The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century

8. Scotland and the Puritan Revolution

8 Scotland and the Puritan Revolution Between the union of the crowns in 1603 and the union of the parliaments in 1707, the relations of England and Scotland were thoroughly unhappy. Unequal in strength, different in history, the two countries had enough similarity to force them together and yet enough diversity to make their contact always explosive. Moreover, each feared the other. To some Scots—to the ‘‘beggarly blue-caps’’ who streamed down to the golden Court of James I and set up dynasties in the north on the unearned profits of England—the union of crowns was a great gain; but to Scotland in general it was a great loss: the King of Scotland became an absentee captured by a foreign establishment, and able, if he wished, to use foreign resources against the liberties of his native country. For the same reason, England too had its apprehensions. The resources of Scotland might be slight, but they were not negligible. In internal English affairs they might give a narrow but decisive margin of superiority to the Crown over its opponents—as they afterwards did to its opponents over the Crown. From the earliest days of the union of crowns, the profoundest of English statesmen, Francis Bacon, foresaw that a revolution in England might well begin in Scotland.1 A generation later, it did. The English Puritan Revolution, at every stage, was affected by Scottish affairs. Without Scotland it could not have begun; having begun, without Scotland it might have been over in a year. But again 1. The Letters and the Life of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding,  (1868), 73. 359 360       and again—in 1641, in 1643, in 1648, in 1651—Scotland reanimated the flames in which England was being consumed. Thereafter, when the revolution had triumphed in England, Scotland paid the price: the revolution was carried to it. The uneasy half-union of 1603 was completed , as even James I had not wished to complete it then, but as the statesmen of Queen Anne would be obliged to complete it afterwards, by a full union of parliaments. Indeed, the union of 1652 was far closer than that of 1707: for it was a union of Church and law as well. Moreover , I shall suggest, it entailed a social revolution in Scotland such as would not occur in fact till after 1745. Only it did not last. Within a few years all crumbled; yet another army set out from Scotland and ended by restoring, with the monarchy, the old half-union of 1603. With that restoration the last age of Scotland’s independence, the darkest age in its history, began. The character and effect of Scottish intervention in the English Revolution is well known. Everyone knows how the Scots were driven into revolt by Charles I’s Act of Revocation and Archbishop Laud’s liturgy; how the leaders of the Puritan opposition in England enlisted them as allies; how, thanks to that alliance, they were able to force Charles I to call a parliament and to prevent him from dissolving it; how Charles I, in the summer of 1641, by a personal visit to Scotland, sought and failed to reverse that alliance; how the English Parliament in 1643 renewed it, and brought a Scottish army, for the second time, into England; how Charles I, in reply, sought once again to raise up a rival party and a rival army in Scotland, and this time nearly succeeded; how the Marquis of Montrose, in his career of triumph, offered to lay all England as well as all Scotland at the feet of the king; but how, in fact, after his disaster at Philiphaugh and the surrender of the king not to his English but to his Scottish subjects, the Scottish Covenanters, in 1646, sought to impose their terms on both the king and the Parliament of England; how they were disillusioned and returned to Scotland, selling their king (as the royalists maintained) for £400,000 to the revolutionary English party which was to cut off his head; how the Scottish parties then sought, in vain, by yet other invasions of England, to stay or reverse the revolution: to snatch Charles I from the scaffold or to impose Charles II as a ‘‘covenanted king’’ on the throne; how Oliver Cromwell destroyed the first attempt at Preston, the second at Dunbar and Worcester; how all Scottish parties were thereafter pulverized by the victors, the Hamiltons...