In Search of Scotland

Guest post written by Hugh Ouston, author of The Advancement of Learning in Stuart Scotland, 1679-89

Growing up in Scotland in the 1960s, it was the doctors, lawyers and academics whose opinions I was habituated to respect. This was because, from 1707 to 1997, in the absence of a national political cockpit, the society of Scotland was dominated (discreetly) by the professions. 

Industrialists and landowners had more economic power, and political initiative surged from the urban and rural populations of their fiefdoms, but social aspiration flowed towards the learned professions. It seemed that the stability and predictability of Scottish life was at once stifling and stimulating. It was from this professional dominance – and perhaps its political torpor – that Scotland was able to take a leading role, for three centuries, in the evolution of intellectual debates about how people could derive health, wealth and happiness from their material and social circumstances.

Such distinctive interests can be first discerned in the 1680s. The equestrian statue of Charles II, which still dominates Parliament Square in Edinburgh, praises his repression of the ‘recrudescent basilisk’ of rebellion. Echoing this ideology of continuity and order following the chaos of the Civil War, and encouraged by Stuart patronage, the “Virtuosi”, Scottish writers and thinkers, sought to define Scotland’s identity. They undertook structured, empirical enquiry into Scottish natural history and geography, human history and antiquities, law and society. Writers engaged in debates on Scottish culture, history and identity. Written and material historical evidence was discussed, with a conscious reflection on the changing nature of truth in contemporary discourse. Empirical information was sought and collected on geography, society and natural history, and individuals and groups discussed natural science with a sense of being part of a scientific community. University Theses indicated an interest in new philosophical ideas and writers from England and Europe. Books were printed, in Scotland or by Scots authors, covering, among others, forensic, geographical, historical, horticultural, legal, mathematical, philosophical, and scientific subjects.

It was this activity which suggested a destination for my own research journey, when I resumed it in 2014.  However, as always in historical research, I also discovered a different and related path, which led me to a better understanding of the Scotland in which I grew up. In the 1680s, the development of these distinctive Scottish habits of enquiry were dependent on the emergence of the professions of medicine and law, to rival and interact with those of the church and universities. In doing so, they provided a template which came to offer both status and purpose to all of these professions, and empowered them to dominate a Scotland abandoned, after 1707, by its political class.

The political search for order, then, shaped not only the philosophical ‘advancement of learning’, but also the creation of professional institutions. These included the Royal College of Physicians, its library, the Physic Garden, and medical professorships. The Faculty of Advocates inaugurated its library as a national as well as a professional resource. Two versions of the Institutions of the law of Scotland were published, along with collections of statutes and decisions. Specialist professorships were patronised. The posts of Geographer Royal and Historiographer Royal were established. Charters were drawn up for both the University and City of Edinburgh, recognising its identity as a locus for professional and learned activity.

There followed the old school pupil questions of how and why. How did the professions come to lead Scottish intellectual intercourse when the Parliament was removed in 1707? Why were they interested in the material world and how it could be classified, understood and manipulated for medicine, money and science? How did a critical mass of educated and reflective writers emerge? Why were the conversations of learned societies about society itself? How, to use the terms contemporaries borrowed from Francis Bacon, had learning ‘advanced’ to this state?

The answers to the how and the why are, as always in history, folded in together. The social rise of the professions in the late seventeenth century was – and again this is familiar territory today – inseparable from their self-definition, their appropriation and development of an exclusive expertise: the security of health, property or soul. However, from the start, this involved a wider commitment to learned enquiry, which derived from the ‘liberal education’ by which they distinguished themselves. So a lawyer should be a historian, a doctor a botanist, a minister a chorographer, and all of them committed to learning how the human and natural worlds in general, and in Scotland in particular, were arranged.

The decade saw a more concentrated development of Scotland’s intellectual conversation than almost any since, a development whose ideas influenced the eighteenth-century ‘enlightenment’, and whose institutions continue to facilitate learned discourse in Scotland today. In summary, there is in the 1680s a key to understanding how Scotland operates and the nature of its learned preoccupations. I had found, by accident, the origin of the social geography of my childhood. 

HUGH OUSTON has taught history in schools in Lothian, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Perthshire. His interest in late seventeenth century Scotland began with postgraduate research in the 1970s and he completed a D. Phil. in 2020.

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