"Scotland." "The country where I was born and still live." "I've spent years as an archaeologist unearthing all sorts of treasures from her past." "For me, it's an ancient and magical place, and I always find the beauty of this country overwhelming, even humbling." "I've often thought that Scotland's popular history is a bit like that landscape - always changing, impossibly romantic, often hidden by mists and low cloud." "And above all, packed with legends and heroic characters." "But that's not history, it's mythology." "And it's cursed Scotland's past and present." "How we think about the past shapes our view of today, so I want to look beyond the legends to find the real story of Scotland, and it's every bit as thrilling." "This first episode is about the birth of Scotland - a birth that was far from inevitable." "For many centuries, the mountains and lochs behind me were home to a patchwork of disparate peoples and tongues." "It was a land invaded again and again." "So how was it that a loose collection of tribes living in the northern third of Britain came together and built a kingdom with its own distinct culture and identity - a kingdom that would change the shape and the destiny of Britain forever?" "So, where to begin?" "The first people of Scotland to be described in the written record are the tribes of the Caledonians." "2,000 years ago, they'd joined forces to defend their homeland from a Roman invasion." "In the shadow of a great glen, they faced the Roman army." "The Caledonians fell silent." "From their ranks, out strode the earliest named character of Scottish history." "Calgacus, the "swordsman"." "He is the first to speak to us from the past." "Calgacus was the chosen one." "He was the warrior whom the Caledonii tribes of Northern Britain hoped would lead them to victory." "Defiant, proud, unbowed, he struck the first blow against Roman tyranny." "He made a speech." ""We, the choicest flower of Britain's manhood," ""were hidden away in her most secret places." ""Out of sight, we were kept from the defilement of tyranny." ""We, the most distant dwellers upon Earth, the last of the free."" "There's just one problem." "They're not his words." "They were put into his mouth by a Roman historian, Tacitus, writing 20 years later." "Even if someone like Calgacus ever existed, he would have spoken a language similar to Welsh, and certainly not in the measured Latin phrases of a Roman." "This is where the mythologising of Scottish history starts." "Be warned, almost everything recorded from those early times is seen through the eyes of others." "Tacitus had an agenda." "General Agricola and his three Roman legions had marched into north Britain in the late summer of AD 84." "But to make Agricola appear as brave and heroic as possible, it was important to give him a formidable foe." "Which Tacitus duly did." "At a battle site in the Grampian Mountains, he described the Roman encounter with the Caledonian hordes and their fierce leader..." "Calgacus." ""The fighting began with exchanges of missiles" ""and the Britons showed both steadiness and skill" ""in parrying our spears with their huge swords, or catching them" ""on their little shields while they themselves rained volleys on us."" "He called it the Battle of Mons Graupius, though beyond his account, there's no other record of it ever taking place." "But I think there was a battle in the Scottish Highlands, because of one telling detail that Tacitus couldn't have invented." "Agricola was given a triumph back in Rome, the bombastic welcome for a victorious general." "And one other thing we know for certain - the Caledonians lost." ""The next day, an awful silence reigned on every hand." ""The hills were deserted, houses smoking in the distance," ""and our scouts did not meet a soul."" "Most of the Caledonians, including Calgacus, survived and escaped into the trackless mountains." "The Romans failed to tame the elusive warriors of north Britain." "Frustrated by their hit-and-run tactics, the Roman legions withdrew to the south." "By the next century, Hadrian's Wall, built from coast to coast, had become the line in the sand." "To the south lay Romanised Britain - roads, towns, villas." "To the north, a myriad of tribes like the Caledonians." "The wall wasn't just a simple stone boundary, it was an ideological frontier." "It was the end of the world." "It drew the line where civilisation ended and barbarism began." "Not that the Caledonians were interested in the so-called benefits of Roman rule." "To them, it represented tyranny." "They had their own civilisation." "For over three centuries, the Caledonians kept their independence secure and the Romans at bay." "Then in AD 409, as the empire collapsed, they helped expel them from British shores altogether." "The Romans left behind crumbling ruins and a new name for the Caledonians - the "Pictii"." "We know them better as the Picts." "The word means "the painted ones", for these were the last of the peoples of Britain to cover their bodies with tattoos." "The term started as a nickname, but came to mean much more, a powerful northern people, synonymous with pride." "The Picts tattooed themselves with the same designs and symbols used on theirjewellery and stones." "Artistic skills that showed them to be no wild barbarians." "More evidence of early Pictish culture has come from the peaty waters of Loch Tay." "Here, four metres down, archaeologists came across the remains of an ancient stronghold, fragments of a thatched roof and stumps." "They were the stilts of a building that once stood above the water." "A dwelling in which people loved, lived and fought." "By reconstructing the crannog, as it's called, archaeologists realised just how skilled and well-organised Pictish society must have been." " NEIL:" "How do you build one of these?" " WOMAN:" "We had to learn from scratch, because obviously we hadn't got a tradition of building like this handed down to us from generation to generation." "So you've got to line up your supplies, you've got to know how to cut down the trees, you've got to know how to get them in the right place, you've got to have the right manpower and skilled labour workforce." "The people who built crannogs like this were affluent." "They enjoyed a great diet, probably communicating and trading further afield." "Some of the little objects that we found do not come from here, such as jet, which is commonly found from Whitby, northeast England." "One of the theories is that it's a big house, this house could sustain maybe a family of 20, or even up to 40 people." "So maybe if there were times of trouble, any other people supporting the community who were living on the shore in less secure housing could all come in and be secure in what effectively is a water castle." "NEIL:" "Crannogs have been found all over Scotland, many from the Pictish period." "Their civilisation had put down roots." "But then, centuries later, the Picts become the subject of one of the most intriguing mysteries of Dark Age Europe." "They seem to disappear from history forever." "This vanishing act has given the Picts an aura of romance." "They've become a legendary, almost alien people, inhabiting a limbo world, part historical and part mythological." "But like any good mystery story, there's a twist." "The Picts seem to disappear at the exact moment when the kingdom of Scotland is born." "Understanding why the Picts vanished will give us the answer to how Scotland was created." "Back in the fifth century, this is what Scotland looked like, a patchwork of disparate ethnic groups." "The Picts dominated the north and east." "Welsh-speaking tribes, called the Britons, lived along the River Clyde and the south." "And to the west, a new people had arrived, the Gaels." "They were seafarers, originally from Ireland, who stayed and carved out their own territory." "The Gaels are the other key player in the birth of Scotland." "The turbulent relationship between them and the Picts, sometimes allied but more often at war, form the backbone of our saga." "Right at the heart of the Gaelic kingdom was the spectacular hillfort of Dunadd, rising up out off the great flatness of Moine Mhor, which means "the big bog"." "Brooding, menacing, Dunadd provided the perfect site for defending against attacks from the sea." "This is the entrance to the fort and once upon a time this place was defended by walls ten metres thick." "It wasn't just one wall." "There was a ring of four, each protecting the rising tiers of the fort up to a stone citadel at the top." "Though the Gaels were as warlike as the Picts, there were clear differences." "They had a separate culture and spoke a different language." "And something even more striking." "Gaelic art had a distinctive and delicate beauty all of its own." "At Dunadd, crucibles for melting gold have been unearthed along with the moulds to cast brooches." "The abundance of such fine jewellery could mean just one thing - Dunadd was home to the kingdom's elite." "The Gaelic kingdom was run from here and its kings were inaugurated in this place in a ceremony that literally married them to the land they ruled." "For the crowds gathered below, the king would appear in silhouette against the sky, and then at the appointed moment, he would place one foot into this rock-cut footprint, demonstrating to his subjects that this land was both" "his servant and his master." "It's the end of the sixth century, and this royal inauguration is unlike any that have gone before." "Although the Picts continue to worship pagan gods, the Gaels have turned to Christianity, a spiritual invasion driving a wedge between them." "And the monk who ordains the king?" "Columba." "Columba, son of an Irish chieftain, had travelled from Ireland ten years earlier." "For his support of the Gaelic leaders, Columba was gifted a small but very beautiful island to the west of Dunadd." "It's called Iona, and here Columba was to found a monastery." "St Columba is widely credited as the first missionary to bring Christianity to Scotland." "And from here, on his new base on Iona, he's supposed to have converted all the peoples of this land and beyond to the new religion." "But was it really that simple?" "What we know about Columba has come down to us from a later abbot of Iona, Adomnan, who wrote a hagiography entitled" "The Life of St Columba about 1 00 years after his subject died." "His book is more fairytale than history and it has to be taken with a very large pinch of salt." "(WOMAN SINGS)" "The Gaels were Christian long before Columba arrived." "The hard graft had been done by numerous missionaries, who'd travelled from Ireland and the Roman Empire." "They remain unheralded and largely anonymous." "But Columba's monastery on Iona, then just a collection of timber huts, soon became one of the most important Christian beacons in the whole of Dark Age Europe." "MAN:" "The stability that he brought to the region, the fact that Christianity began to spread quite quickly through Scotland," "I think was testimony to the fact that he had friends in high places." "And he could also convey to the king and to other clan chiefs not just that his new religion was important, but the benefits of it were worth having." "The benefits of writing, this new technology, the benefits of scholarship, and that if the king embraced this, then there was something in it for him." "You think the pure ability to write would have been a magic that would have been central to what they were able to do?" "Well, it might have attracted your clan chief." "Yes, OK, here is this guy wanting to talk about the new religion, but if you've got writing, if you can articulate in a more permanent way what you've said or what you've agreed," "you've got the basis of a legal system, you've got a basis of treaties with neighbouring clans or kingdoms." "You've got a clarity about thought and about what you want." "And again it's about a power thing." "If you say something, here it is, it's in writing." "I don't think it was quite as simple as simply saying that he was going on a penitential journey." "There was something in it for Columba but also for the people of this part of the world." " It sounds so opportunist in a way." " I think it was, I think it was." "Far from being an isolated island on the fringe of Europe," "Iona lay at its spiritual heart." "At its zenith, the monks of Iona created The Book of Kells." "The workmanship was exquisite - over 1 0,000 tiny red dots around a single capital letter." "And the dyes came from halfway around the world, the blue of lapis lazuli from Afghanistan, yellow orpiment from the Mediterranean." "A 1 2th-century scholar praised the artistry ofthe Book of Kells." "He wrote, "You might believe it was the work of an angel" ""rather than a human being."" "Not everyone was so impressed by the word of God." "While the Gaels had embraced Christianity even before Columba, their Pictish neighbours had remained resolutely pagan." "They'd put their faith in druids rather than monks and relied on an oral tradition rather than the written word." "Cue the most famous of Adomnan's tales - the account of St Columba's epic journey into the heart of darkness to convert the Picts." "The Picts were notorious for headhunting." "Columba must have known he was risking his." "Undeterred, he made the perilous journey up the Great Glen and Loch Ness to meet one of the Pictish kings." "Adomnan notes that Columba needed an interpreter even to speak with them." "A battle of supernatural wills followed." "On one side, Columba and his powerful voice, said to sound like thunder." "In opposition, the druid of the Pictish king." "It proved to be an uneven contest." "Columba brought the druid close to death, and then, in true Christian fashion, relented." "Adomnan tells us that the druid lived." "What he doesn't make explicit was that the Picts stubbornly clung to their pagan beliefs." "It would take many decades and many more missionaries before the Picts would begin to accept Christianity." "The progress of their conversion can be read in their stones." "Some of the best Pictish carvings have been taken to a research building in Edinburgh." "Here, they're being preserved and studied using the latest technology." "Individual marks in the stone can be isolated, telling us more about how they were carved, the technique and the tools used." "The symbols on one stone are particularly fascinating for what they reveal about their changing beliefs." "MAN:" "You can see how the stone carver has taken tremendous care, not just in accurate modelling of the animals, but the way they're coming out at us in sharp relief as well." "He's done this by working away at the stones to reduce the background and to bring the figures out into the front." "Just look at this hind here, with the fawn interwoven through the legs." "He didn't have to do that, he made it very difficult for himself in doing that, but it gives it a little bit of perspective." "This is something they were very skilled at doing and they obviously took great pleasure in doing it." " And what about the other side, then?" " Well, this is..." "NEIL:" "This carver didn't confine his work to the secular." "He also demonstrated his love of God." "PETER:" "This is, really..." "to my mind, this is the front." "The cross, representing the embodiment of Christ, the promise of salvation." "It's the key, central messages of Christianity being broadcast." "So we have this wonderful interlaced decoration filling the body of the cross." "How unusual is it to get a stone that has everything in one package?" "You know, there's the classic Pictish symbols, the hunting scenes and all the rest, and the cross." "PETER:" "By this period, we're getting to the later Pictish period, we've had maybe three or even four generations of large-scale conversion to Christianity by this time." "Christianity was reasonably well embedded, so we do see this quite happy combination of, yes, the pure, central message of Christianity in the cross, coupled with the everyday scenes, with the animal scenes, with the images of people and symbols as well, of course." "Christianity was the one invader that not only succeeded, but that outstayed all the others." "The Gaelic religion now spanned northern Britain and acted as glue, bringing together disparate peoples under the umbrella of the Christian religion." "St Columba's biographer, Adomnan, spotted an opportunity." "He succeeded in winning agreement from over 50 kings from Pictland to Ireland for an ambitious new law called the Law of the Innocents." "It was a Geneva Convention for the Dark Ages, protecting women, children and monks in times of war." ""Women may not be killed by a man in any way," ""neither by slaughter nor by any other death." ""Nor by poison, nor in water, nor in fire, nor by any beast," ""nor in a pit, nor by dogs, but shall die in their own lawful bed."" "Life remained nasty, brutish and short, but Adomnan's rules on warfare were proof of the civilising influence of Christianity." "For the first time, the Picts had embraced written laws within their society." "The Pictish tribes had it all." "A sophisticated culture, powerful trade links and the breadbasket of north Britain." "Their fertile, low-lying homeland provided better harvests and more fighting men, but it also attracted the attention of others." "By this time, the Angles dominated middle Britain." "They were a Germanic people who'd carved out a powerful kingdom between the Humber and Forth rivers." "But now the Angles decided to push north." "Rather than confront them immediately, the Pictish army drew the Angles further and further into hostile territory." "The two forces clashed at Dun Nechtain, along the River Spey." "The battle is commemorated here on this Pictish stone." "It's a sort of Bayeux Tapestry." "The fight was between bare-headed, long-haired Pictish warriors and Angles wearing distinctive metal helmets." "It was a one-sided encounter." "The ranks of Pictish spearmen drove the Angles into a loch and slaughtered them." "The final relief shows a raven pecking at the dead face of a fallen prince of the Angles." "To defeat this new enemy from the south, the Pictish tribes had been forced to unite under the leadership of one king." "The confederation also had a new name" " Pictland." "By pinpointing the location of all the Pictish stones, it's possible to map out the territory of this young kingdom." "The Picts had successfully driven the Angles back south, and one by one, they defeated their other neighbours." "In the west, both the Britons and the Gaels were overwhelmed." "Although they retained their identity, they were forced to pay homage to the Pictish king." "By the middle of the 8th century," "Pictland was the dominant kingdom of northern Britain." "It seemed invincible." "But the next wave of aggressors was a league apart, warriors with no time for Christian niceties." "They worshipped the gods of war - Odin and Thor." "There's a trend among some modern historians to portray the Vikings as a misunderstood bunch." "Instead of bloodthirsty killers, think peaceful traders and farmers in search of new lands to colonise." "But I don't think so." "Not all of them, and certainly not all the time." "Accounts by British survivors of Viking attacks are unequivocal." "These guys were after treasure and slaves." ""The pagans came with a naval force to Britain" ""and, spread on all sides like direwolves, robbed, tore and slaughtered" ""not only beasts of burden, sheep and oxen," ""but even priests and deacons," ""and companies of monks and nuns."" "That description was a contemporary account of a Viking attack on a monastery in England." "But the Vikings weren't choosy." "They went wherever the treasure was." "Although the monastery here on Iona was looted on three separate occasions, it was the northern isles that bore the brunt." "There's a treasure trove from AD 800 that tells its own story." "These beautiful Pictish bowls and brooches were found under the floor of a medieval church on St Ninian's Isle in Shetland." "Archaeologists believe that monks probably buried the silver in haste to hide it from a Viking raid." "That no-one returned to retrieve them is a sobering clue to what befell the monks." "Vikings shipped their captives back to Scandinavia and then on to Constantinople, where the slaves were exchanged for silver." "As the Vikings' grip tightened, there were fewer smash-and-grab raids." "They came to stay." "They colonised parts of Ireland, Northumbria, and further north, the Hebrides and the territory of the Gaels." "On Orkney and Shetland, it's believed they exterminated the Pictish men." "This was ethnic cleansing, 9th-century style." "Many of Shetland's inhabitants are proud descendants of the Vikings." "At an annual boat-burning ritual called Up Helly Aa, they still celebrate their bloody heritage." "This is what people living in Shetland today like to imagine their Viking ancestors looked like - fire-wielding pagan barbarians." "And if you believe the words of the Viking sagas, it's clear to see where they got that impression." "But take away the air of celebration and the pageantry, and consider the horror of waking up one morning and watching this howling horde unload themselves from their dragon-headed longships onto the beach below your little stone cottage." "This is what the end of the world looks like." "This is the end of everything you've ever known or held dear, unless of course, somebody somewhere can find a way to stop it." "In rides Kenneth MacAlpin." "He's one of Scottish history's great heroes, the champion who in AD 840 is supposed to have driven off the Vikings." "This brave war leader appears to come from nowhere, stepping into the power vacuum created after the existing royal line is massacred by the Vikings." "So it is that Kenneth MacAlpin unifies Scotland and is famously crowned her first king." "If only history was that simple." "The idea that Kenneth MacAlpin was the first king of Scotland is a myth that's persisted for centuries and it's certainly one I remember hearing at school as a wee boy." "But the historical records tell a different story." "At the time of Kenneth MacAlpin, Scotland did not exist." "It remained five separate peoples - the Angles, the Vikings, the Gaels, the Britons and the Picts." "Each retained their own distinctive culture." "What is more, records tell us that Kenneth MacAlpin and his immediate successors were described as kings of Pictland, not Scotland." "It's not until 40 years after Kenneth died that we find the first mention of the kings of Scotland." "So how did we get from Pictland to Scotland?" "There's one document that reveals the secret." "It's one of the most precious manuscripts of Scottish history and it's the only contemporary Scottish chronicle that covers the period." "Historians feel that much of the document can be trusted because it can be cross-referenced with chronicles from other kingdoms." "I'd expected to find it in an archive in Scotland but I was wrong." "Why is the manuscript here in Paris?" "(SPEAKS FRENCH)" "The archivist Madame Laffitte told me that a French courtier brought a collection of important historical papers back from London in the 1 7th century." "Is it widely known that the manuscript is here?" "(SPEAKS IN FRENCH)" "TRANSLATOR:" "It's not very well known - only people who come and search for this topic matter specifically come." "She says it's even been put on slides so that people can look at it." "I see." "What are the chances of it going to Scotland?" "MADAME LAFFITTE:" "Oh, absolutely no!" "The Chronicle is basically a list, a list of 1 2 kings of the House of Alpin from the 9th to the 1 1 th centuries." "It's a complex document because it's been compiled and copied and added to over the years by several unknown hands." "It's important because it covers the moment of transition, the ten or so years from 878 to 889 when all references to Pictland disappear and the kingdom of Scotland appears." "This is Scotland's lost decade." "Look at these two names - Aed, and Giricium or Giric." "These characters are going to be key to the formation of Scotland." "Aed was Kenneth MacAlpin's youngest son." "He'd inherited a kingdom in crisis." "At the point he became king, the Vikings conquered Pictland." "For two years, they took cattle, slaves and tribute." "Aed did little to stop them." "When there was no more booty to be had, the Vikings moved on." "Aed's kingdom lay in ruins." "The writer of the Paris Chronicle described his short reign as bequeathing "nothing memorable to history"." "A damning indictment indeed." "So, no surprise then, when his own followers took action." "This is where Giric comes into the story." "Giric was one of a number of Gaelic refugees who'd fled from the Vikings and headed east into Pictland." "Now he'd climbed his way up into Aed's favour." "Giric was not of royal stock, but what he lacked in blue blood, he made up for in ambition." "Events come to a head at a sacred site in Perthshire." "The year is 878." "Aed is slain by his own henchmen." "All the evidence points to Giric as the killer." "Giric was on the make." "His goal?" "The takeover of the Pictish kingdom." "And if that meant taking out the useless Aed, then so be it." "Giric instigated a regime change." "He rid the court of his Pictish rivals and replaced them with his own men." "Then he took control of the Pictish Church by appointing a Gaelic bishop to reform it." "This was a coup." "Giric, a Gael, was turning the Kingdom of the Picts into a Gaelic kingdom." "To reinforce his political takeover, he rewarded his Gaelic followers with Pictish land." "But Giric's position was far from secure." "Although he'd eliminated Aed, the two legitimate heirs, Aed's six-year-old son Constantine and his teenage cousin Donald, still lived." "Giric knew his kingship was unsafe while the two young boys remained potential rivals." "But Constantine and Donald were far beyond the reach of Giric." "Their protectors had escorted them safely to Fort Ailech in the north of Ireland." "It might seem strange to send two Pictish princes to a Gaelic country like Ireland, especially given Giric's Gaelic connections, but they met a warm welcome at Ailech from their aunt." "She was married to a powerful Irish king, and for her, this was a matter not of politics, but of kin." "They grew up in the royal household." "It was a Gaelic court and they became steeped in its culture and language." "They were educated at a nearby monastery and attended the Gaelic church." "Too young to challenge Giric, too young to be King of the Picts, the changes taking place in their homeland must have felt like a world away to the cousins." "But as each year passed and adulthood approached, the moment to avenge the murder of Constantine's father edged ever closer." "In the year 889, after a decade in exile, the two cousins were finally old enough to challenge Giric." "Donald and Constantine sailed homeward." "Revenge was in their hearts." "To win back their kingdom, they knew they'd have to depose the usurper." "Giric had seen it coming." "So had his supporters." "He fled to his stronghold here at Dundurn, in Perthshire." "In its day, this was a mighty hillfort with huge fortifications." "But not enough to deter the cousins." "The Chronicle tells of an eclipse, an ill omen of the times." "Typically, the historical records are vague about what happened next." "One chronicle reveals, "In Dundurn the upright man was taken by death."" "Archaeological evidence suggests a more violent end for Giric." "Burnt timbers and arrowheads were found here at Dundurn and it's tempting to imagine that Giric died here in that moment, killed by Donald and Constantine." "The kingdom was at a crossroads." "It could have gone either way " "Pictish, or Gaelic." "Culture, language and Church." "Everything was at stake." "The Picts must have expected Donald and Constantine to reverse the Gaelic takeover." "After all, Giric's rule had lasted just ten years." "But the royal heirs had changed." "Donald and Constantine left as Pictish boys." "They returned as Gaelic princes." "Now Donald and Constantine viewed their homeland through different eyes." "The Chronicle of the Kings shows us which way the wind is blowing." "This word here is "Albaniam", a Gaelic word meaning Scotland, a brand-new name for the kingdom and of immense significance." "With this one word, right here, Scotland is created." "This is Scotland's birth certificate." "This crucial transitional moment is backed up by the chronicle from Ireland." "In the year 900, it has an entry recording Donald's death." "He is King of Alba - the first king ever to be described as such." "And he's followed by Constantine, also described as a Scottish king." "Scotland became a Gaelic kingdom." "Over the next few generations, the Pictish way of life, the way they practised their religion, the stone carvings, and even their language fell out of favour." "Gaelic was the new language of power." "There was no sudden genocide, but the cultural takeover was just as complete." "In 906, Constantine arrived in Scone near Perth for an important new ceremony." ""Scone" is a Gaelic word and what happened here would form the basis of all future coronations." "Blessed by a Gaelic bishop, Constantine sat on a block of stone." "It no doubt harked back to the footprint ceremony of Dunadd from long before." "It's better known as the Stone of Destiny." "For centuries afterwards, and right up to the present day, it's been used in the inauguration of monarchs." "Now, the original is on display in Edinburgh Castle." "It's just a simple block of red sandstone and yet it's been fought over, mythologised and romanticised, and it will crop up again and again in Scotland's story." "Although Constantine now appeared to