Murdoch Lorna Erskine
Lived: 1671-1729
Earl of Ayr: 1696-1729
Steward of Commonwealth of Scotland, England and Ireland: 1713-1729
Few men in world history possess the reputation of Murdoch Lorna Erskine. He was the aristocratic Earl who led a revolution, the constitutional monarchist who established the most powerful Republic since Rome, the man who made Britain, establishing a unitary state across the diverse Isles of Britain. His period at the head of the newly minted British state, for it claimed direct authority over each constituent nation of the ‘Atlantic Archipelago’ to a far greater extent than any previous Scottish regime in history, might have been one of instability and war. But the legacy he left beyond towers tall indeed.
In the heady days of the Scottish Revolution of 1712-1713, King James III had taken on the Scottish Parliament and lost emphatically. In truth there had only been one military engagement of any real note, after the Battle of Falkirk in November 1712 those forces still loyal to the King were scattered. Some were evacuated to Ireland whilst others demobilised in the face of the overwhelming, and rapidly growing, strength of the Parliamentarians. By the proclamation of the Commonwealth on June 4th 1713 it seemed that Scotland’s 900 year old monarchy had surrendered its Kingdom with little more than a whimper. It was a mirage. In reality there still existed an immense reservoir of sympathy for James III and opposition to the Revolution in Edinburgh across Britain, a bulwark of power that had not resigned itself to Whiggish rule after the scattering of James’ armies the previous winter. In England the regime had no popular base to mention, in Cornwall, Wales and even Scotland itself large and powerful interests, not to mention a great part of the general population, were ready to fight for their King.
Soon after the Commonwealth had been declared in Edinburgh, England erupted in revolt against the new regime. James III took advantage of this and in July he sailed across the Irish Sea – capturing Bristol he marched his army into England proclaiming itself its liberator. With most English rebels hardly more enthusiastic at the idea of being ruled by an authoritarian Scottish monarch than a revolutionary Scottish ‘Steward’, James III scored a political masterstroke. Contacting Richard IX, the theoretical ‘King of England’ whose actual power did not extend beyond the environs of the City of London and England’s not unimpressive colonial Empire, James III of Scotland and Ireland struck a deal. He and Richard would join forces – together they would topple the Commonwealth, restoring James III to the Scottish and Irish thrones, but Richard would regain control over the entirety of the Kingdom of England (a relatively ill-defined area whose borders lay somewhere South of the Humber and East of the Severn, although it was unclear exactly where), Richard’s eldest daughter would also marry James III to seal the alliance. With Richard presenting himself as a national leader, the English rebels appeared willing to accept him as their figurehead, the financial support he could provide them proving decisively important.
The Jacobite-English rising proved irresistibly powerful. At the Battles of Oxford in August and then Northampton in September the predominantly Scottish armies of the Commonwealth were sent into headlong retreat. Buoyed by these triumphs the anti-Whig armies sought to destroy the Commonwealth’s power in the Southern reaches of Britain. Elsewhere, Jacobites rebellions broke out across much of the realm – the most dangerous of which began in Cumbria and threatened break the land link between the two key centres of Revolution, and of Scotland for that matter, in the Northern Central Belt based around the Clyde and Forth Valleys and the Southern Central Belt in Lancashire and Yorkshire. This was a British Civil War.
Overseas, the agents of James III had conspired to globalise the conflict as a means of strengthening their strategic position in the British Isles themselves. Firstly James stressed kinship ties to jockey Burgundy and France into a war against the Commonwealth, the French even providing an expeditionary force to fight on the British mainland as well as substantial funds. But Jacobean diplomacy did not stop there; James was able to build upon his coalition by convincing the Spanish Kingdoms of Navarre, Castile and Mauretania, all colonial rivals of the Scots, to enter the war with the promise of territorial transfers in the New World for their support.
Across North and South America, all of Scotland’s colonial neighbours threatened invasion. Peru, Amazonia, Mexico, New Yorkshire, Nova Scotia, Darien, California and the Caribbean provinces of the New Hebrides were all in danger. This foreign threat was to have an important galvanising effect on the Scottish Empire. Whilst sympathy for the Revolution was significant even before the official declaration of the Commonwealth, few colonial governors had been willing to take sides. Now that the Whigs appeared as the defenders of Scotland and her Empire against invasion, and the Jacobites the quisling allies of the invaders, Scotland’s colonies quickly moved to unanimously recognise the legitimacy of the government in Edinburgh – New Yorkshire leading the way in denouncing the King.
