187. The Birth of Britain

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0:29Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William Durampo. And can I just say, following on from our last episode of the absolutely fascinating yet disastrous Darien scheme, we're joined by somebody who William de Rimpel has been lobbying hard for for quite some time. Is this not true, William? It certainly is. My old friend Murray Pittock, who is one of Scotland's greatest historians, and specifically one of Scotland's great historians on Scotland and Empire. And one of my favourite books of the last few years is his brilliant Scotland, The Global History, which is a book I would love to have written myself.

1:08And we brought him here today to discuss the acts of union, the creation of Great Britain, the country which we still call our own, however fragile the union may seem at times. and particularly were keen to ask him how far or not the need and the desire of the Scottish elite to get their hands on the loot of empire. How much of a role did this play and how much did the failure of Darien and the fact that the Scots had failed to launch their own empire encouraged them to look for an entry point into the nascent empire then being created by England. So, I mean, in a way, Murray, you join us in the middle of what has been previously a very heated pub conversation, which goes on and on and on over weeks and months, that were it not for this desire for colonial loot, were it not for the disaster of trying to go it alone, the act of union itself may never have happened.

2:08So let's just start with that thesis, first of all. Pull up your stool to the pub table and tell us what you make of this, because we've argued long and hard about this. Murray's pouring himself a pint, I think. A pint of whiskey to get through this, yeah. It may not be the point we're after, looking by the expression on his face. Right. Well, let's hear it. So I think undoubtedly there was some support in the Scottish elite for the Union, but the vast majority of the public were against. However, there was a situation brought about which forced the hand of the political nation or large part of the political nation.

2:40And that does arise from the imperial question. So throughout the 17th century, Scotland had been trying, generally via the crown, to get its hands on colonial interests abroad. There was, first of all, the Scots colony in Nova Scotia, though the idea of calling Cape Breton New Galloway didn't take off, which was set up in the 1620s. My family were Nova Scotia baronets, which is from that time. Exactly. And so the clerks of Penicook too. I mean, Nova Scotia baronets were a feature of the attempted creation by William Alexander Earl of Stirling of an expatriate elite who would help to colonize and fund the new colony.

3:23But it was surrendered to the French at the end of the 1620s. Just to say that when I had my DNA done a few years ago. Everyone's brain has gone, oh, really? Legal case, William? Was it so fun? You know, when you sent it off to ancestry.com, you sent a little spittle after my kind children gave me a test tube for my Christmas to spit into. Just wanted to settle that you weren't involved in a murder or something. Okay, as you were, carry on. Yes, yes. And when it came back, I had something like 2 % Mi 'kmaq, Nova Scotia Native American blood in it, which presumably came from the Nova Scotia colony.

4:04Well, it might have done. And so not only are you a challenger of empires, you're also a relic of them, will you? I'm sadly so. That's splendid to know. So the attempts in the 1630s foundered with the Portuguese destroying the Guinea Company's ship and seizing its contents. Then attempts were made in the 1680s in East New Jersey and South Carolina, supported by the future James II and VII. But all of these came fundamentally to nothing. And Darien was the last big attempt, which was well-funded. But the reason all these came to nothing is twofold. The first is that Scotland lacked both the force and the commerce to be able to impose its will on third-party nations.

4:51And the second is that the English Navigation Acts, of which there are four between the 1650s and 1770s, effectively tried to reserve colonial trade to English crews. There were some ways around that. The Scots, as they usually do, found every way around it possible. But in the end, the exclusion of the Scots from colonial trade and the inability to gain their own colonists were the two things which drove the desire for success at Darien and whose failure led to the Union becoming increasingly, not inevitable, but likely. So, I mean, there's so many questions and we're going to delve into a lot of those dates in more detail in a moment.

5:31But just the exclusion of the Scottish interests, you know, there are people in Scotland at this time who have land, they have power, and they have money. They also have ambition. Is the exclusion down to some kind of attitude from the English that actually, you know what, the Scots just aren't good enough to be at the table? There was an exclusionist attitude, absolutely, that this is a composite monarchy, but they're not getting any rights. So there's a tension between Scotland's continuation as an independent state within a composite monarchy, and English decided to exclude them. But there's also the issue that the Scots are seen, and they're seen by some continental powers as well, as a Dutch false flag operation.

