such distinction, that they very well deserved’ the respect and esteem with which they were treated. To which, Lord Dartmouth adds: ‘and were very importunate to have their deserts rewarded. A Scotch earl pressed Lord Godolphin extremely for a place. He said there was none vacant. The other said, his lordship could soon make one so, if he pleased. Lord Godolphin asked him, if he expected to have any body killed to make room? He said, No; but Lord Dartmouth commonly voted against the court, and every body wondered that he had not been turned out before now. Lord Godolphin told him, he hoped his lordship did not expect that he should be the person to propose it; and advised him never to mention it any more, for fear the queen should come to hear of it; for if she did, his lordship would run great risk never to have a place as long as she lived. But he could not forbear telling every where, how ill the lord treasurer had used him.’
Burnet's History of his own Time, vol. v. p. 349, Oxford, 1823. Compare the account, in 1710, in
Wodrow's Analecta, vol. i. p. 293. ‘Argyle is both picked (
i. e. piqued) at Marlburrou, and his brother Yla, for refusing him a regiment; and Godolphin should have said to the queen that my Lord Yla was not to be trusted with a regiment! The Earl of Marr was one of the greatest cronnies Godolphine had, till the matter of his pension, after the Secretary office was taken from him, came about. Godolphine caused draw it during pleasure; Marr expected it during life, which the Treasurer would not yield to, and therefore they brake.’ The history of the time is full of these wretched squabbles, which show what the Scotch nobles were made of. Indeed, their rapacity was so shameless, that, in 1711, several of them refused to perform their legislative duties in London, unless they received some offices which they expected. ‘About the midle of this moneth, I hear ther was a meeting of severall of our Scots Peers, at the Viscount of Kilsyth's, where they concerted not to goe up to this parliament till peremptorly writ for; and (also) some assurance be given of the places they were made to hope for last session and have missed.’
Wodrow's Analecta, vol. i. p. 365. In 1712, the same Scotchman writes (
Analecta, vol. ii. p. 8): ‘Our Scots Peers' secession from the House of Peers makes much noise; but they doe not hold by it. They sometimes come and sometimes goe, and
they render themselves base in the eyes of the English.’ See also a letter ‘concerning the Scots Peerage,’ in
Somers' Tracts, vol. xii. p. 607, edit. Scott, London, 1814, 4to.
375
A Scotch writer, twenty years after the Union, says: ‘Most of our gentlemen and people of quality, who have the best estates in our country, live for the most part at London.’ Reasons for improving the Fisheries and Linen Manufacture of Scotland, London, 1727, p. 22. I do not know who wrote this curious little treatise; but the author was evidently a native of Scotland. See p. 25. I have, however, still earlier evidence to adduce. A letter from Wodrow, dated 9th of August 1725, complains of ‘the general sending our youth of quality to England:’ and a letter to him, in 1716, describes the Anglicizing process going on among the Scotch aristocracy, only nine years after the Union. ‘Most of our Lords and others here do so much depend on the English for their posts, and seeking somewhat or other, that their mouths are almost quite stopped; and really most of them go into the English way in all things.’ Wodrow's Correspondence, vol. ii. p. 196, vol. iii. p. 224. The Earl of Mar lost popularity in Scotland, on account of the court he paid to Lord Godolphin; for, he ‘appears to have passed much more time in intrigues in London than among the gardens of Alloa.’ Thomson's Memoirs of the Jacobites, vol. i. p. 36. Even Earl Ilay, in his anxiety to advance himself at the English court, ‘used to regret his being a Scots peer, and to wish earnestly he was a commoner.’ Letters of Lord Grange, in The Miscellany of the Spalding Club, vol. iii. p. 39, Aberdeen, 4to, 1846.
376
Indeed, their expectation ran so high, as to induce a hope, not only that those Commissioners of the Union who were Scotch peers should be made English ones, but that ‘the whole nobility of Scotland might in time be admitted.’ Laing's History of Scotland, vol. iv. p. 346. Compare The Lockhart Papers, vol. i. pp. 298, 343: ‘the Scots Peerage, many of whom had been bubled with the hopes of being themselves created British Peers.’ Also The Gordon Letters, in The Miscellany of the Spalding Club, vol. iii. pp. 227, 228.
