AT the death of Alexander III. in 1286 Scotland made territorially one
country; the first of Scottish kings, Alexander ruled in fact, as well
as in name, from the Pentland Firth to the Solway. His own special
achievement had been not only to rule the mainland with a firm hand, but
to add the Hebrides and even the Isle of Man to the territory he had
inherited. It had taken well-nigh eight centuries to complete the work
of consolidation to which Alexander put the finishing touch—a work that
had its origin about the beginning of the sixth century, when in the
modern Argyleshire a band of Celts from Ireland founded the Dalriadic
Kingdom. Some two centuries and a half elapse, and one kingdom is formed
to the north of the Forth by the union of the Picts and Scots under
Kenneth Macalpine; and within two centuries more one king nominally
ruled over the whole mainland of Scotland. It was in 1018 that this end
was achieved; and the whole intervening period between that date and the
accession of Alexander III. had been needed to make Scotland a
territorial unit. It was a great work that had been accomplished, and,
with the exception of England, no other country in Europe had attained a
similar degree of territorial cohesion.
But though Scotland was
territorially one, it would be an abuse of words to speak of it as a
nation. The bond of common memories, common hopes and aspirations, which
is requisite to the evolution of a national consciousness, did not and
could not yet exist. The heterogeneous elements that composed its
population had only the tradition of mutual estrangement or hereditary
hostility. Located in different regions and speaking different tongues,
what common interests could exist between the Briton of Strathclyde, the
Gael of the Highlands, and the Saxon of Lothian? Of all the countries in
Western Europe, indeed, there were none where greater obstacles existed
to prevent the formation of a united people than in Scotland. Diverse
races, diverse tongues, a land by its distribution of mountain, river,
and sea almost destined by nature to permanent regional division—such
were some of the impediments to be overcome before a nation in any real
sense of the term could take shape and consistency within its
boundaries. The process, it is evident, must needs be a protracted one,
and, as in all human evolution, what we call accident must play a large
part in it. However inherent and powerful the tendency towards unity,
events over which the incipient nation had no control might intervene
and dash the fair prospect of national growth. The object of the present
lecture is to trace the growth of a national consciousness in the
Scottish people, and to note the main causes that forwarded or impeded
it.
In the development of nations
there is of necessity much that is common to all of them. The same
common instincts of human nature must everywhere be at work, and in the
case of a society like that of Western Christendom similar agencies must
have gone to the common result. Under the regime of feudalism and the
medieval church, the different countries possessed common institutions,
were informed by common ideals, and by community of interests were borne
unconsciously onward to the same goal. Though in the
evolution of national consciousness, however, there was thus a general
uniformity, there were peculiarities in the process which constitute the
essential difference between the national history of one country and
another, and like other countries Scotland had a development
specifically its own. It must be our object in the present discussion,
therefore, to note at once what was common to Scotland with other
countries in their respective national developments, and what was
peculiar to herself in her national growth.
Amid the disasters that fell so
thick on the country after the death of Alexander III., the most
far-sighted contemporary could only have predicted the undoing of the
work that had been accomplished by that king and the long line of his
predecessors. As the history of the previous century had shown, it was
only under such strong and sagacious rulers as David I. and the last two
Alexander's that the heterogeneous elements of the kingdom could be held
together. On the death of Alexander III. there followed the extinction
of a dynasty, a disputed succession in the most aggravated form, and a
war for bare existence against a foreign invader. In all human
probability the result must be either the absorption of the kingdom by
its hereditary enemy and rival, or its relapse into the original
elements that composed it. From both of these dangers it had in reality
the narrowest escape. Alexander had hardly been dead before civil war
broke out. Robert Bruce, Lord of Annandale, who claimed the Crown on the
ground of nomination and descent, sought to make good his claim by the
sword, but it is impossible to imagine that in the existing
circumstances he could ever have established himself as the acknowledged
King of Scots. The intervention of Edward I. had at least this immediate
result—it arrested civil war and for the time prevented national
disintegration. The grandson of the Lord of Annandale, the hero-king
Robert I., succeeded in making himself sole ruler of the kingdom, but it
was only his own remarkable career and the new experience the country
had undergone that had made this consummation possible. In the war of
deliverance which he carried to so glorious a conclusion, the various
sections of the Scottish people were drawn together by common interests,
which in large degree modified hereditary antagonisms, and disposed them
to find a common head. The greatness of Bruce’s achievement placed him
in a position which left no opening for a successful rival, and through
constraint or self-interest or affection the majority of the people
recognised in him the only safeguard against internecine war and a
foreign enemy.
