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Persistence, Principle and Patriotism in the
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Making of the Union of 1707: The Revolution,

Scottish Parliament and the squadrone volante
DEREK J. PATRICK and CHRISTOPHER A. WHATLEY
University of Dundee
Abstract
Since the 1960s most historians of the Union of 1707 have considered it a less than
glorious chapter in Scotland’s history. Driven by ambition and greed, Scots politicians,
covetous of English wealth and swayed by promises and bribes, bartered their nation’s
independence for personal gain. Those genuinely committed to political union were in
a minority. The following article maintains that this interpretation is based on an essen-
tially short-term approach to the subject. Concentrating on the worsening relations
between Scotland and England in the years immediately preceding the Union gives a
distorted impression of what was a more enduring concern. It suggests the Revolution
of 1688–9 had a far greater impact on the politics of union than previously anticipated,
with the religious and political freedoms it guaranteed shaping the beliefs of a large
number of Scots MPs who sat in Parliament 1706 –7, almost half of whom had been
members of King William’s Convention Parliament with a majority supporting union.
Focusing on the squadrone volante – one of the two much-maligned Scots unionist
parties – the article traces the ideological roots of its key members and illustrates the
various factors that led them to endorse an incorporating union which offered security
for presbyterianism and a solution to Scotland’s economic underdevelopment. Not
denying that management and ambition played a significant part in securing the Union,
it highlights the fact that amongst the Scottish political elite there was also a degree of
genuine commitment and principled support.
T
he explanations of historians as to the reasons why the Scottish
parliament voted for the Union of 1707 which created the United
Kingdom of Great Britain have altered significantly over time.
The dominant interpretation from the Victorian era until the 1960s was
that support for incorporating union amongst the leading Scottish poli-
ticians was based on their foresight and recognition of the necessity of
union. Union in this view was canonized as a crucial stage in British his-
tory, a constitutional stepping stone which placed Westminster at the
centre of Britain’s imperial rule; it was preceded by milestone events such
as Magna Carta and the Revolution of 1688 and followed by the Great
© 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 The Historical Association and Blackwell Publishing.
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DEREK J. PATRICK AND CHRISTOPHER A. WHATLEY 163
Reform Act of 1832.1 Thus a leading Scottish historian in 1962 could

comfortably write of the Union as being ‘grounded in common sense’,
and ‘one of the most statesmanlike transactions recorded in our history’. 2
From the 1960s and into the 1970s, Scotland’s politicians of the period
of the Union were subjected to Namierite-inspired scrutiny, and stripped
of their former historiographical dignity. Influenced by the stirrings of
nationalist sentiment in Scotland, historians rejected ideas of conver-
gence, ideological consensus or the shared revolution culture implicit in
the Whig historiographical tradition. A favoured interpretation now is
that union was a ‘political job’, a settlement which according to Colin
Kidd was arrived at ‘without reference to ideological imperatives’. 3 Reli-
gion as a factor that may have drawn Scots towards union has been ruled
out too.4 For most Scottish politicians, it is argued, confessional attach-
ment was simply a convenient cloak to be donned at will and in accordance
with the prevailing political wind.5 In this view, high-minded political
vision as motive is replaced by avarice. The Scottish political class, it is
alleged, was drawn to union with England by the prospect of personal
financial gain, places and promotions dangled before them by Queen
Anne’s ministers in the final two years of Scottish independence. 6 In
coming to this conclusion much emphasis is placed on the Jacobite
George Lockhart of Carnwath’s Memoirs, published in 1714. Lockhart
revealed that monies had been remitted from England to Scotland and
alleged that these had been ‘employed in bribing Members of Parliament’. 7
In more partisan versions of this analysis, assertions are made that less
than a handful of Scottish politicians genuinely favoured incorporating
union; in one account the number is reduced to a single individual, the
ageing, wily and allegedly opportunistic Sir George Mackenzie, first earl
of Cromartie.8 Underpinning gifts proffered to individuals, allege critics
1 T. Claydon, ‘“British” History in the Post-Revolutionary World 1690 –1715’, in The New British
History: Founding a Modern State 1603–1715, ed. G. Burgess (1999), p. 118.

2 G. S. Pryde, Scotland from 1603 to the Present Day (1962), p. 55.
3 See in particular C. Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation
of an Anglo-British Identity, 1689–c.1830 (Cambridge, 1993), p. 50; W. Ferguson, ‘The Making of

the Treaty of Union’, Scottish Historical Review, xliii (1964), 97–108; P. W. J. Riley, The Union of
England and Scotland: A Study in Anglo-Scottish Politics of the Eighteenth Century (Manchester,
1978) [hereafter Riley, Union of England and Scotland].
4 A notable exception is J. Stephen, ‘The Kirk and the Union, 1706–7: A Reappraisal’, Records of
the Scottish Church History Society, xxxi (2001), 68–96.

5 Ibid., pp. 8–11; M. Pittock, Inventing and Resisting Britain: Cultural Identities in Britain and
Ireland, 1685–1789 (Basingstoke, 1997), pp. 9–10, 27–8.

6 A. I. Macinnes, ‘Politically Reactionary Brits? The Promotion of Anglo-Scottish Union, 1603–
1707’ [hereafter Macinnes, ‘Politically Reactionary Brits’], in Kingdoms United? Great Britain and
Ireland since 1500, ed. S. J. Connolly (Dublin, 1999), pp. 54 –5.
7 G. Lockhart, Memoirs Concerning the Affairs of Scotland from Queen Anne’s Accession to the
Throne to the Commencement of the Union of the Two Kingdoms of Scotland and England in May,
1707 (1714) [hereafter Lockhart, Memoirs], p. 405.
8 P. H. Scott, Andrew Fletcher and the Treaty of Union (Edinburgh, 1992) [hereafter Scott, Andrew
Fletcher], p. 164. The Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies was established in
1695 in an attempt to improve Scotland’s overseas trade by establishing a colony at Darien on the
isthmus of Panama. The East India Company was hostile to the scheme and frustrated the Scottish
164 THE MAKING OF THE UNION OF 1707
of the process by which union was secured, was the bribe offered to the
nation – or at least to many thousands of Scots who had invested in the
Company of Scotland – of the Equivalent, which, amongst other things,
provided compensation for the losses incurred from the expeditions to
Darien and paid the salary arrears of a number of state servants. 9 And if
this were not enough to draw the Scots towards incorporating union
with England, such carrots could be complemented with the stick of mil-
itary force: invasion.10
Earlier ‘deterministic’ explanations for union have also been dismissed
in narratives which emphasize the volatility of the political situation in
Scotland in the years immediately preceding 1707 and the unpredictabil-
ity of the Scottish parliament.11 Concern about the economy and the
direction it was taking – in becoming increasingly dependent upon the
English market – is judged by some to have been of little consequence in
the thinking of Scotsmen who voted for the Union; others reject it alto-
gether.12 The constraints imposed on the Scots by the English Navigation
Acts in developing legal commerce with the plantations were less import-
ant than has been assumed, so this line of argument goes – with evid-
ence being adduced that the Scots were creating an overseas empire by
stealth.13 Historians who argue that there was a significant economic
impetus for union are currently in a minority.
Those who maintain that the Scots were bought or forced into union
have compiled a powerful set of arguments, which have been enormously
influential for the best part of half a century. When they are subjected to
close scrutiny, however, fissures can be found in the foundations upon
company’s attempts to raise capital in England. Consequently, Scots investors subscribed some
£400,000 sterling to the project which was viewed as a patriotic solution to Scotland’s economic
underdevelopment. The fact that Darien was a Spanish possession was hardly considered. The
Scots colonists were ill-equipped, under-provisioned and found the proposed location of the colony
completely unsuitable. Faced with Spanish troops and unable to obtain supplies from the English
colonies, the Scots were eventually forced to abandon ‘Caledonia’. Its failure had serious conse-
quences for the Scottish economy, with the loss of £153,000 sterling of paid-up capital. The
fifteenth article of union which dealt with the ‘Equivalent’ – a sum of just over £398,000 sterling as
compensation to the Scots for undertaking to pay part of the English national debt – stipulated
that Scots investors would be reimbursed with the repayment of their capital plus interest. This was
a significant concession secured by the Scots union commissioners.
9 B. Lenman, An Economic History of Modern Scotland, 1660–1976 (1977), pp. 58–9.
10 J. R. Young, ‘The Parliamentary Incorporating Union of 1707: Political Management, Anti-
Unionism and Foreign Policy’ [hereafter Young, ‘Parliamentary Incorporating Union’], in

