10
James Coleman1
The National Wallace Monument on the Abbey Craig near Stirling is one of the most enduring testimonials to the glorification of that most potent of Scottish heroes, William Wallace; yet the circumstances of the monument’s construction and the ideology that it was originally intended to convey have been obscured by subsequent views of what Wallace means to Scotland.2 The early twenty-first-century significance of the National Wallace Monument is markedly different from that intended by its ‘authors’, those Victorian gentlemen who raised the funds for its construction, chose the design, and faced the slings and arrows of the monument’s critics.3 Our purpose here is to shrug off this post-Braveheart image of William Wallace and its associations with modern Scottish political nationalism in an attempt to recover the Wallace of the nineteenth century, a Wallace whose monument was intended both to mark the patriot-hero’s achievement of independence for Scotland and to commemorate what he had done for the Union and the Empire. This requires the consideration of two complementary ideas.
First, consideration of commemorative monuments involves the idea of cultural nationalism as an expression of a nation’s sense of self, its national identity or, to use a term that occurs often in the rhetoric of the nineteenthcentury Wallace cult, its ‘nationality’. Historiographical examinations of nineteenth-century Scotland have tended to view Scottish cultural nationalist discourse and practices as being poor substitutes for the kind of nationalism that Scotland conspicuously did not have: political nationalism.4Alternatively, the commemoration of the Scottish past through the construction of such monuments as the National Wallace Monument, and the worship of the national hero that these symbols represent, has been presented as signifying a lack of a proper national historiography.5 These reductionist views have been countered somewhat by Graeme Morton’s resonant term, ‘unionist-nationalism’.
Derived from an examination of the civil and political autonomy of Scottish Lowland civil society, unionist-nationalism represents the operation and expression of a distinct Scottish national identity within the overarching ideal of Great Britain and Empire; that is, to be self-consciously and loyally British did not involve the renunciation of one’s Scottishness. Quite the opposite, in fact, as unionist-nationalist Scots held fast to their identity as Scots, viewing their Scottishness as an essential component of their Britishness.6The identification of unionist-nationalism in nineteenth-century Scotland provides an alternative to the view of Scotland as turning up late for the nationalist party. In control of the apparatus of civil society, Scots felt no need for political nationalism as there was no significant groundswell of political grievance. In cultural terms, unionist-nationalism was articulated through the contribution of Scots to the greatness of Britain and the successes of the imperial project, whether these Scots were scientists, economists, historical novelists or, looking to national memory, thundering reformers or patriot-heroes. Unionist-nationalism permitted Scottish national self-expression within the cultural sphere.7 The construction of cultural nationalist symbols, such as the Wallace Monument, was not a surrogate for something more potent – i.e. something political – but a form of nationalist expression seen as being every bit as legitimate as calls for constitutional change. Although the vast majority of Victorian Scots felt no need for political nationalism, this did not mean that their cultural-nationalist practices suffered. Victorian Scots were particularly skilful at expressing their Scottishness, as distinct from, yet complementary to, their Britishness. There was an active, articulate and popular Scottish nationalism in the nineteenth century – it was cultural nationalism, and we should not underestimate its potency simply because it had no political correlative.
This leads us to the second component, that of the role of commemorative practice as cultural-nationalist expression, a practice that defines the role of the National Wallace Monument for nineteenth-century Scotland. Like all symbols that have been formed with the intent to communicate a specific idea or concept, commemorative monuments involve a paradox between intention and interpretation, where the intention is to fix some idea of the nation in stone and to present that conception of the nation to subsequent generations as a means of nurturing national identity.8 These structures are meant to inspire, to fill those who gaze upon them with a sense of their nation’s greatness in the past, present and future, emphasising the nation’s historic legitimacy by veneration of heroic precedents. Yet, regardless of any meaning the monument was intended to transmit, ultimately it is the ‘reader’ rather than the ‘author’ who decides what the monument signifies. Each new generation of viewers brings its own set of cultural and historical assumptions to the monument, feeding a constant flow of interpretation and re-interpretation of the person or event being commemorated. In other words, a monument does not project meanings – it operates as a screen on to which meaning is projected by the viewer.9 It is this process that has led to the original meaning of the National Wallace Monument disappearing; the balance between unionist and nationalist readings of Wallace has been lost, as the Victorian unionist counterweight weakened and the scales tipped in favour of the nationalist reading.
To tell the story of the National Wallace Monument, from its first proposal to the close of the nineteenth century, would take an entire book in itself, so this chapter will not attempt to tell that story in any detail, although a brief summary of the most significant dates is necessary. Further to proposals in the Glasgow press and through the zeal of the Rev. Dr Charles Rogers of Stirling, the movement to erect the monument was launched at a ‘Great Public Meeting’, held on the anniversary of the battle of Bannockburn in June 1856, after which a committee of management was elected. Five years later, the foundation stone of the monument was laid, again on the anniversary of Bannockburn, yet, despite the enthusiasm of the fundraisers, subscriptions sufficient to complete the monument were not forthcoming, and it would be another eight years before the completed monument was handed over to Stirling Town Council, this time on 11 September, the anniversary of the battle of Stirling Bridge. On another Bannockburn anniversary, in 1887, a statue of William Wallace was added to the front of the monument, with the so-called ‘Wallace Sword’ being transferred to the monument from Dumbarton the following November. Over the years, numerous busts of Scottish men deemed sufficiently illustrious by the monument’s custodians were placed in the monument’s ‘Hall of Heroes’, beginning with Robert Burns in September 1886 and John Knox, George Buchanan and Sir Walter Scott in September 1887. Further busts were added over the following twenty years, including those of the geologist and journalist Hugh Miller, the Enlightenment economist Adam Smith and the weaver poet Robert Tannahill. The monument’s entrance hall also contains busts of two men who had become synonymous with the difficult movement to have the monument erected: the aforementioned antiquarian, historian and genealogist, the Rev. Dr Charles Rogers, and the Glasgow lawyer, historian and pamphleteer, William Burns.10 As we shall see, these men represent two opposing faces of Scottish cultural nationalism in the nineteenth century. Charles Rogers was a particularly crucial figure in the fundraising and in the construction of the monument, having had a remarkable ability for arranging the erection of Scottish historical monuments. In his time Rogers was responsible for the erection of statues to James Hogg at St Mary’s Loch, to Wallace and to the Covenanting martyr James Guthrie in Stirling, as well as participating in numerous other ‘national’ endeavours, many of which failed to gain much momentum, possibly because of Rogers’ ‘persecution complex’.11 His most lasting legacy – certainly for those examining the nineteenth-century mania for monuments – is his two-volume Monuments and Monumental Inscriptions in Scotland from 1871, as well as the equally monumental Book of Wallace, published in 1889 by the Grampian Club, which Rogers founded. Much of what we know about the progress of the Wallace Monument’s fundraising and construction comes from Rogers’ numerous writings, biased and full of puffing self-justification though they are.
Constructing a monumental shrine in honour of a national hero like William Wallace was by no means unique to Scotland. The worship of national heroes as secular saints was commonplace throughout Europe and North America in the nineteenth century, as monuments and colossal statues were erected with the intention of commemorating the deeds of those heroes sustaining the national virtues they were supposed to represent.12 Through the selection of some element from the nation’s character or memory and the commemoration of that element in material form, monuments could be a potent way of reminding the members of the national community about the essential characteristics of the nation to which they belonged. This element might be drawn from the past or from the present; it might be an event, a person, or an ideology; it might be given form by direct representation of the commemorated individual, or reflected through architecture or images from the realm of allegory. Yet, regardless of the form, the intention was to take this element of the nation and give it an enduring definition. National monuments were an expression of what Ernest Renan described in ‘What Is a Nation?’ as:
the social capital upon which one bases a national idea. To have common glories in the past and to have a common will in the present; to have performed great deeds together, to wish to perform still more – these are the essential conditions for being a people.13
The role of the national monument was to establish precisely what these ‘common glories’ were. Once fixed in place, the monument was supposed to transmit the meaning of the commemorated subject in order that members of the national community could look upon the monument and receive suitably patriotic inspiration. As nations were formed and sustained through a communicated sense of shared experience, across geographical space and ‘calendrical’ time, national monuments were intended to act as expressions of this collective sense of self, this consciousness, this nationality.14 The virtues of the nation could be embodied in the hero thus signified, a single, resonant figure acting as a correlative of national virtue, most commonly perhaps in the hero’s patriotic love of liberty. This passion was shared by the members of the modern nation: the Swiss possessed an ever-evolving cult of William Tell, the French venerated Joan of Arc or the Gauls, while the Germans, among numerous other national monuments, erected theHermannsdenkmal to Arminius the Cheruskan, conqueror of the Roman legions, a monument that shares many of the qualities of the Wallace Monument. All these monuments were intended as ‘a mirror image of national tradition’.15 The Wallace Monument fits neatly into this nineteenth-century vogue for erecting assertively national monuments, being constructed as a symbol of the Scottish nation and of that nation’s virtues, personalised in the patriot-hero William Wallace. The cult of William Wallace shows the Scots were just as adept at playing culturally nationalist games as their European counterparts who may have indulged in ‘proper’ political nationalism.
If the meaning of the past is so vital to the meaning of the present, and to the legitimacy of the nation to which these memories belong, control of that past becomes of great significance; to be able to claim the national hero as one’s own is to hold the rights to one of the defining symbols of the national consciousness – Renan’s ‘social capital’. To possess Wallace was to possess one of the most powerful precedents from the Scottish national past, and his memory was co-opted by numerous disparate bodies – there were as many William Wallaces as there were causes seeking to deal in his social capital: Wallace the Chartist, Wallace the Liberal, Temperance Wallace, Proletarian Wallace and, eventually, Wallace the proto-Nationalist.16 These deployments of Wallace all tended to share certain key components, principally Wallace’s role as a champion of liberty, whether that liberty was national, constitutional, personal or social. Wallace, the ‘great liberator’, had freed Scotland from the tyrannical yoke of the Plantagenets and, in so doing, forged the Scottish nation, giving it the necessary historical legitimacy that a nineteenth-century nation required. At the same time, Wallace had been a ‘man of the people’; by not being a member of the aristocracy he had the advantage, in terms of his cultural capital, of not being aided in his exertions by any inherited privilege.17 By combining Wallace the liberator and Wallace as ‘one of us’, the hero could be made to represent extension of the electoral franchise, free-trade liberalism or simply the Victorian values of hard work and self-improvement.
In part, it was the role of the National Wallace Monument to act as a focus for representations of the patriot-hero, and the conception of Wallace outlined above appeared again and again in the rhetoric of the speeches delivered in aid of raising the monument. The National Wallace Monument saw Wallace deployed as Scotland’s national hero, not just within the Scottish context but transmitting Wallace’s patriotism across a burgeoning international network of nations, heroes and monuments. It was necessary for Wallace to take his place in the pantheon of great national heroes, as powerful as the heroes celebrated by other nations. One speaker at Bannockburn in 1870 suggested that the Swiss national hero, William Tell, was the closest any other nation might get to a hero of Wallace’s quality, ‘but,’ he added, significantly, ‘some said that William Tell was a myth’.18 Wallace’s historic reality legitimised him as a more ‘efficacious’ symbol of the nation, one of the ‘great men’, not only of the Scottish past but of the history of all nations. Speaking at the 600th anniversary of the battle of Stirling Bridge, held at the Wallace Monument in 1897, the Liberal peer Lord Rosebery placed Wallace in his pantheon of great men:
It is the same whether you call it Caesar or Luther or Washington or Mirabeau or Cavour. Crisis is a travail, and the birth of the man ends or assuages it. (Cheers.) We recognise in Wallace one of these men – the man of fate given to Scotland in the storms of the thirteenth century.19
Comparison with the great men of history is a recurrent theme in the deployment of Wallace: part of the inscription on another Wallace monument, a baronial tower erected at Barnweill in Ayrshire in 1859, likens Wallace to, again, George Washington and also to Leonidas, the victor of the battle of Thermopylae, as being ‘names which shall remain through all time the Watchwords and Beacons of Liberty’.20 William Wallace is exalted in terms of his contribution to ideals that transcend national boundaries yet are still held to be definitive of the Scottish national character, specifically in his role as the great liberator. In bequeathing these qualities to Scotland, Wallace not only rendered it a distinct nation with its own laws, institutions and character but also ensured that the Scots had no need for political nationalism. At the laying of the National Wallace Monument’s foundation stone in 1861, the author, James Dodds, who provided a constitutional reading of the Scottish past, reminded the assembled multitude that had it not been for Wallace’s victory at Stirling Bridge, ‘instead of coming here with your peaceful banner and the insignia of social triumph, you would have been engaged in the same awful and terrible contest in which Poland, Italy, and Hungary are now engaged’.21
Dodds, like Charles Rogers, represented the voice of the moderate unionist-nationalist who had not necessarily attained any great social rank, having achieved his popularity as a writer and public speaker. His articulation of Wallace’s legacy, one commonplace in invocations of the patriothero during this period and coming from various levels of Scottish civil society, acts as a counter to the twentieth-century accusation that Scotland did not express any ‘proper’ political nationalism. The worship of Wallace involved a significant element of gratitude for the fact that Wallace ensured, at Stirling Bridge in 1297, that political or constitutional struggle was neither necessary nor desirable – rather than being deficient in not requiring profound constitutional change, the discourse of the Wallace Monument indicates that those unionist-nationalist Scots who found a platform at the monument saw it as a decidedly good thing that they were not in the same position as Italy, Hungary or Poland. This cultural nationalist rhetoric expressed the nation’s historic identity but also the superfluity of its political counterpart.
The ability to claim possession of such a vital symbol as Wallace was of exceptional importance in nineteenth-century Scotland and, as a result, control of the National Wallace Monument inevitably entailed control of one of the most significant symbols of the patriot-hero – to dictate the meaning of the monument would be to direct the resonance of the patriot’s historic achievement. The debates and controversies concerning the monument’s construction point to the importance of the Wallace myth to Victorian Scots yet also to the difficulty of erecting a monument to such a major figure in the mythistoire of the Scottish nation and, of much more profound significance for Wallace’s unionist-nationalist acolytes, celebrating a potentially disruptive figure, one who was most famous for defeating the army of an English king. One of the initial objections to the monument was that no physical memorial of Wallace was necessary, as his true monument was the free and independent Scottish people: ‘Wallace required no monument as he lived in the hearts of his countrymen.’22 Critics claimed that such structures were simply a waste of time and money, requiring justification from the very beginning. In a pamphlet printed in 1860, intended for circulation in aid of the Wallace Monument movement, the Rev. Dr Charles Rogers argued the case for the defence against ‘the absurd cry of the utilitarian’, stating that regardless of the passing of the centuries, nothing could ‘detract from the approbation due to heroic and patriotic deeds’. In thus promoting the monument, in which he had a fairly serious concern, Rogers outlined the role of the monument as a necessary symbol of the national existence, saying that monuments ‘evidence national merit and national gratitude – merit in those who are commemorated, gratitude in those who delight thus to do honour to the meritorious’.23 Despite the eager harangues of Rogers and others, and support from every corner of the Empire, sufficient funds were not forthcoming. By the time the foundation stone was due to be laid, still only half the necessary funds had been raised, although Rogers had attempted to receive assurances from some wealthy donors that the slack would soon be taken up.24 This lack of momentum in gathering subscriptions would ultimately contribute to Rogers’ ejection as secretary and principal fundraiser.
Although the ‘utilitarians’ caused some difficulties, probably the most significant obstacle facing the organisers of the movement to erect the monument was the taint of anti-Englishness. In 1856, as the National Wallace Monument movement was first beginning to gain some momentum, The Times printed an editorial on the subject of these Scottish attempts to articulate their national consciousness, referring to Wallace as ‘the merest myth’ and going on to accuse the Scots of ‘exclusiveness’ and ‘provincialism’, proclaiming ‘the more Scotland has striven to be a nation, the more she has sunk to be a province’.25 The Times’ thundering charted the stormy waters that the fundraisers for the Wallace Monument would have to navigate, by asserting the commitment of the English to ‘the conception of the United Kingdom; nay, more, of a British Empire’, and accusing the Scots of being un-British. Association with such anti-Union sentiment was an ever-present threat, as the historian Archibald Alison identified prior to assuming the chair at the banquet held to celebrate the laying of the monument’s foundation stone. Alison wrote in his autobiography of how easy it would have been to have ‘wound the audience up to the highest pitch of enthusiasm by praise of the Scotch and abuse of the English, for they were to a man intensely national, and highly excited’.26
Instead, and fully aware of the perils of Anglophobia hanging over the entire project, Alison
endeavoured to present a view of the achievements of Wallace which, while it should do justice to the memory of that illustrious patriot, should at the same time exhibit clearly the immense advantages which Scotland, in common with every other part of the empire, derived from union with England.27
The necessity of talking up the union was a defining theme of the Wallace Monument movement, featuring time after time in speeches delivered throughout the monument’s development. If the extracts reproduced by Charles Rogers in his Book of Wallace are to be viewed as representative, almost every meeting held by the likes of Rogers and James Dodds to raise interest and subscriptions was characterised by their attempts to respond to objections that the monument was intended to be ‘a demonstration of hostility against England’, with the sole purpose of reviving ‘ancient prejudice and animosities’.28 Yet, just as Wallace could be summoned to fight for extension of the franchise or the satisfactions of a temperate life, so he could be deployed as a champion of British nationalism – Constitutionalist Wallace, a truly unionist-nationalist hero.
One of the fundamental aspects of the Wallace cult in the nineteenth century, not merely deployed in an attempt to appear self-consciously British but applied almost universally when robing Wallace in any form of nationalist garb, was that his patriotic struggle represented the triumph of Scottish liberty over Plantagenet tyranny, the forging of a national independence that had allowed the Scottish nation to grow and achieve its distinct character. Wallace was literally credited with forming the Scottish nation. Sir John Melville, Lord Provost of Edinburgh, spoke at the 1856 ‘Great Public Meeting’ of Scotland as owing its national existence to ‘the prowess of Wallace and the indomitable spirit of resistance which he manifested’.29 Over forty years later, the same was being said by Lord Rosebery: in his speech at the 600th anniversary of the battle of Stirling Bridge, he projected Wallace as the one who had ‘asserted Scotland as an independent country, who made or remade the Scots as a nation’, receiving loud cheers in response.30
At Stirling Bridge, and through the example of a life lived within the sacred spirit of patriotism, Wallace bequeathed to Scotland a legacy of personal and national liberty, forging the Scots into a proudly historic nation that would go on to make its contribution to Union and Empire. The idea that, had the Scots under Wallace not won at Stirling Bridge, and had Wallace not left this legacy of national independence, the Union of 1707 could not have taken place as a union of equals, is one of the defining characteristics of unionist-nationalist discourse in Victorian Scotland.31 Speaking at the ceremony to mark the handing over of the Wallace Sword to the National Wallace Monument in 1888, Provost Yellowlees of Stirling said:
The sword would not lie in the monument as a symbol of strife and hate and bloodshed, but as a reminder of the weary and long-continued struggle for liberty and national independence. It would be a symbol of that struggle which culminated in the consummation of the Union between Scotland, not as a servile and conquered race, but as a free and independent nationality, on the one hand, and its richer and more populous neighbour on the south, a union entered into on equally free and independent terms, and which had been fraught with untold blessings to both nationalities. (Applause.)32
In this way, Wallace could be made to play a fundamental role in the formation of Great Britain, for the patriot was as much a British hero as a Scottish one, not only a champion of the historic independence of Scotland but of the constitutional government that made Britain and its Empire so great. By defeating a tyrannical, and therefore unconstitutional, monarch, Wallace had taught the English a lesson in the meaning of what it was to be British.33 An article on the 1856 ‘Great Public Meeting’ in the radical Tait’s Magazinestated that Wallace’s ‘value to English liberty was equal to his efforts for Scottish independence’, or in the words of the more moderate Charles Rogers:
Thanks to Wallace that we have not been irritated by feelings of national degradation; and by him, too, taught the lesson that it was our privilege and our duty to battle for the right, to rally round the throne, and fight manfully for the constitution. And well, too, we may claim the privilege of saying that if we derived, as we certainly did, many national benefits from our union with England, we, too, conferred on the south reciprocal advantages; the rose of England never bloomed so fair as when entwined and enfolded by the thistle of Scotland.34
Not only had Wallace won Scotland’s historic independence, he had also fought – whether he knew it or not – in the name of the constitution. Just as the Scots were making their own contribution to the Union and the Empire in the nineteenth century, so too their hero had participated in the development of the British nation in the late thirteenth century. To commemorate Wallace’s victories was not only profoundly Scottish but was also to celebrate what it was to be British, dovetailing both Scottish and British national identity into a definitive statement of unionist-nationalist pride. This was supremely deft cultural nationalism, a carefully constructed image of the patriot-hero that was ably deployed by those who sought to promote the movement for the National Wallace Monument, providing a route through the dangerous waters of Anglophobia.
