Andrew Fletcher Biography Quotes 2 Report mistakes

Overview
Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun (1653, 1716) was a Scottish landowner, political thinker, and pamphleteer whose name became synonymous with civic virtue and national independence in the decades around the Union of 1707. Known to admirers and detractors alike as Fletcher of Saltoun or simply the Patriot, he pursued a vision of a free, frugal, and militarily self-reliant commonwealth, arguing that liberty depended on the character of citizens more than on the forms of institutions.

Early Life and Formation
Fletcher was born into the gentry of East Lothian and inherited the Saltoun estates at a young age, a position that placed him among the political nation of Scotland. His early reading drew him toward classical historians and republican thinkers; the moral temper of antiquity and the example of Renaissance civic humanists shaped his imagination. The country-party skepticism of corruption, luxury, and centralized court power resonated with him, and he cultivated independence by refusing the patronage that sustained many careers in Edinburgh and London.

Exile and Resistance to Stuart Absolutism
The crisis years of the 1680s thrust Fletcher into opposition. He joined Archibald Campbell, 9th Earl of Argyll, in the 1685 attempt to unseat James VII and II. A fatal quarrel within the expedition forced Fletcher to withdraw, and with the rebellion defeated he fled into exile on the Continent. In the Dutch Republic he moved among Scottish and English dissenters, including figures such as Sir Patrick Hume (later Earl of Marchmont), and watched the preparations that brought William of Orange to Britain in 1688. Although he welcomed the overthrow of James, Fletcher's republican commitments kept him wary of court influence even under William III, and his independence set him apart from men who converted exile into office.

Return, Parliament, and the Country Cause
After the Revolution of 1688, Fletcher returned to Scotland and served as a shire commissioner for Haddingtonshire. In the Convention of Estates and subsequent parliaments he joined the country interest, pressing to limit ministerial power, curb dependence on standing armies, and restore vigor to local self-government. He called for annually chosen councils, a strengthened militia, and measures to prevent the crown's control of elections. His proposals aimed to discipline power by dispersing it across property-holders, insisting that liberty rested on a citizenry habituated to arms, law, and frugality.

Principal Writings and Ideas
Fletcher's political thought survives in a cluster of discourses and speeches produced around 1698 and the early 1700s. In A Discourse of Government with relation to Militias he defended the militia as the school of citizenship and denounced standing armies as instruments of corruption. In Two Discourses concerning the Affairs of Scotland he argued that Scotland's poverty sprang from distorted institutions, proposing remedies that combined agrarian reform, civic education, and limits on executive power. In An Account of a Conversation concerning a Right Regulation of Government he staged debates on the common good, drawing on classical exemplars as well as modern writers such as James Harrington and Niccolo Machiavelli. Fletcher's austere program, especially his harsh schemes to compel the idle poor to labor, shocked some contemporaries, yet even critics conceded the moral seriousness that animated his fear of luxury and dependence.

Darien, Crisis, and the Act of Security
The failure of the Darien colony in the late 1690s deepened Scotland's economic and political crisis. Fletcher pressed for measures to safeguard national autonomy, supporting the push that culminated in the Act of Security (1704), by which Scotland reserved the right to choose a different successor to Queen Anne unless trading grievances were addressed. While William III and, later, Queen Anne sought alignment of succession and policy across the kingdoms, Fletcher and his allies maintained that only constitutional limitations and a fortified civic culture could protect a small nation from absorption or manipulation.

Opposition to the Union of 1707
The treaty negotiations of 1706, 1707 brought Fletcher to his most visible role. He denounced the incorporating Union proposed by the crown's managers, led in Scotland by James Douglas, 2nd Duke of Queensberry. In the chamber he pressed alternatives, federal arrangements, rigorous limitations, or national safeguards, that would preserve the self-legislating authority of the Scottish estates. He reproached James Hamilton, 4th Duke of Hamilton, for hesitations that sapped the country party's effectiveness. The government's advocates, including commissioners such as Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, countered that economic integration and a unified succession were indispensable. Daniel Defoe, operating in Edinburgh as a government agent and pamphleteer, described Fletcher with a mixture of admiration and alarm: a formidable speaker, unbuyable, and fixed on a vision of virtue that commerce and empire could not easily accommodate. Though the Union passed, Fletcher's speeches distilled the most coherent republican case against incorporation, insisting that equal trade without equal power would exchange one form of dependence for another.

Networks, Reputation, and Influence
Fletcher's circle intersected with exiles, parliamentarians, and men of letters. He conversed with and was read by writers across Britain and the Low Countries; his arguments attracted interlocutors such as John Toland and critics like Defoe. Even opponents acknowledged his probity: he refused salaried office and preserved a notable independence from both court and faction. Jacobite commentators, including George Lockhart of Carnwath, sketched him in later memoirs as a patriot who disdained both patronage and French intrigues. His standing among the Scottish gentry was reinforced by the management of his estates, yet he never allowed local concerns to obscure his larger goal: a polity in which power, property, and virtue sustained one another.

Later Years and Death
After the Union, Fletcher withdrew from frequent attendance in public councils, though he continued to write and to advise kindred spirits who resisted court consolidation. He never married. The succession of his estates within the family ensured that his name endured; a later kinsman, Andrew Fletcher (Lord Milton), would rise in the Scottish judiciary, a reminder of the line's continuing prominence. Fletcher died in 1716 at Saltoun. He left behind no school of disciples in the formal sense, but his discourses circulated widely and informed subsequent debates over standing armies, public corruption, and the ethics of commerce.

Legacy
Fletcher's legacy lies in the tension he made vivid: between prosperity and virtue, power and liberty, union and independence. He helped set the terms on which Scots and, more broadly, Britons would argue about citizenship in an age of expanding trade and empire. To friends he was the exemplar of an incorruptible patriot; to critics he was an impracticable moralist. To later generations he remains one of the clearest voices of civic humanism in Britain, a writer who refused to separate constitutional forms from the character of the people who must inhabit them.

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