FOR good reason contemporary reflection on the Union state in 1800 was scarce. The state was geographically distant, being for most Scots an irrelevance to their daily life. With no national newspaper or periodical in circulation, parliamentary discussion was dated, variable, or simply unknown. Originating in 1783, The Glasgow Herald did not publish daily until 1859; The Scotsman would not appear until 1817; and it was not until the 1830s that provincial newspapers came to the fore. At the century’s start, chapbooks and broadsides told tales of monarchs and the constitution, the army and the navy, William Wallace, the Stuarts, and the Covenanters. The Scots Magazine (1739), the Edinburgh Review (1802), and the early periodicals dissected culture, religion, sedition, foreign governments, the constitution, and politics. But the state, as a structure of bureaucratic government, was detached from household debate.
This lack of contemporary interaction with the nineteenth-century Union state—which to a lesser or greater extent lasted throughout the century—was reflected upon by the Royal Commission on the Constitution in 1973. It described that state as ‘mostly passive and non-interventionist’ to the extent that ‘[t]the individual one hundred years ago hardly needed to know that the central government existed’.1 With a curtailed franchise pre-1832, around forty-five hundred Scots voted; they were all men. The state in the first half of the century did not record Scots’ birth, marriage, or death. Few paid any tax, and even fewer paid it to the Treasury. It was 1799 when national taxation was imposed upon those with an income over £60, lasting until 1816 when the emphasis shifted to taxing commodities. Even a decade after its reintroduction, income tax produced only one-tenth of the state’s revenue in 1853, with fewer Scots than English earning sufficiently to precipitate a contribution.2 Constitutionally, the Union state was the stable reality. The adult generation who had blazed the trail of the Jacobite cause at the ’45 had all but passed away, and those that followed had the stories and promptings from their elders, but no direct experience. For many the Union state was as much about monarchy as it was about law makers. The Hanoverian line had passed through its third coronation. The monarch had yet to be seen north of the border but loyalty held sway. Radicalism peaked in the 1790s, and would continue to rumble into the 1820s and beyond that into Chartism and suffrage disputes. Where the Scots understood the role of the state most clearly, and where it fashioned an identity that was shared, was in matters overseas. Coming out of the eighteenth century, the Scots found common cause as Britons facing down the upheavals of American independence, war with France, the United Irishmen’s challenge to British rule, and union with Ireland. Tales of great men, especially military men, marked Scotland’s impact in its Empire role. The regiments and the (often brutal) successes of the Scottish soldier were strong narratives at home, evidence that has been charted by T. M. Devine.3 Similarly, accounts of Scottish overseas missionaries coupled firmly nation and Empire across the genders.4 These were identities of the Union state. In John M. Mackenzie’s terms, the British Empire, for the Scots, reflected English institutions imbued with a Scottish ethos. Importantly, he argues, it gave Scotland a platform through which it could counter its large southern neighbour.5
Nationalist campaigning throughout the second half of the century pointed to the Union state being an Empire state, to the detriment of domestic affairs. The nationalists of the 1850s worried that each and every question of Empire was dominating parliamentary time. In the 1880s and 1890s these grievances were growing. To show how the Imperial Parliament might better manage its affairs, Australian Theodore Napier distributed his pamphlet ‘Scotland’s Demand for Home Rule’ (1892), outlining plans for a local national parliament.6 Attending a committee meeting of the Scottish Home Rule Association in Edinburgh in June 1895, Napier heard it was the Australian colonies that were the most active supporters of state reform. Letters were read from Sydney and Melbourne, and acknowledgement made of a parcel of pamphlets received by the Imperial Federation League of Victoria. The campaign to mould the Union state into a federation of Greater Britain sought support in England, with the Liverpool branch campaigning in the north as well as posting a short statement to political associations throughout the United Kingdom.7 The colonial nationalists claimed the clarity of distance to explain the detrimental force of centralized imperial government upon Scotland and themselves:
We believe that nothing less than a wisely devised and comprehensive scheme of Imperial Federation will meet the case, and preserve the Colonies from drifting from Britain. At the present moment almost all the Colonies are enjoying the blessing of local autonomy or Home Rule. In this respect they have the advantage over the mother country, which, in its incorporate Union, subjects the will and voice of the smaller nationalities of Scotland and Ireland to the will of the largest one, England.8
Combining state and ethnicity, Napier identified the relationship of Britain to its colonies as a flow of trade under the Union flag linked by blood.9 And it was the blood relationship—to the grandfather if not closer—that St Andrews Societies overseas sought when administering succour to the colonial Scot. Throughout the year, the boards in these societies gathered information on those they might help. They held their festivities each November with their governors instructed to wear a cross of St Andrew or a thistle on their left breast. These and related Caledonian societies helped sustain business, social, and religious communities of Scots within the British colonies, as studies of India, South Africa, North and South America, and Australasia have shown. Robert Burns, of course, was also celebrated, most especially leading up to, during, and immediately after the centenary celebrations in 1859. In the Burns Club of New York, the St Andrew’s cross was displayed alongside the flag of St George and the Stars and Stripes.10 Toasts were called for ‘the birth day of Nature’s own poet’; ‘the genius of Burns’; ‘Scotland, the land of our fathers’; and ‘America, the land we live in’. In the same city that year, the Burns Anniversary Association met in Mozart Hall on Broadway, declaring there had been but two great kings of Scotland: John Knox and Robert Burns. These were customarily gatherings of men before equality was sought later in the century; until then, women were invited to admire the table settings and room decor, and to parade in their gowns, but to do so in advance of the revelry. Later, in 1880, New York’s Central Park welcomed a statue of Burns alongside an earlier monument honouring Walter Scott. Scots, it would appear, were never alone in Empire. And through the use of the electrical telegraph mid-century, there were a good deal of fraternal greetings—in Scots—exchanged between suppers and balls alike.
