After sketching the gradual unification of Scotland as a kingdom in the mediaeval period, this chapter looks at Scotland’s entry into Great Britain with the Union of Crowns in 1603. The Scottish king, James I & VI, was an important engineer of the British union, although throughout the succeeding Stuart era during the rest of the seventeenth century confessional tensions, especially surrounding prelacy and Presbyterianism, remain rife. Such tensions are reflected in Scottish literature and continue with added conflictual pinch-points following the Union of Parliaments (1707) and the Jacobite rebellions in the first half of the eighteenth century. Debates about improvement, primitivism and the nature of Britishness endure in Scottish literature from that time until the present. From the Victorian era, Scottish culture can be read as subsumed within Britishness, and yet from the twentieth century new patriotic Scottish agendas, including political nationalism, sought a renewed distinctiveness for Scotland, reflected often in literary debates.

Chapter 6 provides the background to Archibald Pitcairne’s overtly atheist treatise, Pitcairneana, which is published in full in Chapter 7. It surveys Pitcairne’s career, including his meeting with Isaac Newton in 1692, his medical practice and influence, his passionate Episcopalianism and Jacobitism and his hostility to Presbyterianism, his circle of friends, his library and reading, and his Latin versification. Particular attention is given to his religious views, including the heterodox tract that he circulated in print, Epistola Archimedis, which voiced a deeply subversive view of Christian doctrine, and to Pitcairneana, of which the history of the manuscript and its content is given careful scrutiny.

“Revolution and Nostalgia: Walter Scott, and the Forms of Jacobite Nostalgia,” examines the concept of revolution in relation to the events of 1688–89 by way of thinking about why this paradigmatic event of modernity – the first “modern” revolution on some accounts – only very hesitantly embraces the idea of revolution. It examines the figure of the Jacobite in Walter Scott’s Waverley, in order to argue that historical fiction works by a logic of nostalgia, structuring the past as the place of the fantasies of the present. This chapter explains why revolution becomes the central if disavowed political fantasy of secular modernity; why nostalgia, a word invented in 1688 and reaching its apotheosis and its formal incarnation as historical fiction over a hundred years later, haunts the project of secularity; and why the Jacobite is at once the exemplary revolutionary, the prototypical nostalgic, and the object of nostalgic investment. This chapter also explains why representations of the “revolution” of 1688–89 tend to allegorize it in terms of racial or colonial conflict and thus how the invention of the Highland rebel managed England’s ambivalence about its own experience with revolution and its colonization projects.

An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (2 vols., 1757–8) by John Brown (1715–66) has rarely been studied in depth by intellectual historians, incongruent to its own initial popularity at publication. The Estimatewas written in a declinist voice, following hard on the heels of Britain’s defeat by France at the Battle of Minorca in 1756. Brown was convinced that Britain’s initial bad fortunes in war against France were related to a general decline in manners and principles, exemplified by the spirit of party. Even more understudied is Brown’s final contribution on the subject: his Thoughts on Civil Liberty: On Licentiousness and Faction, published in 1765, one year before he committed suicide. In this work, Brown tried to do what many political writers, including the principal ones discussed in this book, had held to be impossible: to demonstrate how a free state could exist without the internal conflict exemplified by party.

This chapter builds on the framework and context established in Chapter 1, which in many ways shaped the political experience of Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke (1678–1751). It provides a revisionist interpretation by demonstrating that, rather than an anti-party writer, Bolingbroke is best understood as the promoter of a very specific party, a systematic parliamentary opposition in resistance to what he perceived to be a Court Whig faction in power. Drawing on all of Bolingbroke’s well-known works, as well as his lesser-known journalism and unpublished sources, the chapter shows how most of his writings were calculated to legitimise opposition in the shape of a specific kind of political party: the Country party.

This chapter is devoted to several brief sections and sets the stage for what follows by dealing with some of the key elements of context and background for the remainder of the book. These include: ancient politics and political thought in Greece and especially Rome; the distinction (and non-distinction) between party and faction; Jacobitism; Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and the nature of the eighteenth-century British fiscal-military state; and sociability and partisanship. It concludes by highlighting that the most common way to discuss and write about political parties in the eighteenth century was in political, historical, and constitutional terms.

Among Hume’s most important discussions of party can be found in his History of England, especially in the volumes on the seventeenth century. Hume explained to Adam Smith that he had begun his historical investigation with the Stuart period partly because the factions, which he believed still informed British politics in the eighteenth century, arose at that time. His own historical work, however, was a conscious attempt to rise above faction and to see things both ways, which he believed English historiography had failed to do before him. This chapter places Hume’s History in the context of Rapin and Bolingbroke, but also in the broader context of debate around ancient constitutionalism and Whig history. This chapter points to the important influence of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, which had a notable impact on Hume between his essays and the publication of the History.

Turning to a series of essays written by Hume in the late 1740s, this chapter moves from the scene of London and Westminster politics to a broader British and indeed Scottish perspective. This chapter shows that the Glorious Revolution and the Hanoverian Succession remained at the heart of British political debate even a half century later. Writing in the wake of the Jacobite rising of 1745, Hume concentrated on politics in his native Scotland, and in particular the Scottish version of Toryism, which, as he had stated in his earlier essays, was synonymous with Jacobitism.

The most significant figure in the opposition to Walpole, besides Bolingbroke, was the Whig William Pulteney. However, Pulteney’s involvement with Bolingbroke’s Country party platform, whose raison d’être was to unite Tories and Whigs, ended upon the fall of Walpole in 1742. After Walpole’s resignation, Pulteney abandoned the Tories when he resisted attempts to prosecute Walpole and accepted a seat in the Lords as the Earl of Bath. John Perceval wrote a notorious pamphlet defending Pulteney/Bath, entitled Faction Detected by the Evidence of Fact (1743). In Faction Detected, Perceval distinguished between legitimate and factious opposition, associating the former with Whigs and the latter with Tories and Jacobites. This chapter also discusses various reversionary oppositions and the transitory broad-bottom administration in the mid-1740s.

This chapter looks at the visual and material culture of Jacobitism focusing on a heterogeneous group of objects in the collections of the NMS, V&A and BM, that are defiantly Jacobite in their content and intent. These objects range across media, and across the artistic hierarchies of the so–called fine and decorative arts. There are one–off larger than life portraits of the Jacobite figure heads and their families painted by court artists in the cosmopolitan urban centres of Europe, which were then mass-produced as engravings and published as prints; objects with a distinctive cultural currency, like coins and medals, engraved glassware and embroidered textiles. There are items of dress and adornment, including fans, garters and snuffboxes, that formed part of a corporeal culture of display and concealment. Some of the objects are gendered; others are anamorphic and shape-shifting. Many objects carry inscribed textual mottoes, sometimes in Latin that quote directly from texts including Vergil’s Aeneid. Using the body as a synthesising thematic, the chapter aims to chart the associations of Jacobitism with Scotland though the use of cross–media images and objects, while at the same time, highlighting the possibilities of using such material as tools for historical enquiry.