9

The English Cult of Wallace and the Blending of Nineteenth-Century Britain

Colin Kidd

In today’s Scotland most invocations of the name of William Wallace are directed towards nationalist ends or, at the very least, towards unambiguously Scottish causes. As often as not, appeals to the national memory of Wallace and his achievements carry with them an anglophobic resonance. While Scots celebrate Wallace as a nationalist icon, they remember him quite specifically as an uncompromising foe of English imperial pretension. To their credit, Scottish historians have questioned the historical longevity of this nationalist pedigree. In particular, they have shown that, while for most of Scotland’s history, Scots have considered Wallace an emblem of national freedom, things were very different during the nineteenth century when Wallace became identified with a particular interpretation of the Union. ‘Unionist-nationalism’, in Graeme Morton’s catchy formulation, involved a strict construction of the Union – the notion that Scotland and England were equal partners in a common enterprise freely entered into by sovereign nations in 1707. Unionist-nationalists read into Scotland’s medieval War of Independence the lesson that England had never succeeded in conquering Scotland; amalgamation had come about centuries after the War of Independence only through negotiated union. Thus, commemorations of the deeds of Wallace and Bruce served as a reminder to an oblivious England that the Union was an association of sovereign equals. However, the nineteenth-century Scottish cult of Wallace, which led to the construction of various Wallace statues and towers, including the National Monument on the Abbey Craig, near Stirling, was predicated not only on denial that Scotland was a mere province of England but also on an acceptance by Scots of the Union of 1707. Wallace’s nationalist significance was sublimated in a deeper unionism. For mid-nineteenth-century unionistnationalists ultimately did nothing to challenge the legitimacy of the United Kingdom and a common British parliament.¹

‘Unionist-nationalism’, however, while an adequate description of some manifestations of the Wallace cult during the nineteenth century, does not quite capture the texture of Anglo-Scottish relations during this period, nor some of the more surprising features of the Wallace phenomenon. For example, Wallace’s name did not only serve to forward unionist-nationalist causes; Wallace was also pressed into the service of outright anglicisation. The Shade of Wallace is a poem that argues the Anglo-British case for importing into Scots law the English form of civil jury.² Rather than enlisting Wallace’s patronage in defence of Scots legal distinctiveness, as might be expected in this instance, the anonymous poet deploys Wallace, somewhat misleadingly, for the anglicisation of the Scottish legal system. The poet claims, however, that medieval Scotland, like her southern neighbour, had in fact enjoyed the benefits of civil jury as part of its Gothic constitution until James V introduced the illiberal Franco-Roman College of Justice:

Juries, that shall with truth decide,

Will o’er the Tweed in triumph glide,

Transmitted down, Old England’s pride,

From Saxon times,

Across the mountains stride

To Northern climes.

Shall not a wise judicious race

This glorious privilege embrace

That once did Caledonia grace

Shone bright as moon

Till James the Fifth did quite deface

The heavenly boon.³

In this instance the cause of anglicisation involved a restoration of traditional medieval rights that Scotland had lost but that had been preserved in England.⁴ The association of Wallace’s name with the campaign for a civil jury was, if surprising and apparently ironic, far from preposterous.

Similarly, and on a much larger scale, the association of Wallace with the Union also had an obverse English dimension. Politically, there was a growing English identification with Scotland as an increasingly trusted and reliable partner in the Union. This was mirrored in cultural developments. From around the end of the eighteenth century, English poets, novelists and historians began to take a sympathetic interest in the history and literature of Scotland. One curious aspect of this phenomenon was the emergence of Wallace as a genuinely pan-British icon of liberty. Nineteenth-century England – on a lesser scale, of course – would enjoy its own unionist cult of Wallace.

