is that the stubborn spirit which the arms of the Plantagenets and Tudors had been unable to subdue had begun to yield to a very different kind of force. Customhouses and tariffs were rapidly doing what the carnage of Falkirk and Halidon, of Flodden and of Pinkie, had failed to do. Scotland had some experience of the effects of an union. She had, near forty years before, been united to England on such terms as England, flushed with conquest, chose to dictate. That union was inseparably associated in the minds of the vanquished people with defeat and humiliation. And yet even that union, cruelly as it had wounded the pride of the Scots, had promoted their prosperity. Cromwell, with wisdom and liberality rare in his age, had established the most complete freedom of trade between the dominant and the subject country. While he governed, no prohibition, no duty, impeded the transit of commodities from any part of the island to any other. His navigation laws imposed no restraint on the trade of Scotland. A Scotch vessel was at liberty to carry a Scotch cargo to Barbadoes, and to bring the sugars of Barbadoes into the port of London.[1] The rule of the Protector therefore had been propitious to the industry and to the physical wellbeing of the Scottish people. Hating him and cursing him, they could not help thriving under him, and often, during the administration of their legitimate princes, looked back with regret to the golden days of the usurper.[2]
- ↑ Scobell, 1654, cap. 9., and Oliver's Ordinance in Council of the 12th of April in the same year.
- ↑ Burnet and Fletcher of Saltoun mention the prosperity of Scotland under the Protector, but ascribe it to a cause quite inadequate to the production of such an effect. "There was," says Burnet, "a considerable force of about seven or eight thousand men kept in Scotland. The pay of the army brought so much money into the kingdom that it continued all that while in a very flourishing state … We always reckon those eight years of usurpation a time of great peace and prosperity." "During the time of the usurper Cromwell," says Fletcher, "we imagined ourselves to be in a tolerable condition with respect to the last particular (trade and money) by reason of that expense which was made in the realm by those forces that kept us in subjection." The true explanation of the phenomenon about which Burnet and Fletcher blundered so grossly will be found in a pamphlet entitled "Some seasonable and modest Thoughts partly occasioned by and partly concerning the Scotch East India Company," Edinburgh, 1696. See the Proceedings of the Wednesday Club in Friday Street, upon the subject of an Union with Scotland, December 1705. See also the Seventh Chapter of Mr. Burton's valuable History of Scotland.
