296

The Darien Expedition

[1695-1700

Presbytery on the three nations on the ground that it was the one form of polity which had the sanction of Heaven; the authors of the Revolution Settlement had established Presbytery as the national Church, because it was the most expedient policy in the interests of the new régime. Thus in the minds of statesmen secular had overridden theological considerations; and it was now to be proved that a similar change had come over the spirit of the nation. In the year 1695 James Paterson brought forward his scheme for the founding of a Scottish colony on the Isthmus of Darien: the scheme received the sanction of the Scottish Parliament and of the King; and subscriptions were promised from Holland, always on good terms with Scotland, and at first from London. But the enterprise, so promisingly begun, evoked the commercial jealousy of English traders; and, to the bitter indignation of the Scots, William was persuaded to withdraw his sanction. Thrown upon their own resources, the promoters of the scheme in Scotland appealed to their own countrymen; subscription lists were opened, and the response by all ranks and classes of the nation recalled the days of the singing of the National Covenant. The enterprise thus launched proved a temporary national calamity. A pestilential climate, the active opposition of the English merchants, and the hostility of the Spaniards, who claimed possession of the Isthmus, baffled the efforts of the colonists to effect a settlement; and three successive expeditions experienced the same fate. The immediate result of the tragical failure of what was a national enterprise was exasperation against William and England; and this remained an abiding feeling to the close of the reign. But in the national development the Darien scheme has a wider significance. That the nation which for a century and a half had been dominated by theological interests should have thrown itself with such enthusiasm into a purely secular enterprise was a striking proof that a revolution had been wrought in the public mind. Scotland, following the example of other countries in Europe, had in fact entered on a stage of development in which material interests had become the prime consideration, alike in her foreign relations and in her internal

economy.

Such being now the dominant national preoccupation, the result of the Darien scheme could not but suggest to responsible statesmen both in England and Scotland that the existing relations of both countries could not remain as they were that complete separation or a closer union lay in the necessity of things. During the closing years of William's reign the state of opinion in Scotland pointed to the former alternative as the more probable event. Yet amid all the clamour against William and the English there was one consideration that held the majority of the nation fast to the Revolution Settlement the dread of the return of the Stewart with absolutism and Roman Catholicism as its inevitable result. A common Protestantism, a common political ideal, and common material

1702-3] Accession of Anne.

-

Meeting of Estates

297

interests, on the one hand, and national sentiment and national antipathies, on the other between these warring forces the two nations had to decide whether their destinies were to lie apart or to be joined in indissoluble union.

Throughout the reign of Anne (1702-14) the dominant concern of Scotland was the Union-first, as an impending and, afterwards, as an accomplished fact. It had been the dying counsel of William that, in the interest of both countries, the Union should be effected at the earliest date possible; and, as it chanced, the Tory Queen Anne was of the same opinion as her Whig predecessor. Anne's first action in Scottish affairs decisively showed that she and her advisers had the great object at heart. In her first speech to the English Parliament she expressly suggested that Commissioners from both countries should be appointed to treat regarding the conditions under which the Union might be accomplished. The Commissioners were actually appointed (1702); but public opinion in neither country was sufficiently ripe for the momentous transaction, and their meetings led to no immediate result. It was the proceedings in the successive sessions of the Scottish Parliament which at length convinced both nations that there was no other alternative than complete severance or closer union.

By an Act of the previous reign (1696), similar to one passed in the Parliament of England, it had been settled that the existing Parliament should meet twenty days after the King's death, and should continue to sit for six months thereafter. As the Parliament did not meet within the prescribed period, the Duke of Hamilton protested that it could not be held a legal body; and, at the head of fifty-seven members, he marched out of the House. The members who remained, a hundred and twenty in number and contemptuously nicknamed the "Rump," were virtually unanimous in passing a succession of Whig measures, and, what is specially noteworthy, in response to the Queen's request desired her to nominate Scottish Commissioners to treat regarding union with a similar body representing England. But it was not this Parliament that was to have the responsibility of consummating the Treaty of Union. In 1703 a new Parliament was returned the first elected since 1689, and destined to be the last in its succession. In the previous year the English Bill against Occasional Conformity, which would have deprived Dissenters of civic status, had been introduced into the English Parliament; and, though it was defeated by the Lords, it had been ardently supported by the Commons. In the eyes of the Scottish Presbyterians the approval which the Bill had received could only portend the eventual triumph of Episcopacy in both countries; and to avert the dreaded event they spared no effort to secure a majority in the new Parliament. Their efforts were

successful, and it was a Parliament with a Whig and Presbyterian majority that carried the Union. This was to be its great achievement;

298 The Act of Security.— Union Commissioners [1703-6

but its action during its three antecedent sessions gave little promise of such a result. The one motive animating all parties was hostility to England and the determination to let her know that Scotland was an independent kingdom. The Duke of Queensberry, who was continued as Commissioner in the new Parliament, was instructed in the first place to obtain a grant of supply, and, next, to secure the passing of an Act of Settlement similar to the English Act which devolved the Crown on the Electress Sophia and her heirs. In neither object did he succeed; what the Parliament did, Whig and Tory agreeing, was to pass an Act of Security, which declared that, twenty days after the death of the reigning sovereign without issue, the Estates were to name a successor who should be a Protestant and a descendant of the House of Stewart: whoever this successor might be, he or she must not be the person designated by the Parliament of England unless under conditions that secured to Scotland complete freedom of government, religion, and trade. To such an Act, which virtually declared Scotland an independent kingdom, the Government could not give its sanction; and the session closed amid mutual recrimination between the Commissioner and the House.