This apparently eccentric phenomenon becomes more readily comprehensible when aligned with current thinking about the nature of nineteenth-century British identities. British patriotism of this era involved pride in a family of sister kingdoms and encouraged expressions of sisterly sentiment and sympathy. As a result, the nineteenth century witnessed reciprocal explorations of English and Scottish nationality from both sides of the border, conducted in a spirit of mutual understanding and sympathy. In particular, Keith Robbins has argued that the bonds of British society were strengthened during the nineteenth century not by a straightforward process of anglicisation or of assimilation to a dominant English norm; rather, he suggests, there was a ‘blending of Britain’. ‘Scotland and Wales were not absorbed by England in any simple fashion,’ Robbins contends, nor was cohesiveness of British society attained ‘by the simple imposition’ of English culture and norms upon these territories. Britishness was a ‘complicated affair’, involving the coexistence of multiple identities beneath an overarching common loyalty to the British state.⁵ British integration continued apace but was not accompanied by any drive for cultural uniformity or demands for homogeneity; instead, Britishness was marked by broad-based sympathies and a pan-British pluralism. Some of the superficial peculiarities associated with the English cult of Wallace appear rather to be plausible reflections of the deeper cultural trends that Robbins identifies.

Romanticism assisted in the blending of Britain, in part through the recognition that Scotland possessed an intriguing ‘otherness’ for an English audience. The exotic, the peripheral, the picturesque and the remote – all of which applied in varying degrees to the English perception of Scotland – were themes that exerted a powerful pull on romantic authors. The ploughman poet Robert Burns and his quaint Scots dialect, together with the poetry, and then, later, the novels of Sir Walter Scott, exercised a compelling charm on English readers. Moreover, the appeal of Scotland in particular to English romantic sensibilities was heightened by the duration of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, when Scotland became an attractive yet safe site for the enjoyment and consumption of ‘otherness’ while Continental Europe remained out of bounds and Ireland dangerously associated with the rebellion of 1798.⁶ Tourism enhanced the appeal of romantic Scotland. The cultural blending of the romantic era was far from a simple process of Anglo-Scottish reconciliation, however. In recent years scholars working in the field of ‘English romantic literature’ have broken with that subject’s traditional Anglocentricity to explore the richer textures of a ‘four nations’ literary history, one that investigates the various interactions of Scottish, Welsh, Irish and English cultures in the making of British romantic literature. Literary historians have drawn attention to various ‘Anglo-Celtic dialogues’ between the English heartland and her imagined ‘Celtic’ provinces. Anglo-Scottish cultural relations constituted only one strand in a complex web of influences.⁷

Indeed, an Anglo-Irish model provided significant inspiration for the mediation of Scottish history to an English audience. The first decades of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of the ‘national tale’. This new genre was conceived initially as a way of explaining Ireland – which had joined the United Kingdom in the Union of 1800–1 – to England. The principal begetters of the new genre were Maria Edgeworth, whose novels include Castle Rackrent, an Hibernian Tale taken from facts and from the manners of the Irish squires before the year 1782 (1800) and The Absentee (1812), and Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, the author of a number of influential novels, including The Wild Irish Girl: a national tale (1806) and The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys: a national tale(1827). The national tale was further developed by the Irish Gothic writer Charles Maturin, author of The Wild Irish Boy (1809) and The Milesian Chief (1812). Writers of ‘national tales’ celebrated Britishness as an overarching unity in diversity. In particular, Anglo-Irish novelists saw the potential in the national tale to explain their unfamiliar society to the English. A common theme involved the return of an absentee landlord unacquainted with his native soil and tenantry. Acculturation and familiarisation stood at the centre of such plots.⁸

Scottish writers also saw the potential in the romantic national tale – and variants on the genre such as the historical novel – to introduce an English readership to Scotland and its history. Early examples of the Scottish national tale include Scott’s Waverley(1814) and Christian Isobel Johnstone’s Clan-Albin: A National Tale (1815).⁹ Waverley, which revolves around a young Englishman’s visit to Scotland during the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, follows the contours of the national tale and adds a significant new dimension to the genre. Scott was no great fan of Owenson but acknowledged his debt to Maria Edgeworth in the ‘General Preface’ to the Waverley Novels, noting that her:

Irish characters have gone so far to make the English familiar with the character of their gay and kind-hearted neighbours of Ireland, that she may be truly said to have done more towards completing the Union, than perhaps all the legislative enactments by which it has been followed up.

