Of late times matters have been at full length and freely debated in Parliament. They sit all in one House, and every one answers distinctly to his name and gives his vote, which is in these terms, I approve or not; only those who are not satisfied one way or another, say Non liquet, which is a great ease to those who are conscientious, and a common refuge to the cunning Politicians; the major vote carries it. No dissents or protests are allowed in public acts, but are accounted treasonable.[131]
The arm of the Government was all-powerful, and they had not even to guard against opposition. A caricature of the General Assembly was maintained to give a further ecclesiastical ratification to the king's acts, "But," adds our informant,
as the calling of this synod is wholly in the Crown, so there is little need of it, since the King's Supremacy is so large, that He needs not there concurrence, to adde their Authority to anything that He shall think fit to doe about Church affairs.
It may be at first matter of surprise that Scotland should so completely have succumbed. All that the popular party could do was to suffer. Only on rare occasions could they take the field. Suffering or fighting, they never yielded. But the dearth of constitutional life is not inexplicable. Had the Restoration occurred ten years earlier, it would have been otherwise. The Commonwealth had blotted out the recollection of the years which preceded it, and prepared the way for the years that followed it. Bishop Burnet's remark, that the root of the trouble lay in the king's "entering in without condition," was true, at all events, for the historian's own country. Moreover, we must not forget the condition of the country. The long-continued struggle had brought desolation where before the union of the crowns we can trace prosperity. In Glasgow, in 1692, "near fyve hundredth houses [were] standing waste." The harbour of Ayr was ruinous. The High Street of Dumfries contained scarcely a habitable house.[132] Trade and commerce had declined. The short interval of freedom of trade had but served to intensify the pressure of the Navigation Act. Scotsmen boasted of their "conquest" of England in 1603. England had but given their kings the power to oppress them.
A free Parliament met again in 1689. The absence of any strict constitutional feeling led, as so often before, to the assumption of a much more advanced position than that of the English Parliament. Nothing is more characteristic of the slowly broadening growth of English parliamentary claims than the delicate adjustment of conflicting theories by the Convention. In Scotland no such nice adjustment was possible. The proceedings are marked rather by a rude logic. The Estates enumerated the misdeeds of the unfortunate monarch in language distinguished from that of the Claim of Rights only by its strength.[133] The details are not important for our purpose. There is no appeal to precedent, nor any nicety of phrasing. James, having been guilty of this catalogue of crimes, had "forfaulted the right to the Crown, and the throne is become vacant." The underlying theory is sufficiently clear, but it was based on the logic of events. It was probably an effect of the English connections that the Estates went further than usual, and laid down two general principles. All the acts that they had enumerated were illegal. No papist might be king or queen of Scotland. With these conditions, and one other limitation, they proceeded to offer the crown to William and Mary and to entail it, in default of their heirs, upon the Princess Anne. That other clause expressed a claim which, for the people of Scotland, included civil liberties, and had been throughout the troubles synonymous with freedom. The Estates declared that "Prelacy is a great and insupportable grievance to the nation." A "Covenanted King" it was impossible to hope for, nor is there evidence that they desired to repeat the experiment. But the new sovereigns must understand the situation. When the acceptance of William and Mary converted, without any further change, the Convention into a Parliament, the Estates set themselves to solving the religious problem. They rescinded the act of Charles II asserting "his majestie's supremacy over all persons and in all causes ecclesiastical" as "inconsistent with the establishment of Church government now desired." They restored the presbyterian clergy to their churches and manses. They approved the Westminster Confession of Faith—the sole product of those efforts towards a covenanted uniformity which had led the Church into somewhat devious paths—and they established Church government "by Kirk Sessions, Presbyteries, Provincial Synods, and General Assemblies." The more rigid presbyterians were disappointed. It was not so emphatic a settlement as they desired. Independent as the Establishment was, it seemed Erastian to men whose only associations with the functions of government had been connected with Grierson of Lagg and Bloody Mackenzie. King William insisted upon the extension of a toleration to Episcopalian Dissenters in Scotland which, as the Church more than once complained, was lacking in the treatment of Presbyterian Dissenters in England. The Revolution Settlement, therefore, was not accepted by the whole of the popular party, and the Jacobites were reinforced by ousted episcopalians on the one hand, and presbyterian malcontents on the other. But the compromise of 1690 satisfied the majority of the nation. The credit of the arrangement belongs neither to the Parliament nor to the king, but to the wise statesman who presided over the University of Edinburgh. The English Revolution of 1689 was in its origin religious, but it early assumed the aspect of a purely civil movement. The Revolution in Scotland suggests to-day only the Church Settlement, and the course it took was decided by William Carstares.