Scottish identity within Empire employed a standard set of ethnic markers to bring Scots together in the clubs, societies, and associations characteristic of civil society. Being part of the Union state’s colonial endeavour brought a heightened Britishness alongside a version of Scottish national identity embedded in new communities. The familiar toast to the ‘twa lands’ at Burns suppers is suggestive of this. Scots at home also looked to Burns to hear and read their own language. With local and national administration underlining the dominance of English, Scots was more likely to be heard and read outside of the state. Janet Little (1759–1813), the Scotch Milkmaid, and the often-anonymous Carolina Oliphant (1766–1845), better known as Lady Nairne, followed Burns in producing popular verse in Scots. Coming from contrasting social worlds, addressing different audiences, Little and Oliphant brought folk memories into their writing, linking contemporary and historical life. Furthermore, it was Walter Scott, the anonymous creator of the Waverley series from 1814, who established the genre of the historical novel. From an initial print run of one thousand, Waverley’s success blossomed tenfold before the year was out. The Scottish historical novel was a literature that reflected the ancient nation now in its Union state. Scott’s sentimental Jacobitism allied to a strong political unionism came out in his novels, diaries, and letters as it did throughout the gathering of the clans he organized for George IV in 1822, the first visit of a Hanoverian monarch to Scotland. Scott’s childhood friend Jane Porter (1776–1850) had projected an earlier claim to the creation of the historical novel with Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803) and The Scottish Chiefs (1810), a novel about William Wallace, although the lack of temporal sensitivity compromised both romances. Like Scott, her novels mixed Jacobite romanticism with monarchical and military loyalty that was singularly British. Porter was an Anglo-Scot, born in Durham, raised in Edinburgh, who didn’t write her seminal romance on Wallace until she returned south. Her most renowned brother, Sir Robert Ker Porter, made his name first as an artist of the epic Storming of Seringapatam (1800) in London, later becoming British consul to Venezuela (1825–40). Jane believed her writings embodied the stories of Scotland’s Jacobite widows living on in Edinburgh after the ’45 and the ‘wholesome knowledge in the country, pervading all ranks’.11 Continually reprinted by publishing houses in England, Ireland, and North America, The Scottish Chiefs sold steadily throughout the century, gaining the author plaudits but not wealth. Its success above all other tales of Wallace in this period, or of anything else she wrote, came from its rootedness in the social memory of the Scots within Union. Porter rejected the darker claims of nationalism, but insisted Scotland, like England, should celebrate its heroes lest her people ‘sink in the estimation of nations abroad’.12
Translated into German, Hungarian, and French, Porter wrote in English not Scots. But the use of Scots under the Union state was part of a wide and varied canon that grappled with constitutional and economic variation alongside fears of social dislocation. Dialects were different throughout the country. Gaelic in the north-west of Scotland struggled to engage the new society, but did so with some success. The inexorable progress of English was not simply linear. Words popped up that marked a Scoticizing of English. The most obvious would appear in broadsides where lassies were always ‘bonnie’ or, as in Scotland Yet (c.1860), past stories were best: ‘Gae bring my guid auld harp ance mair’. Perhaps after Burns’s death the Harp of Caledonia (c.1831) was no more, ‘yet still his song f’rae shore to shore/Lives bright in Caledonia’. The Kailyard literature would turn this further into a pawky (crafty) appeal, stingingly sentimental, and non-political, but it would also be a sign of Scottish customs persisting within English literature. For Tom Nairn this genre was symptomatic of Scotland’s failed political nationalism, but that is a hasty judgement. Having identified the disconnection between Scottish civil society and its Union state, Nairn idealizes a nationalism based on a unitary nation-state axis.13 But identity flowed from an amalgam of structures that sustained nineteenthcentury nationalism, favouring more Union, not less. The concept of Unionist-nationalism, as I have shown elsewhere, explains this identity.14 Kailyard fitted such a world, where the language of Scots was employed as an ethnic marker in the works of Scott and John Galt, but used without discrimination in provincial newspapers and periodicals discussing the political and philosophical issues of the day, an important argument from William Donaldson.15 English was dominating, but older tongues were wagging in the homes, and perhaps even in the afterlife: one prescient old widow from Sutherlandshire met with a United Presbyterian missionary in Edinburgh just days before she died in a tenement collapse. She spoke of her life soon ending and her Saviour’s love, looking forward to her heavenly inheritance, speaking the 139th psalm from the Gaelic psalm-book ‘which was read with true pathos’.16