The Union in question was, of course, the British-Irish Union of 1800–01, but Scott saw the potential to use the national tale as a means of strengthening the bonds of the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707:

I felt that something might be attempted for my own country, of the same kind which Miss Edgeworth so fortunately achieved for Ireland – something which might introduce her natives to those of the sister kingdom, in a more favourable light than they had been placed hitherto, and tend to procure sympathy for their virtues and indulgence for their foibles.¹⁰

The national tale and historical novel stood at the centre of a rich network of cultural and historical cross-appropriation. In Scotland during the second half of the eighteenth century, both the philosophic historians of the Scottish Enlightenment and members of the radical movement urged Scots to treat English constitutional history as their own.¹¹ To all intents and purposes, they seemed to suggest, through the incorporating Union of 1707, the glorious heritage of English liberty stretching back to the days of the Anglo-Saxons had become the common property of North as well as South Britons. Scottish historians such as David Hume and John Millar, however, also played a major role in revising and modifying some of the central narrative features in that history. Scots were not only laying claim to English history but also trying to rewrite it in their own terms.¹² In his own way, Scott continued this process. Scott himself produced the definitive myth of English medieval nation-building. His novel Ivanhoe (1819) explored the twelfth-century origins of English nationhood, providing an influential account of Saxon-Norman struggle followed by eventual reconciliation. The Normans had conquered Anglo-Saxon England in 1066. Ivanhoe picks up the story of Saxon-Norman relations just over a century later, during the reign of Richard I. At this period Saxons and Normans still constitute distinct ethnic groups as well as social strata in an unstable Anglo-Norman country. John Sutherland even contends that Ivanhoe was ‘the main popularizer’ of the Norman Yoke myth ‘among the English at large’ during the nineteenth century.¹³ Indeed, John Burrow argues that the popularity of Scott’s Ivanhoe inspired a literary enthusiasm in England for its Anglo-Saxon heritage that manifested itself in such works as Bulwer Lytton’sHarold, Last of the Saxon Kings (1848) and Charles Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake (1866).¹⁴ Nor did Scott confine himself to the twelfth century. He followed Ivanhoe with other novels on English historical themes: Kenilworth (1821) was a tale of merry England during the Tudor age and Woodstock (1826) a novel of the English Civil Wars. On the other hand, Scott’s major contribution to British culture lay in the opposite direction, in the wider dissemination of Scottish history and culture to an English audience, with the aim of winning over English readers to the notion that the Scottish past was part of their own British heritage, not least by presenting it as picturesque, firmly in the past and, hence, unthreatening.¹⁵ Quite apart from the bare statistics of Scott’s sales as a bestselling novelist¹⁶ – in spite or because of his primary reliance on Scottish historical subject matter – there is also oblique testimony to his success in promoting English identification with North Britain.

Sarah Green’s light comic romance Scotch Novel Reading; or Modern quackery (1824) provides compelling evidence that the contemporary English fascination with Scotland’s history and literature was sufficiently modish to attract satirical attention. Indeed, the novel’s principal subject matter is the Caledonian fever brought on by reading too many Scotch novels, particularly those of Scott. As one character complains, ‘“nothing now goes down but Scotch stories; and Scotch dialect, by the way a very unpleasant one, is thrust upon us, as if there was not another country under the sun worth hearing of than poor, miserable little Scotland”’. The novel is largely set in London where our comic heroine, Alice Fennel, has developed, under the influence of Scott but also through exposure to the works of the Ettrick Shepherd and other Scotch novelists and bards, an obsessional identification with all things Scottish. According to Mr Fennel, Scottish literature has gone to his foolish daughter’s head:

We have been now, for some years, inundated with showers of Scotch novels, thicker than the snow you now see falling; and Alice, who is now in her nineteenth year, has read them all, or rather skimmed them over . . . without understanding one half of what she has perused, and scarce comprehending one word of a dialect with which they abound, but which she affects to use on all occasions.

Indeed, Alice, Mr Fennel reports, had fallen into floods of tears on discovering that the romantic Ettrick Shepherd had the very unromantic name of Hogg. When we first encounter Alice herself – a Londoner born and bred without a trace of Scottish ancestry – she interrupts her father’s anxieties about his daughter’s ‘Caledonian mania’ to summon him to his dinner of calf ’s liver and bacon: ‘“Why should ye fash yoursel so, feyther?” said Alice . . . “I was ainly aboot to tell ye, that it were beest ye ganged into the deening parlour, for the haggis will be there directly.”’ Alice affects a thick Scottish brogue for most of the novel and a vocabulary in which the words ‘muckle’, ‘bonnie’, ‘fash’, ‘hoot’ and ‘chiel’ are somewhat overused. Moreover, Alice not only sounds like her idea of a Scotswoman, she also dresses the part. She wears a handsome Highland cap with large black plumes, while her coats are ‘kiltit’, her arms and back are left bare, and her bust is likewise, although modesty makes her ‘twitch the true tartan scarf, that hung in drapery over her form, across her bosom’. The Fennel household is ‘littered with Blackwood’s Magazine, and the Edinburgh Review etc, wherein she found the puff direct, or collateral, given in surfeiting abundance to her favourite novel writers of North Britain’.

