Post by Waverley on Jun 18, 2014 20:47:37 GMT 1
Scotto-Britishness...
It was Scots who were the most vocal advocates of a vibrant, imperial, Protestant Great Britain,
The Union of England and Scotland, Peter Paul Reubens, c.1633
Conspicuously absent from the arguments of the ‘No’ campaign in the current pre-Referendum debate over Scottish independence has been any appeal to a shared sense of Britishness. This is perhaps hardly surprising given that recently released data from the 2011 census reveals that two thirds of Scotland’s inhabitants see themselves as Scottish only and fewer than 20 per cent as Scottish and British.
This marked decline in British identity, which is shared to a lesser extent by the population of the rest of the United Kingdom, signals the obsolescence of what was a largely Scottish invention, hammered out in the aftermath of the 16th-century Reformation and the 1707 Act of Union.
Scottish enthusiasm for the concept of Britishness is evident in the work of one of the first modern historians of Britain, John Major, who taught at the universities of Glasgow and St Andrews and deeply influenced the first generation of Scottish Reformers, not least John Knox. Major styled himself a ‘Scottish Briton’ and his 1521 History of Greater Britain was a passionate call for the union of Britannia. Most Scottish Protestants supported union with England to form a new strongly Protestant nation, which would resist the might and tyranny of the major Catholic powers in Europe, Spain and France. Several, like Andrew Melville, the founder of the Presbyterian church settlement, styled themselves ‘Scotto-Britons’ and advocated the full political union of England and Scotland following the Union of the Crowns in 1603 by James VI and I.
A good example of the enthusiasm and expectations that the 1603 Union of the Crowns created among the Scottish reformers can be found in the tract De Unione Insulae Britannicae, written in 1605 by David Hume, a leading Presbyterian scholar in post-Reformation Scotland. He argued for the full union of England and Scotland, drawing inspiration in almost equal measure from the civic values of ancient Rome, the covenant theology of Old Testament Israel and the ideals of commonwealth and nation forged by the Protestant reformers. For him, a united Britannia, at once stronger and more varied than its component parts, would lead a Europe of small independent states against Iberian imperialism and papal pretension. In order to foster closer community ties and shared identity in the new United Kingdom, he advocated intermarriage, planting English colonies in Lochaber and the Western Isles to promote ethnic intermingling and levying steep fines on those who continued to describe themselves as Scottish or English. He also proposed a single parliament for the new United Kingdom, with regional assemblies in London, York, Lancaster and Edinburgh, drawing at least a fifth of their members from the country on the other side of the old border.
The 18th-century Scottish Enlightenment further encouraged enthusiasm for Britishness north of the border, with Alexander Wedderburn and his fellow contributors to the Edinburgh Review coining the term ‘North Britain’ to describe their country. This espousal of Britishness by enlightened Scots in no sense diminished their sense of Scottishness. Rather their display of what later became known as hybrid or hyphenated identity expressed their conviction that it was as part of Britain that Scotland had its best chance of thriving and improving. In his 1992 book Devolving English Literature Robert Crawford has argued that the whole academic discipline of English literature was essentially an 18th-century Scottish invention as Scottish writing entered its ‘British’ phase, which was to reach its apogee in the work of Walter Scott.
The best known product of this ‘British’ phase of Scottish literature was the song ‘Rule Britannia’, written in 1740 for a masque about Alfred the Great by James Thomson, a son of the Manse who hailed from Ednam in the Borders and studied arts and divinity at Edinburgh University. Thomson, who initially thought of following his father as a Church of Scotland minister but chose rather to pursue a literary career in London, wrote numerous poems promoting Britain as a cultural and ethnic amalgam embodying the principles of diversity in unity. Like many 18th-century Scots who took up the idea of Britishness, he did so partly to make clear that Britain included more than England. Sending an early draft of his poem, ‘Summer: A Panegyric on Britain’ to a fellow Scottish poet, he observed: ‘The English are a little vain in themselves, and their country. Britannia too includes our native country, Scotland.’ The opening line of what is often taken to be the first British novel, Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random (1748) – ‘I was born in the northern part of this United Kingdom’ – provides a further example of dual Scottish-British identity.
Two towering Scots of the 20th century, both sons of the Manse deeply imbued with the muscular Christian values of Presbyterianism, made a significant and enduring contribution to the notion of Britishness. John Buchan, whose hyphenated identity was expressed in the fact that his favourite landscapes were the Scottish Borders and the Cotswolds, created in his famous ‘shockers’ a quintessentially British genre of adventure stories. John Reith almost single-handedly constructed one of the great modern institutional embodiments of Britishness, the BBC. His determination to invest royal and national occasions with quasi-religious significance earned him the sobriquet ‘Gold Microphone Pursuivant’. He also made sure that the BBC expressed Britain to itself and to the world in all its variety by establishing separate services for Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the English regions, which both opted out of the national UK output and also contributed to it their own distinctive accents and cultures.
The reasons for the decline of a sense of British identity among Scots over the last 50 years or so include the ending of the British Empire, out of which they had done so well, the economic woes consequent on the collapse of traditional industries like coal mining and ship building and the erosion of Protestant identity. Ironically, that part of the United Kingdom which was once the most consciously British is now the least so. Yet occasionally this old attachment re-surfaces, as when the most recent Scottish prime minister, Gordon Brown, championed Britishness and sought to stem what seems an unstoppable tide in terms of narrower and more exclusive identities across the United Kingdom.
