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Parliamentary Legislation, Lobbying and the Press in Eighteenth-Century Scotland

Recent years have seen much attention devoted by historians to the legislative activities of the eighteenth-century parliament at Westminster.1 Because of this work, we now know much more about the strengths, as well as the weaknesses, of the unreformed parliamentary system. Parliament has been revealed as the central institution in what some historians, at least, have depicted as a ‘reactive’ state, one which was responsive to a surprisingly diverse range of interests and alliances.2 Annual parliamentary sessions after 1689, and the growing corpus of legislation, also gave rise to an expanding body of print concerned with legislation. Before the 1730s, this typically took the form of single-sheet printed cases, which were circulated to M.P.s and other interested parties by lobbyists.3 From the 1730s, these ‘cases’ were increasingly dropped in favour of a more extended representation of interests, usually in pamphlet form, and an extension of the lobby, again by means of print, beyond the ambit of Westminster.4 However, in describing this ‘reactive state’, and contemporary lobbying tactics, historians are vulnerable to the objection that what they are really describing was an English, not a British, state or political dispensation. The view from Scotland would seem to have been a different one. Scots after 1707 may have been very successful in colonizing areas of the British eighteenth-century fiscal-military state – through the army or the East India Company, or the venerable roll call of individuals who flourished in the interstices of this state – but many historians have argued that the record in relation to Westminster was very different. Put simply, Scots lacked the political leverage to be anything other than reactive in relation to