Adam Graham
Lived: 1694-1780
Member of Parliament for Lancashire: 1728-1752
Duke of Lancaster: 1752-1777
Steward of the Commonwealth of Scotland, England and Ireland: 1745-1780
Adam Graham was the last of the generation of leaders to have lived through the Scottish Revolution and resulting British Civil Wars at the beginning of the 18th century. Having experienced those upheavals as a young man, he took up the reins of government in 1745 and would remain as the Commonwealth’s Head of State for almost half a century. During that lengthy period he was radically, but gradually, redefined the realm’s political system – most crucially renovating the position of ‘Steward’ into an institution almost indistinguishable from that of a constitutional monarch.
Adam Graham was the son of the powerful Duke of Lancaster – one of Scotland’s great landowners and an important player in Edinburgh. At the time of the Revolution, the young Adam Graham was resident in his father’s domains in Lancashire, giving him a more cataclysmic perspective of the ensuing British Civil Wars than so many political figures of the 18th Century. Rather than enjoying the relative safety of Edinburgh, throughout the conflict Graham lived on the frontline, experienced the terror of the people at the prospect of Jacobean conquest and became a lifelong proponent of Parliamentary power.
Thanks to the influence of his father, Adam had been given a relatively minor command from the early days of the Civil War but after proving himself capable shot through the ranks in the aftermath of the brief Anglo-Jacobite occupation of much of Lancashire around 1715-1716 which had resulting in a clear-out of many commanding figures. From then until the end of the Civil War period the prodigious Adam Graham proved himself an excellent military leader, retiring from the army with great respect and many friends in 1728 to take up a seat in Parliament.
Idolising the great Murdoch Lorna Erskine, Adam Graham initially styled himself as a Whig. Yet in the days before uniform political parties the porous boundaries between the moderates amongst the Whigs and Tories meant that the distinction between the two was rarely entirely clear. By the latter years of Patrick MacDouglas’s Stewardship, Graham was firmly on the side of the Moderate Tories grouped around Ranald MacDrostan, in whose government he served with distinction. Upon MacDrostan’s death, Graham quickly emerged as the most obvious replacement, his alliances with both Moderate Tories and Whigs alike allowing him to out manoeuvre his rivals as he took up the position of Steward.
When Adam Graham first became Steward in 1745 Britain appeared to be hurtling towards military conflict with the Netherlands and possibly France as well. The Dutch in particular were enraged by various colonial conflicts – most notably in the East Indies and Australia, but also in India and the far North-West of the Americas – and major trading disputes. The Commonwealth’s new Steward performed something of a minor miracle in that he did not only avert open war between Edinburgh and Amsterdam, but did much to rebuild the historically close relationship between the Dutch and Scots. Rather than engage the Dutch Republic in war, Graham used his own diplomatic skill to come to a series of important agreements which granted Dutch and British merchants certain freedoms to trade within one another’s realms and most importantly established clear and acceptable spheres of influence in the areas of colonial conflict between the two nations around the world. By the 1750s the Dutch had been transformed from a clear enemy into a more or less friendly partner.
To compound upon its diplomatic triumphs in transforming a foe into a friend in the Netherlands, the British government scored another coup in North America. There, on behalf of the mighty colony of New Yorkshire, the British purchased the colony of Louisiana from the cash trapped Spanish Kingdom of Navarre – leaving the all of North America with the exceptions of Florida and the frozen North-West of the continent under the British colonial authority.
Across the Atlantic Ocean, the mid-18th century witnessed incredible development’s in Scotland’s second oldest, but by far its wealthiest and most important colony – New Yorkshire. The division between New Yorkshire and the colony of ‘Nova Scotia’ to its North had been first established in the 16th century based upon the desire of the more awkward inhabitants for a greater degree of autonomy from European based absentee mercantile interests and something of this spirit of independence had never left it. In the centuries that followed New Yorkshire developed into a diverse coalition of individual colonies each governed in unique ways – in the North, where there existed a large base of free holding peasant farmers and great cities equal to those of Europe like Boston, New York and Philadelphia, governments involved an even greater degree of democratic participation than in Commonwealth era Britain – in the South the chattel slave owning aristocracy, with its vast plantations and personal wealth had a far tighter control over local colonial administration.
The colonies of New Yorkshire had long been united under a single administration controlled by a Governor appointed in Edinburgh. Yet gradually over the 17th and 18th centuries the individual local colonial governing bodies of New Yorkshire had secured an ever greater role in negotiating the appointment of that Governor and control over his regime. In 1760, following the appointing of a highly unpopular Governor by Adam Graham’s government in Edinburgh, a delegation of New Yorkshire representatives was sent to mainland Britain with a list of demands for political reform. With the threat of military conflict breaking out in North America over the question of New Yorkshire’s autonomy, the British government reached an incredible deal with the colonials.
