The long
history of the lands of the northern third of Great Britain has been violent and often tragic.
The castles and ruins, the songs and the legends tell Scotland’s tale. It is the harshness of its
history and the ruggedness of its land that have shaped the proud Scottish
people. How this country came to be, and evolved, has long taxed the minds of
many historians.
Archeological
records show that the earliest people (nomadic hunters and gatherers) came to
the area over 6,000 years ago, as the last remains of the ice age crept
northward. The first recorded history of Scotland was by the Roman historian Tacitus
in the first Century A.D., who called the people the Picts, and referred to
them as ‘savages,’ and ‘fierce enemies.’ The other founding peoples of Scotland are considered to be the Vikings,
the Boernicians, the Dalriadans, the Strathclyde-Britons, and, later, the Normans. It was in order to fight the
Romans, that these warring clans began to unite. The Romans had conquered all
the rest of Britain, but were never able to subdue the (Caledonia) clansmen of
the north, and in the end, constructed Hadrian’s Wall, an imposing stone
barrier stretching from sea to sea to protect them from the marauding of the
Picts.
Shortly
after 400 A.D., the Romans left the British Isles, and Scotland began to emerge out of the dark
ages. There were four peoples inhabiting what was then called Alban – the
Picts, the Dalriadan Scots, the Britons, and the Angles –when invasions by
Norwegian Vikings began. By 843, Kenneth MacAlpin, king of the Scots of Dalriada held
all lands north of the river Forth, and renamed the land Scotia. Duncan I (portrayed in
Shakespeare’s Macbeth) added to this kingdom what is now the rest of mainland Scotland. Although there followed a period
of peace with England, warring within Scotland and between Scotland and Norway was constant.
King
Edward I of England fought off a Scottish invasion by
John Balliol, and then rampaged through Scotland, eventually capturing the ancient
stone of destiny, the Stone of Scone, upon which Scottish kings had been
crowned for seven centuries. He placed the stone in Westminster Abbey, where it
stayed until it was ‘stolen’ by Scottish nationalists in 1950. The stone was
formally returned to Scotland November
15, 1996,
and is now on display in Edinburgh Castle. For his exploits, Edward I earned
the nickname ‘Hammer of the Scots.’ The Scots continued attempts to free
themselves of England’s control. One of Scotland’s greatest national heroes, Robert
the Bruce had himself crowned at Scone in 1306. His uprising was defeated, but Bruce was not
killed. He became a famed outlaw who harassed the English armies using guerilla
tactics and united Scottish noblemen in his cause. By 1314, Bruce had driven the
English out of every town in Scotland, but Stirling.
In 1371,
Robert Stewart became the Scottish king, the first in a long line of Stewarts
(later spelt Stuart). There had been several child kings and much strife when
James IV came to the throne at age fifteen. He managed to control lowland
rebellions and attempted to make peace with the Highland clan chiefs. In 1502, James IV
signed a treaty of perpetual peace with England, and married Margaret Tudor,
daughter of King Henry VII of England. Thus paving the way for the
eventual union of the crowns.
The Royal
Stuart line was to come to an end with Mary Queen of Scots, one of history’s
most prominent women. Mary became Queen of Scotland when she was just a week
old. Henry the VIII arranged for Mary to marry his young son, and so when
Mary’s mother rejected this treaty of marriage, Henry responded with a vengeful
onslaught of bloodshed, burning and pillaging in Edinburgh and the Border
Country. Mary returned from France at age eighteen, widowed,
beautiful, strong-willed and Catholic. Her attempt to rule a Scotland was plagued with difficulties, as
Scottish nobles had renounced the Catholic Church in favor of Protestantism in
1557. Eventually, Mary was forced to abdicate and her one-year-old son James VI
was placed on the throne. She fled to England, to her cousin Queen Elizabeth I.
Due to her claims to the English thrown, Mary was imprisoned in the Tower of London, and then beheaded in 1587. The
two queens never met, and some historians suggest that Elizabeth was insanely jealous of Mary’s
beauty and charm.
The infant
son of Mary, James VI, as he grew continually fought with the Scottish his
regents and other nobles to exercise his right to govern. To silence this
Catholic King, a Protestant group eventually kidnapped James. However, in 1583,
James VI escaped from his kidnappers, and resumed the throne of Scotland. When Elizabeth I died in 1603, James was her only
heir; thus he became James I of England, as well as James VI of Scotland. James’ most lasting legacy is the
King James Bible; an English translation still favoured by many Protestants.
The union of the crowns did not however put an end to struggles in Scotland.
Civil war
in England in 1642 pitted the cavaliers
fighting for King Charles I against the Roundheads of Oliver Cromwell’s
parliament. When the victorious Cromwell forced the execution of Charles I, the
Scottish proclaimed Charles’ son as their king. Cromwell, incensed, invaded Scotland, uniting the two countries under a
strong, central, civil government. Upon Cromwell’s death, the English Monarchy
was restored to the throne. Many Scots felt they had lost their independence,
setting the stage for uprisings.
The
Jacobites wanted the return to a Stuart king for Scotland, and periodically took up arms to
this end. By 1707, the English line of succession had passed to Queen Sophia of
the German Hannover family, and a majority of the Scottish Parliament agreed to
a union of parliaments and Hanoverian succession, in return for commercial
equality, use of their own legal system and the Presbyterian religion. The
Jacobite rebellion grew as did opposition to the union of the parliaments. In
1715, James Edward rallied the Scottish clans around him, and was proclaimed
king of Scotland. However, the great families of Scotland were not united, and the uprising
was defeated.
Despite
attempts by the English to disarm the clansmen and ship Jacobites to
plantations in America, the Jacobites rose again. Bonnie
Prince Charlie, a handsome and charming man, gradually drew support until he
led 3,000 clansmen to Edinburgh to reinstate his father, James
Edward, as king of Scotland. After winning several battles in Scotland, Charles crossed the border and
pushed southward toward London. Only a few hundred kilometres
from London, a fatal decision was made to
withdraw to the highlands in order to raise more troops. Yet Scotland was as divided as ever; many clans
supported the Honoverian side. Finally, on Culloden Moor in 1746, Charles’ ragged and
hungry Highlanders were slaughtered by the English cavalry. Charles escaped by
rowboat to the Isle
of Skye,
disguised as a maidservant, and even though the English put a price on his head
of 30,000 pounds (an incredibly vast sum of money for the time); no one ever
betrayed him.
The
English response to these uprisings was vengeful and cruel: whole villages were
burned and clansmen were slaughtered or shipped to the plantations. As
lowlanders and Englishmen became the landlords, and the clan chiefs became no
different from other land holders, the allotted amount of land for sheep
pasture increased dramatically, causing what is know as the Highland
Clearances. People were literally cleared off the land to make way for more
profitable farming. This turned the trickle of migration out of Scotland into a great wave of settlers, who
then pioneered the colonies in North America and Australia.
In fact,
the English tried to destroy the clan system with the Disarming Act of 1746: no
Scot was allowed to bear arms, and the wearing of clan tartans and even the
playing of bagpipes were banned. The penalty for wearing ‘any part whatsoever’
of the Highland dress was six months in jail, for
a first offence. Miraculously, many of the Scottish traditions survived this
period of persecution and have flourished as the restrictions were gradually
dropped. Today, the clan tartan is one of the world’s most powerful symbols of
kinship.
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