A Scotland built on stories

Robert Crawford
BANNOCKBURNS
Scottish independence and literary imagination, 1314–2014
288pp. Edinburgh University Press. Paperback, £19.99.
978 0 7486 8584 4

Published: 19 February 2014

“Robert the Bruce and De Bohun” by Eric Harald Macbeth Robertson

W here are we from? What binds us together? What sets us apart? Robert Crawford’s subject in Bannockburns: Scottish independence and literary imagination, 1314–2014 is the stories that build nations and the place of the literary imagination in politics. Specifically, it is the telling and retelling of the Battle of Bannockburn, the unexpected victory on June 23–24, 1314, of the Scots led by Robert Bruce over the army of Edward II of England. Bannockburn is Scotland’s Agincourt and from the first blow it was a battle of words: the friar-poet, Robert Baston, taken along by Edward to celebrate his victory, was in the event captured by the Scots and required to record the carnage as the price of his release. Almost 700 years later, in 2004, Baston’s Latin verses were translated by Edwin Morgan to mark his appointment as Scots Makar, or National Poet. Another early account, the fifteenth-century prose work the Scotichronicon, ends with the rousing colophon, “Christ! He is not a Scot who is not pleased with this book!” and includes extracts from a poem glorifying Bruce’s incitement of his troops, by Bernard of Arbroath, his chancellor, who, like Baston, may have witnessed the battle.

Bernard, a skilled rhetorician, is credited with drawing up the post-Bannockburn manifesto known as the Declaration of Arbroath, one of the most robust defences of Scottish independence. Taking the form of a letter, dated April 6, 1320, from the Scottish barons to Pope John XXII, who had excommunicated Bruce for reprisals against the English, the Declaration has engaged modern controversy: in particular, whether its recommendation of Bruce as king, only so long as he defend Scotland’s independence from England, can be said to express an idea of national sovereignty (the will of a people). G. W. S. Barrow, first holder of a chair in Scottish History at the University of St Andrews and author of the classic study Robert Bruce and the Community of the Realm of Scotland (1965; now reissued by Edinburgh University Press), interpreted the Arbroath letter as “a clear statement of the constitutional relationship between the king and the community”, in which “we see the community of Scotland . . . reaching full maturity”. For Barrow, the particular and “mature” concept of national freedom that fourteenth-century Scotland embodied both enabled Bruce’s success against England and was its consequence. As for the Declaration itself, “no finer statement of a claim to national independence was produced in this period anywhere in western Europe”.

Whether a medieval resolution about independence and national sovereignty is meaningful in twenty-first-century Scotland is bound up with the possibility of imagining Bannockburn as a living literary-political currency and as something more than nostalgia – “nostalgia”, Scotland’s “National pastime”, according to the chorus, La Corbie, in Liz Lochhead’s play Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off. Alex Salmond, Scotland’s First Minister and leader of the Scottish National Party, studied medieval Scottish history alongside economics at St Andrews in the 1970s, where he was a member of Barrow’s “special subject” class on the Wars of Scottish Independence. At that time, we are informed by Crawford, he displayed a reproduction of the Declaration of Arbroath in his student room. Salmond’s facility for coining resonant phrases, such as “the Edinburgh Agreement”, to describe the decision reached in 2011 with David Cameron to hold a Scottish referendum (the two men met in Edinburgh), and his care to project a political future, in which Scotland will not so much separate from the Union as stand together with England as equals, suggest linguistic skill and an ear to the use of history.

Alex Salmond’s care to project a political future, in which Scotland will stand together with England as equals, suggest linguistic skill and an ear to the use of history

As Barrow emphasized, Bruce is a matter of record and chronicle, but he is most compelling in literature. Bannockburn was canonized in the later fourteenth-century poem The Bruce, written in Scots vernacular by John Barbour with the encouragement of Bruce’s grandson, Robert II, at a time when eye-witnesses to the battle were still alive. Even this early, another Scottish patriot, William Wallace, steps forward in some stories as the more alluring hero. Wallace, an unflinching freedom fighter, has the reputation for moral resolution that Bruce lacks: stories tell how he instructed Bruce, still loyal to England’s king, in the importance of independence. And so, though dead (executed in London nine years before Bannockburn), Wallace plays his part.

The late fifteenth-century Scots poem, Blind Hary’s Wallace, is a counterweight to Barbour’s Bruce. In the Scottish imagination in the decades before and after the Union of 1707, tales of Wallace were legion, attributing to him talents that any modern male politician might envy – from populist to sophisticated European (in his dealings with the French), and even as the object of female desire. Wallace is Robert Burns’s political hero; he is the Highlandized tartan-clad warrior lover of Jane Porter’s popular historical romance The Scottish Chiefs (1810); and he is the basis of the Hollywood movie Braveheart (1995). Eclipsing Bruce as the spirit of Bannockburn, Wallace the folk hero has proved, in some respects, the truer Scot and the better export, more amenable to both national and international reimagining of Scotland’s constitutive stories.

Crawford’s argument that literature is shaped by the history it informs is itself openly directed to a particular reading of the past and to its own political agenda for the future. Of the many Bannockburns explored here, Unionist interpretations are given shortest shrift, except where, in a curious discursive turn, they can be recuperated as fodder for a newer, softer Scottish nationalism – pluralist and gender-conscious. On these terms, Unionist writings have some uses: of the handful of female writers given space in Bannockburns, the English Porter receives disproportionate attention, her novel awarded the confusing accolade of making Wallace and “the ideal of Scottish independence welcomed beyond Scotland – whether by Americans or British imperialists”. Reprinted throughout the nineteenth century, The Scottish Chiefs continued to find readers in North America and the wider Scottish diaspora in the twentieth.

Less surprisingly, Walter Scott, the great appeaser, is easily dismissed for rejecting stories of Bannockburn in favour of the later defeats of Flodden and Culloden, and for imagining over and over the legitimating fictions of a modern united Britain. Yet the historical novel, as Scott shaped it, issued a template to Europe for recording cultural differences, and Scott did more than any writer since to inform southern Britain of the independent customs and literature of its northern partner.

This is not the place to discover the significant impact of Scottish internationalist writers from Scott and Stevenson to Willa Muir, Muriel Spark and beyond – writers who sound within and outside a Scottish context. Crawford’s argument makes no allowance for the subtle or conflicted interfusions of politics and the Scottish literary imagination. In consequence, it offers a severely distorted picture of Scottish writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and of the contribution of female writers at any time. There is cause for disquiet when writer and reader are required to expel so much that is richly Scottish in the interests of a particular definition of Scottishness. Ultimately, there seems a mismatch between the book’s twinned agendas (political and literary): between its description of the Scottish National Party’s ambitious vision of modern Scotland as a model for decentralized politics that are local, pluralist and European in perspective, and its highly selective evaluation of Scotland’s multi-voiced literature.

Interwar Scottish nationalism was intensely literary and bewilderingly varied to the point of eccentricity: revolutionary and conservative, communist, republican, fascist

Bannockburns is far better at explaining specific literary moments, such as the fascinating role of James H. Whyte in the cultural life of St Andrews in the 1930s. An enterprising American, Whyte edited the avant-garde magazine the Modern Scot, publishing Scottish writers (Hugh MacDiarmid, Neil Gunn, the adoptive Scot Compton Mackenzie) alongside a cosmopolitan assortment of contributors (Hermann Broch, Herbert Read, Franz Kafka, Luigi Pirandello). Whyte’s mission, as he saw it in 1932, was to “make up the leeway between Scottish literature . . . and those other ‘new’ countries that have developed a national literature following the gaining of national independence and now move on a European plane”. Between the two world wars, Scottish writers nurtured an ambitious international perspective and engaged vigorously in translation. Interwar Scottish nationalism was intensely literary and bewilderingly varied to the point of eccentricity in its political allegiances: revolutionary and conservative, communist, republican, fascist. Whyte, by contrast, was a modernizer who embraced Scotland’s internal diversity and her relations to a wider world. Crawford generously detects continuity between Whyte’s vision and Salmond, “the most important and consciously pluralist leader in the modern history of Scottish nationalism”.

Inevitably, perhaps, Bannockburns is least convincing where it most matters: in drawing up a literary-political map for Scotland in 2014, the 700th anniversary of Bannockburn and the year chosen for the referendum on Scotland’s future. Contemporary writers (Liz Lochhead, James Robertson, David Greig) are lined up in support of independence. Yet there is something naive, even reductively propagandist, in linking declared political allegiances to writings which are open to far richer interpretation. As Crawford himself admits, “while Lochhead has made clear her support for Scottish political independence, her best known work highlights how difficult it is for a woman to identify with ideals of independence in a world where the odds – in terms of national and gender politics alike – seem weighted against her”. Robertson, a compelling and complex novelist, wrote a doctoral thesis on Walter Scott and crafts his own fiction from some of the same ingredients. In the film stakes, as Crawford points out, Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s Deputy First Minister, is known to favour the political model of the Danish television series Borgen over the movie Braveheart.

The Scottish literary imagination over centuries has been drawn to two fictional techniques, making them in some ways peculiarly its own – the unreliable narrator and the fractured tale (stories whose multiple perspectives contest their own terms from within and without). If one challenge for the modern world and the modern political party is to learn how to live with pluralism, then there is cause to celebrate the many voices of the Scottish imagination and their insistence on questioning our identity: to paraphrase the modern anthem, not so much “who do we want to be again” as “who do we want to be”.

Kathryn Sutherland is Professorial Fellow in English at St Anne’s College, Oxford, and a Leverhulme Major Research Fellow working on a study of Romantic-period manuscripts.