New Yorkshire was granted to right to form its own Assembly for the entire colony, and this Assembly was invested with the right to appoint the colony’s governor. At a time when the British state had sought centralisation in Europe, it had allowed it’s most important American colony an almost unthinkable level of autonomy. Adam Graham and his government had believed it a price worth paying for preserving the Scottish colonial Empire from the horrors of Civil War, a horror Graham himself was intimately acquainted with. The peoples of New Yorkshire had taken another momentous step towards forging a North American identity quite distinct from the Scottish, and now British, Empire that had given birth to their nation.
In metropolitan Britain, Adam Graham’s most significant legacy was his redefinition of the role of the Commonwealth’s Head of State. From the Revolution the Steward had acted as both Head of State and of Government. There had been a powerful line of political thinking that saw the investiture of a single individual with such powerful as a grave threat to the ‘ancient Liberties’ of the Scottish people. Indeed, some theorists had described the role of Steward as that of a ‘democratic dictator’ – a figure with all the powers of a tyrant who, should the position ever fall to an enemy of Scottish Liberty, could destroy Parliamentary power in an instant and reduce the Britons to slavery.
Adam Graham’s innovation was not borne out of any political genius or farsightedness, but from the vagaries of old age. By 1760 Adam Graham, having dominated British politics for 15 years, was already 66. From the end of the 1750s he had gradually started to devolve more of the Steward’s traditional powers as a means of coping with governance, but in 1763 he would do something quite extraordinary. He appointed a ‘Prime Minister’. This Prime Minister would take over all the roles of a Head of Government, running the government and relying upon the confidence of the legislature for his power, whilst Adam Graham retired to the more ceremonial position of Head of State – effectively he had become a constitutional monarch without a crown.
Left to Right: William Morton (Moderate Tory) 1763-1766, Murdoch MacCain (Whig) 1766-1771 and 1774-1776 and Richard Howard (Tory) 1771-1774 and 1776-1789
The movement of the powerful figure of the Steward away from the grubby world of frontline politics contributed towards Britain beginning to shift away from the era of immovable cross bench consensus based Parliamentarianism. Graham’s first Prime Minister, William Morton, attempted to govern from the centre with both Moderate Tories and Whigs, as had been the norm since 1734, but suffered an electoral defeat to the confidently Whiggish figure of Murdoch McCain in 1766. MacCain’s policies, notably more radical than those employed during the years of centrist dominance in the middle of the century, would eventually alienate enough people to facilitate the swing back to power of the Tories in 1771 under Prime Minister Richard Howard who in turn only lasted three years before MacCain returned to government. MacCain’s second term was even shorter lived than Howard’s first had been and in 1776 the Tories returned to government for a much lengthier period of time. Bi-partisan politics were becoming a force in the British Isles.
During this period the British economy and its society were continuing to transform. The agricultural revolution that had begun the 17th century was accelerating rapidly as new techniques and technologies saw yields rise rapidly. At the same time developments in manufacturing were seeing major developments in the Commonwealth’s nascent industrial sector – with particularly significant progress being made in mining. As a means of continuing this process evictions of the comparatively unproductive peasantry from the land upon which they had lived for time immemorial with unerring cold efficiency.
One of the key policies that had returned the Whigs to power under MacCain in 1766 had been the issue of the issue of the Commons. This was common land without a private owner, free to the entire community to use, and had existed across the British Isles since the Dark Ages. In the atmosphere of the mid to late 18th century, when across the country all land was being put to use and producing a degree of wealth previously unimaginable, the failure to develop this common land was regarded by some as near criminal. MacCain and the Whigs claimed that this land was in fact owned not by the community, but the state and promised to sell it off to private investors willing to develop it and continue the process of enriching the nation. Throughout MacCain’s first term the Whigs passed a series of ‘Inclosure Acts’ in which they seized vast tracks of the Commons and sold it on. This process was temporarily brought to an end when the Whigs fell out of power from 1771-1774 at a time of rural unrest, but continued thereafter with even Howard’s post 1777 Tory government continuing the process that they had previously been opposed to.
The mid to late 18th century marked the high point of the Scottish Enlightenment, one of the most incredible periods of cultural flourishing in all human history. During this period the venerable and ancient universities of St Andrews, Edinburgh, Glasgow and York became the greatest centres of learning in the world whilst Durham, Aberdeen and the English universities of Oxford and Cambridge were not far behind. Some have argued that 18th century Scotland gave birth to the modern world. The country produced great generations of poets, artists, authors, philosophers, musicians and scientists. It marked the effective invention of the dismal science of economics, of political economy, rationalism, secularism, empiricism and much else besides. This ‘Age of Reason’ would come to transform the conceptions of Western civilisation in a manner few had thought possible. Scotland was enjoying something akin to a Golden Age.
