How the Scots Invented the Modern World (64 page)

“By 1885,” writes historian Keith Webb, “Gladstone was fully converted to Home Rule for both Ireland and Scotland.” Ireland was the more urgent case: unfortunately, Gladstone’s hopes for a peaceful transition to self-government for Ireland ran aground on the rocks of religious and ethnic conflict, and even split the Liberal Party itself. Scottish Home Rule became a back-burner issue, with the failure of Ireland as a warning to anyone trying to undo Westminster’s control over other parts of the United Kingdom.

Home Rule was originally a Liberal Party issue, just as the Liberal Party was Scotland’s principal political party. As the Liberals withered and died after World War I, so did Scotland’s hopes that it might reverse the trend of two centuries and bring some control over its own affairs away from London and back to Edinburgh. Tories were inalterably opposed to any devolution, so Home Rulers turned to the Labour Party—after all, many of its key founders, such as Keir Hardie, were also Scotsmen. But Labour had come to see Scotland’s working class as an essential part of their own political base: they saw Scottish self-rule as political suicide. So in 1928 disgruntled Scots broke from Labour and formed their own Scottish Nationalist Party, or SNP.

The amazing story of the SNP’s rise and eventual triumph in the face of tremendous official hostility and bitter factional infighting closely follows the decline of traditional British politics. The SNP came to fill the void created by the demise of the Liberals and classical liberalism: as the other political parties made class struggle and whether to extend or demolish the welfare state their principal issues, Scottish voters began to turn to a party that, if nothing else, offered a way out of Scotland’s malaise. Whether it was devolution, or autonomy, or outright independence (the SNP leadership often quarreled bitterly over which they wanted), it was at least something different—and something that struck a chord that most Scots deeply felt but had been afraid to acknowledge: a sense of national pride.

The struggle to gain respectability was long and arduous. Hard times and the Great Depression raised the SNP’s appeal, particularly in working-class Glasgow and Edinburgh, while recovery undermined it. By 1939 the SNP was nearly bankrupt. Then, in 1942 John MacCormick broke from the party and set up his own Scottish Union, and then the Scottish Convention. His goal was a separate sovereign party for Scotland, although still within the framework of a union. But MacCormick’s people were also inspired by a cultural Anglophobia: already in the 1930s there were complaints about the “Englishing of Scotland.” Folklorist Ronald MacDonald Douglas went even further and tried to organize an IRA-style military insurrection in 1935 (it ended up a farce and Douglas was exiled to the Irish Free State). In 1949, just a year before Hamilton and his fellow students struck, MacCormick published his Covenant on Scottish self-determination, which looked to the seventeenth-century Presbyterian Covenanters as its inspiration.

Scottish history was starting to come full circle. MacCormick then filed a lawsuit complaining that Britain’s new queen could not call herself Elizabeth II since Scotland had never had a queen named Elizabeth—under the literal terms of the Act of Union of 1707, MacCormick insisted, she should be Queen Elizabeth I of Britain (the case was eventually thrown out). It was news of the theft of the
Lia Fail,
however, that moved the Scottish nationalist movement from the shadows to center stage. It ignited a major sensation in Scotland as the public cheered the thieves on. After an exhaustive and slightly hysterical four-month hunt, the authorities finally found the stone at Arbroath Abbey. It came back to Westminster in time for Elizabeth II’s coronation (or was it Elizabeth I?), although the Crown declined to prosecute Hamilton and his colleagues—in part, it was rumored, because the English could not offer any proof of ownership in the first place.

Why Hamilton chose Arbroath as the stone’s final resting place was itself significant. It was there in 1320 that a gathering of Scottish bishops and barons declared defiance of the English king and their commitment to the independence of Scotland after the death of Robert the Bruce. The declaration is the Scottish equivalent of the Magna Carta and reads in part:

for as long as a hundred [of us] remain alive we are minded never a whit to bow beneath the yoke of English dominion. It is not for glory, riches or honours that we fight: it is for liberty alone, the liberty which no good man relinquishes but with his life.

The Declaration of Arbroath, like the
Lia Fail
itself, was now a symbol of a Scotland tired of subordinating its identity to an abstract political ideal, that of Great Britain. Scots, Hamilton and other nationalists were saying, will be North Britons no longer.