When this refractory Parliament met in the following year (1704), the new Commissioner, the Marquis of Tweeddale, found it as resolute as ever to have its own way: no supply would be granted till the Act of Security received the royal sanction. As the less of two evils, Godolphin, the English Treasurer, advised the Queen to yield; and the Act was passed. It was intended as a defiance to England, but by the irony of events it was the chief immediate cause in furthering union. As a direct reply to Scotland's challenge, the Tory House of Lords and the Whig House of Commons passed an Act which declared that, unless the Crown of Scotland were settled by Christmas Day, 1705, all Scotsmen would be declared aliens and the importation of Scottish commodities prohibited. By the same Act, however, the Queen was empowered to appoint Commissioners to negotiate a union between the two countries, never less disposed to fraternal feelings than at this moment. But the threat contained in the English Alien Act had the desired result. The Scottish Estates were satisfied with having asserted the national feeling in the Act of Security; and, when they met in the following year (1705) under the presidency of the Earl of Argyll, they passed an "Act for a Treaty with England," by which the Queen was desired to appoint Commissioners to negotiate the terms on which the union might be concluded.

The two Commissions, each consisting of thirty-one representatives, met on April 16, 1706, and in nine weeks accomplished a task which in the opinion of the majority of both nations had seemed "a chimera of the English ministry." By the terms of the proposed Treaty, as it finally emerged from their hands, the two kingdoms were to be united

1706-7]

The Treaty of Union

299

under the name of Great Britain; the United Kingdom was to be represented by one Parliament; and the Crown was to devolve on the House of Hanover in accordance with the English Act of Settlement. There was to be complete freedom of trade between the two countries, both at home and abroad; in the case of certain commodities-malt, salt, stamped paper, vellum and parchment, etc., Scotland was for a time to be partially exempt from duties; and her proportion of the land-tax was to be one-fortieth of that of England. In compensation for her losses at the hands of various English trading companies and of her share in England's national debt, she was to receive an "equivalent" of £398,085. 108. Od., which was to be expended in recouping the parties who had suffered these losses and in encouraging trade and industry. In the United Parliament sixteen Scottish peers, elected by their own body, were to sit in the House of Lords, and forty-five Scottish members in the House of Commons. Scotland was to retain her own Courts of Law, with the addition of a Court of Exchequer which was to deal exclusively with fiscal questions. The privileges of the Royal Burghs and the feudal jurisdictions of the nobles were to remain intact; and, finally, as sign and symbol of the completed union, the arms of the two countries were to be conjoined, as her Majesty saw fit, on "all flags, banners, standards, and ensigns both at sea and land."

The Articles, as drafted by the two Commissions, had now to receive the sanction of the Parliaments of both countries, and, as the greatest opposition was anticipated from the Parliament of Scotland, it was deemed prudent that it should first sit in judgment on the Treaty. The last of Scottish Parliaments, it met in its last session on October 3, 1706, with Queensberry as Commissioner, Lord Seafield as Chancellor, and the Earl of Mar as Secretary of State. In the teeth of a hostility which threatened civil war, the Government addressed itself to the task of passing the Treaty into law. From the Convention of Burghs and from every royal burgh except Ayr, petitions poured in, denouncing the proposed union; in Edinburgh and Glasgow there were open riots, and at Dumfries the Treaty was publicly burned. It was from the national Church, which dreaded union as inevitably involving the ruin of Presbytery, that the most dangerous opposition was anticipated; but its leaders were appeased by an Act of Security which guaranteed the existing establishment "to continue without any alteration to the people of this land to all generations." Opposed at almost every step by the different parties in the House, the Articles were at length successfully carried without essential modification; and on January 16, 1707, Queensberry touched the Act of Union with the royal sceptre, and at the same time, as inviolably bound up with it, the Act for the security of the national Church. In the English Parliament, the Articles had met with little opposition, and on March 6 the Queen gave the royal assent to the Act in the presence of the Lords and Commons.

300

Results of the Treaty of Union

The Treaty of Union, which had thus been sanctioned by the Parliaments of both nations, was not to result in immediate and fraternal co-operation. How the Treaty was regarded by the general educated opinion of Scotland, it is difficult to determine; for, as a leading Jacobite of the time admitted, the petitions against it were in general inspired and even manufactured by the Jacobite party. By the mass of the people, influenced by national sentiment and traditional dislike of England, it was long considered as a disgraceful transaction—the work of venal statesmen and traitors to their country. And in the And in the years that immediately followed there was not a class which did not find ground for alarm in the treatment it received from a legislature in which English influence was necessarily predominant. The nobility were irritated by what they considered infringements of their order; the Church saw in an Act that restored patronage a deliberate intention of reviving Episcopacy; the traders and merchants were exasperated by taxation which they declared to be at once unjust and a breach of the Treaty of Union. Not till towards the middle of the eighteenth century did the national prosperity become so apparent as to convince the majority of Scotsmen that the Union had been a necessity and a blessing. The pre-eminent advantage that Union brought to both countries had, indeed, been the same strength and security as the result of their combined resources. Had Scotland become an independent kingdom retaining her ancient traditions, England would have been seriously crippled in the course she was to run. On the other hand, Scotland, to hold her own in the conflict of material interests in which the nations were now engaged, would have required a fleet and an army, the maintenance of which would have overstrained her resources and permanently retarded their development. Relieved from this necessity and no longer dominated by theological preoccupations, she was at liberty to pursue the new paths on which she had entered at the Revolution; and it was only these new conditions that rendered possible her growth in material prosperity and her contribution to the world's thought, which make the close of the eighteenth century the most distinguished period in her annals.