King James VI of Scotland ascended the throne of England in 1603 as James I, ‘King of Great Britain’. For the first time the fiery and independent Scotland was united with its southern neighbour via the monarchy, yet they remained independent kingdoms with their own parliaments, legal and religious systems. In 1707 the Union of Scotland and England occurred. Through the terms of the Act of Union the Scottish parliament was abolished and England and Scotland were joined as the one kingdom of Great Britain, yet as before Scotland retained its religious and legal independence. The last Jacobite uprising occurred in 1745 and with the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie an end was put to the movement to try to return the Stuarts – the one time kings of Scotland – to the throne. Almost all Scots were now firmly under the Hanoverian banner and they gradually became active citizens of Great Britain.i This essay will study the Scottish identity in the 18th and 19th Centuries, including their culture, traditions, interpretation of history, role in society, relations with the monarchy and their taking up of a British identity alongside the Scottish one.

The Scots of the 17th and 18th Centuries can roughly be divided into two groups – the highlanders and lowlanders. The highlanders of northern Scotland were composed of the clans – powerful aristocratic landowners and their families and peasants such as the Macdonalds and Murrays, who practically ruled their respective territories from large houses and manors and who had great influence in the towns which they oversaw. They were the chief supporters of the Stuarts (although Murrays fought on both sides during the Jacobite uprisings) and had their own (although as we shall see it was later augmented) distinctive culture. The southerly lowlanders were much more like their English neighbours – living relatively freely in towns and cities and on the land with their own lords and earls and knowing little of the highland culture or politics. Prior to 1745 most of the highlanders viewed the Union with contempt, while the lowlanders had mixed feelings. Some of the bourgeoisie supported the increased opportunities for trade and advancement, while others resented the loss of some of their independence, and many who went south found their opportunities limited because of discrimination against the Scots.ii

After the uprising of 1745 the Highlanders, who had formed the majority of the Prince’s army, were scattered and lost much of their power and influence. The private jurisdictions of the clan chieftains were abolished and replaced by the power of the king. The wearing of tartans and kilts was banned except in the army and the Highland culture was shunned as being backwards, feudal, rough and unrefined, as indeed many Lowlanders and Sassenachsiii had always thought. Episcopalian clergymen were required to take new oaths of allegiance to the king.iv Nonetheless with the demise of Jacobitism and the advent of the Union thousands of Scots, mainly Lowlanders, poured into England and took up numerous positions in politics, civil service, the army and navy, trade, economics, colonial enterprises and other areas. Neil Davidson notes that “after 1746 there was an entirely new level of participation by Scots in political life, particularly outside Scotland.”v In 1762 the Scot John Stuart, the 3rd Earl of Bute was appointed as first lord of the treasury, basically the role of prime minister and the first Scotsman to be appointed to the position. Bute was only the tip of the iceberg, as Scots took up important positions all over the empire. Alexander Wedderburn was appointed Attorney-General in 1780. Then there was Henry Dundas, who held a number of important positions during the late 18th-early 19th Centuries such as home secretary, secretary at war and first lord of the admiralty and who came to dominate Scottish politics in his time. Scots MPs also served abroad – in the period 1790-1820 a staggering 130 Scots were MPs representing seats in England and Wales.

The ever increasing British Empire presented many opportunities to enterprising Scots and this people, who appeared to be on the whole more adventurous than the English, took advantage of these.vi The English picked up most of the best posts at home and generally were on the whole reluctant to travel abroad, meaning that many of the English in the colonies were second rate men. By contrast the Scots, who often came from poorer and less established backgrounds and who were at times as much outsiders in England as anywhere else in the empire, were far more willing to travel and take risks in amassing wealth, promotions and prosperity in the far reaches of the empire. This meant that many more talented Scots were available than their English counterparts and many of them made full use of this advantage. Scots could be found all over the empire, from India to Canada to Australia and New Zealand. A Scot from a prominent Jacobite family named James Murray became the first British governor of Quebec. John Murray was governor of New York in 1770, while in India Scots such as George Bogle had important posts and positions. Indeed British Bengal was flooded with Scots – some 60% of the free merchants were Scotsmen.vii

There was considerable backlash against this influx of Scots. This resistance was led by John Wilkes. Wilkes was born in London in 1725 and was a thorough rouge yet also a fervent patriot of England. He was at times involved in trade, was an author and a MP. Wilkes firmly supported whiggism and hated the Scots and was outraged as what he saw as the Scottish takeover of the English administration. Whiggism was an English political and historical ideology that saw English history as the progression of a strong ethnocentricity based on Protestantism, an ancient constitution, limited monarchy and a special and expanding place for England in the world. In contemporary politics Whigs supported policies that upheld these principles and continued their progression and improvement. There was also Scottish Whiggism, based around a Presbyterian-aristocratic ideology.viii Wilkes scorned the concept of ‘Great Britain’ and felt that the Scots “unchangeably alien, never ever to be confused or integrated with the English.”ix Wilkes and his followers, called Wilkites, sought to protect the great building blocks of England – the Protestant succession, the revolution of 1688, the Magna Carta and English freedoms – the great elements of English whiggism, all of which they felt to be under threat in the 1760’s by a rising sense of Britishness. The Wilkites argued that the Scots were politically dangerous. They had a taste for arbitrary power and rule – had not the hated Stuarts come from Scotland?x Their lords were tyrants while the common people were slaves and passively obedient to their masters. The march of the highlanders in 1745 burned freshly in peoples’ minds. With such attitudes history and upbringings, how long would it be before they infected and threatened the building blocks of England? Numerous cartoons such as A View of the Origin of Scotch Ministers & Managers depicted the flocking of Scots to England with bad or evil intentions and a tendency to scratch each others’ backs. Wilkes wrote that “no Scot ever exerted himself but for a Scot.”xi Protests and rallies were heard across England - “more opportunities for Scots meant fewer perks for Englishmen.”xii Wilkes himself was furious that he had lost his attempt to become first British governor of Quebec to James Murray. However Scotophobia, while an important force in England, could not impede the course of events. With the influx of Scots, their rights and place as British citizens and the viewing of Scotland as an important ally backed by the crown and the chief ministers, the importance of Scots in England the rise of Britishness continued and flourished into the 19th Century, aside from the occasional discrimination against Scots seeking promotions in the heart of the civil establishment, as noted above.xiii

Throughout the second half of the 18th Century only the army, a few societies and some proud Highlanders kept the Highland tradition and culture alive. Chief among these was the Highland Society of London, founded in 1777. The Disarming Act which had banned the wearing of any of the traditional Highland garb was repealed in 1782 largely through the efforts of this society.xiv Throughout that time a slow current of revival had begun, and in the1820’s the Highland culture exploded back onto the scene and gained unprecedented popularity. The curious thing was that the tradition that found prominence would have been almost unrecognisable to the Highlanders of 150 years before. It all began with James Macpherson. He was a poet and scholar and a member of one of the great Jacobite clans and he took a great interest in ancients Scots Celtic works. In 1760 he published Fragments of Ancient Poetry, collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and translated from the Gaelic or Erse Language. This was followed in 1762 by Fingal and then Temora in 1763, both of which were complete epic poems. Macpherson claimed that they had all been written by a Celtic bard named Ossian in the 3rd Cen. AD. Here were Scottish epics to rival the Iliad which proved that the ancient Celtic culture had been culturally sophisticated and colourful. However their true nature and authenticity has been debated ever since.

