Trafford Publishing: Scotland the Brave: Picts, Scots, Jacobites...and Then What?

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Scotland the Brave: Picts, Scots, Jacobites...and Then What?

by Willine Hall

112 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #02-1077; ISBN 1-55395-362-2; US$15.00, C$18.50, EUR12.10, £8.40

The natural beauty of Scotland is attraction enough for a tourist planning a special vacation. Scotland the Brave puts a human personality on this enchanting country and gives the tourist or armchair traveler an added delight--an introduction to the people called the Scots.

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About the Book

Scotland the Brave traces the major currents of Scotland's development from pre-history to the present. For facts, the author has relied on the works of recent Scottish historians. For interpretation of the movement of the Scots through the history, she has been led by her own point of view. Despite the fact that she is not all Scot, she is strongly partisan.
The book begins with the history constructed by archaeologists and geologists, then proceeds to the early Picts, the "Scots" who immigrated from nearby Ireland, the Viking conquerors who left their mark on the Scottish society, the wars of independence led by William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, the Normanization that overcame Gaelic Christianity, the Jacobite rebels who tried for many years to reinstate the ousted Stuart dynasty, and the formation of the United Kingdom. The author tells also of her Jacobite ancestor who, exiled from his homeland, started a family line in Virginia and became a grandfather of Chief Justice John Marshall.
As the history moves on into the nineteeth and twentieth centuries, the effects of industrialization, the Scots' reluctant entry into the United Kingdom, and the establishment and eventual loss of the British Empire are traced. The book reviews twentieth-century developments and ends with a question about the future course the Scots, with their newly established Parliament, will take.

About the Author

Willine Hall is a retired teacher-editor-secretary who grew up in Tennessee. She attended public schools and Vanderbilt University and received the Ph.D. in English Literature. A typical American "hybrid," she nevertheless has Scottish roots on both sides of her family and is a member of Clan Keith Society U.S.A. Her strong interest in Scotland, however, was aroused in Scotland, where she has vacationed every summer since 1999.

