Call it a Draw?

#37

   The Black Knight (played by John Cleese) in the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail is plainly a bloody idiot. Having had both arms and both legs chopped off in combat with King Arthur (Graham Chapman) he shouts after his departing foe, “All right; we’ll call it a draw.” The more I read back into Anglo-Scottish history, the more I am reminded of the Black Knight. Between us, the English and the Scots have a long and extraordinarily repetitive history of doing harm to each other. You might expect the issue of Scottish independence to be decided in this twenty-first century by reference to contemporary evidence and future projections. Not a bit of it. The burden of history is exploited to deny the common heritage and make people take sides in atavistic disputes. It’s so easy to do this when what we share are folk-memories of mourning over blood spilled long ago and our enduring propensity for collective idiocy.

   Alex Salmond wants to set Tuesday, 24^th June 2014 as the date for his referendum on independence. This marks the seven-hundredth anniversary of Robert the Bruce’s famous victory over the English[i] King, Edward II at the Battle of Bannockburn. Cue the anthem:

                        O Flower of Scotland,

                        Whan will we see

                        Your like again,

                        That focht an dee’d for

                        Your wee bit Hill an Glen…etc[ii].

Alex has his reasons for not choosing a slightly earlier date, say, Monday 9^th September, 2013. This will be the five hundredth anniversary of the defeat – and death in battle - of Scotland’s James IV at Flodden in Northumberland. Another inauspicious date might be Saturday 16^th April 2016. That will be a mere two hundred and seventy years since the bloody defeat at Culloden of the final Jacobite revolt. After which the victor, William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, began the ruthless repression of the Highland clans; leading to the ‘Clearances’ and the destruction of Scotland’s remaining Gaelic culture. Even the wearing of tartan was forbidden by law.

   Scotland’s medieval independence from England had been confirmed in writing six years after Bannockburn by the Declaration of Arbroath, a document which Mr Salmond doubtless knows by heart:

“…for, as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule…”[iii]

The Declaration is seen by some as advocating modern ‘contractual kingship’ against the ‘Divine Right’ principle. It explicitly threatens to drive out even Robert the Bruce as king if he ever appeared to subject Scotland to rule by the King of England or the English.

   For the next three centuries after 1320, warfare between England and Scotland was mercifully intermittent. The best guarantees of Scotland’s independence turned out to be England’s Hundred Years’ War with France, the Black Death and the fratricidal dispute between the descendants of Edward III which we call The Wars of the Roses. Eventually, in 1502, England’s Henry VII agreed a Treaty of Perpetual Peace with James IV of Scotland. To confirm this, Henry married-off his daughter Margaret to James. The ‘Peace’ proved to be less than wholly ‘Perpetual’. In 1513, James invaded England in support of the Auld Alliance with France only to get himself defeated (and killed – see above) at the battle of Flodden Field. Cue lone piper and lament:

                                  Dool and wae for the order

                                  Sent oor lads tae the Border!

                                  The English for ance

                                  By guile wan the day.

                                  The Flooers o’ the Forest

                                  That fought aye the foremost

                                  The pride o’oor land

                                  Lie cauld in the clay.[iv]

Despite James’ death, the rules of dynastic succession held sway and when Queen Elizabeth I died, childless, in 1603 she was succeeded on the English throne by the great-grandson of James and Margaret - James VI of Scotland / James I of England.

   There then began the period of One King[v], Two Parliaments. This might have continued until even now, had it not been for the impact on both countries of the Reformation, the English Civil War, the Regicide, the Restoration and ‘The Glorious Revolution’ of 1689[vi]. It didn’t help either that by the end of the seventeenth century, Scotland was in dire straits, suffering famines and economic collapse. As the Tory (wouldn’t you know it?)Edward Seymour said in the English Parliament in 1700:

“Scotland is a beggar and whoever marries a beggar can only expect a louse for her portion.”

   The 1707 Act of Union adjourned the Scottish Parliament and created a single ‘united kingdom’ named ‘Great Britain’. The two previously separate national parliaments became a single Parliament of Great Britain housed in the Palace of Westminster. Securing the agreement of the Scottish parliament to the new Union was not without controversy and its opponents alleged that bribery and corruption had played a significant role.

                                       O, would, or I had seen the day

                                       That treason thus could sell us,

                                       My auld grey head had lien in clay

                                       Wi Bruce and loyal Wallace!

                                       But pith and power, till my last hour

                                       I’ll mak this declaration:-

                                       ‘We’re bought and sold for English Gold –

                                       Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!’[vii]

   Like I said, it’s a long and repetitive history. There are still lengths of Hadrian’s Wall to be seen running across the high moors of northern England. Its line, from the Solway Firth to the River Tyne, runs somewhat south of the present border with Scotland. The Wall was built between AD 122 and AD 130. It is unclear whether its purpose was to keep those who lived south of the wall in, or those north of the wall out. Either way, you have to wonder if Hadrian wasn’t onto something….

Next week: Let them eat haggis!

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[i] More accurately, Edward II was a Norman King rather than an English one.

[ii] See Flower of Scotland : lyrics by Roy Williamson / The Corries, 1967

[iii] 19^th Century translation by Sir James Fergusson of the Latin text to the Declaration of Arbroath, 1320. This was, in fact, a letter addressed to the Pope then residing at Avignon (Why Avignon? Don’t ask. History eh? Don’t you just love it?) The letter asserted Scotland’s status as a kingdom and not a parcel of feudal land controlled by the Norman kings of England. It also requested an end to the excommunication of Robert the Bruce.

[iv] The number of Scottish casualties at Flodden Field gave rise to another enduring folk song, Flowers of the Forest.

[v] Strictly speaking it was two kings (because there remained two kingdoms) but the kingships were embodied in one person.

[vi] Keep up at the back!

[vii] Sic a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation. Robert Burns, 1791