Commons 1690-1715

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.

Although Dumfries was the 2nd Duke of Queensberry’s ‘own shire’ he did not sit securely there, even at the height of his power and influence on the national scene. A vast ‘estate and interest’, enhanced by possession of the hereditary sheriffdom, did indeed give him ‘great awe and influence’ over some of the freeholders, but there were rival magnates of sufficient stature to challenge the Douglas ascendancy, notably the 1st Marquess of Annandale, of whom it has been observed, by a modern historian, that ‘opposition to Queensberry was almost the only consistent feature in [his] politics’.

The county of Cromarty was contiguous with the barony, which had been purchased by the Mackenzies of Tarbat in 1682, and enlarged subsequently by the incorporation of the barony of Tarbat and of other lands belonging to Viscount Tarbat, scattered in eight separate parcels across the neighbouring shire of Ross. Despite these additions, Cromartyshire remained among the very smallest of Scottish counties: only five freeholders voted in the last elections to the Scottish parliament.

The 1708 election in Clackmannanshire was fought between stage armies of faggot voters, brought into being by the rivalry of the Duke of Argyll and the Earl of Mar. Between them, these magnates accounted for a great majority of the new charters issued prior to the election, and were therefore largely responsible for increasing the electorate to 23 freeholders. Indeed, Mar’s first thoughts, in this duel by proxy, had turned to the possibility of creating new voters, as he explained to his brother Lord Grange SCJ (Hon. James Erskine†) in January 1708: