How the Scots Invented the Modern World (65 page)

The late John Prebble spent a lifetime trying to uncover the forgotten tragic episodes of modern Scottish history and make them come alive for the modern reader. It is not going too far to say that his trilogy on the defeat of Highland Scotland—
Culloden
(London, 1961),
The Highland Clearances
(1963), and
Glencoe: The Story of the Massacre
(1966)—altered the face of Scottish historical writing and helped to fuel the flames of modern Scottish nationalism. Prebble did nothing to disguise his populist anti-English bias in his triology or his other books, such as
The Darien Disaster
(London, 1968) and his last book,
The King’s Jaunt
(London, 1999). The intelligent reader sets that bias aside when it gets to be too much, and simply enjoys the absorbing story and the wealth of vivid detail. Prebble also published a personal survey of Scottish history,
The Lion in the North
(New York, 1971). Every scholar working in the field owes Prebble, who was a journalist and not a professional historian, a debt of gratitude.

Three other general works, all out of print, also deserve mention. Wallace Notestein’s very dated but still interesting
The Scot in History
(New Haven, 1947) touches some of my themes, but concentrates on the impact of the Scottish Reformation. Neil McCallum’s A Small Country: Scotland, 1700–1830 (Edinburgh, 1983) presents a series of vignettes and anecdotes relating to the rise of eighteenth-century Scotland, some of which found their way into this book. Iain Finlayson’s
The Scots
(London, 1987) tried to summarize the “Scottish national character” in broad and vivid strokes, and sometimes succeeded, although his chapters on Scotland as part of modern Britain no longer have much relevance in the age of devolution.

PROLOGUE

Details of the Thomas Aikenhead case can be found in
A Complete Collection of
State Trials and Proceedings,
edited in thirty-three volumes by T. B. Howell in London in 1812, of which volume 13 contains information relating to the trial, including affadavits from the witnesses, Aikenhead’s petition to the Privy Council, and the letter from Lord Anstruther from which I drew the relevant quotations. The John Locke connection is found in volume 6 of
The
Correspondence of John Locke, E.S. de Beer, ed. (Oxford, 1981). The anecdote concerning Baron Polwarth in the family burial vault is from the second volume of Samuel Cowan’s
The Lord Chancellors of England
(Edinburgh, 1911). The Edinburgh town council’s resolutions are in
Extracts from the Records of the Burgh
of Edinburgh—1689 to
1701,
H. Armet, ed. (Edinburgh, 1962). The full quotation from Henry Gray Graham on the famine of 1695 can be found in David Daiches’s biography of Andrew Fletcher (see Chapter Two, below).

CHAPTER ONE: THE NEW JERUSALEM

Rosalind K. Marshall is supposed to publish a new biography of John Knox, which is badly needed. Until then the reader must turn to Jasper Ridley’s
John
Knox
(New York, 1968) and Stanford Reid’s 1974 biography of the same name. Roger Mason has also edited a brand-new edition of Knox’s political writings for the Cambridge History of Political Thought series, which is available in paperback along with George Buchanan in the same series. For a discussion of their revolutionary endorsement of popular sovereignty, see Quentin Skinner’s
The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Volume
2:
The Age of Reformation
(Cambridge, 1978).

A highly readable account of the Scottish uprising against King Charles is in C. V. Wedgewood’s The King’s Peace, 1637–1641 (London, 1955; paperback edition 1969). A more scholarly one is David Stevenson’s
The Scottish
Revolution,
1637–1644:
The Triumph of the Covenanters
(New York, 1973). The expert on the post-Reformation “parish state” in Scotland is Rosiland Murchison, especially her essay on the Poor Law in
People and Society in
Scotland,
volume 1 (Edinburgh, 1988), edited by Murchison and Thomas Devine.

The place of literacy in post-Reformation Scotland has prompted a great deal of debate and revision recently. The standard view takes statistical form in Professor Lawrence Stone’s classic article, “Literacy and Education in England, 1640–1900,” published in
Past & Present
in 1969. The revisionist view is found in R. A. Huston’s Scottish Literacy and Scottish Identity 1600–1800 (Cambridge, 1985), which argues that the supposed Scottish bias toward literacy is a myth—an argument which for various reasons I find unconvincing. Another provocative thesis is found in Alexander Broadie’s
The Tradition of Scottish
Philosophy
(Savage, MD, 1990), which argues for a deep continuity of Scottish thought from the Middle Ages all the way to the Enlightenment. See also George Davie’s
The Democratic Intellect: Scotland and Her Universities in the
Nineteenth Century
(Edinburgh, 1961) for the lasting impact of the Scottish educational ideal. The evidence for the public library in Innerpeffay comes from Anand Chitnis’s
The Scottish Enlightenment
(London, 1976).