The Parliament of 1690 proceeded to assert its own freedom of action. Henceforward till the Treaty of Union took effect, we have parliamentary independence in Scotland,[134] as far as purely internal affairs were concerned. After William's death we find still wider claims. The events of William's reign had not been such as to draw the nations nearer each other, or to reconcile the Parliament to the limitation of its sphere of influence to internal administration. King William had been responsible for the Massacre of Glencoe; he had forced Scotland to expend large sums upon a war in which, after the battle of Killiecrankie, she took no interest. The Parliament of England had urged the king to an interference with the Darien Scheme, which could not be regarded in Scotland as other than a betrayal. The Scottish Estates had not responded to the Act of Settlement in 1700, and when Queen Anne succeeded, the attitude of the two countries was becoming increasingly threatening. England regarded any advance of Scottish prosperity as a success gained at her own cost. Scotland feared that the country was to be permanently under foreign influence. The rapid growth of a constitutional feeling since 1690 aided the circumstances of the time in the production of parliamentary parties, a unique event in Scottish history. The meeting of Estates in 1703 contained Williamites, Patriots, and Cavaliers.[135] The first of these supported the government of King William and his successor as, at all events, the least of the many possible evils. The Cavaliers clamoured for the return of the exiled House. The Patriot or "Country" party, headed by Hamilton, Tweeddale, and Fletcher of Saltoun, argued that, if foreign domination were to continue, it made but little difference whether it emanated from St. Germains or from the Court of St. James's. A combination of Cavaliers and Patriots passed the Act of Security. This famous act named no successor to Queen Anne. It invested the Parliament with the power of the Crown, in case of the queen's dying without heirs, and entrusted to it the choice of a Protestant sovereign "from the Royal line." It refused to such king or queen, if also sovereign of England, the power of peace and war, without consent of Parliament. It enacted, further, that the union of the crowns should determine, unless Scotland was admitted to equal trade and navigation privileges with England. Nor was there lacking the intention to make good the threat. The same act provided for the compulsory training of every Scotsman to bear arms. The Scottish Parliament debated each clause with vigour. The Estates recognized that now, if scarcely ever before, momentous issues hung upon their decision, and the walls of the Parliament House re-echoed with the unwonted excitement of party cries. The royal commissioner declined to give the queen's assent. The Parliament refused to grant supplies, and the meeting broke up amid confused shouts of "Liberty before Subsidy." The bitterness of the struggle was accentuated by a silly dispute about the Jacobite Plot, and the temper of the two nations was strained to the utmost.
The union of the crowns had been rendered possible only by the self-restraint which permitted the people of England to accept a Scotsman as the king. A similar spirit of self-restraint now actuated Queen Anne's advisers. The queen assented to the Act of Security, and the Scots began to train for a war that was not to be fought by the sword. The English ministers proposed a union of the kingdoms. Fortunately, they recognized that Scotland was in earnest, and expressed their willingness to yield somewhat on the main point—freedom of trade. Into the long and dreary negotiations which preceded the union we need not enter. Amid jealousy, faction, and evils still more sordid, the treaty of union was concluded. The agreement secured to Scotland the maintenance of her law, and the continued existence of her universities, and it guaranteed that there would be no interference with the Church as by law established. On the other hand, the kingdom surrendered her national existence, and was forced to be content with a miserably inadequate representation in the English Parliament. It is little wonder that the people in general, and especially the populace of Edinburgh, regarded the treaty with horror and looked upon its supporters as traitors. Amid riot and uproar, and with howls of execration sounding in their ears, the Estates of Scotland met for the last time on 25th March, 1707, under the presidency of the lord chancellor, the Earl of Seafield. Among some of the senators themselves there was an uneasy feeling that they had sold their country for trade privileges which the givers would strain every nerve to render worthless. Others were more callous. "There's the end o' an auld sang," laughed the Chancellor, as the Honours of Scotland were carried out of the Parliament House for the last time.
There is a touch of pathos in this final scene. To us, it can appear sad only with the sadness of changefulness. But the faces of contemporaries were turned backwards. The three Estates had survived many revolutions. It was true that their history did not represent the best of the nation's life; but with that best it had ever been more or less closely associated. In recent years the Parliament had come to mean national existence. It had entered into a new sphere, and assumed new functions. A career of usefulness seemed to lie before it. In spite of its age, its end was, in this sense, premature. The conditions, too, were ignominious. The accumulated hatred of four hundred years had attached itself to the names of Darien and Glencoe. England had yielded much less than a free and independent nation had a right to ask, and Scotland could not demand more, because the men whom she trusted had failed her.
No doubt the Chancellor was right. It was "the end o' an auld sang." But, after all, the Estates had received "the wages of going on, and still to be." It did not appear so at the first. The Parliament of Great Britain broke more than one pledge solemnly made at the union. The highest boon that King James or Prince Charles could promise to Scotland was the repeal of the union. The Scottish representatives had little weight in the councils of the Empire. Even the faithful Argyll was thwarted, and his service lightly esteemed. The best blood of the country was spilt on foreign battlefields and in alien quarrels. The genius of a Keith served only to lead to victory the troops of Frederick the Great, and to guide the steps of Russia towards Constantinople. Among the exiles, there were others, less fortunate, who found no scope for their talents, and no friends in the land of the stranger. But, as time passed, the tragic element faded out of the story, and, with the rapid growth of prosperity, the influence of Scotland on the destinies of the nation became more apparent. The land of Kennedy and Elphinstone, of Lethington and Carstares, could not fail to produce wise and prudent statesmen, who might find, on a wider stage, the renown that had been denied to those who went before them. The music of the "auld sang" resounded again, although the walls that re-echoed it were those of Westminster. The Imperial Parliament meets close to the ancient Abbey, the guardian of the Stone of Fate, which the first Edward carried in triumph from Scotland, and on which, for nigh three hundred years, descendant after descendant of his enemy has sat. As the old prophecy has not been rendered void by the transference of its subject from Scone to London, so the promise that gave meaning to the last years of the Scottish Parliament has not failed of fulfilment. Nec tamen consumebatur.