ABSTRACT
English constitutional practices had, as discussed, acquired, by European standards of the late seventeenth century, some unusual characteristics. Not only was there, by those standards, a high degree of national self-consciousness, 1 but its monarchy was chosen and constrained. It had combined the qualities of a war machine like the Absolutisms of mainland Europe, but much more efficiently, with commercial acuity and a liberty of personal freedom and the protection of property comparable with the United Provinces. England had two attractions for the Scots. Lowland Scots were, naturally, convinced of the superiority of their law, their educational organization and their Kirk. But they saw a country to their south many times larger, flourishing commercially in a way that Scotland was not. There was also, I believe, a Presbyterian perspective. Presbyterian teaching, since Buchanan, James VI/I’s sometime tutor, was, for the time, remarkably egalitarian, politically, despite its authoritarian theological dimension. All men and women should be literate and all tyrants should be resisted. England had, Scots thought, stumbled on the practice of liberty, but may not, through their obsession with commerce’s more philistine dimensions, have the wit to avoid stumbling into something less savory than education, literacy and civility.
