History

Much of the history of the Scots has been shaped by their country's remote location in a corner of northwestern Europe. Amazingly, Scotland encompasses 787 islands (although only about a fourth are inhabited). Its 10,004km (6,214 miles) of coastline are deeply penetrated by the Atlantic Ocean and Irish Sea on the west and the often turbulent North Sea on the east. In fact, the sea has shaped Scotland's destiny more than any other element and bred a nation of seafarers, many of whom still earn their living on the water.

Although smaller than England, Scotland boasts considerably more open space and natural splendor: some of it easily reached from Edinburgh and Glasgow. The Scots as a people are hard to classify. They're normally generous and yet have a reputation for frugality. They can be eloquent though dour; romantic at heart but brutally realistic in their appraisals (especially of the English).

Early History -- Scotland has long been a melting pot. As writer William McIlvanney once said with pride: it is a "mongrel nation." Its people were made stronger because of their diverse bloodlines -- not weakened by inbreeding or ethnic purity.

Standing stones, brochs (circular stone towers), and burial chambers attest to Scotland's earliest occupation, but little is known about these first tribes. When the Romans invaded in A.D. 82, a people they called the Picts (Painted Ones) occupied the land. Despite spectacular bloodletting, the Romans were unsuccessful, and the building of Hadrian's Wall (well south of the current border) effectively marked the northern limits of their influence.

By A.D. 500, the Picts were again besieged by the Irish, called "Scots," who were successful. They established the kingdom of Dalriada in the west on the Argyll peninsulas, battling and intermarrying with the Picts. Britons emigrated from the south and Norsemen from the northeast, creating new bloodlines and migratory patterns. Languages of the era included a diverse array of Celtic (Gaelic) and Norse dialects with scatterings of Low German and Saxon English.

The role of Dalriada Scots was cemented when a pilgrim named Columba (later canonized) arrived from Ireland in 563. The rocky Hebridean island of Iona became his base for Christian study. Christianity, already introduced by Sts. Ninian and Mungo to Strathclyde and Galloway, became more widespread. In Glasgow, a Cathedral still stands at the spot where St. Mungo (or Kentigern) settled, established an enclave, and was later buried.

The Dark & Middle Ages -- The Scots and the Picts were united in 843 under the kingship of an early chieftain named Kenneth MacAlpin, but it was the invasionary pressures from the south and Scandinavia that helped mold Scotland into a relatively coherent unit. Under Malcolm II (1005-34), tribes who occupied the southwest and southeast of the Scottish mainland were merged with the Scots and the Picts. Macbeth murdered Malcolm's heir, Duncan, and this event fueled the plotline of Shakespeare's famous "Scottish play."

Eventually Duncan's son Malcolm III avenged that killing and defeated Macbeth. His English-born princess wife, Margaret, drove forward church reforms that soon replaced St. Columba's Gaelic form of Christianity. She led a life of great piety, founded Edinburgh on Castle Hill, and was later canonized as St. Margaret in 1251.

However small, Scotland's terrain is full of lochs and mountains that effectively divided the territory, and the country was often preoccupied with the territorial battles of clan allegiances. David I (1081-1153) embarked on one of the most lavish building sprees in Scottish history, erecting many abbeys, including Jedburgh, Kelso, and Melrose, while also establishing royal burghs such as Edinburgh.

But real trouble was brewing in the south by the end of the 13th century. Certainly, Scots invaded northern England and tried to claim parts of it as Scotland. But Edward I, ambitious Plantagenet king of England, yearned to rule over an undivided nation incorporating all of Scotland and Wales. Known as the "hammer of the Scots," Edward intervened when Scottish royal succession was under dispute, setting up John Balliol as a vassal king. But Balliol eventually reneged and sought assistance from France, thus beginning the Auld Alliance.

Some of Scotland's most legendary heroes lived during this period: particularly William Wallace (1270-1305), who drove the English out of Perth and Stirling. Later, Robert the Bruce (1274-1329), succeeded in routing English forces at Bannockburn. Crowned at Scone in 1306, he decisively defeated Edward II of England outside Stirling in 1314. In 1320, the Declaration of Arbroath was sent to the Pope. England formally recognized Scotland's sovereignty in the 1328 Treaty of Northampton, which inaugurated a heady but short-lived peace. Eventually the Scottish crown passed to the Stewarts ("Stewards"), but invariably each monarch in the family was crowned as an infant or child. Dynastic nobility and regents held real power.

The Reformation -- The passions of the Reformation arrived on an already turbulent Scottish scene. The main protagonist was undoubtedly John Knox, a devoted disciple of the Geneva Protestant John Calvin and a bitter enemy of both the Catholic Church and the nascent Anglican Church of England. He had a peculiar mixture of piety, conservatism, strict morality, and intellectual independence that many still see as a pronounced feature of the Scottish character today.

In Edinburgh's Old Town, visitors can see the John Knox House, where the reformer may have lived, and St. Giles Cathedral, where he most certainly preached.

Knox helped shape the democratic form of the Scottish Church as well as establish the rather austere moral tone of Presbyterians. Foremost among his tenets were provisions for a self-governing congregation and allegiance to the word of God as contained in meticulous translations of the Old and New Testaments. Thus, he effectively encouraged people to learn to read. Later, the Church of Scotland's insistence on self-government led to endless conflicts, first with Scottish and then, after unification, with British monarchy.

Mary Queen of Scots -- When Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots (1542-87), eventually took up her rule, she was a Roman Catholic Scot of French upbringing trying to govern a land (about which she knew little) in the throes of the Reformation.

