Darien & the Act of Union

1. Was pre-Union Scotland backward? The historians' debate

For most of the three centuries after 1707, historians saw the Union as Scotland's rescue from a backward past. The Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Roper restated the view forcefully in the 1970s, calling the seventeenth century "the darkest age of Scottish history", dominated by a feudal nobility, a fanatical clergy and an "arrested economy". In the Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History (2012), Karin Bowie summarises a generation of research that has overturned this picture. Scotland before 1707, she concludes, was "not medieval but distinctly early modern". It simply did not change in the same ways as England, which older historians treated as the measure of modernity.

Society was changing. Feuing in the Lowlands and wadsetting in the Highlands (loans to landowners secured on land) created many smaller landholders, known as heritors. A literate "middling sort" of lairds, lawyers, ministers, merchants and craftsmen was growing: R. A. Houston found that urban craftsmen and tradesmen reached about 85 per cent literacy by the 1690s. The advocates were incorporated as the Faculty of Advocates by 1672, and the physicians founded their Royal College in 1681. The state reached further into the localities through kirk sessions, Privy Council commissions and the new circuit courts of 1672, while armed feuding by Lowland nobles faded in the early seventeenth century. Politics was not just a game for nobles: from the Covenant of 1637–39 to the Union, popular opinion, petitioning and print kept breaking into it.

Intellectual life did not stop when the court left for London in 1603. Sir Thomas Craig wrote on feudal law and on the case for legal union in 1603–05; Stair (1681) and Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh (1684) set out the distinctiveness of Scots law; Sir Robert Sibbald corresponded with scientists in England, Paris and the Netherlands. Even the Gaelic-speaking minister of Aberfoyle, Robert Kirk, contributed a study of fairies to British debates about spirits. The Kirk was not uniformly fanatical: Bishop Robert Leighton sponsored talks with Presbyterian dissenters in 1669–72, and moderate figures on both sides helped settle the church after 1690. The hanging of Thomas Aikenhead for blasphemy in 1697 was intolerant, but Bowie notes that it was also a panic over a real current of deism among educated laymen.

The economy remains the sharpest debate. Agriculture was improving slowly, helped by Acts of the 1660s and 1695; cattle droving to England, coal, salt and linen grew; Parliament tried to foster manufactures between 1641 and 1681. But the Union of the Crowns tied Scotland to English wars with its best trading partners, the Dutch and French, while English Navigation Acts shut Scots out of colonial trade. The 1690s brought war with France, a 50 per cent rise in the land tax in 1690, a hearth tax, poll taxes in 1693, 1695 and 1698, a run of failed harvests, higher English tariffs on Scottish linen in 1698, and the loss of capital in Darien. One school, following T. C. Smout and Christopher Whatley, sees these blows as exposing deep weaknesses that made union look like the only way out. Another, led by T. M. Devine and Allan Macinnes, stresses Scottish resilience: trade networks in Poland-Lithuania, Scandinavia and Ulster, colonies in South Carolina (1684) and East New Jersey (1685), and evasion of the Navigation Acts so effective that, Macinnes argues, by 1705 it was the English who wanted economic union to bring Scottish colonial trade under control.

2. Background: the "Ill Years" and the Company of Scotland

Card #15 closed on the "Ill Years" — the famine of the 1690s, Scotland's last great subsistence crisis, in which failed harvests in 1695, 1696, 1698 and 1699 and a war-related trade slump killed an estimated 5–15% of the population. That is the backdrop: a small, poor kingdom, excluded by the English Navigation Acts from trading freely with England's colonies, desperate for an economic escape route.

The answer, for many, was overseas trade. On 26 June 1695 the Scottish Parliament chartered the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies, financed by subscriptions from investors. Its guiding spirit was William Paterson, a Dumfriesshire-born merchant-financier who had co-founded the Bank of England in 1694 (serving briefly as a director before resigning in 1695). This dual connection — founder of the institution that underpinned English state finance, and architect of the scheme that nearly bankrupted Scotland — is one of the great ironies of the period, and it is well attested.

