IT is generally recognized among Scottish historians that Scotland’s national myths are abstractions from reality that tend to force historical, regional, and cultural diversity into a straitjacket; to disregard nuance and hard fact; to embrace gross stereotyping and caricature; and to involve some measure of invention and fabrication.1 However, rarely is it acknowledged that, historically, Scotland’s myths have been subject to the fickleness and changing whims of ideological fashion, and turn out to have had much less staying power than the nation whose supposed enduring essence they are meant to represent. Indeed, not only would an early modern Scot of the sixteenth, seventeenth, or eighteenth centuries have some trouble recognizing the ‘mythical Scotland’ of the early twenty-first-century imagination, but a nineteenth-century Scot, brought up on the lore of rival denominations, each with its own version of the Presbyterian interpretation of Scottish history,2 would also be at something of a loss in the Scotland of today, whose imaginings are rarely ecclesiastical. It transpires that the mental underpinnings of communal belonging—the psychological and cultural processes which make the people who inhabit the geographical territory of Scotland into a nation—are far from robust, notwithstanding Scotland’s long and proud history of nationhood. Today’s myths of Scotland are not the myths of earlier centuries.
Thus, counter-intuitively perhaps, the history of ‘mythical Scotland’ is not a singular depiction of a national mindset, but is best negotiated by way of a series of overlapping phases of mythmaking. In spite of the important caveat that these phases were far from watertight, it is nevertheless possible to discern at least four distinct ‘moments’ of national mythmaking between the sixteenth century and the present. These comprise the refashioning in the sixteenth century by the humanist Hector Boece and the humanist-reformer George Buchanan of the origin legend of the Scottish nation inherited from the late medieval era; the replacement of this spurious account of Celtic antiquity in the 1760s by an equally fabulous account derived from what was believed to be epic poetry composed by a blind bard by the name of Ossian in the third century AD; the emergence of another romantic myth of Scots highlandism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, which was not dependent on the historicity of Ossian and therefore proved more resilient, precisely because it bore none of that particular myth’s vulnerabilities; and, finally, in the nineteenth century, the myth of a democratic, Whig–Liberal Presbyterian tradition.3 This last phase persisted well into the first half of the twentieth century, but was rendered redundant, if not offensive, with the onset of secularization, the rise of a Roman Catholic middle class, and the retreat from a kind of Scots–British political patriotism. The latter was embodied not only by the Unionist Party, which in 1965, significantly, changed its name to the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party, but also by the Presbyterian socialist ethic of the early Labour movement.4 Thus, it is the highland myth of romance, formulated in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which has proved most enduring. Nevertheless, at no stage in the elaboration and transformation of the national myth did a new expression of mythic Scottishness obliterate or occlude a mythic version of the medieval War of Independence, which has remained throughout a significant element in the national consciousness.
Early modern Scotland inherited a powerful myth of Scottish antiquity from the struggles of the Scottish Wars of Independence, which, as historians now recognize, were as much ideological as military. The Plantagenet dream of an English empire of Britain was underwritten by the account of ancient British origins found in the mid-twelfth-century chronicle of Geoffrey of Monmouth.5 According to Geoffrey’s chronicle, Britain had been a kingdom of Trojan origin later divided at the death of Britain’s first emperor-king, Brut, when Brut’s eldest son Locrinus inherited the dominant kingdom of England, and Brut’s younger sons Albanacht and Camber were bequeathed Scotland and Wales respectively. Later, so Geoffrey recounted, King Arthur had reunited the realms of Britain under his imperial sway. In response to the imperial vision of Britishness found in Geoffrey’s chronicle, late medieval Scots clerics—most prominent among them Baldred Bisset; the anonymous rhetorician who composed the Declaration of Arbroath (possibly Alexander Kinnimonth); and John of Fordun—constructed a counter-mythology that stressed the autonomous origins of the Scottish kingdom. This alternative origin myth emphasized that the Scots were not descended from Troy, but from a Graeco-Egyptian pedigree, in particular the elopement of Scota, the daughter of Pharaoh, with Gathelos, a Greek prince, whose descendants came to Scotland—eventually—by a maritime route via the Mediterranean, Iberia, and Ireland. The kingdom of Scotland had its beginnings, according to Fordun’s influential Chronica gentis Scotorum (c. 1363), in 330 BC, when Fergus MacFerquhard made himself king of a Gathelan community settled in the west Highlands of Scotland. Fordun’s chronicle formed the basis of Walter Bower’s more extended Scotichronicon (1441–5), which firmly established the legends of Gathelus–Scota and Fergus MacFerquhard as the accepted origin myth of the Scottish kingdom and principal counter-argument to the English claim of suzerainty over Scotland. The medieval epics, John Barbour’s Bruce, composed in the late fourteenth century, and the fifteenth-century Wallace, ascribed to Blind Harry the minstrel, consolidated the importance of the kingdom’s independence at the core of the nation’s self-image.
