12
Richard J. Finlay
Whatever was valuable in the kingdom was seized upon by its oppressors; even the cause of female virtue was not held sacred under their unhallowed domination; and in short, the whole country was laid under a military despotism of the most unqualified and irresponsible kind. It was at this dark hour of Scotland’s history, when the cry of an oppressed people ascended to heaven, and the liberty for which they had so long struggled seemed to have departed forever from them, that Sir William Wallace arose to avenge the wrongs and restore the rights of his country . . . in less than six months from the death of her great champion, Scotland, roused to the cause now sealed and made holy by her patriot’s blood, shook off the yoke of England, and became once more a free kingdom.
(A Biographical Dictionary of Eminent Scotsmen, ed. Thomas Thomson, 1870)
Contestés par les desseins ambitieux de Souverains anglais, les libertés et les droits nationaux de la nation écossaise furent, après longue guerre dévastatrice et sanglante, maintenus avec succès à la celebre bataille de Bannockburn, évènement après lequel l’Angleterre renonça définitivement, par un traité, à ses prétentions d’excercer une supériorité féodale sur l’Ecosse.
(Petition Nationale de l’Ecosse pour obtenir sa Representation au Congres de la Paix, 1919)
The case of Wallace is different; he was not a baron, but an outlawed guerrilla leader, skilful and daring, but ruthless in his conduct. He adhered to no rules of chivalry, but waged total war against man, woman, and child. It was as a leader of sedition that he was formidable, but it was cold-blooded murder and incendiarism, which led him to the scaffold after his capture. Had his offences been merely political he would have found the same mercy that Edward’s other opponents never sought in vain; but Wallace was not the romantic hero of later legend, but a leader of well-organized criminals in an assault upon society. For 300 years the Borders suffered cruelly for this one man’s misdeeds, and it is strange that the Scots, who were the great sufferers, should have so long idealized their destroyer.
(John Harvey, The Plantagenets, London, 1959, 1967 edn, 121)
At the end of the screening of Braveheart, audiences throughout Scotland burst into spontaneous applause. In spite of the film’s evident popularity, the critical response was less welcoming.1 Braveheart was denounced for its historical inaccuracy, its anti-English sentiment, its right-wing ideological connotations and its overbearing machismo. Hollywood’s treatment of Scottish history was likened to a ‘western in kilts’. Not everybody was so negative. The Scottish National Party (SNP) believed the film would act as an ideal recruiting tool, and the nationalist leader, Alex Salmond, urged Scots to be ‘Bravehearts not Fainthearts’. Undoubtedly, much of the hostility to the film was motivated by the belief that it manipulated Scottish sentiment straight into the hands of the nationalist camp and, worse still, it encouraged the growth of Anglophobia. Yet, the popularity in Scotland of Braveheart raised other deeper issues regarding the relationship of the Scots to their culture and history. Why was it, many asked, that most Scots had their introduction to one of the pivotal characters in Scottish history via Hollywood?2 The issue raised further questions as to the place of Scottish history in the school curriculum, and a gaffe by the newly opened Museum of Scotland that excluded Wallace on account of a lack of ‘material artefacts’ fuelled suspicions of Unionist interference in the presentation of Scotland’s past.3 Unconsciously or not, all assumed that Wallace was a thirteenth-century warrior for Scottish independence whose relevance to contemporary society was to act as a spur to nationalism, hence the contrast between the SNP’s unquestioning approval of Braveheart and the marked ambiguity of the Unionist parties. Yet, such a stark representation of Wallace as the total embodiment of Scottish nationalism was not the case in the nineteenth century, nor was it true for a good part of the twentieth century either. It is the aim of this chapter to examine why it was that the story of Wallace came to be most associated with the nationalist movement in the twentieth century and how, as a consequence, Wallace was marginalised to such an extent that the Braveheart phenomenon could take Scotland by storm in the early nineties.