6:06In other words, they're seen as so close to the Netherlands, and union with the Netherlands is proposed in 1677, and again in the early 18th century, so that Scotland would become yet another province of the United Provinces. Which you see architecturally all over Scotland today. You see Dutch cables. Yes. And so the Scots were very influential both in the VOC, which is the Dutch East India Company in the Caribbean, and also helped to found, or co-founder really, the Swedish East India Company in the 1630s. And go on later, of course, to found the French East India Company, Jean-Laure de Lourdes.

6:41Exactly. De Lourdes, whose brother died in the Darien expedition. Right. Well, that created a lot of laws, subsequent politics and attitudes, we think. I didn't know about the Swedish company. So the Scots create two East India companies in other countries. Right, okay. So there is some legitimate reason why the English may not think they are loyal enough if they're pursuing their own interests and may be slightly cautious about, you know, letting the Scots in and letting them have a slice of the cake. I should explain, Murray, that Anita's from Essex. You need to bear that in mind during this episode.

7:12I mean, I am, but I'm not sure how this makes a great dent in the conversation. English, English. Can we go right back to the beginning and this idea of multi-monarchy in the British Isles? You've used that phrase before, a multi-monarchy. What exactly is that? What are we talking about when we say multi-monarchy? A multi-monarchy, or I guess the term of art is a composite monarchy, is one where there are separate kingdoms under a single monarch. So that was very common. A very common way of arranging European polities. The Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania was one of them. In the early 19th century, until Belgium divided, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands was another.

7:55Perhaps the greatest and the one which was most controversial in various ways, particularly in the 17th century because of the Thirty Years' War, was the Holy Roman Empire, which was in some ways the ultimate composite monarchy. And the thing is that the United Kingdom was formerly a composite monarchy from 1603 to 1707, and actually because of Ireland's separate status also formally after 1801, but also partly in the entirety since 1707, because the Union itself reserved to the Kingdom of Scotland certain rights pertaining to the Crown, and united with the Kingdom of England certain rights pertaining to Parliament.

8:34So a composite monarchy is a multiple monarchy of that kind. And the UK is actually quite a complicated one. But one of the interesting things about the UK is that because King Charles is king of 15 realms currently, there isn't a full understanding of how composite monarchy looks outside the UK to people who are the subjects of King Charles III. But this is a composite monarchy, whether or not you include Kingdom of Scotland as part of that, it's a composite monarchy to this day. Yeah. I mean, some people who just know that King Charles' father was the Duke of Edinburgh, will just think that this is a happy, sort of contiguous union, one big happy family.

9:11Can we go back to, I think, one of the most interesting periods where you really do have somebody who feels like demonstrably a Scot on the British throne or English throne even, and that's James I of England and James VI of Scotland. Because I think those people who listen overseas and don't know what we've been drilled in at school, because we learned this at school. No one gets this outside Britain. No, they're like, I don't understand. You know, one family reigning and suddenly you go and fish in Scottish waters and put somebody else on the throne. So can you just talk us through what happened there?

9:43Because he is very much a Scot. Absolutely. And that's one of the reasons his reputation in England was frequently introduced in the 17th century because he seemed alien. His manners seemed alien. His speech seemed alien. The fact he stuffed his court with Scots appointees seemed alien. They seemed alien. Very much so. A foreigner. We should perhaps explain who he is. Yes, and we should sort of do a little pen portrait because, I mean, you know, he's the son, the only son of Mary, Queen of Scots, who herself has a really quite terrible life, which has been covered and covered and covered in movies and dramas over the years.

10:16Can't get enough of her. Yeah, but there are sort of many things, you know, sometimes portrayed of him that, you know, he's slightly, I don't know, did they say misshapen or misformed? And this is all part of the propaganda at the time that this is not the cleverest man on the planet. And his speech is a bit slurry. His tongue is too big for his mouth. I remember learning this at school, that he had an oversized tongue. So most of that comes from Anthony O 'Weedon's attack on him, which is actually posthumous. But I don't think there's any reason particularly to think that James did have a notoriously bad speech or an oversized tongue or any of those things.