These poems undoubtedly contain information relevant to Macpherson’s own time. Macpherson retained his Jacobite sympathies throughout his life, but he thought that Jacobitism was lost, confined to a past in which the old Celtic highland spirit lived on. The poems reflect this. They picture a Gaelic world in which the old order of the warriors and heroes, the spirit, romanticism and traditions of the people, of a pre-modern life without corruption, are all falling, never to rise again – a romantic world. Yet they depict that the spirit and tradition of those times will continue as an “assertion by the ancient civilisation of the North of the triumph of mind and spirit over the seedy world of Hanoverian commerce and imperialism.”xv The analogies with the current times, less than twenty years after the final fall of the Jacobite cause and the Highlands were subtle yet clear to those who knew their history and politics. Yet it was an assertion of the spirit only – the legacy of the ‘noble savage’ ancestors, and not one that impacted on the contemporary world or Britishness. xvi Nevertheless it seems likely that Macpherson really did collect a large amount of old Gaelic poems from a wide range of places and times, and that he edited and rewrote them as he saw fit to promote his message of the nobility of the old Caledonians, their loss and the endurance of their tradition. Even though their were early claims of forgery against Macpherson, the Ossianic poems turned out to be a great success across Europe and were one of the first significant works of the Romantic movement. Important figures such as Goethe and Napoleon were fascinated by Ossian.

No one had a greater influence over the recreation of the Highlands that Sir Walter Scott, the famous Lowland Scottish novelist. Scott fully supported the Union. He believed that it would heal the divides between the Scottish people and offer new horizons to them, and he actively set about seeing that this was achieved. Scot had some sympathy with Jacobitism and indeed he went on to record it as representing Scottish national feeling as a whole. Yet he saw it as a romantic past, in a similar way to Macpherson – a time of primitive emotion, passion, excitement, heroics and old traditions and an allegiance gained by the seductive Stuart charisma. He described it as having been overtaken by the new rationalism and advancement of a United Britain and its government, a process through which it inevitably had to go. Scott largely ignored the radical politics of the Jacobites and the cruel suppression of them and the highlands by the Hanoverians. He confines Jacobite politics, indeed Scotland’s history as a whole, to the emotive past, with no place in the rational present or future. Scott thus stripped it of its political elements and any active role in the future, confining it to a common Scottish past which one could be proud of and yet which had no bearing on the present world. Furthermore, as stated above he advanced the Union as being able to overcome the old highland/lowland and other divides in Scotland by replacing its nationalism and its efforts in one common and rational cause. His Scotland was a “museum of history and culture, denuded of the political dynamic which must keep such culture alive and developing”xvii and thus not relevant to the current political world.xviii

The culmination of Scott’s beliefs and ambitions occurred in 1822. In that year King George IV visited Edinburgh, the first ever Hanoverian to set foot in Scotland. Scott made the occasion a ‘gathering of the Gael’ and the old Celtic world was everywhere to be seen. Hugh Trevor-Roper argues that Scott was “imprisoned by his fanatical Celtic friends, carried away by his own romantic Celtic fantasises…determined to forget historic Scotland, his own Lowland Scotland, altogether.”xix While this view may be a bit extreme, it is a good indication of what occurred during that fateful royal visit. Celtic culture, dress, tradition, music (bagpipes as opposed to the older Celtic harp) and poetry were all celebrated during the visit, as Scott amalgamated all Scots into the Highland tradition. This allowed him to further shift Scottish allegiance as one whole from a Jacobite ideology to that of the Hanoverians and the Union which he supported. The Highland Society of London, in conjunction with the cloth manufactures of Edinburgh and surrounds cashed in on the festivities by creating a range of separate clan tartans to be worn by the various clans present. This aided the restoration of the clan system that was abolished after the final Jacobite uprising, although the new form it appeared in was somewhat different to the historical reality.xx The work of creating clan tartans was carried on by the brothers Allen, who in the 1840’s published two books called Vestiarium Scoticum and The Costume of the Clans. These works claimed to trace and identify the different tartans of the various Scottish clans and their long history. The manufacture of clan tartan clothes and goods took off and has remained strong ever since. In fact individual tartans were only a creation of the 18th Century at the earliest. They had most likely begun in the various highland regiments in the army to distinguish them from each other and were then first introduced into the civil world as recently as the instances described above. While tartan in the Highlands does indeed stretch back to at least the 16th Century, its patterns were usually only whatever was available or which were the latest styles of the day.xxi

