Worsening Relations with England

1. The Company of Scotland and the Darien Scheme

It is often said that the financial cost of the failure of the Darien Scheme was one of the main causes of the Union of 1707. But the Darien Scheme had far more than an economic impact. From its founding in 1695, the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies disrupted Anglo-Scottish relations. The experience of the Company and its Darien Scheme convinced many Scots that the 1603 Union of Crowns was not working for Scotland. But there was disagreement on what to do about this problem: was the solution more union or less union? Scots agreed that the Company and its Darien Scheme had been a disaster but they disagreed on the remedy.

1695 Act for a Company Trading to Africa and the Indies

A 1695 act of the Scottish Parliament created the Company of Scotland to pursue ‘an American, African and Indian trade’. This ‘joint stock’ Company was innovative in envisioning a multi-national investment vehicle. The list of founders (‘undertakers’) included not just Scottish nobles, gentry and merchants but also London merchants. Scottish investors were to have the opportunity to purchase at least half of the shares, with any remaining shares being offered to ‘foreigners’. The founders planned to recruit capital from London, Amsterdam and Hamburg. Shares were to be sold at a minimum investment of £100 and a maximum of £3000 per investor (pounds sterling).

The act provided sweeping powers, lucrative tax breaks and valuable privileges to the Company by the authority of the Scottish Crown.

  • The Company was allowed to send ships from Scottish ports, or any port where the King was ‘in amity, or not in hostility’, to ‘any lands, islands, countries or places in Asia, Africa or America’.
  • The Company could establish and supply arms to colonies, cities or forts in any place, uninhabited or otherwise, ‘by consent of the natives or inhabitants thereof and not possessed by any European sovereign, potentate, prince or state’.
  • They had the power to make war and peace in defence of their holdings ‘with the sovereigns, princes, estates, rulers, governors or proprietors of the foresaid lands, islands, countries or places in Asia, Africa or America.’
  • Their goods had to be returned to a Scottish port and for 31 years no other Scot was to trade with Asia, Africa or America without the permission of the Company.
  • Their goods would be free of most customs taxes for 21 years.
  • If their ships or lands were seized, the king would pursue restitution with foreign leaders.
  • Scotland’s civil and military officers and magistrates were obliged to assist the company and not allowed to arrest or hinder any Company officer or agent.
  • Company investors, officers and servants were to be free of all taxes and other state impositions (such as quartering) for 21 years.
  • All investors and employees of the Company and anyone settling or born in their colonies were to be given Scottish citizenship (‘free denizens’ and ‘reputed as natives of this kingdom’).

These ambitious terms made it obvious to contemporaries that the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies intended to compete with the English East India Company, England’s Royal African Company and England’s Caribbean colonies, as as well as the Dutch East India Company and Dutch colonies. This put Scotland’s King William in a very difficult position. William was also the King of England and the head of state in the Dutch Republic. His parliamentary Commissioner gave the royal consent to this act in 1695, but William soon backed away from the Scottish Company. Over the next five years it became obvious that when the Scottish Company clashed with English competitors or Crown interests, William would not back the Company.

Company of Scotland Crest

The National Library of Scotland provides an image of the Company of Scotland crest on a volume of the Company’s Minute Book. This marketing device provides evidence of the Company’s ambition to establish a global trading empire and the belief that they would exploit cornucopias of plenty offered by Africa and the Indies.

1697 English Ambassador’s Letter to Hamburg

When the Company of Scotland sought to raise capital by selling shares in Hamburg, the English ambassador to Hamburg attempted to discourage investment in the name of the ‘King of Great Britain’. Hamburg was a major trading city and the Company aimed to raise significant investment there. A copy of a letter to the city from the English ambassador, Sir Paul Rycaut, was printed as a pamphlet. This created anger in Scotland because it showed that English officials were working against the Company.

1698 Petitions to the Scottish Parliament and to the King

In July 1698, the Company complained to the Scottish Parliament about the Hamburg memorial in a petition. They noted that they were unable to get any statement of support from the King and asked the Parliament to ‘vindicate our company’s reputation abroad’. The petition emphasised the social breadth of Scottish investment in the Company, describing this as ‘a far more considerable joint stock than any was ever before raised in this kingdom for any public undertaking or project of trade whatsoever (which makes it now of so much the more universal a concern to the nation)’.

