Scots Abroad: Leiden, Paris & the Scots Colleges

• Paris came first. In 1325 David, Bishop of Moray, endowed bursaries at the University of Paris for students from his diocese, paid for by a farm at Grisy. This "College of Grisy" was a fund rather than a building. A Scots College with its own house followed in 1602, when Archbishop James Beaton bought premises in the Rue des Amandiers.
• Scotland had no university until 1413. Before St Andrews was founded, Scots who wanted higher education had to go abroad, mainly to Paris and Oxford.
• Catholic seminaries kept the old faith alive. Scots Colleges were founded in Rome (1600) and Madrid (1627, moved to Valladolid in 1771 and to Salamanca in 1988), with others at Douai and elsewhere. They trained priests for a Catholic minority after the Reformation.
• A "sixth Scottish university". Historian Tom McInally argues that the colleges abroad together worked as a university for Scottish Catholics. Their surviving registers name 1,749 students between 1575 and 1799. Of these, 561 were ordained or entered religious orders, and 248 are known to have served as missionaries in Scotland.
• Alumni went far beyond the priesthood. Former students included the architect James Gibbs, who studied briefly at the Scots College in Rome, and the Benedictine Andreas Gordon, a pioneer of electrical experiment at Erfurt.
• Leiden trained Scots lawyers and doctors. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many Scottish law students learned Roman law in the Netherlands, which shaped Scots law's civilian character. Leiden's medical school under Herman Boerhaave trained the founders of Edinburgh's medical school, including Alexander Monro primus.
• The traffic ran both ways. Scots taught abroad too: John Mair (John Major) at Paris, George Buchanan in France and Portugal, and Archibald Pitcairne at Leiden (1692).
• And westward. From the 1750s Scottish graduates led American colleges, Americans came to Edinburgh to study medicine, and Scottish textbooks, above all Hugh Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric, became standard in American colleges (Andrew Hook, Scotland and America, 1975).

Medieval Scots scholars were part of a European Latin world. They studied arts and theology in Paris, and some rose high there. The Scots College gave poor Scottish students a base. After St Andrews (1413), Glasgow (1451) and Aberdeen (1495) were founded, Scots had universities at home, but Paris kept its pull. John Mair, the Haddington-born philosopher, taught there in the early sixteenth century.

The Reformation of 1560 made Catholicism illegal in Scotland. For a few years King's College, Aberdeen stayed Catholic. In 1569, though, its principal and senior staff refused to sign the Protestant Confession of Faith and were removed. From then on no institution in Scotland would teach Catholic doctrine. To train priests, Catholics founded Scots Colleges abroad. Priests trained there returned secretly to serve Catholic communities, especially in the Highlands and the north-east. The Rome and Spanish colleges still exist.

The first move came from Mary, Queen of Scots, then a prisoner in England. In 1575 her ambassador, John Leslie, Bishop of Ross, asked Pope Gregory XIII for permission to found a seminary for Scots. A college was set up in Paris in 1580. The following year, before any students had enrolled, it moved to Pont-à-Mousson in Lorraine. Mary's Guise relatives ran a Jesuit college there, and Mary paid for the Scots from the income of her French estates. Its superior was the Scottish Jesuit William Crichton.

Mary's execution in 1587 left the college without its patron, and it soon collapsed. Crichton revived it at Louvain in 1593, and in 1597 he moved it to Douai in the Spanish Netherlands. Douai was already a centre for English and Irish Catholic exiles. The Scots college there, named for St Andrew, could house about twenty students and staff, and over 800 names survive in its register. It mostly took boys in their early teens and acted as a junior college. For a time its superiors were Flemish Jesuits; only from 1632 were Scots accepted as its heads.

Rome followed. Pope Clement VIII founded the Pontifical Scots College by a bull of 5 December 1600, using the property of the old Scots pilgrim hospice and giving it a papal endowment. It had eleven students in 1602, who were taught at the Jesuit Collegio Romano. Jesuits ran it from 1615.

In Paris, Archbishop James Beaton of Glasgow, Mary's former ambassador to France, bought a house in 1602 for Scottish scholars. He left the rest of his estate to support "poor students of the Scotch nation". The Paris college merged with the old Grisy bursaries and stayed under secular, non-Jesuit, principals until the French Revolution.