The kilt too was a recent invention, or one may say adaptation, as Trevor-Roper explains. It was invented by an Englishman named Thomas Rawlinson, who had business arrangements with Ian MacDonnell, chief of the MacDonnell’s of Glengarry in the 1720’s. He adapted it from the traditional full length plaid, separating the lower portion around the waist as a separate piece and making some minor stylistic changes. This made the manual labour of MacDonnell’s workers much easier to perform. It was adopted by the chief himself, and soon the kilt was worn all over the Highlands, to the extent that it was banned as part of the legislation after the ’45. Nevertheless its connection with the Jacobites and this event and its continued use in the Scottish regiments of the British army was enough to make it the garb of choice by Scott and the others who brought the Highlands back into focus, rather than the far older plaid.xxii Interestingly Scots Gaelic was not seen as one of the key elements of Scottishness or even of being a Highlander and its usage grew steadily less throughout the 18th and 19th Centuries.xxiii All in all the Highland past and Jacobitism was thus stripped of is political potency and retained as a memory – a past that was uniquely Scottish and applied to all Scots – Lowlanders included - and was something to be proud of yet was exactly that – the past. Current events of great concern, even to the Highlands themselves, such as the clearances of the first half of the 19th Cen., were mostly ignored by such traditionalists. The past and the nationalism on which it was built did not clash with a simultaneous allegiance to Britain.xxiv

War – especially with Catholic and later revolutionary France, trade and conquest also helped by ‘othering’ people that were clearly not British, thus reinforcing the common bonds between Scots and English. With Jacobitism gone, the government harnessed the significant military potential of the Highlands and Scotland in general – the Highlanders had long had a reputation as fierce and devoted warriors. Approximately one in four regimental officers in the mid-18th Cen. was a Scot, while they also took an important part in home defence – 50,000 Scottish volunteers were mobilised during the Napoleonic Wars. Abroad 25% of the Scottish male population served in a military capacity between 1792 and 1815. The highlanders in particular were dominant, with more than 48,300 of them recruited between 1756 and 1815, while during the Seven Years War one in four males were in service. Senior politicians commented on the merits of the Highland soldiers. The Secretary at War Barrington stated in 1751 that “I am for having always in our army as many Scottish soldiers as possible” and “I should choose to have and keep as many Highlanders as possible.”xxv Some years later Pitt the Younger boasted of his achievement of drawing the highlanders into the armed services, calling them “a hardy and intrepid race of men”.xxvi English generals also commented on their prowess, James Wolfe noting during the Seven Years War that “the Highlanders are very useful serviceable soldiers, and commanded by the most manly corps of officers I ever saw.”xxvii The exploits of Scots generals and highland regiments where the traditions were maintained, with their kilts, swords, bagpipes and other ‘traditional’ highland garb and equipment, became legendary throughout the 19th Century, from the Black Watch at Waterloo to the ‘Thin Red Line’ at Balaklava and the Gordon Highlanders at Dargai.

War with the French continued on and off for over 100 years from 1689 to 1815. The English were also at war at one stage or another with all the European powers and numerous other peoples all over the world. As we have seen in most cases the Scots fought alongside the English, forming a bond with them on the battlefield. The highland soldiers began to understand their identity as being not only Scottish, which was an accomplishment in itself, but as British. The old divides between highland and lowland, Scottish and English, were being wiped away in and via the army. The Scots needed to feel that the risks they took and the blood they shed in the army and navy was for a good cause – a cause that served their interests and advanced and protected something that affected them and which they cared about. This could only be achieved by the belief that they were fighting for a united Britain whose allegiance and nationhood they upheld.xxviii The bonds of the 'Auld Alliance' with France were being shed and replaced with new common interests with England. They thus became firmly linked with the imperial ambitions of Britain and the glorious exploits of its army.