But if there had been the
narrowest risk of dismemberment, there had been an equally narrow risk
of absorption by England. Had Edward II. been cast in the mould of his
father, and had Edward III. not been diverted by other schemes of
conquest, Scotland must either have bled to death or reluctantly
surrendered her independence.
As it was, she emerged from the
long struggle an independent and a united kingdom. Her material loss had
been great. For a full century and a half after the War of Independence
the Scottish people cast regretful eyes backward to the golden age of
Alexander III. But if the material sacrifice had been disastrous, the
spiritual gain was an adequate compensation. ‘A people without an
epopee,’ says Goethe, ‘can never become much worth,’ and Scotland now
possessed the materials of an epopee which in due time was to become a
national possession. First the deeds of Bruce were commemorated in the
soberly-imaginativc poem of Barbour, and at a later date Wallace was
transfigured by Blind Harry with the lineaments and proportions
requisite to make a historic personage pass into the popular
imagination. Wallace, says Wordsworth, left his name
‘Like a wild flower
All over his dear country,'
and his deeds, he goes on to say,
created
'A local tour
Of independence and item liberty.’
Such was the impression Wordsworth
gained from his tour in Scotland in 1814, and his words fitly describe
the moral and spiritual gain of the War of Independence. In a degree far
beyond what she had been in the prosperous days of Alexander III.,
Scotland had now become a united people, with the common traditions and
aspirations which go to form a national consciousness.
Even yet, however, Scotland could
hardly be described as a nation in the sense in which we now understand
the term. In the conditions of society, as they then existed in every
country of Christendom, there were inherent forces at work which
inevitably tended to hold apart the constituent elements of any people
and to prevent their fusion into a uniform whole. Of these separative
forces the chief were the conditions imposed by the feudal system and by
the economic conditions of trade and commerce. Within his own domain
each feudal lord was a petty king, who for the most part regarded his
neighbours as his natural rivals or enemies. As were his own feelings,
so were those of all dependent on him. They virtually composed a
self-subsistent society with little concern in the greater world around
them. Such law and justice as were to be had were mainly administered by
their feudal superior; and the necessaries of life were found in the
cultivation of his domains. So long, therefore, as a country was
subdivided among such isolated societies, the close national union that
can only come of interdependence was practically unattainable.
If the dwellers in the country
districts were thus held apart by the conditions of feudal tenure, the
towns were equally isolated by the conditions of trade and commerce. A
conclusive proof of this fact is that every town of any consequence was
surrounded by a line of defence, which it was one of the chief duties of
the citizens to maintain in an effective state of repair. These lines of
defence, it is to be noted, served a double purpose. They provided
security against actual violence— violence from rival towns, from
neighbouring feudal potentates, from foreign invaders. In the present
connection, however, it is more important to note the second object
which they served. By the conditions under which the mediaeval towns had
grown up, each to a large degree was an independent centre, living its
own life, and disposed to regard every similar community as a rival or
rather as an enemy. The reason for this attitude is simple. At one time
or other the town had received certain trading privileges from its
superior—king, ecclesiastic, or feudal lord—and on the conservation of
these privileges its existence and prosperity depended. It would be
irrelevant to discuss the nature and origin of these privileges, and it
is sufficient to note for our present purpose that the lines of defence
that surrounded the towns were indispensable for their preservation. At
the different gates in the wall or dyke every stranger could be
questioned as to the motives that brought him there. If he was suspected
of any intention of infringing the town privileges, he was either
refused admittance or placed under proper surveillance. Only on one
occasion did the townsmen freely open their arms to all and sundry. At
the annual fair all barriers were thrown down, and absolute freedom of
trade prevailed so long as it lasted. Among the forces that made for
national as opposed to municipal ends, therefore, these fairs must be
assigned their due place. In Scotland, as in other countries, every town
of any consequence had the right of holding its fair either by royal
grant or immemorial prescription. As on the occasion of its celebration
merchants and traders flocked to the town from every part of the
kingdom, it was then borne in upon its citizens that they formed part of
a larger whole in which all had a common interest. Still the normal
attitude of every citizen was that his own community was an isolated
society surrounded by dangerous rivals against whose encroachment he
must ever be on his guard. Such being the relations of every town in the
kingdom to each other, it is evident that the growth of a national
consciousness in the most enterprising portion of the inhabitants of
every country must of necessity be a slow and gradual process. Till new
economic conditions arose, in fact, collective endeavour was impossible,
and a fully developed nation could not in the nature of things be
formed. In due time, as we shall see, these new conditions did arise,
and Scotland, like its neighbours, did not fail to profit by them.
