Ancient times
Evidence of human settlement in the area later known as Scotland dates from the 3rd millennium BCE. The earliest people, Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age) hunters and fishermen who probably reached Scotland via an ancient land bridge from the Continent, were to be found on the west coast, near Oban, and as far south as Kirkcudbright, where their settlements are marked by large deposits of discarded mollusk shells. Remains suggest that settlers at the Forth estuary, in the area of modern Stirling, obtained meat from stranded whales. By early in the 2nd millennium BCE, Neolithic (New Stone Age) farmers had begun cultivating cereals and keeping cattle and sheep. They made settlements on the west coast and as far north as Shetland. Many built collective chamber tombs, such as the Maeshowe barrow in Orkney, which is the finest example in Britain. A settlement of such people at Skara Brae in Orkney consists of a cluster of seven self-contained huts connected by covered galleries or alleys. The “Beaker folk,” so called from the shape of their drinking vessels, migrated to eastern Scotland from northern Europe, probably beginning about 1800 BCE. They buried their dead in individual graves and were pioneers in bronze working. The most impressive monuments of Bronze Age Scotland are the stone circles, presumably for religious ceremonies, such as those at Callanish in Lewis and Brodgar in Orkney, the latter being more than 300 feet (90 metres) in diameter.
From about 700 BCE onward there was a distinct final period in Scottish prehistory. This period is the subject of current archaeological controversy, with somewhat less stress than in the past being placed on the importance of the introduction of iron fabrication or on the impact of large new groups of iron-using settlers. One key occurrence in the middle of the 1st millennium was the change from a relatively warm and dry climate to one that was cooler and wetter. In terms of technology, this period was marked by the appearance of hill forts, defensive structures having stone ramparts with an internal frame of timber; a good example is at Abernethy near the Tay. Some of these forts have been dated to the 7th and 6th centuries BCE, which might suggest that they were adopted by already established tribes rather than introduced by incomers. Massive decorated bronze armlets with Celtic ornamentation, found in northeastern Scotland and dated to the period 50–150 CE, suggest that chieftains from outside may have gone to these tribes at this period, displaced from farther south first by fresh settlers from the Continent and later by the Romans in 43 CE. From 100 BCE the “brochs” appeared in the extreme north of Scotland and the northern isles. These were high round towers, which at Mousa in Shetland stand almost 50 feet (15 metres) in height. The broch dwellers may have carried on intermittent warfare with the fort builders of farther south. On the other hand, the two types of structures may not represent two wholly distinct cultures, and the two peoples may have together constituted the ancestors of the people later known as the Picts.
The houses of these people were circular, sometimes standing alone and sometimes in groups of 15 or more, as at Hayhope Knowe in the Cheviot Hills on the border between modern Scotland and England. Some single steadings, set in bogs or on lakesides, are called crannogs. Grain growing was probably of minor importance in the economy; the people were pastoralists and food gatherers. They were ruled by a warrior aristocracy whose bronze and iron parade equipment has, in a few instances, survived.
Roman penetration
Gnaeus Julius Agricola, the Roman governor of Britain from 77 to 84 CE, was the first Roman general to operate extensively in Scotland. He defeated the native population at Mons Graupius, possibly in Banffshire, probably in 84 CE. In the following year he was recalled, and his policy of containing the hostile tribes within the Highland zone, which he had marked by building a legionary fortress at Inchtuthil in Strathmore, was not continued. His tactics were logical if Scotland was to be subdued but probably required the commitment of more troops than the overall strategy of the Roman Empire could afford. The only other period in which a forward policy was attempted was between about 144 and about 190, when a turf wall, the Antonine Wall (named for the emperor Antoninus Pius), was manned between the Forth and the Clyde.
The still-impressive stone structure known as Hadrian’s Wall had been built between the Tyne and Solway Firth between 122 and 128, and it was to be the permanent northern frontier of Roman Britain. After a northern uprising, the emperor Severus supervised the restoring of the Hadrianic line from 209 to 211, and thereafter southeastern Scotland seems to have enjoyed almost a century of peace. In the 4th century there were successive raids from north of the wall and periodic withdrawals of Roman troops to continental Europe. Despite increasing use of native buffer states in front of the wall, the Romans found their frontier indefensible by the end of the 4th century.
At Housesteads, at about the midpoint of Hadrian’s Wall, archaeologists have uncovered a market where northern natives exchanged cattle and hides for Roman products; in this way some Roman wares, and possibly more general cultural influences, found their way north, but the scale of this commerce was probably small. Roman civilization, typified by the towns and villas, or country houses, of southern Britain, was unknown in Scotland, which as a whole was never dominated by the Romans or even strongly influenced by them.
From about 400 CE there was a long period for which written evidence is scanty. Four peoples—the Picts, the Scots, the Britons, and the Angles—were eventually to merge and thus form the kingdom of Scots.
The Picts occupied Scotland north of the Forth. Their identity has been much debated, but they possessed a distinctive culture, seen particularly in their carved symbol stones. Their original language, presumably non-Indo-European, has disappeared; some Picts probably spoke a Brythonic Celtic language. Pictish unity may have been impaired by their apparent tradition of matrilineal succession to the throne.
The Scots, from Dalriada in northern Ireland, colonized the Argyll area, probably in the late 5th century. Their continuing connection with Ireland was a source of strength to them, and Scottish and Irish Gaelic (Goidelic Celtic languages) did not become distinct from each other until the late Middle Ages. Scottish Dalriada soon extended its cultural as well as its military sway east and south, though one of its greatest kings, Aidan, was defeated by the Angles in 603 at Degsastan near the later Scottish border.
The Britons, speaking a Brythonic Celtic language, colonized Scotland from farther south, probably from the 1st century BCE onward. They lost control of southeastern Scotland to the Angles in the early 7th century CE. The British heroic poem Gododdin describes a stage in this process. The British kingdom of Strathclyde in southwestern Scotland remained, with its capital at Dumbarton.
The Angles were Teutonic-speaking invaders from across the North Sea. Settling from the 5th century, they had by the early 7th century created the kingdom of Northumbria, stretching from the Humber to the Forth. A decisive check to their northward advance was administered in 685 by the Picts at the Battle of Nechtansmere in Angus.
Christianity
Christianity was introduced to Scotland in late Roman times, and traditions of the evangelizing of St. Ninian in the southwest have survived. He is a shadowy figure, however, and it is doubtful that his work extended very far north.
Firmly established throughout Scotland by the Celtic clergy, Christianity came with the Scots settlers from Ireland and possibly gave them a decisive cultural advantage in the early unification of kingdoms. The Celtic church lacked a territorial organization of parishes and dioceses and a division between secular and regular clergy; its communities of missionary monks were ideal agents of conversion. The best-known figure, possibly the greatest, is St. Columba, who founded his monastery at Iona, an island of the Inner Hebrides, in 565; a famous biography of his life was written by Adamnan, abbot of Iona, within a century of his death. Columba is believed to have been influential in converting the Picts, and he did much to support the Scots king Aidan politically.
St. Aidan brought the Celtic church to Northumbria in the 630s, establishing his monastery at Lindisfarne. At the Synod of Whitby in 664, the king of Northumbria, having to decide between the Celtic and the Roman styles of Christianity, chose the Roman version. There had been differences over such observances as the dating of Easter, but no one regarded the Celtic monks as schismatics. The Ecclesiastical History of the English People by Bede the Venerable (died 735), a monk of Jarrow in Northumbria, is a first-rate source for the early Anglo-Saxon history and shows remarkable sympathy with the Celtic clergy, though Bede was a Roman monk.
In the early 8th century the church among the Picts and Scots accepted Roman usages on such questions as Easter. Nevertheless, the church in Scotland remained Celtic in many ways until the 11th century. Still dominated by its communities of clergy (who were called Célidé or Culdees), it clearly corresponded well to the tribal nature of society.
