Free How the Scots Invented the Modern World by Arthur Herman Page B

sixteen Lords and forty-five Commons, a ten-to-one advantage for the English members. To opponents, no provision of the treaty seemed to symbolize Scotland’s reduced status in the new union as much as did Article 22. “The Scots deserve no pity,” Fletcher had warned, “if they voluntarily surrender their united and separate interests to the Mercy of an united Parliament,” where the Scots would have only forty-five elected members. The very principle of representative government for which both Scots and English had fought and died, first in the Civil War and then in 1688, seemed under attack.
    It was going to be a fierce debate, and to lead it Queensberry had chosen his right-hand counsel, John Dalrymple, Earl of Stair. Stair was, as John Prebble has put it, “witty, wise, and ambitious.” The son of Scotland’s most distinguished jurist, both he and his father had been savagely persecuted by the Stuarts. Then the son, realizing there were advantages to going with the flow, switched sides. He became Lord Advocate, and finally Secretary of State for Scotland.
    A man constrained by few principles or much sense of humanity, Stair, more than anyone else, was responsible for the hideous events in Glencoe on February 13, 1692, when the pro-Orange Campbells had slaughtered thirty-seven of their pro-Jacobite neighbors, the MacDonalds of Glencoe, including women and children (“’tis strange to me,” he wrote callously when the news of the massacre set off shock-waves in the Scottish Parliament, “that means so much regret for such a sept of thieves”). 4 The ensuing scandal had forced his resignation from the secretaryship, but his loyalty to William and Mary earned him the title Earl of Stair in 1700.
    As a public figure, Stair was viewed by ordinary Scots with alarm, even fear. Rumors had it that he and his family were possessed by the devil. His sister Sarah was said to be able to levitate over walls at will. His mother was popularly believed to be a witch, and when her daughter Janet married against her will, her mother had (according to scandalmongers) cursed her: “Ye may marry him, but sair ye shall repent it!” On the wedding night, terrible screams were heard from the bridal chamber. When the door was opened the next morning, the daughter was found dead, bathed in blood, with the groom raving in the chimney corner, hopelessly insane.
    The sensational story of “the Dalrymple curse” became the original for a novel by Sir Walter Scott and memorable to generations of operagoers as the Mad Scene in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. Although the story is false (in fact, Janet Dalrymple died of a natural illness two weeks after her marriage), the myth of a curse gave Stair a certain intimidating presence among his colleagues—all except, of course, Andrew Fletcher, who at one point in the debate offered to tie Stair to his horse’s tail and drag him through the streets of Edinburgh (he was forced to apologize for the remark the next day).
    It was Stair who helped Queensberry draw up his list of pliant Scottish commissioners for the original signing of the treaty. It was Stair who proposed the original strategy for getting the treaty past the Parliament, by offering up the molasses first, especially freedom of trade, before getting down to the sulfur, which meant Article 22. Now it was this extraordinary and amoral man, the very opposite of William Carstares in public reputation and integrity, who rose to carry the treaty over its final hurdle.
    His argument was characterstically direct and unsentimental. All this talk of principle would get Scotland nowhere. The real issue was who paid the bills. The only way to draw any sensible comparison between the two kingdoms in representative terms, Stair explained, was not how many members each Parliament had before union, but how much each was willing to pay in taxes. The English would begin by paying into the new British Treasury thirty-five times the amount of