During the early modern period this amalgam of legend and patriotic history was reconfigured in certain ways, but otherwise remained the core of the national myth. In particular, Boece endowed the history of the Scottish kingdom with a humanist veneer. The history of Scotland’s kings—whether the real monarchs of medieval times or the fictitious leaders of a shadowy and fabulous antiquity—was told as a ‘mirror of princes’, that is, an ethical guide to kingship: good kings wisely consulted the community of the realm, ruled happily, and usually died of old age, but the lives of bad kings, or tyrants, tended to end in unfortunate circumstances. Buchanan took this neo-Roman emphasis a stage further, coining an influential myth of an ancient Scottish constitution of 330 BC. According to Buchanan, Fergus had been elected king by the phylarchi, or clan chiefs, of the Gathelan Scots. Not only was kingship largely elective within the royal family, but kings were accountable to the community, and it was legitimate to resist tyrants who overstepped the bounds of limited monarchy. Buchanan set out his theory of Scottish kingship in his tract De Iure regni apud Scotos (1579) and supplemented it with a range of historical illustration in his history of Scotland, Historia rerum Scoticarum (1582). Buchanan’s political myths constituted the central matter of Scottish history until the early eighteenth century.6
It would be wrong to conclude that early modern Scots were any more addicted to myths than other nations. Medieval legends of antique origins—as often as not updated in humanistic garb, purloined from a rediscovered Tacitus—contributed enormously to the formation of national consciousness in early modern Europe.7 In the case of the United Provinces, for instance, the ancient tribe of Batavians provided a foundation charter for Dutch republicanism. Celebrated in Tacitus, the resistance of the Batavians under the leadership of Claudius Civilis to the tyrannical might of Rome prefigured and legitimated the Dutch revolt against Spain. In its most celebrated formulation, the Liber de antiquitate reipublicae Batavicae (1610), the Dutch jurist Grotius outlined the decentralized government, estates sovereignty, and elective generalship of the ancient Batavian constitution.8 Moreover, ancient constitutional myths of the sort fashioned by Buchanan played a central role in political culture across early modern Europe. Romanists and Germanists, for example, debated the provenance of the French monarchy. The Romanists, whose case was formulated in the sixteenth century by Charles Dumoulin and continued in the eighteenth century by Jean-Baptiste Dubos, traced the French monarchy back to Roman imperial authority. On the other hand, the Germanists, whose arguments were devised by François Hotman and rehearsed in the early eighteenth century by Henri de Boulainvilliers, contended that the origins of the French state originated in the Germanic tribal institutions of the Franks.9 The substance of mythical Scotland was similar in form to the political myths found in other parts of early modern Europe.
Alongside the political myth of the ancient Gaelic past there emerged a parallel ecclesiastical legend. An intriguing reference in Fordun’s chronicle to the effect that there had been no bishop among the Scots until Palladius in the early fifth century, Boece’s account of the conversion of the Scots around the year 200 in the reign of the fictitious Donald I, and his transposition of the Culdees, an eighth-century Irish monastic reform movement, back into third-century Dalriada—all provided the raw materials for a Presbyterian interpretation of ancient Scottish history, which flourished in the seventeenth century. Its key features were the claim that Scotland had been converted to Christianity by missionaries from the Johannine churches of Asia Minor, not by Petrine missionaries from Rome, and that the early Scottish Church had been governed in a proto-Presbyterian fashion by colleges of monks, or Culdees.10
Unsurprisingly, the ancient Scottish past was the scene of considerable ideological disputation during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Royalists upheld the story that Fergus had been the first king of Scotland, but rejected the spin that George Buchanan had imparted to the myth. Rather, a tradition of royalist writers, from Adam Blackwood by way of James VI and I to Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh, argued firmly that Fergus had not been an elected monarch and the kings who had succeeded him had followed by a law of hereditary succession. Blackwood reversed one of Buchanan’s central arguments for an elective monarchy, arguing that the ancient clan chiefs constituted a model of unconstrained patriarchal authority, whose hereditary powers had been transferred intact to Fergus I.11 In the same manner, Mackenzie traced the roots of the Stuarts’ indefeasible hereditary monarchy back to the establishment of the Dalriadic kingdom by Fergus MacFerquhard in 330 BC.12
