Arrest of Fletcher—His Release—The Jacobite Prisoners of 1708—Death of Belhaven—Fletcher retires into Private Life—Conversations with Wodrow—His Death—Views of his Character.

It is possible that Fletcher did not ride further than Saltoun; but if he did leave Scotland as soon as the Union was accomplished, he was back again in the spring of the following year. At that time the country was alarmed by the fleet which was fitted out at Dunkirk by the French, and which sailed, with the Chevalier de St. George on board, for the shores of Scotland. The Habeas Corpus Act was suspended; and the Privy Council ordered the arrest of a number of suspected persons, among whom were the Duke of Gordon, the Marquis of Huntly, and no less than twenty other peers of Scotland. One of these was Belhaven. Many commoners, too, were taken up, such as Stirling of Keir, Cameron of Lochiel, Moray of Abercairney, Edmonstone of Newton, and other notorious Jacobites. But, strange to say, Fletcher was also arrested; on what grounds it is difficult to surmise, for it seems impossible to imagine that he could have been suspected of plotting for the return of the Stuarts.

Fletcher took his arrest very quietly. ‘All I fear,’ he wrote to Leven, ‘is that so inconsiderable a man as I may be forgot, and no further orders given about me.’ His indifference was justified; for on the 15th of April 1708 the Privy Council issued a warrant directing Leven to send all the prisoners up to London, ‘Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, Esq., only excepted.’ After this Fletcher disappears from public life; and Belhaven too, but in a sadder fashion. A few lines may be spared to say farewell to Saltoun’s old companion of the Country Party. Belhaven went almost mad with rage. As soon as he heard that a warrant was out for his arrest, he wrote an impetuous remonstrance to Leven, which he read aloud at a coffee-house before sending it off. After he was apprehended he addressed a letter to the Queen, demanding his release, ‘without bail, parole of honour, or any other suspicious engagement.’ Then we find him despatching a long letter to Leven, protesting his innocence, and begging to be set at liberty. He is like a caged lion. He cannot rest. ‘My good name is attacked,’ he declares; ‘I am called unfaithful to my God, and treacherous to my Queen. I must throw my stones about, I must cry and spare not.’ A few days later, he writes a most pathetic letter. ‘My wife,’ he begins, ‘who hath been my bedfellow those thirty and four years, takes it much to heart to be separated from me now.’ And then he asks authority for ‘my dear old wife to be enclosed as a prisoner in the same manner with me in everything.’ Another of his arguments is that he has work awaiting him at home at Biel; eight ploughs going, and a little lake to drain, and turn into meadowland. But he was never to see his home again. The prisoners were sent up to London; and there the eloquent Belhaven died of brain-fever, or, as some say, of a broken heart.[20]

Henceforth Fletcher’s life was that of a private ‘person of quality.’ He never married. When asked the reason why, he used to answer, ‘My brother has got the woman that should have been my wife.’ This was Margaret Carnegie, the eldest daughter of Sir David Carnegie of Pittarrow. Perhaps Andrew Fletcher did not attract her—‘the low, thin man of brown complexion, full of fire, with a stern, sour look,’ to quote the well-known description of the Laird of Saltoun. At all events she fell in love with Henry, the younger brother, who, besides, had this in his favour, that Andrew was an outlaw in Holland while he was paying his court to the young lady. Her father was at first against the marriage; but the young people insisted on having their own way, and they were married on the 27th of April 1688.[21] The couple were very poor, and Henry became tenant of the mill at Saltoun, after the estate had been restored to his brother. Mrs. Henry Fletcher was a woman of great capacity, and it was she who, acting probably on hints given by her brother-in-law, got machinery from Holland, introduced the Dutch system of making ‘pot barley,’ till then unknown in Scotland, imported a winnowing machine, or fanners, and, in short, was the founder of the Saltoun Barley Mill, which was a household word in Scotland for many years. ‘So jealous,’ says Sir William Fraser, ‘was Lady Saltoun of the secret of the construction of her machinery, and so anxious was she to retain a monopoly of this particular trade, that, whilst she occupied, during the day, a room in the mill specially fitted up for herself, all orders for barley were received across a door which was securely fastened by a chain to prevent strangers from entering.’