In response, the 1698 Parliament petitioned the King on behalf of the Company of Scotland. They cited the memorial by the king’s agent in Hamburg as ‘the whole nation’s concern’ and asked the king to support the Company of Scotland.

The King’s officers were anxious about Scottish public opinion. The King’s Commissioner to the Parliament, the Earl of Marchmont, used his closing speech to the 1698 Parliament to urge members to ‘put the people in remembrance of the great things his majesty has done for them’. The Earl insisted that the king had a ‘fatherly design of increasing the prosperity and happiness of his good subjects’.

1699 English Proclamation against Aiding Darien Settlers

On 8 April 1699, the governor of the English colony of Jamaica issued a proclamation from London ordering English subjects not to give any assistance or sell any food to Scottish settlers at Darien. This proclamation was repeated in Barbados on 13 April, New York on 15 May and Massachusetts on 3 June. The proclamation was printed as a pamphlet in Scotland and news of it stimulated great anger. It was seen by the Scots as inhumane and indicative of English antagonism toward the Company of Scotland.

From King William’s perspective, the Scottish colony was ‘contrary to the Peace entred into with His Majesties Allyes’. The Darien colony was made on land claimed by Spain, and Spain objected to the settlement. The Company argued that Spain did not occupy the land and they had the consent of the indigenous peoples for their settlement. But for William, the colony posed a threat to his relationship with Spain at a delicate moment when the succession to the Spanish throne was being negotiated.

A letter from the governor of Jamaica in June 1699 revealed that Englishmen were being called ‘ill names’ by the Spanish ‘because the Scotch are settled at Darien, which they will not believe is without the King’s consent or connivance at least’. The Crown’s April 1699 proclamation tried to distance the King from the colony.

The proclamation was supported by those who saw the Scottish colony as unwanted competition. A letter of 9 June 1699 by Jeremiah Basse, the governor of New Jersey, noted that Scottish settlers in East New Jersey were in correspondence with the Darien colony and expected to establish trade with them. He warned that this would not be in the English interest: ‘In time this evil may be too universal to be easily remedied: the trade of England to these colonies wholly discouraged and that of the Scotch nation advanced.’ Another letter on 10 June reported that the April proclamation ‘arrived very opportunely to curb the endeavours of some gentlemen of the Scotch nation [in New Jersey] to promote not only the Scotch interest in general but that particular settlement which they now call Caledonia.’

Basse warned that the Darien site could become very successful at England’s expense. He felt that it could become an ’emporium of trade and riches of America, a place if it meet with encouragement and be suffered to grow that may in time collect to it the riches of the Eastern and Western Indians, the one safely transported through the famous South Seas over the Isthmus of Darien and the other from the two adjoining Empires of Peru and Mexico.’ This reflected a typical optimism held by many at the time about the Darien site, which had fuelled enthusiastic investment in Scotland in 1696.

The record of the proclamation in Barbados shows how proclamations were made to ensure general awareness: ‘253. Minutes of Council of Barbados. Mr. Secretary Vernon’s letter in relation to the Scotch being settled in America was read and ordered to be published immediately by beat of drum and read in all the Churches and afterwards put up in the public places of the four towns in the island.’ 

A letter to London by the governor of Jamaica on 14 April 1699 reported that he had made the proclamation, but he wished he was allowed to send ships to remove any Scots from Darien who wanted to leave: ‘I have published a proclamation forbidding any Trade or Correspondency in any kind with the Scotch at Darien, and heartily wish I had leave to send vessels to bring away such of them as are willing to remove, for they begin to want provisions and necessaries, and that will make them start [leave the colony] and it will be much better they were here to strengthen this country than to go amongst the French or Dutch where they will be lost to His Majesty or his service.’ However, he noted a report that ‘a recruit of three good ships, with 800 men, are newly arrived to them’ and that as a result ‘they will not easily be removed’.

1700 English Proclamation against a pro-Darien Pamphlet

Anglo-Scottish tensions were reflected in a pamphlet war over the Darien colony. Pamphlets were cheap, soft-bound political tracts. On 29 January 1700, an English proclamation offered large rewards for information on the author or printer of a pamphlet defending the Scottish colony. This was considered a ‘libel’, meaning a scandalous and defamatory text.