These obstacles to the growth of
national feeling—the isolating tendencies of feudalism and of trade—were
common to Scotland and all other countries. But there were other
impeding forces which in her case were of special significance. From the
nature of her climate and surface intercommunication was attended with
peculiar difficulties. The construction and maintenance of roads implied
an amount of labour and expense far beyond what was necessary in such
countries as England and France. In no country in the Middle Ages were
the roads such as to render communication an easy matter, but in
Scotland, with its obstructing mountains, rivers, and bogs, they were
practically impassable during a great portion of the year But without
rapid and frequent intercommunication, the intercourse necessary to weld
a people into a united whole was impossible, and not till past the
middle of the eighteenth century can this obstacle be said to have been
tolerably overcome.
But besides these physical
impediments there were other hindrances to national fusion which formed
a special difficulty in the case of Scotland. Though acknowledging a
common head, the various portions of which the kingdom was composed
continued to be inhabited by distinct peoples speaking different
tongues.
Between the natives of the wide
district of Galloway, the Gael of the Highlands, and the Teuton of
Lothian and the Eastern coast, there could be little community of
feeling, few palpable common interests, and except on rare occasions of
general peril but little united action towards a common end. In the case
of Galloway, the wild nature of the country and the fighting instincts
of its people, perpetuated by the rivalries of the clans who divided its
territory among them, long availed to hold it apart from the main stream
of national development. Even into the fifteenth century Galloway was
governed by laws of its own, and till the beginning of the eighteenth it
clung to the Celtic language, which it had inherited from before the
days of St. Columba. Still more estranging were the conditions of the
Highland section of the kingdom. Of wider extent and still more
inaccessible from its natural features, the region of the Highlands
seemed destined by nature to independence. In greater degree than
Galloway, its inhabitants had a tradition of hostility toward the
Lowlands which only the slow growth of time and the pervasive influences
of modern civilisation have been able to overcome. Till the opening of
the fifteenth century the Lords of the Isles regarded themselves as
independent sovereigns, and made common cause with England against their
nominal head the King of Scots.
Such were some of the forces that
made against the development of a united Scottish people. Yet, as the
issue was to prove, the centripetal tendencies must have been more
powerful than those that made for decentralisation. First we have to
note that in all the countries that made up Christendom there had from
the beginning been a tendency towards the formation of distinct
kingdoms, ruled by one head, and inhabited by peoples bound by
ever-strengthening ties of common interest. For special reasons, which
need not now be considered, Italy and Germany were exceptions to the
general rule, but by the close of the fifteenth century three great
kingdoms, France, Spain, and England, had been formed on the same
general lines of development. As an integral part of Christendom,
Scotland had been subjected to the same influences as these other
countries. Consciously and unconsciously, therefore, she was pushing for
the same goal. From the War of Independence onwards she had been more or
less in the current of European politics, and this was in itself a
powerful stimulus towards the national unity which alone could give her
a voice in the general affairs of Europe.
Among the unifying influences that
went to create distinct nations, that exercised by the Church can hardly
be exaggerated. In the case of Scotland the teaching of the Church was
almost the sole common influence to which its people were subjected.
Trade and commerce, in the Middle Ages, as we have seen, were separative
as well as unifying agencies; but such powers as the Church exerted were
wholly in the direction of cohesion. From the teaching of its religion,
by the ministry of its officials, the Gael was taught that he was of the
same flesh as the Saxon, that he was placed in the world for the same
purpose, and that the same final destiny was the lot of both. By the
organisation of the Church, which bound in a common whole the length and
breadth of the kingdom, the idea of unity was brought home to every
subject with a force and persuasiveness which no other agency could
exert to the same degree. The parish church, with its ministrants, was
at once the symbol of unity, and the most effective factor in enforcing
it.
In England national unity had been
greatly furthered by the development of its representative assembly; to
the Parliament of Scotland, on the other hand, a similar degree of
influence cannot be attributed. At no time were the Scottish people
greatly exercised regarding the privileges of their representative
assembly; and it was only on occasions when their own interests were
specially involved that the sovereign and nobles manifested any lively
desire to improve its constitution. During the fifteenth century, when
its constituent parts were fully developed, the Scottish Parliament had
but little prestige and little real importance; and for two excellent
reasons. Through the weakness of the Crown it became the mere tool of
successive factions; and through the weakness of the executive its laws
were made only to be set at nought. To the Scottish Parliament,
therefore, wc can assign but a subsidiary part in the moulding of the
Scottish nation.
After the Church as a power
tending to unity is probably to be reckoned the administration of law
and justice. When it was brought home to the Highlander that he must
seek justice from the Sheriffs’ Courts at Dingwall and Tarbert, and to
the Lowlander that he must seek it in Edinburgh, Perth, and Aberdeen, he
realised that he was part of a
great mechanism, with the working of which he must find himself in
harmony. It was the misfortune of Scotland, however, that the royal
judicatories were permanently enfeebled by a weak executive; and thus
was lost that confidence in a central source of justice which makes so
large a composite in what we call a national consciousness.
Great public events, involving the
welfare of a whole people, must also play a chief part in national
development. For a century and a half after the War of Independence,
however, there was hardly an outstanding event that exercised a powerful
influence in invigorating national sentiment. No great movement absorbed
the mind of the people; and no public calamity or triumph set their
hearts beating in unison with common fear or exultation. In the
protracted struggle between the Crown and the nobility, which is the
dominant characteristic of the period, there was little to stimulate
patriotism or to bind in closer union the different sections of the
kingdom. To the people in general it was indifferent which faction
gained a temporary ascendency, though the debasement of the coinage by
James III. appears to have evoked a popular feeling which strengthened
the successive rebellions against his authority. There was, indeed, one
permanent feeling in the breasts of the Scottish people which must be
reckoned among the most effectual influences in fusing them into a
nation. Since the War of Independence England had never lost sight of
its aim of re-attaching the country which had once been in its grasp.
Its own troubles had prevented the repetition of the concentrated
attempts of Edward I.; but persistently, though intermittently, almost
every English king had shown that he only wanted the opportunity to
repeat Edward’s work. Hatred and fear of an inveterate and formidable
enemy, therefore, were feelings shared by the great mass of the Scottish
people, and which were bound to strengthen the sentiment of a common
nationality. The animating motive of Blind Harry’s poem, produced at the
close of the fifteenth century, is sheer detestation of England—a motive
which finds expression even in Acts of Parliament and other documents of
the period.
With the opening of the sixteenth
century begins a new phase in the development of the European countries.