The novel recounts our romantic heroine’s ‘awakening’ from her ‘airy’ fancies of ‘Scotch perfection’. Alice is freed from her ridiculous delusions only through meeting some real Scots – the Macbane family – and being vigorously wooed by a rough-and-ready pantomime jock, Captain Duncan Macgregor, who turns out to be her English lover in disguise. Although Scotch Novel Reading provides only a highly exaggerated version of a contemporary trend, it is nevertheless suggestive of a milieu in which an English cult of Wallace might seem less of a paradox.¹⁷

For this contradiction in terms was a visible – albeit minor – feature of English literary culture during the first decades of the nineteenth century. From the end of the eighteenth century several English writers, poets especially, became entranced with the topic of Wallace’s achievements, defeat and martyrdom. In 1798 Robert Southey composed a short poem, entitled ‘The Death of Wallace’, that used a lament for Wallace largely as a vehicle for the condemnation of tyranny, in this case Plantagenet:

Go, Edward, triumph now!

Cambria is fallen, and Scotland’s strength is crush’d;

On Wallace, on Llewellyn’s mangled limbs,

The fowls of Heaven have fed.

Go, Edward, full of glory to thy grave!

The weight of patriot blood upon thy soul.¹⁸

John Stoddart, an English tourist who came to Scotland in 1799 and 1800, was struck by the popularity of the Wallace cult in Lowland Scotland and issued a recommendation to the readers of his Remarks on Local Scenery and Manners in Scotland (1801) that Wallace would provide a wonderful subject with a universal appeal for a Miltonic-style epic:

If, indeed, any man were really possessed with the spirit-stirring enthusiasm, of the true epic (the same, which worked, from youth to age, in the breast of Milton), he could no where find a more noble subject than the life of this patriot warrior. From the materials afforded by record, and tradition, by the historian, and the poet, might be drawn a character, interesting every powerful sentiment in the human heart, exciting the sympathies of domestic affection, and public virtue, calling forth applause for his valour, exultation in his triumphs, contempt of his base betrayer, indignation at his tyrannical punishment; noble tears over his fall, and more noble joy in his imperishable fame. This is a whole, which Shakespeare might have conceived by the power of genius alone; but for which another poet needs other aids.¹⁹

Stoddart’s friend, the great English poet William Wordsworth, who would also tour Scotland, in 1803, produced a poetic echo of such sentiments. In his thirteen-book 1805 version of his great work on the mental formation of the poet, The Prelude, Wordsworth recounts how he had contemplated the composition of an epic poem on the theme of how Wallace fought for Scotland, leaving his name on the landscape.²⁰

Less dreamily, albeit in a more pedestrian fashion, a stream of lesser English writers realised Wordsworth’s yearnings to engage with this promising subject. In 1809 Miss Margaret Holford (1778–1852), a Cheshire lady, published Wallace, or the Fight of Falkirk. Miss Holford’s poetic ‘Dedication’ to her compatriot, Miss Gertrude Louisa Allen, which precedes Wallace expresses a proud English patriotism, couched as an apology for her apparently unpatriotic choice of subject:

And deem not, jealous for our native land,

With alien step I sought the billowy Forth,

Whence led a pilgrim by the Muse’s hand,

I climb’d the rude hills of the stormy north,

And sung her songs – their hardihood and worth!

No! as I turn again my truant eyes,

To mark the pleasant land which gave us birth,

Quick in my soul what rushing crowds arise,

Heart-cheering visions of all native sympathies!