Notwithstanding the Union of 1707 with England, the mythical origins of the Scottish kingdom remained a feature of the Scottish ideological landscape into the early eighteenth century. Patrick Abercromby’s Martial Atchievements of the Scots Nation (1711–15) not only celebrated Scotland’s warrior tradition, but also advanced an absolutist interpretation of the supposed events of 330 BC. In addition, the republication of eminent voices from the past reinforced the myth. Sir George Mackenzie’s Works were published in two lavish volumes in 1716–22, and George Buchanan’s complete Latin works were published, surprisingly perhaps, under the auspices of the Jacobite humanist Thomas Ruddiman in 1715.13 Nor did the Union do anything to silence the popular cults of Wallace and Bruce.14
Nevertheless, the Jacobite priest Father Thomas Innes, from the Scots College in Paris, exploded the myth of the ancient kings in 1729 in his Critical Account of the Ancient Inhabitants of North Britain. Guided by the new science of diplomatic, or charter, scholarship, pioneered by the French Maurist Jean Mabillon, Innes’s scrupulous scholarship unpicked the various layers of material that had accreted as the accepted legend of Scotland’s origins. Trawling various archives in Britain and France, Innes compared genealogies in Scottish regnal lists surviving from the Middle Ages. Errors in transcription made by lowland monks, which had progressively altered medieval Gaelic names—such as Forco, which became Forgo and eventually Fergus—allowed Innes to date the supposedly ancient sources from which Boece had claimed to compile his history. Moreover, Innes noticed a consensus among the materials he had seen from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries that Fergus MacErch, not Fergus MacFerquhard, had been the first king of Scots in Alba. Therefore, Innes concluded, the first forty kings of Scotland between Fergus MacFerquhard and Fergus MacErch had been spurious, an ingenious and ideologically useful interpolation that he traced to the patriotic needs of the Scottish War of Independence.15 In the wake of Innes’s comprehensive demolition job, mid eighteenth-century Scotland became for a brief period an under-mythologized nation, its sense of self now resting in large measure on the new science of society pioneered in the Scottish Enlightenment. However, ideological detachment, historical scepticism, and a sociological outlook seem to have proved an underwhelming substitute for a collective myth of national origins. At any rate, by the 1760s another myth—that of Ossian—had filled the vacuum.
Ossian is the collective name for the two ancient Celtic epics, Fingal (1761, dated 1762) and Temora (1763), which their opportunistically creative editor and translator, James Macpherson (1736–1796), attributed to Ossian, a blind bard belonging to the ancient Caledonian people of Scotland in the third century AD. Educated at Aberdeen under the influence of the Homeric scholar Thomas Blackwell, Macpherson aimed to reconstitute—as he seems initially to have believed—an ancient Scottish epic that would rival those of Greece and Rome. Was Macpherson an outright forger? That would be a harsh judgement on Macpherson’s first airing of the supposed relics of an ancient epic in Fragments of Ancient Poetry collected in the Highlands of Scotland (1760). Yet, while the second full-scale epic, Temora, was largely Macpherson’s own concoction, which allowed him to cash in on the Ossian phenomenon, Fingal was indebted to genuine poetic remains composed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as well as to Macpherson’s own creativity and editorial laxity; for part of the appeal of the epics lay in the sentimental ethos, so popular in the mid to late eighteenth century, that the ‘translator’ imported into his incantatory prose-poems. Macpherson’s celebrated and notorious ‘discovery’ not only provided his fellow Scots with an idealized—and, quite literally, sentimentalized—picture of a third-century golden age; it was quickly translated into various languages, and came to function as a potent and inspiring fantasy of ancient virtue for other national groups. Although Macpherson’s own origins were Jacobite, he himself betrayed few signs of this in his writings, and his active political commitments were to Britain and its empire. Moreover, Macpherson had been encouraged in his project, not least his travels to the Highlands in search of source material, by the Moderate Whig–Presbyterian literati of Edinburgh, men such as John Home, Hugh Blair, and Adam Ferguson, who perceived no threat to the Union or the Hanoverian monarchy in Macpherson’s quest to recover a supposedly lost Celtic epic.
