Fletcher

Fletcher, ANDREW, of Salton, a famous Scottish patriot, was born in 1655, the son of Sir Robert Fletcher, himself of English descent, and of Catharine Bruce, whose father, Sir Henry Bruce of Clackmannan, was directly descended from Robert Bruce. His father dying when he was still an infant, he was brought up under the care of the celebrated Gilbert Burnet, and early imbibed his preceptor's passion for political freedom, but not his prudence. After some years of continental travel, he sat in parliament in 1681 as commissioner for his native county, and offered so determined an opposi- tion to the measures of the Duke of York that he found it necessary to flee to England, and thence to Holland. Here he formed fast friendship with the refugee English patriots, and on his return to England in 1683 shared the counsels of Russell, Essex, Howard, Algernon Sidney, and John Hampden, the greater patriot's grandson. Though a republican, Fletcher was very far from being a modern democrat, for one of his favourite schemes was to utilise the hosts of vagrants and paupers of the time like the slaves of ancient Greece and Rome. On the discovery of the Rye-house Plot, Fletcher fled to Holland, returned as a volunteer with Monmouth, but was obliged almost at once to leave the army for having at Lyme shot a fellow-campaigner in a personal quarrel about a horse. He now fled to Spain, but had no sooner landed at Bilbao than, at the instance of the English ambassador, he was flung into prison, from which he was soon mysteriously delivered by an unknown guide. In disguise he passed through Spain, not without further more than romantic adventures, in Hungary distinguished himself greatly as a volunteer against the Turks, and returned to Scotland at the revolution. He was the first patron of William Paterson, the founder of the Bank of England and projector of the Darien expedition, and it was the bitterness caused in Scotland by the base treatment the unfortunate Darien colonists received from King William's government that gave Fletcher and the nationalist party their strength in the struggle against the inevitable union with England. His famous 'limitations' aimed at constructing a federative instead of an incorporating union—a frail structure that would have borne neither the burden of recent irritation nor the weight of ancient hatreds. Fletcher's orations in the Scottish parliament still glow with eloquence, and carry the stamp of genuine sincerity, but the modern reader has feelings other than admiration for a statesman whose eyes were too much blinded by prejudice to recognise that the only salvation for a country distracted by intestine jealousies and hopelessly corrupt domestic government lay through incorporation with the larger and healthier life of the great southern kingdom. After the consummation of the union, Fletcher retired in disgust from public life, devoting himself to promoting agriculture. His fanners for winnowing corn and his mill for making pot-barley were better gifts to his country than all his speeches. He died at London in the September of 1716. His writings were collected and reprinted at London in 1732. Fletcher is described as follows by a contemporary pen: 'He is a low, thin man, of a brown complexion, full of fire, with a stern, sour look; of nice honour, with abundance of learning, brave as the sword he wears, a sure friend and an irreconcilable enemy, would lose his life readily to serve his country, and would not do a base thing to save it. His thoughts are large as to religion, and not such as can be brought within the bounds of any particular set, and his notions of government are too fine-spun, and can hardly be lived up to by men subject to the common frailties of nature.' Fletcher of Salton's name survives popularly only in the famous but usually misquoted saying, in his Account of a Conversation concerning a Right Regulation of Governments for the Common Good of Mankind: 'I knew a very wise man, so much of Sir Christopher's sentiment, that he believed if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.' See the Life by G. W. T. Omond (1897).