EVER SINCE Nicola Sturgeon crashed and burned, and Humza Yousaf promised to emigrate, the question of the Union has gone off the boil in Scotland. The Westminster election earlier this year demonstrated that conclusively. But there are still lunatics in the Holyrood asylum so a study of the Scottish source of the Union idea is welcome.
Parochial nationalism gives many people who do not understand their own history delusions of agency. They feel that somewhere over the rainbow of the past there was a land where they could be movers and shakers or, at the very minimum, be local “influencers”. The dream of colourful lanyards and exclusive access to fee iPad accounts. That is what gives Holyrood its caché. But such ideas cannot survive serious contact with the real world outside Scotland or, more importantly, a fuller knowledge of our shared past.
I make this point because it was at the core of the thinking of this country’s most intelligent king, James VI. The book under review is not a full biography of the man, but a 600-page study of his approach to the Union of the Crowns (and the full, incorporating Union he wanted but failed to achieve): From Tudor to Stuart: The regime change from Elizabeth I to James I.
The author is Susan Doran, an Oxford academic who specialises in early modern English political history, focussing especially on Queen Elizabeth I. She tells her story well, if with a few lapses of textual taste. For example, is it really appropriate in a semi-academic context to say of a House of Commons decision in 1604, to defer to a forthcoming general election the issue of rising royal expenditure since James ascended to the throne, that it amounted to “kicking the can down the road” (p. 302)?
But that is a small point. Much more important for Scottish readers is the detailed consideration of James’s political situation before he came to the throne in London. Chapter 2, called A King in Waiting, should be required reading for anyone who retains the Scottish exceptionalist view that we were better governed before the Union than after. In fact, Scotland suffered grievously from a selfish, powerful and territorially acquisitive aristocracy, and an almost completely mute populus, Sturgeon-style.
England, by contrast, ever since the reign of Edward I in the thirteenth century, had had a small but growing forum—the parliament—which allowed for the expression of non-Royal opinion, even occasionally counter-Royal opinion. Before the Reformation, Scotland had nothing like that. The Crown was weak partly because it had no way of empowering public opinion to act on its side. As a result, the post-Bannockburn aristocracy was an irremovable threat to stable government. Professor Doran gives a nuanced and readable account of the reality James had to deal with. For example:
“[The king] confronted an armed noble force,” Doran writes, “led by Geroge Gordon sixth early of Huntly, at Brig o’ Dee near Aberdeen in April 1589 and was beset by violent challenges to his authority from Francis Stewart, fifth earl of Bothwell, during the early 1590s. Factional politics involving the powerful Catholic lords Huntly and Francis Hay, ninth earl of Errol, forced James to take up arms against them in 1594… A murky ‘conspiracy’ in August 1600 led by Alexander Ruthven and his brother, the second earl of Gowrie, to kidnap the king was said to have resulted in an assassination attempt that was thwarted by members of the king’s retinue.” (p. 40)
And so on, blood for blood, feud for feud. Prosperity was destroyed and the rule of law “kicked so far down the road” that Heritable Jurisdiction in the shires was not abolished until 1747 (in the wake of Culloden). That level of disorder was not dissimilar to much English experience, both before and after Edward, when the country lurched from anarchy to tyranny and back again until the arrival of the Tudor dynasty in 1485 (and even then the instability did not stop completely).
Their ruthless and politically centralised approach to government enabled England/Britain to begin its long climb to world leadership in the nineteenth century, latterly with much Scottish, Welsh, Irish and even ex-colonial help—the United Kingdom was an “inclusive” imperialist.
I doubt Yousaf knows enough about “his” country to understand much of this; and I don’t suppose Sturgeon has ever been curious about any ruler other than herself. That is why books like Professor Doran’s are so important. They allow historically literate Scots to ponder their own collective past and hopefully to arrive at a mature consensus about our realistically possible future.
Space sadly prevents my mentioning much more of this fascinating story, but I cannot leave it without describing the basis of James’s Sturgeon-like authoritarianism: the theory of Divine Right of Kings. Earthly rulers ordained by God should have unchallengeable powers, even over the church, so long as they exercise those powers in line with God’s more general will as the anointed monarch saw it.