Yet, by a curious irony, Ossian communicated a myth of Scottish nationhood to the wider world, which sat uneasily with the loyal unionist culture from which Ossian emerged. The poems of Ossian played a central foundational role in the making of modern European nationalism. Indeed, it is arguable that these poems constitute one of the canonical Ur-texts of the romantic nationalisms which spread across the Continent in the century after the sensational discovery of Ossian in the early 1760s.16 Historians of Continental Europe are agreed upon the importance of Ossian—and a mythical Scotland—to the emergence of an enlightened patriotism and thereafter romantic nationalism. The eminent Italian historian Franco Venturi has argued that the ‘extraordinary diffusion’ of Ossian across Europe contributed to ‘the emerging patriotism of the age of Enlightenment’. In particular, he points to the significance of Ossian’s Italian translator and commentator Melchior Cesarotti, whose version appeared in 1763.17 In La Création des identités nationales (1999) Anne-Marie Thiesse assigned a central role first to Ossian, and then to Sir Walter Scott (whose Waverley novels provided inspiration for the roman national), in the emergence of European nationalisms. In quick succession they had established a Europe-wide vogue for Scotland that offered a nationalist template for intelligentsias across the Continent. Ossian’s critical place in the history of European ideas during the 1760s was to function as a bridge between the ideologies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Gottfried von Herder. In particular, Thiesse emphasizes the success of Ossian in insinuating a new set of values that would usurp the cultural authority of the conventional framework of standards—historical, geographical, and social as well as aesthetic—hitherto prevailing in ancien régime Europe: no longer was Graeco-Roman antiquity the sole source of cultural legitimacy in Europe.18 Similarly, Jean Plumyène has explored the phenomenon of ‘les nations manuscrites’, nationalisms that took their rise from Ossian-like sources, usually heroic narratives of ancient and medieval times discovered in dusty manuscripts or fragments of poems and folksongs by patriotic antiquaries enthused with the spirit of ‘l’ossianisme’. According to Plumyène, Macpherson’s supposed discovery of the fragments of an ancient Gaelic epic provided an international model for nationalist fantasies, a ‘mould’ that shaped nationalist imaginings. This applied not only to the content and form of these epics, but also to the mysterious circumstances in which they were discovered.19
It seemed that every nation, or aspiring nation, was on a quest to find its own domestic Ossian. The Russians, for example, not only translated, imitated, and adapted Ossian;20 fortuitously, they also happened upon a long-lost medieval epic of their own. During the 1790s Count Musin-Pushkin claimed to have made a discovery in the course of a visit to a monastery of a manuscript containing a Russian epic from about the twelfth century. This epic depicted a medieval campaign in the tenth century between the Russians under Prince Igor at war with a nomadic Turkish people. It is, like Ossian, a tale of defeat. The tale was published in 1800 as ‘The Song of the Troop of Igor’, though the original manuscript somewhat inconveniently, or perhaps conveniently, perished in the Moscow fire of 1812. ‘The Song of Igor’ remained a lively component of Russian national consciousness.21 Moreover, Ossian made an early impact upon Finnish folkloric circles, and would eventually encourage the successful search for a great Finnish epic. Elias Lonnrot, a medical student, made expeditions into the frontier province of Karelia, where he gathered a great body of folk poetry under the title of the Kalevala. Published in 1835, the Kalevala advertised itself as the old Karelian songs of the ancient times of the Finnish people.22 By the 1790s Ossian had also become a major cultural force in Polish literary and historical circles. In 1795, the year of the third and last Partition of Poland, Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski produced an epic patriotic poem, Bard polski, which with its tale of an old bard wandering through a Poland defeated and ravished by the Russians, a poet sunk in grief and haunted by the spirit world, reveals an obvious debt to Macpherson. Scotland’s Ossian inspired among Polish scholars a desire to root out in their own peripheries similar sorts of ancient literary and folkloric evidence. Indeed, Nina Taylor remarks upon the ‘stamina and vivifying power of the bard that never was’, making a persuasive case that the bardic cultural nationalism of nineteenth-century Poland was ultimately built upon the ‘frail foundations of a literary fraud’ in eighteenth-century Scotland.23 Such a verdict is even more applicable to the case of Czech nationalism. In September 1817 the Czech scholar Vaclav Hanka was staying with a cleric friend at Kralov Dvor, where he found in a cellar certain fragments of verse in the language of medieval Bohemia, all wrapped around medieval Hussite arrows that had cut them into tatters. A year later the Czech museum in Prague established under the auspices of the Austrians received a similar manuscript of apparent medieval Bohemian provenance, which also came into the hands of Hanka. These discoveries—and most especially the poem dealing with ‘The Judgement of the Princess Liboucha’—revealed an historic pre-German Czech golden age of constitutionalism, fine manners, and moral purity. By means of this quasi-Ossianic plagiarism-cum-forgery the Czech nation rediscovered itself and declared itself to the world.24
Ossian’s impact within the British world was, however, more limited. Samuel Johnson found in the Ossian affair ‘another proof of Scotch conspiracy in national falsehood’,25 and the Irish complained that Macpherson had stolen Ireland’s antiquity and presented it as if it were Scottish.26 Nevertheless, it was not only English and Irish antiquaries who challenged the authenticity of Ossian. After initially supporting Macpherson, David Hume allowed his ingrained scepticism to reassert itself, and he confessed that he could not believe in the authenticity of Ossian, even if ‘fifty bare-arsed Highlanders’27 should testify on its behalf. The balanced Report of the Highland Society in 1805 noted Macpherson’s habit of utilizing genuine and historic Gaelic sources (though not, of course, from the third century) and of filling gaps in his material with his own fictions.28 By the early nineteenth century, Ossian was no longer a shibboleth of Scottish patriotism.