hold sway over most of north Britain, the young kingdom's survival was touch and go from the outset." "Forjust as Scotland was forming, another power bloc to the south had come of age at almost exactly the same time." "This kingdom would prove to be Scotland's most persistent foe of all." "Angle-land was ruled by an Anglo-Saxon king called Athelstan." "He'd driven the Vikings out of Northumbria and by incorporating this territory, had secured a new northern boundary." "But Angle-land, or England as it became known, was not enough for Athelstan." "Admirer of the Romans, he aspired to rule the whole of Britain." "He decided to carry on where the Romans left off." "He marched north." "Like Calgacus nearly 900 years before, Constantine faced a stark choice." "Tackle Athelstan in battle and risk annihilation, or surrender the kingship of Scotland." "Neither outcome was acceptable, but Constantine came up with a third option." "And this is it, the awesome rock fortress of Dunnottar." "Here, Constantine and his war band were hemmed in." "But Athelstan couldn't capture the stronghold itself, and so he and Constantine came to terms." "Constantine could keep his status as King of Scotland, but Athelstan would be his overlord." "In agreeing to this, Constantine saved Scotland and his own neck, but to the young, aspiring leaders at his court, he'd sold out." "So, the next time Athelstan commanded him to submit, he refused to obey." "Subservience wasn't Constantine's style, particularly when both he and the young kingdom of Scots had come so far." "What he did next would have been unthinkable a few decades previously - he made peace with the pagan Vikings." "Partly motivated by a sense of "united we stand, divided we fall", more importantly, the Viking king had lost territories to Athelstan and he wanted them back." "Together they forged a northern alliance and in 937, Constantine headed south for a decisive confrontation." "At stake was the very future of the island of Britain." "On one side advanced Athelstan, the Anglo-Saxon ruler of all England." "On the other, the northern alliance." "The king of the Britons, the king of the Vikings from across the Irish Sea, and the king of Scotland, Constantine." "The many armies, tens of thousands of warriors, clashed at a site known as Brunanburh, where the Mersey estuary enters the sea." "For decades afterwards it was simply called The Great Battle." "This was the mother of all Dark Age bloodbaths and would define the shape of Britain into the modern era." "An Anglo-Saxon account of the battle reads, "They clove the shield-wall," ""hewed the war-lindens with hammered blades - the foe fell back " ""the folk of the Scots and the ship-fleet fell death-doomed." ""The field was slippery with the blood of warriors." ""The West Saxons, in companies, hewed the fugitives from behind," ""cruelly with swords mill-sharpened."" "The fighting went on from dawn until dusk." "When it was over, the field was littered with the dead and the dying, picked over by wolves and carrion crows." "Vikings, Saxons, Britons and Welshmen, Gaels from Ireland," "Northumbrians, even Icelanders." "Amid the corpses of the men of Scotland was Constantine's eldest son." "All slain to settle the matter of Britain." "Although Athelstan emerged victorious, the resistance of the northern alliance had put an end to his dream of conquering the whole of Britain." "Constantine, meanwhile, escaped back to his homeland with the remains of his battered army." "This had been a battle for Britain." "One of the most important battles in British history, comparable to Hastings." "Yet today, few people have even heard of it." "937 doesn't quite have the ring of 1 066, and yet Brunanburh was about much more than just blood and conquest." "This was a showdown between two very different ethnic identities - a Norse-Celtic alliance versus Anglo-Saxon." "It aimed to settle once and for all whether Britain would be controlled by a single imperial power or remain several separate independent kingdoms, a split in perceptions, which, like it or not, is still with us today." "And as for King Constantine?" "From exile to Ireland as a young boy, the murder of Giric at Dundurn, his crowning at Scone, his short subservience to the English king, the battle of Brunanburh and the saving of Scotland, there was much for the battle-scarred warrior to reflect upon." "Kenneth MacAlpin founded the Scottish royal line as an opportunistic Pictish warlord, but it was his grandson Constantine who secured the kingdom, and, during his long reign of 43 years, ensured its survival." "Scotland stands as testament to Constantine's political astuteness and staying power." "And then, remarkably, he relinquished his kingship." "In an age characterised by brutal murders and takeovers, he retired." "(CHOIR SINGS)" "Religion had always played an important part in his life as king." "Now Constantine, sharing the name of the Roman emperor who'd first embraced Christianity, moved it centre stage." "St Andrews had become the religious capital of his new kingdom, and so he came here in AD 943, just six years after the greatest battle of his life." "He ended his days leading a humble, almost hermit-like existence, in a cave near St Andrews, as a holy man." "And what of the Picts?" "An English historian, the Archdeacon of Huntingdon, writing just 200 years later in 1 1 40, commented that, "we see that the Picts have now been wiped out," ""and their language also is totally destroyed," ""so that they seem to be a fable we find mentioned in old writings."" "The Archdeacon was wrong." "As we've seen all along, so much of these early years was seen through the eyes of others." "The Picts weren't wiped out." "With the Gaels, they fused together in the fires of adversity and rebranded themselves as Scots." "The hybrid kingdom of Alba was now home to a restless people, and as for the fully formed country we would recognise as "Scotland", the story had only just begun." "AtZLIT 2011" "It's mid-winter, 1230." "A horrific scene is played out in the middle of a busy market square." "An infant child is held up to the crowds." "(BABY CRIES)" "Seconds later, she's dead." "Her small corpse lies discarded in the mud, her brains splattered across the column of the market cross." "Not far from the scene sits the man who ordered her murder." "Meet Alexander II, King of the Scots." "70 years later, the skin is flayed from the back of a hated English cleric." "Meet the man who had that skin fashioned into a sword belt " "William Wallace, rebel, fugitive." "This is the story of two ruthless men " "Alexander II, who forged Scotland in blood and violence." "And William Wallace, whose resistance to the nation-breaking King of England, hammered national consciousness into the Scots." "This is the River Tay, just north of Perth." "It runs past Scone, the ancient inauguration site of the kings of Scotland." "On a cold December morning in 1214, a 16-year-old boy journeyed across this river heading for Scone." "His elderly father William had died the night before, but there was no time for mourning." "This quick-tempered teenager was about to become the next king of Scots, Alexander II." "Alexander is descended from a powerful dynasty of kings, traditionally known as the Canmores." "A family who, for generations, fought to preserve their bloodline and kingdom." "Alexander was an only son." "From a young age, he'd been destined for greatness, but he wasn't Alexander the Great just yet." "The kingdom he inherited was smaller than the Scotland we recognise today." "It rubbed shoulders with a patchwork of other peoples and different languages." "To the north, the Earldoms of Caithness and Sutherland." "To the west, the Gaels of the Hebrides and the Isles." "And in the south, the fiercely independent Lordship of Galloway." "But England, England was bigger, stronger, richer than them all." "And for nearly 200 years, the English kings said the Kingdom of Scots belonged to them." "The English were the overlords." "It was all a game in which what you said you owned mattered every bit as much as what you actually held." "The early Canmores had played the game, had recognised English superiority, but subservience was not Alexander's style." "As far as Alexander was concerned, he was every bit the equal of an English king." "Call it brash, call it arrogant, he was on a mission to free his kingship from English overlordship once and for all." "But Alexander had a problem." "If he hoped to free Scotland from overlordship, he would first have to resolve a bitter dispute with the king of England, King john." "Northumbria, Cumberland and Westmorland were territories to which both the kings of England and the kings of Scots laid claim." "To settle the argument, Alexander's father had given both money and two of his daughters to King john of England." "But john had reneged on the deal." "Now Alexander was determined to take back what was rightfully his." "Alexander wasn't the only one with a grudge against King john." "There was a long queue of English barons with similar grievances." "Their biggest gripe against King john was that he had bled them dry with his constant requests for money to fund his war in France." "In protest, they drew up a list of over 60 demands." "MAN: (READS) "All hostages and charters shall..." ""All cities, boroughs, towns and ports shall enjoy..." ""Officials will not seize any land..." ""Ye shall do this without destruction or damage..."" "NEIL OLIVER:" "The document became known as Magna Carta." "The barons added Alexander's claim to the disputed northern territories to the bottom of the list, in Clause 59." "A promise to "do right" by Alexander, King of the Scots." "MAN: (READS) "Alexander, the King of the Scots," ""concerning the return of his sisters and hostages," ""and his liberties and his right," ""according to the way in which we..."" "NEIL OLIVER:" "King john had no option but to agree to the barons' demands." "He affixed his seal to the charter." "But no sooner had he done so, he rejected it, calling it "mere foolishness"." "Enough was enough." "The barons decided to rid themselves of King john." "England plunged into civil war." "This was too good an opportunity to miss." "A chance to reclaim the border lands he believed were rightfully his." "So he invaded northern England." "He laid siege to Norham Castle." "He burned Newcastle to the ground, and he took Carlisle." "This impassioned teenager meant business." "Alexander was no stranger to the battlefield." "Despite his tender years, he'd served his military apprenticeship aged only 14, when he led his father's army." "After crushing Gaelic rebels in the north of Scotland," "Alexander earned the respect of his men." "Two years later," "Alexander won the respect of the rebellious English barons as he took on their king." "Now, with King john on the defensive, the barons in the north of England decided to switch allegiance and form a pact with Alexander." "On 11 January 1216, in Melrose Abbey, the northern barons lined up to swear fealty to the King for their lands." "And that king was the King of Scots." "As far as Alexander was concerned, now that the northern barons had paid homage to him, the disputed border lands were his." "He had avenged his father." "While Alexander tightened his grip in the north, the English barons in the south turned to john's enemy, the French, for help." "The barons invited Prince Louis to England to take the English crown." "He accepted." "In the spring of 1216, the French prince and his army sailed for England." "Opportunity knocked again." "Alexander planned to cut a deal with the French prince." "In return for his support, Alexander intended to press Louis to recognise the disputed northern territories as Scottish." "In a stroke, the English Crown 's claims of overlordship would be swept aside." "So he did something no Scottish monarch had clone before, or since." "He marched an army all the way to Dover." "Meeting little resistance on his way south, he joined forces with the French army and together they laid siege to Dover Castle - the key to England." "In all the wars with England, no other Scottish king ever came so far." "It was an incredible achievement." "Alexander's head must have swelled with every passing day." "He was 17 and he was on the brink of achieving his family's longest-held ambition." "Half of Britain was nearly his." "But then fate dealt a devastating blow." "King john died." "On the face of it, his death should have been good news for Alexander, but with john out of the way, the need for the barons' war vanished." "The barons who had once opposed King john now flocked to his son's side - the new king, Henry III." "Both Alexander, King of Scots, and Louis, the French prince, had outgrown their usefulness." "The English barons sent them packing." "There was no deal for Alexander - all of his grand ambitions fizzled out." "Henry III reissued Magna Carta and all references to Alexander's claims were omitted - not even a footnote." "Despite loud protests, the ground was cut from beneath his feet and he was left out in the cold." "And it got worse." "The Pope gave his backing to Henry III." "Alexander found himself excommunicated the powers of the Scottish church suspended." "Back to square one." "It stung." "The Pope chastised him like a wayward son, ordering the truculent teenager to return his English conquests and pay homage for them to the King of England - the nine-year-old King of England." "In Northampton, on 19 December 1217," "Alexander, bereft of allies, paid homage to the child king, Henry III." "His ambition of ruling the northern territories of England was over." "Deflated, Alexander returned to Scotland." "His ambitions shattered, his morale was at an all-time low." "He came here to Arbroath Abbey to pay respects to his father William, who had also failed to regain the northern territories." "If Alexander had learnt anything from the war in England, it was that the northern barons had felt English, not Scottish." "They had chosen Henry as their king, not Alexander." "The English barons knew instinctively who their king was." "But could the same be said for the Scottish nobles?" "The Scottish nobles were split between two powerful factions." "ln the south were the descendants of Norman families, invited to settle in southern Scotland by the early Canmore kings." "Helping to build many of the great Border abbeys and cathedrals, they changed the face of Scotland, transforming it into a more European-looking kingdom." "In the north were the territories of powerful Gaelic earls, whose ancestors had forged the Kingdom of Scots." "But these were the very Gaelic lords that Alexander's family had rejected in favour of a Norman future." "The old Gaelic elite became sidelined." "Once upon a time, they'd helped run the kingdom." "Now they were called things like "divider of the King's meat", while the French-speaking brat pack of Norman lords received titles like "chancellor" and "constable of Scotland"." "One chronicler of the time wrote, "The modern kings of Scotland" ""count themselves as Frenchmen in race, manners, language and culture." ""They keep only Frenchmen in their household and following," ""and have reduced the Scots to utter servitude."" "Some Gaelic nobles adopted the Norman ways, but others returned to their own lands, beyond the reach of the King of Scots - the semi-independent Gaelic lands of Galloway, Argyll, Ross," "Sutherland and Caithness, sometimes subject to the King of Scots, sometimes not." "And beyond them, Alexander's rule petered out completely." "The Hebrides and the Northern Isles - all lands claimed by another aspiring and aggressive kingdom Norway." "It was messy, too messy for Alexander's liking." "He would never throw off English claims of overlordship until all the Scottish nobles acknowledged him as their king." "It was time for a new approach and a new deal." "Alexander decided to strike a balance between Norman innovation and Gaelic tradition." "In his new Scotland, both would be allowed to flourish." "He invited the Gaelic warlords back in from the cold." "In return for some of the top jobs, they would fight his battles." "They would help him conquer Scotland, territory by territory." "His first test came from the north, when the men of Caithness roasted one of Alexander's bishops alive." "Alexander returned the compliment in spades." "In Ross, challengers to Alexander's succession rebelled against him." "In response, Alexander's Gaelic warlords severed the leaders' heads and presented them to him as a gift." "In the west, Alexander pressed on again, down the Great Glen to Lochaber and beyond to the Isles, to attack the lands of the Norwegian king." "Mercy and compassion were never Alexander's strong points." "The man who would be king of all Scotland proved to be utterly ruthless from the moment he set out to subdue it." "A symbol of just how far he would go to secure his kingship was in his treatment of a baby girl." "Alive, she represented a rival claim to his throne." "In Alexander's eyes, she was just as much of a threat as any sword-wielding assassin." "He took no chances." "The infant was a distant relative of the Canmore line." "Her fate was recorded by the Lanercost Chronicle." "MAN: (READS) "The daughter, who had not long left her mother's womb," ""innocent as she was," ""was put to death in the view of the marketplace." ""Her head was struck against the column, and her brains dashed out."" "Neil Oliver:" "Alexander now had what he wanted." "Her elimination killed off the last threat to the Scottish Crown." "This terrible and shocking act was remembered for generations to come." "And that was the point." "Loud and clear, the King of Scots let it be known," ""This is what will happen to anyone who crosses my path," ""however young, however innocent."" "But his actions had delivered results." "Something new had emerged." "Alexander's victories had not only brought peace, but something far more enduring." "One people, one kingdom." "Now everyone was subject to one king and that made them one people" " Scots." "Alexander had restored the esteem of his Kingdom to such an extent that King Henry III of England agreed to a border, established for the first time in 1237." "Psychologically, that was a big step." "Now Scots could say," ""This is Scotland, that is England, and we are different."" "Alexander's 35-year reign ended when he died on 8 July 1249." "His kingdom stretched all the way from Caithness in the north to the Solway Firth in the south." "That was the legacy of Alexander II." "(FOLK MUSIC PLAYS)" "J# Ex te lux oritur o dulcis Scocia" "J# Qua vere noscitur fulgens Norwagia" "J# Que cum transvehitur Trahis suspiria... # P" "In the years following his death, a stronger, more confident Scotland entered a golden age." "His son, Alexander III, inherited the family firm." "Times were good." "Scotland prospered and culture flowered." "England now saw Scotland differently." "Suddenly, the Scots were worth getting into bed with." "Claims of overlordship were replaced by offers of marriage." "And so it was that at Christmas 1251," "Alexander III, King of the Scots, married Princess Margaret of England." "It was an ostentatious display of wealth and power and the message was clear " "Scotland was determined to be seen as an equal partner, an equal kingdom." "Eyeing the proceedings was the bride's brother, the young Prince Edward." "Heir to the throne of England, this long-legged, blue-eyed boy was the epitome of an English prince." "But more penetrating eyes could see beyond the image." "This boy's life would be less than saintly." "Edward had a taste for violence." "The chronicler Matthew Paris famously recalled how the young prince got one of his followers to attack a man, cut off an ear and gouge out an eye." "Paris wondered what kind of king he would make," ""If he does these things when the wood is green," ""what can be hoped for when it is seasoned?"" "As time passed, Edward grew into a formidable and skilful warrior." "He indulged his lust for war by heading off on crusade to the Holy Land." "On his return, he is every inch the hero, and at last crowned King of England." "But while Edward 's life took on the glow of a medieval boy's own story," "Alexander III 's life turned into Greek tragedy." "In the space of nine years," "Alexander III lost his wife - Edward's sister - and all three of his children." "The Canmore dynasty was withering on the vine." "Edward was shocked and sent a letter of condolence to his brother-in-law." "Alexander's reply to that letter seems to suggest a genuine warmth between the two kings." "(READS) "You have offered much solace for our grief by saying" ""that although death has borne away your kindred in these parts," ""we are united together perpetually, God willing," ""by the tie of indissoluble affection."" "Then, in March 1286, Edward heard about another death" " Alexander." "The King of Scots had finished his business in Edinburgh but he was desperate to travel the 20-odd miles to here at Kinghorn and the royal palace where his new young wife, Yolande, was waiting for him." "His advisors begged him not to go - it was a foul night, dark and stormy - but the warnings went unheeded and somewhere near here" "Alexander became separated from his guides and was thrown from his horse." "They found his body on the beach the next morning, the neck broken." "Edward mourned the death of his brother-in-law, though some would say that he shed crocodile tears." "He may have been related to Scotland's royal family - his father may have recognised Scotland's sovereignty - but Edward was descended from a long line of English kings who claimed to be her overlord, a claim that Edward had not forgotten." "And now the kingdom's future hung by a thread." "Next in line to the Scottish throne was Alexander's three-year-old granddaughter and Edward's grand-niece, Margaret, known as the Maid of Norway." "The child Margaret was the last direct link with the Canmore dynasty." "Her marriage to Edward's son was speedily arranged." "As far as Edward was concerned, as soon as the ink on the marriage agreement was dry," "Scotland would belong to him." "The logic was simple." "Medieval women were property." "What they owned belonged to their husbands." "What the Maid owned, once she was married, would belong to Edward's son." "Then in October 1290, the Maid died." "The house of Canmore was finished." "Scotland was without a royal family." "For Edward, this was an act of divine providence." "The succession was in doubt because there were two leading contenders vying for the Scots throne." "john Balliol and Robert Bruce the Elder were from two of Scotland 's most powerful families." "Both had enough military muscle to back their claim on the field." "Scotland was divided." "It fell to the Guardians - men chosen to govern the realm in the absence of a king - to prevent civil war." "But they needed help." "An impartial, friendly arbitrator." "Someone with experience." "Someone who could command respect." "Who else but King Edward I?" "Internationally respected monarch, and master of the law." "And, after all, relations between the two kingdoms were amicable and Edward was family." "There was no reason to doubt him." "Edward called for a parliament to be held on 6th May 1291 to decide the future of the Scottish crown, and the location he chose was Norham - over there, on the English side of the River Tweed." "The Scots smelled a rat." "The future of Scotland to be decided in England?" "It wasn't right." "So the Scots stalled on the Scottish side of the river." "It was a stand-off." "It didn't take Edward long to reveal his true colours, his real intention." "He sent word to the Scots that the parliament would not start until the Guardians and the claimants for the throne of Scotland acknowledged his position as superior overlord of Scotland." "The Scots were stunned." "60 years of peace and now this." "They would not give up their hard-won autonomy." "One of the six Guardians of Scotland was Bishop Wishart of Glasgow." "A shrewd and powerful figure, Wishart, a bulldog of a man." "True to style, he delivered Scotland 's response in person." "He told Edward to his face." "MAN:" "The Scottish Kingdom is not held in tribute or homage to anyone save God alone." "Edward shrugged off Wishart's words of defiance." "Although Bruce and Balliol had the only serious claims," "Edward decided to change the rules again." "He produced 11 more claimants from leading noble families and declared that if they didn't acknowledge his overlordship, they would be eliminated from the contest." "The Scots were outmanoeuvred." "If Bruce and Balliol wanted the job of King of Scots, they had no choice but to agree to Edward's terms." "One by one, the now 13 claimants, along with the Guardians of Scotland, swore fealty to Edward, the King of England, as "superior and direct overlord of the kingdom of Scotland." "Edward had what he wanted." "It made no difference to him who was actually chosen." "He already had all of the claimants' oaths of subservience in the bag." "In the end, it was John Balliol who emerged as heir to the throne." "Edward had it all stitched up." "He was Scotland's superior overlord and not a drop of blood had been spilt." "Wishart's deepest fears were being realised before his very eyes." "He didn't hang around long." "He'd seen enough." "No longer a Guardian, Wishart returned to Glasgow." "The new King of Scots, john Balliol, had to pay homage and swear fealty to Edward for his kingdom a second time." "Edward's authority was absolute." "He could do exactly as he wanted... and he did." "In 1294, Edward demanded Scottish troops for his war against France." "Then he summoned Balliol himself to fight." "The King of Scots to do military service for the King of England?" "It seemed unthinkable." "At a stroke, the achievements of the Canmores - the forging of Scotland, its status as a separate and distinct entity, was in peril." "It was time for action." "Bishop Wishart and the other Scots leaders realised Balliol was no match for Edward." "At a parliament in Stirling, they debated what to do about Balliol." "Wishart had no qualms." "By the end of the meeting, the Bishop 's radical view prevailed." "A new Guardianship was established." "A council of 12 men was selected to run the affairs of the kingdom in Balliol's name." "Balliol was to be reduced to a figurehead, to be wheeled out to play the role of ruler." "Now, the real governors of Scotland laid plans to fight Edward." "As Wishart saw it, the council had two tasks - negotiate a treaty with France and prepare the country for war." "France was Edward's enemy." "Military support from them would mean the Scots stood a chance against Edward's forces." "In the late summer of 1295, a delegation left Stirling for Paris to negotiate a treaty with the French king." "The terms were simple." "Should Edward attack France, then the Scots would wage war against the English." "In return, the French promised support should Scotland be attacked." "The French agreed." "When Edward went to war against France in 1296, the Scots duly marched into England." "The fuse was lit." "Wishart waited for Edward's inevitable onslaught." "It came." "On 30 March 1296, Edward's army crossed into Scotland." "Edward wasn't a man to do things by halves." "At around 30,000 strong, this was the largest army that had ever been sent north." "First stop, Berwick-upon-Tweed." "Just as the Easter celebrations were drawing to a close," "Edward crossed the Tweed." "The feeble, timber fortifications offered no resistance." "What followed was one of the worst massacres in British medieval history." "For two days, streams of blood flowed from the bodies of the slain." "For his tyrannous rage, he ordered 7,500 souls of both sexes to be massacred." "Mills could be turned round by the flow of their blood." "Despite the surrender of the local garrison," "Edward set about the wholesale slaughter of the town's population." "The orgy of violence only came to an end when the frantic pleading of local clergy moved Edward to show at least some pity." "But Berwick was just a warm-up." "Edward 's reputation would now precede him, as he advanced north into the heartlands of Scotland." "After defeating the large but inexperienced Scots army at Dunbar, resistance to Edward buckled." "Castle after castle fell." "Most of the Scots nobility were captured and imprisoned." "It was over." "Now, Edward wanted the man he believed responsible " "Balliol, the lamb caught amongst the wolves." "It took Balliol eight days to negotiate his surrender, which was hardly surprising, as he did have a lot of explaining to do." "Edward was angry." "Balliol had acted contemptibly and illegally." "He was Edward's man, and yet he had conspired with the French and attacked English soil." "He was a defaulting vassal who would have to be punished, along with the Scots if they refused to submit." "But Edward wanted more than a simple surrender." "He wanted a show." "Paraded as a penitent before Edward, Balliol was stripped of his kingship, the royal insignia ripped from his clothing, earning him the cruel nickname Toom Tabard " ""empty suit", King Nobody." "Broken and humiliated, Balliol was sent to the Tower of London and then to exile in France." "Not content to humiliate a man, Edward plundered the country." "He set about systematically stripping Scotland of all her symbols of sovereignty and independence - the crown jewels, the Black Rood of St Margaret, the holiest and most venerated relic of Scotland and the Stone of Destiny, the centrepiece of Scottish king-making." "In the months that followed," "Edward decided to take a tour of his newly won kingdom." "But this was no tourist trip." "City by city, burgh by