Scottish County

In the last Scottish parliament the stewartry’s two members opposed the Union: William Maxwell of Cardoness, a professional soldier firmly in the Revolution interest and usually loyal to the Court, who voted in favour of the 1st article but ended by opposing ratification of the treaty; and Alexander McKie of Palgown, from the cavalier wing of the opposition, who voted consistently against it throughout. Both commissioners, therefore, placed themselves out of the running for selection as Scottish representatives to the first Parliament of Great Britain.

On the only occasion in the period when there was an opportunity of making a return to Parliament, Kinross-shire witnessed a highly controversial election. Party animosities, of a sort, seem to have been the cause. The county’s commissioner to the last Scottish parliament, (Sir) John Bruce (2nd Bt.*), who owned the most considerable estate in the shire, found himself disqualified as hereditary sheriff from election to Westminster. His nomination of the Squadrone politician Mungo Graham of Gorthy, factor to Bruce’s stepson the Duke of Montrose, aroused the hostility of an opposing interest.

Scot, the Jacobite agent, was guilty of no more than mild exaggeration when he described the population of Kincardineshire as entirely loyal to the Pretender. Nevertheless, at the last election to the Scottish parliament the Court had successfully carried the return of Sir James Falconer, Lord Phesdo SCJ, through the defection of James Scott I* of Logie and his father from the Country party.

The principal landowning families in Inverness-shire adhering to the ‘Revolution’ interest were the Grants of Grant, long-established in Strathspey, and the somewhat more recently arrived Forbes of Culloden, whom some affected to despise as parvenu. Ludovick Grant of Grant, who had been given the sheriffdom by King William in 1689, and Duncan Forbes of Culloden were each elected as commissioners to the Convention in 1689, but in 1702 the laird of Grant returned himself and his son Alexander as supporters of the Country party, to the exclusion of Forbes, who had remained with the Court.

Elections in Haddingtonshire were sometimes strongly contested in this period, even though there was little in the way of an episcopalian or cavalier interest to challenge the prevailing ‘Whig’ consensus, and despite the close political co-operation at national level between three of the magnates possessing local influence, the Earl of Haddington, the Marquess of Tweeddale and the Duke of Roxburghe, all of whom were closely linked in the Squadrone.

‘This shire is so entirely loyal’, reported the Jacobite agent Scot in 1706, ‘that there is scarce any in it of birth, breeding or estate, but what is so, and so are all the commons, some few Whigs excepted.’ Macky, from a different perspective, received the same impression: ‘the gentry of Angus’, he noted, ‘are very numerous, and universal enemies to the Union’. Indeed, during the Fifteen nearly all the nobility in the county joined the Pretender.

The lesser barons of Fife were sufficiently numerous to complicate the electoral management of the leading magnates, lords Rothes and Leven. At the very least, the course of any contest was rendered unpredictable by the variety of potential candidates; and occasionally, when fired by sectarian enthusiasm, the voters exhibited an independence from aristocratic direction.

Elginshire, according to Macky, compared favourably with the vale of Evesham for ‘fertility’ and ‘evenness of ground’: the seaboard was ‘all a bowling green’ and the county town itself was ‘the Richmond of Scotland’, where lay the winter habitations of some of the wealthiest commoners in the northern kingdom. As in the neighbouring counties, there was a sizable episcopalian element in Elginshire, and the presence of some gentry and clergy sympathetic to the Stuart cause led the Jacobite agent Scot, with his customary optimism, to deem the region ‘well affected’.

It was a natural consequence of the pre-eminence of Edinburghshire among Scottish counties that its elections unfailingly attracted the interest of leading politicians. The size of its electorate and the absence of any dominant aristocratic interest, however, rendered it unamenable to control. There was no hereditary sheriff, the crown appointees in this period being the Earl of Dalhousie from 1703 until his death in 1710 and thereafter the Earl of Balmerino, a Tory whose suspected Jacobitism led to his dismissal after the Hanoverian succession.

After the Union the Dunbartonshire representation fell into the maw of the Duke of Argyll, though the way in which this happened remains a mystery. Elections to the Scottish parliament were relatively open. The 1st Duke of Argyll was closely concerned in the contest in 1702, in which his brother James Campbell* was standing, and the Marquess (later Duke) of Montrose, who controlled the Lennox estate, also lurked in the background, the Marquess’s factor William Cochrane* of Kilmaronock being another of the candidates.