Within metropolitan Scotland, a certain nationalist sentiment would bolster the prestige of the Commonwealth at a time when the James III and his allies were advancing rapidly. During the dark days that followed, this Scottish nationalist siege mentality helped keep critics of the regime from turning over to the Jacobites and the core of the nation firmly behind the Commonwealth.
The British Civil Wars, Winter 1714-1715
1. Areas under Commonwealth control
2. Areas under Jacobite control
3. Areas under English control
4. Countries at war with Commonwealth
Nonetheless, from the autumn of 1713 the momentum of the Jacobite led alliance appeared unstoppable. The darkest hour in the history of the Commonwealth came in the year 1714, in Edinburgh Murdoch Lorna Erskine saw his political power under dire threat as his broad Whig coalition was stretched to breaking point by the intensity of the war and revolution, worse the better part of the British Isles was slipping from his grasp. Yet the final months of that year had seen a string of crucial military victories that held the regime back from total collapse.
In the South, the Anglo-Jacobite armies had clearly over extended themselves and Parliamentarian forces had taken advantage of this force the two Kings into halting their advance agonisingly short of the towns and cities of Lancashire and Yorkshire. Further North, the pro-Jacobite Cumbrian rebellion led by the Baron of Carlisle failed in its attempts to severe the link between the two key core Commonwealth territories having been defeated at the Battle of Hexham. Finally, the Jacobite rising began in the vicinity of Aberdeen by the eponymous Earl was forced into retreat after being beaten back from sieges of Inverness and Dundee – victory in which might have seen the Highland clans switch their allegiance from Parliament to the King and would have brought the war to the gates of Edinburgh and Glasgow.
It is impossible to examine the British Civil Wars, especially its early years, without proper understanding of the incredible political situation in Scotland. For this was the tempestuous and wild time of the Whig Revolution. Murdoch Lorna Erskine was, personally, a relatively conservative reformist forced towards extreme positions to save the power of the Parliament he loved. He stood close to the centre of a complex Scottish political spectrum.
A simple division between Tory opponents and Whig supporters of the Revolution and Erskine regime fails to even come close to understanding the situation. The Tory critics of the Revolution were divided between Jacobite supporters of James III and Moderates. The Jacobites in turn were split between absolutists and supporters of a powerful monarchical regime who had broadly joined the Jacobean armies, or at least had sympathy with them, and supporters of James who preferred some sort of constitutional monarchy whose relationship with the Edinburgh regime was complex and not always as openly hostile as the hardliners. The Moderate Tories were defined as those who had continued sitting in Parliament after the declaration of the Commonwealth in 1713; they were, to varying extents, critical of the regime and sat in opposition to Erskine’s supporters. Most supported some sort of constitutional monarchy in which neither the crown nor Parliament reigned supreme. From an initial position of weakness the Moderate Tories rapidly became a genuine threat to Erskine’s government as they looked to bring a halt to the Revolution and replace the government.
On the other side of the Parliamentary chamber lay the supporters of the Revolution, the Whigs. This grouping ranged from moderate constitutional monarchists separated from the Moderate Tories only by their decision to back Murdoch Lorna Erskine through increasingly radical shades of reformers to outright revolutionaries. The leading figure amongst the radicals within Parliament was the Presbyterian, Liverpudlian lawyer John Belper, the greatest thorn in the side of Steward Erskine and his most able lieutenant. The ‘Belperites’ would time and time again push the regime to make far more extensive reformers than it had ever hoped for – bringing about the complete end of press censorship (an act that many later historians credit for sowing the seeds of the Scottish Enlightenment), he removed certain residual restrictions on non-Episcopalian Protestants (this included allowing them to become judges and cabinet ministers), brought down a number of mercantilist trade barriers, eliminated legally mandated local monopolies granted to the aristocracy, minted a new coinage to replace a currency that had been badly debased under the old regime and revised a number of the more dubious legal privileges of the nobility.
The Whiggish centre had been forced to grant these concessions to the Belperites partly as a means of preventing the masses from being attracted to the extra-parliamentary radical fringe of ‘Levellers’ and ‘Diggers’. The Levellers demanded radical expansions to suffrage and reforms to the nation’s democratic structures whilst the Diggers accompanied this political reform programme with economic demands for the redistribution of land and wealth. Concern about these radical currents was accompanied by the knowledge that the Whig government needed to be willing to harness mass revolutionary enthusiasm to turn around Civil War. Although he risked losing support on the Right by leaning to the Left, Murdoch Lorna Erskine feared it was his only means of achieving victory.