It was not all plain sailing, however. Accusations of anti-Englishness did not come from nothing – they had been born of an association, in the eyes of the press and no small proportion of the public, with an earlier Scottish national movement that had had as its focus the redress of certain perceived imbalances in the operation of the Union: the National Association for the Vindication of Scottish Rights. The NAVSR, or Scottish Rights Society, is often viewed as a forerunner of the Wallace Monument movement, and, although connections between the two bodies have been overstated, it is true that some of those involved in the NAVSR went on to play a role in the collection of subscriptions for the National Wallace Monument.35 What both the NAVSR and the Wallace Monument committee undoubtedly did share was a clash of attitudes between moderate and radical nationalists. The moderate nationalists such as Charles Rogers or Archibald Alison looked upon the Wallace Monument as both honouring the deeds of the patriot and symbolising the distinctiveness of Scottish nationality in a firm and unquestioningly unionist context.36 For these moderates, who, if Charles Rogers is to be believed, represented the majority on the monument committee, there was never any questioning of the Union, no subtext of constitutional dissatisfaction implicit in the intended meaning of the monument. Ranged against these moderate unionist-nationalists were those former members of the NAVSR who became involved in the Wallace Monument movement as a direct result of their – Rogers claims, anti-English – grievances and who sought to make the erection of the monument a focus for nationalist dissent. This body’s most vocal spokesman was William Burns, who represents the more radical face of Victorian Scottish cultural-nationalism. No enemy of the Union per se, Burns was a proponent of – at times quite virulent – anti-Englishness, derived from his perception of the ever more problematic anglicisation of Scotland allied with a neglect of Scottish matters in the imperial parliament and within British culture more generally. To this end, Burns was an early advocate of constitutional change, his objections to the status quo being expressed in printed letters and pamphlets bearing titles such asScotland and her Calumniators: her past, her present and her future, although he is perhaps best remembered for his twovolume history, The Scottish War of Independence, and his hatred of the term ‘Scotch’ when denoting ‘Scots’ or ‘Scottish’.37
Much to the detriment of the monument’s progress and to its profile in the press, William Burns and Charles Rogers clashed continually throughout the period that both men were on the Wallace Monument committee. According to Rogers, the moderate members of the committee had constantly to deny the charge that the movement was merely the NAVSR under a different name and hence associated with anti-Union sentiment.38 Writing of the establishment of the NAVSR in The Serpent’s Track, a pamphlet he composed with the sole purpose of describing ‘twenty-two years of persecution’, Rogers accuses William Burns of being the most ‘conspicuous’ of these former NAVSR ‘malcontents – persons disposed whether to gratify a puerile vanity or to re-awaken international dissension’.39 Rogers argues that it was as a result of the involvement of William Burns and others that the Wallace Monument movement had encountered resistance from those who did not wish to contribute financially to a movement so wholly associated with the NAVSR. For instance, the presence of Burns’s ‘malcontents’ caused difficulties in finding a suitable noble figurehead for the movement, as without noble patronage the monument would not possess the required cachet.40 Archibald Alison, who was involved in both the NAVSR and the Wallace Monument movement, had ‘perceived elements of a dangerous character’ in the NAVSR, and agreed with Lord Eglinton to ‘abide firmly by the Union, and utter nothing which could shake the general attachment to it’, wholly disapproving of those elements in the NAVSR who were espousing dissolution of the Union.41 Eglinton’s experience with Burns and his colleagues in the NAVSR appears to have discouraged him from participating in the Wallace Monument movement; he remarked, according to Rogers, that ‘already he had been “burned”’.42 The Earl of Elgin’s acceptance of the chairmanship of the monument committee seems to have been partly because he was out of the country during the NAVSR’s period of notoriety.43Ultimately, it was deemed necessary that assurances must be received from any former NAVSR firebrands that they would not attempt to hijack the monument for their own ends, with William Burns being allowed on to the committee only after he had made ‘a distinct promise’ not to reintroduce any Anglophobic sentiments.44 Both the moderate unionist-nationalists, such as Rogers, Dodds and Alison, and radical promoters of Scottish rights, such as William Burns, understood the importance of the monument and its role in fixing the meaning of the patriothero Wallace, and in this way the schisms within the monument committee represent a struggle for ownership of the past: whoever controlled the monument could control the kind of Wallace, and so the kind of Scotland, that the structure would transmit to its viewers. In the ideological deployment of Wallace, the difference between the moderate unionist-nationalist reading and the more radical view of the Burns nationalists finds its definition not in 1297, or in 1305, or even 1314: the historical moment that divides these two views of Wallace is 1707 – it is their attitudes to the Union that distinguish one from the other. For the moderate, holding the archetypal unionist-nationalist view, Wallace’s victories allowed the Union of 1707 to take place between two proudly historic nations engaging in an equally historic and constitutional partnership; for radical Victorian nationalists, 1707 was the moment when the Scots squandered the magnificent legacy of national independence that Wallace had bequeathed to his nation – not a union of equals but the submission of one nation to another.
These two conflicting readings provided the basis for one of the most rancorous and divisive episodes in the story of the monument’s construction – the choice of a design. Since the physical form of the monument would inevitably be the most enduring method of transmitting its meaning, choosing a design that reflected the kind of Wallace that the monument’s progenitors preferred was of profound importance. Considering that the committee was split between the moderate and radical views of how Wallace’s legacy ought to be signified, there was always going to be trouble. The first design to be chosen by the monument committee was, according to Rogers, selected practically single-handedly by William Burns and his former NAVSR cronies in the convenient absence of a sufficient number of moderate committee members. Designed by the artist J. Noel Paton, the proposed colossal structure was entitled ‘Lion and Typhon’, being ‘a symbolical group of a lion with a broken chain overthrowing a crowned Typhon’, intended to represent the moment when ‘the lion of Scotland breaks from his fetters and overcomes tyranny’. Rogers, representing the voice of the moderates, took a more unkind view, describing the proposal as ‘Scotland as a lion throttling “the English monster”’.45 That Paton’s design might actually be constructed appears to have been the cause of some alarm: in a letter to Charles Baillie, the chairman of the National Wallace Monument committee, William Stirling of Keir, MP for Perthshire, expressed his confusion over the precise meaning of ‘Lion and Typhon’:
How does the composition symbolise the great career and touching story of Wallace? We have a comely lion standing upon the body of an ill-favoured king with thighs twisting and wriggling themselves into serpents, of which the heads form his inconvenient feet. . . . What do these two figures mean? What does the lion represent? Is he Wallace or is he Scotland?46
Even taking into account Charles Rogers’ evident dislike of both the design and its proponent, it seems that he was accurate in observing that ‘dissatisfaction was universal’, and the ‘Lion and Typhon’ was rejected at a second committee meeting held in June 1859.47This controversy is symptomatic of the differences that existed between the moderate and radical members of the Wallace Monument committee. By extracting as fair a reading as possible from amongst Rogers’ propaganda, it would appear that William Burns was intent on rendering the monument as a statement of political intent as much as a symbol of Scottish cultural distinctiveness – despite any ambiguity in its significance, the ‘Lion and Typhon’ was undoubtedly an image of struggle and mastery rather than of tranquil repose in the Union.
After Paton’s design was dropped, new designs were called for consideration, the submissions being put on public display in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Stirling in order that members of the public could voice an opinion on which design was best suited to the monument’s purpose. If Charles Rogers is to be believed, J. T. Rochead’s Scotch-baronial tower was the popular choice. Describing his preferred mode for the proposed monument during the ‘Lion and Typhon’ débâcle, William Stirling had suggested ‘a tall and stately tower of our early national architecture, suggestive of the manners and history of the time’ – Stirling’s reference to ‘our early national architecture’ representing the cultural-nationalist concern with projection of the existence of the nation into the past from the present.48 According to Rogers, Rochead had read a printed copy of this letter and had adopted its suggestions when working on the design, his proposal differing from Keir’s only in being topped by an ‘Imperial Crown’. At the committee meeting called to make the final decision on the monument’s design, Rochead’s was chosen ‘by acclamation’ following a proposal by Sheriff Henry Glassford Bell, who would go on to describe the design as being ‘simple, national, and appropriate’.49 It was still not universally popular: the architect J. J. Stevenson, apparently no great fan of Scotch baronial, claimed that ‘the design seems to aim at being wild’; a retrospective on J. Noel Paton in the Art Journal refers to the Wallace Monument, perhaps unsurprisingly considering the rejection of Paton’s early design, as ‘conventional and utterly barbarous’; while, in 1870, the Scotsman called it ‘a tower of questionable elegance and unquestionable pettiness’.50
Despite such disapproval, however, the Scotch-baronial style was wholly appropriate in fulfilling its intended purpose – the National Wallace Monument is unionist-nationalism in stone, a metaphor for the William Wallace that moderate Victorian cultural unionist-nationalists intended the monument to signify. The ultimate choice of a Scotch-baronial design indicates the success of the moderate nationalism represented by Rogers over the more aggressive deployment of Wallace as promoted by Burns. The rock-faced rubble construction of the superstructure of the tower was intended to represent the historicity of Scotland and its culture, as modern construction methods drew on precedents from the past. At the same time, the ‘imperial crown’ forming the apex of the monument symbolised the power of the British Empire. In other words, the past supports the present; the legacy of Scottish history is crowned with the achievements of the nineteenth century, all combined into a sturdy and harmonious whole – that whole being both the Wallace Monument and the British Empire.51 Such a sentiment was explicit in the intentions of those who chose the design and were responsible for raising the funds for the monument’s construction.
