Scotland without the Union
Julia Buckroyd
The English love precedent. When faced with the challenge of devolution by the last remnants of their empire they naturally turn to the past. Where Scottish devolution is concerned this attitude leads to a reconsideration of the Act of Union of 1707, to questions of what it was intended to achieve and in what circumstances it was concluded. But if history is our teacher we must acknowledge that her lessons are frequently ambiguous. Those facts and events with which the past is so thickly littered do not, alas, speak for themselves. They are indeed very silent. They require interpretation, and interpretations differ.
The Union of 1707 is not exempt from this distressing ambiguity. No matter how much modern politicians would like to be served up with the definitive truth about the Union, and no matter how much individual historians labour to have their individual vision accepted as conclusive, yet it remains true that it can be understood in different ways. It may perhaps nOt be obvious that such is the case. Professor Trevor-Roper has expressed his view of the Union with such vigour and cogency that non-historians might be forgiven for thinking that his views embodied the only possible interpretation. What I should like to do, as a historian of seventeenth-century Scotland, is to challenge that interpretation and offer an alternative version. It is also possible that the lessons to be drawn from this alternative imply a different assessment of what is appropriate for Scotland now, from the pre
scription offered by the Regius Professor. Professor Trevor-Roper's attitude is based on two premises: that Union with England was the 'manifest destiny' of Scotland; and that it rescued Scotland from her own barbarism. From these two premises he derives his conclusion, that the Union was necessary and desirable, and his prescription, that it must continue.
It is the fatal tendency of historians to worship the past and to bow down before the fait accompli. Historians spend their lives accounting for what came to pass and attempting to understand why one course of action succeeded and another failed. 'That which happens' is locked in the historian's determinist system. But we know by common experience that options and alternatives are open in our future. Who would dare predict the obvious and inescapable conclusion on Scotland's future status, for example? Choices can be made.
Scotland's future in the seventeenth century was an open question. True, the crowns had been united since 1603; true, there had been three attempts to achieve a 'more perfect union', but it should not be ignored that these had all three been ignominious failures. Professor Trevor-Roper, and William Ferguson after him, have done their best to persuade us that the ten years of Cromwellian occupation were greeted by rightthinking Scots as a time of liberation. Those right-thinking men are however maverick figures; the common national desire in 1660 from church, nobility, burghs and shires, was for a return to independence.
In 1707 there was a radical difference. For the first time both parties, England and Scotland, saw Union as a pragmatic solution to their respective problems. For Scotland there were economic advantages; for England a solution to a long-standing security problem. The demise of the Scottish parliament would remove a body that had threatened England by its failure to follow obediently the English prescription for the succession. No 'feeble' assembly this, as it is disdained by the Regius Professor, but an increasingly self-confident body, increasingly menacing.
In short the Union was a matter of mutual convenience, deriving from a desire to solve specific contemporary problems. It was not the culmination of a long and ineluctable historical destiny. True, the problems that it attempted to solve were of long standing, but at other times they had been dealt with in different ways. Scotland had in the past found other directions for her economic activity, in Scandinavia and the Low Countries. She had found other political allies in the Auld Alliance with France. Certainly by the late seventeenth century these solutions were no longer appropriate, but there was no mystic necessity urging Scotland on to Union with England. Union was a pragmatic response to particular circumstances.
The practical implication of this analysis for present-day consideration of the Union is that it suggests that union is not the necessary and inevitable condition of the two countries. It was arranged as a matter of mutual convenience and equally, as a matter of convenience, it may be dissolved. Discussion may more usefully be turned to such immediate issues, than to consideration of the supposedly irreversible nature of the Union.
If the Union was not the high point of the surge of Anglo-Scottish history, neither do I believe that it rescued Scotland from its late-seventeenth-century self: 'the darkest age of Scottish history', as Professor Trevor-Roper is pleased to call it. Understanding of Restoration Scotland has been greatly distorted by the work of Hanoverian historians who sought to recommend that regime to their readers by blackening the reputation of the later Stuarts. That imbalance has not been redressed very thoroughly as yet by Scottish historians, but there are numerous indications of the possibility of a more reasoned interpretation.
In the field of administrative development for example, Athol Murray has shown that the Treasury was operating in a remarkably modern and efficient way. .It was not corrupt and it provided administrative and financial experience that were utilised after the Union. The Privy Council, long dismissed as the dutiful recipient of orders from London, was in fact involved In intensive consultation over policy. Decisions made by the Secretary of State in London were made on the advice and recommendation of those in Scotland.
In cultural and intellectual life it is equally possible to suggest an alternative Interpretation. Scots were involved with the current European passion for planting and building; became members of the Royal Society; employed scholars of international reputation in their four universities; went on Grand Tours and concerned themselves With the aesthetic interests of the European world. In what sense can this be called a closed society', `anarchical', a `barbarous pre-Union past'? Is it not more evidently the precursor of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century? Can we not see in lateseventeenth-century Scotland all those qualities and interests which were to be fully developed in the following decades? What basis is there then, in seeing the Union as the agent of Scotland's redemption from herself? I am so far a historian that I too look for the roots of historical developments. The Scottish Enlightenment did not leap from Jove's forehead at the signing of the Act of Union; it was already burgeoning in `Scotland's darkest age'. And so modern politicians need not fear that Scotland needs England for her salvation and survival. The question of ScotIond's future status ought not to be referred to any notion that, without England, Scotland will revert to `barbarism'. Without England, Scotland created the basis for the Enlightenment, and without England she can, if necessary, survive and flourish now.
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