O Brave New World? The Union of England and Scotland in 1603

316 Pages·2005·1.26 MB·English

by  Jenny Wormald

SCOTLAND
A H I S T O R Y
Edited by Jenny Wormald
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide in
Oxford New York
Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi
Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi
New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto
With offices in
Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece
Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore
South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam
Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press
in the UK and in certain other countries
Published in the United States
by Oxford University Press Inc., New York
© Oxford University Press 2005
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
Database right Oxford University Press (maker)
First published 2005
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press,
or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate
reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction
outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,
Oxford University Press, at the address above
You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover
and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Data available
Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India
Printed in Great Britain
on acid-free paper by
Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk
ISBN 0–19–820615–1
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Contents
List of Colour Plates vii
List of Maps ix
List of Contributors xiii
Introduction 1
1. Origins: Scotland to 1100 9
KATHERINEFORSYTH
2. The Emergence of a Nation-State, 1100–1300 38
KEITHSTRINGER
3. Survival and Revival: Late Medieval Scotland 69
MICHAELBROWNANDSTEVEBOARDMAN
4. Renaissance and Reformation: The Sixteenth
Century 93
ROGERMASON
5. Confidence and Perplexity: The Seventeenth
Century 123
JENNYWORMALD
6. Scotland Transformed: The Eighteenth Century 150
RICHARDB.SHER
7. Workshop of Empire: The Nineteenth Century 176
I.G.C.HUTCHISON
8. The Turbulent Century: Scotland since 1900 201
RICHARDFINLAY
9. The Scottish Diaspora 225
DAVIDARMITAGE
vi contents
10. Scotland’s Stories 250
SALLYMAPSTONE
Further Reading 275
Chronology 293
List of Colour Plates
List of Maps
1. Early Medieval Scotland
2. Modern Scotland
3. Scotland in 1286
4. Scotland: Central belt, 1782
List of Contributors
david armitage is Professor of History at Harvard University. He is the
author of The Ideological Origins of the British Empire(2000) and Greater
Britain, 1516–1776: Essays in Atlantic History(2004). He also edited Theo-
ries of Empire, 1450–1800(1998), and co-edited The British Atlantic World,
1500–1800(2002), among other books.
steve boardman is a Senior Lecturer in Scottish History in the Uni-
versity of Edinburgh, and Director of the Survey of Dedications to Saints in
pre-Reformation Scotland. His major research interests lie in late medieval
Scottish kingship, aristocratic lordships, particularly those of Gaelic Scotland,
and the political and social aspects of saints’ cults. He is author of The Early
Stewart Kings: Robert II and Robert III, 1371–1406(1996) and The Camp-
bells(forthcoming), and the co-editor of The Exercise of Power in Medieval
Scotland, c.1200–1500(2004).
michael brown is Reader in Scottish History in the University of St
Andrews. He works on kingship, politics, and the nobility in late medieval
Scotland. His main publications are James I (1994), The Black Douglases
(1998), and The Wars of Scotland(2004).
richard finlay is Professor of Scottish History at Strathclyde Univer-
sity. He has co-edited with Ted Cowan Scottish History: The Power of the Past
(2002), and is the author of Modern Scotland, 1914–2000 (2004). He is
currently working on Scottish national identity since the union of 1707.
katherine forsyth is a Lecturer in the Department of Celtic, Uni-
versity of Glasgow. Her research interests lie in the history and culture of the
Celtic-speaking peoples in the antique and early medieval periods, with a
special focus on epigraphy. She has published on aspects of language, literacy,
and epigraphy in early medieval Britain and Ireland.
i. g. c. hutchison is a Reader in History in the University of Stirling.
Aformer editor of the Scottish Historical Review, he has written three books:
APolitical History of Scotland, 1832–1924: Parties, Elections, Issues(1986);
xii list of contributors
The University and the State: The Case of Aberdeen, 1860–1963(1993); and
Scottish Politics in the Twentieth Century(2000).
sally mapstone is a Fellow in English at St Hilda’s College, University
of Oxford. She is President of the Scottish Text Society. She has published
widely on Older Scots literature, and has co-edited several books of essays on
that literature.
roger mason is Professor of Scottish History in the University of St
Andrews. His wide-ranging publications on late medieval and early modern
Scottish political culture include Kingship and the Commonweal: Political
Thought in Renaissance and Reformation Scotland(1998) and an edition of
the political writings of John Knox: Knox: On Rebellion (1994). His most
recent publication is a critical edition and translation of George Buchanan’s
celebrated political tract, A Dialogue on the Law of Kingship among the Scots
(2004).
richard b. sher is Distinguished Professor of History at New Jersey
Institute of Technology and NJIT Chair of the Federated History Depart-
ment of Rutgers University-Newark and NJIT. He has published extensively
on the Scottish Enlightenment and other topics on eighteenth-century
Scotland, and is the founding executive secretary of the Eighteenth-Century
Scottish Studies Society.
keith stringer is Professor of Medieval History at Lancaster Univer-
sity. He works within the related fields of state-making, noble power struc-
tures, religious reform, cultural exchanges, and the construction of regional,
