back as the reign of Edward I, it was claimed that Scotland was a dependency of England; that as such it was bound to do homage, and that Edward had the right to dispose of the Scottish crown as the liege lord of that kingdom. This claim, which the English never absolutely relinquished, and the Scotch, as a people, never admitted, came under consideration in the reign of Elizabeth, when it was apparent that upon her death, James VI of Scotland, if then living, would become the next in succession to the crown of England, as he did, under the title of James I, through his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, who was the grand daughter of the sister of Henry VIII. Sir James Craig, a Scotch lawyer, then of great eminence, whose work on the feudal law was then an authority in every country in Europe, and is pronounced by Nicholson "a lasting monument of the extraordinary learning of its great author," wrote an elab orate treatise entitled "Scotland's Sover eignty Asserted, being a dispute concerning homage," proving that the kings of Scot land never paid, nor owed, any homage to the kings of England. And as Sir James was not only a great lawyer, but equally dis tinguished as an antiquarian, this treatise was supposed to have settled the question. It appears, however, to have been revived after the accession of William and Mary, and when their joint sovereignty ended by the death of Mary in 1694, William's title to the sole sovereignty of England rested, not upon descent, but solely upon an Eng lish statute, the Act of Settlement, and his right to the sovereignty of Scotland upon a convention of Scottish nobles, who, by a large vote, declared that as James II had, through his abuse of power, forfeited all right to the crown, they tendered it to Wil liam and Mary, who accepted it; which convention, however, the Jacobites main tained was illegal and without authority. The revival of the claim of Edward I,' that Scotland was a mere dependency of Eng
land, would, therefore, if it were true, have afforded some answer to the objection raised by the Jacobites, and to show that it was not, Sir James Craig's treatise, which had been written in Latin, was translated into English, and published in London in 1694, and was received with so much favor that another edition of it was published but a few years before Atwood's return to Lon don. He seized upon this subject as one in which the public and the government were interested, knowing that if he could concoct even a plausible answer to Sir Thomas Craig's treatise, it would attract general at tention. It was a kind of investigation, moreover, that he had previously been en gaged in, having, as has been stated, before his departure for America, published a quarto entitled " History and Resources of the Dependency of Ireland upon the Im perial Crown of England." Accordingly in 1 704 he published a work entitled " The Superiority and Rightful Dominion of the Imperial Crown of England over the King dom of Scotland, asserted in answer to Sir Thomas Craig's Treatise on ' Homage and Succession and the Divine Right of Succes sion to both, inseparable from the civil '" (right). The work abounds with references to matters alleged to have occurred at a very remote period in English and Scotch his tory; authors referred to by Sir Thomas Craig are disposed of by such epithets as "ignorant," " lying," and the like, and state ments are made of what was said by very early writers, which I should be unwill ing to accept without examination, from Atwood's characteristic audacity of asser tion in other matters, and especially as so competent an authority as Erskine says that " no light can be received from ancient histories or writings at what period the feudal law was first introduced into Scot land," and that " perhaps no Scottish char ter is now extant dated before the year