The new departure was due to the widened scope of thought and action in
almost every sphere of human experience. In speculation the scholastic
philosophy ceased to be a living interest for the most active minds;
before the century was long begun Luther shook Christendom to its
foundations; trade and commerce passed under new laws and regulations,
becoming national instead of merely municipal concerns; and the very
limits of the earth were extended by the discovery of another
hemisphere. Under the influence of such facts and ideas individuals and
peoples were quickened to a degree of self-consciousness which had been
impossible under the comparative routine of the Middle Age. In different
measures and by different manifestations we see the vivifying forces at
work in England, Spain, and France —now consolidated kingdoms under the
direction of virtually absolute rulers. Isolated as she was by nature
and circumstances, Scotland could not share to the same extent as these
countries in the general movement that was ushering in the new time.
Later in the century, indeed, she had an experience of her own to pass
through which supplied the spiritual momentum requisite to reveal a
people to itself and give a direction to its destinies. Yet under James
IV., at the opening of the century, Scotland made a notable stride
forward in national development.
It was a fortunate dispensation
that gave her a king like James at this special period. Though somewhat
lacking in the sense of royal responsibility, he possessed many
qualities that fitted him to govern a people when novelties were in the
air. Intelligent, curious, and enterprising, he was peculiarly open to
new ideas, and even unduly eager to see them put in practice. The work
he accomplished in consolidating his kingdom gives him a notable place
among our princes. Beyond any of his predecessors, James succeeded in
making the Highlands and Islands an integral part of his dominion. He
definitively broke the power of the Lords of the Isles, thus ridding the
Crown of a power that had been virtually a formidable rival, and he
reduced the Highlands generally to a state of peace and order which they
had never previously known. It has just been said that one of the chief
forces that tend to create a nation is the sense of a supreme fountain
of justice over which the prince is the presiding divinity, and among
our kings few did more to deepen this sense throughout every class of
his subjects. He was indefatigable in his attendance on the justice-eyres,
by which justice was administered at regular intervals throughout every
quarter of the kingdom. Above all he gave a local place and habitation
to the Supreme Court of Justice—known as the ‘Daily Council’—by
virtually
making Edinburgh its permanent abode. And in passing, the significance
of this step deserves to be specially noted. Till the close of the
fifteenth century Scotland could hardly be said to have possessed a
capital. Before that period parliaments and conventions had met
indifferently in the chief towns of the kingdom as the exigencies of the
moment had dictated. The kings, also, had no fixed place of abode, and
took up their residence wherever state business or their own pleasure
called them. Henceforward, however, Edinburgh became the settled home of
the sovereign; except on rare ociasions Parliament now met there; and
there, as we have seen, James fixed the head-quarters of law. The
significance of this concentration was that Scotland now possessed an
acknowledged centre from which could radiate all the inappreciable
influences that bind a people to a common goal and destiny. What the
possession of an undisputed capital implied for the growth of national
feeling is abundantly proved in the history of every country. We are now
carefully warned against the use of physical illustrations in reference
to history, but it seems an innocent analogy to compare the function of
the capital in the body politic to the function of the heart in the
animal body.
In still another sphere of his
activity James did an important work in consolidating his kingdom,
though, as the future was to show, it was a work attended by unhappy as
well as benign results. In the three contemporary kingdoms —England,
France, and Spain—there was an equally marked endeavour on the part of
their rulers to make themselves absolute princes. Henry VIII., Francis
I., and Charles V., all in greater or less degree succeeded in achieving
this object. The policy of James IV. shows that he consciously aimed at
the same result, and the history of his reign proves that he in a great
degree attained it. From the time that he reached his majority he
appears to have set himself to dispense with Parliaments, and to govern
through the Privy Council, which, though it dates from David II, first
took definite shape in James's own reign. But, as the members of this
Council were his own nominees, he thus made himself virtually the
uncontrolled master of his kingdom. The immediate outcome of this policy
was in the true interests of the country. The great national evil of the
preceding century had been the over-riding of the Crown by the nobles,
with the result that effective administration and a consecutive public
policy had been equally rendered impossible. In these conditions the
tendency towards national unity had been inevitably checked and
retarded. When James found himself in a position to govern through a
docile Privy Council, this evil came to a temporary end. From the time
that he reached manhood, the nobles ceased to play a leading part in the
affairs of the kingdom; and he is himself the one dominating figure to
his reign’s disastrous close. But though the immediate consequences of
his policy were beneficent, it was fraught with sinister results for the
future. It was the example of James IV. that inspired James VI. and
Charles I. in imposing their will on their subjects through a Council
which simply existed to register their behests.