This connection went far beyond that as the peoples against whom they fought were clearly unlike them, thus reinforcing the common ‘Britishness’ they shared. It was a case of ‘us’ against the hostile undisciplined ‘Other’. The multitude of peoples that the British came across in their travels and empire building only served to reinforce this sense of ‘otherness’, especially those native peoples who were markedly difference to the British.xxix Linda Colley sums it all up well when she writes that “they defined themselves against the French as they imagined them to be, superstitious, militarist, decadent and unfree. And, increasingly, as the wars went on, they defined themselves in contrast to the colonial peoples they conquered, peoples who were manifestly alien in terms of culture, religion and colour.”xxx

The lowland Scots shared with their neighbours a keen belief in Protestantism. Protestant reformers had first started to have an impact in Scotland in the 16th Century, the most famous of which were John Knox and Andrew Melville – considered to be the founder of Scottish Presbyterianism.xxxi While Protestantism spread successfully through-out much of the lowlands, the highlands presented a different story. Many highlanders, especially those who remained loyal to the Stuarts, maintained their Catholicism. However the accession of William of Orange and Mary to the thrones of England and Scotland in the 'Glorious Revolution' of 1688-89 firmly established and secured Protestantism at the heart of both nations. Catholicism in the highlands was marginalised and when it came time to revive the highland tradition in the late 18th–early 19th Centuries (see above) Catholicism was quietly dropped from the commemorated Scottish heritage. Even though the main denominations of England and Scotland were different they were both fiercely Protestant and very much anti-Catholic, or at least against the Roman and papal influence they could spread via the Catholic Church. There were great fears in the 1830s-50’s about the increasing influence of Catholicism in Britain and what some saw as the increasingly Catholic trends of the Church of England, known as Tractarianism. In 1851 Rome divided Britain into separate dioceses for its churches and this only served to heighten the fear and was seen as an unwanted outside influence. Their great enemies the French were Catholic, and were they not superstitious and unfree as a result? The growth of the empire showed God’s providential destiny for Britain as the new ‘Protestant Israel’ who’s mission was to spread the Gospel across the world. With all this occurring and the rise of the Evangelicals across Britain both Scots and English had great cause to be proud and supportive of their common Protestantism.xxxii

Scotland benefited greatly from the empire and had much influence in it – they were an active and in many ways equal partner in it. Great intellectuals such as the historian William Robertson and the philosopher David Hume were widely known and respected, while Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the nature and causes of the Wealth of Nations was the first major work on laissez-faire economics and paved the way for modern capitalism. Indeed the Scottish Enlightenment has become well known, far more so than any corresponding achievements in England. Engineers and architects such as James Watt became world famous and there were also prominent authors and poets such as Robert Burns and the aforementioned Walter Scott. Scottish universities were flourishing and produced a wealth of people trained for such professions and also a host of medical doctors. While in the 100 years from 1750-1850 England produced 500 doctors, Scotland produced 10,000. Naturally many of these went south and further abroad in the search for work.xxxiii

Above all else, Scotland became an industrial and economic powerhouse. Davidson states that “far from being the ‘peripheral’ to the British economy, Scotland – or more precisely, the Lowlands – lay at its core.”xxxiv After the 1750s its economy expanded at a rapid rate – overseas commerce growing by a significant 300% between 1750 and 1800. Various industries such as coal and other mining, iron, steel, textiles and linen, tobacco, engineering and cotton all flourished. Steel and iron were particularly profitable. By the 1760s over 40% of British imports of tobacco came through Scotland – more entered Glasgow than London, and other imports also grew rapidly. Glasgow was also the biggest builder and exporter of steam locomotives in the world and shipping was immense – shipbuilders along the Clyde alone produced over 70% of all British iron tonnage between 1851-70, with clients including the mighty Cunard who had many of their great ocean liners built by John Brown’s yards on the Clydebank.