The Union state, as it projected an identity of itself and for itself to the Scottish people, was one of constitutional defence against a foreign threat and the protection and promotion of Empire. It was an identity where the independence of the Presbyterian Church within a broader defence of Protestantism was central, although not exclusive. The Scots language was buffeted between nation and state, and Scottish culture and literature reflected this reality just as English confirmed its position as the lingua franca of bureaucracy. While the key features of identity-formation might be so rooted, and the increasing solidity of the Hanoverian line upon the throne recognized, the contemporary experience of the state was far from straightforward. Colin Kidd contends that the ideology of Unionism can be equated to cross-party support for the British state, but that it was encountered in many different ways.17 However much we can date the making of Scots and their fellow islanders as Britons by the time the eighteen-year-old Victoria took the throne of her uncle in 1837, and no matter how much the Scots at various times throughout the century believed their national identity and languages were on the way out, resilience not fragility has been the reality. Scottish identity was corralled into political union before the ideology of nationalism of the late eighteenth century. From 1800 not only did these political ideas circulate, and were read about in their revolutionary reality, but the state was to expand its reach into society both administratively and through the electoral franchise. Mercantilism receded as free trade overcame the Corn Laws and other excise restrictions to stimulate economic growth through the bounty of Empire. In the philosophical view of John Stuart Mill, writing in the revolutionary year of 1848, international trade would substitute confrontation for mutual interdependence among nations.18 The imperatives of free trade prioritized economic growth over statist ideology, and held back centrist impulses. Despite all the developments in central government that restructured society, from mid-century the British public expenditure per head of population remained substantially unchanged up to 1880.19
Where the Scots did experience greater transformation in their Union state was with their social institutions. Appointed to the Regius Chair of Medical Jurisprudence at Edinburgh University in 1820, and after two decades of further advocacy, W. P. Alison condemned the smallness of sums the poor law was distributing. He debated with Reverend Thomas Chalmers whether the state or the individual (or parish) should take on an increased burden. Reform in 1845 favoured Alison, moving the administration of poor relief from the Church of Scotland to the newly created Board of Supervision in Edinburgh. Compulsory legal assessment—rather than the voluntary system employed under the Church—central inspection, and institutional accommodation followed tenets first established in England, but were no mirror image. The Scots wanted to augment, not restrict help, and their costs inevitably increased: they were not compelled to build poorhouses and were generally more favourable to outdoor relief. The new parochial boards were elective bodies, although older property owners still dominated. The Board of Supervision was staffed with Scots—Lord Provosts of Edinburgh and Glasgow, the Solicitor General for Scotland, and various county sheriffs. And while giving credence to the centralization of Scotland’s administration, the Board still worked within the handshakes and procedures of earlier more ad hoc times.20 The reform of public health would similarly come under reforming pressure from methodologies and imperatives first applied south of the border, but the independence of the Edinburgh medical profession, and the dependence on the localities to put in place the sanitary and infrastructural reforms, again meant any solutions were later than in England and indigenous to Scotland.
