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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 Alexanders 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. |