Eighteenth Century Scotland: New Perspectives, ed. T. M. Devine and J. R. Young (Edinburgh, 1999)
[hereafter Devine and Young, Eighteenth Century Scotland], pp. 39– 46; P. H. Scott, ‘An English
Invasion Would Have Been Worse: Why the Scottish Parliament Accepted the Union’, Scottish
Studies Review, iv (2003), 9–16.
11 The views of T. C. Smout, in ‘The Road to Union’ [hereafter Smout, ‘Road to Union’], in Britain
after the Glorious Revolution, ed. G. Holmes (1969), pp. 176–96, have been described as deterministic;
counter-cases include I. B. Cowan, ‘The Inevitability of Union: A Historical Fallacy?’, Scotia,
v (1991), 1–7; T. M. Devine, Scotland’s Empire, 1600–1815 (2003), pp. 56–7.
12 Riley, Union of England and Scotland, p. 281.
13 Scotland and the Americas, c.1650–c.1939: A Documentary Source Book , ed. A. I. Macinnes,
M. A. D. Harper and L. G. Fryer (Edinburgh, 2002) [hereafter Macinnes, Harper and Fryer,
Scotland and the Americas], pp. 11–12.
which the historiographical status quo is built. This article will propose
that religious adherence was not simply a flag of convenience adopted at
will by devious members of the political class, but instead was a force
that drove political action. Many accounts of the making of the Union
of 1707 choose as their starting date 1702–3, when Queen Anne’s new
parliament was elected, which courtiers found much more difficult to
manage than its predecessor, largely owing to the increased strength of
the country opposition.14 But while few historians ignore altogether the
impact of economic and political events of the preceding years, rather
too little attention has been paid to the place of the ‘Glorious’ Revolu-
tion in the making of the Union of 1707. Fortunately, much more is
known now about the Revolution in Scotland than when several of the
recent classic studies of the Union were written.15 The Revolution, it will
be argued – as well as the religious and political circumstances which
brought it about in Scotland – played crucial parts in forming the ideology
and core beliefs of several key members of the nobility in Scotland, as
well as significant numbers of commissioners (MPs) who sat as members
of the pre-Union Scottish Parliament. It provided some of the personnel
too, men who were instrumental in driving the Articles of Union through
parliament in the winter of 1706–7, whilst others with similar sympathies
voted for them. Although the country-cavalier opposition alliance played
the patriotic card when arguing and campaigning against incorporation,
there were unionists who could – and did – claim that they too were act-
ing in Scotland’s best interests, and that the Union would provide the
Scots with opportunities that would bolster their flagging economy. New
economic policies had begun to be devised and implemented, in the early
post-Revolution years – inaugurating the era of ‘economic politics’, of
which incorporating union can reasonably be interpreted as a part. 16
Limitations of space preclude the possibility of examining this pro-
position as it applies to the totality of MPs17 who voted for Union. Accord-
ingly, the present study focuses on the squadrone volante, or flying squadron,
14 This is not always a failing on the part of the historian: the publishers of the late P. W. J. Riley’s
study of the Union, The Union of England and Scotland: A Study in Anglo-Scottish Politics of the
Eighteenth Century (Manchester, 1978), insisted that the chapters that later became King William
and the Scottish Politicians (Edinburgh, 1979) be removed. We are grateful to Dr Alex Murdoch of
the University of Edinburgh for this information.
15 In particular, D. J. Patrick, ‘People and Parliament in Scotland, 1689–1702’ (PhD thesis, University
of St Andrews, 2002) [hereafter Patrick, ‘People and Parliament’]; and idem, ‘Unconventional
Procedure: Scottish Electoral Politics after the Revolution’ [hereafter Patrick, ‘Unconventional
Procedure], in Parliament and Politics in Scotland, 1567–1707, ed. K. M. Brown and A. J. Mann
(Edinburgh, 2005) [hereafter Brown and Mann, Parliament and Politics in Scotland], pp. 208– 44;
E. Vallance, The Glorious Revolution, 1688: Britain’s Fight for Liberty (2006); T. Harris, Revolution:
The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–1720 (2006); G. Gardner, The Scottish Exile Community
in the Netherlands 1660 –1690 (East Linton, 2004).
16 R. Saville, ‘Scottish Modernisation prior to the Industrial Revolution’, in Devine and Young,
Eighteenth Century Scotland, pp. 7–12.

17 Throughout ‘MP’ is used to describe all members of the Scottish parliament, 1706 –7 – noblemen,
shire and burgh commissioners. ‘Commissioner’ refers to an elected representative of the shires and
burghs.
known initially as the ‘new party’, which had broken away from the coun-
try opposition following the general election of 1703. It has long been
recognized that the squadrone, which comprised two dozen MPs, perhaps
twenty-five, played a crucial part in carrying the Union in the Scottish
parliament.18 In order to steer the Articles of Union through a parlia-
ment which comprised over 200 MPs (in theory, 247 members could have
participated in 1706–7; old age, infirmity and deliberate abstention account
for most of the shortfall), the government or court party needed to com-
mand over 100 votes on each Article.19 The court itself could muster
around ninety supporters, the opposition around eighty-seven. The party
that tipped the balance in favour was the squadrone. Thus, the critical
vote on whether to approve the first Article of Union on 4 November
1706 was carried by a majority of thirty-three (116 votes to eighty-three);
had the squadrone voted with the opposition the proposal would have
been defeated by fifteen (107 to ninety-two).20
Led by John Hay, second marquess of Tweeddale, and John Ker, fifth
earl of Roxburghe, but with Patrick Hume, Lord Polwarth and later the
first earl of Marchmont, John Leslie, ninth earl of Rothes, and his younger
brother Thomas, sixth earl of Haddington, also playing prominent parts,
18 K. M. Brown, Kingdom or Province? Scotland and the Regal Union, 1603–1715 (1992) [hereafter
Brown, Kingdom or Province?], p. 191; J. S. Shaw, The Political History of Eighteenth-Century Scot-
land (1999) [hereafter Shaw, Political History], p. 18; Young, ‘Parliamentary Incorporating Union’,
p. 27. For an overview of the squadrone volante see C. A. Whatley, The Scots and the Union (Edin-
burgh, 2006) [hereafter Whatley, The Scots and the Union], ch. 5. See the appendix of this article for
a list of the twenty-five squadrone members.
19 Riley, Union of England and Scotland, p. 328; D. Szechi, George Lockhart of Carnwath, 1689–
1727: A Study in Jacobitism (East Linton, 2002), p. 63.

20 A Selection from the Papers of the Earls of Marchmont. . . . Illustrative of the Events from 1685
to 1750 (3 vols., London, 1831) [hereafter Marchmont Papers], iii. 329. In a short memorandum
drafted after the Union was concluded, the earl of Marchmont referred to 115 votes cast for the
first article rather than the 116 votes recorded in parliament, although it is unclear whether he
included himself in his calculation. He reckoned there were twenty-two squadrone members in
attendance, all of whom voted for the article. Subsequent analysis suggests that twenty-four mem-
bers of the squadrone – or individuals closely associated with the squadrone – participated in the
first division, all voting in favour of the article. This level of participation was typical. Twenty of
the twenty-five squadrone members took part in at least twenty-five of the thirty recorded divisions;
nine participated in all thirty with twenty-three voting for the ratification of the treaty on 16 Janu-
ary 1707. In parliament voting was affected by both absence and abstentions. However, it is debate-
able whether this had a significant impact on the passage of the Union. In the first division on
4 November 1706, twenty-five MPs who either sat in parliament at least once but never took part in
any voting, or who took part in subsequent divisions, failed to register a vote. This does not include
James Douglas, second duke of Queensberry, the queen’s commissioner, who had no vote. Even
assuming these men were all anti-union, which their voting records clearly indicate was not the
case, the article would have still been carried by a majority of eight votes. Likewise, the Union was
ratified by forty-one votes. Using the same criteria to identify MPs who were absent or abstained –
there is no way to establish accurately who was in parliament on any given day unless they made a
speech, are mentioned in an account of that day’s business or participated in a vote – some forty-
six members who had attended parliament or voted in a former division did not vote on the
ratification. Of these, twenty-four had cast all or the majority of their votes with Hamilton’s con-
federated opposition, five had been in parliament without voting in any division, one MP had split
his votes between the unionist and opposition interests, and sixteen – including the Earl of Stair
who had died some days earlier – were predominantly in the pro-union camp. Overall, absence and
abstention made little difference to the ratification of union.
squadrone MPs have been depicted as political opportunists. The percep-

tion is that they came round to union at the last minute, seduced by the
promise that, as nominees of the directors of the Company of Scotland,
they would be allowed to disburse that part of the Equivalent designated
for compensating Scots investors who had lost some £153,000 sterling
(1.8 million pounds Scots) in the Company’s failed Darien scheme. 21
Roxburghe’s conversion to unionism has been attributed to his ambition
to secure a dukedom.22 With strong cross-border links with the English
Whig junto, they certainly had a keen interest in the role they could play
at Westminster after the two kingdoms’ legislatures had been united. 23
Yet this is only part of the explanation for their support of the Union.
The reality is more complicated. Close examination of the political back-
grounds and beliefs of certain key adherents of the squadrone reveals
previously disregarded elements of the ideological basis of their backing
for incorporating union, as well as a clearly identifiable patriotic concern
for Scotland’s future. Although it was these elements that held the party
together – albeit loosely – members’ backgrounds varied, as did the strength
of the influences which brought them into the union camp and, accord-
ingly, their degree of commitment. Nevertheless, for the purposes of the
present analysis this is fortuitous as it provides glimpses of a number of
the factors that were at work amongst sections of the Scottish political
class in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Similar
influences took other MPs into the pro-Union court party.
Of the 227 MPs who sat as members of the Scottish Estates in 1706–7
(the ‘Union’ Parliament), thirty-five, or some 15 per cent, had sat in the
Convention of Estates in 1689.24 This had been summoned by William of
Orange in February, with instructions that the burgh franchise was to be
widened to include all Protestant burgesses without exception – a temporary
innovation introduced as a means of bypassing James VII’s remodelling
of the Scots burgh electorate which he hoped to use to pack parliament
with his nominees.25 There was no change in the shire electorate, and
some elections were fiercely contested, but as in the burghs, by and large
it was candidates who favoured the Revolution who triumphed. A further
seventy-two men who took part in the Union debates first sat in or were
21 W. Ferguson, Scotland’s Relations with England: A Survey to 1707 (Edinburgh, 1994) [hereafter
Ferguson, Scotland’s Relations], pp. 244, 247, 257; Scott, Andrew Fletcher, p. 182; Memoirs of the
Life of Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, ed. J. M. Gray (Edinburgh, 1892) [hereafter Gray, Memoirs of
Sir John Clerk], p. 48.
22 Ferguson, Scotland’s Relations, p. 233.
23 Brown, Kingdom or Province?, p. 191.
24 Two hundred and twenty-seven MPs sat in the ‘Union’ Parliament including Sir Archibald Hope
of Rankeillour, a commissioner from Fife, who died and was replaced by his son before voting
began. This calculation is drawn from a database which includes the names of all members of the
Scottish Estates from 1689 to 1707. In it are identified at which point during the fifteen sessions of
William’s and Anne’s pre-Union parliaments MPs first sat, as well as their voting behaviour in the
thirty divisions of which there is a record during 1706–7, that is when the terms of the Union were
debated and settled.
25 Patrick, ‘Unconventional Procedure’, p. 214.
elected to William’s parliament between 1689 and 1702. Twenty-five of these