The Company originally intended to raise around £600,000, half from Scotland and half from investors in London, Amsterdam and Hamburg. Under pressure from English commercial interests — especially the East India Company, fearful of a rival — King William and the English Parliament turned against the venture, and the English and Dutch money was withdrawn. Stung by this treatment, Scots resolved to fund it alone. By August 1696 they had subscribed roughly £400,000 — a figure repeatedly estimated at about a fifth to a quarter of all the money then circulating in Scotland. National Museums Scotland states the failure cost Scotland "a quarter of its liquid capital," Other estimates place the subscribed sum at about a fifth of circulating money; these ratios are approximate. Investment came from nobles, merchants, burghs and ordinary people; the burgh of Haddington, for instance, subscribed £400. The scale of participation is the key to understanding why the disaster reverberated through the whole of Scottish society.

3. The strategic logic of Darien

Paterson's vision was genuinely ambitious. A colony on the Isthmus of Panama — at Darien, on the Gulf of Darién — would command a short overland route between the Atlantic and Pacific, allowing goods to cross the isthmus rather than round Cape Horn. It was, in principle, the same logic that centuries later produced the Panama Railroad and Panama Canal. Control of such an entrepôt promised to make Scotland a hub of world trade. The commercial vision could not overcome fundamental strategic and practical obstacles: the terrain was disease-ridden jungle, the Spanish already claimed it, and the planning was woefully inadequate.

4. The first expedition (1698) and its failures

Five ships and about 1,200 colonists sailed from Leith on 14 July 1698, to a rapturous send-off; the destination was kept secret in sealed orders opened only after Madeira. They made landfall on 2 November 1698, named the territory Caledonia, and began building New Edinburgh and Fort St Andrew.

The failures were numerous and, in hindsight, systemic:

Unsuitable trade goods. The colonists carried goods hopelessly ill-suited to a hot, humid isthmus and to trade with the Guna (Kuna) people or passing ships — including combs, mirrors, heavy woollen cloth, wigs, shoes and Bibles. National Museums Scotland records that the Guna "refused to buy combs and trinkets" and rejected the linen, stockings and shoes. (Historians such as Douglas Watt caution that some of these items — wigs and Bibles — were for the settlers' own use, and that the more lurid "4,000 periwigs" claims trace to a hostile deserter, Walter Herries; but the underlying point of poor commercial planning stands.)

Disease. Malaria, yellow fever and dysentery cut through the colony. Paterson's own wife died within days of landing.

Food and leadership. Provisions spoiled; governance rotated chaotically; morale collapsed.

Spanish opposition. Spain regarded the settlement as an illegal encroachment on its claimed territory and moved against it.

5. English hostility and King William III's role, examined

This is a point often oversimplified, so precision matters. William III (William II of Scotland) was simultaneously King of both kingdoms and, crucially, was pursuing an alliance with Spain against France; he did not want to provoke war with Spain over a Scottish colony. His government therefore issued a proclamation instructing English colonies in the Americas and the Caribbean not to supply, aid or trade with the Scottish settlement. National Museums Scotland confirms the proclamation "instructed English plantations in the Americas and the Indies not to supply the Scottish settlement."

The practical effect was devastating: cut off from the nearest sources of resupply — Jamaica, New York, the English Caribbean islands — the colony could not sustain itself. It is important to state this carefully: William's policy was a decision of state driven by European diplomacy, not (as popular accounts sometimes imply) personal malice toward Scotland. But its consequences for the colonists were fatal, and it became a lasting grievance that poisoned Anglo-Scottish relations in the years before the Union.

6. Abandonment and the tragic timing of the relief expedition

After about eight months, in June 1699, the surviving first colonists abandoned New Edinburgh — only around 300 of the 1,200 were still alive, and just one ship ultimately made it home. The tragedy was compounded by timing: news travelled slowly, and a second expedition had already sailed from Scotland before word of the first colony's collapse arrived. Relief ships reaching Caledonia were "welcomed by four hundred lonely graves." The survivors sailed away — scattering to New York and Jamaica — without knowing reinforcements were on their way. It is one of the cruellest near-misses in Scottish history.

