Clan Fletcher · 1707
Fletcher of Saltoun against the Union
In the long autumn session of the Scottish Parliament of 1706, in the Parliament House on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, fifty-three years old, the East-Lothian laird and senior intellectual figure of the anti-Union party in the Scots Estates, delivered the twenty-three speeches against the Treaty of Union with England that had been negotiated by the Scottish Commissioners with the Westminster government in the summer of 1706. Fletcher's speeches, preserved in the Defoe *History of the Union* and in his own *Political Works* of 1737, are the foundational defence of an independent Scottish polity in early-eighteenth-century political thought. The Treaty of Union nevertheless passed the Scottish Parliament by 110 votes to 67 on the sixteenth of January 1707, came into force on the first of May 1707, and dissolved the Scottish Parliament for the next two hundred and ninety-two years (until the Scotland Act 1998 re-established a devolved Scottish Parliament at Holyrood in 1999). Fletcher's most-quoted line from the 1706 speeches, *I would venture to assert that, if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation*, is in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and has been the foundational maxim of cultural-political-nationalism in modern political theory.
It is twenty past three on an unrecorded afternoon in the late November 1706, in the Inner Chamber of the Parliament House on the south side of the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, in pale winter light through the high south windows. He is fifty-three years old. He is Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, born at Saltoun Hall in East Lothian on the sixteenth of October 1653, son of Sir Robert Fletcher of Saltoun and Catherine Bruce of Clackmannan, schooled at the Saltoun parish school under Gilbert Burnet (the future Bishop of Salisbury), at the University of St Andrews, and on a Continental Grand Tour 1672–78 (the foundational decade of his republican-political-philosophical education under the Dutch Spinozan-Republican intellectual circle), member of the Scottish Parliament for East Lothian since 1681 (excluded between 1683 and 1689 on the Stuart-régime political grounds, restored at the 1689 Glorious Revolution).
On the Estates floor in front of him are the twenty-four-article Treaty of Union, printed by the Edinburgh-Royal-Printer Andrew Anderson on the fifth of November in a folio of about a hundred and twenty pages. The Court party of the Treaty-supporters has the majority of about a hundred and ten of the Estates members; the Country and Squadrone Volante opposition has about sixty. Fletcher has, in the previous five weeks of the Estates debate, given eighteen speeches against the Treaty. The Treaty's Article One (the two kingdoms of Scotland and England shall be united into one kingdom by the name of Great Britain) is being read out for the formal third reading.
He thinks: the Treaty passes on the third reading by about forty-five votes. The numerical arithmetic of the Estates is settled. The Hamilton opposition leadership has, by the private bribery-and-pension settlements of the summer (the twenty-thousand-pounds Crown subvention paid to the Squadrone Volante members in the October), been broken.
He thinks: the Treaty will, in plain reading, abolish the Scottish Parliament. The Scottish Parliament will dissolve on the first of May 1707. The Scotland that has had a separate Parliament since 1235 will, for the foreseeable future, have a forty-five-member representation in the Westminster Parliament of about six hundred and fifty.
He thinks: the speech I am about to give is the twenty-third of mine in this Chamber on the Treaty. The speech will not change the vote. The speech is for the record. The speech is for the Scots who, in three hundred years, will read the Estates minutes and judge whether the Scottish-political-class of 1706 had political conscience.
He stands at his place on the Country-party benches. He delivers the twenty-three-minute speech that is preserved in the Defoe History of the Union. The peroration is the foundational quotation that has been in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations since 1941: I would venture to assert that, if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation. The Estates listen without interruption. The speech is, by the Defoe judgement, the finest piece of parliamentary oratory I have heard in twenty years.
The Treaty of Union passed the Scottish Parliament on the sixteenth of January 1707 by 110 votes to 67. It came into force on the first of May 1707. The Scottish Parliament dissolved itself by formal vote on the twenty-eighth of March 1707. Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun did not take the forty-five-seat representation that was offered to the Scottish members in the new Westminster Parliament; he retired to Saltoun Hall and spent the remaining nine years of his life on a comprehensive Scottish-economic-and-political-development pamphlet-series that was published posthumously in 1737 as The Political Works of Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun. He died at Saltoun on the fifteenth of September 1716, sixty-three years old. He is buried in the Saltoun Hall family-vault. The Saltoun-Hall-and-village were taken by the Fletcher-Carmichael family-amalgamation in 1755 and remained in Fletcher-line ownership until 1944. The Saltoun Hall is now a small private apartment-conversion. The Fletcher of Saltoun memorial in the parish church of Saltoun bears the Latin inscription Andreas Fletcher de Saltoun, vir libertatis ac patriae amantissimus, Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, a man most devoted to liberty and his country. The Scottish Parliament of 1999, on its first sitting at Holyrood on the twelfth of May 1999, opened with the recitation of the 1706 Fletcher quotation on ballads-and-laws by the Presiding Officer Sir David Steel.