Ian Bradley is Reader in Church History at the University of St Andrews and author of Believing in Britain: The Spiritual Identity of Britishness
It was Scots who were the most vocal advocates of a vibrant, imperial, Protestant Great Britain,
The Union of England and Scotland, Peter Paul Reubens, c.1633
Conspicuously absent from the arguments of the ‘No’ campaign in the current pre-Referendum debate over Scottish independence has been any appeal to a shared sense of Britishness. This is perhaps hardly surprising given that recently released data from the 2011 census reveals that two thirds of Scotland’s inhabitants see themselves as Scottish only and fewer than 20 per cent as Scottish and British.
This marked decline in British identity, which is shared to a lesser extent by the population of the rest of the United Kingdom, signals the obsolescence of what was a largely Scottish invention, hammered out in the aftermath of the 16th-century Reformation and the 1707 Act of Union.
Scottish enthusiasm for the concept of Britishness is evident in the work of one of the first modern historians of Britain, John Major, who taught at the universities of Glasgow and St Andrews and deeply influenced the first generation of Scottish Reformers, not least John Knox. Major styled himself a ‘Scottish Briton’ and his 1521 History of Greater Britain was a passionate call for the union of Britannia. Most Scottish Protestants supported union with England to form a new strongly Protestant nation, which would resist the might and tyranny of the major Catholic powers in Europe, Spain and France. Several, like Andrew Melville, the founder of the Presbyterian church settlement, styled themselves ‘Scotto-Britons’ and advocated the full political union of England and Scotland following the Union of the Crowns in 1603 by James VI and I.
A good example of the enthusiasm and expectations that the 1603 Union of the Crowns created among the Scottish reformers can be found in the tract De Unione Insulae Britannicae, written in 1605 by David Hume, a leading Presbyterian scholar in post-Reformation Scotland. He argued for the full union of England and Scotland, drawing inspiration in almost equal measure from the civic values of ancient Rome, the covenant theology of Old Testament Israel and the ideals of commonwealth and nation forged by the Protestant reformers. For him, a united Britannia, at once stronger and more varied than its component parts, would lead a Europe of small independent states against Iberian imperialism and papal pretension. In order to foster closer community ties and shared identity in the new United Kingdom, he advocated intermarriage, planting English colonies in Lochaber and the Western Isles to promote ethnic intermingling and levying steep fines on those who continued to describe themselves as Scottish or English. He also proposed a single parliament for the new United Kingdom, with regional assemblies in London, York, Lancaster and Edinburgh, drawing at least a fifth of their members from the country on the other side of the old border.
The 18th-century Scottish Enlightenment further encouraged enthusiasm for Britishness north of the border, with Alexander Wedderburn and his fellow contributors to the Edinburgh Review coining the term ‘North Britain’ to describe their country. This espousal of Britishness by enlightened Scots in no sense diminished their sense of Scottishness. Rather their display of what later became known as hybrid or hyphenated identity expressed their conviction that it was as part of Britain that Scotland had its best chance of thriving and improving. In his 1992 book Devolving English Literature Robert Crawford has argued that the whole academic discipline of English literature was essentially an 18th-century Scottish invention as Scottish writing entered its ‘British’ phase, which was to reach its apogee in the work of Walter Scott.
The best known product of this ‘British’ phase of Scottish literature was the song ‘Rule Britannia’, written in 1740 for a masque about Alfred the Great by James Thomson, a son of the Manse who hailed from Ednam in the Borders and studied arts and divinity at Edinburgh University. Thomson, who initially thought of following his father as a Church of Scotland minister but chose rather to pursue a literary career in London, wrote numerous poems promoting Britain as a cultural and ethnic amalgam embodying the principles of diversity in unity. Like many 18th-century Scots who took up the idea of Britishness, he did so partly to make clear that Britain included more than England. Sending an early draft of his poem, ‘Summer: A Panegyric on Britain’ to a fellow Scottish poet, he observed: ‘The English are a little vain in themselves, and their country. Britannia too includes our native country, Scotland.’ The opening line of what is often taken to be the first British novel, Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random (1748) – ‘I was born in the northern part of this United Kingdom’ – provides a further example of dual Scottish-British identity.
Two towering Scots of the 20th century, both sons of the Manse deeply imbued with the muscular Christian values of Presbyterianism, made a significant and enduring contribution to the notion of Britishness. John Buchan, whose hyphenated identity was expressed in the fact that his favourite landscapes were the Scottish Borders and the Cotswolds, created in his famous ‘shockers’ a quintessentially British genre of adventure stories. John Reith almost single-handedly constructed one of the great modern institutional embodiments of Britishness, the BBC. His determination to invest royal and national occasions with quasi-religious significance earned him the sobriquet ‘Gold Microphone Pursuivant’. He also made sure that the BBC expressed Britain to itself and to the world in all its variety by establishing separate services for Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the English regions, which both opted out of the national UK output and also contributed to it their own distinctive accents and cultures.
The reasons for the decline of a sense of British identity among Scots over the last 50 years or so include the ending of the British Empire, out of which they had done so well, the economic woes consequent on the collapse of traditional industries like coal mining and ship building and the erosion of Protestant identity. Ironically, that part of the United Kingdom which was once the most consciously British is now the least so. Yet occasionally this old attachment re-surfaces, as when the most recent Scottish prime minister, Gordon Brown, championed Britishness and sought to stem what seems an unstoppable tide in terms of narrower and more exclusive identities across the United Kingdom.
Ian Bradley is Reader in Church History at the University of St Andrews and author of Believing in Britain: The Spiritual Identity of Britishness