first appeared before the end of 1695. They included some of the firmest
supporters of incorporation in 1706–7 – not only men like Sir John Swin-
ton of that ilk, elected as shire commissioner for Berwick in 1690, and
William Morison of Prestongrange, but also the squadrone’s George
Baillie of Jerviswood and William Bennet of Grubbet. In total, some 47
per cent of the MPs who voted on the Articles of Union entered parliament
before the end of the 1702 session. Even more marked is the continuity which
existed amongst the nobility and the cadre of MPs who were appointed as
officers of state. Of this number – totalling seventy-eight in 1706–7 – twenty,
or 26 per cent, had sat in the Convention of Estates; approximately two-
thirds of them had entered parliament before the general election of 1703.
The degree of longevity of membership of parliament is significant.
Also striking is the voting behaviour of this cohort of MPs over the
Articles of Union, as they passed through the Scottish parliament. Of
the thirty-five MPs who had sat in the Convention, an overwhelming
majority – two-thirds – voted for the Union. That is, they voted with the court
on at least half of the thirty union-related divisions in the winter of
1706–7, and in most cases much more positively than this. Of the twenty
members of the nobility and officers of state who had sat in the Convention,
an even higher proportion, 75 per cent, voted with the court, and for
incorporation. Similar proportions apply when the voting records of those
MPs who had entered parliament between 1689 and 1702 are examined.
In total, of the 107 MPs who had sat in the 1689 Convention or in William’s
parliament thereafter, seventy, or 65 per cent, voted for the Union. 26
This is not the only evidence for continuity – and even persistence –
on the matter of union. Over the period from 1689 to 1706 there were
three occasions when union was taken seriously in Scotland, the first at
the time of the Revolution itself, the second just before William’s death
in 1702, the negotiations of which dragged over into Anne’s reign, and,
of course, in 1706–7. For the three sets of negotiations a total of sixty-
three individuals were nominated to serve as commissioners from
Scotland to treat with their English counterparts (although no meeting
ever took place in 1689). Notwithstanding the large number of MPs who
were only nominated once, there were three men who were appointed
as commissioners in 1689, 1702 and 1706, namely Adam Cockburn of
Ormiston, James Ogilvie, first earl of Seafield, and John Dalrymple,
first earl of Stair. William, twelfth lord Ross was a commissioner in 1689
and 1706. A total of twelve men were commissioners in both 1702 and
1706. Assuming that these individuals were pro-union to some degree at
least, what this data reveals is that there existed in Scotland a group of
politicians who appear to have been consistent in their support for union
over a period of years. Although this is hardly a startling finding, it has
not been observed before. More importantly it puts paid to the suggestion
26 This includes James Douglas, second duke of Queensberry, who as commissioner did not vote
but was undoubtedly pro-union.
that less than a handful of Scots favoured union. And the twelve is a
minimum: to these can be added a couple more, from the Grant family.
Ludovic Grant (d. 1716), representing the shire of Inverness, was nomi-
nated as a commissioner in 1689, while his son, Alexander (1673–1719),
who also represented the county, was a union commissioner in 1706,
suggesting that within certain families, there was a lasting commitment
to union with England, even though in the Grants’ case support for the
Revolution had cost the family over £12,000 sterling (144,000 pounds
Scots) – never repaid – for raising a regiment for William and as a result
of damage done to their estate by Jacobite enemies.27
Seafield is of particular significance in this regard, as he has been
written off as a cipher, a time-serving secretary of state prepared to work
for virtually any political master who offered him employment. 28 There
is substance in this description, but it is hard to deny the apparent lon-
gevity of his interest in the union project. Dalrymple’s part too is worth
emphasizing; indeed it was even more important. Savaged for his role in
the massacre of Glencoe, Dalrymple (he was created earl of Stair in 1703)
was a tireless worker for the union cause from 1689, when he had been
instrumental in removing James VII from the throne of Scotland, and
persuading William to lay down rules for the subsequent election that
hampered the Jacobites.29 The squadrone’s earl of Marchmont (then Sir
Patrick Hume) was another member of the four-member committee
appointed for this purpose, along with Sir James Montgomerie of Skel-
morlie and William Hamilton of Whitelaw, leaders of the ‘Presbyterian
and discontented party’. With Hume, Dalrymple also had a big hand in
drawing up the Scots’ Claim of Right, as well as the list of Scotland’s
‘Grievances’ under the later Stuarts; together these documents repre-
sented the Scottish Revolution manifesto. According to Lockhart, Dal-
rymple was ‘at the Bottom of the Union’, in which cause he was a highly
effective advocate who during the debates over the Articles in 1706 and
1707 robustly defended the court position and dealt incisively with many
of the objections raised by members of the opposition. He had much in
common with Ormiston, ‘a zealous Revolutioner, and bigoted Presbyte-
rian’, none equalling him ‘in vindictive persecution of all that he thought
Enemies to the Establish’d Government of either Church or State’. 30
At least three questions arise. How is the apparent coincidence
between length of service in parliament and support for the Union to be
explained? If, as seems likely, there is a link between support for the
Revolution in 1689, loyalty to King William, and the Union of 1707,
how can this be substantiated? Third, and as a consequence, could there
27 The Parliaments of Scotland: Burgh and Shire Commissioners, ed. M. D. Young (2 vols., Edin-
burgh 1992), i. 296–7; The House of Commons, 1690–1715, ed. E. Cruickshanks, S. Handley and
D. W. Hayton (4 vols., Cambridge, 2002 ) [hereafter Cruickshanks, Handley and Hayton, House of
Commons], iv. 73.
28 Riley, Union of England and Scotland, pp. 23, 42–3.
29 Patrick, ‘People and Parliament’, pp. 62–5.
30 Lockhart, Memoirs, pp. 96, 129.
be an ideological basis for the Union that appears to have escaped most
historians hitherto, and which needs to be understood in terms of the
context in which the Glorious Revolution in Scotland happened? Satis-
factory answers to these questions would demonstrate that there was
support for the Union in Scotland, long before the end of 1705 and
through 1706, when Queensberry, Argyll and the court began to drum
up support for the union treaty by using the nefarious means – including
the alleged orgy of court vote-buying – described earlier.
It would be wholly mistaken to dismiss religion as a factor in deter-
mining political behaviour in early modern Scotland. Religion was
one of the ideological foundations of the Revolution in Scotland, even
if historians’ scepticism about its extent makes it impossible to discount
altogether the possibility that in some cases there are grounds for
suspecting that the espousal of presbyterian sympathies may have
been driven by political self-interest.31 Religion was also a motive for many
supporters of the Union – and equally for those who opposed it, from
the standpoint both of the more fervent and extreme presbyterians (of
whom there were many thousands), and of most episcopalians – a term
which, by and large, meant Jacobites. 32 By and large, moderatism lay
in the future, although it was from the ranks of the less dogmatic pres-
byterians that unionists tended to be drawn.33 Confessional difference
mattered; adherence to a particular church could, and within living
memory had, cost lives, and resulted in torture, imprisonment, forfeiture
of estates and fortunes, and in some cases internal and even external exile.
Central to the explanation for the Union of 1707 was the behaviour of
key members of the community of exiled Scots in the Low Countries
during the 1670s and 1680s, presbyterians who had fled from Scotland
under the later Stuarts, the so-called ‘Killing Times’. Investigations
carried out by Ginny Gardner have revealed that there may have been
between three and four hundred political exiles from Scotland in the
Netherlands in the decades preceding the Revolution.34 Whilst there,
they met and plotted, sometimes in association with presbyterians still
resident in Scotland, and worked too with William, prince of Orange,
in hopes of restoring themselves and their religion back in Scotland.
Several of those who served in a military capacity or landed with William’s
triumphant invasion fleet on England’s south coast, along with many of
the Scots who flocked to London to greet him, determined never again
to endure the suffering they had experienced under what they considered
to be the arbitrary – and penal – rule of the Stuart kings Charles and
James, and their secretaries in Scotland like Lauderdale. Such men (and
sometimes their sons) were to become the staunchest supporters of the
31 A. C. Cheyne, Studies in Church History (Edinburgh, 1999) [hereafter Cheyne, Studies in Church
History], pp. 58–60.