Such were the important results of
James's rule in knitting his kingdom to a closer unity. Yet of all the
actions and events of his reign, it was perhaps its closing disaster
that most effectually served the happy end. Such a calamity as that of
Flodden has a power to evoke a consentaneous national feeling which no
other experience can produce. It is the misfortunes of the household
that bind its members in the closest bonds of interest and affection,
and, as all history shows, it is the sense of common calamity that gives
to a nation one heart and soul and mind. On the field of Flodden, as we
have been so often told, there was hardly a family of name that did not
lose father, brother, or son. From the remotest Hebrides, from Highlands
and Lowlands, the ill-starred host had come, on an errand from which
human foresight and ‘metaphysical aid’ seemed alike to dissuade the
infatuated king, yet was it precisely this sense of inevitable doom,
combined with overwhelming disaster, that gave the memory of Flodden an
undying place in the heart and imagination of the Scottish people.
The sobriquets by which James V.
was known among his subjects - 'The Gaberlunzie King,’ the ‘Red Tod,'
the ‘ King of the Commons’—show that he held a permanent place in their
affections, but his public policy cannot be said to have forwarded the
work of consolidating the nation. His reign saw the beginnings of a new
chapter in the national history. A fateful question was now presented to
the country, the decision of which must determine the direction of its
future development. The question was—what were to be its future
relations to England and France respectively? For more than two
centuries England had been regarded as a natural enemy, against whose
insatiable cupidity Scotland must ever be on its guard. As an ally
against their common enemy she had cultivated France, and the last fruit
of the alliance had been the disaster of Flodden. In the people at large
that disaster had only intensified the hereditary hatred of its
instrument, but thinking men had already begun to be of opinion that the
time had come when a new policy would be in the best interests of the
country. John Major, the historian, and later Sir David Lyndsay, the
poet, both ‘kindly Scots' if ever there were such, publicly argued that
England and not France was Scotland’s natural ally. Henry VIII.’s breach
with Rome, however, at first seemed to put reconciliation further off
than ever, though, in the gyration of events, it was to be the main
cause of drawing the two countries together. James V. had never any
hesitation as to which of the two paths he should follow. His first
marriage with Magdalen of France and his second with Mary of Lorraine
committed not only himself but his successor Mary to the hereditary
policy of antagonism to England and alliance with France. In this policy
James had the sympathies of his people behind him, and the character and
conduct of Henry VIII. deepened the estrangement between the two
peoples. What we have to note in connection with our present purpose,
however, is that James had not inherited his father’s gifts of
conciliating or repressing a turbulent nobility. The disgraceful affair
of Solway Moss is the final commentary on his conduct of affairs both at
home and abroad. At the call of James IV. noble and commoner had
followed him across the English border; despite entreaties and threats
his son (could not collect a force to attend him on a similar adventure.
In the opposition of the nobles,
there were doubtless very mixed motives, but the motive which they
themselves put forward had its ground in fact and reason; in their
king’s eagerness to carry fire and sword into England he was serving
France better than his own kingdom.
At the death of James V. it might
seem that Scotland was less a united nation than it had been at the
death of his father. In point of fact she had but entered on one of
those momentous crises in which a nation comes to a full consciousness
of itself, and with fully opened eyes chooses the path which its
instincts impel it to follow. The reign of Mary had not well begun when
her people had to face another dilemma besides that of the French or
English alliance. The choice between two policies was complicated by the
choice between two religions. With the details of the revolution in
policy and religion we are not here concerned. The question before us
is, in what manner and degree the double revolution influenced the
development of the people that carried it through.
The one governing fact is that for
the first time in their history the Scottish people had to determine a
question which demanded the forthputting of their whole heart and mind.