The Spanish college had the most colourful founder. Colonel William Semple, born in 1546, had served Mary as a young man. He later fought for the Dutch while secretly spying for Spain, and in 1582 he helped hand the town of Lier to the Spanish. Spain repaid him slowly, and in 1613 it settled the debt with two houses in Madrid. With his Spanish wife, Doña Maria de Ledesma, he signed a deed of foundation in 1627, although Pope Urban VIII had said a further Scots college was unnecessary. The first students arrived from Douai in 1633. Madrid produced few missionaries, because most of its students joined the Jesuits. In 1734 its students were sent to Douai, and the Spanish Jesuits kept the property. After Spain expelled the Jesuits in 1767, the Scottish bishops sent John Geddes to recover it. He re-established the college in the former Jesuit college of San Ambrosio in Valladolid, which took its first students from Scotland in 1770.

A separate network served Scots who wanted to become monks: the Schottenklöster. These were German monasteries of Irish origin that had come into Scottish hands. In 1577 Pope Gregory XIII made Ninian Winzet, the former schoolmaster of Linlithgow, abbot of St James's in Regensburg. Scots monks took over Würzburg in 1595, and there was a third house at Erfurt.

In The Sixth Scottish University (2012), Tom McInally argues that the colleges functioned as a single university, even though none had that name. Scotland already had five: St Andrews, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and King's and Marischal Colleges in Aberdeen. In the Paris rector Robert Barclay's time, the colleges were coordinated into what McInally calls "a coherent unified force". Juniors studied the Trivium, the arts course, often at Douai. Older students went on to philosophy and theology, mainly in Rome and later in Valladolid. Teaching followed the Jesuit plan of studies, the Ratio Studiorum.

McInally's analysis of the registers gives a picture of who went:

• Men and boys only. No women were ever enrolled.
• Mostly young. Over 40 per cent of students were 15 or under when they first enrolled, and the usual age was 12 to 17. Only a quarter were adults, so most went abroad with their families' consent and money.
• Catholics, carefully checked. Rectors feared spies. Alexander Gordon, a Presbyterian minister, was refused at Paris, Rome and Würzburg in 1657. He got into the Regensburg monastery in 1658, then went home and boasted about spying on it. Still, at least forty genuine converts were admitted.
• Scots, loosely defined. Madrid's rules required birth in Scotland or a Scottish parent. Douai admitted the Young brothers in 1731–32 on the strength of a Scottish grandfather, even though the family had become "Le Jeune". The colleges also took sons of English, Irish and Welsh Jacobite exiles.

Intake averaged eight to ten new students a year, and it rose and fell with events at home. It peaked in the 1620s, when the penal laws were harshly enforced and nearly a third of entrants were over 21. It rose again in the 1680s under the Catholic James VII, when half of new entrants were under 15. There was a third peak in the 1730s, driven by Gaelic-speaking students from the Highlands and Hebrides. Intake slumped in the 1700s, after bad harvests and during war with France; Madrid recorded no new students for the whole decade. It fell again after Culloden. Secret junior seminaries at home, Scalan in Glenlivet and a wandering Highland seminary that ended up on Lismore, also reduced the need to send young boys abroad.

Not every student became a priest. The registers record 125 former students in the service of foreign states, two-thirds of them as army officers, and 68 who made their names as scholars. Among them was Thomas Dempster, a brilliant and boastful humanist, and George Strachan, a founding student of the Rome college. From 1613 Strachan travelled through the Ottoman, Persian and Mughal empires and became a leading European expert in oriental languages.

James Gibbs (1682–1754) was the son of a Catholic Aberdeen merchant. He studied at Marischal College and in 1703 enrolled at the Scots College in Rome, aged 21. He left after about ten months, unwilling to take the oath to serve as a missionary, and stayed in Rome to train under the architect Carlo Fontana. Back in London he designed St Mary-le-Strand, St Martin-in-the-Fields, the Senate House at Cambridge and the Radcliffe Camera at Oxford. His Book of Architecture (1728) spread his designs across colonial America. He seems to have stayed a Catholic in private: his will paid for masses for his soul, and he left much of his estate to the Jacobite painter Cosmo Alexander.

Andreas Gordon (1712–1751) was born George Gordon at Coffurach near Fochabers. He was sent to the Regensburg monastery at the age of 12, and took a chair of philosophy at the University of Erfurt in 1737, aged 25. There he built a friction electrical machine: a glass cylinder spun by a flywheel. He used it to stage demonstrations that drew crowds of students. He electrified a chain of people holding hands, and lit alcohol with a spark carried by a charged jet of water. His "electric bells", a charged clapper swinging between two oppositely charged bells, later became known as Franklin's bells. His "electric whirl", a star-shaped wheel turned by discharges from its points, is often cited as an early electrostatic motor. Gordon used these results to argue that Aristotle's physics could not explain electricity, and German Jesuit professors accused him of error. The Archbishop of Mainz silenced the dispute, and Gordon went on working. He was elected to scientific academies at Perugia and, McInally says, in France. He died of tuberculosis in 1751, aged 39. His pupil Ildephonse Kennedy was a founder of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and served as its secretary for about forty years.