32 B. Lenman, The Jacobite Risings in Britain, 1689–1746 (1980), pp. 223–5.
33 Cheyne, Studies in Church History, pp. 48–54.
34 G. Gardner, The Scottish Exile Community in the Netherlands, 1660–1690 (East Linton, 2004),
pp. 9–28, 178–206.
Union. Included in their ranks were the Rev. William Carstares, who was
held in irons in Edinburgh before enduring torture by the use of thumb-
screws in 1684; he became William’s chaplain and later principal of Edin-
burgh University from which base he was enormously influential in kirk
circles in 1706–7, and beyond the Union. The Rev. William Wishart was
another divine, who had opposed, with difficulty, the Stuarts from within
Scotland; as moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of
Scotland in 1706 he played a key role in nudging wary kirk members
towards acceptance of the Union by persuading them that a separate act
would secure their faith. George, fourth lord and later first earl of Melville,
was an émigré; so too was his son David, third earl of Leven, a military
man and future commander-in-chief of the army in Scotland who had fled
to Holland with his father in 1683 over the Rye House Plot, sailed with
William and thereafter remained loyal both to the new king and the electress
Sophia of Hanover (nominated in England as Anne’s successor in 1701).
Leven was one of the twelve men who served as union commissioners in
1702 and 1706. On the accession of the first Hanoverian king, George, in
1714, he was reported to have tearfully recounted to his friends ‘all the
events of the Revolution’, and thanked God that his lifetime’s labours
were now crowned with success, ‘in that he would leave a Protestant king
sitting on the throne of Britain’.35 Similar searing experiences of flight
and exile were shared with several individuals who would later join with
the squadrone, including Baillie of Jerviswood and Sir Patrick Hume.
Following William’s invasion at the end of 1688, over one hundred
prominent Scots – including thirty-six noblemen – descended on White-
hall where they met to discuss the extraordinary events that would have
such a profound impact on the three kingdoms of England, Ireland and
Scotland. From the outset, it appears there was considerable Scottish
interest in union with the Scots’ southern neighbour. William of Orange
may have favoured this as a device for better securing the Revolution, but
he made no reference to union in his intentionally vague ‘Declaration’
(for Scotland). Likewise, the English were lukewarm. And although in
Scotland there was little consensus on the issue, if there was enthusiasm
for closer union between the two nations in the winter of 1688–9, it was
from Scotland that it came. Indeed, at this time, even ‘the patriot’ and
former exile Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, a bitter opponent of incorpora-
tion by 1706–7, was advocating a union of parliaments and trade to
settle the differences between the two countries.36 It has been suggested
that Fletcher was advocating a federal arrangement, but his reference to
35 A. I. Dunlop, William Carstares & the Kirk by Law Established (Edinburgh, 1964), pp. 41–50;
J. Warwick, The Moderators of the Church of Scotland From 1690 to 1740 (Edinburgh, 1913), pp. 158–
99; The Melvilles, Earls of Meville and the Leslies, Earls of Leven, ed. W. Fraser (3 vols., Edinburgh,
1890), i. 195–307.
36 Smout, ‘Road to Union’, pp. 183–4. In a letter to an acquaintance in Rotterdam dated 8 Jan.
1689, Fletcher wrote: ‘For my own part I think we can never come to any true settlement but by
uniting with England in Parliaments and Trade, for as for our worship and particular laws we
certainly can never be united in these’ (ibid.).
a united parliament suggests otherwise.37 In any case, had he favoured

the former, he was out of step with what other Scots were proposing.
John Hay, second earl and first marquess of Tweeddale, was behind an
address from East Lothian that asked William to consider ‘by what
wayes and means these kingdoms of Scotland and England may be
united in a more strict inseparable Union then they have ben as yet’. 38
The address promoted incorporating union as the most effectual means
of securing Scotland’s ‘Religion and Liberty’. Subscribed by Tweeddale,
representatives of the burghs of Haddington and Dunbar, and most of
the region’s landed gentry, the union cause was clearly popular in East
Lothian. Nevertheless, the failure of this proposal to make any provision
for presbyterian church government saw it dismissed by some as favour-
ing the established episcopalian hierarchy.39 Episcopalians certainly saw
a union with Anglican England in 1688–9 as a means of consolidating
their position against the presbyterian interest. Alarmed by the prospect
of a presbyterian recovery, both George Mackenzie, first viscount Tarbat
and Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh, in a memorial to William,
stressed the impossibility for England of fashioning a union with presby-
terian Scotland.40 Yet what is revealing about Tweeddale’s correspond-
ence – with his son, Lord Yester, the future squadrone leader – is his
concern for the security of Protestantism in Britain, and indeed the
whole of Europe, so transcending the ‘local’ (but severe) differences there
were over the form of government of the church in Scotland. 41 This focus
on the enemy without would continue to inform the attitudes of more
moderate presbyterians in Scotland, and their Whig counterparts in
England, up to and beyond the Union of 1707.
The framework within which moderate Presbyterians operated was a
broad one, and entailed a commitment to the defence of Protestantism in
Europe at a time of considerable uncertainty about its future owing to
the strength of the forces of the Counter-Reformation as exemplified by
Louis XIV of France and his ambitions for universal monarchy. 42 The
aspiration for a Britain united by a single faith was not without prece-
dent, and indeed had inspired the Scottish covenanters’ confederal and
apocalyptic confessional aims in the 1640s.43 Ironically, by the time of the
Union debates the country’s more extreme or nonconforming presbyterians
37 Scott, Andrew Fletcher, p. 44.

38 National Library of Scotland [NLS], Edinburgh, Yester MS 7026/94A, ‘The humble adres of the
Noblemen, Gentilmen and Royal Borows, within the Shyre of east Lowthian To his Highnes the
Prince of Orange’.
39 NLS, Yester MS 7026/95, Tweeddale to lord Yester, Edinburgh, 31 Dec. 1688.
40 A MEMORIAL FOR HIS HIGHNESS the Prince of Orange, In Relation to the AFFAIRS OF
SCOTLAND (London, 1689), pp. 7–8.

41 NLS Yester MS 7026/219, Tweeddale to Lord Yester, Edinburgh, 25 April 1689.
42 J. Hoppit, A Land of Liberty? England 1689–1727 (Oxford, 2000), pp. 89–93; C. Kidd, ‘Religious
Realignment between the Restoration and the Union’ [hereafter Kidd, ‘Religious Realignment’], in
A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the Union of 1707, ed. J. Robertson (Cambridge, 1995),
pp. 146, 167.
43 Macinnes, ‘Politically Reactionary Brits’, pp. 46–50.
were hostile to the idea of a closer union with prelatical England; the
fear was that, by adhering tightly to the National Covenant (1638) and
the Solemn League and Covenant (1643), presbyterianism would be
absorbed within a pan-Britannic episcopalian church.44 The international
concerns of the moderates – Scottish Whigs – underlay their allegiance
to King William and his successor Queen Anne – effectively defenders of
the faith, the security of which was seen ultimately to depend on a Prot-
estant Hanoverian successor to the childless Anne. There was also a British
dimension to their thinking, which again has been underplayed, but which
was a powerful attraction for Scottish politicians who in public were
against Union by 1706. Both James, fourth duke of Hamilton, joint leader
of the country party, and John Hamilton, Lord Belhaven, had expressed
their commitment to a united Britain in the previous two years, the last-
named (at this stage still holding office as a new party minister appointed
in 1704) calling for the appointment of union commissioners from both
countries who ‘dessine the peace of Brittain’, a particularly potent senti-
ment as relations between the two countries approached their nadir with
the hanging on Leith sands of the English captain Thomas Green and
members of his crew.45 There is also evidence to suggest that even in
1689, for some individuals, interest in union owed something to the
belief that incorporation would bring economic benefits not only for
themselves but for the nation at large, the prosperity of which within a
strong and united Britain would provide an important bulwark against
the intrusions of France and the Church of Rome. 46 It is difficult to
separate economic concerns from those of state, security and religion.
44 Kidd, ‘Religious Realignment’, p. 145.

