Political History

Scotland, to political observers of the middle of the 16th century, seemed destined by nature to form one homogeneous kingdom with England. The outward frontiers of both were the sea; no difficult physical barriers divided the two territories; the majority of Scots spoke an intelligible form of English, differing from northern English more in spelling and pronunciation than in idiom and vocabulary; and after the Reformation the State religion in both countries was Protestant.

Yet, in spite of these causes making for union, and in spite of the manifest advantages of union, it was by a mere dynastic accident that, in the defect of nearer heirs to the English throne, the crowns of both kingdoms were worn by James VI. (1603), while more than a century of unrest and war had to elapse before the union of England and Scotland into one kingdom in 1707. Even later there broke forth civil wars that, apart from dynastic sentiment, had no political aim except "to break the Union." Thus for seven hundred years the division of the isle of Britain was a constant cause of weakness and public distress. Nothing did more to bring the two peoples together than religion, after the Reformation, yet, by an unhappy turn of affairs, and mainly thanks to one man, John Knox, few causes were more potent than religious differences in delaying that complete union which nature herself seemed to desire.

The historical causes which kept the nations separate were mainly racial, though, from a very early period, the majority of the people of Scotland were, if not English by blood, anglicized in language and, to a great extent, in institutions. All questions of race are dim, for such a thing as a European people of pure unmixed blood is probably unknown in experience.

In AD. 78-82 Agricola, carrying the Eagles of Rome beyond the line of the historical border, encountered tribes and confederations of tribes which, probably, spoke, some in Gaelic, some in Brythonic varieties of the Celtic language. That the language had been imposed, in a remote age, by Celtic-speaking invaders, on a prior non-Celtic speaking population, is probable enough, but is not demonstrated. There exist in Scotland a few inscriptions on stones, in Ogam, which yield no sense in any known Indo-European language. There are also traces of the persistence of descent in the female line, especially in the case of the Pictish royal family, but such survivals of savage institutions, or such a modification of male descent for the purpose of ensuring the purity of the royal blood, yield no firm ground for a decision as to whether the Picts were "Aryans "or" non-Aryans."

The Roman occupation has left not many material relics in Scotland, and save for letting a glimmer of Christianity into the south-west, did nothing which permanently affected the institutions of the partially subjugated peoples. In A.D. 81-82 Agricola garrisoned the Roman frontier between Forth and Clyde, and in 84 he fought and won a great battle farther north, probably on the line of the Tay. His enemies were men of the early iron age, and used the chariot in war. They fought with courage, but were no match for Roman discipline; it was, however, impossible to follow them into their mountain fortresses, nor were the difficulties of pursuit thoroughly overcome till after the battle of Culloden in 1746.

The most important Roman stations which have hitherto been excavated are those of Birrenswark, on the north side of Solway Firth; Ardoch, near the historical battlefield of Sheriffmuir (1715); and Newstead, a site first occupied by Agricola, under the Eildon hills. Roman roads extended, with camps, as far as the Moray Firth. It is not till AD. 300 that we read of " the Caledonians and other Picts "; in the 4th century they frequently harried the Romans up to the wall of Hadrian, between Tyne and Solway. About the end of the century the southern Picts of Galloway, and tribes farther north, were partially converted by St Ninian, from the candida casa of Whither. The Scots, from Ireland, also now come into view, the name of Scotland being derived from that of a people really Irish in origin, who spoke a Gaelic akin to that of the Caledonians, and were in a similar stage of higher barbarism. The Scots made raids, but, as yet, no national settlement.

The withdrawal of the Romans from Britain (410) left the northern part of the island as a prey to be fought for by warlike tribes, of whom the most notable were the Picts in the north, the Scots or Dalriads from Ireland in the west (Argyll), the Cymric or Welsh peoples in the south-west and between Forth and Tay, and the Teutonic invaders, Angles or English, in the south-east.

If the Picts had been able to win and hold Scotland as far south as the historic border, the fortunes of the country would probably have been more or less like those of Ireland. After the Norman Conquest, England would have subjugated the Celts and held Scotland by a tenure less precarious and disputed than they possessed in the western island. Scotland would have been, at most, a larger Wales. But in the struggle for existence it chanced that the early English invaders secured a kingdom, Bernicia, which stretched from the Humber into Lothian, or farther north, as the fortune of battle might at various times determine; and thus, from the centre to the south-east of what is now Scotland, the people had come to be anglicized in speech before the Norman Conquest, though Gaelic survived much later in Galloway.