All nations need heroes, and political ideologies like to claim exclusive ownership of such heroes as a means of reinforcing their claims to represent the true ‘national’ interest.4 It is a way of shoring up the political legitimacy of a particular ideology by making the claim that, if such heroes were alive today, they would be supporters of that particular ideology. William Tell and Joan of Arc are two excellent cases of national saviours whose stories have been modified to accommodate historical change. The canonisation of Joan in 1920 was indicative of an endeavour to claim the martyr of France back to the Catholic right and away from the secular republic.5 Even the Soviet Union was forced to turn to the bourgeois Russian past during the Second World War and dust off the heroic tale of Alexander Nevsky, the Slav king who defeated the Vikings for Mother Russia. It was perhaps no coincidence that the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union was named Barbarossa, after King Frederick I who invaded the Russias, and among the Nazi elite Heinrich Himmler created a cult of Heinrich I, not to mention Hitler’s obsession with Wagnerian myth. Even the story of Sir Francis Drake underwent a revival during the Second World War as the English nation needed to remind itself of a hero who had stood up to a powerful invasion armada, and won. It is not rare for societies to reinterpret their past and their heroes to suit the specific exigencies of the present. Throughout the nineteenth century, Sir William Wallace belonged to the pantheon of national heroes who were regularly recruited for the promotion of the nation-state. Mazzini, Garibaldi and Kossuth all paid tribute to Wallace’s qualities as a defender of national freedom, and he was cited as an inspiration for contemporary nineteenth-century nationalist movements.6 Even before the advent of Braveheart, Wallace had attracted a significant following in the United States of America where the tale of a fight for independence from a tyrannical English monarch by a man of the people had obvious resonances with the history of that republic.7 In spite of the worldwide appeal of Wallace in the nineteenth century, the ‘Great Liberator’ found it difficult not only to hold on to his international status but also faced increasing marginalisation at home in the period after the First World War. In order to explain this development, it is necessary to examine how the cult of William Wallace was used by Scottish political movements to bolster and add credibility to their respective ideologies. Historical icons are invariably subject to competing claims of ownership from different political movements as a means of conferring legitimacy on particular interpretations of tradition. By appealing to ‘tradition’, it is possible for political movements to present themselves as upholding values and beliefs that have had longevity in society and, consequently, claim themselves to be the natural heirs of such traditions.
William Wallace was an ideal icon for nineteenth-century Scottish liberalism. This was a man of the people who rose to a position of eminence in spite of the perfidy of the aristocracy.8 According to one popular historian, John MacIntosh, ‘Wallace belonged to the lower class of Scotch nobles [and] kindled in the heart of the nation an unquenchable spirit of resistance to oppression’.9 Indeed, it is possible to argue that Wallace was a medieval lad o’ pairts. He was held up as an emblem of a meritocratic, individualistic Scotland that chimed in well with notions of laissez faire, hence the frequently cited motto ‘Liberty and Freedom’, which tended to emblazon his statues. The historical consensus regarding Wallace that emerged during the nineteenth century was that he inspired the national awakening of Scotland. His refusal to submit to English domination at his trial, in which he claimed he could not be a traitor to Edward I because he had never owed him allegiance in the first place, demonstrated an unequivocal commitment to the national cause. This set the template for Bruce’s campaign, and the victory at Bannockburn was frequently represented as the culmination of the national effort that Wallace had instigated. Scotland’s successful defence of liberty in the fourteenth century meant that union would not come through conquest. According to Thomas Carlyle, ‘A heroic Wallace, quartered on the scaffold, cannot hinder that his Scotland become, one day, a part of England; but he does hinder that it become on tyrannous unfair terms part of it. . . . If the Union with England be in fact one of Scotland’s chief blessings, we thank Wallace that it was not its chief curse.’10
Without Wallace there could have been no independent Scotland. Wallace was necessary to build up the Scottish character and identity that would find its historic destiny in the Anglo-Scottish Union. While it was argued that Wallace paved the way for Scotland to grow to maturity in time to capitalise on the Union of 1707 and that at heart he was the embodiment of the Scottish meritocratic culture, most Scots venerated him because he was, without question, a national hero. That in itself was enough.
One intriguing issue is the question of why Wallace was abandoned by the political right after 1918. After all, he was the stuff of right-wing ideology, and certainly the example of contemporary Europe showed that the right was especially adroit when it came to enlisting the support of the national canon of heroes. Furthermore, as the nineteenth century demonstrated, there was no difficulty in casting Wallace as a national hero within a Unionist reading of history. Part of the explanation may lie in the fact that the right in Scotland had been so dominated by the issue of union with Ireland that anything that smacked of nationalism was jettisoned. This was especially the case after the Anglo-Irish War, or the Irish War of Independence. The figure of Wallace was further isolated on the right by the work of a number of Tory historians who downplayed the significance of the Wars of Independence. As Graeme Morton has pointed out, Unionists could use the Anglo-Scottish Wars of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries as a means to make the case that the victory of Scottish independence paved the way for a union of two equals in the eighteenth century rather than an absorption of Scotland into a greater England in the fourteenth century. As such, the maintenance of Scottish freedom would pay dividends when union came about later.
Not all Unionists agreed with this line of thinking, however. The Tory MP for Wigtonshire, Sir Herbert Maxwell, faced opprobrium from his Scottish colleagues in the House of Commons when he dared to suggest that the Scottish victory at Bannockburn had not necessarily been a good thing because it meant centuries of Anglo-Scottish conflict. An English victory, on the other hand, would have brought union centuries earlier.11 Sir Henry Craik and John Colville were other Scottish Unionists who subscribed to the idea of an earlier union as a missed opportunity in Scottish history.12 The extent to which the Anglo-Scottish wars were a source of contention in Scottish historical thinking in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been one that has been downplayed in recent discussions of Scottish historiography.13 If there were Tory heroes in Scottish history, they increasingly became the Jacobites and the ideal of the loyal clans. The inherent militarism and unthinking obedience associated with Jacobitism had a strong appeal to Unionists.
In the period after the First World War, the Unionists abandoned Wallace to the left and the nationalists. Even with the resurgence of interest in Wallace occasioned by the release of Mel Gibson’s Braveheart, Scottish Tories struggled to make any capital out of him. This was in spite of the fact that the Lega Norda in Italy and the anti-state right in the United States used Wallace as an icon. Right-wingers all over the world had no problem in seizing the potential qualities of the Great Liberator; only those in his homeland resolutely refused to engage with the myth. The lack of utilisation of the Wallace cult by the Scottish right was one of the great missed opportunities of Scottish political history in the twentieth century. After all, he was the ideal man of action, the touchstone of individualism and meritocracy, and, a real favourite among Tories, a great military leader. As the Duke of Atholl put it:
Deep humiliation at the hands of Edward I in the time of Balliol, and years of adversity, brought forth Sir William Wallace, and even to-day no song (though written many years later) moves the hearts of Scotsmen more than ‘Scots wha hae’. Until that date the courage of the Scots had been squandered in deeds of personal valour, and his loyalty had been misdirected into narrower channels. From that date the magnetic force of Wallace’s example, his loyalty to his country, his personal courage, and his ghastly death stirred the people as they had never been stirred before, and imbued the body politic with a national soul.14
Perhaps the ambiguities in the Tory relationship with William Wallace can be illustrated by reference to John Buchan. In spite of the obvious dramatic material associated with the Wallace myth, Buchan chose Montrose, probably because of the association with loyalty to the British crown by his Scottish hero: ‘I found the Whig historians had dismissed him as at best a bandit of genius, and had beatified the theocrats who opposed him. . . . I came to the conclusion that he was the most balanced and prescient mind in Scotland at the time, as well as the greatest of Scottish soldiers.’15 The reason why the Unionists abandoned Wallace after the First World War is to be found in the crisis of confidence engendered by the profound social and economic problems experienced during the inter-war period.
Confident pre-war Unionism gave way to one that was dominated by pessimism. The old cliché that the Scots ran the Empire and punched above their weight in the partnership with England gave way to one that stressed Scottish dependency on a more powerful southern neighbour.16 Effectively, this invalidated the previous notion that Wallace was the initiator of the Wars of Independence that kept Scotland free until it had reached the historical maturity necessary for the 1707 Union of equals. Although much of the negativity emanating from Unionism was driven by economic arguments, it inevitably spilled over into the cultural arena and affected how Scots perceived their history. Indeed, a number of historians actively set out to reverse such pessimistic views of the past, driven, it ought to be remembered, by the need to counteract the belief that prior to 1707 the Scots did not have a history worth celebrating.17 Furthermore, Unionism was dead set against nationalism and the prospect of Scottish home rule; and the fact that nationalists and socialists were using the legacy of Wallace further distanced Tory association with the Wars of Independence. Home-rulers hit back at the fact that the Scottish establishment issued a declaration against nationalism in 1932 by referring to it as the ‘Ragman’s Roll’: a sardonic reference to the declaration of loyalty by the Scottish aristocracy to Edward I.18
The period after the Second World War, likewise, witnessed no serious engagement by the Unionists with the cult of Wallace. Paradoxically, as the party modernised its social composition in the inter-war period by attracting more middle-class businessmen, the post-war period witnessed an aristocraticisation of the party to a greater extent than south of the border. By such time, the idea of Wallace as a man of the people was unlikely to cut much ice within a party that was not only increasingly aristocratic but also largely English-educated.19 Yet, the potential of Wallace as an icon of the right is revealed by the activities of the shadowy 1320 Club, an extreme nationalist association among whose adherents was Nicholas Fairbairn, the future Conservative MP for Perth and Kinross.20A key argument put forward by Scottish Tories in the late sixties and early seventies in opposition to the rise of the SNP was the claim that nationalism could lead to Anglo-Scottish conflict and that the Union had brought all this to an end. A frequently cited term of derision was the expression ‘latter-day William Wallaces who want to turn the clock back to the bad old days’. The Tory view of the pre-Union Scottish past was one that tended to revolve exclusively around anti-English sentiment and, as such, could offer no useful pointers for the future.21 Even when the Scottish Tories, somewhat belatedly, came to accept the legitimacy of Scottish national sentiment within the context of a Unionist settlement, Scotland’s great national leader could find no place within Tory hearts. Ian Lang, a former Scottish Secretary of State, argued that Bannockburn and Robert the Bruce were more significant than Wallace on the grounds that Bruce was a winner and Wallace was a loser. Lang went on to bemoan the fact that, when it came to history, the Scots seemed to prefer glorious defeat to victory.22 Yet, more than anything, Tory ambiguity over Wallace followed from the fact that Unionism during the twentieth century had a blind spot with regard to Scottish history and had effectively abandoned the notion that the Scots took anything of advantage from their history to the Union with England in 1707. It is almost true to say that, in the race to capture the iconic status of Wallace for political purposes, the Conservatives were non-starters.
Both the left and the nationalists used Wallace in the twenties and, for the most part, neither believed it to be a question of exclusive ownership. Until the Labour Party began to have second thoughts over its championship of home rule in the latter part of the decade, nationalism and the left had had a fairly symbiotic relationship. In part, this can be explained by the inheritance of the radical tradition where home rule was part and parcel of a Scottish political culture that also included other Liberal staples such as land reform, temperance and the like. As with other Liberal icons, such as Robert Burns, Wallace was absorbed into a new pantheon of the left. Wallace was ‘The great Scottish patriot and lover of liberty who played a very important role in bursting the chains of feudalism and paved the way for the democratic principle in government’.23 Thomas Johnston, arguably Scotland’s most important Labour leader of the first half of the twentieth century, used Wallace as an emblem of the nation’s supposed democratic and egalitarian ethos. Wallace was recast as a proletarian leader who sought to break the shackles of feudalism. The battle of Bannockburn, Johnston claimed, was won by the Scottish working class, but it was in vain because Bruce, as his previous machinations proved, was a self-seeking member of the aristocracy:
If at bottom Wallace’s revolt was not a last effort to cast off feudalism from Scotland, why did the Scoto-Norman nobles hate him so? It could scarcely have been that they esteemed themselves more ‘highly born’ than he, for well they knew, most of them, that they were but one or two removes from nondescript barbarism. Yet, that they did hate him is undoubted, and even the two possibly genuine nationalists and English haters among them, Sir Wm. Douglas and Bishop Wishart of Glasgow, ran in haste to meet the English general, Warenne, with the assurance that ‘they were no party to the rising of William Wallace’. And when, after success had come failure, was Wallace not deserted ‘by all men who had property at stake’? In truth, the ‘good king Robert’ of our schoolbooks played a most despicable, vacillating, and traitorous part in the by no means clearly defined drama of the times.24
Johnston was echoing an increasingly Marxist account of Scottish history that had been promoted in some socialist circles before the First World War. There was opposition to the celebration of the battle of Bannockburn by socialists on school boards who challenged the conventional accounts of Bruce in school textbooks, and John Maclean argued that the battle of 1314 was one fought by serfs for the benefit of a few barons.25 Labour support for home rule in the early twenties conditioned a promotion of Wallace as a nationalist proletarian hero that was shorn of the difficulties of venerating a feudal magnate in the shape of the Bruce. In the inter-war period other Labour MPs reiterated the view of Wallace as the unambiguous leader of the common folk of Scotland. Speaking during a debate on education in the House of Commons in 1936, James Barr said:
Why should we speak of William Wallace? I would have every text-book tell of the indictment of Wallace, when he was tried in Westminster Hall on 23 August, 1305. It is no legend that his head was fixed on London Bridge. But I would not have these things taught to bring any animus against England. I would rather have the teacher show that when you behead a man you turn him into a patriot, and you weld his nation together, as was done in that case. The character of Robert the Bruce is a little more dubious in some ways.26
Indeed, Barr was known to stop at the tablet in Westminster Hall where the trial of Wallace is supposed to have taken place and ask the Scots to kneel and do homage to Scotland’s greatest patriot. On his election as the first SNP Member of Parliament, Robert McIntyre described Westminster as the place where ‘they judiciously murdered William Wallace’.
The link with home rule was the most important feature of the veneration of Wallace among members of the Labour Party. In 1924, the Scottish Home Rule Association (SHRA), an organisation dominated by the Labour Party and the Scottish Trades Union Congress, made the anniversary of Wallace’s death its most important date in the calendar and gathered at Elderslie to celebrate his life.27 Among the many speakers who turned out at the annual event were Thomas Johnston, William Adamson (the first Labour Scottish Secretary) and the veteran socialist campaigner R. B. Cunninghame Graham. During the demonstration, the same annual resolution was read out:
This meeting of the Scottish people – assembled here at Elderslie, the birthplace of Sir William Wallace, Scotland’s greatest fighter for national freedom, to commemorate his martyrdom on this . . . Anniversary – pledges itself individually and collectively, to work steadily for National Self-government, until the Scottish people regain full control of their own affairs.28
The early Scottish Home Rule demonstrations at Elderslie were fairly anodyne, with most of the day taken up with demonstrations of country dancing, marching pipe bands and choral music, with only a couple of speeches by political figures, most of whom paid tribute to the memory of Wallace but usually in a fairly uncontroversial way. As the Scottish Home Rule Association began to splinter between Labour loyalists and those who demanded a more aggressive policy, the figure of Wallace was increasingly used by those of a more nationalist persuasion. The growing moderation of Labour, together with its increasing equivocation on home rule, meant that the figure of Wallace, quite an uncompromising one, could no longer be safely endorsed. Also, the intellectual drift within the party was one that emphasised centralised economic planning focused on the present.29 Furthermore, the growth of fascism and nationalism in mainland Europe meant that such associations at home should be denounced on account of their bourgeois sensibilities.30Almost by default, the icon of Wallace fell into the hands of the nationalists, dropped by an increasingly timid and centrist Labour Party.
The nationalists had no such ambiguity regarding Wallace. He featured in the early propaganda and literature of the National Party of Scotland (NPS), which was formed in 1928. Also, the NPS took over the Elderslie demonstrations, and these became increasingly politicised as the spirit of Wallace was enthusiastically enlisted for the nationalist cause. At the North Midlothian by-election in February 1929, Lewis Spence, the nationalist candidate, used a poster designed by Wendy Wood, featuring the candidate standing beside the ghost of Wallace with the words ‘To the English Parties! Go back to your English masters and tell them we are not here to treat but to FIGHT FOR THE FREEDOM OF SCOTLAND’. Unfortunately, the poster misattributed the words to Wallace before the battle of Falkirk, not Stirling Bridge.31 The June gathering to celebrate the victory at Bannockburn was the most important event in the nationalist calendar, but due deference was paid to Wallace. The Bannockburn demonstration was baptised ‘Scotland’s Day’ and did not commemorate the battle as Bruce’s achievement but rather sought to represent it as a combined national effort. In June 1930, the NPS issued a ‘New Covenant’ to outline the party’s objectives. According to R. B. Cunninghame Graham, arguably the NPS’s star speaker:
We Scottish nationalists are in one thing more fortunate than the Nationalists of other countries. We have for our very own the patriot who has inspired all their movement for Liberty. The real liberator of Scotland was not Bruce. Scottish liberty was not won at Bannockburn. The real liberator was Wallace twenty years earlier, because he liberated the minds of the people from the acceptance of superior force. He liberated them from the alien feudal system in which a succession of Anglicised monarchs had tried to enmesh them. We are the heirs of Wallace. The fight that we are fighting is the same fight that Wallace fought – the fight against the domination from Westminster, even though Scottish representatives were to sit there. Have we too, not to seek to liberate the minds of our fellow-countrymen, aye, and our own minds, from the effects of Anglicised education? For 300 years – because the trouble stems from the Union of the Crowns, when we lost control of our foreign policy, when it went with the king to London.32
By 1931, the NPS had added a demonstration in August at the Wallace statue at Robroyston on the Saturday nearest the anniversary of ‘the base betrayal of Scotland’s national hero’.33 The NPS used Wallace to promote key political messages and, as such, adapted the Wallace story for its own political ends. The relatively moderate and anodyne Wallace who was a feature of the Labour Party and the Home Rule Association was replaced by one who was altogether much more uncompromising in his quest for independence.
