Election so corrupt it was ruled as void
DIGGING INTO THE PAST with Dr Murray Cook ‘Democracy’was different in 1770s thanks to Black Bond
So did you vote last week?
I spent a very long day (6:15 am to 10:30 pm) in a polling station checking names talking through the Single Transferable Vote System.
It’s always good fun and I’m very proud of the way our democracy works.
However, it was very different in the late 18th century: a time of physical and moral decay in Stirling.
In 1750 the town was more or less the same size as it had been in 1550.
Edinburgh and Glasgow boomed: there was trade with the Empire and the Enlightenment, one of the world’s greatest intellectual movements.
The cash from Empire played a decisive role in securing Scotland’s place in the Union but not yet in Stirling. There were abandoned and collapsing houses, the incredible renaissance carved heads in James V’s magnificent palace had fallen off and the building was stripped to be converted to a barracks.
As Burns angrily put it in a very risky poem inscribed on a window in the Golden Lion a hotel in Stirling (still open today):
Here Stewarts once in triumph reign’d,
And laws for Scotland’s weal ordain’d;
But now unroof’d their Palace stands,
Their sceptre’s fall’n to other hands;
Fallen indeed, and to the earth,
Whence grovelling reptiles take their birth.
The injur’d STEWART-LINE are gone,
A Race outlandish fill their throne;
An idiot race, to honor lost; Who know them best despise them most.
Worst of all of was the infamous Black Bond of 1771: an agreement between city officials to divvy up positions and income between themselves.
It was so bad that in 1773 the Council elections were declared void by the courts, ‘having been brought about by undue influence and corrupted practices’and the Council was abolished until 1781. Gosh!