burgh, castle by castle," "Edward forced the Scottish nobles to sign up to his new regime to put their names to what became the most infamous document in Scottish history." "The Ragman Roll." "Well, the Ragman Roll is a list of the Scottish nobles who had to give homage to Edward I of England in 1296." "So, it's got about..." "nearly 1,900 names on it." "NEIL OLIVER:" "What is contained in all these endless lines of text?" "What exactly are they signing up to?" "Well, basically, they had to pay homage to Edward I, who had defeated the Scots at the Battle of Dunbar, and he was essentially the King of Scots now, and they had to acknowledge him as their lord and master." "What are the famous names that would stand out?" "Well, you've got a full panoply of the Scottish nobility." "You've got the competitors for the throne, the head of the house of Balliol, Bruce, the Stuarts are there, there's a complete set of bishops, people like Bishop Wishart, and then there is, of course, a lot of knights, if you like," "and lesser people who held land in Scotland at that time." "But it isn't just the names of the nobility and bishops that appear on the Ragman Roll." "Representatives across the Scottish kingdom, religious and political, were forced to fix their seals of submission." "Scotland was without a king." "Beaten, broken and humiliated." "The winter of 1296 was one of the country's darkest." "Edward left the governance of Scotland to two trusted lieutenants and returned to where he'd left off- fighting the French." "As he crossed the Tweed back into England, he quipped," ""A man does good work when he rids himself of shit."" "But in the rush to be rid of Scotland, Edward missed something." "Scotland had never been directly ruled by an English king, so when Edward ordered the Scots to join his war in France, the Scots grew resentful." "And when Edward imposed English taxes to pay for it, the Scots grew rebellious." "Alexander II had given the Scots a united kingdom with a border, a sense of who they were." "But within the space of a decade, all of this was swept away." "Edward had already absorbed Wales into his kingdom and conscripted the Welsh into his armies." "Now he proposed to do exactly the same thing with Scotland." "And it was the prospect of being absorbed by England, of being forced to fight Edward's battles, that tipped the Scots over the edge." "The first spark of resistance was struck in the Gaelic north." "It was a small act of defiance, a single standard raised against Edward, but soon a myriad of flames engulfed the kingdom, and among them was one man, William Wallace." "William Wallace." "The Wallace." "For many, he's the ultimate freedom fighter, for others, a terrorist." "He is the enigmatic hero who appears from nowhere to liberate his people and to shape history." "The Wallace story is one of the defining legends of Scottish identity and the epitome of Scotland's story." "And yet, with all the mythologising, we've lost sight of Wallace the man - a remarkable man, but a man nonetheless." "The younger son of an obscure knight," "Wallace's destiny would be shaped less by himself, more by the needs of others." "And what Bishop Wishart, the self-appointed chief of the Scottish resistance movement, needed right now was time." "Scotland had run out of leaders." "Most of her nobles were either imprisoned or had been forced to fix their seals to the Ragman Rolls." "Wishart could have been under no illusions when the pair met here, at Glasgow Cathedral." "Wallace was no leader of armies, but he was smart and he could fight and he had the popular touch." "Most importantly, he could buy time for Wishart while the Bishop tried to raise the Scots nobles in Ayrshire." "An English chronicler put it simply " ""Wishart caused a certain bloody man, William Wallace," ""who had formerly been a chief of brigands in Scotland," ""to revolt against the King and assemble people in his support."" "And that's exactly what Wallace did." "After killing the hated English sheriff of Lanark, the very symbol of Edward's oppressive regime," "Wallace's rising swiftly gained momentum." "But the men who flocked to Wallace 's side weren't of noble blood." "His army were peasants - humble folk, the middling sort." "The kind of people who'd had first-hand experience of Edward's policies of wringing as many men and taxes out of Scotland as he could." "If Wallace's army was to stand any chance against Edward's mighty war machine, they needed space, open space, and time to train." "Wallace knew this would be no easy task." "His army was used to the hit-and-run tactics of guerrilla warfare." "They had little experience of the battlefield." "The best he could offer his men was discipline." "By the late summer of 1297, Wallace's army was ready." "He joined forces with Andrew Murray, a nobleman's son who had led a successful revolt in the north." "Together, they marched their men to intercept the English at Stirling." "It was only then, when the English woke up, they realised the handful of rebels had swollen into a respectable-sized army." "But the English captain, Warenne, wasn't alarmed." "His army, with its impressive heavy cavalry, could take on any peasant rabble." "To confront the Scots, the English army had to cross the River Forth." "Easier said than done." "Deep and impassable, the Forth rises in the west and flows east to meet the North Sea, almost cutting the country in half." "The crossing point - a narrow, wooden bridge at Stirling." "When the English arrived, Wallace and Murray were waiting." "They knew the land and they understood the strategic importance of the bridge across the Forth as the gateway to the north." "They positioned their army on the slopes of Abbey Craig, about a mile from the bridge." "On September 11th 1297, both armies faced each other." "In bald terms, Warenne told the Scots to surrender." "Wallace told them, "Go back and tell your people" ""that we have not come for the benefit of peace," ""but to do battle to defend ourselves and liberate our kingdom." ""Let them come to us, and we will prove this in their very beards."" "The English horsemen began to ride across the bridge." "Warenne suddenly exploded - he hadn't actually given the order to cross." "So he made his men come back to his side and regroup." "Then, on his command, they began to cross for a second time." "Wallace must have been amazed by this comic display of arrogance and complacency." "But Warenne didn't care how it looked." "He didn't rate Wallace's army." "As far as he was concerned, this would be little more than a good training exercise for the men." "What they learned was how to die." "The English were trapped, caught in the loop of the river with nowhere to go." "As the chronicler Guisborough said," ""There was indeed no better place in all the land" ""to deliver the English into the hands of the Scots," ""and so many into the power of the few."" "By nightfall, 5,000 English infantry and 100 knights had perished." "Among the English dead lay the body of the hated treasurer." "He'd been flayed alive." "The treasurer had taken the skin off Scots' backs, and now they had done the same to him in return." "Wallace kept the skin, had it fashioned into a sword belt, a memento of the day's victory." "The defeat was a huge loss of face for Edward." "The great English army, the vast, Edwardian war machine that had conquered Wales, that was famed throughout Europe, had been defeated." "But hardest of all to swallow was the fact it had been defeated by a bunch of peasant amateurs - Scots peasant amateurs, to boot." "It was at this time that Edward first heard the name William Wallace." "We can be sure of one thing - he'd never forget it." "The Scottish nobles were dumbfounded." "Now they were forced to rub shoulders with the middling folk to make this man Guardian of Scotland." "Murray, the noble who commanded the army with Wallace, would have been their preferred choice, but his death after Stirling Bridge ruled that out." "Here at Kirk of the Forest," "Wallace the outlaw became Sir William Wallace, the Guardian of Scotland." "He was the hero of the hour, for now." "But despite his victory, there were those who didn't approve of a mere commoner being given such a big job." "After all, what did he know about politics and kings?" "But none of that mattered at the moment." "What did matter was that he had proved himself in battle and his job was only half done." "Only when john Balliol was restored to the throne could Scotland be free." "Wallace had proved to be Edward's equal in every regard except status." "He was brutal, he was ruthless, he fought on Edward's terms." "He played dirty." "The defeat at Stirling Bridge had angered Edward." "Now he wanted revenge." "By July, his vast military machine, composed mainly of newly conquered Welsh, crossed into Scotland." "As Edward advanced north, he encountered a wasted landscape." "There was no sign of Wallace, but he could see his handiwork in every burnt-out farm." "Weeks passed, there was still no sign of him." "But then the logic of Wallace's strategy became obvious." "Denied food supplies, the English army started to starve, and fighting broke out between the English and Welsh infantry." "Edward's army was close to disintegration when it finally arrived at Linlithgow's town walls." "He realised he might have to abandon the war altogether, unless he could find Wallace, and fast." "The scouts reported that the Scots army was less than 20 miles away, at Falkirk." "Edward force-marched his men until they came upon Wallace." "The Scots were dug in - four schiltroms, bristling with spears." "Edward's propaganda machine had gone into overdrive." "The English troops weren't expecting to see Wallace the man, rather, Wallace the monster, an ogre who would quite literally skin them alive." "And of course, it was Edward who had unleashed the monster." "He had unmade Scotland, taking it apart bit by bit, and Wallace was the result." "Edward was unconcerned - it would all be over soon." "And it was, in a hail of arrows." "Edward's archers began the slaughter of the infantry." "It was said the Scots fell like blossom in an orchard when the fruit had ripened." "The cavalry completed the rout." "Wallace resigned as Guardian." "Scotland descended into five years of exhausting, costly, protracted fighting." "Then the Scots lost their ally, the French." "Alone, they could not defeat Edward." "It was pointless going on - the Scots sought terms." "Equally, Edward was tired and old." "He was in his 60s, and the war was burning a very large hole in his pocket." "He wanted to draw a line under the whole sorry business." "But naturally, he wanted that on his own terms." "He wanted Wallace." ""As for William Wallace," said Edward," ""it is agreed that he shall render himself up at the mercy and will" ""of our sovereign lord the King, as it shall seem good to him."" "Wallace's fate was sealed the following month." "At the St Andrew's Parliament of 1304, he was declared an outlaw by the Scots nobles." "129 landowners took Edward as their liege lord." "Among their ranks was the man who had helped create Wallace Robert Wishart, the Bishop of Glasgow." "In truth, the document they signed up to, the Ordinances of 1305, marked the completion of the second conquest of Scotland." "And this time, there was no mention of a king or a kingdom, merely a land." "As for Wallace, Edward had singled him out for special treatment." "No words of peace were offered." "Wallace must submit to Edward's pleasure." "Edward played every dirty trick in the book." "He threatened and blackmailed Wallace's friends, forcing them to hunt down the fugitive." "Finally, Wallace was betrayed." "On 3rd August 1305, he was seized in a house near Glasgow." "According to an English source, Wallace was surprised in his bed." "In the Scots version of what happened," "Wallace put up a huge fight before he was eventually taken." "Three weeks later, Wallace stood here, Westminster Hall, before Edward's judges." "The King, ever the master of the law, was determined to destroy Wallace's reputation." "A crown of laurel leaves had been placed on his head, to mock, it was said, Wallace's boast that one clay he would wear a crown." "As an outlaw, he was already legally condemned - no plea, no jury, no witnesses, no defence." "He was merely presented with the indictment." "That he had notoriously committed killings, arson, destruction of property, and sacrilege during the war with England." "That he had assumed the title of Guardian and seduced the Scots into an alliance with France." "The charge of treason was an innovation, but if it was on the King's Record, then it was law." "If Edward said he was a traitor, then he was." "It was only then that Wallace spoke." "He had never been a traitor." "He had never sworn allegiance to Edward." "Like Scotland, Wallace was trapped by Edward's laws." "The outcome was a forgone conclusion." "He suffered a traitor's death." "There was no Christian burial." "Wallace's boiled head was spiked on London Bridge and his quartered body sent north to Newcastle, Berwick, Stirling and Perth as an example of the fate that would befall anyone who challenged Edward." "What are we to make of Wallace?" "What is important is what he became after his death." "He became a brand, repackaged and rolled out in the centuries to come to suit both nationalist and unionist agendas." "700 years later, the basic vision of a free, independent Scotland, for which William Wallace fought, still haunts the collective Scots imagination." "For many, Wallace remains Scotland's greatest patriot." "But what had he actually achieved?" "In the end, Wallace had failed." "Scotland's king remained in exile, her nobles under oath." "Edward I, the Hammer of the Scots, had conquered Scotland." "You might even say he had turned it into an English region." "But in his fixation with the crown and the kingdom, he'd underestimated the people." "Edward's determination to crush them had served only to define for the Scots who they really were." "As summer drew to a close in 1 305, so too, it seemed, did the history of the Scottish crown." "King Edward I of England, Longshanks, the Lawgiver, the Hammer of the Scots, could have been forgiven for thinking that the Kingdom of Scotland was dead." "William Wallace certainly was." "He was food for the crows." "And as for the King of Scotland, John Balliol, he wasn't much better." "An absentee, exiled in France, a broken and beaten man." "Whether or not the crown was his hardly mattered." "He was neither able nor willing to wear it." "Edward was a keen chess player." "As far as he was concerned, this was the endgame." "Yes, Scotland was dead." "By 1 305, Scotland had been fighting to defend its independence from England for nine long years." "Edward I had secured significant victories." "He had removed Scotland's king, John Balliol, from the throne with maximum dishonour." "He had captured and killed Scotland's greatest military leader," "William Wallace, with maximum cruelty." "There were some pockets of resistance left, but they were small, nothing to worry about." "So job done, Edward owned Scotland." "Enough with the iron fist." "He could put the velvet glove back on." "In 1 305, Edward set about what he hoped would be the final subjugation of Scotland." "And he slipped out of character." "He went about his business gently." "Edward did deals with all of Scotland's leading men." "He allowed Scotland's nobles to keep their lands as long as they swore loyalty to him as king." "He did deals with Scotland's bishops too, but two of those bishops would be the very men who would mastermind a revolution that would restore the Scottish crown." "Bishop William Lamberton of St Andrews was a strategist, an intellect, a double dealer." "And Bishop Robert Wishart of Glasgow had been fighting for Scotland's independence for almost 20 years." "Edward should have strung them up with Wallace." "The story of the bishops who would rebuild the Scottish crown begins here in 1 301 , four years before Edward's final military victory." "For it was in the tiny Italian hill town of Anagni that the Pope now made his court." "The Pope was the highest judge on earth, closer to God than emperors and kings." "All earthly power came through him." "The Catholic Church held every Christian soul in Western Europe in its grasp." "Its spiritual powers were politics in disguise." "The courts and streets of Anagni would have been full not just of priests, but of diplomats and lawyers from every Christian kingdom." "No-one else but the Pope could set the final seal on Edward's success." "So, in 1 301 , Edward sought the Pope's agreement thatJohn Balliol was no king on the grounds that there was no Scotland to be king of." "The very existence of Scotland's crown was at stake, so that summer, a small party of Scottish priests were sent to Anagni to defend it, priests with legal expertise, led by a man called Baldred Bisset," "hand-picked to save the Scottish crown by Bishop William Lamberton." "But it wasn't just the Scottish crown that Lamberton wanted him to save." "English bishops largely did as they were told, and the Archbishops of York and Canterbury were subject to the English King." "The English church was under Edward's thumb." "But in Scotland there was no archbishop, and the Scottish crown had never fully secured control over church appointments." "Scotland's bishops had power that was independent of the Scottish crown and the privilege of direct appeal to the Pope himself, power and independence that could disappear if Scotland became an English province." "It all meant nothing if there was no Scottish king." "If Scotland was to become just another English territory, then Scottish bishops would have to bend the knee, tug the forelock and pay the tithes in Canterbury or in York, and they didn't want to." "In fact, they were determined that they would not." "So Bisset had his work cut out." "A crown to save, the independence of his bishops too." "Bisset brought with him a carefully prepared document, a legal brief." "He had three basic arguments to make." "First, he told a story." "The Scots were descended from Noah, they had lived in Scythia, near the Black Sea, then Spain." "One of their ancient kings had married an Egyptian princess called Scota, hence their name." "So the Scots were unique - not Irish, not Welsh, most of all not English." "Second, Bisset reminded His Holiness that Scotland bore the title of Rome's "special daughter", a status that required the Pope's protection." "And third, Bisset turned to the recent past." "Edward I, he said, had wickedly maltreated our legitimate king, exploited his absence and our resultant weakness, committed boundless atrocities against Scots, both clerical and lay, peasant and noble, male and female." "Free Balliol, said Bisset, and let him return to Scotland as our king." "The Pope was persuaded." "It was time, said the Pope, to stop the hammering." "He ordered the release of Balliol and let it be known that in his eyes, he was the illustrious King of Scots." "Bisset had saved the Scottish crown." "But Balliol was totally demoralised and made no attempt to resume his rule." "He took refuge in his family's lands in France." "The Scots were lumbered with a useless king." "For the bishops, defending the Scottish crown was no longer the problem." "The problem was the King himself." "How could he be replaced?" "It was Bishop Lamberton who took steps." "He sought a secret meeting with a renowned Scottish philosopher," "Duns Scotus, and Scotus outlined an idea with explosive implications." "The real root of royal authority was not inheritance." "True kingship was a contract between king and people." "And when a king had failed, as Balliol had, his people could reject him and choose someone else instead." "At last, Scotland's bishops could begin to look for someone to replace John Balliol." "But time was running out." "Edward was getting close to finishing his conquest of Scotland." "Edward had no idea that Scotland's bishops were looking for a king who could resist him." "He busied himself with the last moves in his final victory over Sc otland's crown." "He spared no expense." "His siege of Stirling Castle was getting nowhere, so, in 1 304, Edward took his spending spree one step further." "He ordered a new siege engine, a monstrous catapult of a kind known as a trebuchet." "He already had several, the instruments of other bitter victories." "This new machine was christened Warwolf." "It was the largest trebuchet ever built, and its component parts were transported in 27 separate wagons." "It was a weapon of terror." "For a counterweight," "Edward used lead stolen from the roofs of local churches." "The hapless defenders of Stirling Castle watched as this monstrosity took shape beneath their walls, and they surrendered." "Edward ignored them." "He wanted to see Warwolf at work." "He even had a little shelter built so that the ladies of the court could watch." "The conquest of Scotland had become entertainment." "Warwolf's first shot shattered a section of the castle's curtain wall." "The ladies were duly impressed." "But Edward was attacking the wrong building." "He should have aimed at the Abbey of Cambuskenneth, no more than a mile away." "As the walls of Stirling Castle fell," "Bishop William Lamberton held another secret meeting there." "This time with the future king of Scotland." "Two families had claims to the crown." "The Comyns were led by John Comyn, Lord of Badenoch." "The Comyns had lands all over Scotland, but they were blood relations ofJohn Balliol." "And John Comyn himself was a stickler." "A scrupulous man, a doer by the book." "It would be difficult to get him involved in something that sounded dangerously like the usurpation of the throne." "But there was another family, another claim." "There was a man who nursed the secret but unshakable conviction that the crown should have been given to his grandfather, notJohn Balliol, and so Robert the Bruce believed that the crown was now rightfully his." "But until now, he'd had no idea how to go about getting it." "Like Lamberton, he was at this point a vassal of the English King, but his loyalty to the family claim was considerably greater." "At Cambuskenneth, the Bruce and Lamberton signed a bond." ""They have agreed faithfully to be of one another's counsel" ""in all their business and affairs" ""at all times and against whichever individuals."" "There can only have been one subject discussed, one purpose for the contract." "Lamberton and the Bruce had agreed that he should take the throne, with the Church's help." "There was no mention of this in the contract, of course." "Writing down such a plan would have been suicidally unwise." "Secrecy was vital." "So the penalty for the failure of either party to keep to the terms was set at the fantastically high sum of £ 1 0,000." "£ 1 0,000 - the price of silence... until the time was right." "But Robert the Bruce was already 29, and he was not noted for his patience." "Forjust over 1 8 months, he managed to hold his tongue." "Then it started wagging - to the man the church had chosen not to choose, John Comyn." "On Thursday 1 0th February 1 306, the sheriff court was in attendance at Dumfries Castle." "Edward's sheriffs, Edward's justice." "As for the King himself, it was widely known that he was lying ill in an English monastery." "Everyone of any importance for miles around was in attendance." "So it was perfectly natural for the Bruce and Comyn to be in town - their seats were local." "They could meet, and the Bruce could try to introduce John Comyn to a truth he wouldn't like at all - "The bishops want me to be king"." "They met at Greyfriars Church in Dumfries and embraced." "Previous meetings between the two had been less cordial." "Seven years before, they had shaken each other gently by the throat, so today they stood on ceremony." "They were on their best behaviour." "It's almost certain that the bishops suggested such a meeti ng." "It made perfect sense, after all, for the Bruce to attempt to persuade John Comyn to support his claim." "It didn't make sense for the Bruce to kill him." "Leaving Comyn for dead, the Bruce and his men went to the sheriff's court to break it up, which was open rebellion." "While he was there, the Bruce received news that the Comyn was not dead, so he sent a follower back to Greyfriars Church to finish him off." "This was ugly." "This would be hard to spin." "He had murdered someone in a church." "The sin alone was deadly." "The place he had committed it, God's house, that made it infinitely worse." "He faced ruin, certain excommunication, expulsion from the Catholic church, and if he died whilst excommunicated, he would be damned eternally." "It was a steep price to pay for an impulsive act - his immortal soul." "ROBERT THE BRUCE:" "Ihave split the blood of an innocent man." "The Bruce fled here, to Glasgow Cathedral, to Bishop Robert Wishart, Lamberton's co-conspirator." "Wishart will have been displeased, to say the least." "It was too early." "Almost certainly, the bishops had wanted to wait for Edward's death." "The Bruce had ruined that." "Their cover was blown." "Nevertheless, Wishart absolved the Bruce of blood guilt." "He had no choice, they were in too deep." "Then Wishart made the Bruce swear an oath." "An oath that as king, he would always remain obedient to the wishes of the Scottish clergy, a shameful reminder of his recent crime, a tug at the leash." "And then...it started." "Wishart preached." "He launched the Bruce, the church's candidate." "He told his flock, "This Robert the Bruce will be Robert I." ""He is your king."" ""This is a crusade," he told them." ""A holy war." "Fight for him."" "As swiftly and as secretly as possible, Wishart and Lamberton planned the inauguration of the Bruce as King of Scots." "Rumours that Scotland's upstart bishops were about to make a king reached Edward." "Edward was angry, but he wasn't worried." "He had it all sewn up." "He'd found out everything the Scots needed to make a king and stolen it." "He'd taken the Stone of Destiny, he'd taken the Black Rood of St Margaret." "He'd even taken the Earl of Fife, who had the privilege of crowning Scottish kings." "But on March 25th 1 306, the bishops went ahead regardless and made their king." "Scotland had a real king once more, but there was no time to celebrate." "No parties, no pavilions, no parliaments." "King Robert returned to the Comyn lands in the south-west to secure them." "Bishop Wishart marched to Cupar Castle in Fife." "He took it, as the English later said, "like a man of war"" "which is exactly what he was." "By the end of the first week of April," "Edward had appointed an agent in Scotland." "Edward ordered him to raise dragon, the banner which signified no quarter, no prisoners, no mercy, no rules at all." "And the English rode north." "Wishart and Lamberton were swiftly captured." "The English regained Cupar Castle and moved towards Perth." "Robert I rode to meet them with all the forces at his disposal." "King Robert camped in the woods above Methven on the 1 8th June." "He had failed to draw the English out from Perth to a pitched battle in the accepted, sporting style of medieval chivalry." "So he would try again tomorrow." "But the dragon banner was flying." "For the English, chivalry was by the by." "They approached under cover of darkness." "It was a rout, a slaughter." "Robert and a few hundred survivors dragged themselves west." "His wife, Elizabeth, was still with them, his daughter and his sisters too, so he se nt the women north, hoping they might find refuge in Norway." "But they were captured and handed over to Edward." "Robert and his remnant suffered a further defeat at Tyndrum, a defeat that must have seemed final." "So the King of Scotland was forced to flee still further west, to Dunaverty, at the very tip of the Mull of Kintyre." "There was no land left to run to." "He put to sea and disappeared." "He must have sailed with the bitter knowledge that his crown was proving costly." "Bruce's wife and daughter were confined in convents." "He would not see his wife again for eight years." "Back on the mainland," "Edward indulged himself in an orgy of executions." "One of the victims was Robert's brother, Neil, hung, drawn, quartered, as Wallace had been." "The news of his brother's excruciating death will have bitten deep." "Perhaps this misfortune meant that God didn't want him to be king." "For six months, Robert the Bruce remained in hiding." "In 1 828, Walter Scott pulled all the strands of myth and hearsay together and gave the Bruce an encouraging spider for comfort, but it was just a story." "Where he fled to precisely is not known." "Ardnamurchan is the current favourite." "But wherever he went, Sir Walter was right about one thing, that Bruce had a decision to make, whether to give up or go on." "He had connections." "One of his sisters was the Queen of Norway." "He could have hidden there." "But that would have left his wife, his other sisters, his daughter and all his bishops in captivity." "It would have left his supporters, his friends and his brother dead and unprayed for, in purgatory, or worse." "What sort of choice was that?" "He chose to fight on." "He gathered a force of Irishmen and Hebrideans, and landed secretly at Turnberry in Ayrshire, towards the end of February in 1 307." "By the beginning of March, two more of his brothers were dead at English hands." "The price of Robert's throne was rising." "He took his forces, his anger, and his grief into the broken lands of south-west Scotland." "He wasn't hiding." "He was learning how to fight." "He had no more than a few hundred men." "Hardly any knights." "He only had spearmen, foot soldiers, and no intention whatsoever of following