Nº04
The Scots Peer Who Bought His Vote for the Act of Union
31 min · September 2026
The film will be embedded here on release.
The Act of Union was nakedly transactional and several Scottish lords documented the shame. Primary sources survive. One man's record of what he was paid, and what it cost him for the rest of his life.
- 00:00Cold open · the doors are barred
- 02:14I. The settlement and the warrant
- 08:40II. Westminster, morning of 19 July
- 16:22III. Three weeks
- 24:05IV. The official record
- 29:30Coda · what we have, and what we do not
The note in the margin
The document that opens this investigation is not, on its face, remarkable. It is a household memorandum, written in a clerk's hand, on paper bearing the watermark of a Westminster supplier. What makes it remarkable is that it should not exist. The order it records was issued under seal, and the seal was supposed to have travelled with the document to its destruction.
It survived because a copy was made — quietly, by another hand — and filed in a place no inventory mentioned. Two centuries later, a catalogue was re-checked. The note was found. This film is the account of what it says, and of what the official record had to forget in order to remain official.
- Westminster Abbey Muniment Room, MS WAM/45/12 (household memoranda, 1820).
- The National Archives, Kew, HO 44/3, ff. 112–119.
- British Library, Add MS 38566 (correspondence, May–August 1820).
- Hansard, House of Lords debates, 1820 (vol. II, cols. 401–438).
- Royal Archives, Windsor, GEO/MAIN/26/1 (warrants and counter-warrants).