Bought and sold for English gold: Part three of our major series marking the 310th anniversary of the Act of Union

In this, the third and final part of our series marking the 310th anniversary of the Act of Union, we will show how there was opposition to the Union right up to the day the Act was passed into law and for long afterwards. We’ll chart that bitter aftermath and we will name the worst of the guilty.

No matter what the pro-Union historians and apologists say, it is an undeniable fact that most of those who voted an independent Scotland out of existence in 1707 – against the wishes of the vast majority of Scots – were rewarded for doing so, with some of them reaping very rich rewards indeed. They earned for their votes the equivalent of many millions of pounds sterling in today’s money.

That word “equivalent” says it all, for that was the name given to the deal that sealed Scotland’s fate. Scotland had no national debt as it is understood on April 30, 1707. One day later and Scotland had a share of the British national debt which then stood at £14 million.

It is wrong to say that Scotland had no debt at all, for the collapse of the Darien scheme and years of poor harvests as well as loss of trade revenue due to the wars instigated by William and Mary and carried on by Queen Anne had left many Scots considerably in debt – and it was not just the aristocracy and the landed gentry.

It was not a “national” debt, however. The concept of a debt owed by a nation centrally was entirely English as it began under William and Mary to pay for their foreign wars.

As well as the upper class, the Scottish mercantile sector was in dire trouble, and many had agitated for union. The English Parliament was not too pleased to do so, but in order to proceed with the Union, it was agreed to pay the Equivalent, the sum of £398,000, to offset Scotland taking on its share of a joint national debt and also to soften the blow of the higher taxes Scots would have to pay – there were tax exemptions on things like salt and malt but these only lasted a few years.

The Equivalent was also meant to pay for the loss of value that Scots would suffer as the two countries integrated their coinage and weights and measures. Some 25 commissioners were given the task of distributing the Equivalent, and some of them paid themselves plenty.

The majority of the Equivalent – almost 60 per cent – was used to pay the costs of closing down the Company of Scotland which had been the vehicle for the disastrous Darien scheme. Yes, a lot of ordinary investors across Scotland got some of their money back, but by no means all of them and by no means all of their money.

It also took many years to sort out Equivalent claims and counter-claims and further cash settlements were required, with a firm called the Royal Bank of Scotland helping that process. However, some people got their money quickly and got plenty of it. You can guess who … You will recall from last week that the Scottish Parliament was wholly unrepresentative of the nation.

The 154 commissioners (MPs) from 99 constituencies were voted in by a franchise that was very limited, and only a tiny fraction of the population had the vote.

The Scottish Parliament from 1702 to 1707 consisted of 67 nobles, 80 shires members, the representatives of 67 constituent burghs plus officers of state appointed by the Queen.

Let us be generous here. Let us see those Parliamentarians as desperate to do their monarch’s wishes, to bring about a Union that would still preserve the Kirk, Scots law and our schools. But let us also call some of them desperate for advancement and money, for they were.

With the Duke of Queensberry presiding and the Duke of Argyll leading the bribery backstage, swiftly but surely the Court Party, so called because it formed the administration, outflanked the opposition Country Party and the Jacobites who called themselves Cavaliers, while the Squadrone Volante, a group of Presbyterian nobles whose real name was the New Party, vacillated.

Sums of money, peerages, offices of state and pensions were all promised. Even the “expenses”

of commissioners, totalling £20,000 alone, were to be paid. There were some deserving payees – staff such as the Queen’s chaplain in Scotland and the keepers of Parliament House got their back pay after years, but outside in city streets, town squares and country lanes, the people protested as news of the Equivalent began to spread.

They were cowed by troops sent by the Privy Council wherever riots threatened, and all the time there were reports from down south that the Royal Army led by the Duke of Marlborough, John Churchill, was waiting to invade Scotland if the Union did not proceed. That was cruelly untrue fake news – Marlborough was preoccupied with the War of Spanish Succession, which was not going well in 1707, and in any case he depended on Scottish regiments such as the Royal Scots Greys for the backbone of his army.

Like so many other English leaders, Marlborough wanted the Union to succeed so he could have many more Scots as cannon fodder, or at least have them not invading England while he fought in Europe.

On January 16, 1707, after another piece of treachery by the Duke of Hamilton – he was supposed to lead the final protest by leading a walk out from Parliament but cried off with toothache – the Act of Union was passed by 110 votes to 67, a majority of 43.