The Norse influence
Viking raids on the coasts of Britain began at the end of the 8th century, Lindisfarne and Iona being pillaged in the 790s. By the mid-9th century Norse settlement of the western and northern isles and of Caithness and Sutherland had begun, probably largely because of overpopulation on the west coast of Norway. During the 10th century Orkney and Shetland were ruled by Norse earls nominally subject to Norway. In 1098 Magnus III (Magnus Barefoot), king of Norway, successfully asserted his authority in the northern and western isles and made an agreement with the king of Scots on their respective spheres of influence. A mid-12th-century earl of Orkney, Ragnvald, built the great cathedral at Kirkwall in honour of his martyred uncle St. Magnus.
The Norse legacy to Scotland was long-lasting, but in the mid-12th century there was a rising against the Norse in the west under a native leader, Somerled, who drove them from the greater part of mainland Argyll. A Norwegian expedition of 1263 under King Haakon IV failed to maintain the Norse presence in the Hebrides, and three years later they were ceded to Scotland by the Treaty of Perth. In 1468–69 the northern isles of Orkney and Shetland were pawned to Scotland as part of a marriage settlement with the crown of Denmark-Norway. Nonetheless, a Scandinavian language, the Norn, was spoken in these Viking possessions, and some Norse linguistic influence still remains discernible in Shetland.
The unification of the kingdom
In 843 Kenneth MacAlpin, King Kenneth I of Scots, also became king of the Picts and crushed resistance to his assuming the throne. Kenneth may have had a claim on the Pictish throne through the matrilineal law of succession; probably the Picts too had been weakened by Norse attacks. The Norse threat helped to weld together the new kingdom of Alba and to cause its heartlands to be located in eastern Scotland, the former Pictland, with Dunkeld becoming its religious capital. But within Alba it was the Scots who established a cultural and linguistic supremacy, no doubt merely confirming a tendency seen before 843.
As the English kingdom was consolidated, its kings, in the face of Norse attacks, found it useful to have an understanding with Alba. In 945 Edmund I of England is said to have leased to Malcolm I of Alba the whole of Cumbria, probably an area including land on both sides of the western half of the later Anglo-Scottish border. In the late 10th century a similar arrangement seems to have been made for Lothian, the corresponding territory to the east. The Scots confirmed their hold on Lothian, from the Forth to the Tweed, when, about 1016, Malcolm II defeated a Northumbrian army at Carham. About the same time, Malcolm II placed his grandson Duncan I upon the throne of the British kingdom of Strathclyde. Duncan succeeded Malcolm in 1034 and brought Strathclyde into the kingdom of Scots. During the next two centuries the Scots kings pushed their effective power north and west—William I was successful in the north and Alexander II in the west—until mainland Scotland became one political unit. Less discernible but as important was the way the various peoples grew together, though significant linguistic and other differences remained.
According to the Celtic system of succession, known as tanistry, a king could be succeeded by any male member of the derbfine, a family group of four generations; members of collateral branches seem to have been preferred to descendants, and the successor, or tanist, might be named in his predecessor’s lifetime. This system in practice led to many successions by the killing of one’s predecessor. Thus, Duncan I was killed by his cousin Macbeth in 1040, and Macbeth was killed by Malcolm Canmore (Duncan’s son, later Malcolm III Canmore) in 1057. Shakespeare freely adapted the story of Macbeth, who historically seems to have been a successful king and who may have gone on pilgrimage to Rome.
Until the 11th century the unification was the work of a Gaelic-speaking dynasty, and there is place-name evidence of the penetration of Gaelic south of the Forth. Afterward, however, the Teutonic English speech that had come to Scotland from the kingdom of Northumbria began to attain mastery, and Gaelic began its slow retreat north and west. This is not obscured by the fact that from the 12th century onward Anglo-Norman was for a time the speech of the leaders of society in England and Scotland alike. By the later Middle Ages the language known to modern scholars as Old English had evolved into two separate languages, now called Middle English and Middle Scots, with the latter focused on the court of the Stewart (Stuart) kings of Scots. After 1603 the increasing political and cultural assimilation of Scotland by England checked the further development of Scots as a separate language.
The persistence of distinctively Celtic institutions in post-12th-century Scotland is a more complex question, as will be seen from the way in which primogeniture replaced tanistry as the system of royal succession. It can be argued, however, that a Celtic stress on the family bond in society persisted throughout the Middle Ages and beyond—and not only in the Highlands, with its clan organization of society.
The development of the monarchy
Malcolm Canmore came to the throne as Malcolm III in 1058 by disposing of his rivals and thereafter sought, in five unsuccessful raids, to extend his kingdom into northern England. Whereas his first wife, Ingibjorg, was the daughter of a Norse earl of Orkney, his second, Margaret, came from the Saxon royal house of England. With Margaret and her sons, Scotland was particularly receptive to cultural influence from the south. Margaret was a great patroness of the church but without altering its organization, as her sons were to do.
On the death of Malcolm III on his last English raid in 1093, sustained attempts were made to prevent the application of the southern custom of succession by primogeniture. Both Malcolm’s brother and Malcolm’s son by his first marriage held the throne for short periods, but it was the three sons of Malcolm and Margaret who eventually established themselves—Edgar (1097–1107), Alexander I (1107–24), and David I (1124–53). Such was the force of Celtic reaction against southern influence that Edgar and Alexander could be said to have owed their thrones solely to English aid, and they were feudally subject to the English king. The descendants of Malcolm III’s first marriage continued to trouble the ruling dynasty until the early 13th century, but the descendants of his second retained the throne. Until the late 13th century the heir to the throne by primogeniture was always the obvious candidate. It is noteworthy that in charters of about 1145 David’s son Henry (who was to die before his father) is described as rex designatus, very much like the tanist of the Celtic system. It is thus very hard to date precisely the acceptance of southern custom as exemplified by primogeniture.
David I (1124–53)
Medieval economy and society
David I’s successors
The Wars of Independence
Competition for the throne
With the deaths of Alexander III in 1286 and his young granddaughter Margaret, the “Maid of Norway,” four years later, almost two centuries of relatively amicable Anglo-Scottish relations came to an end. A complete uncertainty as to the proper succession to the throne provided Edward I of England and his successors with a chance to intervene in and then to assimilate Scotland. Although the two countries were feudal monarchies of a largely similar type, the English attempt was, in practice, too tactless to have any hope of success. Besides, the struggle for independence disclosed that a marked degree of national unity had arisen among the different peoples of Scotland. Through the Anglo-Scottish conflict, Scotland developed a basic tendency—to seek self-sufficiency and also to look to continental Europe for alliances and inspiration—that persisted at least until 1560.
Before the death of the Maid of Norway, the Scottish interim government of “guardians” had agreed, by the Treaty of Birgham (1290), that she should marry the heir of Edward I of England, though Scotland was to be preserved as a separate kingdom. After her death 13 claimants for the Scottish crown emerged, most of them Scottish magnates. The Scots initially had no reason to suspect the motives of Edward I in undertaking to judge the various claims. It emerged, however, that Edward saw himself not as an outside arbitrator but as the feudal superior of the Scottish monarch and therefore able to dispose of Scotland as a fief. That Edward’s interpretation was disingenuous is suggested by the fact that he had not invoked the old and vague English claims to superiority over Scotland while the Maid of Norway was still alive and he had made a treaty with Scotland on the basis of equality, not as a feudal superior claiming rights of wardship and marriage over the Maid.
The claimants to the throne, who had much to lose by antagonizing Edward, generally agreed to acknowledge his superior lordship over Scotland. But a different answer to his claim to lordship was given by the “community of the realm” (the important laymen and churchmen of Scotland as a group), who declined to commit whoever was to be king of Scots on this issue and thus displayed a sophisticated sense of national unity.
The sixth Robert de Bruce and John Balliol (see John), descendants of a younger brother of Malcolm IV and William, emerged as the leading competitors, and in 1292 Edward I named Balliol king. When Edward sought to exert his overlordship by taking law cases on appeal from Scotland and by summoning Balliol to do military service for him in France, the Scots determined to resist. In 1295 they concluded an alliance with France, and in 1296 Edward’s army marched north, sacking Berwick on its way.
Edward easily forced Balliol and Scotland to submit. National resistance to English governance of Scotland grew slowly thereafter and was led by William Wallace, a knight’s son, in the absence of a leader from the magnates. Wallace defeated the English at Stirling Bridge in 1297 but lost at Falkirk the next year. He was executed in London in 1305, having shown that heroic leadership without social status was not enough. When the eighth Robert de Bruce, grandson of the competitor, rose in revolt in 1306 and had himself crowned Robert I, he supplied the focus necessary to mobilize the considerable potential of national resistance.
Robert I (1306–29)
In several years of mixed fortunes thereafter, Robert the Bruce had both the English and his opponents within Scotland to contend with. Edward I’s death in 1307 and the dissension in England under Edward II were assets that Robert took full advantage of. He excelled as a statesman and as a military leader specializing in harrying tactics; it is ironic that he should be remembered best for the atypical set-piece battle that he incurred and won at Bannockburn in 1314. The Declaration of Arbroath of 1320 is perhaps more informative about his methods. Ostensibly a letter from the magnates of Scotland to the pope, pledging their support for King Robert, it seems in reality to have been framed by Bernard de Linton, Robert’s chancellor. In committing Robert to seeing the independence struggle through, it likewise committed those who set their seals to it. Some of them were waverers in the national cause, whether or not Robert had proof of this at the time, and his hand was now strengthened against them.
In 1328 Robert secured from England, through the Treaty of Northampton, a recognition of Scotland’s independence; the following year the pope granted to the independent kings of Scots the right to be anointed with holy oil. However, Robert also died in 1329. By the appropriate standards of medieval kingship, his success had been total, but, because of the nature of medieval kingship, his successor was left with the same struggle to wage all over again.
David II (1329–71)
Robert I’s son, David II, has perhaps received unfair treatment from historians contrasting him and his illustrious father. Just over five years of age at his accession, he was soon confronted with a renewal of the Anglo-Scottish war, exacerbated by the ambitions of those Scots who had been deprived of their property by Robert I or otherwise disaffected. In the 1330s Edward Balliol, pursuing the claim to the throne of his father, John, overran southern Scotland. In return for English help, he gave England southern lands and strongpoints not recaptured fully by the Scots for a century. After the Scottish defeat at Halidon Hill near Berwick in 1333, David was forced to flee to France in the following year. Berwick itself fell to the English and was never again in Scottish hands except in the period between 1461 and 1482.
The Scots gradually regained the initiative, and in 1341 David was able to return to Scotland. In 1346, however, he was captured at the Battle of Neville’s Cross near Durham. He was released in 1357 for a ransom of 100,000 merks, to be paid in nine annual installments. This ransom, three-fourths of which was eventually paid, constituted a serious burden on Scotland, and there is evidence that Parliament used this national emergency to establish some checks on the actions of the crown. In addition, the representatives of the royal burghs, which were important as an accessible source of finance, established a continuing right to sit in Parliament with the magnates and churchmen from the 1360s on, thus constituting the third of the “Three Estates.”
Complex evidence relating to these transactions has been uniformly interpreted in a way discreditable to David, though another interpretation is possible. That he collected revenues more assiduously than he made ransom payments may indicate a reasoned attempt to strengthen the crown financially; and his negotiations, especially of 1363, whereby a member of the English royal house was to succeed him on the Scottish throne, may have been a diplomatic charade. Whatever his faults, David left Scotland with both its economy and its independence intact.
The long wars with England necessarily took their toll, retarding Scotland’s economy and weakening the authority of its government. The buildings that have survived from this era are inferior to earlier work, much of which of course suffered damage during the wars. War was increasingly expensive, and taxation was increased drastically to pay David II’s ransom. But, again, a rosier picture can be painted, suggesting that the burgesses were able to meet the increased taxation because of increased prosperity through the still-continuing trade with England.
Scotland in the 15th century
The early Stewart kings
David was succeeded by Robert II (1371–90), previously the high steward, who was the son of Robert I’s daughter Marjory. The next king was Robert II’s son John, restyled Robert III (1390–1406). It may be that the future Robert II’s conduct was responsible for dissension in Scotland during David II’s reign, particularly during his captivity in England. At any rate, neither Robert II nor his son Robert III was a strong king, and some nobles regarded both as upstarts and the latter as of doubtful legitimacy. A long period of monarchical weakness ensued in Scotland, accentuated by a series of royal minorities in the 15th and 16th centuries. Although historians have made much of the turbulence of these times, there were comparable periods of governmental weakness in contemporary England and France, and “bonds of manrent” and other alliances made by the magnates with each other and with their social inferiors should be seen as much as attempts to secure political stability in their own localities as threats to the overall peace of the kingdom.
Robert III’s younger brother, Robert Stewart, 1st duke of Albany, was given powers to rule in his brother’s name several times, and Robert’s son James may have been sent to France in 1406 in order to keep him out of Albany’s clutches. However, James was captured at sea by the English, and shortly afterward Robert III died. Following Albany’s death in 1420, his son Murdac continued to misgovern the realm until 1424, when James I, then age 29, was ransomed.
The Douglas family was becoming particularly powerful in Scotland. They had been rewarded with the gift of the royal forest of Selkirk and other lands in south and southwest Scotland for loyal service to Robert I. But the growing power of the Douglases in this vital border area posed a growing threat to the crown by the end of the 14th century. At the same time, the Lords of the Isles had attained a stature in the western Highlands that outstripped that of the kings of Scots.
One notable event was the founding of the University of St. Andrews, Scotland’s first university, in 1411. The Wars of Independence led Scottish students to go to Paris rather than to Oxford or Cambridge. But universities were the training grounds of the clergy, and when, in the period 1408–18, Scotland recognized the antipope Benedict XIII after he had been abandoned by France, it became expedient for Scotland to have its own university. The bulls of foundation from Benedict XIII reached St. Andrews in 1414.
James I (1406–37) was an active and able king, keen to once again make the crown wealthy and powerful. Perhaps he was too eager to make up for time lost in his captivity, and thus he prompted the opposition that led to his death. The new posts of comptroller and treasurer were created to gather royal revenues more efficiently. Murdac, 2nd duke of Albany, was executed in 1425, and other powerful men were overawed, even in the far north. The laws were to be revised, and in 1426 a court for civil cases was set up, presaging the later Court of Session.
In 1426, possibly to balance the power of the magnates, it was enacted that all tenants in chief should attend Parliament in person. More realistically, they were, from 1428, permitted to send representatives from each shire. Even this system did not operate until the late 16th century. If James had been inspired during his captivity by the English House of Commons, he was unable to transplant that institution to Scotland. The Scottish Parliament, like that of many other European countries, remained throughout the medieval period the feudal court of the kings of Scots; lacking the distinctive development of the English Parliament, it did not differ essentially in kind from the feudal court of any great magnate. Despite, or perhaps because of, his innovative vigour, James made enemies for himself. His murder in 1437 was part of an attempt to seize the throne for Walter Stewart, earl of Atholl, but the conspirators were executed and James’s young son succeeded him.