The colleges also touched the Scottish Enlightenment directly. David Hume worked in the Scots College in Paris from 1763 to 1765. Its principal, John Gordon, let him use the papers of James VII for his History of England. One of the students Hume met there was Alexander Geddes, later a pioneering and controversial biblical scholar. Geddes's cousin, Bishop John Geddes, met Robert Burns in Edinburgh in the winter of 1786–87. He signed up all the Scots colleges and monasteries abroad as subscribers to the Edinburgh edition of Burns's poems.

The French Revolution closed the colleges in Paris and Douai, and the Rome college was also shut during the French occupation. For about twenty years Valladolid was the only Scots college open on the Continent. At home, the Catholic Relief Act of 1793 began to ease the penal laws. In 1799 a new seminary opened at Aquhorties in Aberdeenshire, built with government help that McInally credits partly to Charles Erskine. Erskine was a Rome-born former student of the Scots College who went to London as papal envoy in 1793 and was later made a cardinal. Aquhorties was the forerunner of Blairs College, which inherited much of what survived of the colleges' archives and treasures.

McInally's judgement is that without the priests from the colleges, Catholicism would probably not have survived in Scotland as a community. By the late eighteenth century there were perhaps 30,000 Scottish Catholics, under 4 per cent of the population. They were concentrated in the Highlands, the Islands and the north-east, and many Highland Catholics then emigrated, especially to eastern Canada.

Protestant Scotland looked to the Dutch Republic, a fellow Calvinist trading partner. Leiden, founded in 1575, drew Scottish students of law, divinity and medicine. Scottish advocates commonly studied civil law in the Netherlands before admission to the bar, which helped give Scots law its Roman, or civilian, foundations.

In medicine, Herman Boerhaave's teaching at Leiden inspired a generation of Scots. Alexander Monro primus and his colleagues brought Leiden's model home when they founded Edinburgh's medical faculty in 1726, which went on to become one of the most famous in the world.

Steve Murdoch and Esther Mijers, in the Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History (2012), add detail. Scots were among the first students at Leiden after 1575, but large numbers came only from the mid-seventeenth century. The Thirty Years War (1618–48) devastated the German universities and redirected students towards Leiden. Numbers grew fast from the 1650s, helped by Protestant exiles after the Restoration of 1660 and a second wave in the 1680s, who used their student status for legal protection. Scottish attendance at the four Dutch universities peaked between 1680 and 1730, when a spell at Leiden was often the start of a Grand Tour rather than a degree course. Compared with matriculations at home, they write, the Dutch universities were "effectively a sixth Scottish university", the same phrase Tom McInally uses for the Scots Colleges, especially since many Scots studied there without matriculating. The Union of 1707 made little difference to these numbers; they fell later, as opportunities grew at home.

Religion did not draw rigid lines. The Scots College in Paris admitted Protestant students, even in 1638, and Leiden, though Protestant, attracted Scots of various backgrounds.

The traffic in learning also ran west. The literary historian Andrew Hook, in Scotland and America: A Study of Cultural Relations, 1750–1835 (1975), traces how Scottish teachers, students and textbooks shaped American colleges in the century after 1750.

established Scots who taught America. Scottish graduates founded or led several colonial colleges. James Blair, educated at Marischal College, Aberdeen, and at Edinburgh, was largely responsible for founding the College of William and Mary in 1693. William Smith, another Aberdonian, became first provost of the College of Philadelphia in 1755 and broadened its curriculum beyond training for the ministry. William Small, an Aberdeen graduate of 1755, taught Thomas Jefferson at William and Mary, and Jefferson credited him with fixing the course of his life. Jefferson, James Madison and John Marshall all had Scottish schoolmasters. John Witherspoon of Paisley became president of the College of New Jersey (Princeton) in 1768, and Charles Nisbet of Montrose first president of Dickinson College, Pennsylvania, in 1785. Nisbet's four courses, logic, philosophy of the mind, moral philosophy and belles-lettres, were the Scottish arts curriculum in miniature.

established Americans who studied in Scotland. In the other direction, Hook estimates that about a hundred Americans studied at Edinburgh before the Revolution, most of them in medicine, with some twenty at Glasgow and sixteen at King's and Marischal Colleges, Aberdeen. By 1776 Edinburgh had awarded 393 medical degrees, 42 of them to Americans. The first was John Moultrie of South Carolina in 1749. Benjamin Franklin, after his Scottish tour of 1759, steered young Philadelphians such as John Morgan, William Shippen and Benjamin Rush to Edinburgh rather than to Leiden. On their return they founded the first American medical school, at the College of Philadelphia, in 1765, on the Edinburgh model. Leiden had trained Edinburgh's founders; Edinburgh in turn trained America's.

