Series 2 > Seafield correspondence from 1685 to 1708

1708]
FIRST EARL OF SEAFIELD
443
of collecting revenue, had instituted alien Commissions of the
Peace and a Court of Exchequer in the English style, and was
engaged in abolishing the old Privy Council of Scotland, and in
extending further toleration to Episcopacy. The memoirs of
Colonel Hooke, a Jacobite emissary from Louis xiv. to Scotland,
the writings of Lockhart of Carnwath, a disappointed placeman,
and Defoe’s political works, give us glimpses of a political intrigue
in which the old Chevalier’s adherents sought to take advantage of
the unpopularity of the union, by combining such extremes as
the Cavalier and Catholic Jacobite with the westland Cameronian
Whig. The old active supporters and mainstay of the revolution
of 1689, the westland Covenanting Whigs of Galloway, Lanark,
and Ayr, discontented with the union, were sulkily, through some
of their agents, flirting with Jacobitism. The unsettled state of
Scotland, and the fairly concrete promises of support carried from
that country to the court of Louis by Colonel Hook, the young
laird of Boyne, and others, made a French and Jacobite invasion
of Scotland in the interests of the Chevalier a feasible counter¬
stroke, for the Duke of Marlborough with Queen Anne’s troops
and the allied Dutch were pressing hard on the French in
Flanders, in the campaign of 1707. The victory of Almanza
in Spain, gained by the Duke of Berwick, gave Louis additional
encouragement, and the French invasion of Scotland was planned.
However much the ostensible cause was Jacobite, Louis’s
predominant motive was to seek relief from the pressure of
Marlborough in Flanders, and to that extent alone it temporarily
succeeded. In the remaining letters here published is given a
wonderfully complete, original, and contemporary account of this
invasion, which amplifies and corrects in many points the brief
accounts of our historians, based on the writings of Hooke, Lock¬
hart, and Defoe. An interesting reprint of a journal by an officer
of the Dunkirk squadron, in their intended invasion against Scot¬
land, printed in Maidment’s Analecta Scotica (first series), p. 190,
gives an account of the episode from the Jacobite point of view.
Next year the Naval Records Society may publish an account of
this French invasion, drawn from the Admiralty Records of Great
Britain and edited by the writer.