National opinion and the press in Scotland before the union of 1707

Vigorous extra-parliamentary public debate over the question of union helped to ensure that Scotland brought into the Union of 1707 a sense of itself as a nation with national opinions. Though the parliamentary electorate remained small, a meaningful number of Scots engaged in public political debate on the question of union. Petitions from shires, burghs and parishes spoke for local communities and pamphleteers presented Scottish voices through archetypal figures such as a ‘country farmer’. This allowed opponents to declare that incorporating union was inconsistent with ‘the publickly expressed mind of the nation’. After the Union, extra-parliamentary national opinion continued to be expressed and sustained by the Scottish press and petitions, contributing to the maintenance of Scottish national identity within the United Kingdom

Newspapers, the early modern public sphere and the 1704-5 Worcester affair

This paper shows how the proliferation of Scottish newspapers and pamphlets in 1704-5 contributed to an international crisis in Anglo-Scottish relations over the Worcester piracy case and influenced the chain of events leading to the Union of 1707. It considers how far a Habermasian concept of the modern public sphere can be applied to this case. It finds that while newspapers helped to shape public opinion and events in what might be termed a public sphere, there is not a strong fit with the Habermasian model and the case is better understood in terms of an early modern public sphere

Constitution questions are not new

Considers historical precedents for the writing of a new Scottish constitution in the event of a yes vote in the 2014 referendum. Argues that the tensions inherent in the Union of Crowns (1603-1707) led the Scots to write and rewrite their constitution through new parliamentary statutes and coronation oaths regulating the powers of the monarchy

Cultural, British and global turns in the history of Early Modern Scotland

Assesses the state of the historiography of early modern Scotland, focusing on the effects of the cultural turn, New British History and global history. Based on a paper delivered at a conference sponsored by the Scottish Historical Review Trust 29-30 October 2010, The State of Scottish History: Past, Present and Future

Public, People and Nation in Early Modern Scotland

The emergence of modern publics as national bodies with opinions expressed in print has been described by historians focusing on early modern England, France, Germany and America. These histories have highlighted the seventeenth century as a key period for the development of the concept of a textual ‘public’, with public opinion being seen as authoritative by the eighteenth century. This paper considers the development of textual publics and the language of ‘the public’ in Scotland alongside alternative concepts of collective opinion expressed in terms of ‘the people’ and ‘the nation. It argues that forms of public opinion were becoming more prominent in Scottish political culture across the seventeenth century as political conflict led dissidents to challenge the judgement of the monarch and the representativeness of national assemblies. Though print markets remained restricted in Scotland, expressions of extra-parliamentary opinion developed through petitioning and other forms of direct engagement, employing the language of people and nation rather than the public

From customary to constitutional right: the right to petition in Scotland before the 1707 Act of Union

The confirmation of a constitutional, rather than customary, right to petition the monarch in Scotland and England in 1689 has been recognized as an important precedent for modern constitutions, but the underlying forces impelling this historical transition have been less well recognized. The assertion of a constitutional right to petition the Scottish crown appeared after of decades of conflict over increasingly bold forms of collective political petitioning to crown and parliament. These innovations involved ordinary people in organized political protest, stimulating Scotland’s monarchs to block what they considered seditious and tumultuous activity. Standing laws against lese-majesté and unauthorized meetings were deployed to restrict petitioning, despite claims by Scottish dissidents for a customary liberty and natural right to petition. Within the composite British monarchy formed in 1603, England experienced similar but not identical conflicts over participative petitioning, leading revolutionary assemblies in both realms to demand in 1689 a right to supplicate the crown without fear of prosecution. Though Scotland’s monarchs still sought to discourage and evade unwelcome petitions, this new right allowed assertive political petitioning to crown and parliament to re-emerge in Scotland, contributing to the prominence of petitioning in British political culture after the Union of 1707

'A legal limited monarchy': Scottish constitutionalism in the union of crowns, 1603-1707

After the formation of the British composite monarchy in 1603, a distinctive pattern of Scottish constitutionalism emerged in which a desire to maintain the Scottish realm and church encouraged an emphasis on the limitation of the monarch by fundamental law, guaranteed by oaths. The Covenanters attempted to use the National Covenant and the 1651 coronation to force the king to maintain the Presbyterian church as defined by law. Restoration royalists emphasised the untrammelled power of the king, but in the Revolution of 1688-89, the Claim of Right was presented with the oath of accession as a set of conditions designed to re-establish the Scottish realm as a ‘legal limited monarchy’ with a Presbyterian church. Reforms in 1640-41, 1689-90 and 1703-4 placed statutory constraints on the royal prerogative. The making of the union relied on a reassertion of monarchical sovereignty, though Presbyterian unionists ensured that the new British monarch would be required to swear to uphold the church as established by law

Early modern political petitioning and public engagement in Scotland, Britain and Scandinavia, c. 1550–1795

This article provides an introduction to a special issue of Parliaments, Estates and Representation examining petitioning practices in early modern Scotland, England and Scandinavia

Popular or parliamentary sovereignty? National opinion and the Declaration of Arbroath on the eve of union

Hoping to stop the ratification of a treaty of incorporating union with England, late in 1706 the parish minister Robert Wylie quoted the Declaration of Arbroath in a draft manifesto for an armed uprising. Rather than seeing Wylie’s manifesto as part of a perceived tradition of popular sovereignty rooted in the Declaration of Arbroath, this paper asks what his quotation reveals about this early modern moment. It confirms a growing awareness of the Declaration of Arbroath in Scottish political culture and its usefulness as patriotic rhetoric for Whigs and Jacobites alike, aided by the publication of English translations from 1689. It shows how Wylie used the Declaration to suggest that the pro-treaty majority in the Scottish parliament was a traitorous faction out of step with the mind of a nation bound by its covenant oaths and how this attack on the legitimacy of the estates went against more than a century of presbyterian efforts to bolster the authority of the parliament as a counter to Stewart power. Wylie’s document thus confirms the rising relevance of public opinion in this era and its construction in terms of conscience and covenants; and underlines a key struggle in the making of the union between extra-parliamentary opinion, highlighted in petitions and weaponised through calls for recesses and special assemblies, and the stature of the Scottish parliament as the embodiment of the political nation

Scottish public opinion and the making of the Union of 1707

Abstract available : p. 1 (vol. 1