and religious settlements won in 1689–90.

There was, in sum, an important, often neglected “British” substratum to the making of union, one formed from the strength of fears north and south of the border about the future of European Protestantism and the “Revolution” settlements and, ultimately, from the experiences of opposition to James VII and his absolutist ambitions. Concern for Scottish economic renewal was readily subsumable within this framework.