Daughter of Scotland's James V and France's Mary of Guise, she technically became Queen when only 6 days old and as a child was sent to be educated in France, where, at age 15, she married the heir to the French throne. Mary only returned to Scotland after his death. Following some disastrous political and romantic alliances, she fled Scotland to be imprisoned in England, and her life was eventually ended by the executioner's axe. Her cousin, Elizabeth I, issued the death order, however reluctantly.

The subsequent cult of Mary Queen of Scots has ensured that landmarks associated with her rule and movements through Scotland, whether Stirling Castle or the Palace of Holyroodhouse, are firmly on the modern tourist trail.

Ironically, Mary's son, James VI of Scotland, succeeded the childless Elizabeth and became king of England (James I) as well in 1603. For the next 100 years or so, religious conflict between Protestants and Catholics plus the Puritan revolution and civil war occupied a fractious England and Scotland.

Union & the Jacobites -- In 1689, the final Stuart king, the staunchly Catholic James VII (and II of England), was supplanted by his nephew William of Orange. In exile, the king and then his son James Edward -- the Old Pretender -- became focal points for Scottish (and French) ambitions to restore the Stuart dynasty. Scottish people were divided in their loyalties: The notorious Glencoe massacre of 1692 perhaps best exemplifies this split.

Scottish sovereignty was ebbing away. Economically, the country paid a huge price when its attempts to rival England with a colony in the Caribbean failed. The Darien disaster on the Isthmus of Panama and other economic pressures meant that Scotland had little choice but to merge formally with England and confirm the creation of Great Britain in 1707. After this union abolished the Scottish Parliament -- and before its benefits were widely seen -- the Jacobites (the name comes from Jacobus, the Latin form of James) attempted unsuccessfully in 1715 to place the Old Pretender on the throne and restore the Stuart line.

James died in exile and his son, Charles Edward (the Young Pretender), better known as Bonnie Prince Charlie, carried on in his stead. Charismatic but probably out of his league, he was the central figure in the 1745 Jacobite uprising. After landing near Glenfinnan in northwest Scotland and rallying sympathetic Highland clans, he began his march south. The revolt was initially promising and Jacobite troops easily reached Derby, only 125 miles from London, which flew into a panic. But they made an ill-conceived tactical retreat to Scotland and were eventually crushed at the Battle of Culloden, near Inverness. In an attempt to quell any further uprisings, Hanoverian loyalists ruthlessly suppressed Highland clans that supported the Jacobite cause, and Britain even banned Highland dress until the 1780s.

Economic Growth & the Cutural Revoution -- During the 18th century, the union began to reap dividends, and the Scottish economy underwent a radical transformation. As trade with British colonies increased, the port of Glasgow flourished. Its merchants grew rich on the tobacco trade with Virginia and the Carolinas. Ships from Glasgow were making the trip back and forth to the New World much faster than competitors elsewhere in Great Britain. The Merchant City district of the city center is named after the tobacco and cotton barons of the day.

The infamous Highland Clearances (1750-1850) expelled small farmers, or crofters, from their ancestral lands to make way for sheep grazing. Similarly in the Scottish Lowlands, labor-intensive subsistence farming was deemed antiquated and, in the name of progress, people were forcibly moved on. Increased industrialization and migration into urban centers such as Glasgow changed the national demographics forever, while a massive wave of emigration to the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand created a global Scottish Diaspora.

Rapid progress in the arts, sciences, and education in the new industrial age produced vast numbers of prominent Scots who made broad and sweeping contributions to all fields of endeavor. Victorian builders turned Glasgow into a showcase of that era's architecture. Many of the inventions that altered the history of the developing world -- such as the steam engine -- were either invented or installed by Scottish genius and industry.

The 20th & 21st Centuries -- During this time, immigrants from Ireland and partitioned India arrived in Scotland. But like much of Great Britain, the people endured bitter privations during the Great Depression and the two world wars. In the 1960s and 1970s, Scotland found that its industrial plants could not compete (with government subsidy) with the emerging industrial powerhouses of Asia and elsewhere. The most visible decline occurred in shipbuilding: The vast Glasgow yards that produced some of the world's great ocean liners were closed. Although Scottish businessmen had made fortunes out of the Empire, little was reinvested at home and when the Empire collapsed there was not much to show for it.

A glimmer of light appeared on the Scottish economic horizon in the 1970s: the discovery of North Sea oil lifted the British economy considerably and gave a political boost as well to the Scottish National Party, which argued that petroleum revenues should stay in Scotland.

Scots have always contributed disproportionately to the world's sciences and technology and another breakthrough occurred in the 1990s with the first cloned sheep: Dolly. Today the economy is primarily service-oriented, with a reasonably profitable banking and finance sector, as well as some high-tech manufacturing in what has been rather over-ambitiously called "Silicon Glen" between Edinburgh and Glasgow.

In 1997, under a newly elected Labour government in London, the Scottish electorate was allowed to vote on devolution again. This time the referendum passed, which allowed Scotland to have its own legislature for the first time since the 1707 union with England. Unlike the Welsh National Assembly, the Scottish Parliament, centered at Edinburgh, has some limited taxing powers and can enact laws regarding health, education, transportation, and public housing. Scotland, however, must bow to the greater will of the central government and Parliament in London on matters of finance, defense, immigration, and foreign policy.

Because devolution is well short of independence, critics such as Billy Connolly have dismissed the Scottish body of politicians "as a wee pretendy Parliament." Unionists who opposed devolution are equally scathing. Yet, it is proving successful despite a shaky start. Unlike members of the Westminster Parliament, members of the Scottish Parliament are elected using a system of proportional representation. This has enabled new, fresh-thinking parties to be elected and challenge the entrenched status quo.