Other elements within the late eighteenth-century re-evaluation of the Highlands were not so vulnerable to the probings of sceptics. In 1782 the anti-Jacobite disclothing measures taken against the highlanders were repealed. The transformation of the highland plaid into the kilt endowed Scotsmen with their own distinctive form of dress-wear. Indeed, the growing cult of sentimental Jacobitism—a safely lost cause—allowed even the late Hanoverian monarchs themselves to patronize Jacobites and their emblems. In particular, George IV’s visit to Edinburgh in 1822, a royal pageant of tartanry orchestrated by Walter Scott, ensured that tartan now enjoyed the imprimatur of the establishment.29 The taste for sublimity in late eighteenth-century aesthetics led to a positive reappraisal of the highland landscape, which had formerly been seen as too rugged and wild to be properly picturesque. The vogue for tartan, the romanticization of the Jacobite cause in poetry and song, and the identification of highland mountains, lochs, and glens as the essential features of Scottish landscape meant that the Highlands became the pays not only of highlanders and their descendants in the worldwide highland diaspora, but of all Scots, lowlanders just as much as Gaels. Yet again, it seems, one of the most fascinating puzzles surrounding Scottish self-mythologizing is the absence in a lowland-dominated nation of a clearly articulated myth of lowland identity. The antiquary John Pinkerton tried to supply one in the late eighteenth century, when he traced the ancestry of the Scots-speaking lowlanders back—erroneously—to the aboriginal Picts of the north-eastern Lowlands (who were, in fact, a p-Celtic people). Pinkerton’s attempt to fly a Pictish kite enjoyed some success in the first half of the nineteenth century among Scots racialists who perceived, like the Celtophobic Pinkerton, that the lowlanders were of a different ethnic and racial stock from the Celts of the Highlands.30 However, Pinkerton’s Pictish fantasies were ridiculed by Scott in his novel The Antiquary, alongside the supposed lineage of Fergus MacFerquhard—derided by Scott as ‘the tribe of MacFungus’—and the myth of Ossian, from which Scott was keen to distance himself, notwithstanding his role in promoting Scotland’s adopted highland identity.31 The cult of the Highlands has become one of the most hackneyed features of Scottish popular mythologizing, and, in turn, of cultural history.
From the nineteenth century, mythical Scotland can be appreciated through a wider range of sources, extending beyond the works of an elite circle of chroniclers, historians, and philosophers. The rapid growth of the newspaper press allows us to hear the propagation of myth in the lecture hall, at the public banquet, and at the grand unveilings of monuments and statuary commemorating the Scottish past. Influential studies of historical myth in nineteenth-century Scotland have passed over such sources as unworthy of attention, and have also portrayed the period as an era obsessed with kailyard couthiness and Jacobite swashbuckling.32 Such analyses give a false impression of the depth to which the ‘tartaning’ of the Scottish past had rooted itself in Scottish culture. Certainly, tour operators promoted Scotland as a land defined by history: to travel to Scotland was to step back in time and interact with the past as a palpable presence.33 This commodification of Walter-Scottish history, aligned with Victoria and Albert’s enthusiastic endorsement of romantic highlandism, propagated a sanitized manifestation of national myth. For it was Victoria’s peculiar synthesis of the Presbyterian and the Jacobite, much more than George IV’s spectacular, but brief, excursion to Edinburgh in 1822, that consolidated the modern legend—strikingly at odds with industrial realities—of a tartan Scotland.34 However, this image of Scotland, so convincingly projected onto the world stage by guide books, kailyard literature, and popular song, did not reflect the dominant myth of Scottish history.