Across the English Channel, the Kingdom of France had adopted a notably different path of political development to the mighty British state. Whereas Britain had forged the greatest Parliamentary regime in Europe, most of the continent had seen a centralisation of power around the person of Absolute monarchs. France was the apogee of this trend and by the 1760s it possessed the large land army West of the Alps. Under the leadership of the militaristic Charles XI, this French state was eager to expand. The great King’s dream was to unify the ancient Frankish Empire of the Dark Ages, bringing Aquitaine, Brittany, Burgundy, the Netherlands and even Italy and the German lands under Parisian authority. In 1766 the French took the first important step towards this elaborate goal by launching an invasion of the Aquitaine, which was quickly responded to by the formation of a coalition of Germany, Lotharingia and Burgundy. Capable of raising impressively large armies in relation to its population, the French Kingdom crushed the coalition powers and moved Southwards to overwhelm most of the Aquitaine, a realm that had spent centuries largely on an equal footing with the French, and threatening to expand its borders in every direction.
After almost half a century of isolationism, the British were deeply concerned. Charles XI’s France appeared to be heading rapidly towards the domination of all of Western Europe. In an era when Edinburgh was once again taking an interest in the affairs of Europe, this situation could not be accepted. As French victories mounted, the Britain and the Netherlands, a state whose Protestantism, land border with France and great wealth left it uniquely vulnerable to the expansionist regime in Paris, agreed to a joint invasion of French ruled Flanders. The arrival of an army of some 40,000 red coats near Brugge in the Spring of 1768 marked the beginning of Britain’s in one the defining conflicts of the age, the 13 Years War.
The 13 Years War was a conflict ill-suited to the application of Britain’s naval power. Although the French could be made to suffer badly from a near totally blockade of its ports and incessant raiding against its coastline – France was predominantly a land power with comparatively little interest in overseas colonies. The French would have to be defeated on land.
In the years after 1768 Britain’s involvement on the continent increased ceaselessly. Troops were deployed to Southern Aquitaine to prevent the total collapse of the ancient Kingdom, to the East limited numbers shored up the Germans around the Rhine whilst in the South; Scottish gold coaxed a reluctant Italian realm into entering into the anti-French coalition. Despite all this, on the field of battle coalition forces were damningly unsuccessful.
By the early 1770s the French were pushing forward on every single battlefront, whilst in 1771 they extended the conflict to Brittany – invading the long independent Duchy. Only in Flanders were coalition forces even remotely successful as a number of key cities were captured by Dutch and British troops – the Royal Navy playing an invaluable role in these sieges.
Through the 1770s the war on the continent would loom large over domestic politics in Britain. With the French jangling the Jacobean baubles of the McKarling-Maud Pretender ‘James IV’, there was constant paranoia in Britain that a Catholic revolt in Ireland was inevitable. This fear led to armed occupation of the Emerald Isle and a number of limits placed on freedoms of press, speech and assembly across the Commonwealth – designed to destroy any potential Jacobite conspiracy in the cradle.
In Holyrood itself military failures intensified the political conflict between Whigs and Tories as each blamed the other for Britain’s failure to turn the course of the war around. When he had come to power in 1771, the Tory Prime Minister Richard Howard had promised to reinvigorate Britain’s war effort by raising more men to fight on the continent. When he was defeated at the election of 1774 by the Whigs, the French had overrun Wallonia, crossed the Rhine and relieved Flanders. Murdoch MacCain was in turn pressurised to resign as Prime Minister, leading to the calling of new elections which the Tories won in 1776, following the crushing defeat of a British, Dutch and German army at the Battle of Maastricht.
In the aftermath of Maastricht the Tories and Richard Howard were returned to government in Edinburgh. The treasury was empty, the state heavily indebted, the army exhausted and demoralised, domestic politics fractious and the respected Steward, Adam Graham past his 80th year. Worse, the war was appearing increasingly unwinnable.
Howard, like many Tories, was a believer in constitutional monarchy and saw the Stewardship as adapted by Adam Graham as embodying that political ideal. However, with the veteran Steward long into his dotage, the prospect of his successor returning to the older, more politically partisan, model of Stewardship was a major concern. In response to this the Prime Minister passed the Act of Succession in 1777 which transformed the Stewardship into a hereditary position to be held for life. The Act was rapidly popular amongst Tories and split Whiggish opinion between those who saw the elevation of the ‘political neutral’ Stewardship as a reaffirmation of Parliamentary power and those who damned Howard for surreptitiously crowning a new King.
In 1779 the Thirteen Years War was finally brought to an end by the Treaty of Lisbon. The result was an immense triumph for France and for Charles XI. France directly annexed most of Burgundy and Brittany as well as more than ½ of the Aquitaine. Moreover, the Netherlands, Lotharingia, Germany, Italy and the Aquitaine were all forced into agreements that allowed France to garrison troops within their borders whilst French-aligned regimes implanted in these countries during the war were left in place. Through military conquest the Kingdom of France an established an Empire across most of Western Europe.
Less than a year after the Treaty of Lisbon Adam Graham passed away in peace, he was 86 years old and had been Steward for 35 years. His successor was his already 61 year old son Duncan – the first Head of State who owed his succession to inheritance rather than direct Parliamentary support since 1709.