That the Scots had a Union not a unitary state is crucial to the national identity that formed, a point emphasized by James Mitchell.21 Conglomerate states such as this were not unknown in early modern Europe, but the persistence of the Anglo-Scottish Union has been remarkable.22 The state did centralize over the nineteenth century, but resistance was met at each stage, and rather than having its role diminished, the local state maintained and gained governance. By 1911, instructively, still there were only 944 civil servants or government officials in Scotland.23
Scholars have given attention to the boards and departments that gave Scotland its administrative structure in the eighteenth century: arguments that can be extended onwards even with the local/central government balance in flux. Being close to those they governed was a tension that sustained county and burgh reform. Scotland gained improved powers to administer its urban areas with burgh police legislation: Aberdeen (1795), Glasgow (1800), Greenock (1801), Port Glasgow (1803), Edinburgh (1805), Leith and Paisley (both 1806), Kirkcaldy, (1811), and Dundee (1824) each took on powers, and then on various occasions thereafter further capabilities, to protect and enhance the built environment.24 The towns and cities were reinforced by Scotland-wide police legislation in 1847, 1850, 1857, 1862, and 1892. Hurried by past and impending town-hall bankruptcies—Aberdeen in 1817, Edinburgh in 1833—local government was reformed in 1833 (two years before reform of the boroughs in England). Introducing a similar but not identical franchise to that passed a year earlier for Westminster, the legislation left intact the police system to sit alongside the town councils. The resulting administrative duplication was sometimes problematic—as were the Joint Trusts created to deal with cross-boundary utilities from the 1870s—but both were preferable to the frustrations of guiding local legislation through Westminster. The outcome of the Town Councils (Scotland) Act of 1900 was a regular structure applied to the administrative running of the towns, which established a standard constitution of provost supported by bailies, and councillors elected from a system of adult male suffrage, later expanded in 1907 to include some women, removing the Police Boards and many of the Joint Trusts by 1929.25
Local administration also gained volume from the Union state passing down powers of intervention that were increasingly bureaucratic and systematic. A regular account of births, deaths, and marriages began in 1855 with the General Registrar Office for Scotland administering what had previously been left to the parish minister.26 The equivalent office had begun registrations in England in 1837. Westminster channelled the hitherto large local legislation through the Local Government Board in 1870, rivalling the Poor Law Boards as the outwards sign of centralized government. The creation of the Scottish Education Department in 1872 and the Scottish Office in 1885, located in London, were part of the delayed and irregular recalibration of government north of the border. The Scottish Office started off with Charles Gordon-Lennox, Duke of Richmond and Gordon, as Scottish Secretary, despite him having argued there was no need for the post. The department was no more than a secretariat to support the decision making of the Local Government and Health Boards in Edinburgh, but would gain responsibility, size, and budget to structure Scottishness after the 1930s. As Mitchell makes clear, the Scottish Office paved the administrative path to devolution—a route too often ignored by scholars. In the Scots’ experience of the Union state, local administration mattered to their lives; and it didn’t always matter—despite what contemporary nationalists proclaimed—that Westminster’s attention was directed elsewhere.
The final element of local administration took place in civil society: not directly part of the Union state, Morton contends, but empowered, enshrined, and legitimated by it. The Union state set the parameters and registration for a range of friendly societies and voluntary associations. Often framed in moral and religious terms, these actions confirmed a temperate, industrious, and pious life as an idealized Scottish identity, sustaining religiosity inside and outside the Kirk.27 Help for the fallen, the poor, the disabled, the intemperate, the irreligious, the mad, and the criminal, along with a span of gender-specific, class, worker, and fraternal fellowships, were part of society’s governance. Not by the Union state directly, but in its midnight shadow—its legal, administrative, and ideological framework.28 In a significant supplement to this argument, S. Karly Kehoe identifies civil society as the locale in which Scottish Catholics secured their culture within a confirmed loyalty to the (Protestant) British constitution after 1840. As she explains, alongside the provision of education by women religious and a range of philanthropic and cultural associations, Scottish Catholic groups appropriated St Andrew and other symbols to display their Scottishness within the Union state.29
In a note of caution, Krishan Kumar argues that the concept of civil society is undermined by its elasticity. The interaction between state and society is crucial to the nation, he confirms, but wonders whether theorists are better advised exploring this through concepts of democracy, citizenship, and constitutionalism.30 He further recommends reflection upon the adaption of Britishness along with the Union state’s evolution, and here perhaps these alternative concepts are employed more fittingly. Britishness was fluid, not static, not a cultural, not an ethnic nationalism, but a civic one. Or, in Kidd’s view, Britishness was a utilitarian identity related to state not nation.31 But while Scottishness is defaulted to nation, neither, it can be countered, was it excluded from state: civil society directs attention to its local and national tiers, whereas democracy, citizenship, and constitutionalism point to a necessary Britishness.
The term ‘local government’ did not supplant ‘local administration’ in the language of statute for Scotland until 1889. Local-government reform in England and Wales evolved from democratization of local affairs—rather than decentralization—and carried overtones of ‘government’. In Scotland, although not wholly the case, much of what became local government trickled down from the centre and was named ‘administration’.32 Two routes, two nomenclatures, but in each experience national identity was based on the state’s multidirectional relationship with society: reflecting Scottishness and Britishness.
