Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun(1655–1716)

Andrew Fletcher was born at Saltoun in East Lothian in 1655, eldest son of Sir Robert Fletcher of Saltoun, a Covenanting Presbyterian laird of the East Lothian gentry, and Catherine Bruce of Clackmannan. His father died when he was nine, and the boy's education was placed by his mother in the hands of the parish minister of Saltoun, the great Covenanting divine Gilbert Burnet (later Bishop Burnet of Salisbury and the historian of My Own Time), who tutored him through Latin, Greek and the seventeenth-century English political philosophy on which his later work rested. He was a commissioner for East Lothian in the Scots Parliament from 1678, opposed the Duke of York's measures, and on the failed Argyll Rising of 1685 fled to the Continent, served in the army of the United Provinces under William of Orange and in the army of Hungary under the Margrave of Baden against the Turks at the siege of Buda in 1686.

He returned to Scotland in 1689 with William of Orange, was restored to the Saltoun estate and to the Scots Parliament, and through the 1690s emerged as the leading parliamentary opponent of the policies of the William and Anne governments that he judged subordinated the Scottish interest to the English. He published in 1698 his Two Discourses Concerning the Affairs of Scotland (the diagnosis of the structural causes of Scottish underdevelopment under the Anglo-Scottish dual monarchy), in 1703 his Speeches by a Member of the Parliament Which Began at Edinburgh the 6th of May 1703 (the foundational set of parliamentary speeches against the proposed Union with England), and in 1704 his Account of a Conversation concerning a Right Regulation of Governments for the Common Good of Mankind, the political-philosophical dialogue between Fletcher and his friends Lord Somers and the Earl of Cromarty.

The Account of a Conversation contains the single sentence by which his name is universally known: I knew a very wise man, that believed that, if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation. The line is on every modern study of popular culture and political authority. He led, through the long Union debates of 1705 to 1707, the parliamentary opposition to the proposed Treaty of Union with England, on the constitutional ground that the limited monarchy of Scotland could not be subordinated to a unitary English Crown-in-Parliament without the political destruction of the Scottish nation. He proposed in his 1703 Limitations a programme of constitutional reform of the Scots Parliament under which the prerogatives of the Crown would be transferred to Parliament; the Limitations were defeated, and the Treaty of Union was ratified on the sixteenth of January 1707 by a hundred and ten votes to sixty-nine.

He retired to Saltoun on the dissolution of the Scots Parliament in May 1707, refused to take a seat in the new British House of Commons, and devoted his last years to the improvement of the Saltoun estate, the founding of the Saltoun spinning-and-weaving schools that introduced the barley-water bleaching process to East Lothian, and the importation from Holland of the new fanner machine for winnowing grain that became the standard of Scottish agricultural improvement. He died at London on his way home from Holland in September 1716, in his sixty-second year, and was buried at the family vault at Saltoun. The Fletcher name in modern Scottish constitutional thought carries the weight of the Speeches of 1703 and the line on the ballads of a nation.