7. The second expedition and final collapse

The second expedition — about 1,300 colonists — reached the deserted, overgrown colony on 30 November 1699. Determined to hold on, they rebuilt. But disease returned, and the Spanish, now resolved to expel the intruders, closed in. In a burst of resolute leadership under Alexander Campbell of Fonab, the Scots stormed the Spanish position at Toubacanti on 11 February 1700. It was a brief success. A Spanish force then besieged Fort St Andrew for about a month, also blockading the harbour, until the Scots surrendered in March–April 1700. They were permitted to leave with their arms; the colony was abandoned for the last time. Many died on the voyages home.

8. The scale of the disaster

Across both expeditions roughly 2,500 colonists sailed. National Museums Scotland states that "2,500 settlers had set off from Scotland but only a few hundred survived," and elsewhere records that the venture "cost 2,000 lives and lost Scotland a quarter of its liquid capital." Only a handful ever returned to Scotland, and only one of the original ships made it home. (Some sources, such as the University of Glasgow, give an even bleaker survival estimate; the discrepancy turns on whether one counts those who survived the venture — many settling in New York or Jamaica — or only those who actually reached Scotland again.)

Financially, the bulk of the roughly £400,000 raised was lost. Douglas Watt's The Price of Scotland (2007), the definitive modern financial study, reassessed the Company using its own records and argues that over-ambition and mismanagement — not simply English malice — doomed the venture. Because the Company was backed by around a fifth to a quarter of the money circulating in Scotland, its collapse ruined nobles, merchants and burghs alike, on top of the famine years, and left the landed and mercantile classes financially exposed and demoralised. This is the essential link to what followed.

9. The Equivalent and the direct financial link to Union

Here is the mechanism most often garbled in popular accounts. As part of the Treaty of Union, Scotland was to receive a lump sum known as "the Equivalent": £398,085 10s, set out in Article 15 of the Treaty. Its stated purpose was twofold:

To compensate Scotland for taking on a share of England's national debt (England's debt was large; Scotland’s public debt was much smaller), and to cover recoinage costs and public debts; and

To compensate investors, including Darien investors, for their losses — shareholders and creditors of the Company of Scotland were to receive a majority share of the Equivalent. As the standard account records, "Shareholders in and creditors of the company were to receive about 59% of The Equivalent."

The significance is direct: many members of the Scottish Parliament and nobility had invested in the Company and stood to recover losses through the Equivalent. This created a genuine financial incentive to support union. But two cautions are essential. First, the Equivalent was calculated as compensation for assuming English debt liability, not simply as a Darien refund — it was a structured fiscal settlement. Second, much of it was paid not in cash but in Exchequer bills and debentures, some trading at a discount. The Equivalent is best understood as a real and rational inducement bound up with legitimate fiscal calculation — not as a straightforward bribe.

10. The Alien Act and the succession crisis

The other half of the story is dynastic and coercive. When Queen Anne's last surviving child, the Duke of Gloucester, died in 1700, the succession became urgent. The English Act of Settlement (1701) settled the English throne on Sophia, Electress of Hanover, and her Protestant heirs — without consulting Scotland. The Scottish Parliament retaliated with the Act of Security (royal assent 5 August 1704), asserting that on Anne's death Scotland could choose a different Protestant successor from the Scottish royal line unless Scottish trade, religious and political concerns were met.

This raised a real prospect: after Anne's death, England and Scotland might diverge onto different monarchs — potentially reopening the door to a French-backed Stuart in Scotland during the War of the Spanish Succession. For England this was a strategic nightmare, and it was a central driver of English support for full incorporating union.

England's instrument of pressure was the Alien Act (1705). It threatened that unless Scotland either entered union negotiations or accepted the Hanoverian succession by 25 December 1705, Scots would be treated as aliens in England, Scottish estates in England as alien property, and major Scottish exports (linen, cattle, coal — roughly half of Scotland's trade) would be embargoed. Critically, the Act contained a suspension clause: the threat would be lifted if Scotland agreed to negotiate. This was calculated diplomatic-economic coercion — the "stick" that brought Scotland to the table, paired with the "carrot" of free trade and the Equivalent.

11. The negotiation and passage of the Treaty of Union

Commissioners for both kingdoms negotiated the Treaty in 1706 (drafted in April, substantially agreed by July 1706). Tellingly, the commissioners were largely chosen from among those already sympathetic to union, and the Scots did not choose their own team freely — the negotiation was, in practice, weighted toward the outcome England wanted.