James II (1437–60) was six years old at the time of his accession. His minority was marked by struggles between the Crichton and Livingston families. During this minority and that of James III, James Kennedy, bishop of St. Andrews, played a statesmanlike part in seeking to preserve peace. James II took a violent line against overambitious subjects. In 1452 he stabbed William Douglas, 8th earl of Douglas, to death, and in 1455 James Douglas, 9th earl of Douglas, was attainted. The main line of the Douglas family never regained its position, though a younger, or cadet, branch of the family, the earls of Angus, was important in the late 15th century. Like his father, James II sought boldly to reassert royal authority, and Scotland lost an able king when he was killed by the bursting of a cannon at the siege of Roxburgh Castle, one of the last Scottish strongpoints in English hands. Roxburgh was subsequently captured by the Scots. Among the cultural advances of the reign was the founding, in 1451 by Bishop William Turnbull, of the University of Glasgow, Scotland’s second university.
James III (1460–88), James II’s son, acceded at age eight. During a period in his minority he was a pawn of the Boyd family. The Treaty of Westminster-Ardtornish of 1462 showed that John, Lord of the Isles, and the exiled Douglas were prepared to try to carve Scotland into two vassal states of England for themselves. The alliance came to nothing, but the Lords of the Isles were a threat to the territorial integrity of Scotland until their final forfeiture in 1493. Nonetheless, the power vacuum left by their removal was responsible for much of the unrest in the western Highlands thereafter. It was in James III’s reign that the territory of Scotland attained its fullest extent with the acquisition of Orkney and Shetland in 1468–69.
As James III came of age, his keeping of company with artists caused grave offense to the nobles he shunned. Although it has been suggested that his fine sensibility did him credit, this is probably an anachronistic view. So serious was James’s lack of authority that Berwick fell in 1482 when the nobles, led by Archibald Douglas, 5th earl of Angus, chose—rather than to defend the country against the English—to seize their opportunity to hang some of James’s favourites. In 1488 James was murdered while fleeing from a battle against his opponents at Sauchieburn, though it seems that the death of the king was not intended, and he was succeeded without trouble by his son.
15th-century society
Despite the continuing war and unrest, there is evidence of economic recovery in Scotland during this period. Castle building and the extending of monasteries and cathedrals were widespread; work was done on the royal residences at Linlithgow and Stirling. The building of collegiate churches and of fine burgh churches is additional evidence of prosperity. Both royal burghs, with their share in international trade, and baronial burghs, with their rights in their own locality, were flourishing. The craftsmen threatened to rival the merchants in the running of burgh affairs, but an act of 1469 gave the merchants the majority on the town councils, allowing self-perpetuating cliques to misapply the assets of the burghs—an abuse not remedied until the 19th century. However, the general prosperity that prevailed in Scotland was accompanied by inflation, and a debasement of the coinage added to the troubles of James III’s reign.
Interesting Scottish writing from the late 14th century onward, both in the vernacular and in Latin, has survived. John Barbour (1325?–95) wrote in Scots the national epic known as The Bruce, considered the first major work of Scottish literature. A Latin history of Scotland was compiled by John of Fordun and continued by Walter Bower, abbot of Inchcolm, in his Scotichronicon. Andrew of Wyntoun wrote a history of Scotland titled Orygynale Cronykil, one of the few long examples of Middle Scots writing.
Little is left of the corpus of medieval writings in Gaelic. Nonetheless, the sophistication of the western Highland stone carvings of the later Middle Ages suggests that a strong literary culture too was associated with the courts of the Lords of the Isles and other chiefs. The Book of Deer, containing the Gospels, has in its margins an 11th-century Gaelic account of Columba’s foundation of the monastery of Deer in Aberdeenshire, as well as a series of notitiae, or lists of church rights, which provide clues to the nature of Celtic society. The early 16th-century The Book of the Dean of Lismore (the seat of the bishop of Argyll) contains more than 60 Gaelic poems. From the quality of the architecture that has survived from the 15th century, one can infer the existence of paintings and other objects, such as church furnishings, that have largely disappeared. An outstandingly intricate collegiate church is that at Roslin near Edinburgh, founded by Sir William Sinclair, 3rd earl of Orkney, about 1450. There are fine burgh churches, such as St. John’s in Perth and the Church of the Holy Rood in Stirling. Perhaps the outstanding piece of evidence of royal patronage of the arts is the altarpiece for James III’s Trinity College Church in Edinburgh, which is almost certainly the work of the great Flemish painter Hugo van der Goes.
In the 14th century the papacy had built up its claims to appoint to the higher offices in the church; in Scotland it had established a system of “provisions,” or papal appointments, to vacant offices. This did not merely cut across the rights of rulers, who used the church to provide their loyal bureaucrats with a living, and the rights of other local patrons; it also meant a drain to Rome of money in the form of the tax payable by a cleric “provided” to a vacant post by the pope. James I resisted these developments, and at the same time, in the Council of Basel (1431–49), the conciliarists were seeking to curb papal power in the church; a distinguished member of the Council of Basel was the Scot Thomas Livingston, one of the first St. Andrews graduates.
James also sought to revive the monastic ideal in its early purity and established a house of the strict Carthusians at Perth. A compromise between James I and the pope was probably pending when James was murdered, and his successors tended to let the popes collect their money as long as they “provided” to church offices along lines acceptable to the monarchy. In 1487 James III was granted the concession that the pope would delay promotions to the higher offices for eight months so that the king could propose his nominee.
St. Andrews was made the seat of an archbishopric in 1472, in itself a desirable step. But the first archbishop of St. Andrews secured the honour by supporting the papacy against the king, and, as a result, the appointment was not welcomed in Scotland. Glasgow also became an archbishopric in 1492.
Scotland in the 16th and early 17th centuries
James IV (1488–1513) and James V (1513–42)
James IV, being physically impressive, cultured, generous, and active in politics and war alike, was well-equipped for kingship. In 1493 he eliminated a potential rival by carrying out the forfeiture of the last Lord of the Isles, and he also dealt severely with unrest on the English border and elsewhere. James and Bishop William Elphinstone of Aberdeen founded King’s College, Scotland’s third university, in Aberdeen in 1495. This was the great age of Scottish poetry, and, while one of the leading makars, or poets, Robert Henryson (1420/30?–c. 1506), author of The Testament of Cresseid, was a burgh schoolmaster, the others were members of the court circle; Gawin Douglas (1475?–1522), bishop of Dunkeld and kinsman to the earls of Angus, splendidly translated Virgil’s Aeneid into Scots, and William Dunbar (1460/65–1520), a technically brilliant poet, showed the versatility of which Scots was capable.
After initial disharmony with England, James concluded a “treaty of perpetual peace” with Henry VII in 1502 and married Margaret, Henry’s daughter, in 1503. But Henry VIII of England became involved in the anti-French schemes of Pope Julius II, and in 1512 France and Scotland renewed their “auld alliance” as a counterbalance. In 1513 Henry VIII invaded France. James IV consequently invaded England, where he died along with thousands of his army in the rashly fought and calamitous Battle of Flodden.
James’s efficiency at home was thus offset by his excessive international ambitions. And both had cost money—for artillery, for a navy whose greatest ship, the Great Michael, cost £30,000, and for embassies. The crown granted lands in feu-farm tenure, which gave heritable possession in return for a substantial down payment and an unchangeable annual rent thereafter. In the great European inflation of the 16th century (known traditionally as the “price revolution”), this policy weakened the crown over the long term.