A Presbyterian narrative of liberty dominated Scottish popular historiography during the nineteenth century. It told how Scots had contributed to the winning of Britain’s glorious heritage of civil and religious freedom. This Presbyterian interpretation of British history reached back not only to the revolutions of the seventeenth century and to the Reformation that—ultimately—underpinned them, but further back into the medieval past, to the Scottish Wars of Independence, which constituted the political platform for Scotland’s distinctive democratic Reformation and for a Union of equals in 1707. The cult of William Wallace was at the heart of what has come to be known as ‘unionist-nationalism’.35
Speaking on the six-hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Stirling Bridge (1297), the liberal-imperialist peer and former prime minister Lord Rosebery described Wallace’s victory over the English as nothing less than the creation of the Scottish nation. All Britons, he proclaimed, should rejoice ‘in the memory of this hero; for he at Stirling made Scotland great, and if Scotland were not great the Empire of all the Britons would not stand where it does.’36 A letter to the Ayrshire Advertiser from December 1854, written under the pseudonym ‘Pro-Patria’, stated that it was thanks to Wallace and Bruce that the Scots had been able:
at last to form a permanent union with their more powerful neighbour on the principles of most complete equality…. How much better it is for England, than it would have been if the Scottish nation had been overpowered, conquered, and oppressed.37
Since the Middle Ages, it was argued, Scotland had been a beacon of liberty, and nineteenth-century Scots felt an obligation to perpetuate these commitments to the ideal of freedom and, in particular, to the cause of oppressed liberty (though without in any way calling into question the benefits of the Union of 1707). At the laying of the foundation stone of the National Wallace Monument in 1861, the popular author and public speaker James Dodds claimed that had it not been for Wallace’s victory, the Scots ‘would have been engaged in the same awful and terrible contest in which Poland, Italy and Hungary are engaged at this time’.38 Dodds had befriended Lajos Kossuth during the Hungarian nationalist’s exile in London. Attending a meeting in Stirling in 1856 in support of the National Wallace Monument movement, Kossuth himself proclaimed:
May that liberty dwell with you to the consummation of time, is my prayer, and may the monument you are about to raise to the noblest of your national heroes … be a monitor of lasting inspiration to Scotland … Two things at least I can claim to have in common with your William Wallace—that of having struggled for national independence [cheers]—and that of being unfortunate.39
In order to prove the bona fides of the Monument movement, and to raise much-needed funds, letters of encouragement were solicited and received from, amongst others, Kossuth and the Italian patriots Garibaldi and Mazzini, which were then framed in fragments of ‘the Wallace Oak’.40
The elevation of Wallace, it should be noted, conformed to trends found elsewhere in Europe. In 1875 a monument to the Cheruscan chieftain Hermann or Arminius, was completed, which celebrated his defeat of a Roman legion in AD 9. In France a colossal statue was raised to the memory of the Gaulish leader Vercingetorix near the site of the Battle of Gergovia (52 BC).41 Propagandists found ancient and medieval heroes of this sort rich in mythical potential, for so little was known about them that their lives and achievements could be moulded to fit current concerns. Thus a figure such as Wallace—an icon not burdened by a wealth of biographical detail—has proved capable of serving ideological needs that varied from generation to generation. For the Victorians, Wallace was enlisted as an historic exemplar of self-reliance, hard work, and meritocracy.42
Inevitably, Wallace’s pre-Reformation Catholicism was conveniently overlooked, but no such problems attached to John Knox’s central role in the Scottish Reformation. The Reverend Alexander Duff, a Free Church minister, speaking at the tercentenary of Knox’s death in 1872, claimed that by thwarting ‘the oft-renewed Popish conspiracies and confederations in the South’, Knox had saved the throne of Elizabeth. In so doing, the ‘Great Reformer’ had guaranteed the success of the Reformation in both England and Scotland, and, by extension, the cause of civil, constitutional, and religious liberty throughout the British Isles.43 The alternative to Protestantism had been not only Catholicism in the religious sphere, but its political manifestation in tyranny and absolute monarchy.
