The Winter Sea (Slains, #1)(58)
Stuart raised his hand. ‘Am I allowed another drink?’
‘Aye.’ Graham smiled, and took another swig of whisky while his brother briefly left the room, returning with a full glass and a question for their father.
‘Should the oven still be on?’
‘Ach, na.’ And rising, Jimmy left the room with urgency.
As Stuart took his seat again, he said to me, ‘He’s never met a roast he hasn’t burned past recognition.’
Graham shared the joke and shrugged. ‘We eat them, all the same.’
‘I’m only warning her,’ said Stuart. ‘Anyhow, where were we? I was asking, I believe, about the Union, and so far you haven’t mentioned it.’ To me, as an aside, ‘These academics always ramble on.’
‘So, with King William on the throne,’ said Graham, patiently recapping, ‘we’ve got Scotland in a muddle, and enjoying one long chain of rotten luck. Towards the last years of the century, the harvests are so poor that people starve to death in droves, while English laws and tariffs choke out Scottish trade and navigation. And when a Scottish company scrapes up enough investment for a colony at Darien, in Panama, to take a bit of trade away from England’s East India Company, the English slam it hard by cutting off supplies and aid that might have helped the colonists survive. When Darien fails, the investors lose everything. Scotland is not only broke, but in debt, and we have nothing left to sell,’ he said, ‘except our independence.
‘William’s a widower now, but still fighting with France. He doesn’t want to die and leave the French king any cards to play with, and so long as Scotland is a separate country, there will always be the threat that King James Stewart or his son, young James, might, with the backing of the French, return and cause the English trouble. It makes sense, in William’s mind, that since the thrones of England and of Scotland had been joined some hundred years before, that now the parliaments should join as well, and make one single country of Great Britain.’
‘Ah,’ said Stuart, beginning to comprehend.
‘And when William dies, he passes on this policy of Union to Queen Anne, his wife’s sister and the second daughter of the old King James. Anne’s a little nicer than her sister. She at least admits in private that young James is her half-brother, and it’s widely hoped that, since she has no living children of her own, she’ll name him as her heir. But her advisors have their own agenda, and they quickly see to it she chooses as her heir another relative, from the German House of Hanover.
‘The Scottish parliament replies it won’t accept the Hanoverian succession unless Scotland has the freedom to opt out of foreign policies that go against our interests, like the war Queen Anne’s still waging with the Spanish and the French.’
‘And I’m guessing,’ Stuart ventured, ‘that the English didn’t go for that.’
‘They hit us,’ Graham said, ‘with the Alien Act, which said in effect that unless we Scots came to the table to talk about a Union, every Scot who lived in England would be treated as an alien, and all estates in England owned by Scots would be repatriated, and our exports banned.’
‘We had no choice, then,’ Stuart said.
His brother looked at him. ‘There is always a choice. But Scotland’s nobles, as ever, were rich on both sides of the border, and few of them wanted to risk their own fortunes, so in the end, they sat down at the table. And our friend the Duke of Hamilton proposed that the selection of commissioners to talk about the Union should be left up to Queen Anne herself. He put it to a snap vote in the parliament when the opposition weren’t all in their seats, and so it passed by a few votes, and that meant virtually all the commissioners were pro-Union. That,’ Graham said, ‘was just one of the small, sneaky things that he did.’
‘So the Union went through.’
Graham grinned. ‘Did ye not go to school?’
‘Well, we have our own parliament, now.’
‘Aye, but that’s only recent. Christ, Stuie, you’re not that young, surely, that you can’t remember the whole campaign around the country for home rule? The Scottish National Party? Everybody marching in the streets?’ When Stuart looked back at him blankly, Graham shook his head. ‘You are a lost cause, aren’t you?’
Shrugging, Stuart took it in good part, and told his brother, ‘I was likely overseas, when all of that was going on.’
‘More likely sitting in the pub.’
‘It’s possible,’ said Stuart. ‘Does it really matter?’
‘Not unless your children ask you where you were the day our parliament re-opened after nearly three full centuries without one.’
I was privately inclined to think it wouldn’t be a problem. Stuart Keith was not the kind of man who married and had children. With him, life was all great fun and play, and staying with one woman while she aged, or sitting up with crying babies, simply wasn’t in his cards.
It had been interesting to sit here in my chair and watch the two of them while Graham gave his history lesson— both men with their different personalities, yet brothers through and through. Beneath the banter ran a deeper vein of genuine affection and respect, and it was clear they truly liked each other.
Jimmy, when he came back in to tell us lunch was ready, made the triangle complete, and from the way the three men interacted, I could tell that this had always been a happy home.