This clever Scottish lady of the old school also started the manufacture of Holland cloth on a wide field near the mill; and in a hollow near Saltoun Hall the British Linen Company worked for many years, until they changed their business into that of a banking company. Perhaps a dame of so very practical a turn would not have sympathised with the Utopian dreams of her famous brother-in-law, and had chosen wisely. The walls of a new mill which was erected at Saltoun in 1710 are still as strong as when they were built; and some fragments of the old machinery still remain.

During the latter part of his life Fletcher lived chiefly in England or abroad. Wodrow has preserved an account of some conversations which he had with him. On one occasion Fletcher told him that ‘he used to say to Sunderland, Wharton, and the leading Whigs in England, that they were the greatest fools imaginable in three things, and acted directly contrary to their interest: 1st, In the settling of the Succession upon Hanover, he remarked that the Lutherans, and still the nearer people goes to Popery, they are still the more for absolute government; and so much the more for a Tory. 2nd, In promoting and violently pushing the Union with Scotland, which now they are sensible is an addition to the power of the Court, and makes the Prince by far more absolute than before; and 3rd, In the affair of Sacheverell, when he (Fletcher) was in London, and conversed with them at that time, their pushing of his trial was the most unpopular thing they could do, and raised the cry of the “Danger of the Church,” and proposed nothing in the world to themselves by such a prosecution. Things were openly vented upon the behalf of absolute Government and non-resistance; and the event has sadly verified all his thoughts as to this.’[22]

On another occasion Fletcher expounded his ideas on the subject of church patronage. He said a Presbytery was no judge of a young man’s fitness to be minister of a congregation, and he had a plan of his own ready. He would appoint six Professors of Divinity in each University, none of whom were to teach more than ten or twelve students; for they could not know more than that number intimately. These Professors were not only to lecture, but to watch the temper and character of each student, and license him when he was really capable of being a minister. Then, when a vacancy occurred, the Presbytery was to ask the Professor to send down a man whom they thought suited to the parish which was vacant. If the people did not like the man who was sent, another was to come; and so on until the congregation was satisfied.

Wodrow asked Fletcher if he had not thought of writing a History of the Union; but he replied that he had kept no notes of the proceedings, and his memory was not to be relied on. He lamented his bad memory, and said he used to write out all his speeches, and repeat them, over and over again, to himself, like a schoolboy learning his lessons. He also said that he had so little readiness in debate, that if he did not know what subject was to be brought forward, he was obliged to prepare several speeches, which he laboriously learned by heart.

In 1716 Fletcher was in Paris, where he took ill. His nephew Andrew, afterwards a judge of the Court of Session under the title of Lord Milton, who was then studying at Leyden, hearing that his uncle wished to return home, hurried to Paris. They reached London, but the old gentleman was unable to go further. Lord Sunderland called on him, and asked if there was anything he wished done. ‘I have a nephew,’ he replied, ‘who has been studying the law. Make him a judge when he is fit for it.’[23]

On the 15th of September 1716 he died; and his nephew brought his body to Scotland in a leaden coffin, which was laid in the family vault under the parish church of Saltoun, where it still remains.

A scrap of paper among the manuscripts in the Bodleian Library at Oxford bears this curious memorandum, in the handwriting of Thomas Rawlinson, the great antiquary and book collector: ‘Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, dyed in London, on Sunday, September 16th 1716, of a flux contracted by drinking ye waters of the River Seine at Paris. He died Christianly and bravely, only concerned for ye ruin of his country, and yt he had been base enough to have kissed the hand of ye insulting Tyrant.’[24]

He was succeeded, in the estate of Saltoun, by his brother Henry, and afterwards by his nephew, Andrew Fletcher of Milton, who, as Lord Justice-Clerk, was, for many years, the Duke of Argyll’s right-hand man in the management of Scottish affairs. Many of the books collected by Fletcher are still preserved at Saltoun Hall, where there is a tablet with this inscription, ‘This Library was builta.d. 1775, by Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, to contain that excellent collection of books made by his great uncle of Illustrious Memory, whose name he bore. Lieutenant-General Henry Fletcher of Saltoun inscribes this marble to the memory of his lamented brother, and desires to remind their common successors that the Love of Letters or of Arms has always distinguished the family of Saltoun.’