Although the choice of design for the monument was a battle won by the moderates, Burns and his colleagues could still scent a sort of victory. Shortly after the laying of the foundation stone in 1861, Rogers was either ejected from his role as secretary because of financial irregularities or resigned as a result of being too often persecuted by William Burns.52 Still keen to be involved in the erection of a monument that he believed was his idea in the first place, Rogers set up a ‘supplementary committee’ and proceeded to continue his fundraising efforts. The divide between Rogers’ ‘supplementary’ fundraising and the official committee, now in the charge of Burns, seems to have very much retarded construction, with Rogers blaming Burns’s extremism and the latter’s supporters pointing the finger at Rogers’ creative accounting.
One of the most significant events concerning the monument during the Burns ascendancy must be the presentation to the committee in 1868 of ‘patriotic sentiments’ from the ‘celebrity’ nationalists Kossuth, Mazzini, Garibaldi and others, mounted in a frame constructed from pieces of the so-called ‘Wallace Oak of Elderslie’.53 The intention was that copies of these framed testimonials would be circulated in an attempt to raise interest in and funds for the monument.54 Such a self-conscious association between the unambiguously political nationalism of these European leaders and the commemoration of Wallace emphasises the kind of national hero that the radical cultural-nationalists intended the monument to represent. This was an interpretation symbolised by their preference for the ‘Lion and Typhon’ and sustained through their promotion of the contributions of Kossuth et al – a relic of the historical Wallace surrounds and protects the messages offered in support by the patriot’s nineteenth-century counterparts. It is important to emphasise that the committee under Burns’s more radical secretaryship appears to have been every bit as successful in raising subscriptions for the monument as it was under Rogers’ more politically moderate, if no less zealous, hand.55
It would take until 1869 for the monument to be completed, during which time, along with sporadic but strong criticism in the press, the architect died and it was discovered that the price quoted for the construction of the tower had been too conservative. A ‘quiet ceremony’ was held on 11 September 1869, there not being enough money in the coffers for a large ‘demonstration’, attended by members of Stirling Town Council and the monument’s committee, including William Burns. The inauguration was something of a muted affair, with very little of the celebratory commemoration that had marked both the Great Public Meeting and the laying of the foundation stone.56 There do not appear to have been any lengthy speeches celebrating Wallace’s achievements, nor was there a particularly high attendance. The most significant speech seems to have been made by the secretary of the monument committee at that time, a Mr Morrison, who merely read out the minutes of the last committee meeting, not missing an opportunity to criticise the Rev. Dr Rogers. In a separate event, held later that day in a Stirling hotel, Rogers was presented with a portrait of himself, given in acknowledgement of his labours.57
Despite the dominance of the Burns-led committee during the latter part of construction, the moderates would ultimately regain control of the monument’s signification. William Burns died in 1876, by which time, according to the autobiography of the partisan John McAdam, those parties deemed ‘objectionable’ by the Burns party – i.e. Rogers – were once more beginning to assert themselves.58 For proof of this we need look no further than the next major event to take place at the Wallace Monument after its inauguration: the unveiling of a bust of Robert Burns, donated by Andrew Carnegie, in the Hall of Heroes in September of 1886. There not being enough space within the monument for the ‘goodly number of people’ who arrived at the Abbey Craig for the event, it was arranged that one of the speakers would ‘deliver an “oration” on the patriotism of Burns’. That speaker was none other than the Rev. Dr Charles Rogers, his reappearance marking the shift away from radical control back to that of the moderate unionist-nationalists.59 Rogers’ persistent presence at events subsequent to this emphasises the control exerted by moderate unionist-nationalism in determining the monument’s representation of Wallace and his legacy. In 1887, a statue of Wallace, mounted in a niche on the side of the monument, was unveiled by the Marquess of Bute, ‘right-wing’ Scottish nationalist and one-time member of the Scottish Home Rule Association.60 Despite his more radical nationalist propensities – radical, certainly, in the context of the monument’s moderate unionist-nationalism – it would appear that Bute was asked to unveil this new adornment because of his title and renowned interest in Scottish history. Although certain statements in Bute’s speech proved somewhat controversial – he claimed that the difference between Scotsmen and Englishmen was ‘scientifically, even physiologically, true’ – his rhetoric was replete with the necessary gestures to Wallace as champion of liberty and father of the nation. He stated that ‘our country owes its existence to-day quite as much to [Wallace] as to any other’, and at no point did he suggest that the nation might have somehow squandered Wallace’s glorious legacy.61 It is also worth noting that Charles Rogers gave a fairly lengthy speech, setting the record straight on the progress of the monument and delivering a eulogy on its architect, J. T. Rochead. Also, in a mild yet uncharacteristically political statement, Rogers made reference to the recently installed Scottish Office in calling the monument’s imperial crown ‘the watchtower of Dover House’.62