national, and supra-national identities, His most recent publications include
The Reformed Church in Medieval Galloway and Cumbria: Contrasts, Con-
nections and Continuities (2003). He co-directs the Leverhulme-funded
research programme ‘Border Liberties and Loyalties in North-East England,
1200–1400’, and is editor of the forthcoming Regesta Regum Scottorum, iii:
The Acts of Alexander II, King of Scots, 1214–1249.
jenny wormald is a Fellow in History at St Hilda’s College, University
of Oxford. She was President of the Scottish History Society, 2001–4. She
has published widely on late medieval and early modern Scottish history,
and early modern British history. She is currently working on a book on
JamesVI and I.
Introduction
‘Stands Scotland where it did?’ asked Macduff in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
‘Alas, poor country!’ answered Ross. ‘Almost afraid to know itself!’ This well-
known quotation from that play which has given us so many quotations offers
a quite remarkable number of interpretations when thinking about Scotland
from the early medieval period to the modern age. Macbethwas, of course,
written at one of the great pivotal times in Scottish history, shortly after the
Union of the Crowns of 1603. Its author’s attempt to dramatize ‘real’ Scottish
history, its sympathetic portrayal of a kingdom rent by murder, self-ambition,
total failure of loyalty, on the verge of being rescued by the great Malcolm
Canmore—akin, in that sense, to the similar portrayal of that darkest of peri-
ods of English history, the reign of Richard III, before the advent of Henry
Tudor—stands in very sharp contrast to the savage and utterly fictitious James
IVby Robert Green of 1599; Green tapped into English hostility to the likely
union with Scotland, Shakespeare to acceptance of it, however grudging. In
other words, the English succession crisis made Scotland very centre-stage.
That refers to a particular historical moment. But one might extrapolate from
that the more general point that historiographically Scotland has had had to
fight hard against the normal instinct of marginalization; famously, Scots are
very interested in their past, real or invented, but who else is? Macbeth, for
example, picks up on Scottish witchcraft, and no wonder in view of the royal
demonologist who inherited the English throne in 1603. But how many col-
lections of essays on witchcraft trawl through Europe, include England,
which was not a major witch-persecuting society, but ignore Scotland, which
was? Scottish historians, especially in the last half-century, have fought very
hard to demonstrate that Scotland—Scottish history—does not stand where
it did. ‘To know itself’ is not a matter of fear, but confidence. It is therefore
very pleasurable to acknowledge Oxford University Press’s agreement with
that; already there is an Oxford Illustrated History of Britain, but that was
based on the chronological history of England, although incorporating
comment on Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. This volume, however, is one of a
number of recent OUP publications on Scottish history, and the editors and
2 jenny wormald
contributors are very appreciative of the fact that when it devised its series of
Illustrated Histories, it did not ignore Scotland.
This is not all that can be picked up from Macbeth. Shakespeare’s Richard
IIIhad a message which would inform later historiography: that the fifteenth
century—the end of the Middle Ages—was about to give way to the infinitely
more civilized early modern world; he was writing about England, but the
point can be made equally about historians of Europe, except perhaps of Italy
with its precociously early renaissance. The second half of the twentieth cen-
tury saw a sustained attack on that view, and no one now would subscribe to
it. Macbeth takes us into a much more problematic world, the world of
intractable sources which still present huge problems to those who engage
with them. There has, therefore, lingered on the idea, thanks mainly to Bede,
that pre-Conquest England was already in some sense a nation—I take refuge
in ‘in some sense’ because I would not dare to try to define ‘nation’. Scotland,
by contrast, was a very ill-defined place, full of Gaels, Britons, Vikings, and,
above all, those most problematic and most fascinating Picts, about to be
pitchforked, as Shakespeare had heralded, into the more civilized world of
English and European fashions, by Malcolm Canmore and his Anglicizing
and Europeanizing successors. It is so much easier to deal with charters and
chronicles than with sculptured stones. But this is now a matter of very con-
siderable and exciting historical investigation; and Katherine Forsyth’s article
gives us a compelling insight into that investigation, and her own equally com-
pelling answer to it. She demolishes the idea that Scotland before 1100 was,
or ever had been, an isolated country.
Thus when Keith Stringer shows us the remarkable developments which
did take place in the next two centuries, he does not lose sight of the past, and
so brings out, to great effect, the distinctive nature of high medieval Scotland,
drawing, as it did, on both its own traditions and the new attitudes which were
sweeping Europe; and it should be emphasized, as Forsyth does, that it was
not a question of Scotland belatedly coming into line, but taking part
in the general changes, secular and ecclesiastical, detectable throughout
Europe. These two articles replace the cloth so apparently rent c.1100 with a
more seamless web, and Stringer’s approach enables him to depict a kingdom
whose keynote was a striking confidence. That confidence makes little sense
if in fact, as has tended to be assumed, Scotland was no more than a marginal
little kingdom, struggling to ape the really important players. Rather, changes
were happening—which is to say no more than that change happens in every
historical period—and Scotland was very much part of this. And that is why