Allan Ramsay. [A biography.] - National Library of Scotland

ALLAN RAMSAY 29
Wallace and Bruce to those of the exiled and discredited
Stuarts, was not to be crushed out by a band of political
wirepullers, by whom State peculation was reduced to an
art and parliamentary corruption to a science.
Although the ultimate effects of the Union between
England and Scotland were in the highest degree bene-
ficial upon the arts, the commerce, and the literature of
the latter, the proximate results were disastrous in the
extreme ; yet the step was imperative. So strained had
become the relations between the two countries, con-
sequent on the jealousy of English merchants and
English politicians, that only two alternatives were pos-
sible—war, or the corporate union of the whole island.
Yet in Scotland the very mention of Union was sufficient
to drive the people into a paroxysm of rage. The
religious animosity between the two countries was as
important a factor in producing this feeling as any other.
English churchmen boasted that with any such Union
would come the restorati-on of Episcopacy north of the
Tweed, and the abolition of the Church of Scotland.
The latter retaliated by pushing an Act of Security
through the Scottish Legislature, which demanded an
oath to support the Presbyterian Church in its integrity
from every sovereign on his accession. The Scottish
Whigs and the Scottish Jacobites, despite political differ-
ences wide as the poles, joined hands in resistance to
what they considered the funeral obsequies of Scottish
nationality. For a time the horizon looked so lowering
that preparations actually were begun in Scotland to
accumulate munitions of war.
But the genius, the patience, and withal the firmness,
of Lord Somers, the great Whig Richelieu of his time,