‘Lord have mercy on my poor country that is so barbarously oppressed.’ His last words, almost certainly anecdotal, place Andrew Fletcher among the tragic heroes of the Scottish national pantheon. The oppression was meant to originate from a redefined British Union, which absorbed Scotland into a constitutional framework shared with England – an outcome Fletcher tried and failed to prevent. Capturing the essence of his life in relation to the lost cause he represented feeds well into a proverbial tradition of Scottish defeatism, but it must be acknowledged that Fletcher consistently refused to accept the circumstances facing his native country.

Union with England turned out to be the most consequential subject debated in the Scots parliament that assembled in 1703, following Queen Anne’s accession. Deepening the constitutional ties with England at the expense of Scotland’s sovereignty had many opponents in the chamber; few were as vocal as Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun (1653-1716), the member for Haddingtonshire. Fletcher would have rather seen the regal union between the two kingdoms dissolved than condone Scotland’s further submersion into a polity dominated by English interests. He cautioned against the expectation that political independence might be exchanged for economic benefits, reminding his audience that ‘Wales, the only country that ever had united with England… after three or four hundred years, is still the only place of that kingdom, which has no considerable commerce.’

This was a straightforward approach, one that Fletcher is rightly remembered for. Yet he did not advocate for it back in January 1689, when he had warned that Scotland ‘can never come to any true settlement but by uniting with England in Parliaments and Trade’. This apparent inconsistency can be explained, however, by an examination of Fletcher’s consistent commitment to Scotland’s prosperity.

The best way ahead for Scotland was a prominent subject of public debate following the restoration of the Stuart monarchy and its dissolution of the Cromwellian union that was imposed on England, Scotland, and Ireland. Although Scotland had shared a monarch with England since 1603 and was entangled in the web of English politics, interests, markets and colonial exchanges, by the 1680s the English Navigation Acts made it increasingly difficult for Scottish merchants to take part in transatlantic trade, considered by many – including Fletcher – to be the key to national prosperity. The religious policies of the Stuart monarchy added further incentive to colonisation as an escape route from the constraints imposed on Scotland. The resulting trading schemes – the Carolina Company in the 1680s and the Darien Company in the 1690s – ended disastrously, underlining the tensions between the protective umbrella of the British composite monarchy and the interests of its richer, more powerful, and more populous kingdom of England. Starting in 1695, failed harvests plunged Scotland into famine and poverty for years. Scotland arrived at a crossroads. The state was entangled in a set of constitutional, geopolitical, and commercial dilemmas.

Fletcher’s engagement with these dilemmas was, to an extent, conditioned by his family background and upbringing. He was born in or around 1653 into a Scottish noble family that was neither the richest, nor the most prestigious in the kingdom, although his mother’s family claimed descent from Robert the Bruce. The Fletchers were not left untouched by the troubles of the mid-17th century. Andrew’s paternal grandfather was a judge on the court of session with the title of Lord Innerpeffer, and a member of parliament in the 1640s. As an ‘engager’ – a faction of Scottish Protestants who would have joined forces with the English Royalists and restored Charles I to his throne in exchange for the establishment of Presbyterianism in England for a period of three years – his grandfather was simultaneously committed to a more bottom-up, Presbyterian approach to the organisation of society as well as top-down social experimentation. This was a duality that would find an echo in Andrew’s own work, and paying a price for such commitments turned out to be another shared thread in the lives of grandfather and grandson. The loss of office and heavy fines incurred by Lord Innerpeffer forced his son Robert – Andrew’s father – to sell part of the family estates to pay the debt. The Saltoun estate, brought into the family’s possession by the grandfather, was spared. Andrew was most probably born there.

Before his premature death in 1665 – Andrew was about 12 then – Robert Saltoun entrusted his son’s education to Gilbert Burnet, a Scottish philosopher and historian, whose antagonism to James VII and II’s policies would later orient him toward William and Mary’s service and ultimately secure his appointment as Bishop of Salisbury after the triumph of the Glorious Revolution. It is difficult to quantify Burnet’s influence on his pupil, but the pair certainly shared an appreciation for George Buchanan’s work. Fletcher owned 21 books by ‘the great historian’, whose constitutional theories show an affinity with his own approach to limited monarchy. His private library contained about 6,000 volumes, possibly constituting the second largest collection of books in Britain at the time, after that of the English jurist John Selden. The bulk of Fletcher’s collection was published before 1675, some dating back to the 15th century, but he owned over 1,000 books published from 1675 onwards.

