When History is a Tug of War
Dr Ronnie Scott (historian and writer)
The Herald, Friday 2nd November, 2007
Battles, said Winston Churchill, are the milestones of history. Stones perhaps, but ones with changing
directions and distances, capable of being revised and rewritten by successive generations for their own
purposes.
For historical events do not end when the last musket is fired, or the executioner's blade falls. Nor is their
meaning or importance fixed by the chroniclers of the times. Rather, events continue to resound down the
ages, being remade and remodelled until we have no further use for them.
People and nations, whether winners or losers, continually re-make and re-interpret the history of their
battles, painting their heroes a little brighter or their enemies a shade darker and making the outcome
seem part of an inevitable march of events leading to, and justifying, present- day actions or proposals. For
example, Culloden, often described as the last formal battle on British soil, has been presented in a number
of ways, depending on who was telling the story and what campaign or cause they wished to promote.
Other battles, such as Stirling Bridge in 1297 or Bannockburn in 1314, are equally malleable, and have been
plausibly co-opted in the competing causes of Scottish independence and British Unionism. So it can be
seen that history does not belong to any one group. For instance, consider the opposing interpretations
and conflicting "ownership" of Robert Burns (radical supporter of the French Revolution or loyal taxcollector and Freemason) and Adam Smith (advocate of the free market or stern critic of mercantile
capitalism).
Conflicts may well shape nations, but the subsequent interpretations of these conflicts have far more
lasting power. Many battles involved relatively small numbers of combatants, and there was no referee to
make a definitive ruling. So propaganda - including the oral tradition of bards and ballads, printed national
histories and paintings - can be as powerful as an extra battalion.
Monuments raised a generation or more after the battle have a suspicious air of rewritten history. Like
Tony Blair apologising for the Irish potato famine, or Pope John Paul II saying sorry for the Inquisition,
monuments do not change the past, but rather seek to appropriate the values and emotions popularly
associated with the event or the person and apply them to present circumstances - for the benefit of the
promoter in the present.
Dr James Coleman of Glasgow University, a historian who has researched the Wallace Monument and its
place in the political history of Scotland, says: "The tide of British and Scottish patriotic fervour that swept
the country in the later 1850s and 1860s threw up numerous monuments and encouraged the celebration
of countless anniversaries. Commemoration of great battles and national heroes was a means of inculcating
a sense of nationality' into those who took part."
The curtains of romantic mist that obscure the detail of many of our national milestones are easily parted.
For example, the Battle of Largs in 1263 involved only a small proportion of each side's warriors, and
neither party claimed victory at the time; King Robert I (the Bruce) swore loyalty to England and then
changed sides, and also committed murder in a church; and the Battle of Culloden in 1746 was over in 40
minutes. Yet Largs is remembered as the battle that ended the Viking control of the north and west of
Scotland, Bruce is seen as a great patriot and champion of liberty and Culloden is remembered as a pitched
battle worthy of undying fame.
William Wallace, too, can be reduced to an outlaw and an opportunist, although we can say little with any
certainty, since the first records of him were collected and written by Blind Harry in 1477, more than a
century and a half after his execution in 1305. Yet Scots - in common with every other nation, it must be
said - have constructed a national autobiography on the flimsiest of evidence. Prominent in all this is the
Wallace Monument in Stirling, raised by Victorian Scots more than 550 years after his death.
"The monument stands as an enduring legacy of our need to show that we remember the debt owed to our
national heroes and heroines," says Coleman. "Yet the rhetoric that built the Wallace Monument was
almost entirely Unionist, celebrating Scotland's role in Great Britain and its Empire, and a far cry from the
nationalist Wallace that dominates today.
"If anything defines the way in which successive generations of Scots have used their past, it is the variety
of different stories we've been telling and - more often than not - how we handle opposing versions of the
same story."
The career of Robert the Bruce is a clear example of history being used, centuries after the fact, for political
ends. The Battle of Bannockburn in 1314, which decisively ended the First Wars of Scottish Independence,
saw King Robert I defeat Edward II of England, "and sent him homeward to think again", in the words of
Flower of Scotland, a potential national anthem that - unlike many patriotic songs - has the power to divide
the nation.
After the Union of Scotland with England and Wales in 1707, and the wholehearted embrace of the British
Empire by Scots, the victory no longer had a place in national myth. But when the first stirrings of modern
Scottish nationalism began in the 1920s, Bannockburn became a place of pilgrimage. Almost the first act of
the National Party of Scotland, which was founded in February 1928, was to organise a rally there on June
23, the anniversary of the battle.
The Jacobite legacy is another powerful example of a cause being re-purposed, long after the event, to tell
a story at odds with the original narrative. The Highland Scots, who rallied behind the banner of Prince
Charles Edward Stuart in 1745, after a series of failed Jacobite rebellions that began in 1688, were, by their
support of an exiled claimant to the throne who was backed by a foreign power, traitors to the British
crown. Also, to put it bluntly, they turned tail at Rugby, were routed at Culloden and brought decades of
bloody vengeance on the Highland people and their culture. Yet "Bonnie" Prince Charlie has been
celebrated as the champion of Scotland against England, the Romantic rebel who spawned a thousand
saccharine songs, the "Prince in the Heather" who evaded capture and escaped back to the continent - the
face that launched a thousand tea-towels.
Culloden, the site of his famous defeat in April 1746, was left abandoned and uncommemorated for a
century, until it suited the Victorian "nationalist unionists" to package the prince and his followers in a safe
and sanitised mythology that bolstered the United Kingdom. "Attempts in the 1840s to erect a monument
at Culloden were remarkably unsuccessful," says Coleman. "The site itself was not held in particularly high
regard, and though some attempts were made to improve it in the 1880s, it wasn't until the 1920s that the
care of the battlefield was taken seriously."
Following Culloden, the Highland warrior, a symbol of uncivilised rebellion, came to be recast in a heroic
mould, and the kilted Scottish soldier, marching into battle behind the bagpipes, came to stand for British
imperial might. In the First World War, the Germans feared and detested the "devils in skirts" or "ladies
from hell" - and what is the Edinburgh Tattoo but an annual military Brigadoon, when the kilts and bagpipes
of the Jacobite clans are re-presented as fixtures of the British Army, firmly on the side of Crown and
Kingdom? Scottish military museums, too, have shaped the perceptions of "our boys" fighting the good
fight, proud of their Highland or Cameronian heritages but putting aside the former, rebellious, meanings
of these.
Not all historical conflicts have their uses. The 1820 Radical Rising, during which 60,000 people went on
strike and many took part in the so-called Battle of Bonnymuir, has failed to stay in the popular
imagination, and has been used as a precedent or accelerant by only fringe radical groups. And the
Covenanters, whose devotion to the Presbyterian cause and the sovereignty of parliament set them at odds
with the Crown in the seventeenth century, but whose central beliefs became mainstream, have yet to be
revisited as propaganda for any current causes. Coleman may be the one to champion them, however.
"Compared to the Jacobite Highlanders, the good guys were the now largely neglected Covenanters: pious
patriots who fought and died for civil and religious liberty.
"The Covenanters are a resonant example of how we change our past to suit our present. Scottish heritage
culture is robed in the garb of Highland Jacobitism, the product of a corrupt and venal monarchy, not the
piety of the lowland Covenanter. How many of us who have visited Culloden, Killiecrankie or Glenfinnan
have also visited the monuments at Drumclog or Bothwell Brig?"