Over the winter of 1706–07 the Scottish Parliament debated the 25 articles one by one. On 4 November 1706 it approved Article 1 — the principle of an incorporating union — by 116 to 83. On 12 November it passed a separate Act of Security for the Kirk, guaranteeing the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, which was decisive in calming religious opposition. The Treaty as a whole was ratified on 16 January 1707, by 110 votes to 67. The union took effect on 1 May 1707.

The crucial distinction. The 1707 union was fundamentally different in kind from the 1603 Union of the Crowns (Card #14). In 1603, James VI of Scotland inherited the English throne: the two kingdoms shared a monarch but kept entirely separate parliaments, laws and institutions — a personal/dynastic union. In 1707, the separate Scottish and English parliaments were replaced by a single new Parliament of Great Britain at Westminster: a genuine incorporating political union creating one state. Scotland sent 45 MPs to the Commons and 16 representative peers to the Lords. In return, the Treaty explicitly preserved three pillars of distinct Scottish life: the separate Scots legal system and Court of Session, the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, and the continued existence of Scotland's universities under the accompanying religious-security legislation. These protections are why Scotland retained a distinct civil identity within the united state.

The Act for Securing the Protestant Religion and Presbyterian Church Government was made a fundamental condition of union. Alongside Presbyterian government, it guaranteed the continued existence of the Scottish universities as then established by law; this is more precise than claiming that every aspect of a modern education system was expressly protected by the Treaty.

12. Why did the Union pass? Three centuries of argument

Clare Jackson's survey of Union historiography in the Oxford Handbook traces how explanations have swung. In 1907 Peter Hume Brown's bicentenary essays agreed that the Union was "inevitable, and at the same time, desirable". In the 1960s William Ferguson attacked this "inevitability thesis", calling the Union "probably the greatest 'political job' of the eighteenth century". Patrick Riley went further in the 1970s, describing a Union endorsed "by men of limited vision for very short-term and comparatively petty, if not squalid, aims". By the tercentenary of 2007, most historians agreed with Christopher Whatley that this cynicism had gone too far. Whatley and Derek Patrick argue that the Union came as much from "persistence and principle as patronage and prostitution".

Union had a long Scottish pedigree. Talks in 1670 produced proposals strikingly similar to those of 1707. After the Revolution of 1689 the Convention of Estates itself appointed union commissioners, and Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, later the Union's most famous opponent, admitted in January 1689 that he could not conceive "any true settlement but by uniting with England in Parliaments". For many Scots, union was a way to secure the gains of 1689: a Protestant monarchy, a Presbyterian church and protection against a Catholic Jacobite restoration.

Voting analysis supports this. Whatley and Patrick found a strong link between the post-Revolution "Revolution interest" and support for the Union: a court party of about ninety members, plus the squadrone volante, a group of about twenty-five whose switch to the Union side was decisive. Economics mattered too. Article IV, which granted free trade, won the largest majority of any article (154 to 19). Iain McLean and Alistair McMillan found "surprisingly little direct association" between voting for the Union and holding Darien stock. They also noted how members voted to cut their own representation. 112 of 157 shire and burgh commissioners voted to reduce Scotland's Commons members to 45, and 144 of 166 nobles voted to reduce the peers to 16: in their phrase, "turkeys voting for Christmas (albeit with many receiving a huge stuffing)".

Religion and public opinion shaped the outcome. Church matters were deliberately kept out of the negotiations, but pressure from the Kirk forced the Act for Securing the Protestant Religion and Presbyterian Church Government (12 November 1706), which quietened most Presbyterian opposition. Karin Bowie has counted 79 petitions from 116 shires, burghs, parishes and presbyteries, bearing over 20,000 signatures, most of them against the Treaty. She argues that public opinion helped to create the crisis and won concessions, such as Article XXIV, which kept the regalia and public records in Scotland. Women are almost invisible in the records, as they could not usually sign petitions, though Daniel Defoe claimed that among Presbyterian opponents "the women are the instructers and the men are meer machines wound up".

Nor was the choice simply union or independence. Pamphleteers explored many alternatives. Fletcher proposed a confederal "United Provinces of Great Britain". James Hodges in 1703 discussed models ranging from the Auld Alliance to the Polish-Lithuanian, Dutch and Swiss unions. Colin Kidd has called the debates of 1698–1707 "an intra-unionist conversation". It was the English commissioners in 1706 who refused anything but full incorporation.