The most important of the Belperite inspired reforms of the period was a momentous shakeup of the structures of the Commonwealth’s armed forces. An important programme of professionalisation promised greater discipline, organisation and leadership. Although command positions remained available exclusively to the nobility, they could no longer be garnered simply through favour and appointment. Beyond this, a large-scale programme of mass conscription tapped into popular support for the Revolution and nation and thousands were recruited to oppose the old regime and its foreign allies. Images of an unholy alliance of savage English rebels and tyrannical reactionaries storming Northwards into the heart of Liberty in Scotland proved even more effective than the regime could have hoped. Although it would take months and even years for these reforms to come fully into effect, the process had been begun by the end of 1714.
1715-1716 marked the bloodiest period of the British Civil Wars. The Anglo-Jacobite forces remained extremely powerful despite setbacks at the tail end of the previous year and were able to make gains in Wales and push into the Humber Valley – capturing Grimsby and Hull. Even more concerningly they were able to temporarily occupy much of Lancashire – reaping destruction in a number of important towns before withdrawing further South. However, to the North the Cumbrian based revolt lost Galloway, Dumfries and Carlisle in 1715, forcing the rebels into the mountainous Lake District. Towards the Grampian region, in the aftermath of their defeats at Inverness and Dundee the Aberdeenshire rebels were forced into headlong retreat. By the summer of 1715 Aberdeen itself was under siege, the city finally falling in December 1716.
Overseas the almighty power of the Scottish fleet, which emerged as heavily in favour of the Commonwealth by 1715, was crucial to the assertion of Edinburgh’s global dominance. In the Americas the foreign invasions of Scottish colonies were eventually repulsed and blockaides preventing the movement of adequate reinforcements allowed colonial forces to begin to make progress into enemy territory. In the Old World, by the end of 1715 the Scots had totally eliminated their continental opponents as a genuine maritime threat – blockading ports and wreaking havoc on enemy shipping from France to Mauretania.
With these key victories in the secondary fronts of the conflict, not to mention the growing size and quality of the Commonwealth’s military from 1717 the conflict began to turn decisively against the Jacobite coalition. In the Spring of 1717 a large Commonwealth army march Southwards from Yorkshire and met an equally mighty host at the Battle of Woodthorpe near Sherwood Forest and Nottingham. With some 125,000 men clashing, the narrow majority of whom fought under the banner of the Commonwealth, Woodthorpe was the only single engagement of the British Civil Wars larger than the Battle of Falkirk fought in 1712. The outcome of the contest was the obliteration of the Anglo-Jacobite army as the Parliamentarian forces were able to outflank much of the enemy army as it withdrew from the field and prevent it from escaping across the River Trent. In this single engagement in the centre of Britain, the entire world’s fate was decided. The cause of a united British Isles, a force capable of dominating the entire 18th century world, was ascendant.
Through 1717-1719 the Anglo-Jacobite forces continued to fight valiantly, yet the tide had turned against them for good. In April 1719 Richard IX died at the Battle of Enfield as the remnants of the English army tried desperately to save Southern Britain’s greatest city. Within a week Scottish troops were marching through the streets of London under the banner of the Commonwealth. Realising the game was up on mainland Britain, James III fled across the Irish Sea for the second time in a decade – once again leaving the bulk of his supporters behind to inevitable defeat. What followed the capture of London was little more than a mopping up operation with remaining holdouts of anti-Whig resistances slowly being eliminated.
Quickly after their victory on the island of Great Britain, Parliamentarian forces began preparations for an invasion of Ireland, a country that had been effectively independent since 1712. In September 1719 an army landed in Ulster, home to the large Scots speaking Protestant community which had suffered badly from reprisals and discrimination by Catholic authorities since the collapse of Scottish power on the island almost a decade previously. Amongst a friendly population the Scottish invasion force established a firm bridge head and proceeded to march on the Irish capital of Dublin. As James III panickedly formed gathered all the strength he could muster in Ireland and met the Parliamentarians at the Battle of the Boyne. There the well drilled Scottish red coats shattered the largely tribal Irish army with ease. Although James III fled towards the wilds of the interior with what supporters he had left, it was clear as day that James would be unable to hold on to either of his Kingdoms. In early 1720 the King’s army was surrounded and James III committed suicide, by the winter of that year the last Jacobites had surrendered.
With the newly united realm exhausted from a decade of debilitating Civil War, that same year the Commonwealth entered into peace negotiations with the continental powers that had ranged against it. The terms of the Treaty of London were relatively light. Navarre lost its colony of Texas – giving up lands bordering Mexico but retaining Louisiana (a territory based around the Mississippi Delta), the annexation of London and English possessions in the Caribbean and Atlantic (including Bermuda, the Azores and Madeira) by the Commonwealth was recognised although England’s former colonies in South America were allowed to become the independent Kingdoms of Brazil, La Plata and Upper Peru (this largely a result of Scottish reluctance engage in a large-scale invasion of Brazil, whose colonial government was capable of fielding a very significant force) finally the French, Castilians and Mauretanians all agreed to pay a hefty tribute to the Scots so as to avoid territorial losses of their own.