The English domain comprised, roughly speaking, the modern counties of Selkirkshire, Peeblesshire, Berwickshire, Roxburghshire and most of the Lothians, while south of Tweed it contained Northumberland, Durham and Yorkshire to the Humber. In later days the Celtic kings of northern and western Scotland succeeded in holding, on vague conditions of homage to the English crown, the English-speaking region of historic Scotland. That region was the most fertile, had the best husbandry, and possessed the most civilized population, a people essentially English in language and institutions, but indomitably attached to the Celtic dynasties of the western and northern part of the island. It was the English-speaking south-east part of Scotland, gradually extended so as to comprise Fife and the south-west (Lanarkshire, Dumfriessbire, Stirlingshire, Dumbartonshire, Ayrshire and Renfrewshire), which learned to adopt the ideas of western Europe in matters political, municipal and ecclesiastical, while it never would submit to the domination of the English crown. This English element, in a nation ruled by a Celtic dynasty, prevented Scotland from becoming, like Wales, a province of England.

On the west of the northern part of the English kingdom of Bernicia, severed from that by the Forest of Ettrick, and perhaps by the mysterious work of which traces remain in the " Catrail," was the Brython or Welsh kingdom of Strathclyde, which then included the territory and population, later anglicized, of Renfrewshire, Ayrshire, Lanarkshire, Dumfriesshire, and, south of the historic border, Cumberland and Westmoreland to the Derwent. Strathclyde was essentially Welsh, and it may be noted that this region, centuries later, was the centre of the recalcitrant Covenanters, a people enthusiastically religious in their own way. Later, this region was the hotbed or "revivals" and the cradle of Irvingism. Whether the influence of Cymric blood may be traced in these characteristics is a dubious question.

While southern Scotland was thus English and Cymric, the north, from Cape Wrath to Lochaber, in the west, and to the Firth of Tay, on the east, was Pictland; and the vernacular spoken there was the Gaelic. The west, south of Lochaber to the Mull of Kintyre, with the isles of Bute, Islay, Arran and Jura, was the realm of the Dalriadic kings, Scots from Ireland (503): here, too, Gaelic was spoken, as among the "Southern Picts" of the kingdom of Galloway. Such, roughly speaking, were the divisions of the country which arose as results of the obscure wars of the 5th, 6th and 7th centuries.

In 431 the contemporary Chronica of Prosper of Aquitaine record that Palladius was ordained by Pope Celestine as the first bishop "to the believing Scots," that is, to the Irish. If there were "believing Scots" in Ireland before the first bishop was ordained, their ecclesiastical constitution cannot have been episcopal. Fordun, in the 14th century, supposed that the clergy, before Palladius, were presbyters or monks.

As Hector Boece, "that pillar of falsehood," dubbed these presbyters " Culdees," " the pure Culdee," a blameless presbyterian, almost prehistoric, has been claimed as the ancestor of Scottish presbyterianism; and episcopacy has been regarded as a deplorable innovation. The Irish church has paid more reverence to St Patricius than to Palladius (373-463), and the church of St Patricius, himself a figure as important as obscure, certainly abounded in bishops; according to Angus the Culdee there were 1071, but these cannot have been bishops with territorial sees, and the heads of monasteries were more potent personages.

The Dalriadic settlers in Argyll and the Isles, the (Irish) Scots, were Christians in the Irish manner. Their defeat by the Picts, in 560, induced the Irish St Columba to endeavour to convert the conquering Picts. In 563-565 he founded his mission and monastery in the isle of lona, and journeying to Inverness he converted the king of the Picts. About the same date (573), the king of Cymric Strathclyde summoned, from exile in Wales, St Kentigern, the patron saint of Glasgow, who restored a Christianity almost or quite submerged in paganism, Celtic and English.

The pagan English of Deira (603) routed under ~thelfrith the Christian Scots of Argyll between Liddesdale and North Tyne; and pagan English for more than a century held unopposed the region from Forth to Humber. In 617 Ethelfrith fell in battle with the English of East Anglia, and his sons, Eanfrid and Oswald, fled to the North. Eanfrid, by his marriage with a Pictish princess, became the father of the Pictish king Talorcan, while Oswald was baptized into the Columban church at lona. In a season of war and turmoil Oswald won the crown of the northeast English kingdom, stretching to the Forth, with its capital at Eadwinsburgh (? Edinburgh, a dubious etymology), and in that kingdom St Aidan, from lona, erected the Columban churches under the auspices of Oswald, whose brother Oswin dominated Strathclyde and Pictland up to the Grampians; the English element, for the time, extending itself and anglicizing more and more of the Scotland that was to be.