The last major event to be held at the National Wallace Monument in the nineteenth century sets the seal on the moderation of the Wallace myth it was intended to convey – the celebration of the 600th anniversary of the battle of Stirling Bridge, with Lord Rosebery as the principal speaker. Closely following the unionist-nationalist script, Rosebery was careful not to strike any Anglophobic chords, delivering a speech replete with all the necessary unionist-nationalist tropes concerning Wallace’s place in the formation of a secure and contented Union and a prosperous Empire.63 The moderate cultural unionist-nationalism that had defined the Wallace Monument practically since its inception continued to provide the significance for both hero and monument that its custodians aimed to project. It is interesting to note that, despite the controversies surrounding the monument’s birth and early development, by this stage of its life the archetypal unionist-nationalist reading of Wallace appears to have made itself acceptable beyond Scotland; whereas in 1856 The Times had accused the Scots of provincialism, forty-one years later, in commenting on Rosebery’s speech, it celebrated the ‘deep and lasting impression’ that Wallace had made upon the Empire:
The conflict which WALLACE began, and which was continued through generations, was the seed-time of qualities and tendencies that the Empire could ill spare. We can all heartily unite in commemorating the work that, in the slow ripening of centuries, has produced a noble harvest of intellectual force, high moral aims, and steadiness of character and purpose.64
The Times was not alone in endorsing the commemoration of Stirling Bridge and its heroic victor, the Telegraph stating that Englishmen and Scotsmen should join together in celebrating the ‘shared advantages’ and ‘yeoman service’ that the national independence of Scotland had brought to the Union and the British Empire, while the Standard praised the beautiful surroundings of the monument and called Wallace a man of the people.65 Yet, just as the unionist-nationalist projection of Wallace appears to have gained acceptance by a formerly disapproving English press, the Burns view of Wallace’s legacy was alive and well, albeit at a short remove from his monument. On the same day as Rosebery’s speech, the Scottish Home Rule Association held its own commemoration of the battle of Stirling Bridge, where, alongside the familiar idea of Wallace as having rendered Scotland a nation of ‘free-born men and women’, Charles Waddie, the Association’s secretary, failed to see any modern Wallaces amongst the representatives of Scotland at Westminster, saying:
It was in a different spirit that Scotland maintained her independence. If this generation of Scotsmen are not prepared to do the same, let them abstain from celebrating the battles of Stirling Bridge and Bannockburn.66
By 1897, the SHRA was no longer enjoying the kind of support it had formerly attracted, and press reaction to its gathering was fairly critical. Still, Waddie’s and the SHRA’s sentiments resonate with the interpretation of Wallace preferred by the radical nationalists of the Wallace Monument committee, viewing any of the current generation of Scots who were not willing to spend Wallace’s legacy in the correct way – in defence of Scotland’s rights in an unequal union with England – as akin to those nobles who had failed to stand up for Scotland in the late thirteenth century. Crucially, however, this message was not expressed at the Wallace Monument but at a separate event held on the supposed site of the battle – control of the messages transmitted by the National Wallace Monument remained firmly within the grasp of moderate unionist-nationalism and a rhetoric kept clear of any anti-Union sentiment or Anglophobia.
Scottish cultural unionist-nationalism, while participating in the discourses and practices of European cultural nationalism through the deployment of national heroes and the inauguration of national monuments in their name, emphasised the commitment of Victorian Scots to both the constitution of Great Britain and the distinct national character and virtue of the Scottish nation. For these Scots, William Wallace was a hero of truly international significance, representing the essential ideals of personal and national liberty, able to keep company with the greatest of great men from the histories of all nations. So, too, the Wallace Monument, with its national architecture and Hall of Heroes, represented a significant landmark in the emerging tradition of national monumentation. Yet the intended meaning of that monument was contested from the very beginning by two brands of nationalism, each determined to control the meaning of the monument. Despite the efforts of those in possession of what was generally viewed as a nationalism too far, one that stressed the frittering away of Wallace’s legacy of national and personal liberty, for the majority of its public life the National Wallace Monument remained firmly under the control of a moderate unionist-nationalism that saw the patriot-hero as having left Scotland a legacy of independence, allowing the nation to participate in the Union as an equal with England. The National Wallace Monument was the centre for a cultural nationalism that, rather than acting as an inadequate substitute for political nationalism, stressed Wallace’s role in ensuring that a peaceful union with England rendered such efforts unnecessary.
Still the paradox remains. Although, as the nineteenth century drew to a close, the unionist-nationalist interpretation of Wallace was still ringing around its walls, it was nevertheless the more nationalistically radical deployment of the Wallace myth that was to attain ascendancy. As the politico-cultural milieu around the monument shifted, particularly as the appeal of Scottish political-nationalism broadened, the image of Wallace became increasingly associated with profound constitutional change, even divorce. Cultural operators such as Charles Rogers may have struggled to retain control of the meaning of their monument, to transmit their intentions to future generations, yet it is the interpretation of the viewer – the tourist, the passing motorist, the nationalist pilgrim – that decides what the symbol means.