Scottish towns and cities also flourished. The urban population doubled between 1750 and 1800, Glasgow became an industrial powerhouse and Edinburgh a modern, attractive city with a true blend of the Scottish past and British present.xxxv Agriculture too continued to be important, especially the keeping of sheep.xxxvi As has already been noted, Scots all over the empire ran or worked for profitable businesses, farms or trades. The commercial empire thus opened up a whole new world to the Scots and invited them to become a full part of Britain, an invitation that many accepted with relish. This is not to say that the Scottish working classes and poor were well off – in most cases and times far from it, yet like their English counterparts they were proud of their nation’s achievements and on the whole seem to have supported British imperialism and culture. Were they not superior to the peasants of Europe and the natives of Africa and Asia? The rough times of the 1830s and 40s were the greatest test of this support, including the rise of the Chartist movement, but things improved somewhat from the 1850s onwards.xxxvii

The Scots were also increasingly supportive of the monarchy, particularly during the reign of Queen Victoria. New technologies such as the train had greatly improved and increased the speed of travel and the Queen and her family made numerous trips to Scotland. These were popular and regal events and attracted many people. The two peoples thus had another common bond in their support for a common ruler, largely outside of the political and party sphere. Aside from the new possibilities allowed by steam transport, the other key factor in the growth in support for monarchy is what has come to be known as ‘Balmorality’.xxxviii This refers to the adoption by the Hanoverians of the Highland tradition of Scotland. Alex Tyrrell describes Balmorality as “a form of Scottish identity in which the Lowlands were elided from consideration, and the monarchy took pride of place in a romantic, backward-looking vision of Scotland as a society that was characterised by clan-based hierarchical loyalties and distinctive Highland rituals.”xxxix Victoria and Albert had an increasing interest in the Highlands and they openly supported the Highland history and culture of Scotland as it was described by the likes of Scott and Macpherson. This was much loved by the populace and the monarchy became very popular in Scotland – it became in many ways ‘their’ monarchy far more than under any previous Hanoverian rulers. By playing up to the Highland tradition, the monarchy managed to largely avoid becoming involved in contemporary political problems in Scotland, they achieved the shift of the old Scottish familiarity with monarchy from the Stuarts to themselves and they helped to uphold Scottish conservatism by recalling the times when the chiefs and aristocrats had supposedly been respected and revered figures. This was aided by the restoring in a renewed form of the old clan system which had been crippled after the ’45, as noted above.xl

In conclusion, we have seen how the Scots were able to integrate themselves into Britain yet retain their sense of being Scots. A combination of a retained semi-independence, a tendency to stick together and a questionable yet highly popular tradition forged from a deep Highland past, gave the Scots a sense of their own national identity that went beyond being a Highlander or Lowlander. Yet this did not interfere with or prevent them from actively joining Britain. The possibilities and activities of Britain and above all the empire gave the Scots access to the world and the English allowed them this access. Their commonality with the English was reinforced through war, trade and conquest as the multitude of other peoples whom they met were othered in one way or another. This strengthened the bonds of law, religion – especially Protestantism, ideology and customs that they shared. Finally the monarchy came to be accepted in Scotland and was a unifying force for both peoples. The Scots could be both Scottish and British at the same time – it was to be one of the most successful partnerships the world has ever seen.

BIBLIOGRAHY

• An Act for an Union of the Two Kingdoms of England and Scotland 1707

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• Davidson, Neil; The Origins of Scottish Nationhood, London, Pluto Press, 2000. Kidd, Colin; Subverting Scotland’s Past, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993

• Lockhart, J. G.; Life of Sir Walter Scott, Edinburgh, Adam & Charles Black, 1888

• Magnusson, Magnus; Scotland: the story of a nation, London, Harper Collins, 2001

• Mitchison, Rosalind; A History of Scotland, London, Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1970

• Pittock, Murray G. H.; The Invention of Scotland, London, Routledge, 1991.

• Trevor-Roper, Hugh; ‘The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland’, The Invention of Tradition ed. E. J. Hobsbawn & T. Ranger, Canto, Cambridge, 1983 pp. 15-41.

• Tyrrell, Alex; ‘The Queen’s Little Trip: The Royal Visit to Scotland in 1842’, Scottish Historical Review, vol. lxxxii, 1:no. 213: April 2003 pp. 47-73.

• Withers, Charles; ‘The Historical Creation of The Scottish Highlands’, The Manufacture of Scottish History ed. Ian Donnachie & Christopher Whatley, Edinburgh, Polygon, 1992 pp. 143-156.