There were no fireworks, or even much awareness, to greet the centenary of the Union in 1807; the abolition of slavery under the lead of William Wilberforce dominated public as well as parliamentary debate. Yet, in the years ahead the Union would be invoked as Scots politicians debated the structures within which their government operated.33 William Dundas, nephew of the first Viscount Melville, summoned the Treaty’s articles against the Sinecure Offices Bill of 1812, legislation that would alter how pensions and sinecures were proffered to those in public office. Fearing his argument might be regarded as ‘invidious’, still he could not ‘suffer the rights of the Scottish people’.34 Along with the other institutions to survive 1707, Dundas described the Sinecures Office as being ‘the son of remuneration’ to the Scottish people and no ‘act of grace and favour’. He accused his opponents of never even thinking about the implication for the Union in proposing abolition. Here greater transparency was an assault upon the Union state that undermined the office of an independent monarchy lost a century more distant. The debate continued on unprincipled favouritism—but by choosing not to delve further into the claims of loyalty, one opponent withdrew ‘lest the headless ghosts of a Charles and a Montrose should be conjured up in the imaginations of the members for North Britain’.35 The impetus had been to reduce costs, to reward talent, and to remove sinecures, but it was inimical to the Scottish nation because it weakened the influence of the Crown in the constitution.
This debate on the Union state highlights an element of trust that marked these pre-reform years: a belief that England would not be so disingenuous as to bring harm to the interests of the Scottish nation. On a discussion of heritable jurisdictions in 1826, Dundas again bemoaned that ‘after these articles of Union, so solemnly ratified, was England now to violate them? Was the richer country to turn upon the poorer? The stronger upon the weaker?’36 He could not believe England would be guilty of such injustice. It was the kind of faith that nationalists later in the century doubted could ever be possible. But at times it was difficult for the Scottish parliamentarians to maintain the moral high ground when so distant from their nation. Continuing the debate on Edinburgh’s franchise, James Abercromby, first Baron Dunfermline, felt he could be counted a Scottish MP while representing an English constituency; others felt differently.37 As the elements of franchise reforms and democratization were debated, comment was made that much of this was taking place in London, not Edinburgh. Legislation passed from Westminster had obvious implications for Scottish identity, being both the source of change and the obstacle to that change. Scottish parliamentarians were caught in this flux, alternating from praise to disapprobation in the press and broadside printings.38
Critiques of the political process began in earnest in the lead up to franchise reform. The Loyal Reformers Gazette first roared into print on 7 May 1831 from its offices in Glasgow, promoting the case of parliamentary reform while doing its best to avoid the attentions of the stamp office in Edinburgh. Its editors observed the path of legislation for England and especially for Scotland, their biggest fear being that the House of Lords—where ‘the last stand of bigotry in antiquity is to be made’—would reject the will of the Commons.39 Their loyalty was to William IV for the pressure he put on the peers to back reform. The newspaper’s banner proclaimed: ‘The King and the People/Stand and surround the King!/Through peril at home and abroad!/Close to the patriot Monarch cling/Who will not be led or awed/To do or to suffer wrong!’40 But when William seemed not to provide the action they demanded, his title was blacked out from their front page. And while the paper was loyal to the Hanoverian constitution, it would willingly summon memories of Wallace to fight its cause.41
Still there were protests after franchise reform that too much time was given to the interests of Irish over Scotch members, even with 1,270 hours allocated to debate Scotland in the 1832 session of Parliament compared to 918 hours in 1831.42 Scottish business, it seemed obvious to those who took an interest, was suppressed, or abridged. Before the franchise was further expanded to include the skilled worker—in 1867 for England, 1868 for Scotland—it was much easier to manipulate parliamentary representatives, as had been the case before 1832. On the eve of the 1852 general election, the influence of faction was blamed in Edinburgh for not making the Protestant religion central to Parliament’s decision making: ‘a small but noisy and determined band of Papists in the House of Commons arrest the whole business of Parliament’. And as the nationalists argued for Scotland’s rights to be treated equally with those of England, so the defenders of the Protestant faith wanted their own coterie, ‘a resolute band of men in the House of Commons who understand, value, and are determined to defend the principles of the Reformation’.43 The ten years of strife that led up to the Disruption in the Church of Scotland in 1843 had demonstrated in the most volatile terms the seriousness with which Scots took Presbyterianism to their hearts and minds. Along with the highland land crisis of the 1880s, I. G. C. Hutchison identifies the Disruption as the only other Scottish issue of sufficient importance to warrant extended discussion in Westminster, despite the presence of four Scottish prime ministers over the century. Even then, Parliament’s concern was with its impact upon the Church of England than the finer details of Presbyterian theology.44 To some, the Disruption was the single most significant nationalist event in the period. The decision by the House of Lords to uphold heritable authority over the presbytery led over 40 per cent of ministers to leave their manses and take nearly half of Scotland’s national Church with them. The rhetoric of Union, Wallace, and Bruce was only occasionally combined with ecclesiastical arguments, yet it was a national and an international movement.45 John M. Mackenzie claims its impact to have been extraordinary throughout the empire.46 The Reverend Dr Cunningham travelled to New York in 1844 to raise awareness and funds for the newly created Free Church, a tour that was reported as far afield as in the New Zealand newspapers.47 It is perhaps one of the most insular of debates within Presbyterianism’s history, yet it was incomplete without the support of Scots around the globe, a feature that George Shepperson examined with evidence of donations amounting to around £3,000 coming from the southern slave-owning states of America.48