James V (1513–42) acceded to the throne when he was 17 months of age. The factional struggles of his minority were given shape by the division between those who adhered to Scotland’s pro-French alignment and those who were determined that the price Scotland paid at Flodden not be repeated. John Stewart, 2nd duke of Albany, was regent until 1524 and favoured France; Archibald Douglas, 6th earl of Angus, maintained a pro-English policy until 1528, when James began his personal rule. James now found Scotland’s support in international politics being sought on all sides. In the 1530s he obtained papal financial help in establishing a College of Justice, and he concluded two successive French marriages, each bringing a substantial dowry; his second wife, Mary, daughter of the duke de Guise, became the mother of Mary, Queen of Scots. James’s support for the papacy and France alienated some of his subjects, however, and his rule was not simply strict and financially vigorous but rather avaricious and vindictive. Lack of noble support seems to have caused the rout at Solway Moss in November 1542 of a force invading England. This and the deaths of his infant sons led to the death of James, probably from nervous prostration, in December, a week after the birth of his daughter, Mary.
Mary (1542–67) and the Scottish Reformation
The church in 16th-century Scotland may not have had more ignorant or immoral priests than those of previous generations, but restiveness at their shortcomings was becoming more widespread, and the power structure of the church seemed to preclude the possibility of reform without revolution. The church made a poor showing at the parish level, since by 1560 the bulk of the revenues of nearly 9 parishes in every 10 was appropriated to monasteries and other central institutions. In return for receiving its share of this wealth, the papacy abandoned spiritual direction of the Scottish church; from 1487 royal control over appointments to the higher church offices grew steadily. That this occurred at a time when the church’s annual revenue—reckoned at £400,000 in 1560—was 10 times that of the crown readily explains the attraction of church office for unspiritual, career-seeking nobles. Laymen were feued (granted tenure of) church lands, became collectors of church revenues, and were given abbeys as benefices. Church property, particularly monastic property, was effectively being secularized, and if Protestantism offered to the nobles and lairds of Scotland a more spiritually alive church—and one with lay participation—it probably also appealed to them as a system under which they would not have to hand back what they had grabbed.
Particular laymen were as pious as ever, endowing collegiate churches as they had once endowed monasteries, and trenchant criticism of church abuses was expressed in the morality play Ane Pleasant Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis by Sir David Lyndsay (c. 1490–c. 1555). Nonetheless, reform from within was probably almost impossible. For example, Archbishop John Hamilton, a would-be reformer who gave his name to a vernacular catechism (1552), belonged to the family who had the most to lose if the careerists were curbed.
Mary began her reign (1542–67) as another Stewart child ruler in the hands of factions. The pro-French party upheld the old church, while the pro-English desired reform. By the Treaties of Greenwich (1543), Mary was to marry Edward, Henry VIII’s heir. David Beaton, archbishop of St. Andrews and a papal legate in Scotland from 1544, and Mary of Guise, the queen mother, had this policy rescinded, and the murder of Beaton (1546) and English punitive raids culminating in the Scottish defeat at Pinkie (1547) did not cause Scotland to love England more. France helped Scotland to expel the English, but only in return for such a hold over the country that, by the time of young Mary’s marriage to the dauphin in 1558, France appeared to be about to absorb Scotland.
Anti-French feeling and Protestant preaching combined to bring about revolt. In 1559 the reformers took up arms to forestall Mary of Guise’s action against them. Despite the preaching of John Knox and others and the plundering of the monasteries, the decisive issues were political and military: Queen Elizabeth I of England sent troops to check French plans in Scotland. Mary of Guise died in June 1560, and, by the Treaty of Edinburgh in July, both France and England undertook to withdraw their troops. With Scotland thus neutralized, England’s proximity to Scotland gave it an important advantage over France.
In August 1560 the Scottish Parliament abolished papal authority and adopted a Reformed Confession of Faith, but Mary, still in France, did not ratify this legislation. Still, the organization of local congregations, which had been going on for some years, continued, and the General Assembly emerged as the central legislative body for the church. In the First Book of Discipline (1560), Knox and other ministers proposed a striking social program for the church that would provide education and relief for the poor. However, laymen had not despoiled the old church to enrich the new, and, as an interim settlement secured by Mary’s government in 1562, the church and crown together were to share but one-third of the old church’s revenue.
Cromwell of Scotland
Cromwell imposed on Scotland a full and incorporating parliamentary union with England (1652). However, this union, maintained by an army of occupation, did not enjoy popular consent. Nevertheless, Cromwell’s administration of Scotland was efficient, and his judges, some of them Englishmen, achieved an admired impartiality. Public order was well maintained, even in the Highlands after the collapse of royalist resistance in 1654. Cromwell did not overturn Presbyterianism but ensured toleration for others, save Roman Catholics and Episcopalians (those who believed the Protestant church should be governed by bishops).
The Restoration monarchy
The restoration in 1660 of Charles II (1660–85) was welcomed by many moderates in both Scotland and England. Charles had learned much from his father’s fate and was prepared to forget many injuries, though his government executed some Scots, including the marquess of Argyll.
In 1662 Charles formally restored church government by bishops, but, like the compromise fashioned under James VI, they were to act in association with synods and presbyteries. Charles seems to have been moved not by rancor toward the Covenanters, who had bullied him in the early 1650s, but merely by a desire to achieve the system that satisfied most people. Many laymen accepted his system, and few nobles opposed it. However, approximately 270 ministers—just over a quarter of the total—were deprived of their parishes for noncompliance, leading to the Pentland Rising (1666), which was easily quashed and was countered by an experimental period of tolerance by the government. Persons who still persisted in attending conventicles were strong only in the southwest and to some extent in Fife and among the small lairds and common people. These men adhered to the “Protester” position, regarding Scotland as still bound by the Covenants. In another trial of strength with the government, they were defeated at Bothwell Bridge (1679). Some Cameronians (the name derives from Richard Cameron, a leading Covenanter) remained, meeting governmental violence with further violence, and in 1690 they refused to join a Presbyterian but uncovenanted Church of Scotland. Their brave and fanatic “thrawnness” (recalcitrance) endeared them to later generations of Scots.
When Charles’s brother succeeded as James VII of Scotland and James II of Great Britain and Ireland (1685–88), most Scots showed that they were prepared to support him despite his Roman Catholicism. But he showed his ineptitude by requesting Parliament to grant toleration to Catholics (1686); this stirred up unprecedented opposition to royal wishes in the Scottish Parliament. Nevertheless, although many exiled Scots were at the court of William of Orange in Holland, the collapse (1688–89) of James’s regime in Scotland was entirely a result of the Glorious Revolution (1688) in England and the landing there of William.
The era of union
The revolution settlement
With James VII having fled to France, a Convention of Estates (really the same assembly as Parliament but meeting less formally) gave the crown jointly to the Protestant William of Orange (William III of Great Britain, 1689–1702) and his wife, Mary II (1689–94), James’s daughter. William’s first major decision was a moderate one: episcopacy was abolished in 1689 and Presbyterianism reestablished the following year. However, a series of crises throughout William’s reign exposed his total lack of interest in Scotland and placed a strain on the system that had developed whereby the Scottish ministry took orders not only from the monarch but also from the English ministry.
The Act of Union and its results
William fought one war against France (1689–97) and on his death in 1702 bequeathed another (1701–13) to his successor, his wife’s sister Anne (1702–14). These circumstances made a union of Scotland and England seem strategically as well as economically desirable. That an Act of Union was achieved in 1707 is at first sight surprising, since intervening sessions of the Scottish Parliament had been in a mood to break the English connection altogether. But by 1707 England’s appreciation of its own strategic interests, and of the nuisance value of the Scottish Parliament, was lively enough for it to offer statesmanlike concessions to Scotland and material inducements to Scottish parliamentarians to accept union.
The union was an incorporating one—the Scottish Parliament was ended and the Westminster Parliament increased by 45 commoners and 16 peers representing Scotland. Scotland benefited by gaining free trade with England and its colonies, by the grant of a money “equivalent” of the share of the English national debt that Scotland would assume, and by the explicit safeguarding of its national church and legal system. After Queen Anne’s death in 1714, when the Jacobites, supporters of James VII’s descendants, missed their best opportunity, the worst crises of the union were past.
