28 ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ and the ’45
29 Sir Walter Scott: ‘The Wizard of the North’
Epilogue: ‘There Shall be a Scottish Parliament’
Appendix B: Kings and Queens of Scotland
Early medieval Scotland (C.AD 700)
The Battle of Stirling Bridge, 11 September 1297
The Battle of Otterburn, 19 August 1388
The Battle of Flodden, 9 September 1513
The Battle of Solway Moss, 24 November 1542
The Battle of Dunbar, 3 September 1650
The Battle of Worcester, 3 September 1651
The Battle of Killiecrankie, 27 July 1689
The Battle of Prestonpans, 21 September 1745
The Battle of Culloden, 16 April 1746
These Tales were written in the interval of other avocations, for the use of the young relative to whom they are inscribed [Sir Walter Scott’s grandson, John Hugh Lockhart]. They embrace at the same time some attempt at a general view of Scottish History, with a selection of its more picturesque and prominent points … The compilation, though professing to be only a collection of Tales, or Narratives from the Scottish Chronicles, will nevertheless be found to contain a general view of the History of that country, from the period when it begins to possess general interest.
SIR WALTER SCOTT,
PREFACE TO TALES OF A GRANDFATHER
These are stirring times for Scotland. With a parliament of its own – the first for 292 years – Scotland stands on the threshold of a new future. What this future will bring is anyone’s guess; all we can be sure of is that it will be informed and influenced by the past, just as our present has been. History gives the present a context.
In this book I have tried to tease out the significant strands in Scotland’s history which highlight the key concepts of nationhood and identity. When and how did the many peoples who inhabited Scotland become Scots? When and how did the country of Scotland become the nation of Scotland? How did relationships with England (and other nations) evolve? How did an independent realm develop? How did the role of kingship, the concept of monarchy, develop? When and how did the governance of Scotland evolve into the community of counsels which is now called parliament?
All these threads are woven, often luridly, into the tapestry of Scotland’s past. But what was that past? The Scottish history which I absorbed in my childhood was the history of Scotland as expressed and cast in the nineteenth century by the greatest novelist of his day, Sir Walter Scott. Some 175 years ago he wrote Tales of a Grandfather (1827–29), purportedly for the edification of his grandson John Hugh Lockhart, whom he addressed by the neat pseudonym of ‘Master Hugh Littlejohn’. In the Tales, Scott told history essentially as story. He was a brilliant teller of history. And he had a wonderful feel for the natural landscape, for the scenes where history happened – history on the hoof, one might call it. This is one of the things which have made his Tales such an enduringly popular exposition of history for generations of readers of all ages.
Like every historian, Scott had his own views – there is no such thing as truly objective history: every generation writes its own history to suit its own agenda, for history is part of the process of cultural definition and redefinition. Scott’s agenda was very clear. Soon after writing the Tales, he expanded his children’s book into a ‘grown-up’ History of Scotland, 1033–1788 (published in 1831). His purpose, as he put it, was ‘to show the slow and interrupted progress by which England and Scotland, ostensibly united by the accession of James the First of England, gradually approximated to each other, until the last shades of national difference may be almost said to have disappeared’.
Implicit in everything Scott wrote was the assumption that this union of England and Scotland was the inevitable outcome of an inevitable historical process – a process which meant progress. He believed passionately that the Union of the Crowns in 1603 and the Union of the Parliaments in 1707 had helped Scotland to mature out of turbulent and rebellious adolescence into adult nationhood, as an equal partner in the corporate nation-state of Britain.
Walter Scott was a meticulous and extremely erudite historian as well as being the first great historical novelist. He was familiar with all the fashionable theories of history of his day. He read extraordinarily widely, had a remarkable memory, and absorbed information from all manner of sources. He searched out medieval manuscripts and founded societies to edit and publish them.1 He was greatly admired by historians all over Europe for the way in which he breathed fresh life into the musty recesses of the past. He was deeply interested in historical changes and movements and their causes – and even more so in their effects. And in his greatest novels (where his characters are constantly seen as being helplessly trapped in the social and economic forces of history), no less than in his writing of history, he subtly and imaginatively examined the meaning of history in terms of the relationship between tradition and progress. Scotland, it has often been said, was invented by Walter Scott in his portrayal of its history.
But