45 National Archives of Scotland [NAS], Edinburgh, Ogilvie of Inverquharity MSS, GD 205/39,
Belhaven to lord Godolphin, 2 Jan., 24 Feb. 1705; E. J. Graham, Seawolves: Pirates and the Scots
(Edinburgh, 2005), pp. 153–90. The Worcester, an English merchant vessel, was seized by agents of
the Company of Scotland in August 1704 in retaliation for the seizure of the Annandale – the com-
pany’s last trading ship – by English customs officers. Captain Thomas Green and the crew of the
English ship were accused of piracy and charged with the murder of the crew of the Company of
Scotland vessel, the Speedy Return which had disappeared in the Indian Ocean, a victim of Mada-
gascan pirates. Illustrative of the rising level of Anglophobia in Scotland, a consequence of Darien,
the English Act of Settlement (1701) and retaliatory Scots Act of Security (1703– 4) and English
Aliens Act (1705), the crew of the Worcester were sentenced to death in March 1705. Queen Anne
interceded on the crew’s behalf but the Scottish privy council was obliged to satisfy the mob who
were not prepared to accept any leniency to the English. Consequently, the innocent Green and
two of his crew were hanged in front of large crowds gathered on Leith Sands in April. The remain-
ing crewmen were released in September.
46 NAS, Leven and Melville MSS, GD 26/7/20. The anonymous author of the draft ‘Act of the
Estates of Scotland Establishing the Government Thereof’ observed that since ‘our Kings after
they became Kings of England . . . our money was exhausted and a great part of it spent in appli-
cations and addresses to our Kings to the benefite of England who communicat to us no benefite
of trading with them or their plantations more then to any other strange nation So that therby and
by the vast expenss of supporting standing armys and their irregular free quarters by forfaulturs
and excessive fynes . . . the nation is now reduced to extream poverty’. Incorporating union was the
preferred solution. For the security offered by closer union see NAS GD 3/10/3/10; NLS MS 7026/
94A; NLS MS 7026 John Hay, second earl and first marquess of Tweeddale’s letters to Lord Yester
1688–9; and the Convention of Estates’ letter to the prince of Orange, 23 March 1689.
These concerns helped shape the concurrent address from ‘the Nobilitie,
Gentry, Majestrats and Inhabitants of Glasgow with others nou in armes
in the West of Scotland’. Studiously avoiding any overt reference to a
presbyterianism settlement at such an early stage in proceedings, the
signatories beseeched William to deal with their grievances and to secure
the Scots from ‘popery and Arbitrary power’ – the principal cause of the
‘evills under which we groan’. In order to achieve this end, they under-
took ‘to indeavour an union of these two nations of Great Britain into
one politick body as divine providence hath united us in one island and
under one head’; they were at pains to assure William that ‘the accom-
plishment of that Blissed work tending so much to the happiness and
securitie of both nations. . . . hath been reserved to be non of the least
Glorious trophies of your most illustrious name’.47
What the addresses from East Lothian and Glasgow make clear is that
closer or incorporating union as a means of securing Protestantism and
redressing recent grievances was not without support in Scotland at the
Revolution. Indeed, it was members of the Scottish political elite who
were advocating incorporation, a fact borne out by the reply of the Con-
vention of Estates to William of Orange’s letter dated 16 March 1689.
From the outset the Convention was dominated by the Revolution and
presbyterian interest. Despite a belief that the Scots were reluctant to
rebel and the Convention was packed with men who had yet to commit
to either William or King James, vigorous electioneering in the opening
months of 1689 had produced an overwhelming Revolutioner 48 majority,
as noted earlier.49 The prince declared that he was encouraged that ‘so
many of the nobilitie and gentry when here at London, were so much
Inclined to ane unione of both Kingdomes and that they Did look upon
it as one of the best means for procureing the hapines of these nationes
and setleing a lasting peace amongst them . . . They living in the same
Island having the same langwage, and the same comone Interest of Reli-
gion and Liberty’.50 His letter, however, was silent on the form of union.
This was to be left to Scottish Estates, on whose behalf it was replied,
‘that as both Kingdomes are united in one head and Soveraigne so they
47 NAS, Eglinton MSS, GD 3/10/3/10, ‘To His Royal Highness, The Prince of Orange, The Humble
Address of the Nobilitie, Gentry, Majestrats and Inhabitants of Glasgow with others nou in armes
in the West of Scotland for [the] Defense of the Protestant Religion, their Liberty and Property, 1688’.
48 ‘Revolutioner’ was a contemporary term used by the Jacobite, George Lockhart of Carnwath, to
describe Scots supporters of the Revolution settlement. See ‘Scotland’s Ruine’: Lockhart of Carnwath’s
Memoirs of the Union, ed. D. Szechi (Aberdeen, 1995) [hereafter Szechi, ‘Scotland’s Ruine’], p. 8.
49 I. B. Cowan, ‘The Reluctant Revolutionaries: Scotland in 1688’, in By Force or By Default? The
Revolution of 1688–1689, ed. E. Cruickshanks (Edinburgh, 1989), pp. 65–81; W. Ferguson, Scotland,
1689 to the Present (Edinburgh, 1994), p. 2; I. B. Cowan, ‘Church and State Reformed? The Revo-
lution of 1688–1689 in Scotland’, in The Anglo-Dutch Moment: Essays on the Glorious Revolution
and its World Impact, ed. J. I. Israel (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 164 –5; P. Hopkins, Glencoe and the End
of the Highland War (Edinburgh, 1986), p. 127; B. P. Lenman, ‘The Scottish Nobility and the Rev-
olution of 1688–1690’, in The Revolutions of 1688, ed. R. Beddard (Oxford, 1991), p. 146. The
alternative view is expressed in Patrick, ‘Unconventional Procedure’, pp. 208– 44.
50 Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, IX (Edinburgh, 1822), p. 9.
may become one Body Politick, one Nation to be represented in one

Parliament’.51
Surviving draft legislation adds further support to the contention that
the notion of union was a live – and prominent – political issue in Scot-
land in the early months of 1689, and for some Scots an explicit goal. An
act designed to establish the government of Scotland after the Revolution
made a strong, unambiguous case for incorporating union. Its premise,
contained within the opening lines, was that William and his army had
restored and preserved ‘our religion, Laues and Liberties Against arbi-
trary government, Idolatrie and superstition’, for which the nation
offered its ‘most hearty thanks never to be forgotten’.52 Consistent with
the Convention’s earlier letter to William, the wording of the draft act
urged that ‘the body politick of this nation be and is unite with the body
politick of England and that wee bee under the same soveraign authority
and in the same comonwealth with them henceforth intituled and
denominat the kingdom of great Brittain, France and Ireland.’ Separate
clauses safeguarded Scots law and the Church of Scotland. A further
clause dealt with Scottish representation at Westminster, with the proposal
being made that the Scots would have a twentieth part of England’s
MPs, less than was obtained in 1707, while another draft act, similar in
style to the Claim of Right, proposed that union ‘be more seriously
minded’.53 As it happens, neither of these acts appears to have been
discussed in the Convention, and they were doubtless by-products of
one of the several parliamentary committees – or sub-committees –
established by Convention members.54 However, this should not detract
from their content and the aspirations they represented.
Indeed, so enthusiastic were Convention members for union in 1689 –
an affair skilfully managed by Tarbat and Dalrymple – that they nomi-
nated twenty-four union commissioners, evidently with a view to their
meeting with counterparts from England.55 Those selected – after the
entire membership had been polled – included representatives of the
émigré hierarchy along with leading members of the internal opposition
to James VII’s religious policies. Members included the future earls of
Marchmont and Stair, and the émigré lords Cardross and Melville, and
Tweeddale. Negotiations never took place however, owing largely to the
lack of English enthusiasm. In Scotland, immediate interest in union
diminished as Jacobites hijacked the proposals in what proved to be a
futile attempt to delay the proceedings of the Convention – in the belief
51 Ibid., p. 60.
52 NAS, Leven and Melville MSS, GD 26/7/20, Act of the Estates of Scotland Establishing the
Government Thereof, n.d.
53 NAS, Leven and Melville MSS, GD 26/7/202.
54 Committees were appointed for a number of reasons – administrative and legislative. The most
important chosen by the Convention of Estates were the committees for controverted elections,
securing the peace, and settling the government.
55 Colin Lindsay, third earl of Balcarres, Memoirs Touching the Revolution in Scotland 1688–1690
(Bannatyne Club, Edinburgh, 1841) [hereafter Colin Lindsay, third earl of Balcarres, Memoirs], p. 33.
that lengthy negotiations would buy time for King James and his French
allies. The adoption of delaying tactics set a pattern that would re-emerge
in the parliamentary sessions between 1703 and 1707. Just as there was
an element of continuity in terms of the membership of the union com-
missions in 1689 and 1706, so amongst the ranks of the opposition ele-
ments of consistency can also be detected: Sir James Foulis of Colinton,
commissioner for the shire of Edinburgh, was fined for absenting himself
from the Convention, forfeited his seat in 1693 (but was re-elected in
1704) – and voted solidly against the Union in 1706–7; almost identical
was the case of Sir James Stewart of Ardmaleish, in Bute, although
Stewart (who became first earl of Bute in 1703) left Edinburgh in 1706
before the first votes on the Union were called. Yet on the other, pro-
Union side, the Revolution interest or Revolution sentiment and its
role in the ideological construction of the advocates of the Union went
considerably further than a handful of union commissioners.
The importance of the state, security and the Protestant religion observed
above in relation to the Revolution settlement in Scotland was as great in
1706–7 as in 1689. They were arguably more important in a period of
what had been virtually continuous war with France and her allies (re-
opened in 1702), and when Scotland – frequently referred to by contem-
poraries on all sides of the political spectrum in the early 1700s as ‘this
sinking nation’ – was economically vulnerable and still to recover from
the devastating blows of wartime maritime losses, famine and the colony
at Darien which had been struck during the 1690s.56 The Hanoverian
Protestant succession was still unresolved in Scotland, and from St Ger-
main James Francis Stuart – the ‘Old Pretender’ – and his energetic supporters
posed a real threat to the Revolution settlement.57 Relations between
Scotland and England were in freefall from 1702, although they had
begun to degenerate into bouts of mutual hostility earlier. With Anne’s
accession to the throne in Scotland the presbyterians fell into momentary
disarray – and panic, while the Jacobites recovered their confidence and,
with the opposition in parliament, played the patriotic card to great effect. 58
It was at this point – the aftermath of the general election of 1703 –
that the squadrone made its entry onto the Scottish political stage. What
was known initially as the ‘new party’ first emerged as a group distinct
from the country party opposition led by the duke of Hamilton. Most of
its members had been actively involved in the Company of Scotland in
the 1690s, sometimes as directors, or as substantial subscribers; in this
regard they can fairly be regarded as sincere patriots, having invested
considerable sums in what was a stupendously ambitious national enterprise. 59
56 T. C. Smout, Scottish Trade on the Eve of the Union, 1660–1707 (Edinburgh, 1963), pp. 244–56; C. A.
Whatley, Scottish Society, 1707–1830: Beyond Jacobitism, towards Industrialisation (Manchester, 2000),
pp. 16–47; E. J. Graham, A Maritime History of Scotland 1650–1790 (East Linton, 2002), pp. 63–97.
57 J. S. Gibson, Playing the Scottish Card: The Franco-Jacobite Invasion of 1708 (Edinburgh, 1988),
pp. 9–34,
58 Lockhart, Memoirs, pp. 49–51, 54 –66.
59 Shaw, Political History, p. 11.
With the exception of Marchmont and his immediate family, those who
had sat in the previous parliament had been prominent supporters of the
opposition and at the forefront of demands for redress for the failure at
Darien, often expressed in terms of the 1689 Claim of Right. Although
the cluster of MPs who would later form the squadrone remained part of
the opposition coalition in the contentious first session of Queen Anne’s
parliament, divisions had begun to appear amongst those who had previ-
ously been Hamilton’s supporters. Following William’s death, and in hopes
of furthering the Stuart cause under Anne, episcopalians (and Jacobites)
had begun once more to participate actively in electoral politics in
Scotland. Following the general election of 1703 there was a considera-
bly larger cavalier presence in the parliament than there had been in
the immediate post-Revolution years, much to the chagrin of men like
the (squadrone’s) earl of Rothes, who felt usurped by and aggrieved at the
Jacobite earl of Balcarres’s attempts to place himself at the head of the
country opposition in Fife.60 The election and consequent redistribution
of seats in parliament in 1703 underscored fundamental ideological dif-
ferences that persuaded members of the nascent new party to distance
themselves from their former colleagues. Party members were particu-
larly active in the campaign to introduce the Act of Security (1703) and
to limit the powers of Scotland’s future monarch. Nevertheless, their core
commitment was to the Protestant succession as established at the Revo-
lution; accordingly, the rise in Jacobite influence was greatly to the dis-
comfiture of the Revolution-supporting, mainly staunch if usually moderate
presbyterian, pro-Hanover countrymen who formed the breakaway group.
As is evidenced by the strength of their attachment to the in part patrioti-
cally inspired Company of Scotland, they also had an eye to Scotland’s
economic interests, although in this last respect they could claim no
monopoly or even pole position; the court party and its supporters
attracted many of the country’s leading economic modernizers, as in the
cases of John Clerk of Penicuik, Sir John Swinton, and his fellow former
émigré the third earl of Leven, governor of the Bank of Scotland from
1697 until his death in 1728.61 What is important, however, is that from
1703, for those who adhered to the new party, the quasi-republican and
anti-Hanoverian stances of Andrew Fletcher, the Jacobitism of the earl
of Home and George Lockhart of Carnwath, and the apparent oppor-
tunism of Hamilton and the old country party men had little attraction,
and none offered any obvious solutions to the difficulties Scotland faced.
It takes more than the ‘politics of the closet’ or references to promises
of post-Union financial gain to explain the party’s alleged turnaround in
1706–7. Their attitude to the Union – or the attitudes of several of the party’s
members – had begun to gestate many years beforehand. The twenty-five
60 K. M. Brown, ‘Party Politics and Parliament: Scotland’s Last Election and its Aftermath, 1702–3’,
in Brown and Mann, Parliament and Politics in Scotland, p. 268; NAS, Hamilton MSS, GD 406/1/
5181, John Leslie to duke of Hamilton, 13 Feb. 1703.
61 R. Saville, Bank of Scotland: A History, 1695–1995 (Edinburgh, 1996), pp. 6–7, 909.
men who can be identified as comprising the squadrone volante consisted