10:50But one of the things was he's very guttural. Exactly. And a lot of guttural expressions do tend to involve the expulsion of spittle. So being gobbed over is your fate as an English courtier under James VI and I, because he uses gutturals that you're not familiar with. And you think this guy's tongue's too big for his mouth and he just can't keep it in. But he's no fool, is he, Murray? He's well-educated, even if he has a slightly kind of weird obsession about witches. Could you talk about all that? He's an extremely well-educated man. He actually writes a work of literary criticism, Rules and Courtals in the early 1580s.

11:29He notoriously attacks tobacco as injurious to health and is polemic against it. Man before his time. Yeah, 1590s. But he is also personally extremely insecure because the early loss of his mother, the fact he's brought up by competing factions, on occasion kidnapped, fierce assassination attempts all the time, that's what lies behind the witches. He's paranoid. And has to watch his auntie murder his mother. Yeah, he's a paranoid man. And of course, he's not a tyrant, but he's paranoid. We should say quickly again that not only I, but Callum, our producer, are North Berwick boys. So we have a vested interest in these particular hags.

12:10I'm very much outnumbered in this episode. I know it. There's only one Essex contingent here, and that's me. Essex fusiliers are holding their own there in the corner. So, yes, who are the North Berwick witches? The North Berwick witches are a number of women who were tried because James had a bad time at sea. And it was alleged that they'd put a spell on the boat and that a storm had almost sunk it. And that therefore they were being used as effectively a scapegoat for the king's own feelings of fear and anxiety. And they were also part of a contemporary craze because there were big trials in Aberdeen and elsewhere within a year or two of 1596.

12:54And this has its echo in literature, of course, in Macbeth. Macbeth with the Scots witches comes immediately after the North Berwick witches are the talk of London. Absolutely. I mean, Shakespeare was hoping for a little bit of a tip there by bringing in some of the king's favourite topics and also underlining the fact that witches are in favour of usurpation and can't be trusted, which is very much what James VI and I would have thought. Brilliant. Okay, so we live towards southwest London and there is a story around here where Elizabeth I is taking her last breaths at Richmond Palace. And there is a rider waiting below the window on the green, waiting for her ring to be dropped out of the window.

13:34And when she dies and takes her last rattle, it's dropped, it's caught. And then a rider rides hard to Scotland to tell James he is now King of England. Would that have been something that he would have welcomed, wanted, been aware that it would have been actually a pretty nightmarish job he was walking into? It was what he expected, and he was certainly planning for that. He'd brought up for all his life, hadn't he? He's unwilling to move too far away from English foreign policy. He relies on Elizabeth's court for subsidies in the 1580s. They help to stabilise his position, which otherwise is contested by Scottish factions.

14:13So yes, this is what he's looking for. And there's a view, it's a Scottish view you can still find today from some of his courtiers and supporters. they're effectively going to take over England. And Scotland is going to become an important and dominant force, the political leadership of the Anglo-British composite state. But it doesn't happen? It doesn't happen because, as Henry VII said, I don't want to get too far, but as Henry VII said, when his daughter was betrothed to James IV of Scotland, and this became a possibility, some of his courtiers were concerned that the Scots might one day accede to the throne of England.

14:47And he simply said, the greater will always draw the lesser. But Murray, how does this play out practically in terms of Scotland and England? You've now got a Scotsman on the throne of both countries, but it doesn't mean that the two countries are one country. It doesn't mean that Scots can have any access to the English colonies. No, it doesn't, though. This is at an early stage under James. And James, just like James II, tries to ensure that Scots do have access to the overseas colonies through direct imperial intervention. But the first thing he does is his instinct is to centralize. First of all, he talks up the prospect of a fuller union, probably not quite the way the 1707 union panned out, but a fuller union between England and Scotland.