Apart from English, Fletcher read French, Spanish and Italian, as well as Latin and Greek (the latter with less proficiency). His correspondence with the mathematician John Wallis or the mathematician-astronomer David Gregory reveals an avid interest in the knowledge of the ancients. Apart from religion in ancient Egypt, Fletcher would discuss contemporary politics with John Locke, whose works also found their way to his library. Several works of Hungarian interest, on the liberation of Buda and the rebel prince Thököly, suggest that Fletcher kept up with international politics.

Remarkably, one of Fletcher’s contemporaries who would develop a keen interest in the Habsburg’s Central European reconquista was none other than James VII and II, though they would never be able to bond over the news from the Hungarian campaigns of the 1680s, as Fletcher had antagonised the future monarch well before the Turks could attempt one last siege of Vienna. By the time James, as Duke of York, arrived in Edinburgh in 1681 as his brother Charles II’s High Commissioner to summon the Scottish parliament, Fletcher, a commissioner in the Convention of the Estates of 1678, had already taken issue with the government’s plans to maintain a standing army in Scotland at the expense of landed proprietors and had sworn to protect the king rather than the country.

In 1680, Fletcher and two of his fellow gentlemen from Haddingtonshire, Robert Sinclair of Stevenson and Archibald Murray of Blackbarony, were arraigned before the Scottish Privy Council for obstructing these plans. Let off with a rebuke, Fletcher was back, a member of parliament this time, trying to frustrate the Duke of York’s recognition as heir apparent to the Crown of Scotland – despite being a Roman Catholic, a feature Fletcher and many of his contemporaries would associate with arbitrary rule and foreign (Catholic) interests. Fletcher failed, but his meddling in the process earned him James’ implacable enmity. In 1682, the Privy Council accused him again of obstructing the provisioning of troops quartered in his county. This time, he took no chances, and left Scotland, first for London, then the Netherlands. He was formally accused of treason two years later.

James’ accession in 1685 provided Fletcher with another opportunity to become a thorn in his side and actively protest what he considered abusive practices of government, when the Duke of Monmouth returned to England from his Dutch exile to lead an uprising against the king. Fletcher, initially advising against the expedition, joined the duke’s cavalry in England. The rebellion was unsuccessful, but Fletcher had to abandon it even before the decisive battle of Sedgemoor: somewhat ironically, he got into an altercation after requisitioning a horse, shooting and killing the horse’s owner in the heat of the quarrel. Monmouth advised him to leave England, so he boarded a ship to Bilbao. He was imprisoned upon arrival, awaiting extradition, but somehow, perhaps thanks to a mysterious benefactor, he escaped, and travelled incognito in Spain and Europe. He was even reputed to have joined the anti-Ottoman campaign in Hungary.

This last anecdote has less to do with reality than with him being perceived as a freedom fighter, as it is unlikely that Fletcher would have taken up arms on behalf of the Habsburg emperor. From what is known about his travels, he would have had very little time to do so in any case: the funds sent to him through Amsterdam and Rotterdam were used for payments in Geneva, Leipzig, and Kleve. By 1687, he was back in the Netherlands, until another opportunity presented itself for his return to Britain in the form of the invasion led by William of Orange.

This time, crossing the Channel to England led to a favourable outcome for Fletcher’s side. In December 1688, King James fled to France; the English Parliament resolved the ensuing constitutional crisis by declaring the throne vacant and offering it to James’ daughter Mary and her husband William as joint monarchs. Fletcher appears to have been quite optimistic about the opportunities for Parliament to impose the kinds of limitations on the new monarchs – chiefly William – that aligned with his approach, which explains the favourable view on a union of parliaments and trade between England and Scotland that he expressed in early 1689, especially as the Scots parliament followed the English in dethroning James, asserting its right to regular assembly, uncensored debate, and financial oversight, and rejecting the absolute power of the king.

