I watched Braveheart when it came out in a packed
Danish cinema and enjoyed it. I explained to the Danes who I’d gone to the
cinema with a little bit about the history of the period, but none of us much
cared about that. The film was like Robin Hood with a Scottish bunch of merry
men and the English were the Normans. Anyone who has read anything about the
real history of the period knows that the English really were the Normans and
the Scottish nobles were the Normans too.
Robin Hood is a good story, but it is a tale of heroes
and villains for which reason it is mainly myth. So too the story of Wallace
and Bruce has become mythologised particularly by Scottish nationalists. When I
saw the film, it was a story about me and my country and that is why I enjoyed
it. I’m sure most Scots who saw the film at the time enjoyed it too. Only later
did half of us view it with derision. The SNP politicised our shared history
and turned it into a story about them and their supporters. From then on much of
Scottish history has been alien to British Scots. It was not
always so.
Most of the Scottish history I know comes from reading
Walter Scott. I decided to read him because no one else did. I read all of the Waverley
novels just like everyone did in the nineteenth century. I read some history
books too to better understand the context of the stories. I came to love
Scottish history. There are so many great stories. There is violence, romance
and complex characters. Hardly a king dies in his bed.
What we think of today as Scotland was invented by
Scott in the same way that Dickens invented Christmas. Scott put Edward
Waverley an Englishman into the Jacobite Rebellion and was able to both show his love for the romanticism of the Jacobite cause while also showing why it was better
that it lost. This is the genius of the novel. It shows history as something
complex with many sides. It shows characters who have aspects that are good and
bad and in between. It shows that we can support both sides of a war. One from
the perspective of the past the other from the perspective of sixty years
since. Waverley brought reconciliation and created a shared history without resentment. It also became the prototype for similar reconciliations through historical fiction all over the world. Examples include all those Civil War novels loved equally by North and South.
Waverley was wildly popular and made the Scottish
landscape a place that people from all over Europe wanted to visit. Without
Waverley Queen Victoria would not have spent her summers at Balmoral.
A love of Scottish history was an expression of love for Britain. People all over Britain read Scott because his message was
unifying rather than divisive. He made Scottish heroes British heroes. Waverley
united Britain far more as a novel than as a railway station.
It was Scott that led the Victorians to celebrate
figures like William Wallace. There were almost no Scottish nationalists until the SNP crept out in 1934 inspired by events in Mitteleuropa. The nineteenth century nationalist movements on the continent did not spread to
Scotland because we were content with our shared Scottish/British identity. It
was the expression of this that led to the creation of the Wallace Monument in
1869. The heroes in the hall of fame apart from Wallace and Bruce were the
major figures of the Scottish Enlightenment and reign of Victoria not one of whom wanted Scotland to
be independent.
The monument was built by British Scots as a means of
celebrating each aspect of our identity. Wallace and Bruce to Victorians all
over Britain were as much British heroes as Boadicea or Alfred the Great. There
was no distinction between this history of Scotland and England. Scots didn’t
think that Magna Carta was part of the history of a foreign land, nor did
English people think Mary Queen of Scots was from abroad.
Scott invented medieval England with Ivanhoe and gave
new life to Robin Hood. He brought chivalry and knights in armour to life not merely in Britain. The Victorians staged jousting tournaments and became fascinated by half-forgotten
battles which no one much had thought about for centuries. In Scott’s last
novel Castle Dangerous he resurrects Robert the Bruce and shows both English
and Scottish knights behaving with honour and reaching a kind of
reconciliation. Bannockburn and Bruce might be as obscure as much else in
Scottish history if it were not for Scott. Not one Scot in a million knows the
date of the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh.
The Bannockburn monument to Robert the Bruce was
created by a British sculptor Pilkington Jackson who was born in Cornwall. It
wasn’t a monument to Scottish nationalism. It was built in 1964 and the SNP had
yet to win a seat.
It is ironic that the ultimate place of pilgrimage for
Scottish nationalists was built by an Englishman and that no one who built it
thought it had any contemporary political significance whatsoever. Not one independence supporter contributed a penny to the cost of the statue.
I realised when I saw the statue of Bruce vandalised
that I was upset in a way that surprised me. I had become estranged from my
love of Scottish history and Scottish heroes. I realised that the SNP had taken
them from me, and it was time to take them back.
Bruce and Wallace are heroes of British history and an
attack on them is an attack on all of us. Scottish nationalism has no more
right to vandalise Scottish heroes by making them exclusive to independence
supporters, than anyone else has the right to write slogans on our statues in white
paint.
The monuments that have been put up in Britain belong
to all of us, they express our shared history. The monument to Bruce belongs to
everyone in the United Kingdom. He is the hero of all wherever we live and
wherever our parents came from.
History is full of complex characters. They were human
beings. Just as we each have good and bad qualities so did, they. The vandalism
of statues is to view history as if it is Braveheart or Robin Hood. It is to
see heroes and villains, when the truth is much more complex and much more
human.
A slave trader can be a philanthropist, just as a murderer can be a saint. An owner of slaves
(serfs), Pushkin, Tolstoy, can be great writer. Each of us is a combination of
morality and immorality for which reason we dare not judge others and certainly cannot
judge the past by the standards of the present.
Robert the Bruce had patience with spiders, but rather
less patience with John Comyn. He had cunning and could be treacherous but won
in the end. There is hardly another figure in Scottish history who is as famous
as Bruce and that itself is an achievement. But the whole interest in medieval history
is due to the most British of writers Walter Scott, without whom neither Bruce
nor Wallace would have monuments.
First they came for Edward Colston
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a slave owner
Then they came for the Winston Churchill
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Conservative
Then they came for the Baden Powell
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Scout
Then they came for the Robert the Bruce
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Scottish Nationalist
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me