15:34And that's rejected by England fundamentally. And one of the interesting things is that Magna Carta reappears after a very long absence, getting on for 200 years from English political discourse, as a reason why Scotland can never be united to England. because English common law and the rights of Magna Carta cannot accept the Scottish legal system. And James himself doesn't really understand the limitations on his power, does he, when he arrives in England? He's trying to exceed his powers in the eyes of Parliament. Well, he is trying to exceed his powers in the eyes of Parliament to an extent.

16:11But on the other hand, I think one would say there are a lot of other things operating. There's an increased radicalization of Protestant opinion. And James is not a friend of Presbyterianism in Scotland. He's not a friend of Puritan Anglicanism or anything outside it in England either. And the increasing importance of confessional politics is one of the things which is driving wedges between the monarchy and the constitution throughout Europe. So in a way, the conflict which eventually breaks in the British Isles in the late 1630s with the Bishop's War in Scotland, which becomes known by many as the English Civil War, is in a way a British front of the Thirty Years' War, because the same things are happening throughout Europe, that religion and confession issues are driving constitutions apart.

16:59Okay. Now, you've pulled us forward 100 years, and I'm glad you have. James is fascinating. But, you know, despite having had a Scottish king on the English throne, Scotland by 1707 is impoverished. I mean, it is not doing well. Why is it doing so badly? So there are a number of reasons. First of all, fighting each other for half a century tends to cost quite a lot of money. But the English had too. Not for quite so long, because of course the Covenanters under Charles II create a great deal of economic disadvantage and unrest. We should just explain who the Covenanters are for those poor English people who haven't been well educated in our history, Murray.

17:38The Covenanters are those Presbyterians who refuse to be accommodated to the royalist government of Charles II because they believe that he's betrayed the covenant, which he signed. And the covenant was the reason that Scotland effectively entered the English dimension of the Civil War. So a lot of those big battles, Maston Moor, Naseby and so on, but particularly Maston Moor, are partly decided by the Scottish army, the army of the covenant. And the Covenanters don't like to pray inside churches. They pray in the open air despite the Scottish weather. Yes, they do, but they often pray in the open air because they're not permitted to pray in churches.

18:14That happened to Scottish Episcopalians in the next century. But to move on from the confessional basis, Scots have been fighting each other for half a century, more or less. A significant downturn, which is common to the European margins due to climate change, which Scotland have been struggling with for some time. And the large commercial enterprise of Darwin, though it didn't ruin Scotland, was an extra kicker to impoverishment. A country when it's down already. Yeah. I mean, I saw one absolutely astonishing figure. And tell me this sort of chimes with what you know, that, you know, you're talking about climate change, but crop failure killed as many as 15 % of Scotland's population.

18:50I mean, that's just a nutty figure. Absolutely. The 1690s had a big famine. But the other thing I would just mention is that although not yet yoked to English foreign policy, Scottish foreign policy was compromised by the fact that the Crown appointed diplomats. And although the crown often appointed Scots, he didn't appoint them to represent Scotland, but Great Britain. And so Scotland was losing diplomatic influence. And at the stage where, say, 32 % of its overseas trade is with the Netherlands, and the three Anglo-Dutch wars between 1650 and 1680, you can see that there's a perfect storm there, which is going to seriously affect the economy, which is already suffering.

19:32Murray, just lay out for us quite how poor Scotland is? I mean, where is it on the European League table? Is it similar to sort of Scots football today or where are we? It depends how you rate Scots football. And I think if all the games stopped in the 85th minute things would look rather better. True story, by the way. Anyone who follows football knows what a bitterly true story that is. So, Scotland is, by the late 17th century, turn of the 18th century, better off than Ireland not nearly as well off as the Netherlands or France, probably somewhere roughly in the Central European kind of orbit.

20:16It's probably roughly comparable with Lithuania. It's probably roughly comparable with Norway. It's not as well off as Denmark or Sweden. But significantly behind England. It's a much poorer country. It's a much poorer country. But very interestingly, I know we're dealing with the 18th century, But in the 13th or 14th centuries, it's very clear that the papal taxation rates the diocese of St. Andrews roughly the same as Canterbury. So it has fallen hard and fallen far. Okay, so I mean, you've got Scotland now economically battered. You've got the promise of power and a seat and a voice at the table has been thwarted.