Unofficial ‘Union Jack’, first used during 1720s
The post-war treatment of Ireland and England, the two ostensibly conquered British realms, proved remarkably different. Whilst in 1720 the Commonwealth witnessed its first elections since the war, MPs were elected across both England and Scotland but in Ireland only in the ‘pacified’ provinces of Ulster and Meath were elections carried out and even there far fewer seats were awarded per head of population than across the Irish Sea where the situation was relatively uniform throughout Britain. In England the freedoms of the Revolution were consciously extended, in Ireland, deemed more prone to rebellion and not yet ready for such changes, a military occupation ruled under martial law. In England there was a conscious attempt to forge a ‘British’ identity on the part of both Scots and some English, before Murdoch Lorna Erskine’s death in 1729 the ‘Union Jack’ was being used in many parts of both countries for unofficial purposes whilst in London the
South British Daily Mail, one of the oldest newspapers in the entire world was founded in 1727 as an overtly pro-Commonwealth press organ, even if its funding had origins amongst the local Scottish merchant community it was quite remarkable. Moreover, London in particular began to see real benefit from involvement within the global Scottish Empire – entrance into the largest trade network on earth facilitating something of an economic boom, the English city quickly beginning to revival the powerhouses of Glasgow, Edinburgh and Bristol as an economic centre.
With the wars over, Erskine still had a raft of political problems at home. The 1720 elections had caused no end of problems. The newly elected English MPs were overwhelmingly of a Moderate Tory and conservative Whig variety, in Scotland a there was a noticeable shift in favour of the Belperites whilst both pro and anti-government moderates also made gains. His own personal base of support was gravely undermined. Worse yet the Belperites themselves appeared to be growing troublesome as they demanded further reforms to the political system, greater reductions in aristocratic privileges and even an expansion of the franchise to all men of a certain property qualification. Extremism might have had legs during the white heat of Civil War, but not in peacetime. Following one incendiary speech too many John Belper was arrested under trumped up charges of inciting revolt, when many of his close allies began to denounce the government they faced a similar fate. At the same time prominent Levellers and Diggers were quietly arrested and the Commonwealth began to export its political prisoners by the hundreds across the Atlantic to the far flung reaches of the Scottish colonial Empire. John Belper, the hero of the Revolution, would spend the final two decades of his living in colonial Lima in Peru. Later election in 1724 saw the few remaining radicals in Parliament wiped out.
There was still one last battle to be fought in the British Civil Wars. When James III had taken his own life rather than face the humiliation of capture in 1720 the McKarling-Maud line had not died with him. Indeed, he had an infant son, born during the Civil Wars to an English Princess, who laid claim not just to Ireland and Scotland, but the Kingdom of England as well. This infant, the would be ‘James IV’ was under the custody of his Catholic uncle David. Ever the romantic, and realising that tensions in Ireland still ran high, David arranged for his smuggling to the Emerald Isle in 1727. There he met with sympathetic veterans to raise the Jacobite banner once again. This fateful rebellion was to last barely nine months and bring to a close the lengthy period of internal chaos in the British Isles. David and his Jacobites marched hastily on Dublin, winning a small battle outside the city they entered the capital in May and proclaimed the young McKarling-Maud boy King James of Ireland in absentia. With popular enthusiasm rapidly rising after this victory the Jacobite army marched Northwards to Republican Ulster – seeking the capture Ireland’s second city in Belfast and in doing so ensure total control over the island.
In contrast to the triumphal entrance into Dublin, as the Jacobites marched North panic gripped the streets of Belfast. With Commonwealth reinforcements being rushed to the province large numbers of locals were hastily conscripted into the army. Meanwhile, across the sea, high hopes of a great stirring of the peoples of Southern Britain in support of a new Jacobite rising came to nothing as little more than a few Cornish riots worried authorities. At the Battle of Dundalk Jacobitism as a viable military force in the British Isles was destroyed for good. The rising couldn’t survive the loss of men, material and belief it sustained at Dundalk and quickly petered away with Prince David escaping back to France, never to fight another day in his life. The Union of the British nations had been firmly secured.
Murdoch Lorna Erskine died in 1729, aged just 58 having been Steward of the Commonwealth for 16 years and effective leader of the Scottish state for 17. He was succeeded by a close lieutenant in the form of Patrick MacDouglas. The British state he had created was to endure for generations to come.
. The Kingdom of Scotland is dead, long live the Commonwealth!