established Scottish money for American colleges. In 1754 the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland authorised a collection at every church door for the College of New Jersey. It raised over £3,200, much of it spent on Nassau Hall. Similar appeals followed for the College of Philadelphia, King's College, New York, and the College of Rhode Island.

established The textbook export: Hugh Blair. After the Revolution the main export was books. Hugh Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), the published form of the course he had given at Edinburgh for more than twenty years, was printed at Philadelphia in 1784 and abridged at Albany in 1788. Counting full and abridged versions, Hook finds fifty-six American editions between 1805 and 1823 alone, many from small-town presses such as Morristown, New Jersey, whose "Sixth American" edition of 1814 was its only belles-lettres title in more than twenty years, and Brooklyn (1807, 1812). Yale set Blair from 1785 until at least 1824, Harvard from 1788, and by 1835 Brown, Union, William and Mary, Columbia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Middlebury, Williams, Amherst, Hamilton and Wesleyan had all used him, often alongside Lord Kames's Elements of Criticism. Some editions were "reduced to question and answer" for schools. The historian Richard Beale Davis found that almost every well-read Virginian used Blair as a textbook of composition and oratory.

established Philosophy follows. The same pattern held in philosophy. Thomas Reid's Essays were printed at Philadelphia in 1792, Dugald Stewart's Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind from 1793, and by the 1810s Harvard, Yale and Brown set Stewart. The division of philosophy into "mental" and "moral" in nineteenth-century American colleges came from Scotland.

shared What it meant. Hook argues that this Scottish teaching made American students value taste, correctness and elegance, which helped American oratory but may have slowed the growth of a native literary idiom. He also argues that the Revolution interrupted this influence only briefly: the main period of Scottish influence on American learning came after 1783, not before. Both are interpretations. Later scholarship, including Douglas Sloan (1971) and Henry May (1976), agrees that the Scottish contribution to American colleges was large, while placing it beside English and continental sources.

These links made Scotland unusually European in its learning. They shaped Scots law, the Scottish Enlightenment and the medical schools, and they left lasting institutions abroad.

• The Royal Scots College in Spain has moved twice: from Madrid to Valladolid, and then to Salamanca.
• Scottish advocates were often expected to have studied civil law on the Continent.
• George Buchanan, tutor to James VI, taught in France and Portugal.
• David Hume spent two years working in the archive of the Scots College in Paris.
• The founder of the Spanish college, Colonel William Semple, had been a double agent who helped hand a Dutch town to Spain.
• Andreas Gordon's machine was strong enough to electrify a whole chain of people holding hands. The Frenchman Abbé Nollet later repeated the trick with 200 Carthusian monks.
• James Gibbs's father once named two dogs Calvin and Luther. After the Revolution of 1688–89, Aberdeen's council put him on trial and ordered the dogs hanged.
• Bishop John Geddes put every Scots college abroad on the subscription list for Burns's poems.
• Hugh Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric went through fifty-six American editions in the eighteen years from 1805 to 1823.
• Benjamin Franklin persuaded young American doctors to study at Edinburgh rather than Leiden, so Leiden's influence reached America at one remove.

• Student numbers at continental universities are estimates.
• Individual careers are known mainly for elites.
• Some college histories rely on institutional accounts.
• The Paris founding date: "Founded in 1325" really refers to bursaries; the college as a house dates from 1602. McInally calls the founding bishop "David Innes", but most sources name him David de Moravia (Murray).
• Valladolid: McInally gives 1770 for the first students; the college itself and most accounts date the move to 1771.
• The Schottenklöster: McInally says they were dissolved by Napoleon's actions. Würzburg and Erfurt went in the secularisations of 1803, but St James's in Regensburg survived as a Scottish house until 1862.
• Andreas Gordon: McInally suggests that the Leyden jar was discovered by others repeating Gordon's experiments, and that he was a step away from it himself. That is his argument, not an established fact.
• American numbers: the figure of about a hundred Americans at Edinburgh before 1776 is Hook's approximation from matriculation and graduation records; many students did not graduate. Blair's fifty-six editions include abridgements.
• "University": many college students were taught at neighbouring Jesuit colleges, such as the Collegio Romano and the Colegio Imperial in Madrid. The "sixth university" is a description of function, not of degree-granting status.

• Scotland's Ancient Universities
• Scots Law — A Mixed Legal System
• Roman Law and Scots Law
• Scottish Medical Education as a Global Export