1700 Scottish Pamphlet

At the May 1700 session of the Scottish Parliament, the King’s lack of support for the Darien venture was a major issue. From November 1699, the Duke of Hamilton and other leaders in the Country party supported the circulation of a petition to King William asking for a meeting of Parliament to hear the nation’s grievances on Darien. No signed copy survives, but it seems to have been subscribed by thousands of nobles, gentry and burgesses in a number of shires and burghs. The petition was delivered to the King in London on 25 March 1700. William received it grudgingly, noting that he had already called a Parliament for May.

For the May parliament, a short pamphlet was printed in Edinburgh that purported to speak for the people in the form of a mock petition to parliament: The People of Scotland’s Groans and Lamentable Complaints, Pour’d out before the High Court of Parliament. The tract blamed the Union of Crowns for allowing the English to treat the Scots like ‘Enemies’, criticised the English ban on sale of food to the Darien colonists and asked the Parliament to ‘assert the Liberties of this Injur’d Nation’.

The claim to speak for ‘the people’ was political theatre, but actual petitions to the Parliament show that many Scots were aware of the troubles of the Company and its colony.

Burgh and Shire Petitions to 1700-01 Parliaments

The Country party opposition in the Scottish Parliament organised a petitioning campaign to pressure the government on the King’s lack of support for the Company of Scotland. Though organised by central elites, these documents came from shires and burghs and provide evidence for local opinions in Scotland. A petition from Wigtownshire claimed that the Darien scheme was ‘so great a national concern as cannot but effect the minds of all true hearted Scotsmen’.

On 21 May 1700, petitions came to Parliament from five shires and three royal burghs. A petition was also read from the Company of Scotland. These petitions can be seen on the online Records of the Parliament of Scotland to 1707.

A larger batch of petitions from eleven shires and six burghs was read on 9 January 1701. A petition from the Company of Scotland was also read.

These petitions advanced a range of economic grievances and proposed remedies to parliament. The texts are similar, showing that papers were circulated to shape local petitioning efforts.

Ayrshire was typical in complaining of ‘our Company Trading to Africa and the Indies (in which the honour and interest of the nation is deeply concerned) meeting with so much oppositions from abroad and getting so little support at home’ and asking Parliament to ‘assert the India and African Company’s right to the colony of Caledonia, which has been and still is unjustly called into question, by giving such support to it as may encourage the adventurers to go on with an undertaking that may tend so much to the wealth, honour and interest of the nation’.

Resolves in Favour of the Company

On 10 January 1701 the Scottish Parliament passed a series of resolves criticising English interference with the Company of Scotland. These public statements were passed unanimously, revealing the depth of anger at England among members of Parliament. The resolves included:

  • A condemnation of the actions of the English ambassador in Hamburg as ‘an open encroachment upon the sovereignty of this crown and kingdom’
  • A condemnation of the 1699 proclamation in England’s colonies as ‘inhumane, barbarous and contrary to the law of nations and a great occasion of the loss and ruin of our said colony’.

A further resolve passed on 13 January asserted that the Darien colony had been ‘legal and rightful’. Parliament voted to address King William asking him to defend the Company and its colony. The Country party pushed for a more assertive act but lost the vote 104 to 84. A bill to provide funds to the Company also failed to secure a majority.

Less Union or More Union?

The experience of the Company of Scotland and its Darien colony bred anger and mistrust in Scotland towards England and King William. For some Scots, the answer was closer union. Unionist ministers supported Queen Anne when she pursued a treaty of union in 1702. In a letter written in March 1702, the Earl of Seafield urged the Earl of Leven (the governor of Edinburgh castle) to persuade members of Parliament, especially Presbyterians, to entertain a closer union. For Seafield, closer union would save the British kingdoms from a Jacobite restoration backed by Catholic France.

For other Scots, the answer was less union. The next section will consider Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun’s 1703 proposals for the devolution of powers from the Scottish monarch in London to the Scottish parliament in Edinburgh to provide more independence for Scotland in the Union of Crowns.