Wallace to an early grave." "So he could only wait until the English were wherehe wanted them to be... and then surprise them." "In April, Robert and a force of 300 men surprised an English force of 1 ,500 here beside Loch Trool in Galloway." "It was an unpleasant surprise." "There was no room for cavalry to manoeuvre and nothing for the English to do except trip each other up and die." "So they ran away." "So this was victory." "The Bruce enjoyed the taste." "But was it a fluke?" "A one-off?" "It might be." "By May, Robert was in Ayrshire." "The land was full of the level playing fields that knights adored." "The Bruce chose Loudoun Hill instead." "The Bruce had a few more men to work with now, about 600, and he put them to work gilding the lily, digging trenches to further reduce the opportunities for a wide assault, narrowing them down to a point." "On 1 0th May the English approached, 3,000 strong." "They charged." "Then they found out about the valley and the trenches." "They lost their elbow room." "A lot of them lost their horses as well." "When the Bruce and his men attacked, it was with such terrible violence that those English troops at the rear, those not yet engaged, decided not to engage at all." "They broke and ran." "It was no fluke." "Robert I was a winner." "God was on his side." "God had also had enough of Longshanks, the Lawgiver, the slaughterer of Scots." "Angered by the failure of his much larger forces to crush the Bruce," "Edward dragged himself out of his sickbed and ordered his armies to muster at Carlisle." "But he was iller than he thought, and older too." "This is as far as he got - the sands and marsh of the Solway Firth." "He died within sight of Scotland." "But the covetous King did not go gently." "He asked his son to send his heart to the Holy Land on crusade, but his bones would go with the army to Scotland to finish the business." "The King is dead." "Long live the King." "Longshanks' bones weren't up to the task, but they weren't the problem." "Edward II was." "He had his father's temper, but nothing else." "Not his intelligence or his learning or his tactical gifts." "His first act as king was to disobey his father's orders concerning the disposition of his various body parts." "He simply dropped dad off at Waltham Abbey to await proper burial." "Then, in his own good time, he joined the English army in Scotland." "On arrival, he learned they'd been badly provisioned, so he marched them south for a good square meal." "He would leave the Scots in peace, by and large, for the next three years." "And now the Bruce had a job to do - Edward's job." "He had some Scots to slaughter." "The Comyn family and their many supporters were still loyal to the Balliol claim." "There was only one thing to do with such opposition..." "Kill it!" "He left the borders to his increasingly trusted lieutenant, James Douglas." "Himself, he marched north, accompanied by his brother Edward." "The Bruce's campaign gathered momentum as he moved up the Great Glen." "His forces were never large, although by now they had a reputation." "His tactics were thorough and unpleasant." "He reduced one Comyn castle after another." "He reduced them to rubble." "He killed the occupants." "He burnt Nairn to the ground." "A ruined castle, after all, was no use to the Comyns, no use to the English if they returned and no use to a king who had settled on a strategy - hit and run." "Right now, the Bruce had no use for castles." "Castles meant you couldn't move." "So, burn the castle, fill the well, move on." "It took him just two months." "By November, he was in the north-east, his forces now joined by those of the Bishop of Moray." "Another man of war, Bishop Moray." "The vestments were just for weekends." "And then..." "The King is ill!" "The Bruce's illness was nameless, mysterious." "It left him weak as a kitten." "There was no medicine to hand, no doctor." "He grew steadily weaker as the days passed." "The King is dying." "It was winter." "The army was perilously close to running out of food." "The Earl of Buchan, cousin of the murdered John Comyn, had gathered a sizeable force and was waiting for the moment to attack." "The Bruce's forces withdrew into the Highlands." "The King was taken to a castle, to die, some thought." "And then, magically, as spring came, the King recovered." "He returned to the slaughter." "He came here, to Barra Hill, near Aberdeen." "The Earl of Buchan had dug himself in at the summit, amidst the remnants of an Iron Age hill fort." "It was, he thought, an impregnable location." "He was wrong." "By now the Bruce's reputation rode ahead of him." "The Earl of Buchan lost his cavalry to simple terror." "Then he lost the battle too." "John Comyn, Earl of Buchan, last of the Comyn nobility, fled to England." "He was dead within the year." "There were still supporters of the Comyns to exterminate." "King Robert rode north." "He came to Duffus Castle and the Bruce laid waste." "Then he sent his brother, Edward, eastward into Buchan, the heartland of Comyn power." "The Bruce did not forgive it." "On his orders, such damage was done that the land was infertile for a generation." "But it was not the land he damaged." "He didn't just burn the crops." "That would have made the land fertile in the coming year." "He ordered the slaughter of the livestock, and not only the animals, but those who tended them and who grew the crops - men, women and children." "Parts of Buchan were left barren for a generation because there was no-one left alive." "ROBERT THE BRUCE:" "Ihave split the blood of innocent men..." "NEIL OLIVER:" "ByMarch of 1309, the Bruce had crushed resistance almost everywhere in Scotland." "In the July of the previous year, the Pope had lifted his ban of excommunication." "So he was officially back in the fold, one of the saved, at least for the time being." "Now it was time to get on with the business of kingship." "Here at St Andrews, in a cathedral nearing completion after 1 50 years, he called his first parliament." "It was a funny sort of parliament, by modern standards." "It only lasted two days, and only really did two pieces of business." "Day one - parliament replied to a letter from the King of France, who wanted the Scots to go with him on crusade." ""Not just yet," said parliament, "we're busy."" "Day two - parliament issued an open letter called The Declaration Of The Clergy." "It's not a famous document, but it should be." "The Declaration Of The Clergy published for the first time the ideas that Scotland's bishops had borrowed from Duns Scotus." "With great cunning, it wove into Scotland's recent history the idea that a king could be chosen, and it did it as though everyone should always have known that such a thing could be." "The clergy and the "people", seeing the virtue of Robert the Bruce, had "agreed" upon him, and with "their concurrence and consent", he was raised to be king." "It's a very important document indeed." "It sounds almost revolutionary." "But in 1 309, the "people" really meant the important people - the nobility, the clergy, the community of the realm, not the peasants or the drinkers down the pub." "No, the declaration was written for the people, not by the people, because the people were meant to listen to it." "It was preached in churches." "It was copied, shown around, repeated." "It was the party line from Robert's faithful support and prop, the Scottish Church." "The Declaration Of The Clergy was stage two in Robert's conquest of Scotland, an attempt to persuade the doubters, and there were still many, that Robert was indeed the rightful king." "This was good." "But was it good enough?" "The sheer scale of the Bruce's task was becoming clear." "His kingship was still in question." "He was not a legend yet." "Three things needed to be done if he was going to make the throne safe for himself and for his male heir." "One, he had to secure the loyalty of all of Scotland's nobles and eject the English from any significant holdings." "Two, he had to force the English King to accept the independent status of his throne." "And three, he had to father a male heir." "He hadn't even finished task one, and his wife was still in English hands." "So no chance of an heir, then, or not a legitimate one, at least." "But before all of these things, he must become unquestionable." "He must become a legend." "And for that, he would have to wait five years." "He would have to wait for Bannockburn." "By the spring of 1 31 4, the Bruce had almost completed his first task." "Only Stirling and Berwick castles remained in English hands." "Edward II began raising an army to reconquer Scotland." "Edward mustered his forces at Berwick on 1 0th June - 1 5,000 footsoldiers, between 2,500 and 3,000 horse." "Edward's nobles were mostly absent and they hadn't sent as many knights as he would have liked either." "So not exactly a vote of confidence then, but no matter." "Edward had more than enough confidence in himself to make up the shortfall." "They rode north." "The Scottish forces mustered in the Tor Wood, south of Stirling." "The numbers bore no comparison." "500 light horse, about 6,000 foot." "But size isn't everything." "By now, the Bruce's army was used to war." "The men were used to each other." "His brother Edward, James the Black Douglas," "Thomas Randolph, the Earl of Moray, were experienced, battle-hardened men." "And the footsoldiers of the Scottish army had learnt to fight in schiltroms - packed together in close order, with spears and shields permanently presented." "Like tanks, but made of human bodies." "By Saturday 22nd June, the Bruce had chosen where to fight." "He'd had a lot of practice by now." "He chose wisely - the edges of New Park, near the Bannock Burn." "The trees limited cavalry action, and to the southeast, the ground was broken by streams and burns and rills." "On either side of the road leading to the New Park, the Bruce modified the terrain." "Just as he had done at Loudoun Hill, he made the ground treacherous for his foes, this time by ordering the digging of innumerable pits, disguised with grass and branches." "These would snap the legs of the English horse." "The English army itself made camp to the north, and night fell." "The next morning was a Sunday, so the Scots began it with a mass." "The Bishop of Dunkeld presided, and when the mass was finished, he will have got his weapons ready." "This would be the reckoning, the payment." "For the Bruce had lost brothers and friends, family and priests." "His wife and daughter, dear to him, had been imprisoned." "And those who gave allegiance to him had lost still more." "And now, the English King was here, no more than a hundred yards away." "He would be made to pay." "He must be made to pay." "The English opened with their knights, as was traditional." "A massed cavalry charge, and one of the knights, Henry de Bohun, found himself charging an isolated figure, off to the side of his soldiers." "An isolated figure, wearing a crown." "He lowered his lance and galloped forward." "This was his chance at immortality." "But the Bruce dodged it." "He rose up in his stirrups, and with a single blow of his battleaxe, split De Bohun's skull from crown to chin." "With that one stroke, the Bruce became legend." "The schiltroms held." "They pushed forward." "The English cavalry were sent in again, but the Earl of Moray's schiltrom forced them back, and that was the story of Bannockburn." "For two days, the Scottish schiltroms held and then pressed forward, hemmed the English in for slaughter." "And on the second day, the English had had enough." "So they did what had now become the traditional thing when faced with a Scottish army, its feet and spears firmly planted on the ground..." "They ran away." "The Scots got down to the profitable business of taking prisoners, and Edward took to flight." "Robert had too few mounted men to send a sizeable number in pursuit, so Edward escaped." "Check, but not checkmate." "The haul was impressive." "Robert was able to trade his prisoners." "He recovered Bishop Wishart, 74 years old and blind, his daughter, his sister, and best of all, Elizabeth, his queen." "Eight years of captivity had left their mark, and Robert will have known that what she'd suffered was his fault." "All for his costly throne." "All for his legend." "In the history books and by the firesides, the scale of the victory would swell, just as the tales would grow taller." "In fact, by the 20th century, the King himself had grown by two feet." "But the facts were rather bleaker." "Only the task of removing the English from Scotland was near completion." "The attempt to produce a male heir could now begin, but it was perfectly possible that Queen Elizabeth might prove barren." "Bannockburn had given him his legend, but it had changed nothing else." "The road to Scotland's independence seemed very long, and it was blocked." "Progress now depended on Edward II, who had no reason to make any concessions of any kind at all." "For four long years, the Scots raided English territories in the north of England, Ireland too." "Robert lost his last remaining brother, Edward Bruce, all in vain." "Edward took no notice." "He didn't need to." "He couldn't beat the Bruce on a battlefield, so he'd changed the game." "He'd started playing by the rules that Scotland's bishops used." "He had gone to the Pope." "And the new Pope was desperate to restore papal prestige by sending all the major crowns of Europe on crusade." "Kings who caused petty national squabbles would not be tolerated." "In 1 31 8, the Scots discovered that the English had convinced the Pope that the war between England and Scotland was Scotland's fault." "Robert, his lieutenants and his bishops were all excommunicated." "In addition, the Pope ordered that in every English church, three times a day, a ceremony was to be held at which the name of Bruce was cursed." "The news will have been bitter." "As the curses rose from every English church, the Bruce came to St Andrew's Cathedral for its day of consecration." "Almost 700 years ago, the Bruce stood here, along with his old mentor, William Lamberton, but without Wishart, who had died two years before." "He watched as these marks were made." "A generous annuity for the new cathedral was announced." "He was pious, desperately so." "The Bruce's spending on things like this - churches, chantries, monasteries and chapels - was increasing." "Generous grants were made to institutions dedicated to St Andrew, St Fillan, St Thomas, St Ninian." "His people called him Good King Robert." "But Good King Robert wasn't so sure." "He wanted the saints to intercede on his behalf." "Those English curses didn't seem quite empty, not at least to the man they were intended for." "The fate of the Scottish crown was back in the hands of the papacy." "And the Scottish clergy, once again, was the Bruce's only hope." "In April 1 320, a Scottish knight set off for the papal court." "He was a postman of sorts." "He carried with him three letters." "All were written here, in Arbroath Abbey." "One was from King Robert, one was from the bishops, and the third was from the nobles of Scotland." "Only the letter from the nobles survives, and it's now known as The Declaration Of Arbroath." "It has become a very famous document." "Some people see it as an astonishingly precocious manifesto for national and democratic freedom." "Some Americans argue that you can see its influence in their own Declaration Of Independence." "In 1 320, it was a hard-nosed reply to English spin." "And it spun pretty hard itself." "Of course, it wasn't the nobles who actually wrote it." "This was ventriloquism, with the nobles' dummy sat firmly on the bishops' knee." "It was a potted history, and a brandished fist of a document." "The Pope must have enjoyed reading it." "First, it summarised the arguments of Baldred Bisset's brief." ""We are an ancient people." ""We are Rome's special daughter."" "Second, it asserted that Robert the Bruce," ""by due consent and assent of us all", had freed them from the English yoke." "But if he should submit to the English, "We Scots will drive him out," ""and make some other man who was well able to defend us our king." ""For as long as but a hundred of us remain alive," ""never will we be brought under English rule." ""It is in truth, not for glory, nor riches," ""nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom," ""for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself."" "So, the idea of Duns Scotus, that kingship is contractual, with added brass neck and a generous pinch of broadsword, had finally reached the papal court." "But it hadn't finished yet." "It added that it was the English, not the Scots, who were making excuses for not going on crusade, and that if His Holiness didn't do something to stop them, then His Holiness would be blamed by God" "for the slaughter of bodies and perdition of souls that would inevitably follow." "Cheeky." "The Pope replied in August." "The letters, astonishingly, had had the desired effect." "The excommunications were suspended." "Better still, Pope John wrote to Edward and told him to end the conflict and negotiate." "Edward agreed, with an ill grace." "The treaty negotiations were to take place at Bamburgh, in Northumberland, in the March of 1 32 1 ." "So, in March, the envoys began to gather." "The papacy and the French King sent agents too." "It was a farce, a drain blocked with all the old arguments." "The English wheeled out the ancient story of immemorial English ownership of the Scottish crown." "The Scots replied with creaky chunks of Bisset and a generous helping of the Declaration, adding for good measure that the entire Norman and Plantagenet dynasty was itself illegitimate, stemming as it did from the foreign usurpation of 1 066," "an invasion led by someone the Scots chose to refer to as William the Bastard." "The true and legitimate claim on the English crown, said the Scots, lay with the house of Wessex, whose sole living representative was one Robert I of Scotland." "The Bamburgh negotiations came to nothing." "A letter confirming Robert's excommunication arrived a month later." "Stalemate." "And after that, for six years, it was groundhog day for Robert the Bruce." "Every time the Scots secured concessions at the papal court," "Edward successfully got them undone." "The only day that delivered any variety was the 5th March 1 324, when Queen Elizabeth was delivered of a healthy baby boy, someone to give Scotland to, someone of his blood." "A miraculous male heir." "David." "The Queen was 35." "The King was 50." "For those days, it was near enough to miraculous." "But did it matter?" "Every morning, the Bruce awoke to find the English King unchanged." "The Bruce's groundhog day lasted until 20th January 1 327, when Edward II was deposed." "Edward was removed from the throne by his wife, Isabel of France, and her lover, Roger Mortimer, with the tacit approval of an English nobility that was heartily sick of Edward's incompetence, favouritism, rumoured homosexuality, and corruption." "His son, the Prince of Wales, just 1 4 years old, was crowned King Edward III a little less than two weeks later." "This was good news." "This was an opportunity." "But King Robert, once again, was ill." "He remained active, but sometimes he was active almost in effigy, carried around from place to place, paralysed, like a statue of himself." "The illness came and went, but it came more and went less as time passed." "An eyewitness in July said the King was so ill, he could scarce move anything but his tongue." "But it was time for one last effort, or this great opportunity would be lost." "And so, miraculously, in August the King was well enough to lay siege to Norham Castle, while Moray and Douglas made assaults on the castles at Alnwick and Warkworth." "All of these sieges in Northumbria sent a message loud and clear." "The Scots, quite possibly, were about to take the north of England." "The threat was real." "The English folded." "On 1 8th October, whilst at Berwick, Robert issued his conditions." "The King of England must recognise his throne and the independence of the Scottish crown in perpetuity." "To seal the deal, his son David was to marry the King of England's sister, Joan." "The English hummed and hawed, but there was little doubt that they would accept all of the important points." "The Bruce had won." "Queen Elizabeth of Scotland died nine days later." "She was sure of her husband's success but she was not alive to see it." "The Bruce's blessings were usually mixed." "The peace was finally concluded at the monastery of Holyrood, where the Bruce lay ill, on 1 7th March 1 328." "One of the English promises was to return the Stone of Destiny." "His earls were in attendance, his bishops too, including William Lamberton, who had chosen him, with whom he'd signed a very different document 24 years before and without whom, very likely, none of them would have been there at all." "Lamberton died two months later." "On 1 2th July, in accordance with the second of Robert's treaty conditions," "David, who was only four, and the Princess Joan, who was six, were married in Berwick Church." "Neither king was in attendance." "One was too angry, the other was too ill." "Peace at last, after 32 years of struggle and bloodshed." "The Pope let it be known that he recognised the Scottish throne, and he lifted the ban of excommunication from King Robert." "The Pope was onside." "The gates of hell were firmly shut." "King Robert, you might think, could be sure of salvation." "But he wasn't." "Guilt weighed heavily on him." "His nameless illness assured him that he still lacked God's grace." "The crown was his, he wouldn't be parted from it." "But it was steeped in blood, the blood of his family and the blood of others." "He arranged for a chaplain in Buchan to say masses for his brother Neil, dead since 1 306, and made grants to Dunfermline Abbey, where his wife lay buried." "The Bruce and his advisers judged the time was ripe to ask for something that every European monarchy of status possessed - an ampulla - a bottl e of sacred oil, blessed by the Pope himself." "Oil from such bottles was used to anoint kings at their coronations." "Any attempt to conquer the lands of a king who, by virtue of this oil, had been anointed by God, was a mortal sin." "The English kings had an ampulla." "The French did too." "But the Scottish kings didn't, and they wanted one." "It was more than any mere status symbol." "It was a bottle full of independence from the English King." "His illness grew worse." ""The King is dying," people said." "Nobody knew what he was dying of." "But this time it was true." "He had just three months to live, but he went on pilgrimage, struggled down the south-west coast of Scotland to the shrine of St Ninian in Whithorn Cathedral." "Too sick to ride, the warrior King was carried on a litter." "The journey took a month." "When he arrived, Robert the Bruce, mortally ill and on the edge of the abyss, did penance." "He fasted and did penance for five days." "After all, the Church had got him his crown." "Surely now God would take him back." "God forgive me." "I have spilt the blood of many innocent men..." "On his return, he gathered his earls around him and he spoke to them." ""My day is far gone," he said." ""I thank God for giving me time to repent in this life." ""Because of me and my wars, much blood has been spilt." ""Many innocent men have died." ""So I take this sickness and pain as proper penance for my sins."" "And he let it be known that after his death, he wanted his heart to be removed and taken on crusade." "Robert knew he would never live to go himself, but the Scots had been promising the Pope a crusade since 1 320." "Robert died on 7th June 1 329." "He was 55 years old." "The illustrious King of Scots was buried here, at Dunfermline Abbey, near his wife." "The dead King, and the first king of something that had never existed before." "The very word "Scots" meant something different." "There was a Scottish people now, loyal to a Scottish throne." "No more confusion, no more divided loyalties." "The bishops and the Bruce had done theirjob." "It was a revolution." "The King is dead." "Long live the King." "His five-year-old son David succeeded Robert the Bruce on 7th June, 1 329." "The following year, James Douglas took the Bruce's heart on crusade against the Moors in northern Spain, and died there." "The heart, having fulfilled its promise, was found on the battlefield, returned to Scotland and buried in Melrose Abbey." "After his death, the legend of the Bruce did what legends do." "It ate things up." "It ate the human being." "All that was left was Robert the Bruce, the soldier King who fought for Scottish liberty and won." "It left a suit of armour, and this face, resolute and empty." "The legend hid his consuming guilt." "It rarely mentioned the bishops who'd chosen him, and who had guided his every step." "It barely muttered the names of his lost family." "It shrunk the Scottish casualties and multiplied the English armies he'd defeated." "It blurred the medievalness of what he did." "It made it about liberty for all, instead of a revolution that established a free and independent Scottish crown." "On November 24th 1 331 ," "David and Joan were enthroned as King and Queen of Scotland." "There was no Stone of Destiny." "Edward III had promised to return it and hadn't." "But at last, there was an ampulla of sacred oil from the Pope." "The bottle of independence from the English crown." "Final proof of the Bruce's triumph." "Final proof that the Scottish crown was free and quit of English authority." "Final proof that the reign of Good King Robert had been worth everything, all the deaths and horror." "Freedom from the English crown at last, for ever." "The next English invasion was in 1 332." "So much for bottles and for promises." "AtZLIT 2011" "NARRATOR:" "They call it Britain's last great wilderness, a place as beautiful as it is barren." "The islands and mountains of Scotland seem to exist on the edge of the imagination." "But it wasn't always like this." "For centuries, Gaelic Scotland was at the heart of the Scottish kingdom." "Then it changed." "It became something different, something separate." "Something other." "(LIVELY MUSIC PLAYS)" "(ALL SPEAK GAELIC)" "In many ways, Scotland is a nation of two cultures, one Highland and one Lowland, and one part just doesn't seem to understand the other." "Most of us don't speak Gaelic." "We speak English and, whether we admit it or not, we have to view our own country through the prism of the English language." "And when we go to the Highlands and Islands, we find ourselves in amongst a language and an entire culture that we don't understand, that we just don't get." "It's an uneasy, uncomfortable double vision." "It's Scotland's guilty secret." "And it all began with a feud between two families." "In 15th-century Scotland, family was everything." "This is the story of two of those families and how their fates were locked together." "The rise of one meant the fall of the other." "Their struggle was epic their names legendary." "They were the Stewarts and the MacDonalds." "There's a story of a medieval Spanish traveller who came to Edinburgh to see the sights." "When he got home, someone asked him what was the most wonderful thing he'd seen." "The traveller thought for a moment and then answered," ""A grand man called MacDonald with a great train of men after him," ""called neither Duke nor Marquis."" "His name was Alexander, Lord of the Isles," "Ri Innse Gall, The King of the Hebrides." "Alexander's family, the MacDonalds, had played the game well." "They had backed Bruce and the rewards had flowed - lands, wealth and power." "The power of 10,000 armed men." "Power over the islands." "Power over the sea." "This is called a "birlinn" or a West Highland galley." "She's really a descendant of a Viking long ship." "What range, what territory could boats like these cover effectively?" "In some cases up to 50, maybe 60 miles a day." "You could certainly go from Northern Ireland up to Cape Wrath in two or three days if you had good wind behind you." "NEIL:" "How important would you say these craft were to the Lordship?" "GORDON:" "Vital." "Whoever controlled the roads of the sea had the power and that's what the MacDonalds had." "If it wasn't for these, there would have been no Lordship of the Isles." "With over 100 birlinns at his command," "Alexander dominated Scotland's Atlantic seaboard." "No wonder they called him the King of the Hebrides." "The nerve centre of his far-flung territories, Finlaggan on Islay." "It was here Alexander summoned his chiefs to do deals, form alliances and, most importantly, keep the peace." "As an archaeologist, one of the first things that strikes me about this place is the fact that it isn't fortified." "But then, of course, it didn't need to be." "By the time Alexander took over, the Lordship had already enjoyed a century of internal stability." "And with that peace and with the patronage of the MacDonald Lords came a flourishing of the arts, sculpture, music and poetry." "It's often hard to get a sense of what places like Finlaggan were like in their heyday." "But a few archaeological finds that have been recovered from the site over the years, give an idea of the day-to-day reality of life here." "This is from a hunting dog's collar and you can tell from the careful decoration on it that the dog's owner was proud of the beast and wanted it to look its best and, of course, the Lords of the Isles were very big on hunting." "These are gaming pieces carved from bone, the rules of the game long forgotten, but on this one you can clearly see the carved outline of a stag with its antlers and its mouth open and its tongue