In any case, the spell had been broken. Although the SNP continued to languish as a political party in the postwar boom of the 1950s, when Prime Minister Harold Macmillan (scion of the great Scottish publishing firm) announced to the British public that, “you have never had it so good,” few Scots believed it. The next two decades confirmed their worst fears. The great Clydeside shipyards began to close, as did the Lanarkshire coal pits and the blast furnaces. Between 1979 and 1981, Scotland lost close to 11 percent of its industrial output and 20 percent of all its jobs. Even the discovery of oil off Scotland’s North Sea coast in 1975 only served to push the British pound higher and ruin Scotland’s exports. Textile production in the Border country fell by 65 percent. Active Scottish coal pits declined from fifteen to just two. “Today ours is a fearful, anxious nail-biting nation,” wrote SNP activist Jim Sillars in 1985.

In the midst of national crisis and decline, the SNP stepped into the breach. Contrary to myth, it was not the promise of nationalizing North Sea oil that propelled the SNP into prominence. It emerged as a mass political party in the late 1960s and early 1970s—long before engineers had any idea of the vast oil reserves located just off the continental shelf from Aberdeen. Instead, it was the failure of either British Labour or Tory conservatism to offer a solution to Scotland’s sense of decline that made the SNP a political powerhouse. “There is no alternative,” Margaret Thatcher would say as she announced the closing of yet another government-run shipbuilding yard or coalfield; yet to millions of Scottish voters there seemed an alternative: Scottish independence and the promise of devolution.

In 1996 a beleaguered government in London tried to appease this sentiment by a symbolic gesture—symbols having become, in this postmodern age, suddenly very powerful. On November 15, two Army Landrovers and a transit van carried the Stone of Scone across the bridge at Coldstream, from England to Scotland and eventually Edinburgh, to great fanfare and the sound of bagpipes and politicians’ speeches. England had renounced its claim to the
Lia Fail
. Ian Hamilton, the stone’s original thief, had defied authority and tradition as Thomas Aikenhead had. Unlike Aikenhead, however, he had won. Yet now, at age seventy-three and rector of Aberdeen University, Hamilton refused to attend the installation ceremony at Holyrood Palace. His getaway driver, Kay Matheson, did, as did Gavin Vernon, who flew in from Canada. But Hamilton denounced the ceremony as a “charade” and warned “Betty Windsor” not to show her face north of the border. He declared, in tones reminiscent of Knox and James Buchanan: “We are no longer ruled by sovereigns. Sovereignty now rests with the Scottish people.”

Today, in 2001, Hamilton nearly has his wish. Scotland finds itself with a separate Scottish Parliament for the first time in nearly three hundred years, a new Parliament House, a growing computer technology industry, and a burgeoning service sector economy. Some are finding that the hopes they pinned on devolution may go unfulfilled: politicians in a Scottish Parliament turn out to be not much better than the ones in a British Parliament, while Scotland’s larger economic problems, such as unemployment, remain unsolved. Just as becoming a modern industrial nation created as many problems for late nineteenth-century Scotland as it solved, so devolution turns out to be less wonderful than everyone had anticipated.

Of course, any of the figures of the Scottish Enlightenment could have told them that. No one can blame Scots for wanting to wrest some control over their lives back from London. In one sense, it fulfills the vision of modern liberty of the great Scots of the eighteenth century: that of increasing the independence and freedom of individuals in as many aspects of their lives as possible. Yet the great insight of the Scottish school was that politics offers only limited solutions to life’s intractable problems; by surrendering her sovereignty the first time in 1707, Scotland gained more than she lost. She has to be careful that, in trying to reclaim that sovereignty, she does not reverse that process.

Scotland, like much of the modern West, has seen the results of too much modernization. It is easy to forget, therefore, the penalties that accrue from having too little. One of the disturbing trends in Scottish intellectual life in the past two decades has been an increasing hostility to the great legacy of the Scottish Enlightenment. Scholars decry the Act of Union as a betrayal of “true” Scottish culture, while others condemn the founders of the Scottish school as sexists and elitists. “Whatever did not square with their philosophy was not knowledge and they loftily dismissed anything they could not understand,” is the way William Ferguson loftily dismisses Hume and Robertson in
The Identity
of the Scottish Nation.