Thus the Dalriaclic Scots had handed on the gift of Irish Christianity, with such literature as accompanied it in the shape of Latin, and reading and writing, to the northern English from Forth to Humber. The ecclesiastical constitution thus introduced was one of missionary monastic stations, settled in fortified villages. The Celtic church, unluckily, differed from the Roman on the question of the method of calculating the date of Easter, the form of the tonsure, and other usages, one of them apparently relating to a detail in the celebration of the Holy Communion. From a letter to Pope Boniface IV. of an Irish saint Columbanus, who led twelve Irish monks into Gaul and Burgundy, the Celtic church appears to have denied that the papal jurisdiction extended beyond the limits of the Roman empire. Consequently Rome would have no jurisdiction in the affairs of the Irish church established in Scotland and the north of England.

The results would be the severance of these regions from the main current of western ecclesiastical ideas. Conceivably these sentiments of Columbanus never wholly died out in the Scottish kingdom of later history, whose kings were always apt to treat Rome in a cavalier manner, laughing at interdicts and excommunications. A papal legate, in Bruce's time, was no more safe, if his errand was undesirable, than under John Knox, when Mary Stuart wore the crown. "All the world errs, Rome and Jerusalem err, only the Scoti and the Britones are in the right" is quoted as the opinion of the Scoti and Britones in 634. It appears that Scotland was naturally Protestant against Rome as soon as she was Christian.

Meanwhile Rome was too strong, and in 664, in a synod held at Whitby, St Wilfrid procured the acceptance of Roman as against Celtic doctrine in the questions then at issue. The English Christians overcame the Celtic divines of lona, and in 710 even in Pictland they came into the customs of western Christianity. The church of the Celtic tribe thus yielded to the church of the Roman empire. There followed an age of war in which the northern English were routed at Nectan's mere, in Forfarshire, and driven south of Forth. In the quarrels of Picts and of Scots of Argyll, the Pictish king, Angus MacFergus (ob. 761), Scots. was victorious while in his prime, and then consolidated Pictland; but (802-839) the Scandinavian sea-rovers began to hold large territories in Scotland, weakened the Picts, and made easy their conquest by Kenneth MacAlpine of Kintyre, the king of the Dalriad Scots of Argyll.

In 860 this Scot became king of the Picts. Old legends represent him as having exterminated the Picts to the last man; and the Picts become, in popular tradiLion, a mythical folk, hardly human, to whom great feats, including the building of Glasgow cathedral, are attributed, as the walls of Tiryns and Mycenae in Greece were traditionally assigned to the energy of the Cyclopes. In 1814 Sir Walter Scott met a dwarfish traveller in the Orkneys, whom the natives regarded as a "Pecbt" or Pict.

There was, of course, in fact, no extermination of the Picts, there was merely a change of dynasty, and alliance between Picts and Scots, and that change was probably made in accordance with Pictish customs of succession. Kenneth MacAlpine, though son of a Scottish father, was probably, though not certainly, a Pict on the mother's side, and in Pictland the crown was inherited in the female line. The consequence was that what had been Pictland came to be styled Scotland. The king of Alban was a Scot in the paternal line. His conquest was not achieved at a blow, but his language, Gaelic, prevailed. Henceforth, despite 'the incursions of the Scandinavians, and partly because of them, the ecclesiastical and royal centres of life are moved to the south and the east. He allies himself with Cymric Strathclyde, and by constant raids, and thanks to English weakness caused by Danish invasions, he extends his power over English Lothian. A marriage of the daughter of Kenneth MacAlpine with the Welsh prince of Strathclyde gives Scotland a footing in that region; in short, Scotland slowly advances towards and even across the historic border.

Through this contact with and actual tenure of English lands arose the various so-called "submissions" of kings of Scotland to the English crown. Thus (924) the English Chronicle asserts that Constantine, king of Scotland, "chose Edward King to father and lord." It is impossible with here to analyse the disputes as to whether, in Freeman's words, "from this time to the 14th century" (he means, to Bannockburn) "the vassalage of Scotland was an essential part of the public law of the Isle of Britain." In fact this vassalage was claimed at intervals by the English kings, and was admitted by Scottish kings for their lands in England; but as regards Scotland, was resisted in arms whenever opportunity arose. Each submission "held not long," and the practical result was that (945) Malcolm acquired northern Strathclyde, Cumberland, Galloway and other districts, while another Malcolm (1018) took Lothian, the northern part of Northumbria, after winning a great battle at Carham on the Tweed.

The Celts, Scoto-Picts, of Alban, had thus annexed a great English-speaking region, which remained loyal to their dynasty, the more loyal from abhorrence of the Norman conquerors. The English or anglicized element in Scotland was never subjugated by England, save during the few years of the Cromwellian Commonwealth, and was supported (with occasional defections, and troubles caused by dynastic Celtic risings) by the Celtic element in the kingdom during the long struggle for national independence. Scotland, in short, was too English to be conquered by England. Poor, distracted, threatened on occasion by the Celts on her flank and rear, anglicized Scotland preferred her poverty with independence, to the prosperity and peace which England would have given, if unresisted, but never could impose by war. Her independence, her resistance, curbed the conquering ambitions of England abroad; and it went for something in securing the independence of France, and the success of Protestantism, where it succeeded.