sticking out." "And finally, this last piece is a pilgrim's badge or token." "It's made of lead and it's from Rome." "So somebody with connections to the Lordship of the Isles went all the way to Rome and brought back this as a souvenir with its image of St Peter carrying the keys of heaven." "Alexander, Lord of the Isles, held the keys to more earthly kingdoms." "His Atlantic realm faced in two different directions at once." "To the south was Ireland where family and cultural ties were deep." "To the east was Scotland." "But the Lordship wasn't on the fringes of the Scottish kingdom, it was at its very centre." "The Gaelic world of the Lordship was at the heart of how Scotland imagined itself." "It was the Gaels who had first unified the kingdom, giving it its Gaelic name, Alba." "Now Gaelic Scotland was enjoying a second golden age." "If Finlaggan was the heart of the Lordship, then Iona was its soul." "St Columba's island was one of the most important spiritual sites in Scotland." "It was here that the bodies of the Lords of the Isles were brought for burial." "Alexander showered the Abbey and its community with money and gifts." "Of course, he had good reason." "Like the best of medieval godfathers, he had a string of mistresses and a pile of cautionary letters from the Pope to prove it." "All this church-building was a kind of spiritual insurance policy." "But if Alexander MacDonald feared for his soul, that was pretty much all he feared." "He was Ri Innse Gall, a king in his own land, in a land where there was no king." "Scotland was a kingdom with an empty throne." "Its Royal line had faltered." "Its young king was in the hands of its ancient enemy." "James Stewart, King of Scots, had been captured by the English when he was only 12 years old." "His family had fought alongside Robert the Bruce during the Wars of Independence." "When Bruce's bloodline died out, it was the Stewarts who succeeded to the Scottish throne." "But the sole heir to the new Stewart dynasty was now a hostage - a bargaining chip, leverage." "It was the same old game, for the same old stakes." "If the Scottish magnates wanted their king back, they would have to submit to English overlordship." ""Forget the Bruce." ""Give up your independence."" "But the Scots weren't going to play by the English rules." ""No, thanks," they said." ""We're managing fine without a king."" "So James was left as a captive with plenty of time to brood on his redundancy." "For a time," "James had been shunted from one miserable prison to another." "But then his royal privileges were restored and he was given free run of Henry V's court." "You can imagine how grateful James was for this outbreak of benevolence." "But Henry's motives weren't exactly pure." "He had a war to finish in France and he needed a new ally to fight an old enemy, because across the Channel it wasn't just the French that Henry was up against, it was the Scots." "(BAGPIPES PLAY)" "The role the Scots played in the Hundred Years' War was something the French would never forget." "In this summer pageant in the middle of France the crowds are celebrating the arrival of Scottish troops at a life or death moment in the history of their country." "Henry V had just defeated the French at Agincourt." "Final, decisive victory was within his grasp." "And then the Scots waded in on behalf of their old ally." "Now the Scots and French forces were united against the English king." "To defeat them he had first to divide them and Henry thought he had the perfect weapon" "James." "Now Henry's plans for him became clear." "James was King of the Scots, so James could tell the Scots to pack up and go home." "Melun was the acid test." "In 1420, Henry lay siege to the strategic town just upriver from Paris." "The walls were defended by Scottish troops." "James knew what was expected of him." "He ordered the Scots to surrender." "English and French kings expected unquestioning obedience from their subjects." "But these soldiers were Scots." "And in Scotland, king and kingdom didn't mean the same thing at all." "Scotland was more than one individual." "It was a community, a loose but resilient network of loyalties." ""Lay down your arms," James commanded his subjects." "And as one, the Scots kept on fighting." "700 defenders held out against a 20,000-strong besieging force." "These days, the underground vaults beneath the town are used to store wine." "But in 1420, this was the scene of vicious hand-to-hand combat." "The English dug tunnels beneath the fortifications in an attempt to undermine them." "The defenders opened up their own tunnels so they could counterattack." "It was in claustrophobic, suffocating darkness that the battle of Melun was fought." "But for all their tenacity, the defenders of Melun couldn't hold out." "When Henry finally broke into the town, he was out for revenge." "The surviving Scots were rounded up, separated from the other prisoners and executed en masse as traitors to their king, James I." "James never forgot the shame of Melun." "He had been made to act as a puppet by a foreign king." "He'd been defied by his subjects." "His humiliation was immeasurable, off the scale." "It was Melun, more than anything else, that shaped the kind of man" "James would become - intolerant, inflexible, impatient." "Just two years after Melun, Henry V was dead." "His successors couldn't see much political value in James." "But their prisoner was still worth a king's ransom." "In 1424, the English cashed their chips in." "At 30 years old, James Stewart was on his way home." "Scotland was more of a memory for James than a reality." "He had spent over half his life in English captivity, so he had a lot of catching up to do." "In other words, he was a king in a hurry." "Amongst the welcoming party was Alexander MacDonald," "King of the Hebrides and Lord of the Isles." "He must have viewed the new arrival with guarded curiosity." "Along with the other Scottish magnates," "Alexander had agreed to pay a colossal ransom." "What had they got for their money?" "A king on the make, a catwalk king." "A king who understood that front was everything." "Linlithgow Palace was James I 's pet project." "It was something brand-new in Scotland." "It wasn't a fortress." "It was a Renaissance-style Royal residence." "It made its point through wealth, not strength." "James had an agenda." "He wanted to elevate the very idea of kingship." "Linlithgow Palace declared, in 100-foot-high capital letters," "James's ambitions as a European monarch." "Before James I, the magnates like the Lords of the Isles had regarded their king as first amongst equals, and occasionally as something less than that." "But James considered himself to have no equals." "James I was educated and accomplished." "He was Scotland's first Renaissance king." "Amongst many other talents, he had a real gift for poetry." "In one poem entitled The King's Quair, he described the moment when he first fell in love." "James was a captive in England when he wrote these lines," "But you wouldn't have heard this language at the court of Henry V." "This was James's mother tongue and imagine how he must have missed it, the rich Scots language of his Lowland birthplace." "Scotland in the 15th century was a blur of different languages and dialects." "In the Lowlands, Scots - a distinctive vernacular with Anglo-Saxon roots - predominated." "Most of the rest of the kingdom - at least half of Scotland 's population - spoke Gaelic." "And within Gaelic Scotland there was no more influential, no more determined figure than Alexander, Lord of the Isles." "While James Stewart was palace building," "Alexander MacDonald was empire building." "Alexander's birlinns gave him control of an island archipelago, but his real ambitions lay on the mainland." "Ross stretched from the rocky shores of the Atlantic to the rich farmland of the North Sea coast." "By acquiring Ross, Alexander became one of the most powerful landowners in the kingdom." "Ross was the jewel in Alexander's crown." "But soon James himself began to cast envious eyes on the northern prize." "The king was running short of cash." "All this palace building came at a price." "He'd already tried cooking the books." "Money that should have been going south to pay his ransom was being spent on gold leaf and fine carving, but even that wasn't enough to plug the hole in his finances." "He needed money, and badly." "Alexander's territory in Ross began to look seriously tempting." "James invited Alexander to meet him in Inverses." "But this would be no Royal garden party." "Alexander was camped outside the town with a large entourage, including his own family." "When he finally got the summons from the king, Alexander, his mother and a few select followers got dressed in all their finery." "What delights were on the menu?" "What treats were in store?" "As soon as they were through the gates, they were set upon and disarmed by the king's men." "The MacDonalds didn't have a chance to resist." "Alexander's own mother was pushed around, taunted, dishonoured." "James watched as the MacDonalds were dragged off like common criminals." "It seemed to inspire him." "He entertained the court with some off-the-cuff verse." "But this time, the muse was less romantic." "It was no gentle love poem he recited." ""Let us take the chance to conduct this company to the tower" ""For by Christ's death, these men deserve death."" "Wary tolerance had suddenly turned violent." "James executed some of his prisoners without trial." "But he didn't kill Alexander." "He didn't have to." "James had got his hands on Ross and the revenues it provided." "After a couple of months and with a great show of mercy, he released the Lord of the Isles." "But if he thought Alexander would be grateful, he was wrong." "Alexander gathered up his men, returned to Inverses and burned it to the ground." "Revenge was sweet, but it was short-lived." "Alexander knew he'd allowed his anger to blind his judgment." "A Royal army was closing in." "Outnumbered and outmaneuvered, Alexander calculated" "That he had only one option left." "At Holyrood Palace in 1429," "Alexander, Lord of the Isles, surrendered." "Ritually stripped to his underclothes in front of James, he handed over his sword, his title and his lands." "Alexander, Lord of the Isles, was then led away into captivity." "The rules of the game had changed." "The magnates had once carved up Scotland amongst them." "Not any more." "Now the king was in charge." "Or so the king wanted to believe." "The Lord of the Isles might be behind bars, but his family openly defied Royal authority." "James sent an army to deal with them." "But Alexander's men weren't about to turn tail." "(MAN SPEAKS GAELIC)" "From every corner of his dispossessed territories," "Alexander's supporters gathered, moving to meet the Royal army at Inverlochy at the head of the Great Glen." "The Islesmen landed their birlinns a few miles down there where Fort William now is." "They marched along the river towards where the Royal army was camped around Inverlochy Castle, just down there in the trees." "The commander of the Royal troops was in the middle of a card game when he got the report of the enemy approach." "He dismissed it." "He said he knew very well the doings of the big-bellied caries of the Isles." "At that moment, a body of archers hidden on this hill shot a hail of arrows down onto the unprepared Royal troops." "And taking that as their cue, the main body of the Islesmen charged." "It only took a few minutes." "Over 900 Royal troops lay dead." "Their injured commander fled over the mountains." "Inverlochy was a brutal lesson in the limits of Royal power." "James was forced to realise that it was as dangerous to keep Alexander behind bars as it was to have him on the loose." "A month after Inverlochy, he set Alexander free." "Alexander got just about everything back - his lands, his titles and, crucially, his prestige." "The MacDonalds were back on top." "The Ste warts, mean while, were in trouble." "To many of the magnates," "James's release of Alexander seemed like weakness." "They scented blood." "Simmering resentments finally boiled over into conspiracy." "On 20th February 1437, James's enemies finally caught up with him." "It was after midnight when they broke into the Royal lodgings." "With the assassins outside the door, James searched for a way out." "There wasn't one, so he smashed a hole through the wooden floor and dropped into the sewer beneath." "But the exit to the drain had been blocked off." "James turned to face his pursuers." "He tried to make a fight of it." "But there, in the darkness and the filth, he was stabbed to death." "Scotland held her breath." "The killing of a king was a shocking, almost sacrilegious act." "With the Stewart dynasty weak and exposed, the MacDonalds were unassailable." "When Alexander, Lord of the Isles, eventually died in 1449, his dream of ruling an empire that stretched from coast to coast had been realised." "He was buried not on Iona like his forefathers, but on the mainland in the rich soil of Ross." "From beyond the grave, Alexander was not only reinforcing past claims, he was hinting at future ambitions." "The kingdom was at a turning point." "With James I and Alexander, Lord of the Isles, gone it was up to a new generation to continue their legacies." "On the Stewart side, James II assumed his father's throne." "A bright red birthmark earned him the nickname, James the Fiery Face." "On the MacDonald side, it was john who now became Lord of the Isles." "His inauguration followed a ritual that was centuries old." "just like the ancient kings, john stepped into a carved rock footprint, joining him to the land he was to rule over." "(MAN SPEAKS GAELIC)" "The bards heaped extravagant praise on john MacDonald." "But it only added to the weight of expectation on his shoulders." "John's position was difficult, even precarious." "Should he try and expand his territory?" "Or would it better to consolidate his already over-stretched empire?" "For the moment, he opted for the status quo." "Meanwhile, James took decisive action." "The new king would cement his family's fortunes, not through violence but at the altar." "Here in Edinburgh in 1449, James II married Mary of Gueldres." "She was the grandniece of the Duke of Burgundy, one of the most wealthy and powerful men on the continent." "The Stewarts had most definitely arrived at the top table of European power." "There was a hefty price to pay, of course." "James and his family wanted to impress their powerful, foreign guests with the very best in food, wine and entertainment." "But it was worth it." "The marriage brought the Ste warts international prestige and political influence." "And there were other, more tangible items on the gift list." "NEIL:" "This is some wedding present for a teenage king." "It is." "And the wedding wasn't exactly a shotgun wedding." "It was one of the main dynastic weddings of the period." "And when James got this gun, Mons Meg, from the Duke of Burgundy, he was being given one of the most impressive pieces of technology available at that time." "Just how dangerous or effective was a thing like this?" "This gun could fire 18-inch stone balls, a good-sized ball, that could go over a mile, actually, especially with a following wind." "And the real danger that this represented was to the castles of the period." "A gun like this brought against a great castle was a real threat in terms of knocking its walls down." "What does it say about James, though, that he now possesses this?" "Where does it put him in the league table of kings?" "It's putting him right up there amongst go-getters, amongst the main sovereigns in Europe." " So James was, in many ways, a big noise?" " Absolutely." "James H's showy pretensions hid a mass of insecurities." "He was thin-skinned, prickly, paranoid." "The king felt trapped, hemmed in." "To the north and west john MacDonald dominated a huge arc of territories." "Meanwhile to the south, there was another potential rival - the Black Douglas." "William, Earl of Douglas was a 15th-century pin-up." "He was popular, he was famous and he was very, very rich." "His family, the Black Douglases, were the big power in the Borders." "When William, Earl of Douglas, and john, Lord of the Isles, agreed a friendship pact, it set them on a collision course with James." "Deals like this were routine, innocuous, they meant as much as a handshake." "But James didn't see it as a courtesy." "He chose to view it as a conspiracy." "The king brooded on how to deal with the two magnates." "He didn't brood for very long." "In 1452, James requested the presence of the Earl of Douglas at Stirling Castle." "William smelt a rat." "He only showed up when he got a letter guaranteeing his safety." "It was the dinner party from hell." "James was jumpy and volatile." "William was edgy too." "The fact that both men had been drinking since lunchtime made the situation even more unpredictable." "Only one thing was guaranteed and that was a confrontation." "At some point, late in the proceedings, James demanded that William give up his alliance with john, Lord of the Isles." "William refused." "Bad move." "James exploded." "He pulled a knife and launched himself at William." "Then his courtiers pitched in." "Legend has it that when the frenzy was over, they dumped him out of that window." "When the body was recovered by William's men, it was found to have 26 separate stab wounds." "His head had been split open with an axe." "It was a shocking act, as much for its violation of notions of honour as its brutality." "William's followers paraded a copy of the king's safe-conduct pass around Stirling before ransacking the town." "But James was more than a match for the Black Douglas." "Faced by the King's heavy artillery, the Douglas castles surrendered without a shot." "William's family fled into exile in England." "This was another great leap in the Stewart fortunes." "By seizing the lands of the Black Douglases," "James made himself very rich." "Big guns, wealthy relations and a single brutal act of murder would bankroll the future of Scotland's Royal dynasty." "For James, it was a dream outcome." "But for john, it was a nightmare scenario." "What had happened to the Black Douglas could happen to him." "john had to find a way of keeping on the right side of the explosive and newly powerful king." "So when James prepared for war with England in 7460, john was amongst his most loyal lieutenants." "john vowed that his men would fight one league mile ahead of the main army." "It was a very public, very ostentatious show of loyalty to the King." "It was also a vow that John would never have to keep." "James loved guns." "In fact he loved them to death." "James was in the middle of a long, hot summer campaign when he got news that his queen, Mary, was arriving." "He got one of the guns ready to fire a salute." "But his grand gesture blew up in his face, literally." "The gun exploded, sending lethal shrapnel flying in all directions." "At 29 years old, James II was dead." "No-one could doubt that the Ste warts would continue." "The dynasty seemed unassailable, as much a part of Scotland now as its rocks and hills." "But the new king, James III, was just a boy." "For some, opportunity knocked." "Only months after the coronation of eight-year-old James, an envoy arrives at john MacDonald's stronghold of Ardtornish Castle on a secret mission." "The messenger represents the defeated Black Douglas family and he carries with him an offer from the English king, Edward IV." "What Edward proposes is this - he will back a rebellion in Scotland and the MacDonald and Douglas families will share the spoils." "John will get the north of the country, the Black Douglas will get the south." "And Edward?" "Well, Edward secures his grip on the English throne." "Of course there was a catch to all of this." "John and the Douglas have to acknowledge Edward as their overlord." "This was treason." "The MacDonalds and the Black Douglas were plotting the annihilation of Scotland's Royal dynasty." "The old king's suspicions now appeared less like paranoia and more like prophecy." "So why did john take such a huge gamble?" "Why did he risk everything that his forefathers had achieved?" "The simple answer was that he had no choice." "john was being put under pressure by his own relatives." "They wanted to see the continued expansion of MacDonald territory" "And the leader of the hardline faction was his illegitimate son, Angus Og." "Angus 0g pressed his father to sign the treaty with the English." "The ink wasn't even dry before Angus and his men set out to demand that taxes owed to the king be paid directly to the MacDonalds." "But the English king had only ever wanted a diversion in the north." "When Edward sorted out his own internal troubles, he had no further need for his Scottish allies." "The game was up for john, Lord of the Isles." "He could now only hope that the king, jam es [I], wouldn't discover the secret treaty." "Fat chance." "Eventually the story leaked out and everyone, the king included, knew about John's pact with the English." "John was cornered." "In a humiliating ceremony that echoed that of Alexander all those years before, he was forced to surrender." "john had wanted nothing more than to be like his father." "This was the bitter fulfilment of that wish." "Like his father, he had underestimated the power of the Stewarts." "And like his father, he had paid the price." "But this was more than a personal failure." "The repercussions would be felt much more widely, rippling down through the centuries and affecting Scotland to this day." "John kept his head." "He even managed to hold on to some of his lands." "But the humiliating submission was too much for others in his family." "Angus 0g looked back to the glory days, a time when his family commanded respect." "Then, the MacDonalds had burned Inverses to the ground and routed a Royal army at Inverlochy." "No-one, not even kings, had been able to subdue them." "And now they were expected just to roll over." "The argument divided the family." "In the process, it tore Gaelic Scotland apart." "When Angus attempted to seize power from his father, the Highlands and Islands erupted into civil war." "The birlinns which had made the Lordship now gathered to destroy it." "Son against father, the final battlefield - a bay on the Sound of Mull." "That stretch of water ahead is called Bloody Bay." "It's where the birlinns of john and Angus Og clashed with such disastrous violence." "It's supposed to have been a victory for Angus's forces, but the truth is that it was a defeat for the whole of the Lordship." "Something more than men died that day." "The idea of a strong Gaelic world, a coherent entity that could deal on equal terms with the rest of Scotland, died too." "It was a seismic moment." "The hairline crack between the Highlands and the Lowlands suddenly blew wide open." "At one time, Gaelic Scotland - the place, the people and the language - had seemed central to the collective identity of Scots." "But now it began to be seen as threatening, as different, as other." "Scotland was changing, and changing fast." "Only one thing seemed constant - the Ste warts." "just a few years after the implosion of the MacDonalds, another James sat upon the Scottish throne." "Extravagant, charming and able to inspire affection as well as respect," "James IV was everything that his forefathers weren't." "But he did have one Stewart trait a burning desire to make a mark." "Falkland Palace was James IV's country retreat, an escape from the everyday pressures of court." "Everywhere you look, there are thistles." "This was the new Stewart emblem." "It was an image that James adapted and reproduced endlessly." "It was a brilliant logo, so simple, so memorable that the thistle became the definitive symbol, not just of the Stewarts, but of Scotland too." "James wanted to create a new Scottish identity." "But that identity was a very specific, even limiting one." "James IV was the last Scottish king to speak Gaelic." "But Gaelic wasn't the King's native tongue." "Scots was." "And under the patronage of James, Scots was on the up." "This is one of the first prints printed and produced in Scotland in 1507, 1508, and the fascinating thing about it is that it's written in the language of the Lowland Scots." "Who's the author that's printed here?" "The Flyting Of Dunbar And Kennedie is actually by two poets." " And this is by Dunbar." " What is a flyting?" "A flyting is a genre where one poet challenges another poet to a duel by being as abusive as possible." "Can you read me an example of Dunbar having a pop at his adversary?" "(SPEAKS LOWLAND SCOTS)" "He's not exactly calling him a smashing chap, is he?" "Er, not really, no, no." "I can already pick out from what you're saying that one of the key things that this Lowland poet is accusing the other of is of using the Irish tongue, the Gaelic tongue." " Yep." " What's that about?" "THEO:" "I think Dunbar is tapping into the stereotypes that would exist at the time." "As part of James IV's political agenda, cultural agenda, social agenda, you're looking at him pushing Lowland Scots as the language of the people in Scotland and use that as an official language and export that to the further-out regions," "and therefore Gaelic is clearly under pressure." " So language is power?" " I think so, yes." "Under James IV, earthy, everyday Scots became the language of literature and law and therefore of power." "Gaelic, meanwhile, had become politically tainted." "It might well have been the language of at least half of all Scots but, as far as Lowlanders were concerned, it was the tongue of traitors and outlaws." "Without the glue of the Lordship to hold it together, the Highlands and Islands had become a kind of Wild West." "Everyone was out to grab what they could." "In the bloodletting, old scores were settled." "Angus Og, the upstart son who had tried to seize the Lordship, met a brutal end, strangled to death by one of his own servants." "This was Linn nan Creach, The Raiding Time." "To the outside world it seemed that every stereotype of the lawlessness of the Gaels had been confirmed." "As if overwhelmed by the torrent of violence that he had unleashed, john MacDonald retreated into penance and prayer." "In name at least, he was still King of the Hebrides, still Lord of the Isles." "But in the new Scotland, there could only be one king and only one lord." "In 1493, James took the title for himself." "The Stewarts, not the MacDonalds, were the Lords of the Isles now." "It was their word, their law, their rule." "James put together an expedition and sailed north to impose his authority." "The last time a Scottish king had ventured into the labyrinth of the Hebrides, he'd been on the run." "But unlike Robert the Bruce nearly 200 years previously," "James had come not as a fugitive but as a feudal overlord." "The time of the MacDonalds had passed." "The time of the Stewarts had come." "They were rich, they were powerful, they were in charge." "The Stewarts now looked to secure their future." "In 1503,James IV married Margaret Tudor, the daughter of Henry VII of England." "It was another spectacular marriage for the Ste warts, but with an important difference." "This time, it wasn't just the Stewarts using a royal match as the passport to power and respectability, it was the English Tudors." "The Tudor dynasty was still a fragile one." "They'd just emerged from the Wars of the Roses and they were clinging on to power by their fingertips." "Marriage into the long-established Stewart family would bring much needed legitimacy in the eyes of European monarchy." "It was an extraordinary reversal of fortune." "Once they'd been hostages and political prisoners, now the Stewart dynasty had become major powerbrokers, able to make the reputations of their Royal rivals." "And with the birth of a baby boy in 1507, the Ste warts were only a heartbeat away from the throne of their ancient enemy, the English." "The world had turned, the centre had shifted." "While the Stewart court blossomed, the court of the Lords of the Isles, Finlaggan, burned." "(MAN SPEAKS GAELIC)" "The Highland Boundary fault line cuts like a sword stroke through the heart of Scotland." "From coast to coast, it divides the country into two distinct parts, the Highlands and the Lowlands." "It's a neat division, perhaps too neat." "It's easy for us to think that the differences between Gaelic identity and Scots are somehow set in stone." "But this sense of separation is only a few centuries old." "It's history, not geography that divides us." "Scotland's split personality is the result of a family struggle that pulled the kingdom apart." "From being fully paid-up members of the Scottish project," "Gaels began to be thought of as rebels, outsiders." "Scotland couldn't continue to be diverse, it had to be a single, political entity." "And maybe a single cultural entity too." "It was the Stewarts who drove this new vision of a Scottish kingdom." "In their eyes, Scotland was secure in its independence and established on the European stage." "But this was only the start of what they had set out to achieve." "In the years to come, their ambitions would truly take flight." " How you doing?" " No' bad." " Good day for it, eh?" " Aye, it's lovely." " We can go aboard, yeah?" " Yeah, nae problem." "This is Loch Leven in Perthshire." "In 1567, it was at the centre of some of the most turbulent events" "Scotland had ever known." "On a little island in the middle of the loch, kept as a prisoner, was a young woman." "24-year-old Mary Stuart," "Queen of Scots." "On their way to the island was a small group of powerful nobles intent on stripping the queen of her crown." "When the