Chapter 3 analyzes how, within a newly expanded marketplace for print, a combination of manuscript and printed letters helped shape the ways in which the Company of Scotland’s Darien venture (1695–1700) and its subsequent failure came to be understood in cultural memory. Letters in both manuscript and printed form helped establish the company. Letters also served to connect the company directors with the colonists in Darien, and, when published in pamphlet form, they provided information and propaganda about the new colony to the nation back home. After the collapse of the Darien settlement, letters also became the evidence used to shape the cultural memory of the disaster. The chapter traces how, over the course of the eighteenth century, the cultural memory of Darien was erased by the bigger controversies surrounding the implications of the Acts of Union (1707) for the Scottish nation. Lastly, it considers how the rediscovery and publication of the Darien papers by John Hill Burton in 1849 brought them back into focus as a site of cultural memory.

Capturing the cumulative effect of the innovative modes of engagement outlined in previous chapters, this chapter examines a term for Scottish public opinion that had become current by the end of the seventeenth century: the sense of the nation. This phrase (and its variants, the sentiments or mind of the nation) suggested the thoughtful conclusions of a national political community. Attention was drawn to these extra-institutional opinions by changes arising from the 1688-90 Revolution, including greater freedom of debate in parliament, the confirmation of a right to petition the crown and weaker monarchical oversight of Scottish politics from London. As a series of scandals created discontent in Scotland, a ‘Country’ opposition re-energised adversarial petitioning alongside political pamphleteering. In 1706-7, opponents of proposals for an incorporating Anglo–Scottish union asserted collective objections in petitions, pamphlets, speeches and street protests, securing some treaty amendments alongside measures to safeguard parliament from violent resistance. Though the stature of extra-institutional opinion was still contested, these efforts to defuse its force indicate its contemporary profile in Scottish political culture.