Sample Excerpt

This is a book about the people of a wee country. You can find them in many other countries, too, for they migrated far and wide. Their blood is in a lot of us, even if we can lay no claim to a "Mac" in our names.
Back in the wee country as the population of human beings kept moving out, the population of sheep grew...and grew...and grew. And now one of the delightful aspects of this land of Scots is that the world can go there, enjoy the scenery and go home with a really nice sweater.
My interest in Scotland began with interest in my genealogy. In the past four years, however, I have become an admirer of the land and its people of today. I have become other than a tourist. The story of the Scots' development of a nation is more exciting to me than the most fabulous sweater.
There are many reasons an American or a Canadian might have for going to Scotland. If you're a descendant of Scots, you might attend a clan gathering. Golf, sailing and fishing, history, scenery, hiking, bird watching, "getting away from it all," being married in a castle, attending Highland games, exploring archaeological sites--such are reasons that might take you there for the first time. I have found that my principal reason for returning is simply "being there."
When you become acquainted with a contemporary Scot or when you reflect upon the fact that Scotland gave us our first James Bond, you may begin to wonder about the connection between the ancient ruins you're inspecting and the people you're now getting to know. How did the progressive Scotland of today develop from the Scotland of castles and glaring disparity between economic classes?
I hope you will enjoy knowing a bit about the way the people of the brave Scottish nation survived very hard times and eventually prospered--how they grew.
* * *
In 1297 the young man William Wallace got into a fight with the English soldiers sent to keep Scotland down. Wallace escaped but was outlawed, and thereafter he functioned as a guerrilla leader and managed to gather about him an army of Scots who were willing to fight to the death to rid their country of the English tyrant and his army. This ragtag body of Scots won the Battle of Stirling Bridge, as any viewer of Braveheart knows (although there is no bridge in the film), and Wallace went on leading guerrilla efforts. Eventually he was captured, and "Longshanks" devised a particularly gruesome death for him (in an age when executions were generally gruesome). Read about it elsewhere, if you care to. Not here.
This Wallace was of Celtic stock. His father was a Renfrewshire laird (landowner). William did not turn to the aristocrats for backing or aid, for he know about their being helpless in the clutches of the English bully-king. Rather, he appealed to the ordinary folk. If you have seen the film Braveheart, you will remember that it makes Wallace's fight very personal as well as patriotic. The fight against Edward I must surely have been deeply personal, at least in a psychological sense, for all those ordinary Scotsmen who rallied to Wallace's leadership.
William Wallace roused the Scots to patriotic fervor in his day and in ours. The Scots needed a sense of unity, which they had not had for centuries. The Picts had had a nation, but the Scots relied more on their clans than on any central authority. And there was a division of the people of the Lowland south and the people of the Highland north.
The coming of the Normans in 1066 had brought a new cultural element, a dominant element, into Scottish as well as English society. The Normans posed a problem to the unification of Scotland, in that they often owned property both in England and in Scotland and did not want the Scots to make trouble for England. William Wallace saw that it was high time to make some trouble.
* * *
Time Lurches On
From our perspective today, what were the effects of the eighteenth century's struggles upon subsequent Scottish history? For one thing, can we not suspect that many adopted an "Ain't Gwine Study War No More" attitude? For another, can we not see that the Highland Scots, who suffered most terribly, kept that sturdy humanity which enabled them to shelter the escaping Prince Charlie? In fact, they hung on proudly to their culture.
What was the nature of the development that took place between that time and our own? I believe we must bear in mind that, however much Scots may enjoy advertising their colorful history (and however much their cousins in the "colonies" may enjoy fantasizing about the romance and glories of bygone times), what the Scots have now is a healthy social democracy. Their evolution from aristocracy to democracy is exemplary. In fact, it's downright astonishing unless you trace the history of this evolution in terms of incremental achievements.
There is a legal difference between an aristocratic nation and a democratic nation, of course, but there is, more importantly, a basic philosophical difference. It is this basic philosophical difference that needs always to be understood, honored, defended, and protected against erosion. The people who are best at this work are the patriots of a nation, and Scotland today has many patriots devoted to the preservation and nourishment of democracy. A study of history can show us also that devoted patriots worked to create this democracy.
People living in a legally democratic nation can rather easily drift into a de facto aristocratic point of view--trusting the values and judgements of the wealthy and of the "achievers" who rise in social power because of their wealth rather than their talents or service. "Money talks" when people trust wealth more than they trust democracy. The Scots did not drift out of democracy; they built a road into it, by deliberate steps, after centuries of aristocratic domination. And how did this come about?
* * *
The nineteenth century saw the railroad and the steamship make tremendous differences in commerce. Not only did these modes of transportation create jobs but the tourist industry also began to bloom. It was during the nineteenth century, too, that the educational system of the United Kingdom grew to include more and more people. Perhaps the most dramatic developments of consequence in the fashioning of society, however, were the growth of the union movement and the advent of the Labour Party. As commerce and industry increased, so did jobs for workers. And as work changed from the agricultural sphere to the industrial and people moved from country to city, a new type of social structure--as well as social need--was being created.
It was not merely efficiency of method, and certainly not standardized test scores, that brought Scotland renown for its educational system in those days; it was the fact that so many Scots distinguished themselves around the world as people who strove to be "good at what they did." Regardless of one's field of study, is it not the quality of one's work in that field that matters? The quality of the Scots weavers' work, for instance, was well known. The weavers themselves were aware of the skill they had to possess for their work, and they believed that one function of government should be to see that skilled workers were not impoverished or ruined by fluctuations in the market. Beginning with the weavers' union in the late eighteenth century, the trade movement progressed during the nineteenth. Along with this movement and with the coming of several brilliant minds to the issue, political organization for change gained momentum.
What kind of change would catch the imagination of the Scots? Some moved with intellectual vigor into the "new age." In 1888 the Scottish Labour Party was formed. It was related to the trade union movement of the nineteeth century, of course, but its leaders were not all workingmen. The founders were James Keir Hardie, secretary of the Scottish Miners' Federation, and R.B. Cunningham Graham, a writer and landowner. The party's original program included the nationalization of land, the abolition of the hereditary House of Lords, the disestablishment of the Church of Scotland (that is, putting the Church of Scotland--Presbyterian--on the same footing as all other religious bodies and withdrawing state support), and home rule for Scotland. These political thinkers envisioned a nation responsive to the people, not as members of classes but as human beings with common, basic human needs. The new party was moving the people toward something different from the abuses of the aristocratic past. It would not be paternalistic, as in the idealized version of the clan system, nor would it be coldly unobservant of the needs of a class of citizens.
* * *
What Now?
A question that remains to be answered is, Whither Scotland? Will the SNP's preference for full independence win the day, or will Scotland remain a very vital though small part of the UK? It is not for an American to speak on this issue, but I would simply advise my fellow tourists to be aware of it and also to bear in mind that it's usually best to call a Scot "Scottish" and not "British"--and certainly not "English."
Scotland, the place where Tony Blair began, is at a kind of crossroads--a place for choosing which way to pursue. One can see this crossroads in relation to a people's sense of destiny. The Scots have fought for freedom. Was it merely political freedom they sought, or was it the freedom to be themselves? And if it was the latter, may it not require their seeking the very best in themselves? The world has yet to see what this best will bring to pass in the political history of the United Kingdom.

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