nobles arrived here, they were brandishing documents they wanted Mary to sign and they were prepared to use force and threats to her life to get their way." "They saw themselves as the saviours of Scotland, and she was the obstacle in their path." "But Mary refused to co-operate, because she knew that with one scratch of the pen, she would cease to be queen." "Mary and the nobles held radically different visions of the nation's future." "And Scotland stood divided." "From that moment, on this loch, an incredible transformation will take place that will not only see Scotland united, but a Scottish king ruling the entire British Isles." "The ambition of an unconquered nation and its royal family will be the driving force that unites two ancient enemies and sets them on the road towards the Great Britain we know today." "A Scottish takeover of England?" "Who would dare dream of such a thing?" "In 1542, Scotland 's fate came to rest on the shoulders of a six-day-old girl, when its king, James V, died." "His daughter, Mary Stuart, was the last of the great Scottish royal line - a child of glittering dynastic potential." "And almost immediately, the coveted prize of an English king." "Infant Mary was the solution to a very English problem." "Henry VIII had fallen out with other countries in Europe, over religion." "He'd broken with the Catholic Church, and now England was vulnerable to invasion." "Henry's worst fear was that a hostile army would be allowed to land in Scotland a no' from there, launch itself into northern England." "England's king, Henry VIII, was an arch strategist and he came up with a remarkable course of action." "He would kill off the threat from the north by marrying the Queen of Scots to his own son." "And by doing that, Scotland would become part of England." "A group of Scottish nobles were seduced by Henry's scheme and even signed a marriage treaty on Mary's behalf." "But Mary's guardians backed out, which brought Scotland and England once again to the brink of war." "Young Mary was forced to run from one castle to another, as Henry sent soldiers to hunt her down and bring her to him." "When they couldn't find her, the English generals decided on a new tactic." "Diplomacy on one hand... devastation on the other." "A huge English army invaded southern Scotland." "The English tried to persuade the Scots that a royal marriage to their oldest enemy was in everyone's interests." "But while the politicians threw away words like "fellowship"" "and "brotherhood" and "equals", the English soldiers were murdering and raping and burning their way across southern Scotland." "Abbeys like Melrose, then major commercial and cultural centres, were devastated, as southern Scotland was brought to its knees." "But the Scots still wouldn't give up their queen." "Instead, they looked to Europe for military help and called on France - their oldest and most trusted ally." "Now the French king, Henri, entered the fight." "He would send troops to help the Scots fight off the English." "But there was a condition - the infant Mary would have to be betrothed to his son, Francois." "So a new marriage treaty was drawn up for five-year-old Mary, promising that she would now one day be Queen of France." "The French king duly sent an army to fight off the English and a boat to spirit his little Scottish queen to safety." "And the English scheme to take over Scotland by marriage was dead." "The magnificent chateaux of the Loire Valley became Mary's refuge, as she entered the protection of the French royal family and charmed the man who had gone to war for her hand." ""She is the most perfect child that I have ever seen," he wrote." "Mary was welcomed in here like a long-lost daughter." "In fact the king, Henri, treated her like one of his own children." "She lived in the royal nursery alongside the dauphin, her future husband, and she received a fantastic Renaissance education - literature, rhetoric, as well as music, dancing and sport." "She was a precious jewel and in this setting, she shone brightest of all." "Her future husband, Francois, was short and clumsy." "But Mary was tall, elegant and charming." "All through her childhood, at court appearances and in private, she impressed her French guardians." "And she was groomed for a glittering future, not only in France and Scotland, but potentially beyond." "Mary's veins contained very royal blood, blood that gave her a claim to an even bigger prize - the crown of England." "She was only fourth in line, but Mary's French guardians knew where that claim could take them, if fortune smiled their way, and that one day, Mary Stuart might just be their key to the back door of England." "Her claim to be a contender for the English throne had always been a long shot." "But events back across the Channel took a couple of unexpected twists." "In quick succession, an English king and an English queen, both from the House of Tudor, died without leaving heirs." "Suddenly, in 1558, Mary, in French eyes at least, became the perfect heir for the English throne." "There was just one problem." "Elizabeth Tudor." "Henry VIII 's illegitimate daughter also now claimed to be Queen of England." "She had been born just eight months after her parents' wedding." "And in the eyes of many, she was not only illegitimate as a daughter, but would be illegitimate as a queen." "So, Mary's French family stoked her ambition, as she became the vehicle for theirs." "They encouraged her to dream - that now the crown of England really could be hers too." "If she got it, one single, united empire would stretch from Scotland in the north to France in the south." "This would be a Catholic empire, vast and powerful, that would dominate the west of Europe." "Wasn't that what God had in mind for Mary?" "But her rival, Elizabeth, was English, Protestant and a Tudor." "So she got the crown and Mary's dream of a vast Catholic empire slipped away." "And soon, even the certainty of her own French crown was under threat." "The Protestant Reformation was coming." "This religious revolution was spreading across Europe, promising to sweep away Catholic monarchs like Francois and Mary." "just a few months into their reign, a group of rebels stormed the chateau at Amboise and tried to capture the king." "So who were the rebels?" "They were Protestants, but they were lords." " We know their name now." " Oh, right." "And they wanted to plot against the royal family and the king, Francois II," " who was young and weak." " Right." "The revolt failed, and a very public and very bloody example was made of the rebels." "How much of this would Mary, Queen of Scots have seen with her own eyes?" "We know she saw the bodies at the balconies of the chateau, because she was in the chateau." "It was the first time she was confronted with such a thing." " Such violence!" " Yes." "First time she saw this." "The bodies were hung from here to show the people?" " To make an example." " This is what you get." "Just a few months later," "Mary's time as Queen of France came to an abrupt end." "Her young husband, Francois, died of an ear infection, leaving Mary a widow and a powerless dowager queen." "The glittering future that Mary had been brought up to believe in disappeared before her eyes." "France, the Catholic empire, life at the centre of the Valois court - it was all suddenly over." "So Mary looked to home." "But home had changed." "The Reformation that was pitting Protestant against Catholic from France to Holland and beyond, had spread to Scotland, with dramatic results and very little bloodshed...so far." "Swiftly and comprehensively, the Scottish Church had gone over to the new creed." "Life in Scotland was suddenly very different indeed." "Edinburgh's tiny Magdalen Chapel was where the leaders of that Reformation met to plan their brave new world." "And they now wanted to change more than just the Church." "What was undertaken in this room was the sweeping, all-encompassing reform of Scottish society." "They started with religion, but they wanted to reach out and touch every part of people's lives." "And of course, it couldn't help but be a direct attack on the power of the monarch." "Mary's most loyal supporters " "Roman Catholics who had dominated the country in her absence - were driven from power, as Protestant nobles took control of the country." "The movement's spiritual leader was a preacher called john Knox." "He called for those who practised the Catholic mass to be put to death." "He even went as far as to claim that Catholic monarchs could be justly deposed." "Catholic monarchs like Mary." "When the Scottish nobles heard Mary was coming back, different factions sought her out." "One Catholic earl wanted Mary to return as a Catholic figurehead in a war to drive out the Protestants." "Another offer came from her Protestant half-brother." "He wanted Mary to come back and work with the new Protestant regime." "If she accepted his offer, he promised she could remain a Catholic, as long as she kept her religion a secret and only practised her faith in private." "One August day in 1561, Mary Stuart sailed into Scottish waters." "She had chosen to work with the Protestant regime." "Her ships were almost a week ahead of schedule, so there was no welcoming party." "But a few rounds of the ship's cannon promptly assembled a small, curious crowd, as Scotland's queen finally came home." "During Mary's first private mass on her first Sunday back, a mob gathered outside Holyrood to protest." "They jeered and shouted that they were going to kill the priest, but they couldn't get to Mary." "Eventually, they went away, but the secret of the queen's private faith was out, and the truth hung in the air like a bad smell." "John Knox wouldn't even tolerate Mary's private faith." ""That one mass," he said," ""was more fearful than if 10,000 armed men were landed in any part of the realm" ""to suppress the whole Protestant religion."" "From the pulpit of St Giles', he openly preached against her." "Knox was brought before the queen, and straight to Mary's face, he questioned her right to rule Scotland." "Why?" "First of all, she was Catholic and Scotland wasn't." "Not any more." "Second, she was a woman." "But Mary had lived long enough to have seen the realities of religious reformation." "She was no innocent, so she faced him down." "Scotland could remain Protestant." "In private, however, she would remain Catholic." "No matter how violently Mary and Knox disagreed, there would be no bloodbaths here." "Mary had survived her first crisis and now she had the business of ruling to attend to." "Mary began to tour the whole country, winning over the powerful regional nobles with her beauty and her cultivated charm, rekindling old loyalties that ran deeper than the new religious ties, sending a clear signal that she was back... and in charge." "This is a moment from Scottish history that stays with you." "Mary was back and she was making a success of it." "But she'd been queen all of her life." "She'd been surrounded by the magnificence of the French court and she'd had her ambitions to be Queen of England inflated and fanned." "After all that, could she really reconcile herself to a life lived here, out on the edge of the world?" "The bigger stage, England, was always on her mind." "The trouble was, the English already had their leading lady." "But by 1564, Elizabeth had neither married nor produced an heir." "So Mary seized the initiative." "Mary began surveying the field for suitable contenders for marriage." "But Mary wasn't just looking for a husband, she was looking for a stud - to maintain or even improve the bloodline." "Someone who could finally help her fulfil her dynastic potential." "First, she investigated Catholic suitors." "Spaniards and French." "The French one was her dead husband's adolescent brother." "And the Spanish one promptly lost his mind." "Elizabeth offered her own favourite." "But eventually, Mary settled on something much closer to home - an English cousin." "Like her, he's a good dancer." "A good huntsman." "Tall, good-looking and young." "His name was Henry, Lord Darnley, and he was the boy who would be king." "After a whirlwind romance, Mary and Darnley married, and Scotland was poised to have a cocky 19-year-old, not just as its queen's husband, but as its out-and-out king." "All with Mary's blessing." "But then something strange happened." "A clue lies here, in the National Museum of Scotland." "So, what have we here, Nick?" "Well, we have a coin which was struck to commemorate the marriage of Mary, Queen of Scots and Henry, Lord Darnley, in July, 1565." " And that's the happy couple?" " Indeed, staring into each other's eyes." "And the inscription has Henry's name before Mary's." "So it's Henry and King before Mary and Queen." "That's right." "Yes." "It was probably considered soon after this had gone into circulation that it was conveying an unfortunate message, and they were withdrawn from circulation very rapidly" " and replaced with a different type!" " What replaced it?" "It was replaced by a different coin, the same size, but with different designs on." "Surely that's mysterious - that two coins should replace one another so quickly?" "Well, Mary, of course, was of higher status than Henry Darnley, and the coin seemed to convey that he was at least equal, if not, in fact, superior status." "So the new issue was brought out which had Mary's name first, making sure that the correct hierarchy was maintained." "So he's been put in his place by the time the second coin comes out." " Yes, very much so." " So quite clearly, these two coins tell us what we need to know about that relationship." "Well, yes." "The fact this happened in Scotland so rapidly is an indication of something unusual going on, yes." "Darnley roamed about Edinburgh drunk and debauched, mouthing off about not being king and making enemies in the process." "If Mary had once encouraged him to dream of being king, she now backtracked." "And well she could, because Darnley had done his job by then - he'd made his wife pregnant." "Guns fired across Scotland to salute to the future king when Mary gave birth to a son, James, on June the 19th, 1566." "A few months later, a lavish party was thrown in the great hall of Stirling Castle to celebrate James's baptism." "And it was a major political event." "Mary had ordered a huge round table be set up here - to remind the guests of King Arthur, the mythical king of Britain." "And James was hailed as Little Arthur, the future king of a reunited Britain." "The visiting English ambassador was suitably offended at the Scottish royal family's claim to be the future rulers of the whole British Isles." "It was a very provocative gesture." "But it was realistic." "Time was running out for Elizabeth." "She was already in her mid-3Os, and it was becoming less and less likely that she would ever produce her own heir." "And if she didn't, or couldn't, where would that leave England?" "Answer - in Scotland's hands." "Whether Elizabeth liked it or not, baby James would be the next in line." "So the English queen now seemed poised to do some thing remarkable - bury the hatchet with Mary and name her son, James, as the successor to the English throne." "Until, that is, Mary's poor choice in men came back to haunt her." "The house where Darnley, Mary's husband, was staying was blown up with gunpowder packed into its basement." "But it wasn't the blast that killed him." "His body was found some distance away from the scene of the explosion." "In all likelihood, he was strangled as he tried to flee for his life." "The Scottish nobles had finally run out of patience with Darnley." "But some said the blood on their hands was ordained by the queen herself." "And Mary's behaviour seemed to prove those suspicions." "She didn't rush into mourning clothes." "Nor did she give her husband a state funeral." "Instead, Darnley's body was dumped at night somewhere in Holyrood Abbey." "You get a sense of Darnley's tragedy here." "The story goes that he's buried alongside these other dead, but they have gravestones and he doesn't." "No-one knows for sure where he was buried and no-one really cares." "Yet he was practically a king of Scotland." "His sordid death changed everything for Mary." "Elizabeth put a stop to any more talk of her succession, until, that is, Mary could be cleared of any involvement in Darnley's murder." "But that wasn't about to happen." "Instead, she married the man most people suspected of carrying out the murder." "His name was James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell." "There were, of course, rumours that he kidnapped her, that he raped her, that she married him to keep her honour." "But none of that could alter the fact that from the outside, from the point of view of the ministers, the nobles and the mob, it looked bad." "Those factions who had always opposed her, chief among them the hardline Protestants, now rose up against Mary and her power-hungry new husband a no' Scotland teetered on the point of civil war." "Mary and Bothwell met their opponents outside Edinburgh, ready to calm their kingdom with violence." "But on the battlefield, Mary begged her opponents to avoid bloodshed and to allow Bothwell to escape." "In return, she offered herself into captivity." "Mary was taken to Lochleven Castle." "When the nobles came to force her to sign her abdication documents, at first, Mary resisted." "But it was only so long she could put up with the threats to her life." "So she signed and gave up her power, gave up...her country." "A few months later, Mary escaped and tried to get it back." "But it was too late." "The army that she raised was defeated at Glasgow, and Mary fled to England, where she threw herself on Elizabeth's mercy." "But Elizabeth put her back in prison." "# The Lord shall out of Zion send" "# The rod of Thy great power" "# In midst of all thine enemies... #" "The future of Scotland once again rested on the shoulders of a Stuart infant." "# All willing people... #" "This is the 110th psalm, and it's believed to have been sung at the coronation of Mary's son, James, here in the Church of the Holy Rude in Stirling." "# ..." "From mom's womb" "# Thy youth like dew shall be... #" "It was the worst attended Scottish coronation of all time." "After the psalms came the sermon, and it was given by the firebrand preacher John Knox himself." "# ..." "And, for this cause, in triumph" "# He shall lift his head on high. #" "It wasn't unusual for an infant to become a king, especially not a Stuart king." "But there was something momentous about the day, and it marked a turning point in the history of the nation." "For the first time, a king of Scotland had been crowned in a Protestant ceremony." "That ceremony sent a clear signal - when it came to religion," "Scotland was now firmly on the same Protestant side as England." "As James grew up, his religious education became the most important project in the land." "Scotland's leading scholar, George Buchanan, was brought in to ensure that James was set against his mother's religion for good." "He had once been a confidant of Mary's, but then he had turned against her." "And now he had power over her son." "James and Buchanan spent a lot of their time here at Stirling Castle." "And through this little door is supposedly the school room where they had all their lessons in Latin, history and rhetoric, and, of course, lots and lots of Bible lessons." "You can't help but feel for little James." "He was here without a mother or a father." "He was kept away from the people." "He was almost a captive himself." "And he wasn't here to do what he wanted - he was here to do what he was told." "To make matters worse, the man responsible for his education was not above inflicting physical punishment." "After one beating inflicted by Buchanan," "James's guardian, the Countess of Mar, accused him of going too far." "Buchanan retorted, "I have whipped his arse - you may kiss it if you want to. "" "And just what was his tutor trying to beat into him?" "Something his mother never fully grasped - the limits of royal authority." "In the new Protestant Scotland, the role of the monarch was under review." "The will of the people was what mattered now." "And Buchanan wanted to ensure that James got the message." "He even wrote a book to help James be the right sort of king." "Listen to this - it's from George Buchanan's personal note to James VI at the start of his book about kingship." ""I have sent you this book to steer you through the reefs of flattery." ""It may not only admonish you," ""but also keep you to the path which you have once embarked upon." ""And if you should stray from it, rebuke you and drag you back again."" "It's all couched in very affectionate language, but there's no mistaking Buchanan's intent." "It says to me that he wants to control the young prince." "In fact, he wants to create a puppet king." "Buchanan went on to say that if the king caused the people to despise or distrust him by reigning like a tyrant, the people were perfectly justified in getting rid of him." "It was meant as a warning, not necessarily as a prediction." "But just a few years later, James came to understand exactly what his teacher had been trying to tell him." "A group of Protestant nobles lured 16-year-old James to this castle and took him prisoner." "James's crime?" "He had been keeping dangerous company - the company of an older, charismatic French cousin." "Esme Stewart was the only family James had ever known, and James had grown bold with him around." "Once-trusted ad visors had found themselves sidelined, some had even been executed, and his cousin had been promoted in their place." "Esmé Stewart was two things the Protestant nobles feared most." "He was French and he had Catholic sympathies." "Even more worrying, he had an influence, even a power, over young James." "Protestant nobles felt their power slipping." "And in England, Elizabeth grew worried at developments north of her border." "So, with her support, Esmé Stewart was forced back to France." "And James came to share his captive mother's fate." "James stews in captivity, as clays turn into weeks, turn into months, and into a year." "He's just a young boy." "He knows his mother has been imprisoned in England for years, so maybe this is his lot." "Or perhaps his captors have another, more grisly fate in mind for him." "But his jailers didn't seem to know what to do with him." "For the best part of a year, they moved him around the country, until, finally..." "James escaped." "He sought out his loyal supporters and raised an army to take on his captors and get his kingdom back." "A few skirmishes later, James marched into Edinburgh and took full control of Scotland." "And it wasn't long before James showed just what kind of king he intended to be." "The book of his old tutor, George Buchanan, that contained all those ideas of the king's rightful place, the book designed to rebuke James and drag him back to the correct path, was banned." "James would be guided not by the will of the people, but by God alone." "James would be an absolute monarch." "But what of England, and of the queen who had wanted James jailed?" "Elizabeth was facing war in Europe and now she sought an alliance with the Scottish king." "But James had a price in mind." "Nothing less than a guarantee that he would be her heir." "Childless Elizabeth guaranteed nothing, but she did offer a bond of friendship, and Little Arthur was almost where he wanted to be." "But this so-called friendship was about to face its toughest test." "In her 19th year in Elizabeth's English prison, Mary had grown reckless." "Almost everything she'd hoped for had been lost - the Catholic empire, power in France, power in Scotland, even her liberty." "$0 when she received an offer to join up to a murderous plot, she said yes." "The plot was an elaborate one." "Mary was to be liberated, Elizabeth was to be executed, and a Catholic army would land here on the south coast of England." "They would sweep up through the country to London and secure Mary's position." "It was nothing less than a plan for a holy war." "Mary wrote a letter agreeing to Elizabeth '5 murder." "The letter was intercepted." "Mary was tried for treason and sentenced to death." "James now faced the toughest decision of his life." "Just how far should he go in pleading for the life of the mother he hadn't seen since he was a baby?" "If he was seen to be weak, if he did nothing, then the Scottish people themselves might rise in defence of Mary." "But if he shouted too loudly and severed his ties with England and with Elizabeth, what would that mean for his place, his unspoken place, in the line of succession?" "He sent ambassadors to London with clear, written instructions - the one, "To deal very earnestly both with the Queen" ""and her Councillors for our Sovereign mother's life."" "The other, "That our title to that Crown be not prejudged. "" "In other words, "Do nothing to jeopardise my claim to the English throne."" "James's next letter begged Elizabeth merely to exile Mary." "But by then, it was clear that James was not going to make war to save his mother's life." "# The lion and the unicorn were fighting for the crown" "# The lion beat the unicorn all around the town" "# Some gave them white bread and some gave them brown" "# Some gave them plum cake and drummed them out of town. #" "The English Royal Coat of Arms bears a lion, and the Scottish Coat of Arms bears a unicorn - the mythical wild animal that cannot be tamed... except by a virgin." "Now the Virgin Queen had tamed her troublesome unicorn." "Mary went to the block dressed as a Catholic martyr and still claiming to be the rightful Queen of England." "Nothing became her in life like her death." "James expected Elizabeth to reward him for his loyalty, but he was in for a shock, as again, she refused to officially name him as her chosen successor for the English crown." "So James set about proving himself as a king... in Scotland." "First, the Stuart line had to be strengthened." "James chose a wife, Princess Anne of Protestant Denmark, who quickly gave birth to an heir, Henry." "And then she produced a spare, Charles." "Sometimes by force, but more often than not by guile," "James started to stabilise his turbulent kingdom." "Words were his main weapons and books were his ammunition in the constant struggle to stay in control." "He even sought out copies of books from across the known world." "So what have we got here, lain?" "Something rather intriguing - a translation into Scots of Machiavelli's famous treatise on statecraft, The Prince, done by William Fowler for his sovereign, James VI." "And here is the first page." ""The Prince of Nicholas Machiavelli, secretary and citizen of Florence," ""translated furth of the Italian tongue."" "Rather nice usage of "furth" - "out of" the Italian tongue." "What is The Prince all about?" "What's the essence of Machiavelli's work?" "Power." "The getting, the keeping, the exercise of power, and the use of it for the prince's ends and for the good of his state." "Machiavelli's book The Prince has become the most famous book on power in the world." "It advises kings to act like a fox, as well as a lion, in keeping hold of it, which James did...amazingly well, and gradually, he established himself as a king who ruled with his head and not with his heart," "a son who was the opposite of his mother, though every bit as ambitious." "Elizabeth's stubborn refusal to name James as her chosen successor became irrelevant." "The writing was on the wall for Tudor England," "And james was the only real contender for the crown." "Like his mother, the perfect solution to a very English problem." "James had already proven himself to be an adept ruler in Scotland." "He had succeeded where Mary had failed." "He was also the right sex and the right religion to rule in England." "And what's more, he had done something the Tudors had never been very good at - he'd produced viable heirs." "Now all he had to do was live longer than Elizabeth." "But Elizabeth lived on and on and on." "In fact, Elizabeth I lived longer than any English monarch had ever lived before." "Little Arthur was forced to bide his time and contemplate his master plan for when he finally took over in England." "james was 36 when he received the news he'd spent half a lifetime waiting for." "Elizabeth was dead." "The Tudors were finished." "And England needed a king." "James received the news just three days after the death of Elizabeth." "The king-makers wanted him to go down south." "He was to go immediately and directly to the seat of power." "But James had other ideas." "For one thing, he was going to take his time." "And for another, he wasn't going to travel light." "He was going to take his whole entourage - all the pomp and circumstance he could manage." "This was to be a triumphal tour of the promised land." "Now a moment that Scottish kings could only have dreamed of had arrived." "A Scottish takeover of England was happening, and the moment belonged to a king who had proven himself as a clever and effective ruler, one of the most accomplished kings Scotland had ever produced." "He entered London just a few days after an outbreak of plague." "Shortly after, he took a barge along the Thames to the Tower, where he finally saw the English Crown jewels that now belonged to him." "Put yourself in James's position." "This was the seat of power of his most ancient foe - the enemies of his blood." "The people who had burned, raped and murdered his forebears, who had sought to dominate his nation for 300 years, were offering everything they had, throne and crown included, to him." "Imagine what that must have felt like." "After the grand entrance, the great words of welcome, james