Justice & Law Quote by Andrew Fletcher

A grievance disguised as administrative bookkeeping, Fletcher's line is really an indictment of sovereignty lost by inches. Written in the long shadow of Scotland's 1603 Union of the Crowns - when James VI of Scotland became James I of England - it frames political subordination not as a dramatic conquest but as a quiet procedural capture: advice, offices, "managed". The verb choice matters. Management suggests routine, almost boring governance, which is precisely the point: domination works best when it looks like normal staffing.

Fletcher is also doing something sharper than simple Anglophobia. He targets the mechanism of control: ministers who are selected not for competence or legitimacy but for their predicted obedience. "Such men" is a sneer, and "subservient" is doing heavy moral work, casting collaboration as a character flaw rather than a policy position. The subtext is that Scottish elites have become a client class, rewarded with titles and posts in exchange for smoothing over English priorities. It's a theory of empire built out of patronage.

Contextually, Fletcher is a hard-edged Scottish patriot writing amid intense debate over union and dependency, when Scotland's economic vulnerability and political fragmentation made "advice" from London feel less like counsel and more like instruction. The sentence is engineered to make constitutional change feel personal: not abstract treaties, but your country's "principal offices" occupied by people chosen to serve someone else's design. It's an early, bracing portrait of how power travels through institutions - and how resentment grows when a nation senses it is being governed, politely, from elsewhere.