Jacobitism in the Highlands
The Jacobites were seldom more than a nuisance in Britain. An expedition from France in 1708 and a West Highland rising with aid from Spain in 1719 were abortive; bad leadership in the rebellion in 1715 (known as “the Fifteen Rebellion”) of James VII’s son, James Edward, the Old Pretender, and divided counsels in the rebellion of 1745 (“the Forty-five”) led by the Old Pretender’s son Charles Edward, the Young Pretender, crippled invasions originating in France that had in any case less than an even chance of success. The government was not always sufficiently prepared for invasions, but the generalship of John Campbell, 2nd duke of Argyll, at Sheriffmuir in 1715 sufficed to check the Jacobites, and that of William Augustus, duke of Cumberland, at Culloden in 1746 dealt the coup de grâce to a Jacobite army.
19th-century Scotland
Agitation for constitutional change was considered treasonable by many during the years 1793–1815, when Britain was fighting Revolutionary France. Several advocates of universal suffrage, including a young Glasgow lawyer, Thomas Muir of Huntershill, were sentenced to transportation (exile) in 1793. After repression had broken this first radical wave, postwar industrial depression produced another—the “Radical War” of 1820, an abortive rising of workers in the Glasgow area. Intellectual campaigning of a more moderate sort had greater short-term success. The Edinburgh Review, founded in 1802 by a group of young lawyers led by Francis Jeffrey and Henry Brougham (1st Baron Brougham and Vaux), was influential in both radical politics and literature. Edinburgh life was particularly brilliant during the war years, when students unable to study abroad found the University of Edinburgh more attractive than ever. Outstanding in this period was Sir Walter Scott, although not until 1827 was he known to be the author of the Waverley novels. Scott’s greatness as a novelist lay in the way he took Scottish society as a whole for his main character, and his best books are a lament for an era that he knew was dying, the organic society of preindustrial Scotland. The other major figure in 19th-century Scottish fiction was Robert Louis Stevenson, who published a wide variety of historical novels, adventure stories, and travel literature before his premature death in Samoa in 1894. His voice, especially from exile, was distinctive. Scottish writing in the 1890s is generally perceived to be sentimental and mawkish, exemplified by the Kailyard novels of Sir James Barrie, Samuel Rutherford Crockett, and Ian Maclaren; George Douglas perhaps overcompensated for this tendency in The House with the Green Shutters (1901), the first realistic portrayal of Scottish life. Gaelic poetry is generally held to have been in decline for much of the 19th century until the work of Iain Mac a’Ghobhainn (John Smith), Uilleam MacDhunlèibhe (William Livingstone), and the political activist Màiri Mhór nan Oran (Mary Macpherson) in the final third of the century.
The Industrial Revolution
From the 1820s the Industrial Revolution was in full swing in Scotland, linked (in a way historians have not altogether disentangled) to a dramatic increase in population. There were perhaps a million people in Scotland at the beginning of the 18th century. By the beginning of the 19th century there were more than 1.5 million, and by the turn of the 20th century the population exceeded 4.5 million. The manufacturing towns showed spectacular increases. Hundreds of thousands of Irish emigrants went to Scotland in the 19th century, beginning prior to but increasing in number during the Irish Potato Famine of 1845–49. In some country regions there was a population decrease as people moved to the towns, to England, or overseas. Part of the overall increase was the result of improved medical care that had lessened the ravages of epidemic diseases by the mid-19th century. Much of the food for the increased population was supplied by progressive Scottish agriculture. Farming in the southeast was celebrated for its efficiency in the early 19th century, and the northeast became famous for its beef cattle and Ayrshire for its milking herds.
The key advance was in heavy industry, which from about 1830 took the industrial primacy from textiles, at a time when industry as a whole had replaced agriculture as Scotland’s chief concern. Coal production rose, as did that of iron, with the hot-blast process (1828) of James Beaumont Neilson making Scottish ores cheaper to work. Major canals, such as the Forth and Clyde, completed in 1790, enjoyed a short boom before being rendered obsolete by the railways, of which the Glasgow-to-Garnkirk (1831) was noteworthy for using steam locomotives (rather than horses) from its inception. Above all, Scottish international trade was catered to, and Clydeside’s reputation made, by the building of ships. Robert Napier was the greatest of many great Scottish marine engineers. The later 19th century was characterized by the expansion of new heavy industry, such as steel, and technological advances in shipbuilding and marine engineering.
Politics and religion
Parliamentary (1832) and burgh (1833) reform ended fictitious county votes and corrupt burgh caucuses but disillusioned the working classes by failing to extend to them the franchise. As in England, they had to await the 1867 and subsequent Reform Acts (see Reform Bill). But the great bulk of the Scottish middle classes were delighted with the Whigs, who had brought the reforms. The Whig Party, or Liberal Party (as it became known in the 1860s), dominated Scottish mid-19th-century politics. Liberal Party leader and hero William Ewart Gladstone, of Scottish parentage, was widely admired among Scots for his moral dynamism and fire despite his High Church Episcopalianism.
Ecclesiastical strife was perhaps more important than parliamentary politics in Scottish life in the 19th century. Opposing approaches to the relationship between church and state within the Church of Scotland brought about the Ten Years’ Conflict, which was not resolved until a large proportion of the clergy and the laity left the established Church of Scotland in 1843 to form the Free Church of Scotland. This fracture was not healed until the Presbyterian reunion in 1929, and it had profound effects on Scottish life, because the church was the main agency of social welfare (until 1845) under the old Poor Law of Scotland and undertook a similar role in the Scottish education system until 1872.
The Highlands of Scotland
By 1800 the Highlands had become overpopulated relative to the means of subsistence. Many lairds, seeking to support their tenantry through the kelp industry, were ruined when it collapsed in the period from 1815 to 1825. Other landowners introduced sheep, sometimes violently removing their tenants in the “Highland Clearances”—as agents of the Sutherland family did in Strathnaver, Sutherland, about 1810–20. The Potato Famine in the Scottish Highlands that began in the mid-1840s caused distress and encouraged landowners to engage in a new round of clearances and to sponsor large-scale emigration.
By the 1880s Highland subsistence-farming tenants, or “crofters,” faced a new problem. Deer forests had replaced sheep runs as the most immediately profitable land use open to landowners, and, as a result, the shortage of land for grazing and arable agriculture was the major grievance of the crofting community. Parliamentary agitation by the crofters, who voted for the first time in 1885, and by their Lowland sympathizers, as well as sporadic outbursts of violence beginning in 1882 (the “Crofters’ War”), secured an act of 1886 that gave the crofters security of tenure and empowered a Crofters’ Commission to fix fair rents, though it did little to make more land available to crofters. (Further legislation in 1911 and 1919 helped to alleviate this problem.) Unlike their Irish counterparts, the Highlanders sought not ownership of their land but the imposition of certain standards of conduct and responsibility upon their landlords. As the crofting agitation of the 1880s united both Highlanders and Lowlanders, it was a key stage in the forging of a modern Scottish consciousness.
Scotland since World War I
World War I and after
World War I had a great effect on Scottish society; 74,000 Scots were killed and industry mobilized as never before in a coordinated national effort. Clyde shipbuilding and engineering were crucial, and Clydeside was the key munitions centre in Britain. In retrospect, however, the expansion of heavy industry in the 1920s was in fact an overexpansion. The collapse of the wartime boom in 1920 began a period of economic depression in Britain, in which Scotland was one of the worst-affected regions.
