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Cromwell imposed on Scotland a full and incorporating parliamentary union with England (1652). However, this union, maintained by an army of occupation, did not enjoy popular consent. Nevertheless, Cromwell’s administration of Scotland was efficient, and his judges, some of them Englishmen, achieved an admired impartiality. Public order was well maintained, even in the Highlands after the collapse of royalist resistance in 1654. Cromwell did not overturn Presbyterianism but ensured toleration for others, save Roman Catholics and Episcopalians (those who believed the Protestant church should be governed by bishops).
The Restoration monarchy
The restoration in 1660 of Charles II (1660–85) was welcomed by many moderates in both Scotland and England. Charles had learned much from his father’s fate and was prepared to forget many injuries, though his government executed some Scots, including the marquess of Argyll.
In 1662 Charles formally restored church government by bishops, but, like the compromise fashioned under James VI, they were to act in association with synods and presbyteries. Charles seems to have been moved not by rancor toward the Covenanters, who had bullied him in the early 1650s, but merely by a desire to achieve the system that satisfied most people. Many laymen accepted his system, and few nobles opposed it. However, approximately 270 ministers—just over a quarter of the total—were deprived of their parishes for noncompliance, leading to the Pentland Rising (1666), which was easily quashed and was countered by an experimental period of tolerance by the government. Persons who still persisted in attending conventicles were strong only in the southwest and to some extent in Fife and among the small lairds and common people. These men adhered to the “Protester” position, regarding Scotland as still bound by the Covenants. In another trial of strength with the government, they were defeated at Bothwell Bridge (1679). Some Cameronians (the name derives from Richard Cameron, a leading Covenanter) remained, meeting governmental violence with further violence, and in 1690 they refused to join a Presbyterian but uncovenanted Church of Scotland. Their brave and fanatic “thrawnness” (recalcitrance) endeared them to later generations of Scots.
When Charles’s brother succeeded as James VII of Scotland and James II of Great Britain and Ireland (1685–88), most Scots showed that they were prepared to support him despite his Roman Catholicism. But he showed his ineptitude by requesting Parliament to grant toleration to Catholics (1686); this stirred up unprecedented opposition to royal wishes in the Scottish Parliament. Nevertheless, although many exiled Scots were at the court of William of Orange in Holland, the collapse (1688–89) of James’s regime in Scotland was entirely a result of the Glorious Revolution (1688) in England and the landing there of William.
The era of union
The revolution settlement
With James VII having fled to France, a Convention of Estates (really the same assembly as Parliament but meeting less formally) gave the crown jointly to the Protestant William of Orange (William III of Great Britain, 1689–1702) and his wife, Mary II (1689–94), James’s daughter. William’s first major decision was a moderate one: episcopacy was abolished in 1689 and Presbyterianism reestablished the following year. However, a series of crises throughout William’s reign exposed his total lack of interest in Scotland and placed a strain on the system that had developed whereby the Scottish ministry took orders not only from the monarch but also from the English ministry.
The Act of Union and its results
William fought one war against France (1689–97) and on his death in 1702 bequeathed another (1701–13) to his successor, his wife’s sister Anne (1702–14). These circumstances made a union of Scotland and England seem strategically as well as economically desirable. That an Act of Union was achieved in 1707 is at first sight surprising, since intervening sessions of the Scottish Parliament had been in a mood to break the English connection altogether. But by 1707 England’s appreciation of its own strategic interests, and of the nuisance value of the Scottish Parliament, was lively enough for it to offer statesmanlike concessions to Scotland and material inducements to Scottish parliamentarians to accept union.
The union was an incorporating one—the Scottish Parliament was ended and the Westminster Parliament increased by 45 commoners and 16 peers representing Scotland. Scotland benefited by gaining free trade with England and its colonies, by the grant of a money “equivalent” of the share of the English national debt that Scotland would assume, and by the explicit safeguarding of its national church and legal system. After Queen Anne’s death in 1714, when the Jacobites, supporters of James VII’s descendants, missed their best opportunity, the worst crises of the union were past.
Jacobitism in the Highlands
The Jacobites were seldom more than a nuisance in Britain. An expedition from France in 1708 and a West Highland rising with aid from Spain in 1719 were abortive; bad leadership in the rebellion in 1715 (known as “the Fifteen Rebellion”) of James VII’s son, James Edward, the Old Pretender, and divided counsels in the rebellion of 1745 (“the Forty-five”) led by the Old Pretender’s son Charles Edward, the Young Pretender, crippled invasions originating in France that had in any case less than an even chance of success. The government was not always sufficiently prepared for invasions, but the generalship of John Campbell, 2nd duke of Argyll, at Sheriffmuir in 1715 sufficed to check the Jacobites, and that of William Augustus, duke of Cumberland, at Culloden in 1746 dealt the coup de grâce to a Jacobite army.
The Jacobites never had full French naval and military assistance, and support in Scotland itself was limited; not many more Lowland Scots than Englishmen loved the Stuarts enough to die for them. Many politicians, especially before 1714, corresponded with the royal exiles simply as a matter of insurance against their return, and in the dying days of Stuart hopes there were fewer people than there have been since who were struck by the romantic aura surrounding Prince Charles Edward, “Bonnie Prince Charlie.” The Stuarts primarily had to rely on the clans of the Gaelic-speaking regions, and Highland support in itself alienated Lowlanders. Not all Highlanders were “out” in the Fifteen or the Forty-five rebellions; such clans as the Campbells and the Munros, the Macleods, and the Macdonalds of Sleat were Hanoverian either because they were Presbyterian or through their chiefs’ personal inclinations. However, many clans were Roman Catholic or Episcopalian and favoured a Catholic monarch; they were legitimists and reasonably so, since both James VII and his son, James Edward, the Old Pretender, appreciated Highland problems—problems of an infertile land overpopulated with fighting men who owed personal allegiance to their chiefs and who were partly dependent on plunder to maintain their standard of living.