of seven noblemen, thirteen shire and five burgh commissioners. Of these,
five had sailed across the English Channel with William of Orange in
1688 and had been members of the émigré community exiled in the Low
Countries. At least another five were present when the Scots elite met
at Whitehall following William’s arrival in the capital. One of these,
Sir William Anstruther, had been identified as a leading member of
the aforementioned presbyterian party in 1688.62 In other respects too
their roots lay deep within the Revolution. Four members had sat in the
presbyterian-dominated Convention of Estates, while a further seven were
the sons or heirs of men who had sat in the Convention. Another ten were
elected or had first entered parliament between 1689 and 1702, that is, during
William’s reign, and formed part of the patriotic opposition of 1700–2. Most
members came from the counties of Fife and Kinross, Perthshire, and south
towards and beyond Edinburgh and the border shire of Roxburgh, and in
a number of cases were closely linked by either ties of kin or friendship:
Tweeddale was Roxburghe’s uncle and Rothes’s father-in-law for example,
while John Cockburn of Ormiston was also a cousin of Rothes and Haddington.
Tweeddale’s father had evinced an interest in union as early as 1670, a
measure which had been urged by Charles II.63 He had also been respon-
sible for the East Lothian address in 1688, which was presented to William
by his son. The second marquess was clearly therefore no stranger to the
concept and implications of a British union when negotiations began in 1706.
Marchmont was another who had entertained notions of union from a
fairly early stage, and certainly before the court embarked on its campaign
to manage parliament and secure the passage of the Articles of Union.
Indeed, Marchmont’s nineteenth-century family historian was convinced
that he was an instigator of union rather than simply a follower. In a letter
to the duke of Devonshire dated December 1705, Marchmont expressed
satisfaction ‘that your Grace thinks an entire union the surest way for
securing the Protestant religion, [and] establishing the monarchy, with
the peace and prosperity of these nations’, and added that, ‘I have been
long of that opinion’. He was an established unionist, probably since the
time of the Revolution, and certainly by the end of the 1690s when Anglo-
Scottish relations began to disintegrate over Darien. Following the
abortive union negotiations of 1702–3 he made it his business, working
in collaboration with Whig grandees south of the border (Lords Somers
and Wharton in particular), to bring a fresh set of proposals to fruition,
which would also secure the Hanoverian succession in Scotland. 64
62 Colin Lindsay, third earl of Balcarres, Memoirs, p. 12.

63 G. H. MacIntosh, ‘Arise King John: Commissioner Lauderdale and Parliament in the Restora-
tion Era’, in Brown and Mann, Parliament and Politics in Scotland, pp. 167–8, 172–7.
64 Marchmont Papers, iii. 295; ibid., i, pp. xxxv–xxxvi, xcii; H. Kelsall and K. Helsall, Scottish Life-
style 300 Years Ago (Edinburgh, 1986) [hereafter Kelsall, Scottish Lifestyle], p. 188; M. Warrender,
Marchmont and the Humes of Polwarth (Edinburgh, 1894) [hereafter Warrender, Marchmont and the
Humes of Polwarth], pp. 57–8; Brown, Kingdom or Province?, p. 186.
Marchmont’s attachment to the Protestant cause and devotion to the

presbyterian form of church government was entirely sincere, lifelong
beliefs burned into his consciousness through bitter personal experience. 65
His opposition to Lauderdale led to his imprisonment in Edinburgh’s
tolbooth, on the Bass Rock, and in the castles at Dumbarton and Stir-
ling; in 1682 he was one of a number of political dissidents who pro-
moted a scheme to emigrate and found a colony of presbyterians, many
of them traders, in Carolina – thereby following a route which many
hundreds of covenanters had taken before them, but under duress, as
white slaves. Other backers included men who would later push for
union, like the Lord Cardoss and first marquis of Tweeddale, or whose
sons would support incorporation, as in the case of the fifth earl of Had-
dington.66 Marchmont’s religious convictions had caused him to be
charged with complicity in the Rye House Plot in 1683, and having
endured a period as a fugitive which included a month hidden in a light-less
underground vault of Polwarth church, he sought refuge in Utrecht. 67
His subsequent participation in the earl of Argyll’s ill-fated expedition of
1685 ended with a sentence of forfeiture, and economic privation for
himself and his dependents during another spell of exile in Holland
where he remained until the Revolution. He was returned as a commis-
sioner for Berwickshire to the Convention of Estates, in which capacity
he played a leading part in drafting the Claim of Right. He was also one
of the Scots members appointed to negotiate a union with England.
Patrick Hume was a loyal Williamite who was created Lord Polwarth by
his king in 1690, and earl of Marchmont in 1697, serving as the king’s
commissioner to parliament in 1698, in which capacity he bore much of
the brunt of the rage directed against William’s government.
It is true that in 1706–7 Marchmont was owed a considerable sum of
money in the form of salary arrears from the civil list and apart from
Queensberry was the biggest beneficiary of the notorious £20,000 ster-
ling payment distributed to bolster or buy Scots support for union,
receiving just over £1,100.68 Whether this mattered much in March-
mont’s case is open to question, but seems unlikely. The aged earl was
ideologically committed to the Protestant succession and the Revolution
settlement which the Union would secure against a Jacobite Stuart
intruder; worse in Marchmont’s eyes, as well as those like him in his own
party and amongst his social circle – several of whom were attached to
the court party – was the prospect of a Catholic intruder. Indeed, there
65 Kelsall, Scottish Lifestyle, p. 16.

66 Warrender, Marchmont and the Humes of Polwarth, p. 30. Henry Erskine, third lord Cardross
was named as one of the Scots union commissioners in 1689. John Hay, second earl and first mar-
quis of Tweeddale was responsible for the pro-union East Lothian address to William of Orange in
1689; his son was the squadrone leader 1706–7. Both the fifth earl of Haddington’s sons, Hadding-
ton and Rothes, were leading members of the squadrone.
67 Warrender, Marchmont and the Humes of Polwarth, p. 36; Kelsall, Scottish Lifestyle, p. 17;
Macinnes, Harper and Fryer, Scotland and the Americas, pp. 71–2.
68 Lockhart, Memoirs, p. 414.
are grounds for believing that the depth and longevity of his support for
union was recognized by parliamentary managers: it was Marchmont
who on 1 November 1706 moved that parliament should proceed to
consider the first Article of union, which would unite the kingdoms ‘into
one Kingdom by the Name of Great-Britain’.69
Marchmont was an important figure in the squadrone and his parlia-
mentary significance has almost certainly been underestimated by
historians. Few men were able to deliver so many pro-union votes in
parliament where he was joined by two of his émigré sons, Sir Alexander
Campbell of Cessnock and Sir Andrew Hume of Kimmerghame, and
two sons-in-law, James Sandilands, seventh lord Torphichen – an army
officer – and George Baillie of Jerviswood, a grand total of five votes,
one fifth of the squadrone’s membership. For his efforts Marchmont
received the thanks of Queen Anne in November 1707.70 There was
nothing irresolute, inconsistent or ignoble about his behaviour. 71 Incor-
porating union promised to secure what the Revolution had re-established,
and ensured that for men and women of his ilk – devout Protestants of a
presbyterian bent – never again would there be a return to the desperate
circumstances of the 1670s and 1680s, when political and religious liberties
appeared to have been withdrawn.
Similarly if not more intensely felt sentiments can also be detected in
Jerviswood’s character and background. According to his enemies he
was ‘morose, proud and severe’, the ‘Hardest Headed Man of all his
Party’.72 But even Lockhart conceded that Jerviswood was something of
a patriot, and his daughter was in no doubt about the strength of his
devotion to the national interest, pointing to the long periods her father
spent in London prior to the Union, and afterwards as a Westminster
MP.73 Like Marchmont, whose daughter Grisell he married in 1691,
Jerviswood had been several years in exile in the Netherlands following
the execution in December 1684 of his father Robert – a covenanter,
much revered by English Whigs – for his alleged part in the Rye House
Plot. His son, still in his teens, had witnessed what must have been the
torment of his ailing father’s execution in Edinburgh.74 He was descended
too from Sir Archibald Johnston of Wariston, one of the architects of
the National Covenant, who had suffered a similar fate when he was
hanged in Edinburgh in July 1663. Jerviswood could also claim family
connections with the celebrated reformer John Knox – thus, he could
69 NAS, Hamilton MSS, GD 406/M9/266, handwritten minute of speeches in parliament, 1706–7,
fo. 24.
70 Warrender, Marchmont and the Humes of Polwarth, p. 58.
71 Since the 1960s most historians who have written on the period have considered unionist politi-
cians in this manner. See nn. 3, 5 and 8 for examples.

72 Szechi, ‘Scotland’s Ruine’, p. 64.
73 Lady Murray of Stanhope, Memoirs of the Lives and Character of the Honourable George Baillie
of Jerviswood and of Lady Grisell Baillie (Edinburgh, 1824) [hereafter Stanhope, Memoirs], p. 10.
74 G. Gilfillan, Martyrs & Heroes of the Scottish Covenant (Edinburgh, 1863), pp. 122–3; A. Smellie,
Men of the Covenant (1911), pp. 365–72.
boast a venerable Protestant pedigree, littered with martyrs, which few

could match. Although regular in his religious devotions, Baillie was no
puritan. In common with many of the Scots émigrés he had limited
material resources, having been stripped of his fortune following the
forfeiture of his father’s estate. This was restored shortly after his return
to Scotland at the Revolution, when he secured election as an MP from
Berwick and, latterly, Lanarkshire. Despite his dalliance with the oppo-
sition and dislike of the duke of Queensberry, he was a resolute sup-
porter of the Hanoverian succession. If Jerviswood was a less enthusiastic
advocate of union than his father-in-law, he was ultimately convinced
that – in his own words – it was ‘our [the Scots’] onlie game’, the best
means of blocking the Jacobites.75 Presbyterians like Jerviswood recognized
the virtues of political pragmatism.
The conventional notion that the members of the squadrone adopted
union in exchange for an assurance that they would be responsible for
the distribution of the Equivalent fails to recognize that, for some of
them, conversion to the cause of full-blown unionism followed intense
discussion and deep reflection. Montrose and Roxburghe had no claim
on the Equivalent anyway, although both were rewarded with dukedoms
in 1707.76 The Revolution settlement, the Protestant succession and pres-
byterian sentiment were important determining factors, but there were
other considerations which drew them to the conclusion that union was
the preferred solution. This can be demonstrated by reference to another
squadrone adherent, Captain William Bennet of Grubbet. Grubbet was
with the Dutch fleet when it landed at Brixham. Although there is no
evidence that he was a political or religious exile, what is clear is that
Bennet had left Scotland sometime after graduating from Edinburgh
University in 1685, and found service in Holland as an officer in the
prince of Orange’s pay.77 There is no ambiguity however about where his
confessional sympathies lay. Grandson of a minister and a firm presbyte-
rian, he wrote to his father shortly before his return to Scotland, to
describe how ‘some days [ago]’ he had been ‘in persuit of some papists
and jumping over a wiket’, a task he relished, had strained his horse’s
back.78 Bennet therefore was cut from the same cloth as many of his
party colleagues and shared their interests and concerns for the kirk in
Scotland and the security of the post-Revolution state, although as with
other leading squadrone figures, his presbyterianism was not of the strict
moralizing kind, and could accommodate a full and diverse social life. 79
Another matter however was the economy. Bennet’s attitude to this is
well illustrated in a letter to his brother-in-law and another squadrone
75 Correspondence of George Baillie of Jerviswood, 1702–1708, ed. Earl of Minto (Bannatyne Club,
1842) [hereafter Correspondence of Jerviswood], p. 145.
76 Shaw, Political History, pp. 13, 15.
77 Cruickshanks, Handley and Hayton, House of Commons, iii. 175.
78 NAS, Ogilvy of Inverquharity MSS, GD 205/31/1/8, Capt. William Bennet to Sir William
Bennet of Grubbet, London, 5 Jan. [1689].

79 Stanhope, Memoirs, pp. 8–9, 11–13; Kelsall, Scottish Lifestyle, pp. 80 –106, 181–91.
member, William Nisbet of Dirleton, written in April 1706, as rumours

spread of the terms of the prospective union. Bennet was of the opinion
that:
a fair bargain, with our nighbour nation, [was] the best handle to give us
peace and save us from Anarchy and confusion, We have long gone astray
and been bewildered in a maze of perplexitys and misery, had nothing left
us but to complain, and noe view how to be better at the long run, As
to the generall concern of the nation, what ever desynys and advantages
private men might have projected for themselves . . . if we are now to have
compensation for what we have suffer’d from our nighbours in the matter
of darien and the like, and the advantages of ther trade and plantations . . .
we then see the end of our journy.
He ended by remarking that ‘noe body can doubt, but this will be
advantageous to us, labouring under so many hardships and miserys’,
adding – as a good British Whig – that union would also be ‘most
important, for the hapinese of our nighbours’.80
The significance of Bennet’s economic thinking, and his references to
compensation for Company of Scotland subscribers, free trade, and
access to the English plantations, is that these demands had been high on
the Scots agenda during the failed union negotiations of 1702–3. That
the English commissioners had been reluctant to concede ground and
seemed not to be taking the Scots all that seriously, had led some of the
Scottish commissioners to abandon the talks and return north early,
notably Sir David Dalrymple of Hailes, Archibald Primrose, first earl
of Roseberry, and Sir James Falconer of Phesdo. The first two were re-
appointed in 1706, their resolve stiffened by the humiliation of 1702. That
England was now prepared to accede to the Scots’ demands partly
explains why union attracted men like Bennet, another of the squadrone
MPs who had been a leading member of the country opposition in 1700,
to the extent that he had travelled to London in support of the petition
demanding that William call a meeting of parliament, and with another
ten of the men who would join the new party, voted in favour of the act
to declare Darien a lawful colony. Although Bennet had private reasons
for going along with Queensberry and Argyll over the Union (he had
been appointed muster master in Scotland in 1704), there were compel-
ling public motives too. That squadrone members sided with the patriotic
opposition from around 1700 and up to and including 1704, yet voted
for the Union in 1706–7, is perfectly consistent: union secured for Scot-
land the national objectives that had been sought – unsuccessfully – earlier.
In fact, the economic question loomed large fairly widely amongst
squadrone ranks. Indeed, this had long featured in discussions about union
in Scotland. Contained within the draft legislation for an incorporating
union in 1689 was the recognition that the existing union of the crowns
80 NAS, Ogilvy of Inverquharity MSS, GD 205/38, Capt. William Bennet to William Nisbet of
Dirleton, Marlfield, 13 April 1706.
had been much to Scotland’s economic disadvantage, having reduced the

nation to ‘extream poverty’.81 Marchmont had little doubt that union
would bring prosperity to both nations.82 There is also Roxburghe’s well-
known and frequently quoted letter to Jerviswood in which he consid-
ered what would persuade MPs to support union, concluding, ‘Trade
with most, Hanover with some, ease and security with others, together
with a generall aversion at civill discords, intollerable poverty, and the
constant oppresion of a bad Ministry’.83 Doubts have been cast on
whether Roxburghe’s views were sincerely held, but fresh evidence sug-
gests that these are weakly based. What a previously unseen record of
speeches made in the Union Parliament reveals is that in a riposte in
parliament on 2 November 1706, Roxburghe acknowledged the ‘great
many very fine speeches’ made by members of the opposition. These he
argued, however, offered, ‘no remedy . . . for our present ill circumstances’.
As with the drafters of the 1689 act for establishing the government of
Scotland, Roxburghe lamented the several ‘inconveniences we have been
groaning [under] since the Incomplete union of the tuo Crouns’, observing
that ‘Our Nobility houever contentedly they may live at home, yet can
keep no figure abroad, our Gentlemen entirely decayed, and our Coun-
treymen all beggars’. Asking rhetorically how the situation could be
improved, he declared that ‘I knou no way but this union’. 84
The rest of the squadrone shared much in common with the individuals
whose political backgrounds have already been examined in some detail.
The support for Hanover and the Union of James Graham, fourth mar-
quess of Montrose, High Admiral of Scotland, mirrored that of his step-
father John Bruce of Kinross, and his cousins John, earl of Rothes and
Thomas Hamilton, sixth earl of Haddington, a man described as being
‘entirely abandoned to Whiggish and Commonwealth Principles, and one
of Cockburn of Ormiston’s beloved pupils’.85 Rothes’s great-grandfather
had also been a stout covenanter.86 Rothes himself would go on to serve
as commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland
from 1715 to 1721 and, with his brother Haddington, fought against the
Jacobites at Sherrifmuir in 1715. John Haldane, a commissioner from
Perthshire with similarly deep covenanting roots (his grandfather had
lost his life at the battle of Dunbar), appears to have been out of Scot-
land in the years immediately prior to William’s invasion. He had mis-
givings about the oaths introduced in 1689, and as a leading light in the
81 NAS, Leven and Melville MSS, GD 26/7/20, Act of the Estates of Scotland Establishing the
Government Thereof, n.d.
82 Marchmont Papers, iii. 295.
83 Correspondence of Jerviswood, p. 138.
84 NAS, Hamilton MSS, GD 406/M9/266, handwritten minute of speeches in parliament, 1706 –7,
fo. 33. For further discussion of the speeches in parliament 1706 –7 see Whatley, The Scots and the
Union, ch. 8.
85 Rothes was also the son-in-law of John Hay, second marquess of Tweeddale; Lockhart, Memoirs,
p. 137.
86 The Scots Peerage, vii (Edinburgh, 1910), p. 297.
Company of Scotland, he was an active member of the country opposi-