The radical newspapers framed the franchise fight in constitutional terms of Union and Crown, and it was not too dissimilar to arguments found in the urban and provincial press. Free from the newspaper stamp tax in 1855 to publish daily, these organs of debate facilitated greater focus on the operation of the central state. The electrical telegraph allowed London news to be more quickly incorporated into the provincial papers; the rail journey from Edinburgh to London was nine hours (in 1888, in competition, the Flying Scotsman reduced this to under seven and a half hours). The queen could take the train all the way to Royal Deeside by 1862 and there conduct the business of state, much to the chagrin both of her ministers and The Times. Greater immediacy and familiarity with Westminster meant the state’s operation came increasingly to reflect Scotland’s national identity. There were two attempts to organize this identity into associational form. The home-rule decades of the 1880s and 1890s found the closest link between party politics and the rationale for a devolved legislative Parliament. The earlier phase was in the 1850s and centred on the National Association for the Vindication of Scottish Rights. Its figurehead was the Tory peer Archibald William Montgomerie, thirteenth Earl of Eglinton and first Earl of Winton. Like the Association’s co-secretaries James and John Grant, who toyed with the Jacobite sympathies of their grandfather, Montgomerie was an intellectual romantic who flitted between causes. His public renown rested on the organization of a medieval spectacle on his family estate in 1839, drawing one hundred thousand (subsequently rather wet) spectators; in 1852 he was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.49 For this group of nationalists, Union came to be framed as the nation’s future. This developed from an argument that administrative centralization was undermining the otherwise beneficial local independence established upon institutional separateness. The provosts and councillors from burgh and county councils bulked out its office-bearers, arguing for greater administrative powers of operation to come to them.50 If the principle of union was right, but its operation undermined, then there was common cause between the localities. But if the principle of union were flawed, then it would be uncertain that local government benefited from legislative power returning to Edinburgh—that, after all, was centralization, too. In one of a series of letters sent to the Home Secretary, Lord Palmerston, the Glasgow lawyer and later Wallace monument campaigner William Burns argued that he favoured local not central government, while comrades feared the ‘crushing policy of centralization’ that only a ‘just observance of the Treaty of Union’ could prevent.51 Their objection was that public business in the northern part of the United Kingdom was being ignored, that Scotland was subjugated to the will of English courts, and that a gradual dissolution of the Scottish character was the result. Campaigning took place through the press, with a series of articles sent to the Glasgow and Edinburgh newspapers, The Times, and to Scotland’s provincial press. This, the clearest statement of the Unionist-nationalist position, came from an analysis of the Union state being overburdened and thus forced to gather in more power: ‘the dreaded system of imperial centralization—the appointment, by the state, in the different localities, of government officials to manage local affairs’.52
The movement was short lived, breaking up as British engagement in the Crimea in the mid-1850s became more burdensome. Its members scattered, some into the committee charged with raising subscriptions for a national monument to William Wallace (beginning 1856, built 1869), the councillors to engage with administering an increasingly bureaucratic set of structures either devolved or empowered from the centre. Wallace was commemorated with statues throughout lowland Scotland: from Dryburgh (1814) to Aberdeen (1888), from Ayr (1819, 1831, and 1837) to Robroyston (1900). Burns would be first commemorated in stone in Edinburgh in 1831 and much more so overseas. The nationalists and the cultural movement that followed mixed Liberal progression with Tory preservation, the argument of Lindsay Paterson.53 Burns and Wallace were modern democratic heroes who also personified the unchanging humanity of the Scottish character and the nation’s social structure. When the Union was next invoked by a political cause, it was pushed along by a central government trying to impose a national Parliament on one part of the kingdom; but it was Ireland not Scotland being favoured.
In January 1884 there had gathered an impressive array of Scotland’s nobility, Conservative and Liberal MPs, plus representatives of the parochial boards, town councils, and public bodies, all packing the Free Assembly Hall in Edinburgh under the banner of a ‘National Meeting’.54 Their aim was to create a separate Department of State for Scotland. Edinburgh’s Lord Provost, Sir George Harrison, argued there ought to be more than one national life in the British nation. He was prompted to action by concern that it was difficult to pass a Scottish Bill without £10,000 being spent on it, and the Scots were proud of their separate institutions from England. Playing to the crowd, he added that the English were welcome to their own institutions, those that suited them better. The future Scottish Secretary and British Prime Minister A. J. Balfour supported the need for more satisfactory arrangements for the better administration of Scotland. He answered the charge that the inevitable ending of their arguments would be something akin to Home Rule, declaring ‘all in this room, like him, were at one in thinking that no legislative act had been so fruitful of good consequences to the countries concerned, as the act of Union between Scotland and England’.55 Prime Minister Gladstone made noises in favour of Scotland’s government during the campaign, in order to secure his parliamentary seat in Midlothian (1879–1880, 1885, and 1890), but was reluctant to follow through lest he jeopardize his dealings with Ireland. In frustration, the Scottish Home Rule Association was formed by a group of disaffected Liberals in 1886.