G. Whittington and I. D. White,
An Historical Geography of Scotland
(London, 1983), give a valuable overview of the changes in the Scottish economy from the sixteenth century to the eve of union, as do the relevant chapters in Thomas Devine’s
The Scottish Nation,
mentioned above. John Prebble’s
The Darien Disaster
provides all the relevant material on William Paterson’s ill-fated scheme, although a much older work,
The Darien Venture
(New York, 1926), still provides some interesting details—including the quotation from William Paterson on Panama as “the key of the universe.”

CHAPTER TWO: A TRAP OF THEIR OWN MAKING

There are several books on the relations between England and Scotland before the Act of Union: the best is probably William Ferguson’s
Scotland’s Relations
with England: A Survey to
1707
(Edinburgh, 1977). The best book on the debate over union is by Charles Dand,
The Mighty A fair
(Edinburgh, 1972), which can be supplemented by information on the financial details in John Shaw’s
The
Political History of 18th Century Scotland (London, 1999) and P.W.J. Riley’s The
Union of England and Scotland: A Study in Anglo-Scottish Politics of the Eighteenth
Century
(Manchester, 1979). The description of the opening ceremonies for the opening of the Scottish Parliament is from Frederick Watkeys’s
Old Edinburgh,
volume 1 (Boston, 1907).

David Daiches wrote a brilliant and vivid introduction for his
Andrew
Fletcher of Saltoun: Selected Political Writings
(Edinburgh, 1979), which is not only a condensed biography of Fletcher but a fine summary of Scottish political history between the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to the Act of Union in 1707. However, Daiches must now be supplemented with Paul H. Scott’s full-length biography,
Andrew Fletcher and the Treaty of Union
(Edinburgh, 1992) and John Robertson’s edition of
Andrew Fletcher: Political Works
(Cambridge, 1997).

I made two slight modifications in the historical sequence in this chapter. Besides including the rituals of “the riding of Parliament,” which took place in 1703, my quotations for Fletcher’s arguments against the economic consequences of Union actually come from Fletcher’s
An Account of a Conversation
Concerning a Right Regulation of Government,
published in 1704.

CHAPTER THREE: THE PROPER STUDY OF MANKIND I

Probably no figure in the history of the Enlightenment is more discussed
in
passing
than Francis Hutcheson. Everyone acknowledges his enormous influence on both sides of the Atlantic, and on both sides of the English Channel; everyone admits his role as the founding father of the Scottish Enlightenment. But precisely because Hutcheson is such a useful foil for scholars who really want to talk about two even greater figures, Adam Smith and David Hume, and because his works now make (to be honest) tedious reading, the list of books dedicated to Hutcheson, and Hutcheson alone, is woefully short. We have to make due with W. R. Scott’s venerable biography, which first appeared more than one hundred years ago, and some excellent scholarly articles published in learned books and journals. The one that most influenced my approach to Hutcheson is by James Moore, “The Two Systems of Francis Hutcheson,” in
Studies in the Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment,
M. A. Stewart, ed. (Oxford, 1990). Chapters on Hutcheson by Donald Winch and Ian Ross in their books on Adam Smith are particularly useful as well (see Chapter Nine, below).

Hutcheson’s milieu in Dublin can be reconstructed from Scott,
Francis
Hutcheson,
and M.A. Stewart’s illuminating article, “John Smith and the Molesworth Circle,” which appeared in 1987 in
Eighteenth Century Ireland.
Lord Islay’s role in the hiring of Hutcheson at Glasgow, and in Scottish academic politics generally, is covered in Roger Emerson’s “Politics and the Glasgow Professors, 1690–1800,” in
The Glasgow Enlightenment,
Andrew Hook and Richard Sher, eds. (East Linton, 1995).