tion until he joined with the squadrone around 1705. But he was essen-
tially a Revolution man whose vigorous support for the Union earned
him the nickname ‘Union Jack’.87 The fathers of two, James Spittal of
Leuchat and John Cockburn of Ormiston, son of Lockhart’s ‘bigoted
Presbyterian’ the lord justice clerk, had been prominent figures in the
opposition to James VII in 1688. Their number also included two mem-
bers of the Council of Trade appointed in 1705, to investigate the ‘State
and Condition of the Trade and Commerce of this Nation’ – Jerviswood
and Sir Thomas Burnet of Leys.88 Detailed knowledge of the laggardly
Scottish economy had a discernible impact on how council members acted
in parliament in 1706–7, with most – fifteen out of twenty-one – voting
consistently for union. Haldane of Gleneagles too had long immersed
himself in commercial and manufacturing ventures, and was recognized
for his expertise on matters relating to the Scottish economy. Thus, John
Clerk of Penicuik was far from being a lonely voice in concluding that
however desirable an independent Scottish parliament, without the means
of implementing decisions relating to the economy in an era of muscular
mercantilism, it was ‘at best a meer shadow and an empty name’. 89 Nor,
it should be noted, had council members been court appointees, but
elected by MPs. In short, the principles which shaped the voting behav-
iour of Marchmont, Jerviswood, Bennet, Roxburghe and Tweeddale, a
combination of Revolution sentiment and what can reasonably be called
economic nationalism, or at the very least patriotic concern for the econ-
omy, were as relevant to the remaining members of the squadrone.
Lockhart described the squadrone as a party that ‘never scrupled to
serve their own interest, though at their country’s cost’, a view that has
gone largely unchallenged since his Memoirs were first published in
1714.90 Yet the Jacobite Lockhart’s deceit was to conflate the interests of
Scotland with that of the exiled Stuarts, and to deny that ‘true blue Pres-
byterians’ had at least an equally strong claim to represent the interests
of the nation. Lockhart’s is a biased account, fed by his understandable
detestation of the Union and the Hanoverians. There was, however, an
alternative vision of where Scotland’s future lay. It was as an integral
part of a Protestant state, with the Union securing not only the Protestant
succession but also the presbyterian kirk as the national church of Scot-
land as restored in 1690.91 There is a clear overlap in the membership of
the Estates over the period 1689 to 1707 and common interests that in the
shape of the squadrone drove a direct route from the Revolution to
the Union. Principle and patriotism were not the exclusive properties of
the anti-unionist opposition.
87 Cruickshanks, Handley and Hayton, House of Commons, iv. 152–3.
88 Gray, Memoirs of Sir John Clerk, p. 56.
89 History of the Union of Scotland and England by Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, ed. D. Duncan
(Edinburgh, 1993), pp. 199–200.

90 Szechi, ‘Scotland’s Ruine’, p. 134.
91 Kidd, ‘Religious Realignment’, pp. 165–7.
None of this is to ignore the part played by management by the ministry

in London and senior court party adherents in Edinburgh in bolstering
support for the Articles of Union in the Scottish parliament in the
autumn and winter of 1706–7. It was a victory made easier by the in-
effectiveness of and divisions within the ranks of the opposition. Not to be
overlooked, either, are the personal ambitions and failings of individual
MPs, who were by no means innocent of the charge of political chicanery.
Nor was the new party as a whole blemish-free in its political mano-
euvrings between 1703 and 1706. This is not a reversion to an older, dis-
credited version of unionist history, but it is clear that it was Whigs from
both sides of the border who were driving hardest for a union. By adopting
a longer perspective than is usual and looking back beyond 1702–3, and
identifying the ideological bases of political action and ambition, the
claim can reasonably be made that there was amongst the Scottish political
elite a degree of principled support for union with England the strength
and significance of which has been previously overlooked.
APPENDIX: SQUADRONE MEMBERS 1706–170792

Names of MPs who sat in the Convention of Estates in 1689 are in italics;
those who sat in William’s parliament are in bold.
[A] Nobility
Thomas Hamilton, sixth earl of Haddington

Patrick Hume, first earl of Marchmont
James Graham, fourth marquess of Montrose
John Leslie, ninth earl of Rothes
John Ker, fifth earl of Roxburghe
James Sandilands, seventh lord Torphichen
John Hay, second marquess of Tweeddale
[B] Shire commissioners
Sir William Anstruther of that ilk, Kt [Fife]

George Baillie of Jerviswood [Lanark]
Capt. William Bennet of Grubbet [Roxburgh]
John Bruce of Kinross [Kinross]
Sir Thomas Burnet of Leys, 3rd Bt [Kincardine]
Sir Alexander Campbell of Cessnock, Kt [Berwick]
John Cockburn of Ormiston [Haddington]
Robert Dundas of Arniston [Edinburgh]
Mungo Graham of Gorthie [Perth]
92 The list of squadrone members was compiled using a variety of sources including Riley, Union of
England and Scotland, p. 334; NAS GD 406/M1/208/21; Lockhart, Memoirs; and Correspondence
of Jerviswood.
John Haldane of Gleneagles [Perth]

James Haliburton of Pitcur [Forfar]
Sir William Ker of Greenhead, 3rd Bt [Roxburgh]
William Nisbet of Dirleton [Haddington]
[C] Burgh commissioners
Patrick Bruce of Bunzion [Cupar]

Sir John Erskine of Alva, 3rd Bt [Burntisland]
Sir Peter Halkett of Pitfirrane, 3rd Bt [Dunfermline]
Sir Andrew Hume of Kimmerghame, Kt [Kirkcudbright]
James Spittal of Leuchat [Inverkeithing]

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Persistence, Principle and Patriotism in the

Making of the Union of 1707: The Revolution,

Reform Act of 1832.1 Thus a leading Scottish historian in 1962 could

History: Founding a Modern State 1603–1715, ed. G. Burgess (1999), p. 118.

of an Anglo-British Identity, 1689–c.1830 (Cambridge, 1993), p. 50; W. Ferguson, ‘The Making of

the Scottish Church History Society, xxxi (2001), 68–96.

Ireland, 1685–1789 (Basingstoke, 1997), pp. 9–10, 27–8.

Unionism and Foreign Policy’ [hereafter Young, ‘Parliamentary Incorporating Union’], in

Eighteenth Century Scotland, pp. 7–12.

1727: A Study in Jacobitism (East Linton, 2002), p. 63.

squadrone MPs have been depicted as political opportunists. The percep-

elected to William’s parliament between 1689 and 1702. Twenty-five of these

but was undoubtedly pro-union.

History], pp. 58–60.

pp. 9–28, 178–206.

a united parliament suggests otherwise.37 In any case, had he favoured

37 Scott, Andrew Fletcher, p. 44.

SCOTLAND (London, 1689), pp. 7–8.

44 Kidd, ‘Religious Realignment’, p. 145.

may become one Body Politick, one Nation to be represented in one

men who can be identified as comprising the squadrone volante consisted

62 Colin Lindsay, third earl of Balcarres, Memoirs, p. 12.

Marchmont’s attachment to the Protestant cause and devotion to the

65 Kelsall, Scottish Lifestyle, p. 16.

69 NAS, Hamilton MSS, GD 406/M9/266, handwritten minute of speeches in parliament, 1706–7,

cians in this manner. See nn. 3, 5 and 8 for examples.

Men of the Covenant (1911), pp. 365–72.

boast a venerable Protestant pedigree, littered with martyrs, which few

Bennet of Grubbet, London, 5 Jan. [1689].

member, William Nisbet of Dirleton, written in April 1706, as rumours

Dirleton, Marlfield, 13 April 1706.

had been much to Scotland’s economic disadvantage, having reduced the

Company of Scotland, he was an active member of the country opposi-

(Edinburgh, 1993), pp. 199–200.

None of this is to ignore the part played by management by the ministry

APPENDIX: SQUADRONE MEMBERS 1706–170792

Thomas Hamilton, sixth earl of Haddington

[B] Shire commissioners

Sir William Anstruther of that ilk, Kt [Fife]

John Haldane of Gleneagles [Perth]

[C] Burgh commissioners

Patrick Bruce of Bunzion [Cupar]

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