The years after the Battle of Culloden were characterized by a series of attempts by the chiefs in the late 18th and particularly in the early 19th century to emulate the new capitalist agriculture of the Lowlands, thus creating an impersonal cash relationship with their tenants based on the exploitative employment of the latter—in industries such as the harvesting of kelp (seaweed) for its alkali content—or stimulating recruiting to newly formed regiments of the British army. The roots of this process can be found prior to the defeat of Jacobitism, but the catastrophe of the Fifteen and Forty-five rebellions made the process more rapid and more painful. The atrocities of government soldiers and the repressiveness of government legislation after 1746 were much less important in ushering in the new order than economic and social forces.
The Scottish Enlightenment
No straightforward connection can be drawn between the union and the exceptional 18th-century flowering of intellectual life known as the Scottish Enlightenment. Absence of civil strife, however, permitted the best minds to turn, if they chose, from politics and its 17th-century twin, religion, and few of the best minds from 1707 onward were in fact directly concerned with politics. Philosophy, in which 18th-century Scotland excelled, was a proper concern for a country where for generations minds had been sharpened by theological debate. Scottish culture remained distinctive, and distinctively European in orientation. The historian and philosopher David Hume sought to remove Scotticisms from his speech, and the architect Robert Adam gained extra experience as well as income from being able to design buildings in London as well as in Edinburgh. Nevertheless, Adam drew most of his stylistic inspiration from the Classical architecture he had studied in Italy, and Hume, “le bon David,” was an honoured member of Continental polite and intellectual society. Hume’s The History of England (1754–62) made his literary reputation in his lifetime, but it is his philosophical works, such as his A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), that have caused the continuous growth of his reputation since his death. Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations (1776), was the philosopher of political economy. The discipline of history was developed by William Robertson, a Church of Scotland clergyman, principal of the University of Edinburgh, and official historiographer royal for Scotland; his History of Scotland, During the Reigns of Queen Mary and of King James VI was published in 1759. Henry Home, Lord Kames, may be singled out from a number of other significant figures to illustrate the versatility characteristic of the times. He was a judge, interested in legal theory and history, an agricultural reformer in theory and practice, a commissioner of the Forfeited Estates (of the rebels of 1745), and a member of the Board of Trustees for Manufactures (which encouraged Scottish industries, notably linen production). In poetry there was a reaction, possibly against union—and certainly against assimilation—with England; revived interest in Scots vernacular poetry of the past was the herald of a spate of new vernacular poetry, which culminated in the satires of Robert Fergusson and the lyrics of Robert Burns. Some of the greatest Gaelic poets, such as Alexander MacDonald, were also writing at this time.
The Scottish educational system, its foundations so securely laid throughout the previous century, made possible this extraordinary cultural outpouring. The Scottish universities enjoyed their heyday, Edinburgh being notable for medicine and preeminent in most other subjects as well. Gradually the regents, who taught students throughout their university course, were replaced by professors specializing in single subjects. That students seldom troubled to graduate was of little disadvantage in an age when appointments depended on patronage. Not bound by a rigid curriculum, students were able to indulge the Scots’ traditionally wide intellectual curiosity by attending lectures in a variety of subjects. Scientific study was encouraged, and practical applications of discoveries were given due place. Francis Home, professor of Materia Medica at Edinburgh, studied bleaching processes and plant nutrition; and James Watt, instrument maker to the University of Glasgow for a time, was encouraged by the university to work on the steam engine, to which he was to make crucial improvements.
19th-century Scotland
Agitation for constitutional change was considered treasonable by many during the years 1793–1815, when Britain was fighting Revolutionary France. Several advocates of universal suffrage, including a young Glasgow lawyer, Thomas Muir of Huntershill, were sentenced to transportation (exile) in 1793. After repression had broken this first radical wave, postwar industrial depression produced another—the “Radical War” of 1820, an abortive rising of workers in the Glasgow area. Intellectual campaigning of a more moderate sort had greater short-term success. The Edinburgh Review, founded in 1802 by a group of young lawyers led by Francis Jeffrey and Henry Brougham (1st Baron Brougham and Vaux), was influential in both radical politics and literature. Edinburgh life was particularly brilliant during the war years, when students unable to study abroad found the University of Edinburgh more attractive than ever. Outstanding in this period was Sir Walter Scott, although not until 1827 was he known to be the author of the Waverley novels. Scott’s greatness as a novelist lay in the way he took Scottish society as a whole for his main character, and his best books are a lament for an era that he knew was dying, the organic society of preindustrial Scotland. The other major figure in 19th-century Scottish fiction was Robert Louis Stevenson, who published a wide variety of historical novels, adventure stories, and travel literature before his premature death in Samoa in 1894. His voice, especially from exile, was distinctive. Scottish writing in the 1890s is generally perceived to be sentimental and mawkish, exemplified by the Kailyard novels of Sir James Barrie, Samuel Rutherford Crockett, and Ian Maclaren; George Douglas perhaps overcompensated for this tendency in The House with the Green Shutters (1901), the first realistic portrayal of Scottish life. Gaelic poetry is generally held to have been in decline for much of the 19th century until the work of Iain Mac a’Ghobhainn (John Smith), Uilleam MacDhunlèibhe (William Livingstone), and the political activist Màiri Mhór nan Oran (Mary Macpherson) in the final third of the century.