377
The Chevalier de Johnstone, in his plaintive remarks on the battle of Culloden, says: ‘The ruin of many of the most illustrious families in Scotland immediately followed our defeat.’ Johnstone's Memoirs of the Rebellion in 1745, p. 211. He, of course, could not perceive that, sad as such ruin was to the individual sufferers, it was an immense benefit to the nation. Mr. Skene, referring to the year 1748, says of the Highlanders: ‘their long-cherished ideas of clanship gradually gave way under the absence and ruin of so many of their chiefs.’ Skene's Highlanders, vol. i. p. 147.
378
‘About 1784, the exiled families began to return.’ Penny's Traditions of Perth, p. 41. See also Macpherson's Annals of Commerce, vol. iv. p. 53. In 1784, ‘a bill passed the Commons without opposition,’ to restore the ‘Forfeited Estates’ in the north of Scotland. See Parliamentary History, vol. xxiv. pp. 1316–1322. On that occasion, Fox said (p. 1321) the proprietors ‘had been sufficiently punished by forty years' deprivation of their fortunes for the faults of their ancestors.’
379
Dean Ramsay, in his Reminiscences (5th edit. Edinburgh, 1859, p. 57), notices that, owing to ‘transfers of property and extinction of old families in the Highlands, as well as from more general causes,’ the old clannish affection ‘is passing away.’ But this intelligent observer has not indicated the connexion between so important a fact and the Rebellion of 1745. In 1792, Heron writes: ‘The prejudices of clanship have almost died away.’ … ‘The dependents of the family of Kenmure are still attached to its representative with much of that affection and respect with which the tribes of the Highlands have till lately been accustomed to adhere to their lord.’ Heron's Journey through the Western Counties of Scotland, 2nd edit. Perth, 1799, vol. i. p. 248, vol. ii. p. 154. See also the remarks made, in the same year, in Lettice's Letters on a Tour through various parts of Scotland, London, 1794, p. 340. To trace the movement back still further, Pennant writes, in 1769: ‘But in many parts of the Highlands, their character begins to be more faintly marked; they mix more with the world; and become daily less attached to their chiefs.’ … ‘During the feudal reign, their love for their chieftain induced them to bear many things, at present intolerable.’ These two important passages are in the 4th edition of Pennant's Tour in Scotland, vol. i. p. 194, vol. ii. p. 307, Dublin, 1775. They prove that, twenty-four years after the Rebellion of 1745, the decay of affection was so manifest, as to strike a candid and careful, but by no means philosophic, observer. For Pennant to have discerned these changes, they must already have risen to the surface. Other and corroborative evidence will be found in Sinclair's Account of Scotland, vol. ii. p. 545, Edinburgh, 1792; and vol. iii. pp. 377, 437, vol. xiii. p. 310, vol. xv. p. 592, vol. xx. p. 33.
380
Burton's History of Scotland, vol. ii. pp. 535–537. Struthers' History of Scotland, Glasgow, 1828, vol. ii. pp. 519–525.
381
Macpherson (Annals of Commerce, vol. iii. p. 259) says, ‘This excellent statute may not unfitly be termed a new magna charta to the free people of Scotland.’
382
I cannot, therefore, agree with Macpherson, who asserts, in his valuable work, that the abolition of these jurisdictions ‘should undoubtedly have been made an essential preliminary of the consolidating union of the two kingdoms of England and Scotland, concluded forty years before.’ Macpherson's Annals of Commerce, vol. iii. p. 257. Compare De Foe's History of the Union between England and Scotland, pp. 458, 459, London, 1786, 4to.
383
In 1740, ‘the rising manufacturing and trading interests of the country’ were ‘looked down upon and discouraged by the feudal aristocracy.’ Burton's