In 1975 Michael Hechter even published a book that suggested that Scotland shared a common identity with Ireland, India, and the Third World as the exploited victims of English colonialism and “underdevelopment.” Andrew Fletcher has emerged as the new hero of radical Scottish nationalism (forgetting, perhaps, his call for mandatory slavery as the solution for Scotland’s ills), while the Declaration of Arbroath and William Wallace occupy center stage in a Scottish nationalist history that smacks more and more of acute Anglophobia. Some have even ventured onto the further fringes of pan-Celtic nationalism, calling for a Celtic League to draw Scotland into union not only with Ireland and Wales, but also Brittany, Cornwall, and the Isle of Man.

Like the legends surrounding the Stone of Scone, these are appeals to myths and historical fantasies. Scotland was never an exclusively Celtic nation: it included Anglo-Saxons, Normans, and Scandinavians from its first medieval beginnings. Likewise, the notion that its history as part of the British Empire is one of systematic abuse and exploitation is absurd: if anything, Scots have been
overrepresented
as part of its ruling establishment for more than two hundred years. The effort to turn Scots into Irishmen—trying to make them bitter and resentful about their links to Britain—does a disservice not only to historical truth, but to Scotland herself.

The great insight of the Scottish Enlightenment was to insist that human beings need to free themselves from myths and to see the world as it really is. This kind of intellectual liberation, they said, is required for living a free and active life. William Robertson, like Adam Smith and David Hume, cared deeply about human freedom and his homeland. Yet he does not even mention the Declaration of Arbroath in his
History of
Scotland—
not because he was a brainwashed Anglophile, but because he saw it in historical context, as a well-worded defense of the old Scottish feudal regime by its oligarchic beneficiaries. Robertson and his generation of Scottish Whigs welcomed union because they were all too familiar with the Scotland that preceded it; their successors remained grateful for what union had accomplished. From Robertson and Reid to Dugald Stewart and Walter Scott, the Scottish mind understood that genuine human liberty was the by-product of a historical process that ground men like the Arbroath signers into dust—and would also have saved Thomas Aikenhead from the gallows.

That process was the making of the modern world—a process, for all its faults and failures, blind spots and injustices, in which Scotland and Scots have played a crucial part. As Scotland moves toward its new and uncertain future, it must not forget that achievement, any more than it should forget its earlier, premodern past.

As the first modern nation and culture, the Scots have by and large made the world a better place. They taught the world that true liberty requires a sense of personal obligation as well as individual rights. They showed how modern life can be spiritually as well as materially fulfilling. They showed how a respect for science and technology can combine with a love for the arts; how private affluence can enhance a sense of civic responsibility; how political and economic democracy can flourish side by side; and how a confidence in the future depends on a reverence for the past. The Scottish mind grasped how, in Hume’s words, “liberty is the perfection of civil society,” but “authority must be acknowledged essential to its very existence”; and how a strong faith in progress also requires a keen appreciation of its limitations.

Sources and Guide for Further Reading

Scottish history suffers from a profusion of very general surveys, a multitude of specialized studies and monographs, and not enough good books in between. Historians who write for a general audience tend to be drawn to the more romantic episodes in Scottish history, such as the life of Mary Queen of Scots and the Jacobite uprising of 1745. Go to any public library and these are the books you find on the Scottish shelf, along with a life or two of Robert the Bruce or William Wallace, and perhaps an older volume on Scotland during the English Civil War (such as John Buchan’s life of the Earl of Montrose, who raised the clans for Charles I in 1645).

In recent decades a trio of scholars have set out to correct this problem. Thomas Devine’s The Scottish Nation: A History, 1700–2000 (New York, 1999) is an invaluable guide to the economic and social history of modern Scotland. But Devine has also published useful books on topics as diverse as the Glasgow Tobacco Lords (in 1975), clan life in the Highlands after Culloden, and
The
Transformation of Rural Scotland
(Edinburgh, 1994), and edited several more. Another model of scholarly industry is Professor Bruce Lenman at St. Andrews University, whose books such as
The Jacobite Risings in Britain,
1689–1746
(London, 1980),
The Jacobite Clans of the Great Glen
(London, 1984), and
Integration and Enlightenment: Scotland,
1746–1832
(London, 1981) offer an insightful and level-headed look at the evolution of eighteenth-century Scotland, on which I have relied for this book.