The Political Works of Fletcher of Salton; With Notes &c. to which is prefaced a Sketch of his Life, with Observations, Moral, Philosophical and Political: by R. Watson M.D.

Notes

A handsomely-bound scarce later edition of the political writings of Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, for the first time preceded by a 108-page biography of him by Dr Robert Watson (1746-1838). At the end is a postscript by Watson apologising for any errors in that biography, which he attributes to his arrest for treason and subsequent imprisonment in Newgate 'around the time it was sent to press'. An ardent supporter of the French Revolution, in 1798 he fled to France via Scandinavia and Germany where he was appointed head of the Scottish College in Paris by Napoleon. Watson claimed to have been Napoleon's English tutor; a claim which, alongside his claims to have fought in the American War of Independence, to have been deeply implicated in the Gordon riots and to have been awarded a medical degree, remains unverified.
This copy belonged to Robert Andrew Scott Mcfie (1868-1935), the writer and academic who refounded the Gypsy Lore Society in 1907. A later inscription in Gaelic places this copy for a time on the small Hebridean Island of Berneray.