20:54So is there one particular thing that pushes Scotland or is this like a perfect storm of bad luck, which pushes Scotland to say, you know what, we're not going to do this on our own.

21:09So if we tie ourselves, we marry, if you like, in the acts of union, England, we just do that. The impetus to do that didn't come really from Scotland. I think the failure of Darien is a factor. How much in the end of the Scottish economy is sunk into Darien? There are 3 ,000 subscribers. I'm not sure about some of the calculations that are breached about, but if we just say that in Scotland, the number of subscribers to Darien exceeds the combined number of subscribers in England to the Bank of England and the East India Company. And per capita, of course, that's much worse. You're getting a sense of the huge amount of surplus capital that's been deposited in Darien.

21:50It's a hopeless scheme. It was a great idea if you had a lot more soldiers in Spain and none. And better cannons not made out of shoe leather. You know, things like that would have been useful. They were quite popular at the time because they were awfully portable. The trouble was they overheated in five seconds and then they collapsed. I mean, it's a fundamental problem, Murray, I'd suggest. When you're firing a cannon, you know. They may overheat when they're fired, it's true, but never mind. Great Scottish Inventions, Part 94. So, if I may bring in the dear old Viscount stare. Ah, you better explain who he is, too, to the English.

22:27Yes. So he's one of the prominent politicians of Scotland in the 1690s, and a member of a very famous Scottish family. Go on. Oh, he's doing He's doing his preening. Go on, spit it out. It's William Durham Poole, isn't it? The Durham Poole's are coming into it. He's a member of the Durham Poole family. He's a graduate of the University of Glasgow. We've got a little pluck to his codification of the law of Scotland. But that actually his responsibility or perceived responsibility and indeed failure to stop the subsequent inquiry into the massacre at Glencoe is significant because it personally turned William in favour of union, that an act he had signed off was under an inquiry of the Scottish Parliament regarded as murder under trust.

23:14Murray, again, you better explain Glencoe, one of the less glorious moments in our Drimple history. The massacre of Glencoe, some supporters of the Macdonalds of Glencoe, who did not swear their allegiance to the new king in preference to the old one, James VII and II in time, time were massacred. Fewer of them were massacred than was intended. But what was worse was that the soldiers, Scottish army soldiers, were billeted on them for two weeks before they massacred them. And these were Campbells? They were Bredalban. The Bredalban Campbells sent by a certain Viscount Stair. Yes. So this is something which is described formally in Scotland as murder under trust.

23:56Right. It's an accentuated form of treachery and massacre because it happens when hospitality is being offered to the people who are killing you. And we should just sort of set the picture here. They billeted themselves on the McDonald's of Glencoe. And after two weeks of eating their porridge and drinking their whiskey. And sharing stories and, you know, conviviality. And sharing stories and all that stuff. The signal was given, I think, at 3 a.m. to rise up and kill their hosts in their beds. It's really not a very honourable… Men, women and children. And your forebear gave the order. Well, that's a controversial point, but he was sadly involved.

24:33Own it. Own it. Okay. Murray, give a neutral picture of this. I'm sure that there were many people responsible. And I actually used it as part of a field lecture to the British Army Reserve on the difficulties of reconciling military and political command and control systems. Murray, I love you all the more for this. Letting me off the hook like that. Yes, okay. So I'll take that as a yes. We should also say the massacre of Glencoe is the model for the Red Wedding in Game of Thrones. For those who haven't known their Scottish history but do watch Game of Thrones. Right, which makes you a Lannister.

25:07But anyway, look, so you said the impetus for union didn't come from Scotland. So, I mean, let's slip into Queen Anne's story because that seems to be quite instructive. And there's one of the most central figures of her age and somebody who passionately believed and wanted union. So we're talking about the dates now, just to remind people where we're at. It's 1702 to 1707 we're talking about. So she's the daughter of James II of England. She's the sister of Mary, who is the wife of William of Oran. Just to give you some context, because all of these families around Europe are very, very intertwined.