In introducing the Government of Ireland Bill on 7 June that year, Gladstone asked his opponents to consider just who the Unionists were and who were the Separatists. He likened the debates in the popular press to those that circled the 1832 franchise reform when ‘it was conscientiously and honestly believed by great masses of men, and intelligent men, too, that the Bill absolutely involved the destruction of the Monarchy’.56 As with the Scottish rights society in the 1850s, home rulers at the end of the century aimed to resist rather than encourage separation. Much debate in 1890 focused on the cost and challenges of obtaining passage for Scotland’s private legislation. Dr Gavin Clark, the Crofter MP for Caithness, saw the process as affecting the welfare of the Scottish people, with decisions often made against the wishes of the Scottish representatives. The desire was there to keep the Imperial Parliament, but so too to devolve Scotland’s domestic affairs.57 When Dr Donald MacGregor, the MP for Inverness-shire, requested of Gladstone in 1893 that he consider home rule all round as a means of taking local affairs out from the purview of the imperial Parliament, while supporting devolution as a good thing when a ‘practical shape’ can be obtained, the prime minister was unconvinced there was sufficient information for all parts of Great Britain to enable a decision to be made.58 MacGregor’s impetus was on learning that Burgh Police and Public Health Bills were unable to be debated in the current parliamentary session, warning that the unreformed legislation was accounting for thousands of preventable deaths.59 He claimed Scotland was at least a quarter of a century behind England as a result. Liquor, grocers’ licences, land tenure, reform of the recent Crofter’s Act (1886), a Scotch Allotment Bill to match the rights of agricultural labourers in England, access to mountains and native heath, were all being neglected. It was estimated that with two hundred Private Bills allotted only ten days in the current parliamentary session, not more than 5 per cent would have a fair chance of being put before the House.60 Even discussion of the Indian budget, Britain’s imperial showpiece, was once delayed until the end of an already busy session, and thus ‘while the Anglo-Saxon race will dominate the world’, MacGregor insisted:
I feel that unless something is done to draw the bond closer, by and by in the race of nationalities, we may find ourselves in the background, unless something is done to give to every portion of the kingdom the management of its own domestic affairs.61
Loyalty to Britain was a familiar cry. The challenge was never to persuade Gladstone to forget Ireland, but to include Scotland’s needs upon something approaching equal footing: ‘Shame! Scotland Shame! to be the slave/of every canting English knave.’62
The nationalists never had the membership numbers or sufficient representatives at Westminster to succeed by the ballot box or the division lobby, but this did not mean a politicized identity was silent. However ordinary Scots, local or national politicians, or nationalist associations interacted with their state, identity was forged in the complexities that flowed from the Union formation. To replicate this relationship, scholars have extended their examination to all its aspects: Empire, Whitehall, the Scottish Office, local administration, the local and national boards, civil society, and the spiritual challenge to temporal authority. All are unions within the Union state; and it is to this variation that analysis has turned to discern Scotland’s ‘missing’ nationalism.
Building on this multidirectional approach, one possible means to further nuance an understanding of identity is to direct analysis to the level of the individual. A. P. Cohen conceives of national identity as a personal claim to ‘my identity’ and to ‘my view of the world’.63 It is a method that may guide scholars away from a current quandary, for while H. J. Hanham, Nicolas Phillipson, and Christopher Harvie have published pioneering work on the characters that peopled the nationalist movements of the nineteenth century, their analysis pre-dates how the Union state is now conceived.64 Not only has the concept of ‘personal nationalism’ the potential to reinvigorate some benchmark evidence, the scope to include all, irrespective of party or affiliation, foregrounds the individual in Scotland’s political identity.
Singling out one person who lived long enough and was involved sufficiently with Scotland’s politics to exemplify personal nationalism, then Duncan McLaren makes a suitable choice. Born in Dunbartonshire in 1800, he spent his adult life in Edinburgh, starting out as a draper. He was elected to Edinburgh’s Town Council in the first post-reform election (1833), rising to become provost in 1851 until 1854. He first tried for election to Westminster in 1852, eventually succeeding in 1865, remaining incumbent until retiring in 1881. For his extensive knowledge of his country and the British Parliament, he was known as the ‘Member for Scotland’.
