(Vol. viii., p. 272.)
Your correspondent BALLIOLENSIS should remember that at the time Dr. Drake
published his {347} _Historia Anglo-Scotica_, 1703, there were no bounds to
the angry passions and jealousies evoked by the discussion of the projected
union; consequently, what may appear to as in the present day an
insufficient reason for the treatment the book met with in the northern
metropolis, wore a very different aspect to the Scots, who, under the
popular belief that they were to _be sold_ to their enemies, saw every
movement with distrust, and tortured everything said or written on this
side the Tweed, upon the impending question, to discover an attack upon
their national independence, their church, and their valour.
Looking at Dr. Drake's book, then, for the data upon which it was
condemned, we find that it opens with a prefatory dedication to Sir E.
Seymour, one of Queen Anne's Commissioners for the Union, and a high
churchman, wherein the author distinctly ventures a blow at Presbytery when
he says to his patron:
"The languishing oppressed Church of Scotland is not without hopes of
finding in you hereafter the same successful champion and restorer that
her sister of England has already experienced."
He farther calculated upon Sir Edward inspiring the neighbouring nation
"with as great a respect for the generosity of the English as they have
heretofore had to dread their valour." Now the Scots neither acknowledged
the Episcopacy which Seymour is here urged to press upon them, nor had they
any such slavish fear of the vaunted English prowess with which Dr. Drake
would have them intimidated; without going farther, therefore, into the
book, it appears to me that the Scots parliament had a right to consider it
written in a bad spirit, and to pacify the people by condemning it.
Defoe, in his _History of the Union_ (G. Chalmers' edition, London, 1786),
says:
"One Dr. Drake writes a preface to an abridgment of the _Scots
History_, wherein, speaking something reflecting upon the freedom and
independence of Scotland, the Scots parliament caused it to be burned
by the hangman in Edinburgh."
In his _Northern Memoirs_, 1715, Oldmixon observes:
"They (the Jacobites) therefore put Dr. Drake, author of the _High
Church Memorials_, upon publishing an antiquated Scotch history, on
purpose to vilify the whole nation in the preface, and create more ill
blood. This had the desired effect. The Scots parliament highly
resented the affront, and ordered it to be burnt by the common hangman
at Edinburgh."
D'Israeli, in his _Calamities of Authors_, has the following interesting
notice of Drake:
"I must add one more striking example of a political author in the case
of Dr. James Drake, a man of genius and an excellent writer. He
resigned an honorable profession, that of medicine, to adopt a very
contrary one, that of becoming an author by profession for a party. As
a Tory writer he dared every extremity of the law, while he evaded it
by every subtlety of artifice; he sent a masked lady with his MSS. to
the printer, who was never discovered; and was once saved by a flaw in
the indictment, from the simple change of an _r_ for a _t_, or _nor_
for _not_, one of those shameful evasions by which the law, to its
perpetual disgrace, so often protects the criminal from punishment. Dr.
Drake had the honor of hearing himself censured from the throne, of
being imprisoned, of seeing his _Memorials of the Church of England_
burned at (the Royal Exchange) London, and his _Hist. Angl. Scot._ at
Edinburgh. Having enlisted himself in the pay of the booksellers, among
other works, I suspect, he condescended to practise some literary
impositions; for he has reprinted Father Parsons famous libel against
the Earl of Leicester, under the title of _Secret Memoirs of Robert
Dudley, E. of L._, 1706, with a preface pretending it was printed from
an old MS."
The same instructive writer adds:
"Drake was a lover of literature; he left behind him a version of
Herodotus, and a system of anatomy, once the most popular and curious
of its kind. After all this turmoil of his literary life, neither his
masked lady nor the flaws in his indictments availed him; government
brought a writ of error, severely prosecuted him; and abandoned, as
usual, by those for whom he had annihilated a genius which deserved a
better fate, his perturbed spirit broke out into a fever, and he died
raving against cruel persecutors, and patrons not much more humane."
Another book before me, and one which shared the fate of Drake's in
Edinburgh, is _The Superiority and Direct Dominion of the Imperial Crown of
England over the Crown and Kingdom of Scotland, the true Foundation of a
compleat Union reasserted_; 4to. London, 1705. This had appeared the year
before, but was reproduced to answer the objections to it from the other
side. It was written by William Attwood, Esq. If it required a nice
discrimination to discover the offence of Drake, there was no such dubiety
about this book, which goes the whole length of Scottish vassalage; and Mr.
Attwood would lead us to believe that he knocks over the arguments of
Hodges and Anderson[6] for Scottish independence with as much ease as he
would ninepins.
{348}
Unfortunately these subjects are again forced upon us, and a reference to
some of the books I have cited will enable gentlemen who are curious upon
the point to judge for themselves in the matter of the present agitation of
"Justice to Scotland."