Hutcheson’s writings suffer from the same neglect as the story of his life. Bernhard Fabian put together a facsimile reprint of the 1755 edition of Francis Hutcheson’s
Collected Works,
published in Hildesheim, Germany, in 1969. Excerpts of his writings are available in an inexpensive Everyman Classics paperback edition, and in Alexander Broadie’s selections of various authors in
The Scottish Enlightenment
(Edinburgh, 1999).
A System of Moral Philosophy
and
An
Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue,
from which I quote extensively in this chapter, both exist in modern editions but are out of print. On the other hand, one of Hutcheson’s earliest and shortest treatises, his
Remarks on
[Bernard Mandeville’s]
“Fable of the Bees,”
which denounced Mandeville’s idea that private vices yield public benefits, does circulate in numerous versions, and can even be found on the Internet—again, since it serves as a foil for the economic theories of Adam Smith.

CHAPTER FOUR: THE PROPER STUDY OF MANKIND II

From a biographical point of view, Lord Kames fares much better. Two modern biographies exist, William Lehmann’s
Henry Home, Lord Kames and the
Scottish Enlightenment
(The Hague, 1971) and Ian Ross’s
Lord Kames and the
Scotland of His Day
(Oxford, 1972), which is the better of the two. Even the 1814 biography by Alexander Fraser Tytler of Woodhouselee bears rereading, especially for its discussion of his fellow judges on the Court of Session. There is also invaluable information in Ernest Mossner’s
The Life of David Hume
(see Chapter Eight, below).

Kames’s writings, unfortunately, have fared even worse than Hutcheson’s. A modern edition of
Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion
appeared some years ago. Otherwise, if you want to read
Historical Law Tracts
or
Sketches on the History of Man,
you will need to visit a large university library.

The main theme of these chapters is the origins of the Scottish Enlightenment. The old classic on the subject is Gladys Bryson’s
Man and
Society: The Scottish Enquiry of the Eighteenth Century
(Princeton, 1945) but the illustrated volume edited by David Daiches, Peter Jones, and Jean Jones,
Hotbed
of Genius: The Scottish Enlightenment,
1730–1790
(Edinburgh, 1986), might be a better place to begin, while Anand Chitnis’s
The Scottish Enlightenment
(mentioned above, Chapter One) still offers the best account of the social background to this amazing episode in the history of European culture. The now-famous collection of essays in
Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political
Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment,
I. Hont and M. Ignatieff, eds. (Cambridge, 1983), have shaped my own approach: David Lieberman’s essay in that collection, “The Legal Needs of a Commercial Society: The Jurisprudence of Lord Kames,” was important to this chapter, as well. Robert Wokler, “Apes and Races in the Scottish Enlightenment: Monboddo and Kames on the Nature of Man,” in Peter Jones’s edited volume,
Philosophy and Science in the Scottish
Enlightenment
(Edinburgh, 1988), covers Kames’s views on race and history. The Joseph Knight case deserves more attention than it gets: my description is from Ross’s biography of Kames.

CHAPTER FIVE: A LAND DIVIDED

Neil Macallum’s
A Small Country
offers interesting details on Edinburgh in the early eighteenth century, as does A. J. Youngson’s
The Making of Classical
Edinburgh
(Edinburgh, 1966).
The Works of Adam Petrie, The Scottish Chesterfield
(Edinburgh, 1877) offers up the rich material of Petrie’s guides to civilized comportment.

The standard work on the Scottish-English “culture wars” of the eighteenth century is David Daiches’s
The Paradox of Scottish Culture
(Oxford, 1964). The journals and correspondence of James Boswell, however, provide plenty of material for analyzing this problem; the volumes edited by Frederick Pottle and William Wimsatt, especially
Boswell’s London Journal,
1762–1763
(New York, 1950),
Boswell For the Defence,
1769–1774
(New York, 1959), and
James
Boswell: The Earlier Years,
1740–1769
(New York, 1966), are very useful—as well as fun reading. Boswell’s fantasy of upbraiding Rousseau in broad Scots comes out of
The Earlier Years.
A fascinating article on Scots, “A Corrupt Dialect of English?” by Brian Osborne, appeared in
Highlander
magazine in May/June 1998. The quotation from Robertson that starts this discussion is from the second volume of the 1811 edition of his
History of Scotland.