Ireland was held up as a terrifying example of a nation that lacked the necessary heroic counterpart to Scotland’s great men. By saving Scotland from oppression, Wallace, Knox, and, later, the Covenanters of the seventeenth century had steered Scotland onto a path of historical development happily different from Ireland’s. At the laying of the foundation stone of a monument to Knox intended for Edinburgh’s High Street, the Free Church minister William Cunningham depicted Ireland as suffering from the absence of any ‘Reformer or Reformation of her own at all; and the consequence is, that the great majority of her population are still sunk in Popish ignorance and darkness.’44 Nineteenth-century Protestant critics not only denounced Popery as ungodly, but also identified it as a solvent of nationality. At the United Presbyterian Synod’s commemoration of the Scottish Reformation in 1860, Dr Neil McMichael claimed that whereas Presbyterianism ‘sanctified’ nationality, Popery attempted to destroy nationalities in order that ‘upon the ruins of national freedom she might set her throne’.45
Nineteenth-century Scots aligned their own contemporary causes, such as Chartism,46 with earlier phases of Scotland’s liberal history. Radicals identified both with Wallace and with the Covenanters. In 1814 ten thousand ‘democratic people’ marched from the Lanarkshire town of Strathaven to the field of Drumclog and then on to the site of what they believed to be one of ‘Wallace’s first victories’.47 During the national commemoration of the tercentenary of the Reformation in 1860, Patrick Dove, who had been assistant to Hugh Miller on the Free Church Witness newspaper, argued that Wallace and Bruce had established Scotland’s political freedom, paving the way for the Reformation and the blessings of religious liberty.48
The glue that held the disparate elements of this narrative together was a loosely defined commitment to ‘civil and religious liberty’. At the ‘national meeting’ held to inaugurate the National Wallace Monument movement, in Stirling in June 1856, Provost Melville of Edinburgh claimed that it was thanks to Wallace’s ‘courageous enterprise in war and prudent administration in peace, [that] the first germ of that civil and religious liberty which we now enjoy’ had been established. Almost half a century later, at the inauguration in June 1903 of a monument to the Covenanters who fell at the Battle of Bothwell Bridge, the principal speaker, Lord Overtoun, reminded a crowd of over twenty-six thousand spectators that those who ‘possess in this favoured land the priceless boon of civil and religious liberty’ must remember that the history of Scotland was ‘really the story of the Scottish Church, and of the heroic souls who, against fearful odds, stood and died for Christ’s Crown and Covenant’.49
Notwithstanding the undoubted attractions of the Jacobite cause for Scottish romanticism,50 within the popular Presbyterian interpretation of British history the Stuarts were viewed less as symbols of a lost Scottish nationhood, but more commonly as villains who thwarted the will of the people. Not that nineteenth-century Scots Presbyterians objected to monarchy per se. In 1887 a monument was unveiled in the Ayrshire village of Muirkirk, dedicated to the memory of several Covenanters who had fallen in that parish. The inauguration ceremony made an unambiguous connection between the civil and religious freedoms bequeathed to Scotland by the Covenanters and the beneficent reign of Queen Victoria; indeed, the inauguration was intended to mark Muirkirk’s celebration of Victoria’s Golden Jubilee year.51 The Reverend John Wallace, the parish minister, emphasized the contrast between the 1680s and the 1880s:
we cannot but feel the great and the happy change that has taken place in the relation between sovereign and people since those trying times when the House of Stuart sat upon the Throne … [Victoria] has not only a constitutional, but a moral right to reign.52
The Stuarts’ inherited right to govern was as nothing when weighed against the moral right they had forfeited by their odious persecution of the Covenanters.