Economic distress bred political radicalism. The Liberals were eclipsed, and in most seats the real contest was between the Unionists and Labour, which became Scotland’s biggest single party for the first time in the election of 1922. Willie Gallacher, Scotland’s only notable communist member of Parliament and an able political theorist strongly influenced by Vladimir Lenin, was at the same time a radical belonging to a revered Scots tradition. In 1930 John Wheatley, who had been minister of health in the first Labour government (1924) and the author of an important housing act, died, thereby depriving left-wingers in the Labour Party of a skilled leader, and counsels of moderation in the party prevented its taking any distinctive initiative on the economic crisis. Ramsay MacDonald, a Scot who had led two minority Labour governments, agreed to form a national coalition government with Conservative and Liberal support in 1931. However, the Labour Party refused to participate, disowned MacDonald, and was heavily defeated at the polls in Scotland as elsewhere.
Another political development that resulted partly from economic distress was the formation in 1934 of the Scottish National Party (SNP), a merger of two previous parties. It had some distinguished supporters, especially literary figures, but it was suspected, sometimes unfairly, of political extremism and made little electoral impact before World War II. The national government of the 1930s was dominated by the Conservatives. While opposed to an independent Scottish legislature, this government furthered the extension of the Scottish administrative system in 1939, installing it in St. Andrew’s House in Edinburgh.
The interwar period was one of significant cultural advance and self-confidence in Scotland. In poetry the dominant figure in this renaissance was Christopher Murray Grieve, who published under the pseudonym Hugh MacDiarmid. Important achievements in prose literature were made by Neil Gunn, Edwin Muir, Nan Shepherd, and Willa Muir. James Leslie Mitchell (Lewis Grassic Gibbon) published a trilogy of novels, collectively known as A Scots Quair (1932–34), which charted the changes in the social life of the communities of northeastern Scotland. In Gaelic literature poetry continued to be the dominant form, and the lyrical work of Somhairle MacGill-eain (Sorley Maclean) dominated the 20th-century scene.
World War II and after
During World War II Scotland suffered some 34,000 combat deaths, and approximately 6,000 civilians were killed, many in air attacks on Clydeside. In 1943 Tom Johnston, a Labour member of Parliament who acted as secretary of state for Scotland in the wartime national government, helped to create the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board, which was one of the most successful government agencies of the period.
In 1945 Labour won a landslide national election victory that gave it 37 of Scotland’s 74 seats in Parliament to the Conservatives’ 32. Support for Labour gradually ebbed in the early 1950s, however, and in 1955 the Conservative Party took 36 of 71 Scottish seats, its first majority in Scotland. These gains were reversed in 1959, when the Conservatives lost 3 seats in Scotland, despite the party’s net gain of 23 seats nationally.
The Scottish economy was relatively healthy from 1945 through the mid-1950s. The Labour governments (1945–51) sought to ensure full employment, and though the Conservatives initially opposed Labour’s widespread nationalization of industries—such as the coal mines, the Bank of England, the railroads, and electric power—they eventually accepted the mixed economy and the expanded welfare state. The Scottish Milk Marketing Board helped to boost Scotland’s agricultural productivity. However, Scotland’s heavy industries—especially coal mining and shipbuilding—began to stagnate in the mid-1950s, and unemployment in Scotland was often twice that in England. In its 1961 report on the Scottish economy, the Scottish Council for Development and Industry remarked that “if there is a panacea for Scotland’s economic problems we have not found it.”
Scottish nationalism was relatively muted in the 1950s, despite the signing of a Scottish Covenant, which called for home rule in Scotland, reportedly by more than two million Scots in 1949, and despite the theft of the Stone of Scone, the ancient stone upon which Scottish kings were traditionally crowned, from Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1950 (the stone, which was taken to Scotland, was returned in April 1951). By the late 1950s Scottish nationalists supported independence or the creation of a devolved assembly, though their demands were opposed by both major parties. Scotland’s faltering economy under the Conservatives in 1951–64 helped to increase support for Labour, which defeated the Conservatives by 43 seats to 23 in 1964 and by 46 seats to 20 in 1966. The Liberals and the SNP—both of which supported greater autonomy for Scotland—also made gains in these elections, though the SNP failed to secure any parliamentary seats.
IOn March 1, 1979, in an effort to stave off militant nationalism, the Labour government of James Callaghan held a referendum to approve its devolution legislation, which was designed to grant Scotland its own assembly with limited legislative and executive powers. Although favoured by a majority (52.9 percent) of the Scots who voted, the referendum failed to win the approval of the required 40 percent of the electorate. The SNP (along with the Liberals and the Plaid Cymru) then withdrew its support from the Labour government, causing it to lose a vote of confidence, and in the ensuing election the SNP lost 9 of its 11 seats in Parliament.
Despite economic and political problems in the 1980s Scottish cultural confidence grew in most areas of artistic activity. Established Scottish writers such as Alasdair Gray and James Kelman pursued new themes in Scottish literature. They were joined by a new generation of younger writers, notably Irvine Welsh, whose novel Trainspotting (1993) was made into a successful film.
Throughout the 1980s, when the Conservative government in London enjoyed little support in Scotland, support for greater political autonomy increased. In 1989 the introduction in Scotland of the “community charge,” a uniform-rate poll tax intended to replace taxation based on property, produced widespread protests against the Conservatives and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. (The poll tax was introduced in England and Wales in the following year.) Partly because of the SNP’s strong opposition to the poll tax and Labour’s lukewarm response, the SNP’s support spiked to 21.5 percent of the Scottish vote in 1992—though it won only 3 seats in Parliament, because of the plurality election system; the Labour Party won 49 seats, the Conservatives 11, and the Liberal Democrats 9. Despite Labour’s continued popularity in Scotland, the SNP managed to remain a significant presence.
The establishment of a Scottish Parliament
After Labour won a landslide victory in the general elections of May 1997—in which the Conservatives lost all their Scottish seats and the SNP took 6 seats in Parliament—the Labour government of Tony Blair called a referendum for establishing a Scottish Parliament with a broad range of powers, including control over the country’s education and health systems. Supported by the SNP and the Liberal Democrats—but opposed by the Conservatives—the referendum passed with more than 74 percent of voters in favour; 64 percent also approved giving the body the power to change tax rates.n the 1960s the Labour government of Harold Wilson introduced a plan to modernize Scotland’s economy and retrain its workforce for new industries. Despite these efforts, there was considerable pessimism about the country’s economic prospects until the early 1970s, when oil was discovered in the North Sea. During the early 1980s a worldwide recession coincided with a collapse in oil prices and a series of closures of large industrial plants in Scotland, contributing to an increase in unemployment and further pessimism. In response, the British government created special agencies to attract new investment, notably from American electronics companies, with the result that by the 1990s Scotland had become one of Europe’s major electronics manufacturing centres. Scotland’s resource industries—farming, fishing, and forestry—continued to play an important role in its economy, and tourism increased in importance. Revitalization in Glasgow led to its designation as the European Capital of Culture in 1990, and by the end of the 1990s Scotland’s “Silicon Glen”—the nickname given to the central part of the country that housed the country’s high-tech sector—produced nearly one-third of Europe’s computers, four-fifths of its workstations, and two-thirds of its automatic teller machines. Although high-tech plants remained important, confidence in the sector was shaken at the turn of the 21st century by the closure of a number of high-profile plants during the worldwide economic slowdown.
North Sea oil and the rise of Scottish nationalism
In the early 1970s the SNP enjoyed some short-lived electoral success, especially as the flow of North Sea oil increased support for Scottish independence. Campaigning for the October 1974 election on the slogan “It’s Scotland’s oil!,” the SNP managed to mobilize a sense of economic grievance and cultural resentment that cut across the traditional class divisions of Scottish politics. The party won more than 30 percent of the Scottish vote and 11 of the 71 Scottish seats in Parliament.