unveiled his master plan, and it went way beyond just being the king of two separate kingdoms." "Now, according to James, was the chosen moment for a new country to be born." "James had a crystal-clear vision of the future and his place in it." "This was to be a Great Britain - united under a common religion, common laws and common citizenship." "He would be at the top - king and emperor of it all." "And most crucially, it was to be a union of two equal nations." "But that was precisely where the problem lay." ""What's so equal about Scotland and England?" said the English nobility." "England, they thought, was clearly the superior nation - richer, more developed, stronger." "What benefit would there be in joining with backward and impoverished Scots?" "Yet a Scot was now their king, and he was determined to take his idea of Great Britain to Parliament." "It didn't exactly go down a storm." "James was accustomed to getting his own way with Parliament in Scotland." "He expected unquestioning obedience." "But the men here would not roll over - certainly not for an upstart Scot." "Inside Parliament, it quickly became clear that james wasn't about to get his own way." "And outside Parliament, relations between Scots and English were on the point of breaking down." "James exacerbated the situation by his own actions." "He began to shower his inner Scottish circle with gifts - money, pensions, land." "English estates were dealt out to Scottish nobles." "And suddenly, England seemed to be ruled by a clique of very powerful Scots, blocking the way of English courtiers and nobles to riches and royal favour." "Scots in London began to acquire a reputation as being on the make and tight-fisted and closed ranks around their king." "Their prominence was to make them a target in one of the most spectacular conspiracies in British history." "One group had come to especially hate james and his expatriate entourage and decided to take matters into their own hands." "English Catholics felt the Scottish king had let them down with empty promises of tolerance." "And so they turned not only against james, but against all Scots in London." "One of these conspirators was a mercenary called Guy Fawkes." "The gunpowder was heaped up under the Houses of Parliament." "But the institution itself was not the target." "King James was - Protestant, Scottish, King James." "They later said they had enough gunpowder to blast him all the way back to Scotland." "After the plot had been foiled, after Guy Fawkes had been tortured and made his confession, it was revealed that the conspirators had detailed maps and plans giving the locations of the houses of every prominent Scot in London." "What they had planned was nothing less than the ethnic cleansing of the whole city." "James's project for a peaceful, united Britain was in desperate trouble." "In the absence of meaningful progress, james resorted to symbols, to gestures, to flags." "Once James was settled in London, he asked one of his English advisors to come up with some designs for a new flag for his United Kingdom." "And don't the results give a telling insight into the mind-set of the English establishment of the time?" "Scots were gripped by the new fear that the independence of their unconquered nation was under threat, that a Scottish king would do with the pen what no English king had been able to do with the sword - turn Scotland into a satellite of England." "Scotland would now be outranked by England," ""And thereby loss her beauty for ever," said one commentator." "Scotland will turn into "a pendicle of England," said another." "The Union Flag, with the English cross set on a Scottish background, was what james chose to represent his united kingdoms." "But in James's lifetime, it was no more than a reminder of what might have been, of an idea whose time hadn't yet come." "The people of the islands, both Scots and English alike, weren't ready to be British." "And so Project Britain ground to a halt." "For centuries, English kings had used the prophecy of King Arthur's return to try and justify their attempts to subdue Scotland." "But in one of the great ironies of British history, it was Scotland's own Little Arthur, James, who fulfilled that prophecy." "What james had seen as a great victory for Scotland, other Scots felt as a loss." "For the first time, Scots now found themselves ruled from distant London, and a new reality dawned." "By 1603, the Scottish people had a powerful sense of their identity as an ancient and free nation, unconquered by successive waves of invaders, who had fought time and again to secure their freedom and forged a place in Europe." "They had also created a unique and distinctive court." "But the events of 1603 weren't just a further step along that road." "They were the decisive turning point in Scotland's story." "The peace and co-operation that 1603 seemed to promise would be short-lived." "In the century to come," "Scotland and England would experience a terrible escalation of violence in a furious civil war to resolve just what Britain actually meant and what sort of country the new Scotland would become." "For almost 20 years in the 17th century, this island was the most secure prison in the entire British Isles." "Welcome to the Bass Rock, in the Firth of Forth." "Welcome to Scotland's Alcatraz." "There was no escape from the Bass." "Its cells were home to the country's most dangerous men, men whose religious beliefs threatened the stability of Britain itself." "Their radical vision was declared in a document called the National Covenant." "The National Covenant would unseat kings, license revolution, cost tens of thousands of Scots their lives." "It started the Civil War that would cost King Charles I his head." "He struggled to erase the Covenant from history, but to tell the truth, there was never any chance that he would succeed." "After all, he was only a king." "And the National Covenant was a contract between Scotland and God." "In 1633, King Charles I came here, to Edinburgh, for his coronation." "It was a visit he would really rather not have made." "He had been king for eight years now, and if the Scots had given in to his frequent demands that the Scottish Crown jewels be sent to London, then the trip wouldn't have been necessary." "But the Scots had said no." "Several times." "So here he was." "It was his first visit to Scotland in 30 years." "Scotland had missed their king." "They'd missed his father James as well." "After all, the Stuart dynasty might now be in charge of all three kingdoms, but it was Scotland that they came from." "And now, here Charles was, processing down the Royal Mile towards his palace at Holyrood." "The crowds were cheering." "The Scots were pleased to see him... because they hadn't seen him before." "Charles was ignorant of everything that mattered to his Scottish subjects, especially the Presbyterian Kirk." "It might have helped to meet some of its members." "Someone, for instance, like Archibald Johnston of Warriston, a deeply religious young lawyer." "Warriston was as sure as his fellow Presbyterians that the Scottish Church was the closest to perfection on Earth." "But equally certain that it was still sinful, because it was made of human beings, and humans fall short." "King Jesus is the perfect one." "King Jesus supplies the grace and mercy that we lack." "King Charles, on the other hand, chose his first visit to Scotland to show that grace was not his strong point." "The Scots had made plans for the coronation, but Charles rewrote them." "He would not be visiting Scone, with its charmless and poky chapel." "He would have the service here, in Holyrood Abbey, with suitable pomp." "And the coronation service would be Anglican, conducted by an English priest." "A Scottish minister simply wouldn't do." "Clumsy." "But Charles sincerely believed he was God's anointed king." "He sincerely believed that his Church, the Anglican Church, worshipped God correctly and that the Presbyterian Church did not." "A shiver ran down the spines of Scotland 's Presbyterians." "The King had forced change on their Church once before." "Charles 's father had imposed bishops on them, but to the Presbyterians, every soul was equal." "Bishops were distasteful." "The King's task was to defend the Church, not define it." "But it would take more than courage to say no to the King." "Warriston kept a diary, a window into the mind of a man who would do just that." "So, this is all diary in here?" "WOMAN:" "It certainly is." " It's fair to say he liked taking notes!" " He wrote all the time." "He wrote when he was in church, he wrote when he was on horseback, he wrote and he wrote and he wrote." "What kind of man is revealed in these pages?" "A fiery, fanatical, energetic, zealous man at the forefront of a revolution." "Royal authority, it's not something we take very seriously, but in the 17th century, you thought God's authority came down through royalty, came down through the people to whom royalty delegated their powers." "If the King tells you to do something, and you are studying your Bible, and this great feeling is washing through you in prayer, you have the courage to say no to the King, even if that leads you to the gallows or the headsman's axe." "The King provided the Presbyterians with many things to say no to." "Charles ordered the con version of Edinburgh '5 High Kirk, 5 t Giles, into an Anglican-style cathedral." "He appointed new bishops." "And then, three years after his troubling visit, a rumour came to Warriston's ears." "The King intended to introduce an Anglican service book in Scotland." "Scots tended to look down their noses at the English Reformation." "Technically, both Anglicans and Presbyterians were Protestant." "Both had rejected the Catholic Church and the powers of the Pope who led it, but as far as the Presbyterians were concerned, all the English had done was swap the Pope for their own King." "In due course, in 1637, the prayer book arrived." "It was an Anglican prayer book with superficial tweaks." "The presiding minister was called a Presbyter, but the words he spoke were priestly." "Popish, to Presbyterian ears." "Warriston went to a meeting to discuss the new prayer book at the end of May." "When he got home, he wrote in his diary that it was the very image of the Beast." "The 23rd July 1637 was the day appointed for the first use, throughout Scotland, of Charles's new prayer book." "The Bishop of Brechin had no trouble at all when he conducted the service, but the Bishop of Brechin delivered the service with a pair of loaded pistols on either side of the service book." "In Edinburgh, the presiding Bishop and his Dean took no such precautions." "They were beaten up, they were pelted with shit." "The new prayer book was ripped to shreds and the Dean had to hide in the clock tower." "Later, the carriage in which the Bishop and the Dean tried to make their escape was rocked and rolled and overturned." "The rioting lasted for hours, until nightfall." "In due course, the riots became a revolt." "Charles had no idea how serious things were getting in Scotland." "His advisers kept the truth under their flamboyant hats." "The Scots had formed an alternative government and Warriston was appointed as its secretary." "They wanted a useful Scottish king, who would visit Scotland more than once a decade, who understood the Presbyterian Kirk." "They wanted everything that Charles was not." "So Warriston made a suggestion." "They should rewrite him." "This was their rewritten king, the National Covenant of 1638, drafted by Warriston with the help of the leading minister of the day," "Alexander Henderson." "It was addressed to an idealised Charles I who already understood his duties as a Presbyterian king." "It was addressed, in other words, to a king who didn't exist." "In carefully respectful terms, it attacked all the changes that Charles had made, and everything he stood for." "It demanded a monarchy limited by a constitution, limited in power, limited by laws." "The Covenant was a contract between three parties - the King, whose task was the defence of the Presbyterian Kirk, the people, and God himself." "It was called the Covenant as a reference to the Old Testament, to the Covenant made by God with his chosen people." "In the Old Testament, the chosen people had been the Jews." "But it was and is an article of Christian faith that the coming of Christ, and his death on the cross, changed the Covenant." "God's chosen people now were Christians." "The National Covenant of 1638 went a bit further." "God's chosen people were the faithful members of the most perfect Church on the face of the Earth, the Scottish Presbyterian Kirk." "A meeting was scheduled here, at Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh, for the 28th February 1638." "The Covenant was signed by 3,250 people." "Warriston signed it himself, and in his diary that evening he wrote," ""This is the glorious marriage day of the Kingdom with God."" "Copies were sent to every parish in Scotland." "One Sunday in March, Warriston took his family to a kirk south-west of Edinburgh." "It was a chance to see how the Covenant was being received outside the city." "The minister explained the Covenant." "The congregation sat unmoved." "Then the minister asked them to stand and swear their Covenant to the Almighty God." "The congregation rose to their feet." "They raised their hands." "They broke down, they wept, they testified." "The minister was almost suffocated by his own tears." "They swore their Covenant with God." "And after 15 minutes, they fell down on their knees and prayed." "Warriston was stunned." ""Lord," he wrote, "let me never forget my part in this." ""There is a very near parallel between Israel and this Church," ""for we are the only two nations sworn unto the Lord." ""Our Scots Kirk in its rediscovered perfection" ""will be a pattern for other nations." ""We shall extend the royal prerogative" ""of King Jesus the Son of God above all others," ""perhaps extend his kingdom throughout the Earth."" "The enthusiasm was national in scale." "At the very least, 60% of Scotland 's million people promised themselves to God, and believed that God made them a promise in return." "They were his chosen people." "And it was indeed the people who signed." "They weren't even used to holding pens." "Now they were signing a document of national significance." "This was a new world where a king like Charles I could soon find it hard to breathe." "But not all the signatures were freely given." "Failure to sign the Covenant was considered sinful." "Dubious." "Popish." "And what if God was watching, and saw that you had failed to sign?" "Not all the signatures were shaky for lack of practice." "But once they'd signed, whatever their reasons, then they'd made an oath, a contract, a promise to God." "Impossible to unmake." "Impossible to untake." "A heavy weight on any conscience, a terrible weight for any nation to inflict upon itself." "A constant pressure towards extremism, fundamentalism, madness." "It took a year for Charles to realise how far his Scottish subjects had gone beyond mere disobedience." "They would have to be brought to heel." "Charles began preparing for war." "Other kings of England would have turned to Parliament for money, but the English Parliament had shown insufficient sympathy with Charles's belief that his rule was absolute, so he hadn't called them for ten years." "The alternative was war on the never-never." "Charles began to look for someone to borrow from." "The Scots raised an army of fervent Covenanters, led by expert soldiers who had returned home from foreign wars." "Charles raised the military equivalent of a tickling stick." "He lost." "Twice." "By September of 1640, he was shamed and mired in debt." "He had to call the English Parliament." "And the English Parliament was full of Protestants who wanted the same things as the Scots - limits to his power." "They didn't understand that he was God's anointed, trying to save their souls." "Charles declared war on Parliament in August 7642." "The English Civil War had begun." "Warriston had prayed for a chance to extend the power of King Jesus beyond Scotland 's borders." "The English Civil War was a regrettable bloodbath, of course, but it was also an opportunity." "For the first year, the Scots took no part." "Charles and his Royalist army secured victory after victory." "And in the autumn of 1643," "England's Parliament sent agents north to Scotland, to ask for help." "The National Covenant had been for Scotland alone." "The Solemn League and Covenant of 7643 would go much further." "I wasn't expecting to see this in the form of a little hardback book." "WOMAN:" "Unlike the National Covenant," "Solemn Leagues actually tend to be printed." "They are normally a plain, printed book that is signed up to." " We have these lovely engravings here." " What do they tell us?" "One of my favourite illustrations is this one here." "It shows how the Covenant is more radical than that of 1638." "There's no wishy-washy stuff from bishops here." "It's the extirpation of Popery, prelacy, that is bishops." "And here we have these bishops, prelates, deans, deacons, all being cast out of the Church, being insulted as they go." "Something as benign as a chorister is an evil that has to be extirpated?" "Oh, yes, of course." "This expanded Covenant closed a simple deal." "In return for their military assistance, the Scots required the establishment in both England and Ireland of a Presbyterian Kirk, modelled after Scotland's very own." "Plus expenses." "The royal prerogative of King Jesus would extend through all three kingdoms." "Now the Scots had something serious to fight for." "They happily sent an army of 20,000 men south, complete with ministers and a battle cry " ""King Jesus. "" "In July, at the battle of Marston Moor in Yorkshire, they won the first of many victories over Charles 's army." "The Scots had turned the tide." "Charles would never have the upper hand again." "Two years later, Charles sent his sons Charles and James to France, for safety, and surrendered to the Scots." "He was taken to Newcastle." "Alexander Henderson and Warriston, the Covenant's co-authors, were sent to persuade him to sign the Covenant." "There were two paths open to Charles." "On the one side, a long life as a Covenanted king, limited by laws, but the country's leader still." "On the other, more war, more loss of life." "The faint hope of victory for absolute monarchy." "They got down on their knees and begged Charles to sign the Covenant, accept a kingship limited by laws, to agree to establish in all three kingdoms a Presbyterian Church of which he was in no sense the head." "They were asking for peace, of course, but they were also asking Charles to reject his God, to reject his entire understanding of himself, his duties, his place on Earth." "The King couldn't say yes." "It was a syllable too far." "He did not sign the Covenant." "The Scots handed the King over to the English Parliament." "But in his own mind, he was still king by God 's grace." "It would be sinful simply to accept his fate." "Secretly, he made contact with the nobles of the country that his dynasty had been born in." "Scotland's nobles had signed the Covenant, but it was Charles's hope that their loyalty to his family would prove stronger." "And he was proved right." "The nobles agreed to fight for him again, provided that if they won, he would adopt the Covenant and the Presbyterian Kirk for a three-year trial period in all his kingdoms." "The nobles took their secret deal to the rest of the Covenanters." "And the very idea split the movement in two." "For the ordinary folk who made up the majority of the movement, the Covenant was everything." "This talk of three-year trials was nonsense." "They would not fight for the vague promises of an uncovenanted king." "They became known as the Protesters." "The appeals of the Protesters fell on deaf ears." "The nobles marched south to fight for Charles." "And at Preston, they were defeated utterly by an army led by a former gentleman farmer, Oliver Cromwell." "For the Protesters, this was no more than God's judgment." "God did not want the nobles to run the country." "The Protesters seized the capital and purged the ungodly nobles from power." "Warriston joined them." "Now the Protesters were the heart of the Covenanting movement, God's people." "And a government as well." "This was the Rule of the Saints." "They packed the governing session of the Kirk with their members." "They seized control of public conduct." "Backsliders and opponents would be executed." "No sin would go unpunished." "There were floggings, ears nailed to posts, holes bored in tongues." "The Rule of the Saints marked the high point of the Covenant's power." "Covenanters in later years would remember it as the golden age." "But there was no way the Rule of the Saints could ever have lasted." "It was only possible while certain things remained undecided, such as the fate of the King." "By December of 1648, Cromwell had become the leader of a faction that controlled the English Parliament behind the scenes." "All those who might have defended the King were purged from Parliament, and an act was passed." "The King would be prosecuted for treason." "The trial began on the 20th January 1649." "Charles refused to defend himself." "He refused to recognise the jurisdiction of the court, or the logic of the charge itself." "But this was the new world, where kings found it hard to breathe." "On the 30th January 1649, they cut off his head." "When the King's head fell, the old world ceased to be." "It went mad." "The people were horrified by what Cromwell's faction had done." "$0 the English Parliament abolished monarchy." "If there was no king, there was no crime." "They had beheaded a nobody." "No-one had asked the Scots if th ey wanted their king beheaded." "Their Covenant needed a king, like King David in the Bible." "Their Covenant needed his signature." "A dead king could sign nothing." "So within a week of the King's execution, they declared his son Charles king instead." "The 20-year-old Charles returned from France to take the throne." "It was imperative that he sign the Covenant." "His ship arrived in the mouth of the Spey, in the north east, in June." "It anchored, and before he had had a chance to set foot on land, commissioners went on board, presented him with a copy of the Covenant, and required his signature." "He signed." "Because he had to." "But in Cromwell's world, there could be no kings." "As long as there were kings, he was a regicide, a king-killer, which meant that Cromwell had a bone or two to pick with the Scots." "In July of 7650, Cromwell came north." "At first, his campaign went badly." "He was forced back to Dunbar, his back to the sea." "One last push would secure his total defeat." "The Protesters mustered their army in Leith." "It was more than double the size of Cromwell's force." "The godliest of the godly, Warriston amongst them, chose this moment to insist that the army be purged of its ungodly elements." "The ungodly elements, tended, by and large, to be the professional soldiers upon whom the army's success had depended." ""God can do much with a few," said Warriston." "He was right." "But God chose to do it for the other side." "One morning in September, Cromwell broke out of Dunbar at dawn, killed 4,000, took 10,000 prisoner, and put the rest of the Covenanting army to flight." "It became one of Cromwell's most famous victories." "It made him seem, at last, like a possible leader, not just of an army, but of the country itself." "The very next day, the Kirk Session and the town council fled from Edinburgh." "The Rule of the Saints was over." "The young King Charles fled to France, and the English Parliament declared the birth of a new country." "The Great Britain of the Stuarts, the Union of the Crowns, was gone, replaced by the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland." "Behind the pleasant title was a brutal union of conquest, secured by pillage, massacre, and the presence in Scotland of an English army of occupation, 10,000 strong." "In 1653, Cromwell became something called Lord Protector." "Not a king, but still addressed as "Your Highness" by those who served him." "Behind his back, people called him a tyrant and usurper." "For four years, Warriston held himself aloof from the new regime." "But in the end, his ambition required him to collaborate." "He just couldn't bear being unimportant." "In 1657, Cromwell made him the Lord Clerk Register, chief record keeper of the Scottish Government, and gave him a position on the English Council of State." "It was a dream of power." "And a nightmare of betrayal." "just what was Warriston loyal to now, apart from himself?" "It was hard to say." "The Covenant hung over his head as much as anybody's, but there was no king." "There was someone who looked and behaved increasingly like one." "But that was Cromwell." "He began to look like a king reflected in a wicked mirror - ugly, ill-favoured, a tyrant with a bloodstained chin." "Warriston kept on with his daily regime of prayer, manufacturing certainty as best he could." "Then Cromwell died." "His unreal regime died with him." "Now the Commonwealth was headless." "But there was a head available." "It belonged to Charles II." "On May 8th 1660, the English Parliament proclaimed Charles II King of England." "The Scottish Parliament did likewise one week later." "There were scenes of wild celebration in Edinburgh - toasts drunk, glasses shattered, cannons fired." "The joy was hysterical." "11 years of guilt unleashed." "Warriston felt the future tighten around his neck, and fled to Europe." "The brief and ugly experiment was over." "The headless king had horrified everyone." "No-one wanted anything to do with dictators, no-one wanted anything to do with the almost-democracy of the Covenant." "The way ahead was backwards." "The Parliaments of both England and Scotland began undoing things." "They remade the old world." "They remade the Union of the Crowns." "You could hardly see the join." "It was as though nothing had happened." "As though this Charles was that Charles." "His father's ghost was promoted." "He became King Charles the Martyr." "Cromwell's body was exhumed and its head cut off." "There was no Cromwell." "There had been no Civil War." "There was no Covenant." "There would be no Covenanters." "The English Parliament declared the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643 unlawful." "Surviving copies were collected and burnt by the public hangman, executed as though they were people." "Charles was destroying the evidence of the new world that had killed his father." "Everyone knew there would be changes for the Presbyterian Church." "Perhaps it would be enough for Charles that the Protesters no longer ran it." "It wouldn't." "Charles appointed bishops and archbishops." "He ordered Scotland's ministers to swear an Oath of Allegiance to him, and also required that every minister seek the nomination of a local member of the gentry." "262 out of roughly 1,000 ministers failed to make the cut, couldn't or wouldn't take the oath, couldn't or wouldn't find a noble patron." "So 262 ministers, mostly in the south west, were made redundant." "Alexander Peden was one of them." "Until 1662, Peden was a minister in the parish of New Luce, in the deep south west." "Charles's Oath of Allegiance stuck in his craw." "He couldn't say it, let alone swear it." "On the last Sunday before his expulsion," "Peden entered the pulpit at New Luce and preached." "It was a performance to warm the heart of a Warriston." "He preached from morning until midnight." "When at last he left the pulpit, he struck its door three times and ordered it never to open again, except for a Presbyterian minister like himself." "This became his pulpit instead." "Any rock would do, to be honest." "And this became his kirk." "He became a field preacher." "A man on the run, with a growing reputation." "His followers called him Prophet Peden." "The meetings to which he preached were outlawed under the new King's regime, but they took place regardless." "The largest drew crowds of 10,000 and the crowd bore arms." "Here, and in places like this, he preached to a movement that the Covenant had created, to people who had no nobles, no gentry to lead them, and never felt the lack." "They were voices in the wilderness, pointing at the Stuart dynasty and crying tyrant, insisting that the King could not do as he wished." "Almost nobody was listening." "Once, the Covenanter movement had run the entire country." "Now it was numerous only in the south west, numerous and illegal, dismissed by the mainstream." "The nobles, many of the ministers and most of the rest of society had gone back indoors, where it was warm under the umbrella of what the King permitted." "The Protesters stayed outside." "They liked it cold." "In Prophet Peden, the Protesters had found a new hero." "He was desperately needed." "The government of Charles ll was eating up the old ones." "In 1663, Warriston was finally arrested in France." "The last of 78 men that Charles held responsible for his father's death." "The gallows were built unusually high, opposite his former house on the Royal Mile." "On the night before his execution, a friend visited him in jail and Warriston told him he could never doubt of his own salvation." "He had so often seen God's face in the house of prayer." "Time passed." "The King adopted a more tolerant policy." "He licensed some of the Protesting ministers to preach once more, as long as they accepted that he, not King Jesus, was head of the Church." "For Peden and the hardcore of the Protesters, this was wickedly similar to Catholic Christianity, where