Supreme icon led the fight for freedom and united a nation

Published on Sunday 21 August 2005 00:29

FOR THE historian of the past three centuries of Union, the current debate on identity is intriguing because it contrasts strikingly with earlier concerns. In 1800 the issue which confronted Scottish intellectuals was not the threat to the Union but the moral danger which the rapprochement with England posed to the very survival of Scottishness itself.

Several prominent Scots of the time, including Sir John Sinclair, Henry Cockburn and Sir Walter Scott, feared that assimilation with England was a real possibility and that Scotland faced the future as 'North Britain', a mere regional appendage of the British state. The Union had brought remarkable benefits but at the cost of anglicisation; as Scott put it, 'what makes Scotland Scotland is fast disappearing'.

England was not the only threat to Scottishness. Between the 1760s and the 1850s Scotland experienced unprecedented economic growth and the fastest rate of urbanisation in western Europe. Economic modernity was creating a new order. In addition, much of the historical and philosophical analysis of the Scottish Enlightenment of the 18th century gave further momentum to this process. The literati subjected the ancient history of Scotland to rational inquiry and then dismissed much of it as mythical, fanciful and beyond belief. In this way the nation was in danger of losing the connection with its past. The Presbyterian Church of Scotland was fracturing rapidly as dissenting congregations multiplied in the first few decades of the 19th century until the old Church finally split in two in the 1843 Disruption. Education too was felt to be in a sorry state. Many members of the Scottish legal establishment also lost confidence. Some, such as Henry Cockburn and Francis Jeffrey, denounced the Scottish system as backward in comparison with that of England, while others argued that legal assimilation was a necessary step in order to reap all the economic benefits that the Union could provide.

We now know with the historian's supreme advantage of hindsight that all of this pessimism proved to be groundless. Scotland endured as an entity and prospered during the Union but not at the expense of the annihilation of Scottishness.

Indeed what is most remarkable is that so much of what we now regard as integral and accepted features of modern Scottish identity in 2005 were created, invented, renewed or strengthened in the very period when the death of Scotland was widely predicted by many thinking Scots.

The idea of Scotland as a national entity was being reinforced through the appeal to the nation's distinctive past which was threatened with destruction by the scale of urban and industrial transformation. Sir Walter Scott himself, who feared that Scotland might become invisible, helped to pioneer major collections of Scottish ballads and folk tales. Scottish history loomed large in the most popular working-class paper of the later 19th century, The People's Journal.

It contained frequent series on the Scottish past and also had a pioneering interest in folklore and social history that went far beyond the orthodox focus on kings, queens and national heroes. The Reformation, the Covenanters and the Presbyterian heroes were commemorated in the paintings of Sir George Harvey and immortalised in numerous monuments in stone erected in several Scottish towns.

But more potent were the mythical and semi-mythical stories and personalities set in the times before industrialisation. Here again Scott had led the way.

Through his Waverley novels and Tales of a Grandfather he invested the Scottish past with a magical appeal and satisfied the powerful emotional needs for nostalgia in a society experiencing unprecedented changes. Scott was a brilliant pioneer in the invention of tradition, a process which helped to develop a new set of national symbols and icons while at the same time renewing others of venerable antiquity in the contemporary image of Victorian Scotland.

The adoption of tartan and kilt in the modernising Scotland of the 19th century at first sight seems bizarre. For much of the period since medieval times Lowland society had regarded the Highlands as alien, hostile and barbarous.

This antagonism hardened during the Jacobite rebellion of 1745-6 and its immediate aftermath. Presbyterian Scotland had been threatened with a Catholic counter-revolution spearheaded by a Highland army. There was rejoicing in many parts when it was annihilated at Culloden. Moreover, it was deeply ironic that as Scotland was transformed into an urban and industrial society, the lites of the nation looked towards the poorest and most underdeveloped rural region in the country as the source of some of its main symbols of cultural identity.

Highlandism essentially grew out of the Union. After all, Scotland was in a contradictory position within the imperial relationship with England. The Scottish economic miracle ultimately depended on the connection but some feared that the massive political and material superiority of England could also inevitably lead to full-scale assimilation and the disappearance of the historic nation.

In addition, this was a time when romantic nationalism was spreading throughout Europe.

Scotland was unlikely to remain isolated. Yet any vigorous political assertion of national identity could undermine the imperial and union relationship on which Scottish economic success ultimately depended. Highlandism therefore answered the emotional need for a distinctive Scottish identity without in any way compromising the Union.

On the contrary, the indissoluble link between tartan, the deeds of the Highland warrior, patriotism and imperial service conferred a new cultural and emotional cohesion on the Anglo-Scottish connection.

Above all, the cult of national heroes became one of the most popular ways of linking urban Scotland with its history. Pre-eminent in this respect were Robert Burns and William Wallace.

The modern Burns cult was born in this period.

In one Burns festival in 1844 an estimated 80,000 were in attendance, and of this multitude 2,000 sat down to eat lunch, accompanied by numerous toasts to the poet.

The cult of William Wallace in the 19th century was complex and bears little relation to the raw nationalism of Hollywood's Braveheart in the 1990s. There can be little doubt that Wallace was one of the supreme Victorian icons. Magnificent statues to the hero of the Wars of Independence were erected overlooking the Tweed in Lanark, but these paled before the grandest of such projects, the 220-foot high tower of the National Wallace Monument, built near Stirling between 1859 and 1869.

This colossal edifice overlooked the country where the Scots at Stirling Bridge and Bannockburn had fought their most decisive battles against the English.

Wallace was not only remembered in statuary and monuments. Blind Harry's 15th-century epic, 'The Wallace', which was vehemently anti-English in language and tone, maintained its popularity, while tales of Bruce and Wallace were always familiar features in the local press.

But the Wallace cult was not designed to threaten the Union or inspire political nationalism, though the membership of the National Association for the Vindication of Scottish Rights were among the most enthusiastic supporters of the proposal for a national monument. Rather, the cult reminded the Scots of their own history in which the Union had been achieved because of Wallace's earlier struggle for freedom.

Wallace had ensured that the Scottish people had never been conquered. As a result of their own courageous fight for independence in medieval times, a fruitful, peaceful and enduring union between equal partners had become possible in 1707.

In addition, Wallace could appeal to a Victorian Scotland profoundly divided across class lines. To middle-class Liberals, he had saved the nation at a time in its history when it had been betrayed by the aristocracy which still held power in the 19th century and which remained the reactionary enemy of many of the urban bourgeoisie throughout the Victorian era. For working-class Chartists, who often passionately sang Scots wha hae at their meetings, he represented the spirit of the common man striving for freedom from oppression. The national devotion to Wallace demonstrated that pride in Scottish nationhood and loyalty to union and empire could be reconciled.

The very speed of the Scottish economic transformation and its accompanying cost of irreligion, social disruption and even political anarchy, released a wave of nostalgia and yearning among the propertied classes for an idealised past. This provided the perfect context for the inventors of tradition to produce the refurbished icons of identity which have endured to our own day and which we as Scots at the beginning of the new millennium are now refashioning in our image.

• Tom Devine is author of The Scottish Nation