McLaren has been described as an energetic Free Churchman, who was anti-drink, anti-establishment, anti-trade union, and anti-home rule.65 His biographer makes much of McLaren’s civic-mindedness. Even after leaving Edinburgh City Council, he continued to be active in the city’s Chamber of Commerce, the Royal Infirmary, the Trade Protection Society, and his long-standing concern the Merchant Company.
McLaren used statistics not rhetoric to make his case for better parliamentary representation, comparing Scotland’s share of taxation with that in 1707, asking ‘why should Scotland have one-twelfth of the members when she pays for one-eighth of the taxes?’66 Since 1868, Scotland had sent sixty representatives to Westminster, with three urban constituencies—Glasgow (three), Edinburgh (two), and Dundee (two)—returning more than one member. McLaren calculated that if determined by relative taxation, Scotland should send seventy-eight representatives, or by population figures it should be sixty-eight. His support for reform stemmed from a speech made to the National Convention in 1853 when he pushed for the re-creation of the office of Secretary for Scotland. He noted that Scotland had had its great Officer of State before the Union and her Secretary of State after the Union, and now it should be restored. His biographer J. B. Mackie claimed that McLaren joined the movement not out of patriotism, but because he had studied the issued ‘historically and practically’. Later, having been consulted on the matter by the Scottish Boards inquiry in 1869, McLaren confirmed and then maintained his position until the post was created in 1885.67
Where we especially see nuance in this civic-minded proponent of local national administration was in the advance of governmental boards. These, he warned Gladstone, were ‘giving birth to well-paid offices that were more or less sinecures beyond public control’. McLaren bemoaned the fact that the boards were overstaffed—identifying the Lunacy and the Prison Boards in particular—and that public opinion was never able to penetrate their workings. The efforts of the Fishery Board he branded ‘the last fragment of monopolist and Anti-Free Trade principles in Scotland’. He suggested Scotland had outgrown such nursing. And while supporting the Register General Office, he did not understand why the work required three highly paid officials, a chief at £1,000 per annum, a Secretary at £500, and a chief clerk at £337. Similarly, he estimated the Office of Queen’s Remembrancer could be done for £900 per annum rather than £1,250 with a clerk at £610 per annum alongside.68
Despite retirement, McLaren found sufficient energy in 1884 to join the deputation from the National Convention that visited Gladstone to make their case.69 He had followed a principled life to the end; death came on 26 April 1886, the year the Scottish Home Rule Association pushed the politicization of their arguments firmly toward Scotland’s agenda. This individual projected a version of nationalism that was historically based. It was enacted first in civil society and city hall before coming to the fore in the chamber at Westminster. The value he saw in administrative boards was qualified by their tendency toward centralization and functionaryism. His convictions on identity and character had little to do with party policy or compliance with the Whips office or even patriotism. Yet, the Member for Scotland was not about to give the Member for Midlothian a free hand to grant home rule for Ireland, while giving nothing of a similar stature to Scotland. His politics privileged the Scottish Secretary, a pre-Union office that would benefit the late-Victorian Imperial Parliament. This was McLaren’s personal nationalism. Despite fears raised by an assortment of contemporaries, his personal identity in the Union state did not call out for more.
Devine, T. M., ed., Scotland and the Union, 1707–2007 (Edinburgh, 2008).
Kidd, C., Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British identity, c.1689–c.1830 (Cambridge, 1993).
Kidd, C., Union and Unionisms: Political Thought in Scotland, 1500–2000 (Cambridge, 2008).
Mackenzie, J. M., ‘Empire and National Identities: The Case of Scotland’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 8 (1998), 215–32.
McCrone, D., Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Nation, 2nd edn. (London, 2001).
McLean, I., and McMillan, A., State of the Union: Unionism and the Alternatives in the United Kingdom since 1707 (Oxford, 2005).
Mitchell, J., Strategies for Self-Government: The Campaigns for a Scottish Parliament (Edinburgh, 1996).
—— Governing Scotland: The Invention of Administrative Devolution (London, 2003).
Morton, G., Unionist-Nationalism: Governing Urban Scotland, 1830–1860 (East Linton, 1999).
—— ‘Identity out of Place’, in T. Griffiths and G. Morton, eds., A History of Everyday Life in Scotland, 1800–1900 (Edinburgh, 2010).
—— and Morris, R. J., ‘Civil Society, Governance and Nation: 1832–1914’, in R. A. Houston and W. W. J. Knox, eds., The New Penguin History of Scotland (London, 2001).
Nairn, T., The Break-up of Britain (London, 1981).
Pentland, G., Radicalism, Reform and National Identity in Scotland, 1820–1833 (Woodbridge, 2008).
Smout, T. C., ed., Anglo-Scottish Relations from 1603 to 1900 (London, 2005).