That was the basis of much pre-modern kingship, but the idea was already going out of fashion in James’s day (though it remained the basis of Russian tsardom until 1917). In Britain, it was replaced after 1688 by the concept of “the Crown-in-parliament”. That empowered a semi-commercial oligarchy whose unspoken aim was to replace acquisition of territory as the main national goal with increased commercial prosperity and the arts of peaceful consumerism, Jane Austin-style.
Representatives of that oligarchy sat in the parliament, which became increasingly imperial until after Napoleon’s competing empire had been crushed, and which then evolved slowly and hesitatingly into the semi-democratic House of Commons that we know and laugh about today.
The over-bearing aristocracy was not James’s only enemy in Scotland. After the Reformation in 1560 a new challenge emerged in the shape of the over-bearing and hyper-virtuous (as they saw themselves) Protestant kirk. It argued that the state should not control spiritual aspects of the lives of Christians: “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.” (Matthew 22:21)
This was incendiary stuff. It implied spiritual freedom from all government. That of course is the basis of the argument today about the appropriate status of Sharia law in a secular society.
That was not how James wanted to run his newly-inherited kingdom. He was one of the most highly-educated monarchs in Europe, and he responded to the kirk not by drawing his sword but by reviving and refashioning the ancient idea of divine right as it gave theoretical sanction to Crown control of both the material and the spiritual life of the people. The kirk was to be subordinate to the king.
That was roughly what Henry VIII had imposed on England when, in 1534, he bullied the House of Commons into passing the Act of Supremacy. He was now head of the church as well as of the state. That was what James wanted to achieve in Scotland. And who is to say he was wrong? There were good arguments on both sides.
It was a conflict which was not to end, as far as Scotland is concerned, until the 1850s when, after the Disruption and the formation of the Free Church, the idea of spiritual independence of subjects from the Crown—“Christ alone is Head of the Church”—was finally defeated. By then, the aristocracy had been knee-haltered by the Union. After the Jacobite rebellion in 1745, even its most recalcitrant were brought within the ambit of the law. The result was that the battles of the nineteenth century religious “rebellion” were fought entirely in the courts, without shedding any blood or laying waste any areas of the productive countryside.
That in itself was a tremendous advance for what had formerly been a viciously authoritarian kirk. Even after the rout of the Covenanters, in 1690, a teenage boy was hanged in Edinburgh for frivolously denying the existence of the Devil. The blood-free way in which the Court of Session (and later the House of Lords) defused the ecclesiastical crisis is an important illustration of the rule of law finally making the impact in Edinburgh that James would have desired (“I rule Scotland with my pen.”).
The story of the court battles is told in what I think is the best book ever written about Scotland and its constitutional realities, namely The Courts, the Church and the Constitution – Aspects of the Disruption of 1843 (2008). The author, Lord Rodger of Earlsferry (1944-2011), is widely thought to have been the most intellectually gifted judge Scotland (or Britain) produced in the last half-century. His book is a classic, and therefore largely ignored in funky, modern, Euro-facing Alba.
That is a shame because these controversies are subtle, complicated and extremely important, especially in the identity-obsessed world of today. Different people, quite legitimately, hold different views. Some choose to “discuss” their differences in court. However, unlike violence, litigation is rarely a simple solution to any problem. It often leads to unnecessary complexity, as is wittily illustrated by Lord Rodger.
He describes one of the cases in the House of Lords which involved the brilliant philosopher-advocate from Edinburgh (born in Charlotte Square) who later became Lord Haldane (famous for reforming the British Army before 1914, and later becoming Lord Chancellor). The young egg-head brought so much abstruse theology into court that it completely fogged one of the judges. His Lordship (“a crusty old Whig”) shook his head and said to Haldane: “I never knew how incapable I was of understanding these things until I heard your argument.” (p. 103)
Professor Doran’s book explains the root of these difficulties in terms which make the arguments and counter-arguments clear, interesting and, for once when writing about Jacobean history, relevant to current events. I am thinking particularly of the eagerly-awaited departure of Humza Yousaf for somewhere else—anywhere else—and the descent of the Sword of Damocles onto the motor-mouthed but curiously forgetful head of King James’s failed imitator, the undivine dame of Dreghorn.
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Hamish Gobson is the author of Living the Green Dream (forthcoming). It is a lightly humorous account of the immigration battle on the remote Scottish island, Great Todday, where Gobson lives and films seaweed for the Hebridean Centre for Marine Meditation.