But here it is well to remember that when we speak of a nation we do not
mean the number of heads that make up the population. The nation of any
country is that section of the population which, by its capacity of
thought and feeling, by the strength of its convictions and the
strenuousness of its action, determines the main current of the general
life and presents the characteristics which specifically distinguish one
nation from another. Understood in this sense, the Scottish nation
during the reign of Mary consisted of a few thousands, mainly to be
found in the chief towns of the kingdom. On this elect few it devolved
to choose the course which the whole people were to follow and to
develop those national traits by which the Scottish character is known
to the world. But of this chosen number it was not to be expected that
all would see eye to eye on the momentous questions that were submitted
to them. Some by natural instinct favoured the old order, and wished to
abide in the ways of their fathers. To such it seemed the wisest and
safest policy to hold by the ancient religion and the traditional
alliance, and not to venture on courses which might lead no man knew
whither. Wherever the new faith had appeared, these persons argued— in
France, in Germany, in England—civil discord and revolution had been the
invariable result. On the other hand, the greater number of the select
body of the people came to be of a different mind. To them the teaching
of the new religion appeared to be a revelation from Heaven which no
individual or nation could reject without forfeiture both in this world
and the next. But if the new faith were to be adopted, it was with
Protestant England and not with Catholic France that the destinies of
Scotland must be linked. It was in the collision of thought and feeling
between these two classes of persons that a Scottish nation in the
strict sense of the term became a real entity, conscious of itself and
with a destiny to fulfil. In the imbroglio of the Reformation struggle
we are apt to lose sight of this fact. In the maze of statecraft and
diplomacy we see only the failure and success of one and another stroke
of policy, and we are bewildered into imagining that these were the
determining factors in the final issue. In point of fact, statesmen and
diplomatists were but the conscious or unconscious instruments of the
new forces that were working in society, and which were impelling the
various peoples along the paths which long-inherited instincts marked
out for them. The French people, says Michelet, would not have the
Reformation; Scotland, on the other hand, wished to have it; and the
different choice of the two peoples is only to be explained by their
respective idiosyncrasies which had been evolved in the long process of
time.
The essential significance of the
Scottish Reformation, therefore, is that for the first time in our
history we find a great question submitted to a public opinion
sufficiently developed to understand and realise its importance. The
result, as has been said, was a collision of thought and feeling which
evoked into clear day the latent instincts and propensions which had
been evolved in the past history of the people. Character in the
individual is formed in the conflict of warring impulses, and so it is
with nations. Whenever a nation attains to selfconsciousness, the same
phenomena invariably appear. If the nation is truly alive, there will be
division on fundamental questions; when such division ceases, it implies
that the nation has ceased to exist, either through its own paralysis or
the tyranny of external circumstance.
The course of Scottish history
subsequent to the Reformation is the sufficient illustration of the
foregoing remarks. During the century and a half which elapsed from the
Reformation to the Revolution, Scotland was engaged in seeking a
political equilibrium which had been disturbed by the overthrow of the
ancient religion. The successive sovereigns of Scotland and the most
strenuous section of their subjects held incompatible views regarding
the relations of Church and State, and as each of the parties believed
their opinions to be the absolute will of God, compromise was impossible
so long as this state of things endured. But the very existence of such
a permanent crisis is the proof that in Scotland there now existed a
nation in the strictest sense of the term. In the period prior to the
Reformation we have no parallel to the situation that had been created
by that event. Down to the middle of the sixteenth century we find
occasional popular discontent and chronic disputes between the Crown and
the feudal lords, but we find no great national question evoking a
public opinion divided alike by reason and passion; in other words,
previous to the change of religion, Scotland cannot be regarded as a
nation in the true sense of the term. If we fix our eyes on the most
remarkable event in Scottish history during the seventeenth century, we
realise what in its fullest sense is implied in the distinction. In the
portentous uprising which produced the National Covenant we find all the
manifestations which characterise a national act— unity of action
determined by reason and passion towards a fully apprehended goal.
P. Hume Brown.
From the Scottish Historical Review January 1904 |