A sturdy and stoical temper was developed in the nation, which later helped parliamentary England in the struggle against the crown (1643-1648). Habits of foreign adventure and of thrift were evolved, which were of advantage to the empire when, too long after the union of 1707, Scottish men were admitted to participate in its privileges and in its administration. Such were the consequences, in the sequel, of what seemed at the time a disastrous event, the absorption, by a Celtic kingdom, of a large and fertile region of northern England.

The English element in the realm of Malcolm II (1005-1034) was the conducting medium of western ideas which naturally appealed to the interests and the ambitions of that prince. On looking at the genealogical tree of the dynasty of Kenneth MacAlpine, we see that from the date of his death (859) to the accession of Duncan on the death of Malcolm II. (1034) no monarch is succeeded by his own son or grandson. The same peculiarity appears in the list of the ancient kings of Rome, but these are entangled in mythology. In the dynasty of Kenneth the succession to the crown alternated thus: he was succeeded by his brother Donald, who was followed, by his nephew, Kenneth's son, Constantine; Constantine's brother, Aodh, followed; and henceforth till 957, the kingw were alternately chosen from the houses of Constantine and Aodh.

It was the custom to appoint the successor to the king, his "Tanist," at the same time as the king himself. Malcolm II. succeeded his own cousin, and, in accordance with the native system of royal inheritance, should have been followed by the unnamed grandson of his own predecessor, Kenneth III. But Malcolm is accused of putting his legitimate successor out of the way, and thus securing the succession of his own grandson, Duncan, a son of his daughter, Bethoc, and her husband Crinan, protector of the abbey (or lay abbot) of Dunkeld. Malcolm thus set the example of advance to the western system of royal successions, while in Crinan's lay tenure of the abbacy of Dunkeld we see the habit of appropriating ecclesiastical revenues which again became so common about a century before the Reformation.

The innovation of Malcolm II. brought no peace but a sword. Boedhe, son of Kenneth III., left a daughter, Gruach, who inherited the claims of the unnamed son of Boedhe slain by order of Malcolm. Gruach married Gilcomgain, and had issue male, Lulach. After the death of Gilcomgain, Gruach wedded Macbeth, Mormaor (or earl in later style) of the province or subkingdom of Moray; Macbeth slew Duncan, and ruled as protector of the legitimate claims of Lulach. From Lulach descended a line of Celtic prélendants, and for a century the dynasty violently founded by Malcolm II. was opposed by claimants of the blood of Lulach, representing the Celtic customs adverse to the English and Norman ideas of the family in possession of the throne. Thus Celtic principles, as opposed to the western principles of chartered feudalism, did not perish in Scotland without a long and severe struggle.

Meanwhile the dynasty of Malcolm II. was brought into close connexion with the English crown, and relied on English support, both before and after the Norman Conquest. The genius of Shakespeare, in his Macbeth, based on legendary materials borrowed by Hollinshed from Hector Boece, and on the dynastic myth of the descent of the Stuart kings from Banquo, has clouded the actual facts of history. To the Celts of Scotland, or at least to those of the great subkingship or province of Moray, Duncan, not Macbeth, was the usurper. Duncan left sons, Malcolm, called Canmore (great head), and Donald Ban; and in 1054 Siward, earl of Northumbria, defeated Macbeth, whether acting under the order of Edward the Confessor in favour of the claims of Malcolm Canmore, or merely to punish Macbeth for sheltering Norman fugitives from the Confessor's court. The latter is the more probable, though the chronicler, Florence of Worcester, asserts the protection of the sons of DuncanbyEngland. Siward did not dethrone Macbeth, who was defeated and slain by Malcolm in 1057; Lulach fell obscurely in 1058, leaving claimants to his rights, though these did not trouble much the crowned king, Malcolm Canmore. His long reign (1058-1093), and his second marriage (1068) with Margaret, sister of Edgar, of the ancient English royal blood, dispossessed by the Norman Conqueror, intensified the sway of English ideas in Scotland, and increased the prepotency of the English element in political, social and ecclesiastical affairs. The anarchic state of Northumberland and Cumberland after the Norman Conquest, which did not soon assimilate them, was Malcolm's opportunity. He held Cumberland (1070), and the houses of Gospatric (earls of Dunbar and March) and of de Comines (the Comyns of Badenoch) were long puissant in Scottish history.

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