Despite her celebration of a Scottish hero, England remained, to Miss Holford, she insisted, the ‘gem and glory of the west’.²¹

The next year saw the publication of the Wallace sensation of the nineteenth century, a novel written not by a Scot but by an Englishwoman. Jane Porter’s five-volume novel, The Scottish Chiefs, took the world by storm. Porter (1776–1850) was born in Durham, spent her early years in Edinburgh, and then moved to London in 1803. The Scottish Chiefs was published in London in 1810, and by 1816 was already in its third edition. Between 1816 and 1882 the novel was reprinted nine times. It was also published in the United States, where it enjoyed tremendous success, and was translated into French, German and Russian. In short, The Scottish Chiefs was a literary sensation. Porter’s novel, to take but one curious example, appears to have haunted the peculiar imagination of the radical English poet and artist William Blake, who experienced his own personal vision of Wallace.²² Indeed, the very success of The Scottish Chiefs explains in part why Scott – who ranged otherwise across the whole gamut of Scottish history in his novels – should neglect the story of Wallace as matter for his historical fiction. Only in his very last work, Castle Dangerous (1832), did Scott even touch upon the wider subject of the Scottish Wars of Independence. Porter’s introductory apparatus acknowledges the novel’s provenance in a new British patriotism, a fusion of the old historic allegiances to rival Scottish and English nations. Declaring herself in favour of ‘an honest pride in ancestry’, Porter contends that at a time when Britain is threatened by Napoleonic France there is a place in the new order for the spirit that had once animated the old Border feuds:

respect for noble progenitors cannot be wrong, for it proceeds from the same source – the principle of kindred, of inheritance, and of virtue. Let the race of Douglas, or the brave line of Percy, bear witness whether the name they hold be not as a mirror to show them what they ought to be, and to kindle in their hearts the flame which burnt in their fathers. Happy is it for this realm that the destiny which now unites the once contending arms of those brave families has also consolidated their rival nations into one, and by planting the heir of Plantagenet and of Bruce upon one throne, hath redeemed the peace of Britain, and fixed it on lasting foundations.²³

The Scottish Chiefs provided an important point of entry to the Wallace story for generations of English readers. More immediately, enthusiastic immersion in The Scottish Chiefs helped to provide an unlikely English winner for the literary competition on the subject of Wallace held in 1818–19.

In December 1818 a competition was announced in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. An anonymous benefactor had offered to donate fifty pounds to be divided into three prizes of twenty-five, fifteen and ten pounds ‘for the best lines, in verse or prose, on the subject of Sir William Wallace inviting Bruce to the Scottish throne’. This alluded to the long-standing tradition that Wallace and Bruce had found themselves in one another’s company – although on opposite sides of the River Carron – in the confused aftermath of Wallace’s defeat at Falkirk. Conversing across the river, Wallace called on Bruce to cast off his demeaning vassalage to Edward I, inviting him to assert his right to the Scottish throne. The benefactor, a native of Edinburgh who had left the city at the age of twelve and was now a member of the Highland Society of London, also promised to make a much larger donation of a thousand pounds were a project to be mounted to erect a statue to the memory of Wallace on Arthur’s Seat or Salisbury Crags. Nevertheless, despite his manifest patriotism and obsession with Wallace, the shadowy philanthropist desired that the literary efforts submitted to his competition should be expressed in such a way ‘as not to give offence to our brethren south of the Tweed’.²⁴

Submissions for the prize were to be made to the booksellers Manners and Miller by 1 May 1819. In the end, the competition appears to have attracted fifty-seven entries, including one that was reported to have been as long as Paradise Lost.²⁵ First prize went to an Englishwoman, Mrs Felicia Hemans (1793–1835), a poet best remembered today for her poem ‘Casabianca’ (1829), which opens with the memorable lines, ‘The boy stood on the burning deck / Whence all but he had fled’. In the apparatus that accompanied the published version of her prize poem, ‘Wallace’s Invocation to Bruce’, Hemans alludes to Wallace’s growing reputation in England: ‘It is a noble feature in the character of a generous and enlightened people, that, in England, the memory of the patriots and martyrs of Scotland has long excited an interest not exceeded in strength by that which prevails in the country which boasts their birth, their deeds and their sufferings.’²⁶ Indeed, her own upbringing and literary formation encapsulate the blending of Britain. Born in Liverpool to a Venetian-German mother and an Irish father, she moved with her family to Denbighshire and later Flintshire.²⁷ As a result, she maintained a broad range of sympathies for the peoples and cultures of Britain. Not only did she compose a series of Welsh melodies celebrating the culture of her adopted Wales, but she would also add to ‘Wallace’s Invocation to Bruce’ a shorter piece entitled ‘The Heart of Bruce in Melrose Abbey’.²⁸ Moreover, she was a fan of Jane Porter and had clearly caught the Wallace bug long before the competition was announced. Writing back in 1811 to Matthew Nicholson, a Manchester cotton merchant who had retired to Liverpool, the then Miss Felicia Browne confessed to lapsing into some light reading:

Will you assume a very good grave mentorial face, and give me a long lecture, when I tell you I have also been guilty of reading a romance? It is The Scottish Chiefs by Miss Porter, and though I am by no means an advocate for historical novels, as they bewilder our ideas, by confounding truth with fiction, yet this animated authoress has painted her hero, the patriot William Wallace, in such glowing colours, that you cannot avoid catching a spark of her own enthusiasm, as you follow him through the incidents of the narrative.²⁹

In the course of her victory in the competition of 1818–19 Hemans had triumphed over one of Scotland’s finest writers, James Hogg. Hogg was a gallant loser and was happy to cede the prize to Hemans: ‘Had I been constituted the judge myself, I would have given hers the preference by many degrees’. Moreover, Hogg was won over by the fact that this was an English celebration of Wallace: ‘I estimated [the poem] the more highly as coming from one of the people that were the hero’s foes, oppressors, and destroyers.’³⁰ Not all Scots shared Hogg’s graciousness on this topic of vital patriotic significance. Another loser, the female author of ‘Wallace and Bruce, a Vision’, commented that ‘the far-famed interview of our patriot heroes ought not to be left entirely to English celebration’ and puffed instead her own composition as ‘a simple strain of genuine Scottish feeling, flowing from a mind that owns no other muse but the amor patriae’.³¹

Nevertheless, the general run of opinion in Scotland tended to a generous appreciation of English acknowledgement of Wallace’s achievements. In fact, the Edinburgh Monthly Review reported that several competitors came from ‘the other side of the Tweed’. Nor was this a problem, rather a matter for congratulation. Indeed, according to the journal, English participation in the competition seemed indicative of the transition in both England and Scotland towards a more pluralist patriotism, towards a Britishness that invited celebration of the best elements in its different constituent parts:

That a Scottish prize for a poem on a subject purely, proudly Scottish, has been adjudged to an English candidate, is a proof at once of the perfect fairness of the award, and of the merit of the poem. It further demonstrates the disappearance of those jealousies which, not a hundred years ago, would have denied to such a candidate any thing like a fair chance with a native – if we can suppose any poet in the south then dreaming of making the trial, or viewing Wallace in any other light than that of an enemy, and a rebel against the paramount supremacy of England. We delight in every gleam of high feeling which warms the two nations alike, and ripens yet more that confidence and empathy which bind them together in one great family. We hail every fresh proof of a generous community of worth, which entitles each people to adopt the other’s moral ornaments; and to look upon their respective great names as a common patrimony – a sum of British genius, virtue, and glory, which stands unequalled in the world.³²

The Scots Magazine also responded positively to the ‘poetical magic’ of Hemans’ triumph by reflecting how in recent years the process of British integration had moved up a gear with the emergence of a sympathetic development of English interest in Scottish history and culture:

We live now in very cordial union with our south country friends, and the benefits of that union which we so much detested, and they so much despised, at the time it took place, are now found to be mutual and important. One peculiar benefit is only of late occurrence, yet, perhaps, full as much valued as any of the others; it is that our southern neighbours have learned (though late) to appreciate the Scottish character, and to discern and taste Scottish genius even in the disguise of our national language.

The causes of this transformation, the Scots Magazine believed, were not hard to find: the phenomena of Burns and Scott and the great impression they made on English literary circles.³³

During the course of the nineteenth century, the blending processes of British integration continued apace. By the mid-nineteenth century, moreover, there was a large Scots diaspora in England, evidenced by the huge number of dinners held throughout England to commemorate the centenary of Burns’s birthday in 1859. This Scots presence in England helped to reinforce Anglo-Scottish cultural connections. At the Burns centenary meeting in Carlisle it was remarked that ‘the sympathies of the two countries have become interwoven and consolidated’.³⁴ Burns and Scott were, of course, central to this extension of sympathy,³⁵ but so too was Wallace. Nineteenth-century Scots not only celebrated Wallace as the champion of a Union of equal partners, they also acknowledged the English celebration of Wallace and pondered the particular reasons why the English should have become so captivated by the history of the Scottish national hero.