The public commemoration of the Forty-Five was marked by equivocation. Commentators stressed the folly of the cause that had prompted the rising, and emphasized that it was not the political goals of Jacobitism which made the events of 1745–6 so worthy of remembrance. Instead, nineteenth-century Scots celebrated the heroism and fidelity of the highlanders, whose descendants in the Highland regiments of the British state had risked their lives on behalf of Britain and its empire.53 A parchment sealed inside the foundation stone of the cairn erected at Culloden stated that the intention was not to remember the Prince or the recovery of the Stuart monarchy but was instead ‘dedicated to the memory of brave Highlanders who fell at Culloden … fighting for a cause which they conscientiously believed to be a right one’.54 Whereas in the twenty-first century the Culloden battlefield of 1746 signifies a national tragedy, a century and a half ago the site had fallen into serious neglect, with several attempts to raise a commemorative monument ending in failure through lack of interest.55 At Glenfinnan, another key site in both Jacobite memory and the Scottish heritage trail, a marble panel placed in the monument erected there in 1815 by MacDonald of Glenaladale describes the Forty-Five as Charles Edward Stuart’s ‘daring and romantic attempt to recover a throne lost by the imprudence of his ancestors’. The panel states that the monument was raised ‘to commemorate the generous zeal and inviolable fidelity’ of Glenaladale’s forebears who ‘fought and bled in that arduous and unfortunate enterprise’.56 Jacobite traditions were too closely associated with feudal authoritarianism, Catholic tyranny, and a marginal episcopalianism to find a secure and straightforward position within the Presbyterian interpretation of Scottish history. Another canonical icon of today’s mythical Scotland, Mary, Queen of Scots, proved similarly problematic for nineteenth-century Scots. Mary’s Catholicism rendered it impossible to bind her tragic tale to the national Presbyterian myth. Instead, Mary occupied the same cultural space as Bonnie Prince Charlie: a subject for songs and poetry, for the novelist, the dramatist, and the painter, but not for those who sought to co-opt the power of the past for present purposes.57
Nevertheless, by the close of the nineteenth century, the complexion of Scottish nationality was changing. Instead of a loyalist unionist-nationalism, a new hybrid emerged which, under the guise of Home Rule, brought out the nationalist implications of the romantic tradition. This is perhaps most clearly exemplified in the antics of the nationalist-cum-Jacobite Theodore Napier, who not only made several pilgrimages to Culloden on the anniversary of the battle but did the same to Fotheringay, scene of the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots.58
Yet the fate of the once-dominant Presbyterian mythology of the nineteenth century was sealed only in the inter-war era, when the intellectuals of the Scottish Renaissance, most prominently Christopher Murray Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid), began to debunk the sentimental kailyardry of previous generations. For Grieve, authenticity was to be found in the Scots language. This was the only reliable touchstone of national identity, and even here truth was not to be equated with a sentimentalized cult of Robert Burns, but with the vigorous full-blooded poetry of the medieval makars. Moreover, the Scottish Reformation was identified as the ultimate source of the prim Victorianism that had stifled indigenous cultural energies. The poet and literary critic Edwin Muir wrote in ‘Scotland 1941’ that the Scots had once been ‘a tribe, a family, a people’, until ‘Knox and Melville clapped their preaching palms’, rendering ‘Burns and Scott, sham bards of a sham nation/And spiritual defeat wrapped warm in riches.’59 However, the Covenanting movement—shorn of its full religious significance—did become a source of inspiration for the Labour movement. Nevertheless, the dominant trend was to mythologize Knox and the Reformers as authoritarian dominies who—far from begetting a liberal tradition—were enemies of popular freedom. The Presbyterian interpretation of history had been turned on its head.
Moreover, with industrial dislocation and the retreat from empire, twentieth-century Scotland lost the self-confidence of the unionist-nationalism and popular imperialism that had flourished in the Victorian era. Secularization and the rise of nationalism contributed to the emergence of a mythology of victimhood, grievance, and glorious failure, running from Flodden (1513), via Culloden (1746) and the Highland clearances, to industrial decline. Post-imperial Scotland had become an underdog nation, its people stabbed in the back by a self-serving aristocracy in 1707, and ever since its needs and values had been subordinated to those of a dominant and unforgiving England. Counterbalancing this myth was an apolitical myth of tartanry that had, as both nationalist and socialist intellectuals maintained, anaesthetized the nation during recent centuries of apathetic unionism to the real condition of Scotland.60 Such arguments were, of course, no less mythological than the myths they criticized. Over time, these views have fashioned a new myth of Scotland’s past that emphasizes nationalism and elides Scottish unionism. In 1993 it came as a jolt when the then Conservative Secretary of State for Scotland, Ian Lang, claimed that he would like to have been a fly on the wall at the Battle of Bannockburn (1314); for, had it not been for Bannockburn, Lang stated, Scotland would not have joined in Union with England under such equal terms.61 Had Lang expressed such an opinion a century or so earlier, he would have been articulating a widely held view. However, as we have seen, political and cultural demands change, and the myths of Scottish history change with them.
Ash, M., The Strange Death of Scottish History (Edinburgh, 1980).
Broun, D., Finlay, R., and Lynch, M., eds., Image and Identity: The Making and Re-making of Scotland through the Ages (Edinburgh, 1998).
Cowan, E. J., and Finlay, R., eds., Scottish History: The Power of the Past (Edinburgh, 2002).
Gaskill, H., ed., The Reception of Ossian in Europe (New York, 2004).
Kidd, C., Subverting Scotland’s Past (Cambridge, 1993).
Thiesse, A-M., La Création des identités nationales (Paris, 1999).
Trevor-Roper, H., The Invention of Scotland (New Haven, 2008).