The success of the Glorious Revolution also allowed Fletcher to return to Scotland and reclaim his estates, confiscated in 1686 when he was convicted for treason in absentia. As a further promising development, King William gave his assent in 1695 to a bill establishing the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies, providing it with generous monopolies and privileges to boost its competitiveness. The project was very close to Fletcher’s heart, who saw Scotland’s participation in global commerce as the key to its overall prosperity. Fletcher would not only promote the Company of Scotland as ‘that affair which presses most, and in which the nation is so universally concerned’; he also invested the huge sum of £1,000 in the company, becoming one of its biggest shareholders.

Fletcher had little time to enjoy the contentment brought by the welcome constitutional arrangements and his public rehabilitation. William’s government soon gave him cause for resentment. The Glencoe Massacre of 1692 was a bad augury for the regime’s handling of Scottish affairs. The suspicion that Scotland would always be of secondary importance to William was fully confirmed when the king declared that he was ‘ill served’ in the matter of the Scottish trading company and did not lift a finger when the English Parliament made it impossible for the fledgling enterprise to raise capital in London. The necessary funds were still subscribed in Scotland, sucking all the liquid wealth out of the northern kingdom only for the venture to end in abysmal catastrophe – in part because the king (i.e. England) refused to assist the colonists in any respect that Spain, an important ally in the Nine Years War, could make objections to. The interests of William III of England trumped the interests of William II of Scotland. When the king hesitated to disband his armies after the Peace of Ryswick, Fletcher was back in the saddle calling out the power grab. This time, instead of involving himself in a rebellion or a coup, he added his voice to the growing criticism of the government in England and published A Discourse concerning Militias and Standing Armies in 1697. The following year, he republished a version of the Discourse better tailored to a Scottish audience in Edinburgh.

Pamphlets remained Fletcher’s favoured form of public engagement for the rest of his political career. They allowed him to engage with all the issues of importance facing Scotland, from questions of defence and the oversight of the exercise of military power, through entering the global competition for markets, to the impact of the European geopolitical situation. The printing press also served him well upon his return to Parliament in 1703, especially as, in his own assessment, he was not a great orator. Always a sharp analyst, he would occasionally grab his readers’ attention rather violently, with outlandish or even dystopian proposals, such as the introduction of slavery in Scotland to help the poorest of the population through the years of famine or breaking up Britain and Europe into units of equal weight to ensure peace, stability, and, most importantly, prevent any part of Britain or any state in Europe from amassing an unhealthy concentration of power.

In his final works, published in 1703-04, Fletcher’s focus turned to the matter of union with England, elevated to the top of the political agenda by the complications of Queen Anne’s succession. By then, Fletcher was categorically opposed to incorporating union on the basis that only the strengthening of Scotland’s own constitutional system could provide it with the necessary leverage within the British monarchy. Failing that, Scotland would be better off on its own, severing the line of succession it had shared with England since 1603, and, for want of a better option, recalling the exiled Stuarts to the throne and imposing a set of strict limitations on them to make sure parliament would retain the upper hand. He saw no guarantees that a union with England would bring long-term economic benefits; an argument that, in the end, was defeated by rather short-term economic benefits in the shape of generous courtly patronage to members of parliament and a full compensation to the shareholders of the Scottish trading company on their lost investment.

As the Scottish parliament voted itself out of existence and the Kingdom of Great Britain was born in 1707, Fletcher’s time in frontline politics came to an end. His name surfaced again in 1708, when he was briefly imprisoned in Stirling Castle on the unfounded allegation that he was party to a Jacobite plot, and in 1713, when the dissolution of the Union gained an ephemeral momentum in the House of Lords. The conclusion of Fletcher’s story – he died in London in 1716, too ill to travel to Scotland – might conjure the image of an embittered quasi-exile, who had heroically fought for a lost cause. But Fletcher was much more than that. He was an educated laird and an adventurer, a respected parliamentarian and a convicted traitor, a political pamphleteer and a dutiful soldier, a moralist and a possible road-rage killer. Holding together all these personae was the kind of patriotism that is neither tribal, nor self-absolving, and the principle that unchecked power always does more harm than good. In times like ours, remembering personalities like Fletcher might have a valuable lesson for us all, and who knows, it might also help overcome what Scotland’s longest-serving first minister called a ‘chronic lack of national confidence’.