THE STUARTS AS VILLAINS

The Scottish national past was the story of the struggle for civil and religious liberty, reaching its glorious outcome at the Revolution of 1688. With their prologue in the proto-Presbyterian Culdees, collective memories of Scottish nationality ran from Wallace and Bruce, through Knox, to the Covenanters. At each stage in this memory, the heroes of Scotland's past had overcome the threat posed by their antithesis, whether Edward I or Edward II, the Roman Catholic church, or the later Stuart kings. Both explicitly and implicitly, the narrative of civil and religious liberty framed the commemoration of the Scottish past in the nineteenth century, generating a collective sense of what it meant to be Scottish, explaining or justifying present attitudes and national mores. In a sense, the Glorious Revolution marked the end of Presbyterian history, the closure of a centuries-long struggle to achieve full and coherent Scottish nationality with a free nation and a secure Presbyterian church. It was for this reason that union was made possible. The Scots had proved their point, won their battle, and could give up their statehood, confident that Scottish nationality could never be undone.

This proposes the question about what happened after the Union. That is, the milestones in the path of Scottish nationality that loom largest after 1707 are undoubtedly the Jacobite risings of 1715 and 1745, with the ‘Forty- Five’ carrying particular weight as a signifier of Scottish historic identity. Victorian Scottishness in particular is still widely viewed as having been defined by sentimental Jacobitism: songs of yearning for the lost cause of Bonnie Prince Charlie, packaged in tartan against inspiring images of the Highland landscape. Whilst it is undeniable that nineteenth-century Scots enthusiastically embraced the trappings of romantic Highland culture, the representation of Scottish nationality described in the preceding chapters clearly provided little space for Jacobite enthusiasm. Memories of Wallace, Knox and the Covenanters saw the aims and achievements of these heroes as relevant to the nationality of the present, yet the cause of Jacobitism was not viewed in the same way. As we have seen, the later Stuarts were the villains of Covenanting memory.