What is meant when we refer to public opinion in the early modern period? How did writers, protesters, and governments think of and use public opinion then, and what was its impact on extrainstitutional debate, and ultimately on historical events? How representative were claims of public opinion by political or religious groups, and what were the actual opinions that lay behind those publicly expressed? How might thinking of the generation of public opinion in Scotland as a cultural dynamic suggest an alternative to the model of the public sphere developed in Jürgen Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989)?
These are the key questions Karin Bowie asks of a huge body of protestations, petitions, communal oaths, and public communications that express opinion outside government in Scotland from the Protestant Reformation of 1560, through the cataclysmic Covenanting Rebellion and Wars of the Three Kingdoms, to the Revolution of 1688–90 and the negotiations leading to the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707. In the first four chapters, Bowie demonstrates how traditional devices of complaint and protest were “re-engineered” from 1560 to 1688 to “increase reach and impact,” as “powerful tools for public resistance” that circumvented and stimulated government's attempts to suppress what it saw as dangerous opinion (15). She is not interested so much in what that opinion was, but in how it was generated and expressed, and what effect it had. The last two chapters cover the period from the Claim of Right of 1689, in its expression of the “inclinations of the generality of the people” (18), to the Act of Union of 1707, and the legitimacy opposition to it claimed from a sense of nation. As the Duke of Atholl protested, “the inclinations of [Queen Anne's] people” and “the immediate sentiments of the nation” against union meant that the government should “satisfie the minds of the people” (239).
Bowie's argument is a tour de force, succinctly, authoritatively, and accessibly expressed, and richly evidenced. It makes a compelling case for what was claimed of public opinion in its own time, and a distinctive “grassroots opinion formation” (17) in Scotland, unlike the political debate generated in a male-dominated, print-facilitated Habermasian public sphere. The crowd (and women) make it into that space, threatening institutional attempts to suppress sedition and control disorder. The presence of the crowd in the presentation of petitions, for instance, suggests something of the orality and performance of dissent and the expression of public opinion. This is an understanding of protest beyond the confines of print-based sources.
This work draws and builds on Bowie's previous groundbreaking research on the public voicing of opposition to the Anglo-Scottish union, for instance in pamphlets, in the years of its negotiation. Now, over this longer period, she shows how traditional resistance, in oral, written, and printed form, facilitated different processes of dissent (protestation), complaint (petition), commitments to resist (oaths), and communication with larger audiences (public tracts), looking beyond the consumption of print into the repurposing of these older devices to mobilize much larger-scale opposition. Their strength came from the implicit “threat of collective disorder and violence” (4) when everyone was allowed their own opinion. As Sir John Skene warned in 1597, “I am affrayed of all Readers, for ilk man hes his awin Judgement and opinion” which would lead to “als mony contrarieties” (12).
Bowie kicks off with a striking example of contemporary awareness of the existence and power of public opinion in a pamphlet of 1706 against union by Robert Wylie. He was convinced of the effect it might have: “the very Fears of [union] are like to cause a most dreadful Convulsion!” Such illuminating quotations appear throughout. But it is in this expression of a collective opinion that dangers lie of an overly homogenous picture. Although Bowie nuances this, there is an unease in defining something as public opinion when it derives from multiple individual opinions, mediated by those who use them to legitimize their objectives and to mobilize that public opinion. Bowie is careful to explore the differences between opinion claimed on behalf of a group and their actual opinions. But given the difficulties in capturing the granularity of such thoughts from their ephemeral oral origins, it is a tension that remains somewhat unresolved.
Bowie's great strengths lie in unpacking theoretical models that elsewhere are obfuscated by overly complex language. With great clarity she shows that “Scotland does not present an obvious fit with this [Habermasian] scenario” of the public sphere (240), sidestepping it with the identification instead of a “cultural dynamic” (243) in the articulation of public opinion itself. This has significance, not just for understanding the impact of public opinion on events in Scotland, but in suggesting an alternative method of analysis for extra-governmental political debate in other countries: away from a prescriptive model to a more amorphous understanding of the generation of thought, words, and actions.
