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SCOTLAND
[HISTORY

pecuniary equivalent was to be paid, the kirk and Scottish courts of justice were safeguarded (final appeal being to the British House of Lords), and Scots shared English facilities and privileges of trade, in name, for many years passed before Scotland really began to enjoy the benefits. Mar, Queensberry, Stair (of Glencoe) and Argyll (Red John of the Battles) were the leading statesmen of the Unionist party; being opposed by Hamilton, Atholl and Lockhart of Carnwath as Jacobites; by Fletcher of Saltoun as an independent patriot; by popular sentiment, by mob violence, and by many of the preachers, though not by the General Assembly. Every sentimental consideration was against a union with a prelatic kingdom, “an auld enemy,” which drove a hard bargain by threats of excluding Scottish commodities. The negotiations were constantly disturbed by Jacobite intrigues with France in favour of James VIII.; by Scottish adherence to the Act of Security, which might give Scotland a king other than a Hanoverian in succession to Anne; and by the hanging of an Englishman, Captain Green, for piracy on a lost Scottish vessel (1705). The final debates of 1706 were conducted under apprehensions of an invasion of Edinburgh by highlanders and wild western fanatics of the Covenant; but the astuteness of Harley's agent in Edinburgh, de Foe, the resolution of Argyll and the tact of Queensberry, who easily terrified the duke of Hamilton, carried the measure into haven. The Union was at first rich in causes of friction, and in nothing else; even as late as 1745 it was most unpopular, but Scotland had no choice. The nation would never accept a Catholic king, a Stuart, nor revert, as against England, to the ancient French alliance. The religious objection was insuperable; opportunities of commercial development were indispensable; war with England was not to be contemplated by the common sense of the country; and thus, as de Foe wrote, “The Union was merely formed by the nature of things.” In Lockhart's words, the 30th of April 1707 “was the last day that Scotland was Scotland. I may lament and weep,” he adds, “but truly I have had admirable sport,” with his greyhounds.

Friction about matters of trade was the instant sequel of the Union: so much ill-feeling was provoked that, in the general Jacobite failures. opinion, had King James VIII. landed alone when brought to the Scottish coast by Forbin's fleet in March 1708, he would have carried Scotland with him. But Forbin was chased away from the Firth of Forth by a fleet under Sir George Byng; he refused to allow the young adventurer to land farther north, and the Jacobites doubted that France was never serious in the enterprise. The Jacobites also, through mistrust of each other—none could trust Hamilton—and finally through the intoxication of a pilot who failed to reach Forbin, led to the imbecile fiasco. In the English parliament the Jacobites managed to secure a measure of toleration for the Episcopal clergy, after one of them, Mr Greenshields, had long lain in prison for his use of the liturgy (1711). The kirk was incensed by the growth of Episcopalianism and of Popery, the restoration of patronage, and the pressure to accept an oath abjuring James, which divided a church that was absolutely anti-Jacobite. Repeal of the Union was actually mooted in 1712, and even Argyll was restive. The fatal duel in which Hamilton was slain by Mohun, when on the eve of going as ambassador to France, with the interests of James in his eye, was a blow to the Jacobites; as were the death of Anne, the fall of Bolingbroke and the unopposed succession of George I. (August 1714). Their king over the water had, in a manly and magnanimous letter to his adherents, refused to change his creed, and when Bolingbroke fled from England his evangelical efforts at proselytizing James were fruitless. Berwick and Bolingbroke were his ministers, but Berwick would not accompany him to Scotland, and Bolingbroke did not provide the necessary munitions of war. Through a series of confusions and blunders, Mar prematurely raised on the 16th of September 1715 the standard of King James, and though in command of a much larger army than ever followed Montrose, was baffled by Argyll, who held Stirling with a very small force. Mar never crossed the Forth, and the command of Mackintosh, who did, was captured, with his Northumbrian cavaliers, at Preston, on the very day (12th of November) when Argyll foiled Mar in the confused battle of Sheriffmuir. Mar's highlanders began to desert; his council was a confusion of opinions and discontents, and when, after many dangers and in the worst of health, James joined the Jacobites at Perth, it was only to discourage his friends by his gloom, and to share their wintry flight before Argyll to Montrose. Thence he furtively sailed with Mar to France, a broken man, leaving his army to shift for themselves. Many of his noble supporters escaped, he did his best to provide them with ships, others were executed, while the great Whig, Forbes of Culloden, protested against the bad policy of the repressive measures. Argyll, who had saved the country, was regarded as lukewarm, and lost the royal favour, while James, at Avignon, intrigued with Charles XII. of Sweden and with Argyll and his brother, the earl of Islay, till he was driven from France to take refuge in Italy. Spain backed him in 1719, but the death of Charles XII., and the utter failure of a Spanish expedition to Scotland in 1719, when the Jacobites were scattered, and the Spaniards taken, in a fight at Glensheil, ruined what had seemed a fair chance of success. Returning from Spain, James married Maria Clementina Sobieska, daughter of Prince James Sobieski, a pretty bride whom Charles Wogan rescued from durance in Innsbruck, an adventure of romantic gallantry. The marriage was unhappy; James was eternally occupied with the business of his cause and the feuds of his adherents; Clementina lost her gaiety and became causelessly jealous; and her retreat to a convent in 1725 was a greater blow to the cause than the failure of Atterbury's plot (1720), the alleged treason of Mar and the splits in the Jacobite party. Clementina, however, was the mother of two sons, Charles Edward, the hope of his party, and Henry. The cause slumbered, till in 1742-1743 the outbreak of wars with France and Spain gave Prince Charles a chance of showing his mettle. The Jacobites surrounding James in Rome never ceased to weave at the endless tissue of their plot, but in Scotland nothing more substantial than the drinking of loyal healths was done, between the flight of Lockhart of Carnwath, the manager of the party, and the years of 1737-1744. The old Jacobites were dying out; James never had a minister who was not baited by three-fourths of the party, and denounced as a favourite at best, at worst a traitor; and the Cause would have sunk into ashes but for the promise of his eldest son, Prince Charles.

In Scotland the kirk, as ever, was militant, but it could no longer wage war on kings and their ministers, nor attempt to Parties in the kirk. direct foreign and domestic policy. The preachers thus fell into parties, which attacked each other in a brotherly way. The grounds of strife were the spread of “liberal” religious ideas; on one side heretical and anti-Calvinistic doctrines, and on the other a tendency to stretch Calvinistic principles till they were scarcely to be distinguished from Antinomianism. A Glasgow professor, the Rev. Mr Simson, was attacked for Arminianism and Socinianism as early as 1717; and the battle raged between the more severe Presbyterians—who still hankered after the Covenant, approved of an old work The Marrow of Modern Divinity (1646), and were especially convinced that preachers must be elected by the people—and the Moderates, who saw that the Covenant was an anachronism, thought conduct more important than Calvinistic convictions, and supported in the General Assembly the candidates selected by patrons, as against those chosen by the popular voice. The Marrow was discouraged as verging on Antinomianism (1720); and in 1722 its protesting admirers were rebuked by the Assembly. The Marrow men put in protests, and were clearly on the way to secession from the kirk. The oath of abjuration of James was another cause of division, at least till it was watered down in 1719; and by 1726 a revival of the charges of heresy against Simson, with the increase of agitation against the majority of the Assembly who supported patrons, lighted a flame which burned the slight bonds that kept the extremists in union with the kirk.

In 1732 their leaders were the brothers Erskine, one of whom, Ebenezer, preached a sermon accusing professed Presbyterians