Scottish independence referendum
In 2012 he and British Prime Minister David Cameron signed an agreement to hold that referendum in 2014. Cameron agreed to the wording of the referendum question and to a lowering of the voting age to 16 for the referendum. However, Salmond had to relinquish his demand for a second question that would have given the Scots the option of backing more powers for the Scottish Parliament if a majority of Scots rejected full independence. The referendum, to be held in September 2014, was to pose a single simple question: “Should Scotland be an independent country?” Vigorous campaigns were conducted on both sides of the question. Opinion polls in 2013 indicated clear sustained opposition to independence by margins ranging between three to two and two to one. Scotland appeared to be polarized between supporters of the SNP, about 4 in 10 Scottish adults, who overwhelmingly backed independence, and the majority of Scots, who both supported the Britain-wide political parties and opposed independence. More than 4.2 million Scots—97 percent of Scotland’s residents—were registered to vote.
As the day of voting approached, the “yes” side began to gain tremendous momentum, and opinion polling indicated that the outcome was very much in question, though the “no” side held an edge. Former British prime minister Gordon Brown of the Labour Party, a Scot, played a prominent role as an opponent of independence, but he called for debate to be held in the House of Commons on the future of the union in the event that the referendum was defeated. He also outlined a plan that called for codification of the purpose of the United Kingdom akin to the U.S. Declaration of Independence, for recognition of the Scottish Parliament as permanent and indissoluble, and for greater income taxing powers for Scotland. Only days before the vote, Cameron, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg of the Liberal Party, and Labour Party leader Ed Miliband jointly published in the Scottish newspaper National Record a pledge to increase powers for Scotland’s government if the referendum was rejected. When the day of the vote, September 18, arrived, more than 3.6 million Scots (about 85 percent of registered voters) went to the polls and convincingly defeated the referendum, 55 percent voting “no” and 45 percent voting “yes.”
Scotland under First Minister Nicola Sturgeon
In May 2016 the SNP won the election for the Scottish Parliament for the third straight time, though it lost its outright majority, dropping from a total of 69 seats in 2011 to 63 in 2016. Nevertheless. Nicola Sturgeon—who had succeeded Salmond as leader of the SNP and first minister in 2014—chose not to form a coalition government, opting instead for minority rule in the belief that election results were still a mandate for her party to continue in power alone. Not only did the results reveal Labour’s influence in Scotland to have ebbed even further, falling from 37 seats to 24, but, to add insult to injury, the Conservatives, long largely irrelevant players in Scottish politics, passed Labour to secure 31 seats in Parliament, a gain of 16 seats.
Sturgeon became a vocal opponent of the movement to withdraw the United Kingdom from the European Union, and some 62 percent of Scots who participated in the referendum on “Brexit” on June 23, 2016, voted for Britain to remain within the EU. The majority of those who voted in the United Kingdom as a whole, however, endorsed withdrawal. At the end of March 2017—as Cameron’s successor as prime minister, Theresa May, was invoking Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty and triggering the start of negotiations with the EU on separation—Sturgeon sought and won approval from the Scottish Parliament to formally request that the British government grant Scotland the powers necessary to hold a new referendum on independence, to be conducted before spring 2019. In the June 2017 snap election called by May, however, Scottish voters appeared to rebuke Sturgeon’s call for a new referendum as the SNP’s representation in the British Parliament fell from 56 seats to 35. Responding to that result, Sturgeon indicated that she would delay a decision on the timing of the referendum until after the terms of the Brexit deal became clearer.
In a snap election for the House of Commons called for December 2019, May’s replacement as prime minister, Boris Johnson, won a convincing mandate for his vision of Brexit, and the United Kingdom officially withdrew from the EU at the end of January 2020. The results of the December election also appeared to provide Sturgeon with the support she needed to seek another referendum on independence for Scotland, as the SNP added 13 seats for total of 48 seats by garnering 45 percent of the Scottish vote. Those gains came at the expense of the Conservatives, who lost seven seats for a new total of six MPs, and Labour, which lost seven seats to hold on to only a single seat in Parliament. The Liberal Democrats maintained their status quo with four seats.
In 2020 life in Scotland and the rest of the world was turned upside down by the onslaught of COVID-19, the potentially deadly disease caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, which had originated in China in December 2019. Like the British government, the Scottish government imposed a lockdown on institutions and businesses in March 2020 after the World Health Organization declared the outbreak a pandemic. Sturgeon, however, generally reacted more cautiously to the public health crisis than Prime Minister Johnson did. When the first wave of the pandemic receded, she was more selective than Johnson in rolling back restrictions, and, when the second wave hit in the last quarter of the year, she acted more quickly than he did to reimpose countermeasures. Consequently, Scotland weathered the pandemic better than England did, suffering less proportionally in terms of cases of COVID-19 and deaths attributed to it.
Opinion polling suggested that most Scots were happy with Sturgeon’s handling of the crisis, and her approval ratings climbed, as did the percentage of those who favoured the pursuit of independence, which seemed to bode well for the SNP in the important upcoming election for the Scottish Parliament in May 2021. Much of the goodwill that Sturgeon had won appeared to be undone, however, by the scandal that developed related to her government’s handling of accusations of sexual harassment against her former mentor Salmond. Although an ethics panel that investigated Sturgeon’s response to the matter determined that she had not violated ministerial code, a committee of members of the Scottish Parliament found that her government’s investigation of Salmond was “seriously flawed.” In the meantime, the new charges of sexual assault (including attempted rape) that had been brought against Salmond were dismissed, but his reputation was deeply tainted. Instead of entering the May election on a high note that it hoped would lead to an outright majority that would facilitate pursuit of a new referendum on independence (“indyref2”), the SNP was deeply divided. Moreover, Salmond had formed a new pro-independence party, the Alba Party, for the election.
When the votes were counted, the SNP fell one seat short of an outright majority. Sturgeon still characterized the result as a “historic” victory, but it was less than clear whether she had gained a mandate to push for indyref2, which was opposed by Johnson. Although she indicated that she would pursue the referendum, Sturgeon said that action would have to wait until the pandemic had been brought to heel.
In late June 2022 Sturgeon announced that she planned to hold a second independence referendum in October 2023 and that she would be asking the Supreme Court to determine the constitutionality of Scotland’s holding the vote without the approval of the U.K. government. In November 2022 the court ruled that Scotland was not empowered to conduct the referendum absent Westminster’s approval because the matter related to “the Union of the Kingdoms of Scotland and England” and was thus subject to the authority of the U.K. Parliament. Sturgeon responded by promising to make the U.K. parliamentary election scheduled for 2025 a de facto referendum on Scottish independence.
In December 2022 the Scottish Parliament enacted a law that permitted transgender people in Scotland to change their legal gender by self-declaration without a medical diagnosis; however, in January 2023, under the auspices of the Scotland Act of 1998, the British government blocked the legislation, arguing that it created inequalities because elsewhere in the United Kingdom a medical diagnosis was required for an individual to transition for legal purposes. The veto of the legislation marked the first time in the roughly 25 years since devolution that the British government had overruled an action by Scotland’s Parliament. Sturgeon quickly announced that she would take the matter to court.
As the issue heated up, some SNP members wondered if Sturgeon’s championing of the controversial law might limit her ability to achieve the party’s preeminent goal, independence. On February 15, 2023, Sturgeon made the shocking announcement that she intended to resign as SNP leader and first minister, not because of the growing pressure surrounding the issues of the independence referendum and the gender recognition legislation but because she felt that she could no longer bring the energy to her job that was necessary to perform it. She said she would remain as SNP leader and first minister until the party had chosen her successor.
Comentarios
Publicar un comentario