A reprint of an article that first appeared in Scottish Home Rule was worked over for inclusion in the Scots Independent and had the following paragraph inserted:
1. Wallace was a Nationalist Extremist
There were many half-hearted and fair-weather nationalists in the Scotland of his day, men professing loyalty to the Nationalist cause but ready to desert it in the hour of danger or some poor temptation. Wallace was uncompromising, not afraid of being called extremist, as he doubtless often was. He was for the complete independence of his country and never in the slightest degree trimmed his faith or weakened his purpose. So be it with us. The charge of extremism need not dismay us. It is a tribute of our consistency and courage and vision as it was in the case of Wallace. There are always plenty of men to advise what they call moderation, but moderation is often a moral betrayal of the spiritual vision.34
Along with other choice insertions, what the article demonstrates is the way in which the story of Wallace was radicalised in order to suit the political interests of the nationalists. Moderates and waverers were denounced as weak-willed, and the establishment of the day was described as self-serving and venial. The message was clear: that the Scottish enemies of Wallace were the same type of people as the enemies of the NPS. The National Party was predominantly made up of former Labour home-rulers and nationalists of a fundamentalist persuasion who were strongly influenced by the example of Irish nationalism and the ideas of pan-Celticism. Leftist and racialist ideas were combined in their reading of the Scottish past. The theme of betrayal was a favourite one in their reading of history:
The nobility and gentry were fickle and unreliable, ready to make terms to save their estates and material interests. At Irvine only Sir Andrew Moray of the leading men stood by Wallace; all the rest deserted him. It was the same in 1707; Scotland was betrayed by the titled ones, and Andrew Fletcher carried on the work of Wallace. To-day it is just the same. The great ones stand aloof, because of economic entanglements with England or merely commercial considerations too narrowly regarded.35
The comparison of the betrayal of Wallace and the Union of 1707 was a common theme for speakers at Elderslie. R. B. Cunninghame Graham claimed that Elderslie symbolised ‘the death of Wallace and the awaking of Scotland to the realisation that she is a separate entity, a separate nation. Fraud and cowardice brought about the Union of 1707’.36 The Union was represented as a betrayal of the work of Wallace: the same factors that had led to Wallace’s betrayal were at work in the nation during the Union negotiations. Furthermore, this group of people in Scottish society was still active, and it was the ‘establishment’ who were the leading opponents of nationalism as epitomised by the ‘Ragman’s Roll’. The fact that Scotland’s leading aristocrats, nobles and members of the elite had signed a declaration opposing Scottish nationalism was an ideal propaganda weapon for the NPS, who were keen on drawing historic parallels with the time of Wallace. In this way the NPS constructed a view of Scottish history in which the same self-serving aristocrats who put personal gain above national interest undermined the template of Wallace’s achievement. In short, to undo the Union of 1707 would be to finish the work of Wallace.
Reflecting a wider debate within nationalist circles, racial notions filtered into the debate regarding Wallace. For one scholar, the racial and ethnic divisions of Scotland were a factor in inhibiting the development of a coherent nationalist movement in the sense that the Scots were divided between Teutons and Celts. Not surprisingly, given that the example of Ireland loomed large in nationalist discourse, with many believing that a racial dimension was a critical factor in Scottish nationalism, efforts were made to Celticise Wallace. This was especially the case among left-wing Celtic nationalists in the early twenties:
The community will be the ruling power and on the sane and stable foundations of Celtic culture and Celtic communism, from which Wallace drew his inspiration, we who share his convictions and speak his tongue, will use both to work out freedom for our beloved land.37
According to H. C. MacNeacail: ‘His name shows his Celtic descent. . . . From a passage in “Blind Hary”, we may probably infer that Wallace spoke the Celtic tongue then still living in Strathclyde, and from another we know that he wore the Celtic dress.’38Celtic nationalists sought to de-Saxonise Wallace, although there is little evidence that racial notions had much impact in the creation of Wallace as a nationalist icon, with most accepting that Scottish ideas of nationalism outweighed the racial combination of the Scots. Indeed, part of Wallace’s achievement was the promotion of the idea of a nationalism that could overcome ethnic and racial differences. In a BBC broadcast on 5 November 1929, Compton MacKenzie railed against the division of Scotland into Teutonic and Celtic parts:
Circumstance and climate may have fostered the development of the two types we recognise as Highlander and Lowlander, but racially the stock is the same. The blood of the Norseman has blended with the Gael and the Pict, even in the outermost islands of the west and that blend modified and preserved by climate and conditions has produced as obstinately characteristic a strain as any in Europe.39
Yet, for MacNeacail and some others who wanted to promote the notion of a Celtic Scotland, Wallace could be brought into a Celtic pantheon of heroes who fought Teutonic imperialism:
With his statesman’s vision, he may have also seen the baleful effects of the spread of the Teutonic language in Scotland, and, if he had lived, he might have done much to restore his native Celtic speech to its rightful place in the lowlands. . . . England, the enemy of all the small nationalities in her path, the enemy of Wales and Ireland as well as Scotland, saw to that. She sent Wallace off to a shameful death before his work was finished. England has oftimes slain, and even murdered, the patriots. We think not only of Wallace, but also of Llywelyn and Owain Lawgoch, of Aedh Ruadh and Padriac MacPiarais, of Jeanne M’Arc and many another.40
The image of a kilt-wearing Wallace was not just a latter-day invention by the film Braveheart. The youth wing of the NPS, Clan Scotland, even went so far as to claim that Wallace wore the kilt and that it was the insults of the anglicised nobility when he adopted feudal costume that drove him to fury and back to traditional Celtic garb.41 Yet, the most important Celtic comparison was that with the Irish myths that had acted as such a font of inspiration for Sinn Fein:
As Cuchulain, single-handed, defended the marches of ancient Uladh, so Wallace, also almost single-handed at times, defended his native land. As in the case of the great epic hero just mentioned, it might have been said that the tales of his high deeds shall be told forever, but he shall be short-lived and fleeting. As with Cuchulain, so with Wallace, a prophet might have foretold that ‘the men of Eire and Alba shall hear that name and the mouths of the men of Eire and Alba shall be full of that name’.42
Too much should not be read into this, however. The most frequent assertion made regarding Wallace’s racial origins was that he was of a mixed background, as was the case with most Scots. William Power, a frequent speaker at Wallace Day demonstrations, denounced endeavours to divide the Scots on the basis of racial characteristics. Indeed, the nationalists made continuous efforts to disregard racial notions and used, after Andrew Lang, the idea of the nation as the most important component in their construction of Wallace’s nationalism. This trend was further confirmed by the publication of Evan Barron’s Scottish War of Independence in 1934, which put forward the argument that Scottish nationalism in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries embraced both the Highlands and Lowlands. The fact that Barron was both a Unionist and a Highlander helped his case in the sense that, as a Gael, he did not try to Celticise the whole of the nation and, as a Unionist, he applauded the partnership of Celt and Teuton.
The leftist radicalism of the NPS was also reflected in the Wallace demonstrations. As has been discussed, the motif of aristocratic treachery was one that not only served as a warning against the dangers of anglicisation but also had undertones of class conflict. This was especially prominent among those who had been former members of the Labour Party and still maintained their socialist credentials. R. B. Cunninghame Graham used his Spanish connections to enlist the support of the Spanish ambassador of the newly created republic at the Elderslie demonstration in 1933. The image of Wallace was closely related to the internal politics of the nationalist movement, and the pro-left and hardline independence stance of the early NPS was reflected in the veneration of the Great Liberator. Moderate nationalism began to assert itself in the leadership of the NPS in the early thirties, largely in response to the emergence of the pro-devolutionist and right-wing Scottish Party in 1932.43 Moderates in the NPS believed that fundamentalists within the party were putting off the electorate, making a merger with the Scottish Party more difficult. In response, the leadership began a series of purges designed to rid the party of its wilder elements. When the two organisations merged in 1934 to form the Scottish National Party (SNP), moderates were in charge, with official policy on independence watered down to a form of devolution.
Obviously, such a change in political direction had consequences for the image of Wallace within nationalist circles. Could the uncompromising defender of Scottish liberty be recast as a devolutionist? The Elderslie and Robroyston demonstrations continued and still attracted those of a more fundamentalist persuasion, but the coverage given to the Wallace demonstrations dried up in the pages of the party’s newspaper, the Scots Independent. No mention of the event occurred after the formation of the SNP in 1934. Much of the criticism of the nationalist movement – that it was Anglophobic and backward-looking – had stung, and increasingly the party sought to escape from its ‘1314 and all that’ image. A drive to present the party as moderate and forward-looking resulted in a focus directed more at contemporary Scotland than at past history. Indeed, an emphasis on the present has been one of the abiding characteristics of the SNP up to the present day, in contrast to other nationalist movements. The anachronistic aspect of Wallace and his association with nationalism was captured by two of Scotland’s leading leftist writers, Edwin Muir and Lewis Grassic Gibbon (James Leslie Mitchell). In Gray Granite, Gibbon puts forward a conventional leftist line of thinking on the nationalist movement:
Chris minded back to her days in Segget and said that nationalism was just another plan to do down the common-folk. Only this time twas to be done in kilts and hose, with bagpipes playing and a blether about Wallace, the English to be chased over the border and the Scots to live on brose and baps.44
A case can be made that there was an increasing association between nationalism and Wallace in Gibbon’s mind from the fact that in one of the previous novels of the trilogy, Sunset Song, Wallace is mentioned without comment. Yet, writing in 1935, Gibbon still regarded the victory of Bruce as the victory of a ‘shoddy, noble adventurer’ and one who brought no benefit to the ordinary Scottish people.45 Muir linked the veneration of Wallace with the insipid Anglophobia of Scottish society. He recounted the story of an old Glaswegian carter who became more morose the more he drank until he slapped his hand on the table and roared ‘Wallace; the hero of Scotland. . . . D’ye ken what the English did to him, the dirty bastards. Libbed him.’46 Although both Muir and Gibbon cast the Reformation as the villain of Scottish history and idealise pre-industrial medieval society, they stop short of support for the Wars of Independence.47