The principal reason Scots adduced for this unusual phenomenon was that the English had come to view Wallace as a symbol of resistance to a threatened Plantagenet absolutism the realisation of which might have diverted the beneficent course of English history. In particular, nineteenthcentury commentators held the view that the conflicts of Wallace’s epoch were not only – or even primarily – Anglo-Scottish but also involved the common, if then unrecognised, interests of the British nations of Scotland and England in the face of an alien (French) and imperialist Norman-Plantagenet monarchy. Wallace stood as an exemplar of British freedom in the face of the ambitions of the Plantagenet monarchy not only to a pan-British empire but also to a despotic form of government within England itself. Thus, the story of Wallace, it seemed, had become intertwined with the history of English liberty. Joanna Baillie, who included Wallace as a subject of one of her Metrical Legends, asserted that ‘England as well as Scotland, under Divine Providence, may owe its liberty to [Wallace]: for, had the English crown, at so early a period, acquired such an accession of power, it would probably, like the other great crowns of Europe, have established for itself a despotism which could not have been shaken’.³⁶ Scottish patriots happily conceded that Wallace was an Anglo-Scottish icon who had made a positive contribution to English as well as Scottish history. Even the Scottish nationalist historian William Burns recognised the significance of Wallace in English history. Scotland, Burns contended, was:

(unconsciously, perhaps) the means of securing the liberties of England. Every student of history knows that the Plantagenet race of kings were systematically bent on acquiring despotic power; and that it was long a very critical question, whether England was to become a despotism, or a constitutional monarchy. Had Scotland succumbed to Edward I, she would assuredly have been made the ready tool for enslaving that king’s English subjects. But Scotland resisted, and by that very means enabled the English to wring from their unwilling tyrant the privileges they never afterwards lost. In fact, paradoxical as it may, at first sight, appear, Wallace, the arch enemy of England, was indirectly, one of her greatest benefactors. The national independence of Scotland, and the political and civil liberties of England, at that time, trembled in the same scale. The life, and much more, the death of Wallace, turned that scale.³⁷

A similiar line also appeared in the unsuccessful proposal of 1859 for a national monument to Wallace and Bruce in Edinburgh: ‘Intelligent Englishmen also know that their countrymen from Wallace’s day . . . not only had no sympathy with the feudal despotism of the Norman kings, but mourned for the Scottish patriot as the forlorn hope against the “common oppressors of both countries”.’³⁸ Without Wallace, it seemed, the civil and political liberties enjoyed by modern Britons might not have been achieved.

Actually, Wallace’s liberal appeal in England was of two kinds. Not only did Wallace stand out as a significant figure in the history of British liberty, but he also belonged to an international pantheon of liberal-democratic heroes. When Chartists gathered at Ashton-under-Lyne in November 1839 to celebrate the birthday of Orator Hunt, they toasted:

The immortal memory of Thomas Paine, William Cobbett, Major Cartwright, Robert Emmett, John Knight, Julian Hibbert, Hampden, Wat Tyler, Sidney, Thomas Hardy, Horne Tooke, Volney, Voltaire, Elihu Palmer, Mirabeau, Robespierre, William Tell, Andreas Hofer, Washington, Wallace, and all the illustrious dead of every nation, who by their acts and deeds have contributed to the cause of liberty.³⁹

Wallace’s international fame as a champion of freedom helped to reinforce his local celebrity as a champion of specifically British freedoms. In addition, nineteenth-century theories of racial difference accentuated Wallace’s appeal, for the story of Wallace meshed neatly with the Norman Yoke theory of English history, the notion that the commoners had been libertarian Saxons conquered in the eleventh century by an aristocratic caste of Normans, until the former regained their historic freedoms.⁴⁰ In a sense, the Saxon commons of twelfth- and thirteenth-century England had shared a virtuous political cause with the Scots commoners led by Wallace. Both had been the victims of alien Norman-Plantagenet oppression. Moreover, during the nineteenth century Wallace tended to be depicted – even by Scots – as the champion of the Saxon Lowland ‘race’ within Scotland.⁴¹ These various factors – along with a contemporary Victorian obsession with the medieval past, which also embraced other folk heroes, including King Arthur and, more pertinently, Robin Hood⁴² – combined to raise Wallace’s profile in the English historical memory.

