Patrick MacDouglas
Lived: 1679-1747
Lord MacDouglas: 1704-1747
Steward of Commonwealth of Scotland, England and Ireland: 1729-1734
Patrick MacDouglas was a portly man of stern disposition. As the ‘Chief’ of the Highland MacDouglas Clan he sat in the House of Lords and retained vast estates in the far North of Scotland. However, beyond his ancestry, MacDouglas had little connection to the wild, Presbyterian people who were his vassals. He spent his entire life in the Northern Central Belt, most of it in metropolitan Edinburgh, and shared the faith of the Scottish governing establishment – Episcopalianism – and its political faith as well – Whiggism. From his assumption of his seat in the Lords at the beginning of the century, Patrick had been a loyal Whig and became a close lieutenant of the great Murdoch Lorna Erskine from the beginning of the Revolution – liaising with the Tory Moderates and centrist Whigs, whipping many doubters of the regime into at least tacit support during the dark days of the British Civil Wars. At Erskine’s death MacDouglas was regarded as his natural heir – a continuity candidate with strong credentials as both a Revolutionary and guardian of the social status quo.
MacDouglas’ period as Steward of the Commonwealth marked a blessed return to a period of internal stability, when the young but all powerful British state finally appeared to have settled down from internal conflict and violence. Economic operations disrupted by war were restarted, the Scottish economy was on the rise once more, and a sense of normality prevailed across the Isles. Memories of Civil War and Revolution remained painful, but there appeared little prospect of them returning in the immediate future.
For the first time in two decades Edinburgh began to look outwards again. In the Far East, in cooperation with authorities in the Cape Colony, the Commonwealth established its first new colony since its proclamation as around ½ of the rich and populous East Indian isle of Java was conquered. In the West, California had been steadily growing with little metropolitan support throughout the years of conflict in the British Isles, but during the early 1730s a number of forts were constructed throughout the colony in order to reaffirm Scottish power on the Pacific shoreline of North America.
However, in the Old World, the Commonwealth found itself more isolated than any Scottish state had been for centuries. The Kingdom of the McKarling-Mauds had been well connected with dynastic links to France and Burgundy, a close alliance with the Dutch Republic and amicable relations with the Protestant Kingdoms of Northern and Eastern Europe. The Revolution and the wars that followed had shattered all these ties, few continental states appeared eager to rebuild them. This was the apogee of the ideal of ‘splendid isolation’; Scotland had no friends in Europe and with it no entanglements in the old continent’s rivalries and conflicts.
Within the vast territories of the Scottish Empire, the policy of free trade, so inextricably linked to the Whigs, was brewing a grand, if peaceful, political conflict. The Whigs believed that by tearing down the old mercantilist barriers that had seen the Scottish world economy shelter itself from the outside world and ossify during the 17th century, they could unshackle the entire Imperial economy and endow it with the vibrancy to achieve progress without limits. With the stresses of war the policy was only really introduced fully from the 1720s and had a number of unexpected consequences.
With the removal of various monopolies, tariffs and trading barriers the prices of key agricultural goods plummeted. This was politically damaging in the metropolitan British Isles – greatly aggravating a domestic aristocracy that supported the regime with great reluctance as it was – but was an even greater disaster for several Scottish colonies which had been exporting their produce at inflated prices. The big crash hit in 1732 when two of the great merchant houses of Scotland collapsed, with great debts left unpaid a number of Scottish banks were also brought close to bankruptcy.
Perhaps more worryingly, the Commonwealth government itself was struggling to stay afloat. Although Scotland had long had access to the most fluid credit flow in the world, through the Civil Wars, the maintenance of an army much larger than anything the country had ever before retained and the loss of incomes through old tariffs and taxes that had been abolished, there was great concern that Edinburgh would soon find itself unable to pay its debts. There was high demand for a change of course, yet Patrick MacDouglas remained implacably behind traditional Whig economic doctrines.
This lack of pragmatism greatly alienated Patrick MacDouglas form many of his allies in Parliament, but it wasn’t until after the 1733 election that concerted opposition to his governance challenged his rule. In that year allies of MacDouglas lost a swathe of seats in the Commons, leaving his government’s ability to command the confidence of the Lower House in hanging by a thread. The Tories had made great gains and the veterans of the Revolution were deeply reluctant to surrender power to those who had been sympathetic to the old regime.
The Moderate Tory MP for the Burgh of St Andrews, Ranald MacDrostan was to play the decisive role in ending MacDouglas’ Stewardship. The Honourable Gentleman was the son of the Earl of Fife, the heir to the last surviving branch of the ancient House of MacDrostan which had ruled Scotland from 916-1413. Ranald represented something close to the absolute centre of post-Revolution Scotland’s political spectrum. Seeing himself as a political pragmatist, he had opposed the overthrow of the monarchy but came round to supporting the regime of Murdoch Lorna Erskine after James III began making alliances with anti-Scottish forces in England and the continent. After the end of the Civil Wars he had been a staunch critic of the supposed excesses of the Whigs free trade policies but otherwise accepted all the changes that had swept the nation since 1712. Representing a clear change from the current course, he did not go so far as to alienate men who had long considered themselves Whigs.
In early 1734 Patrick MacDouglas faced a rebellion from many of his Whig supporters in the wake of the prominent defection of two key ministers to the opposition benches. Seeing that he had lost the confidence of Parliament, Patrick MacDouglas took the momentous step of resigning (or in the lexicon of the time ‘abdicating’) as Steward of the Commonwealth of Scotland, England and Ireland. In his place Ranald MacDrostan successfully united Tories and many Whigs behind his cause. His ascension to the Stewardship was approved by both Houses of Parliament, making the descendant of nineteen Kings the first member of the House of Commons to be appointed as Steward of the Commonwealth.
After being removed from government Patrick MacDouglas continued to fight the Whiggish cause in the House of Lords for more than decade before he succumbed to his unhealthy lifestyle. None the less, if his reign as Steward was unremarkable, he deserves great credit for peacefully standing down in 1734 and facilitating one of the first peaceful transitions of power in Scottish history than did not involve the death of a head of state.