Most nationalist commentaries that dealt with history now began their analyses at 1707. Furthermore, as the decade of the thirties progressed, the party began to disintegrate under a confusion of political strategies and objectives as fundamentalists staged a comeback.48 With the majority of nationalist critiques directed against the Union of 1707, Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun rose towards the top of the nationalist pantheon.49 Also, Robert the Competitor began to enjoy something of a comeback. Agnes Muir Mackenzie did much to restore the reputation of the king in the thirties, and in the post-war period the Ladybird history and Nigel Tranter put Bruce back at the centre of Scotland’s War of Independence in the popular mind. In scholarly terms, the publication of Geoffrey Barrow’s Robert Bruce in 1965 firmly cast the king as the deliverer of Scottish independence. The nationalists themselves did much to remove Wallace from centre stage. The party’s moderation, but also its eschewal of republicanism, meant that there was a greater case to be made for Bruce. In spite of shaky genealogy, it could be claimed that the current monarch was a direct descendent of Robert, and therefore the nationalists could still promote the cause of independence without disloyalty to the Crown, as was formally enshrined in the party’s constitution of 1946.50
During the Second World War the nationalist movement underwent a period of turmoil in which competing moderate and fundamentalist factions sought to establish control. In 1942, the moderates left and went on to form the genesis of what would become the Scottish National Covenant. Moderate nationalism was problematic for the SNP. The Covenant, although ultimately unsuccessful, demonstrated that there was a considerable residue of support for moderate nationalism. Furthermore, the period of the fifties was one in which support for the monarchy remained high, even though the ‘theft’ of the Stone of Destiny, the Coronation and Queen Elizabeth’s numeral caused offence at the casual indifference to Scotland’s royal history.51 The need to court moderate opinion, the general revulsion at extremist nationalism following the Second World War and the belief that it was best to make the case for independence in terms of contemporary social and economic criteria relegated Wallace in nationalist iconography. It may also be the case that as the SNP was not committed to the creation of a Scottish republic, Bruce, an ancestor of the royal family, began to creep back into favour. In terms of nationalist demonstrations, Bannockburn and the celebration of 1314 overshadowed the Elderslie demonstrations in the post-war era. Even at the time of the SNP’s electoral breakthrough in the late sixties and the early seventies, the party made little allusion to Wallace and instead focused on issues of a more contemporary nature, such as ‘It’s Scotland’s Oil’. The performance of Sydney Goodsir Smith’s The Wallace at the Edinburgh Festival in the late sixties further confirmed the widely held assumption that Wallace was firmly the intellectual property of nationalism, with audiences standing up to sing the Scottish national anthem, ‘Scots Wha Hae’, at the end of performances. The theft of the sword from the Wallace Monument in the seventies demonstrated that some nationalists still attached a great deal of significance to the Great Liberator, but the promotion of Bannockburn as a tourist site further deflected attention away from Wallace. Finally, the SNP’s flirtation with a more overt left-wing stance in the eighties and the existence of organisations such as Siol na Gael increased the association between Wallace and extreme nationalism: a position the party leadership endeavoured to reverse.
In addition to the relegation of Wallace in the ranks of the nationalist heroes, further trends within Scottish society in the latter part of the twentieth century contributed to the alienation of Wallace from the historical mainstream. The fact that Scottish history received scant attention in schools and universities did little to help. The intellectual construction of the case for home rule in the eighties was based on notions of civic society that stretched its historical comparison back to 1690 and excluded the Wars of Independence. When Braveheart was released, it coincided with a period of demand for constitutional change and a growing upsurge in Scottish history, as well as a Scottish cultural revival generally, but the position of Wallace had been marginalised in the story of the nation to such an extent that it exploded on popular consciousness in a way that few could have predicted. The increasing popularity of Wallace may also have been helped by the fact that, apart from having the stamp of approval from Hollywood in an increasingly globalised world culture, it also coincided with a period when royalism was firmly in retreat throughout the United Kingdom. As the symbolic power of the monarchy declined in the contemporary world, it can be argued, although not demonstrated empirically, so too did the appeal of monarchy diminish in the historical canon. Thus, in the 1990s, reflecting either a growing republican sentiment, a decline in support for the institution of monarchy, or a combination of the two, Wallace was increasingly seen by many Scots as a more appropriate national icon than Bruce for contemporary Scotland. The man of the people knocked King Robert off the top spot in nationalist iconography once again.52