The Duke of Queensberry was rewarded with the Dukedom of Dover and a £3,000 annual pension, and the Duke of Argyll was made Duke of Greenwich.

A century later, that great Unionist Sir Walter Scott wrote of the events of that month: “Men, of whom a majority had thus been bought and sold, forfeited every right to interfere in the terms which England insisted upon, and Scotland, therefore, lost that support, which, had these statesmen been as upright and respectable as some of them were able and intelligent, could not have failed to be efficacious.

“But, despised by the English, and detested by their own country, fettered, as Lord Belhaven expressed it, by the golden chain of equivalents, the Unionists had lost all freedom of remonstrance, and had no alternative left, save that of fulfilling the unworthy bargain they had made.”

FOR once, Wattie got it right. He later added: “Owing to all these adverse circumstances, the interests of Scotland were considerably neglected in the Treaty of Union; and in consequence the nation, instead of regarding it as an identification of the interests of both kingdoms, considered it as a total surrender of its independence, by their false and corrupted statesmen, into the hand of their proud and powerful rival.

“The gentry of Scotland looked on themselves as robbed of their natural consequence, and disgraced in the eyes of the country; the merchants and tradesmen lost the direct commerce between Scotland and foreign countries, without being, for a length of time, able to procure a share in a more profitable trade with the English colonies, although ostensibly laid open to them.

“The populace in the towns, and the peasants throughout the kingdom, conceived the most implacable dislike to the treaty; factions, hitherto most bitterly opposed to each other, seemed ready to rise on the first opportunity which might occur for breaking it; and the cause of the Stewart family gained a host of new adherents, more from dislike to the Union than any partiality to the exiled prince.”

How true that was about the “exiled prince” James Stuart, above: the Scottish Parliament held its last meeting on March 25, 1707, being adjourned for 292 years, after the English Parliament voted through the Act in a single sitting. As the Scottish Parliament was dissolved, the Earl of Seafield lamented: “There goes the end of an auld sang.” Within a year of the Act taking effect 310 years ago yesterday, on May 1, 1707, a Jacobite uprising almost threatened the whole project.

The forgotten rising of 1708 followed the first sitting of the united Parliament on October 23, 1707. There were 45 Scottish MPs able to sit in the House of Commons compared to 513 from England and Wales.

Sir John Clerk of Penicuik recorded that they found themselves “obscure and unhonoured in the crowd of English society, where they were despised for their poverty, ridiculed for their speech, sneered at for their manners, and ignored in spite of their votes by the ministers and government”.

At the start of 1708, popular feeling in Scotland against the Union was running even higher, as people found that their coins were being put out of tender – the Scottish national mint couldn’t cope and closed within a few years.

The forced introduction of English coinage, weights and measures wreaked havoc, and all the time Jacobite sympathisers were planning another attempt to take back the throne of the United Kingdom, with spies reporting that Scotland was ready for rebellion against the Union and Queen Anne.

King Louis XIV of France had sheltered the Stuarts and now he sanctioned an invasion force of 5,000 troops and 20 ships to take “James VIII and III”, as Louis called him, to Scotland, where spies said 25,000 men were ready to rise. There’s little reason to doubt that figure.

The Royal Navy intercepted the French force even as it prepared to land near Burntisland and despite James’s pleas to be set ashore, they all returned to Dunkirk save for one ship lost during the flight from Fife.

We will never know how much the history of Europe would have been changed if that rising had been successful.

By 1713, the Union was so unpopular that a call was made for the repeal of the Act in the House of Lords, the Scottish peers having at last seen what the Union really was – a takeover and not a genuine union of equals. The resolution was lost by just four votes. The hoped-for benefits of the Union just didn’t happen at first.

The writer and English spy Daniel Defoe came north in 1726 and concluded that the improvement in trade and the economy hadn’t happened – it was “not the case, but rather the contrary”.

Walter Scott himself wrote: “Nor was it until half a century had passed away that the Union began to produce those advantages to Scotland which its promoters had fondly hoped, and the fruits of which the present generation has so fully reaped.”

No historian can deny that Scottish involvement in the British Empire in the late 18th and 19th centuries enriched more than a few Scots. Whether the Enlightenment would have occurred or not is a moot point, but the fact is that the Act of Union certainly changed these islands and its peoples.

It was a shabby, underhand anti-democratic deal, and as is often said about history, those who do not learn from it are condemned to re-live it.