Fletcher occupies a peculiar place in the history of Scottish Literature. His works were produced during a period of about six years, from 1698 to 1704, and at that time Learning had sunk to a very low point in Scotland. Sir George M’Kenzie stands out almost, if not entirely, alone as a man of Letters during the closing years of the seventeenth century; but his style is turgid, and wholly wanting in that quality of simplicity which is to be found in everything written by Fletcher. Burnet’s chief works, with the exception of the History of His Own Times, which was not published until after his death, appeared before the end of the century; but though a Scotsman, he can hardly be placed in the catalogue of purely Scottish writers. Pamphlets and sermons there were in abundance, many of them composed with great skill, and most of them invaluable from the light which they throw on the controversies of that time; but in point of style Fletcher is unique. He had no models. If he had written ten or fifteen years later, it might have been supposed that he had imitated Addison; for, especially in the Account of a Conversation, the style of Fletcher resembles the style of Addison. But he had ceased to write long before the Spectator appeared. To Burnet he doubtless owed a sound classical education, and a knowledge of political history. The clearness and elegance of his style, however, were certainly not learned from Burnet, but were evidently the result of studying, very closely, the literature of Greece and Rome, from which he loves to draw illustrations for the purpose of enforcing his own theories of government, and his peculiar political schemes.

The political schemes of Fletcher may have been visionary, but that he honestly believed in them is evident. The Utopias which he loved to imagine may have been wild dreams, but there was always something noble in the ideals which he set up. His faults were those of a man of ardent temper. I have not attempted to conceal them, and the men of his own day, even those who most widely disagreed with him in his views on public questions, seem all to admire him, with only one or two exceptions. One of these exceptions is Swift, whose description of him is: ‘A most arrogant, conceited pedant in politics; cannot endure any contradiction in any of his views or paradoxes.’ But a Scotsman was to Swift like a red rag to a bull. Oldmixon, too, who knew Fletcher, says, and certainly with some truth, that he was ‘hot, positive, obstinate, opinionative.’ Nor does Sir John Clerk of Pennycuik seem to have fully appreciated Fletcher. ‘He was,’ he says, ‘a little untoward in his temper, and much inclined to eloquence. He made many speeches in Parliament, which are all printed, but was not very dexterous in making extemporary replies. He was, however, a very honest man, and meant well in everything he said and did, except in cases where his humour, passion, or prejudice were suffered to get the better of his reason.’ On another occasion he speaks of him as a ‘worthy man’; but that excellent placeman, Sir John Clerk, patting Fletcher of Saltoun on the back, is the tame pigeon patronising the eagle.

But, as against the hostile opinions of Swift and Oldmixon, and the lukewarm verdict of Sir John Clerk, it would be easy to fill page after page of unstinted praise from the writings of men who either knew him, or had good opportunities for observing his conduct. Of these I shall quote only two. In Mackay’s well-known Characters of the Nobility of Scotland, which are said to have been compiled for the private use of the Princess Sophia, we have what may be called the official opinion of Fletcher. ‘He is,’ says Mackay, ‘a gentleman steady in his principles, of nice honour, with abundance of learning; brave as the sword he wears, and bold as a lion. A sure friend, but an irreconcilable enemy; would readily lose his life to serve his country, but would not do a base thing to save it.’

The Tory Lockhart, also, in a passage which is too long for full quotation, draws the character of Fletcher. He tells us how the Laird of Saltoun was master of the Latin, Greek, French, and Italian languages, and well versed in history and the civil law; a nice observer of all points of honour; free from all manner of vice; impatient under opposition, but affable in private conversation. ‘To sum up all,’ says Lockhart, ‘he was a learned, gallant, honest, and every other way well accomplished gentleman; and if ever a man proposes to serve and merit well of his country, let him place his courage, zeal, and constancy before him, and think himself sufficiently applauded and rewarded by obtaining the character of being like Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun.’