13. Public reaction and the bribery question, examined

The Union was widely unpopular among ordinary Scots. Anti-union petitions poured into Parliament from shires, burghs, presbyteries and parishes, and from the Convention of Royal Burghs — and, strikingly, not a single petition in favour of an incorporating union was received. There were riots and disorder in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dumfries and elsewhere; martial-law measures were taken against unrest. The unionist negotiator Sir John Clerk of Penicuik admitted the Treaty was "contrary to the inclinations of at least three-fourths of the Kingdom."

So was Scotland bribed into union? This must be handled with care. The bribery story originates largely with George Lockhart of Carnwath, the sole anti-union member of the Scottish negotiating team, whose Memoirs (1714) alleged, as recorded in the parliamentary record, "that there was a total sum of £20,540 … spent more or less directly or indirectly under one pretence or another in bribery." Modern scholarship — above all Christopher Whatley (Bought and Sold for English Gold? and The Scots and the Union) — has scrutinised this and found the simple "bribery" narrative wanting:

Of the roughly £20,000, some £12,325 went to a single man, the Duke of Queensberry — the Queen's Commissioner — who had publicly backed union years earlier, and much of it functioned as reimbursement of expenses/salary.

Of the remaining £7,700 shared among twenty-nine members, "seventeen were heavily in arrears, and the sum they received was actually only a small portion of what the Scottish government owed them in unpaid wages."

Lockhart himself relegated the allegation to an appendix, but its placement alone cannot establish how much weight he gave the allegation.

Whatley's influential reassessment is that "the long-held and popular notion that the Scots were bought and sold for English gold seems not to stand up to close scrutiny," and that supporting politicians were driven by a mix of economic calculation, fear of the succession crisis, and genuine (if contested) conviction about Scotland's long-term interests. That is not to say money and patronage played no role — they clearly did, and the Equivalent gave interested parties a real stake. The accurate formulation is: political and economic self-interest, coercion and calculation all mattered; the documented payments do not by themselves establish that decisive votes were purchased; historians differ on the weight of patronage, interest and conviction.

The most famous line of the closing scene belongs to the Lord Chancellor, the Earl of Seafield (James Ogilvy), who is traditionally said to have remarked, as the Treaty was signed/Parliament closed, "Now there's ane end of ane auld sang." The phrase is traditionally attributed to him; it captures the elegiac mood — the end of Scotland's ancient independent Parliament. (Note that it is variously reported at the 16 January signing and at the Parliament's final proceedings in March; the exact occasion is reported inconsistently.)

14. Robert Burns's later literary characterization

The verdict most people "know" — that Scotland was sold out by corrupt aristocrats — comes not from 1707 but from Robert Burns's song "Such a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation," generally dated to 1791, more than eighty years after the event, and published (unattributed) in Johnson's Scots Musical Museum in 1792. Its most quoted lines — "We're bought and sold for English gold — / Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!" — are a powerful piece of late-eighteenth-century patriotic polemic, drawing on the Jacobite tradition of blaming the "thirty-one rogues" (the Scottish commissioners).

The distinction matters: Burns's line is an influential literary and political interpretation of the Union, composed generations later, not contemporary evidence about the actual motives of individual parliamentarians. Its cultural power is part of the history of how the Union has been remembered, not proof of the motives of individual voters.

15. An unresolved constitutional question

Whether the Union is a fundamental law has been argued since 1707. Opponents revived Sir George Mackenzie's argument of the 1670s that "parliaments cannot overturn fundamentals", denying that the Scottish Parliament could vote itself out of existence by a simple majority. In the twentieth century the Scottish jurist T. B. Smith called the Union a "fundamental law" of the British state, above ordinary Acts of Parliament. The opposing view, associated with the English jurist A. V. Dicey, held that Westminster is sovereign and that "neither the Act of Union with Scotland, nor the Dentists Act, 1878, has more claim than the other to be considered a supreme law". The question has come before the courts in cases such as MacCormick v. Lord Advocate (1953) and Gibson v. Lord Advocate (1975) without being finally settled.