Murray, Sir Alexander
The True Interest of Great Britain, Ireland and our Plantations
£530
Auction: 05 February 2025 from 10:00 GMT
Description
or, a Proposal for making such an Union between Great Britain and Ireland, and all our Plantations, as that already made betwixt Scotland and England … and A New Method of Husbandry by Greater and Lesser Canals … With Proposals for Removing the Hurtful Parts of the Heretable Courts …
[Part 2:] A Letter and Remonstrance, etc. To the Right Honourable Philip Lord Hardwicke … Wherein the Miserable State of Scotland, from the Slavish Dependance of the People on a Few Families, and the Great Danger thence arising to Great Britain, are considered. With a New Method of Improving all the Different Products of our Lands and Waters, and Paying off the National Debts.
[Part 3:] An Apology to the Reader. January the First, 1740-1 [drop-head title].
London: for the Author, 1740. First edition, 3 parts in 1 volume, folio (37 x 22.8cm), viii 52, [2] 20, 8 pp., uncut in contemporary calf-backed marbled boards with vellum tips, with 12 engraved folding maps and plates (of 13: lacking 'A Display of the Coasting Lines of Six Several Maps of North Britain'), a few with splits to folds, a few repaired tears, ‘A New Map of Britain’ laid down, ‘A Plan of Loch Sunart’ guard torn [Kress 4515 & 4514 for parts 1 and 2]
Provenance
From the library of the Murrays of Dollerie, Crieff, Perthshire.
Footnote
Sir Alexander Murray of Stanhope, Baronet (c.1684-1743) was a prominent Highland landowner and long-time Jacobite, who rallied to the Old Pretender in 1715 before being captured after the Battle of Preston and surviving owing to his promises of loyalty to George I, though in reality he kept us his Jacobite contacts and remained invested in the cause. The True Interest was his ‘personal manifesto for the regeneration of the Scottish polity and economy, through constitutional reform and such specific engineering projects as the construction of a national network of reservoirs and canals for irrigation and transport. In particular Murray pronounced the survival of the heritable jurisdictions to be a blight upon Scotland (though without naming Argyll’s, which was the one he himself had in view), and called for their abolition. His case was made in the terms of civic humanist discourse, as he argued that the continued existence of such feudal powers enfeebled public virtue and thwarted economic improvement. Circumstances suggest, however, that clothing his proposals in the language of classical republicanism was an act of pragmatism rather than philosophy, prime evidence being the disingenuous condemnation of the ‘wicked and unnatural rebellion’ in which he had himself taken part, and a new-found enthusiasm for the Union, which he now wished to see extended to incorporate Ireland and the American colonies’ (History of Parliament).