ABSTRACT
This chapter takes two obsessions of contemporary political debate – leadership and the union – and examines their interaction through three case studies of leading Scottish politicians. Each theme has been individually neglected within Scottish historiography (though there has, of course, been a very welcome resurgence of interest in the union and unionism in recent years). In general terms Scotland’s modern political past, certainly when one looks to the expansive historiographies of English and Irish politics, has been little researched even when ongoing debates about Scotland’s political future have witnessed an indiscriminate plundering of her history for examples, warnings and justifications. Each of the three case studies – Henry Dundas (1742–1811), Francis Jeffrey (1773–1850) and Archibald Primrose, fifth Earl of Rosebery (1847–1929) – engaged with the idea and practice of the union from very different leading positions within Scottish and (in the cases of Dundas and Rosebery) British and imperial politics. The chapter brings these two themes together with the aim of making conclusions about each of them: about the challenges, opportunities and constraints operating on political leadership in nineteenth-century Scotland; and about the intellectual, rhetorical and practical approaches to union by prominent Scottish politicians.