This was as much a feature of popular as of high culture. In his inaugural lecture as professor of history at the University of Glasgow, Richard Lodge, an English incomer who regarded the Forth–Clyde line rather than the Tweed–Solway border as the real racial frontier in Britain, assured his audience that

English boys are taught both in prose and in poetry to regard Wallace and Bruce as the heroic champions of a just cause, and to attribute to them perhaps greater purity of motive than they can justly claim. I cannot remember that one ever acquired the habit of regarding Bannockburn as a great English disaster and disgrace . . .⁴³

Jane Porter’s The Scottish Chiefs had an important role in the formation of this English boyhood cult of Wallace. So too did G. A. Henty, the popular English writer of historical adventures for schoolboys, who produced a novel of Wallace and Bruce, In Freedom’s Cause (1885). Henty’s novel views events from a Scottish rather than an English angle. To be strictly accurate, however, the perspective of the novel is not so much anti-English as anti-Norman. The invaders of Scotland are described as oppressive Normans throughout, that is, the same Normans who had earlier trampled on the liberties of the Anglo-Saxons.⁴⁴

On a more elevated level, Wallace also came to occupy an important niche in the narrative framework of English Whig history, which told a progressive story of the unfolding of liberty. Historians perceived that Wallace had championed a kind of popular liberty that transcended the rigid social demarcations of feudal society. In his popular History of the English People, J. R. Green commends ‘the instinct of the Scotch people’ which:

guided it aright in choosing Wallace for its national hero. He was the first to sweep aside the technicalities of feudal law and to assert freedom as a national birthright. Amidst the despair of nobles and priests he called the people itself to arms, and his discovery of the military value of the stout peasant footman, who had till then been scorned by baronage and knighthood – a discovery copied by the burghers of Flanders, and repeated in the victories of the Swiss – gave a deathblow to the system of feudalism and changed in the end the face of Europe.⁴⁵

Wallace was a similar hero to the last of the great English Whig historians, George Macaulay Trevelyan. In his History of England (1926) Trevelyan celebrates Wallace as the founder of a new brand of politics:

This unknown knight, with little but his great name to identify him in history, had lit a fire which nothing since has ever put out. Here, in Scotland, a few years before the very similar doings in Switzerland, a new ideal and tradition of wonderful potency was brought into the world; it had no name, but now we should call it democratic patriotism.

Trevelyan reckoned ‘Wallace’s amazing appeal to the Scottish democracy to save the Scottish nation’ to be ‘abnormal’ in its day, for in thirteenthcentury Christendom, society was divided ‘horizontally into feudal strata’ rather than into discrete national units. Wallace called into being a nation of ‘burghers and peasants, led by the lairds or small gentry’ of whom he himself was one, which defied not only the might of England but also Scotland’s cross-border Anglo-Norman ruling elite who had been ‘excusably lukewarm in their Scottish patriotism’.⁴⁶

From the 1930s the Whig tradition of history came under sustained assault from historians, beginning with Herbert Butterfield in his classic book, The Whig Interpretation of History. Unionism in Scotland followed a similar trajectory of decline from the 1960s, while in England, too, a sense of shared Britishness has yielded in recent decades to a less comprehensive Little Englandism (unconscious as well as overt) that conveys scant sympathy for the non-English peoples of the United Kingdom except, on occasions, in the special case of Northern Ireland. In these circumstances, it is unsurprising that the English cult of Wallace which prevailed in the nineteenth century has disappeared. The film Braveheart (1995) rearticulated the ‘international’ version of Wallace as a universal icon of freedom, but the specifically ‘British’ appeal of Wallace that once exercised the English historical imagination is now literally unimaginable except to historians prepared to reconceptualise the nineteenth-century blending of Britain. Today, Wallace has become a symbol of otherness. He now represents a line of division between Scotland and England, and stands as an icon of historic enmity. Nevertheless, the nineteenth-century English cult of Wallace stands as a reminder to those trapped in the mindset of the present that the historic configuration of Anglo-Scottish relations is rich in unexpected ambivalences on both sides of the border.⁴⁷