Fletcher of Saltoun against the Union

Some defeats are chosen before they are suffered. A man sees the arithmetic of a chamber, counts the votes, weighs the pensions already paid in the corridor outside, and knows by the candlelight of an October afternoon that his cause is finished. He is then offered a private path: silence, accommodation, a seat in the new dispensation. Refusal in such a moment is not strategy. It is a deposit laid down for readers three centuries away, who will open the printed minutes and want to know whether anyone in the room held out.

THE LAIRD FROM EAST LOTHIAN

Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun was born at Saltoun Hall on the sixteenth of October 1653, son of Sir Robert Fletcher and Catherine Bruce of Clackmannan, and put as a boy under the tutorship of the parish minister Gilbert Burnet, who would later go south to be Bishop of Salisbury. He read at St Andrews. Between 1672 and 1678 he made the long Continental tour that formed him: the Dutch republics, the Huguenot academies, the late shadow of Spinoza in the Amsterdam coffee-houses. He came home a republican in a kingdom of Stuarts, and sat for East Lothian in the Scots Estates from 1681. The Duke of York's administration drove him out in 1683; he soldiered abroad with Monmouth, fought the Turks under the Imperial standard at Buda, and returned at the Revolution of 1689 to take his bench again. By 1706 he was fifty-three, a laird without a wife or an heir, and the senior intellectual of the Country party in a parliament that was being asked to dissolve itself.

THE INNER CHAMBER, NOVEMBER 1706

Edinburgh that autumn smelt of wet coal-smoke and printer's ink. The Treaty had been laid before the Estates on the fifth of November in a folio of about a hundred and twenty pages, struck off by Andrew Anderson the King's Printer. Outside, on the Royal Mile, the apprentices roared at the Commissioners' coaches and the town guard stood with halberds reversed. Inside the Parliament House, the south windows let in the pale, low light of a Scottish November, the kind of light that gives the panelling its grain and shows up the dust on a man's coat. Article One was being read for the third reading: That the Two Kingdoms of Scotland and England shall upon the First Day of May next ensuing the Date hereof and forever after be United into One Kingdom by the Name of Great Britain. The Court party, marshalled by Queensberry, had its hundred and ten. The Country and the Squadrone Volante together could put up about sixty. The arithmetic was settled. The twenty thousand pounds sterling that had crossed the border in October to settle the arrears of certain noblemen had settled the rest.

THE SECOND BEFORE THE TWENTY-THIRD SPEECH

He sat at his place on the Country bench with the printed Articles open on his knee, and he understood, as a man understands the weather by the ache of an old wound, that the speech he was about to deliver would not move a single vote. He had given eighteen already. There were five more in him. He had a habit, when waiting for the clerk to finish a reading, of laying the pad of his thumb on the corner of a page and pressing until the paper marked. He pressed it now, on the corner of Article One, and considered the shape of what was happening. A parliament that had sat, in one form or another, since the reign of Alexander II in 1235 was being asked to vote itself out of existence in exchange for a guaranteed forty-five seats in a chamber of six hundred at Westminster. The Hamilton leadership of the opposition had collapsed in the most ordinary of ways, by private composition. The crowds outside the door were furious and the crowds outside the door did not vote. He thought of the Dutch towns he had walked through as a young man, of the way a republic teaches its boys to argue in the marketplace, and of the ballads the Saltoun harvesters sang at the kirn each autumn in the speech of their grandfathers. A man's politics, he had long believed, lived in such songs before it ever lived in a statute. If the Estates would not save the kingdom, then what he said now must be the kind of thing a Scotsman in the year 2006 might still want to find in the margin of a book. He stood.

THE TWENTY-THIRD SPEECH

He spoke for something close to half an hour. The clerks took it down in the shorthand of the day and Daniel Defoe, sitting by as an English agent and pamphleteer, wrote it into his History of the Union of Great Britain the next year. He did not raise his voice. He went through the constitutional case article by article: the threat to the Scots burgh trade, the wreck of the woollen manufactory, the absurdity of forty-five Scots members deliberating among five hundred and thirteen English on the affairs of a kingdom they had never visited. He came at last to the matter of national character, and gave the sentence that has outlived every other sentence spoken in that chamber: I said, I knew a very wise man so much of Sir Christopher's sentiment, that he believed if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation. The Estates listened without interruption. Lord Belhaven, his ally, was seen to weep. The vote was not taken that afternoon.

THE INTERLUDE OF THE QUEENSBERRY COACH

That same evening, by one account, the Duke of Queensberry's coach went down the High Street to Holyroodhouse with the curtains drawn and a file of dragoons trotting on either side, because the apprentices had begun to throw stones at any conveyance that bore the Commissioners' arms. Queensberry was a tall, careful man who had made his calculation years before. He had been promised the Order of the Garter, an English dukedom, and three thousand pounds of arrears. He would receive all three. Inside the coach, with the printed Articles on the seat beside him, he could hear Fletcher's sentences faintly through the leather, repeated by some clerk on the pavement to a knot of listeners, and he did not care to listen. The arithmetic was his. He had bought it fairly, by the standards of his trade. What he could not buy, and what he understood without troubling himself over it, was the sentence about the ballads. That sentence had passed already into a country he did not own.

THE VOTE

On the sixteenth of January 1707 the Treaty passed the Scottish Parliament by 110 votes to 67. On the twenty-eighth of March the Estates voted their own dissolution. On the first of May the Union came into force, and the bells of St Giles were rung, by order, while the crowd on the Royal Mile stood in a silence the magistrates afterwards described as sullen. Fletcher declined the seat at Westminster that the new arithmetic offered him. He went home to Saltoun Hall in East Lothian by the post-road, and did not return to public life. He spent the remaining nine years writing the pamphlets on militias, on the governance of small nations, on the husbandry of the Scottish soil, that were collected after his death as The Political Works of Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun and printed at London in 1737. He brought back from Holland the fanners, the winnowing machines that broke the monopoly of the wind on the Scottish harvest, and set them up at Saltoun, where his tenants used them. He died at London on the way home from a last visit to the Continent on the fifteenth of September 1716, in his sixty-third year, and was carried back to be laid in the family vault at Saltoun Kirk.

RETURN

A defeated man writes for the country that has not yet been born. The Saltoun estate passed into the Fletcher-Carmichael line in 1755 and stayed in Fletcher hands until 1944; the Hall is now divided into private apartments, and the village of East Saltoun is much as it was, with the parish church on the rise and the Lammermuirs blue to the south. In the chancel of that church the memorial tablet reads, in the Latin of his executors, Andreas Fletcher de Saltoun, vir libertatis ac patriae amantissimus, Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, a man most devoted to liberty and his country. On the twelfth of May 1999, when the Scottish Parliament sat for the first time in two hundred and ninety-two years, the Presiding Officer Sir David Steel opened the proceedings by reading the sentence about the ballads. It was the oldest unfinished business in the chamber. The fanners, by then, had been rusting in barn corners across the Lothians for a hundred years, but the principle of them, that a small country might bring home from abroad the tools it needs and set them turning by its own hand, was the thing the laird had been arguing all along.