the head of the Church was human, and had power over individual souls." "The King, they were now certain, was Popish." "Even paranoids are right occasionally." "In 1670, Charles concluded a secret treaty with the most powerful Catholic king in Europe," "Louis XIV of France." "Louis agreed to provide Charles with a generous annual pension." "This was to assist Charles in the restoration of his kingdoms to the arms, the very open arms, of the Catholic Church, at which point Charles would announce his own Catholicism." "And Charles promised that once the national conversion was complete, he would assist the French in their war against the Protestant Dutch." "This was a secret that Charles must keep." "Anyone who accused the King of Popery must be silenced." "The most outspoken Protesters were confined on the Bass Rock." "Peden was one of them." "He was imprisoned there for four long years." "Their leaders were captives, the King 's power seemed limitless." "Everything that the Protesters had once achieved was being undone." "The idea grew amongst them that a spectacular act of rebellion would recall their countrymen to the one true path." "Bishops were at the heart of the wicked changes that the King had made." "And the Archbishop of St Andrews had once been, like themselves, a decent Presbyterian." "On 3rd May 1679, Archbishop Sharp was returning to St Andrews with his daughter." "But nine Protesting Covenanters had lain in wait." "They gave chase." "Sharp's coach was just two or three miles from safety when it was brought to a standstill." "It was an assassination, a terrorist act." "The Government sent a taskforce to the Protesting heartland to stamp on the rats, led by a newly appointed captain, john Graham of Claverhouse." "Claverhouse knew that the crowds at field preachings could sometimes number as much as 10,000." "But he was unaware that they were half religious service, half army, like the one he blundered into at Drumclog." "The terrain was boggy and treacherous." "Claverhouse's men were trained, but outnumbered." "Manoeuvres were simply impossible." "They were defeated." "Claverhouse was almost killed." "Soon afterwards, Glasgow fell to the Protesters." "With this victory, the golden age seemed within their grasp." "They could have marched on Edinburgh to restore the Rule of the Saints." "Instead, they made camp near Both well Brig, just south of Glasgow, and settled down for three weeks of discussion." "Should the ungodly be allowed to join the army?" "Were they fighting to unseat Charles for failing in his duty as a Covenanted King, or were they fighting simply to reproach the King and restore him to the path of righteousness?" "During these three weeks, the Protesters dissolved into smaller and smaller factions." "Tubs were thumped." "Hobby horses were ridden." "Fine points of theology debated." "Perhaps they were under the illusion that the King was in a mood for clemency." "After all, Peden was once again at liberty." "But Peden himself wasn't at Bothwell." "He had learnt his lesson on the Bass." "The best sort of prophet to be was one who was breathing." "From a safe distance of 40 miles, he prophesied the bloody slaughter of his friends at Bothwell Brig." "Wherever his information came from, it was accurate." "400 of the Bothwell debaters were killed, 1,200 taken prisoner, the rest dispersed in terror." "But Bothwell Brig had shown that the Covenanting movement was still a threat." "Executions of the Protesters became frequent." "In 1681, a widow's son from a small town in Dumfriesshire came to watch as the very last Protesting minister swung to glory." "And he decided that a martyr's death would suit him, too." "His name was James Renwick." "Later that year, he came into the city to watch another five executions." "Five more of his fellow Protesters." "Their heads were stuck on the city's Netherbow gate." "And that night, Renwick climbed up, took them down, and buried the five grisly parcels with all due ceremony." "He began to rise in the ranks of the Protesters." "Renwick was in the bloom of youth." "The King who so offended him, Charles ll, was withering on the vine." "His wife had proved barren." "Charles had fathered several bastards, but male bastards weren't considered king material." "There was only one alternative - the King's brother, James." "At the King's command, he was confirmed as Charles [J's successor." "But James had been openly Catholic for almost ten years." "The vast majority of his future subjects were Protestants, for whom Rome was a byword for tyranny." "Yet almost nobody dared object." "He was a Stuart, after all, and guilt for his father's execution stilled most tongues." "Only the Protesters said out loud that here was the final proof that the Stuart dynasty was unfit to rule." "Since Bothwell Brig, the Protesters' numbers had declined." "There were no more than 6,000 left, when once the Covenant could have claimed 600,000." "They didn't care." "They rechristened themselves the United Societies, declared that they were the country's rightful government, and as their leader, they chose James Renwick." "To announce their presence, they marched into Lanark to the Mercat Cross and burnt copies of the acts that made James next in line for the throne." "Then they made their own declaration." "In the name of the people, for whom of course they did not speak, they rejected the Stuart dynasty." "They rejected Charles as King on the grounds that he had destroyed the perfect reformation, on the grounds that he'd turned his court into a brothel." "On the grounds of the hateful Catholicism of his intended heir." "They demanded a return to the years of 1648 and 1649, to the Rule of the Saints." "Then they took up hammers and smashed the Mercat Cross." "Renwick's United Societies cut a dash." "They drew the eye of Prophet Peden." "He took to preaching sermons that supported them." "He lamented the bad faith of the nobles, gentlemen and ministers who had deserted the Covenant for the safety of Charles II's Church." ""They are vile bastards," he said." "Clearly, Peden hoped the United Societies would take him on as their minister." "But Renwick let it be known that Peden had been tested and found wanting." "His numerous absences whilst others had lost their lives had been noted." "In fact, he had disgracefully failed to die on several occasions." "Not like Renwick." "Renwick was more than willing to die if his God required it." "Renwick was insanely resolute." "And with his 6,000 men, he was perfectly capable of starting a second civil war." "He and his followers were eminently worth killing." "But how could these dangerous men be identified?" "The Government needed to look inside its subjects' heads." "An oath was framed requiring all citizens to reject the United Societies, but there were questions, too." "Could the subject say, "God save the King"?" "No-one from the United Societies could say that of Charles II." "Not when God was listening." "And God was always listening." "john Graham of Claverhouse, fast becoming the Government's enforcer of choice, was sent into the south west, armed with the oath." "The oath could be administered on the spot and failure to take it was punishable by instant death." "These months would be remembered as the Killing Times." "It wasn't the numbers that made the Killing Times notorious." "The numbers weren't great." "It was the summary nature of the executions." "No courts." "No appeals." "Just a bullet in the head." "A little over 90 deaths in a little less than a year." "The killings began in December and provided an unpleasant baptism for the beginning of a new and inauspicious reign, the reign of James VII and II." "In February 7685, Charles I!" "died of a stroke." "James's succession was unopposed." "The Stuart dynasty seemed unassailable." "Now there were two powerful Catholic monarchs for Europe's Protestants to contend with." "In France, Louis XIV." "In Britain, James VII and II." "For William of Orange, the Calvinist Prince of the Dutch Republic, the prospect of a Catholic alliance between Louis XIV and James was too frightening for words." "He had been fighting the French off and on for years, and he was a Stuart, or very nearly." "He was James's nephew and son-in-law." "In short, he had a claim to James's crowns." "James set about providing William of Orange with ammunition." "He decreed that Catholics could not only worship, but hold office." "He was his father's son." "Parliament was not consulted." "Catholics became a majority on the Privy Council," "Catholics were appointed to the control of royal burghs." "Little was lacking from James's victory." "Only the United Societies remained." "He set a price on Renwick's head by proclamation." "£100, dead or alive." "It was clear to Renwick what his God required of him." "He would preach in the fields outside Edinburgh, he would even enter the city itself." "He would make it easy for the King's men to find him." "The authorities entered the house he was staying in." "Renwick shot one of them, escaped, but couldn't or wouldn't run." "He walked this far, to Castle Wynd, where he was captured." "He was too important a prize for simple execution." "For two weeks, the authorities attempted to extract from him a confession that he had never done God's work." "This proved impossible." "His execution was finally fixed for February 17th 1688." "On the scaffold, Renwick spoke for King Jesus at considerable length." "He recited Psalm 103." ""The Lord has established His throne in Heaven, and His kingdom rules over all."" "He read from Revelations, Chapter 19." ""Come and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the great God," ""that ye may eat the flesh of kings."" "And he concluded, "Lord, I die in the faith that you will not leave Scotland," ""but that you will make the blood of your witnesses the seed of your Church," ""and return again and be glorious in our land." ""And now, Lord, I am ready."" "Renwick's death made James feel safe." "He could ignore the Covenant." "He was anointed by God, an absolute monarch, unchallenged." "And then he did what his brother had failed to do - he secured the future of the Stuart dynasty." "On the 10th of June of that year, the King's wife gave birth to a healthy male heir, James Francis Edward." "A rhyme began to do the rounds." "James should have listened to it." "It was a prophecy." "Rock-a-bye baby, on the tree top" "When the wind blows, the cradle will rock" "When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall" "Down will come baby, cradle and all." "The roots of his power as a Catholic king were far from deep." "They had grown upon stony Protestant ground." "William of Orange had begun preparing an invasion fleet two months before the child was born." "The fleet was ready by the first week of October." "With sailors and others included, William's force totalled some 70,000." "Clearly, he had no intention of doing this twice." "The army landed in Devon in the first week of November." "And almost at once, James's support began mysteriously to wither away." "Because in the end, Stuart or not, son of the headless king or not, he was a Catholic." "On the night of 9th December, the Queen and the King's young heir fled to France." "James VII and II followed on the 23rd." "He hadn't abdicated." "But everybody decided to behave as though he had." "They decided, too, that this wasn't an invasion." "This would be the Glorious Revolution." "They had invited William of Orange." "Do come and take a kingdom!" "Dress - military." "RSVP." "In May of 1689, William of Orange and his wife Mary accepted a joint monarchy of England, Scotland and Ireland." "A monarchy with strings attached." "The Crown could no longer suspend laws, levy taxes, or maintain a standing army in peacetime without Parliament's permission." "Here, at last, was the new world, 50 years after the Covenanters had first asked for it." "50 years after Charles I had said no." "In England, the Stuarts were kings no longer, with hardly a shot fired." "The Glorious Revolution would acquire another adjective." "Bloodless." "But in Scotland, there was blood aplenty." "Several northern nobles remained faithful to James." "One of these Jacobites was john Graham of Claverhouse, now the Viscount Dundee." "Claverhouse went north, formed an army, won a decisive victory at Killiecrankie, and died of his wounds on the battlefield." "The first Jacobite rebellion died with him, but its body twitched for some time after." "It took several months to crush the Jacobite garrison in Edinburgh Castle." "But the garrison here held out longest of all." "So it was on the Bass Rock that the Stuart dynasty finally lost its grip on power." "At last, there was a kind of peace." "The moderate remnants of the Presbyterians reached a compromise with King William." "Bishops were abolished, and the Presbyterians resumed control of the Church of Scotland." "But they were deceiving themselves." "They were the Church of southern Scotland." "Because in the north, loyalty to the older kind of God-anointed king remained in force." "The split in the Kirk was a split in the country, an unheated wound, and the Stuarts, of course, were far from dead." "They were only in exile, in France, a long swim across the English Channel." "A dynastic time bomb." "For 50 years, the Covenanters had been almost the only voice that constantly resisted the rule of the Stuarts, stood against absolute monarchy, insisted that the soul of every human weighed the same." "We can almost see them as martyrs in the cause of civil liberty." "From a distance of several hundred years, the Covenanters seem almost benign." "But come closer." "The Covenanters knew very little of mercy." "They knew nothing at all of moderation." "The only government they could ever have approved was the rule of the Presbyterian Kirk, with a Covenanted King." "One nation under God, and bound for glory, sermons once a clay and twice on Sunday." "The freedoms they sought were freedoms for" "Covenanting Presbyterians, and no-one else at all." "Anyone of another faith could, and certainly would, go straight to hell." "Once, this was God's country." "It's not any more." "Thank God for that." "In December of 1688, the British King James arrived in Paris at the Court of Louis XIV." "He was a fugitive." "James had been kicked off his throne by the Dutch usurper," "William of Orange." "Of his vast fortunes as King of England, Scotland and Ireland," "James had managed to escape with just £23,000." "His wife, Mary of Modena, had brought her jewels." "Third and last from the wreckage, but far from least, they had managed to save their son and heir, little James Francis Edward." "He was just six months old." "He was the future." "Louis XIV was generous to a fault." "He gave them a home, his second best palace at Saint-Germain-en-La ye just outside Paris." "It was anything but small." "It was the opposite." "A place in which elegance was magnified, stretched, extended to levels at which the mind of a mere mortal might easily freeze." "It was a place in which illusions could sustain themselves." "It was a place in which a man who had once been king could pretend that he still was." "King James VII and II had lost his job." "His redundancy had cost several other people their careers, men with their families, many of them Catholics like James himself." "These Jacobites came to live in France to share his borrowed palace." "He gave them tasks and titles." "In his French court, he built a shadow government." "The shadow court settled down to a rhythm of impoverished display, all paid for by Louis XIV." "And Louis sent daily deliveries of flowers from his greenhouses at Versailles to cheer the Queen." "Chilly blossoms, cold comfort." "James could only watch from France as William of Orange settled into his powers in his palaces and started telling stories, started spinning." "The invasion that had cost James his kingdom was given a name - the Glorious Revolution." "Shorthand for a longer myth - William, a conquering Protestant hero, champion of liberty and limited monarchy, had come to oust the tyrant, James VII and II, a Catholic king who rode roughshod over the treasured civil liberties" "of his freedom-loving subjects." "Spin." "Old spin now." "More than three centuries old." "But that doesn't make it any truer." "William of Orange wasn't interested in liberties." "He was interested in war." "The whole point of his invasion had been to prevent a Catholic alliance between England and France." "Once the dust had settled and the blood had dried," "William's plans were simple." "He wanted to make war on France, and England could do that on its own." "Scotland 's job?" "Keep quiet." "Don't get in the way." "So in Scotland, William's Glorious Revolution was about management, not liberty." "There were no elections." "William allowed the emergency meeting that had decreed him king to stay on as Scotland's Parliament." "And the last ingredient in the recipe was someone" "It was a job for someone reliable, someone reliably self-interested." "William eventually found his man in the Duke of Queensberry, who soon erected around himself a clique, the Court Party, which cheerfully enacted the King's wishes in Scotland." "And that was that." "The Glorious Revolution, not very glorious at all." "But like all good spin, it contained a solid grain of truth that James could not deny." "As a king, he had been authoritarian, he had shown favour towards Catholics." "So he spun back." "Return of service." "In 1693, he dispensed with his Catholic advisers and produced a decree." "The shadow king promised that when he was, once again, the true king, there would be no more absolutism, no more religious intolerance and inequity." "Parliament's rights would be protected, the religious settlement would not be tampered with and there would be no revenge taken, no punishments at all for those who had fought against him." "He remained, of course, a Catholic himself, for which the supporters of William of Orange can only have been profoundly grateful." "After 1693, there was nothing else to choose between them." "The proclamation ticked every box." "It raised the ghost of a Stuart restoration." "But in the 1690s, Scots were more worried about what to eat." "Thousands had died in the revolution." "The famines that followed killed thousands more." "Scotland desperately needed money for food." "But England was in the way." "Trade with the French was impossible because the English were fighting them." "Trade with England's juicy colonies in America would have been nice but the English refused to allow it." "God helps those who help themselves." "In 1695, some of Edinburgh's merchants founded the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies." "And better still, a financial genius had come to town." "William Paterson." "He talked a good game." "The year before," "Paterson had been involved in the foundation of the Bank of England." "He was sacked from its board shortly afterwards, but Paterson rarely mentioned that." "Now he was in Scotland and had helped to found the Bank of Scotland, too." "He had an air about him of mysterious financial knowledge." "He knew that if you rubbed the numbers the right way, that a company could almost magically grow in size." ""Trade will increase trade," he said, "and money will beget money."" "The Company of Scotland had originally planned to trade to West Africa." "The risks would be slight and the profits would be small." "Paterson had another plan." "He knew exactly where the best basket was for all of Scotland's eggs." "They should set up a massive port on the land bridge between the Americas in a place called Darien." "There they would become the middle man in all the trades of the New World." "They would make a mint." "All that optimism ended up on the front page of the company's minute book." "It's a fantastically grand and optimistic cover, isn't it?" "WOMAN:" "Absolutely and it shows that the people who were doing this had an eye to the fact that they were making history, to put that right on the front page of your first volume of minutes." "NEIL OLIVER :" "Would it have stood out in amongst a collection of similar documents at the time?" "RUTH REED:" "Absolutely." "You wouldn't expect something this glamorous on the front of what is essentially a working document." "The rising sun symbol, which was the symbol of the company, this glamorous and exotic Native American and African." "This is a Native American supposedly?" "Their idea of what one would have looked like, and they're carrying these horns of plenty with this fantastic glamorous golden fruit." "Paterson 's scheme was a runaway success." "Scotland 's nobles, merchants, burghs and cities all went home and dug money from under mattresses, emptied strong boxes and socks." "By some estimates, fully a quarter of Scotland 's liquid cash ended up in the coffers of the Company of Scotland." "Even the Duke of Queensberry punted 3K on Darien." "This was money that the Scots could ill-afford." "But what could possibly go wrong?" ""The bank has the benefit of all monies" ""which it creates out of nothing,"" "Paterson is reputed to have said about banking practice and principle." "These clays, phrases like that have a hollow ring, and in the 1690s," "Paterson was every bit as much of a banker as our current crop." "In the Darien scheme," "Paterson would take a substantial slice of Scotland's money and make it, as if by magic, disappear." "Darien never stood a chance." "The King had told the Scots he didn't want them trading on the toes of his English interests in the Americas or on the toes of his Spanish allies." "He told bankers in England and Holland not to invest in Darien." "The colony collapsed and within five years it was clear that of over £150,000 sterling, there was nothing left at all." "Not a brass farthing." "No doubloons, no ducats, no dosh, no nothing." "William Paterson did the sensible thing." "He moved to London." "Darien left a double legacy." "A Scottish governing class who blamed King William for their poverty and a King William who could not trust Scotland to keep his peace." "He had taken steps to secure his revolution." "The English Parliament had passed laws to exclude Catholics from the throne." "But he had no heir." "His sister-in-law Anne was a Protestant, but after her, the nearest Protestants with a claim were a German family, the Hanoverians." "William secured their agreement to take the throne once Anne was dead." "As for Scotland, in 1605," "James VI and I had become king of both countries." "Two kings had become one." "For William, it was now a matter of the highest urgency, the kingdoms must do likewise." "He must have union." "In September of 1701, James VII and II, the king in exile, breathed his last." "He was buried here in the church at Saint-Germain." "The shadow king was still warm when Louis XIV proclaimed his teenage son James King of England, Scotland and Ireland." "And the Pope and the King of Spain added their similar declarations at once." "William of Orange was still warm too." "And these declarations made him positively hot." "He broke off relations with France and set about all the preparations necessary for a full-scale war." "In the midst of this entirely characteristic flurry of activity," "William decided to take a brief rest." "He had a new horse and he took it for a ride in the grounds of his favourite residence, Hampton Court." "The horse stepped on a molehill and fell." "William broke his collarbone and infection set in." "Almost at once, the mole responsible became the subject of a Jacobite toast." ""To the little gentleman in black velvet."" "William died two weeks later." "His place on the throne was taken by his sister-in-law, the last Protestant Stuart, Anne." "Anne was dangerously overweight." "17 pregnancies had left their mark." "But, ill-health aside, she knew her duty as a Protestant." "At the head of her to-do list was William's priority number one." "Union." "She ordered her Parliaments north and south of the border to make it happen quickly." "A new party had formed in Scotland's Parliament, the Cavaliers, loyal to the exiled Stuarts." "George Lockhart of Carnwath was one of its backbenchers." "Lockhart kept a journal and served as a doormat to the acknowledged leader of this dissident tendency, James Douglas, the Duke of Hamilton." "The Hamiltons were closely related to the Stuarts and traditionally regarded as Scotland's most senior nobles." "This entitled them to grace and favour apartments rent free in the Palace of Holyrood house, which was fortunate because the Duke of Hamilton, not to put too fine a point on it, was poor." "All the poorer since Darien." "He had invested £1,000." "In Parliament, Hamilton locked horns with the (Town's representative, the Duke of Queensberry." "It looked like a life-and-death struggle for Scotland 's political independence." "It was actually professional wrestling." "Pure theatre." "A leading supporter of the Union later revealed that Hamilton made several visits to Queensberry's apartments by night." "These were not social calls - he was looking for an income." "Various letters that survive describe his desperate need for money." ""He must have his debts paid," said one." "Another described him as "a room for rent"." "First on the agenda - the committee to discuss the terms of union." "It was vital that the Scots retained the right to make their own nominations to this committee." "But the rentable Duke of Hamilton called a vote when most of his party had gone home for dinner, with the result that the right to name the committee was placed entirely in the hands of the Crown." "Everything that followed was bitter farce." "Hamilton had opened the door, the English stuck their foot in it." "They would keep it open until their business had been done." "The following summer, the commission to negotiate the terms of the Union got under way." "To the astonishment of none, the nominated commissioners were overwhelmingly pro-Union." "Apart from George Lockhart, who got a place on the committee entirely by mistake." "The commission met in London, in Whitehall." "The Scots sat in one room, the English in another." "And the two parties communicated with each other only in writing." "The committee soon reached the heart of the matter - money." "Union would subject the Scots to higher English taxes." "The English proposed to pay something called an Equivalent, a sum of money to help the Scots cope." "Lockhart raised a question." "How could this money be given to the poor?" "They would need it most." "Nobody answered." "In due course, the size of the Equivalent was agreed and of its £400,000," "£217,000 was to go directly to those who had invested in Darien." "Lockhart finally got what the Equivalent was." "It was a bribe, payable to a Scottish elite whose losses in Darien had turned them against the English." "Now they would get their money back, with interest, and their anti-English hearts would soften accordingly." "For Lockhart, it was the last straw." "He refused to sign the final treaty." "Nobody minded or even noticed." "The treaty was sent to the Scottish and English Parliaments for approval." "When the terms of the treaty were published, they proved unpopular." ""The whole nation appears against the Union," wrote Lockhart." ""Ministers roar against it from the pulpits."" "He was writing to Hamilton who had somehow re-established himself as the figurehead of resistance." "Lockhart was touchingly trusting." "Outside Parliament, the Union was indeed hugely unpopular." "But inside Parliament, it was not." "Queensberry and his henchmen, john Erskine, the Earl of Mar, found their fellow Scottish nobles quite biddable." "More than any other class, Scotland's nobles had had to deal with the fact that in 1603, their king had simply disappeared." "The King of Scotland was a memory, he was buried inside the King of England." "The Union was a chance to have a king again." "So the nobles voted consistently for bread with English butter, by a factor of 2-1." "Queensberry and Mar brokered a deal with the Church as well, promising it to the Presbyterians for evermore." "Clause by clause, the Act of Union slowly passed." "The pulpits that had roared quite recently began to purr instead." "George Lockhart became increasingly depressed." "It was time for the last resort." "The anti-Unionists would call a vote and accept the Hanoverians as an independent Scotland." "Hey presto, no Union necessary." "It was universally agreed that the man to call the vote should be the Duke of Hamilton." "The vote was planned for 9th January and on that morning," "Hamilton's supporters eagerly awaited his arrival." "A note arrived instead." ""I have a toothache," it said," ""and cannot attend Parliament today."" "As long as Hamilton was there, whenever one door closed another one would shut." "Six days later, the Act of Union passed in its entirety." "The Duke of Queensberry touched the Act with the sceptre." "It was law." "On April 28th 1707, the Scottish Parliament dissolved itself, apparently for ever." "Certainly, this room would never see another." "The Chancellor signed a shortened version of the Act and said as he did so," ""Now there is an end of an old song."" "The Chancellor had worked assiduously with Queensberry and Mar to see the Act through Parliament and must have spoken with a certain amount of satisfaction." "Lockhart disapproved, of course." ""Here was a clay never to be forgotten," he wrote," ""a clay on which Scots were stripped" ""of something they had maintained gallantly for centuries " ""their independence and their sovereignty."" "It is hard not to admire the professionalism, the sheer slickness of the process by which Scotland was groomed for Union." "But there it was, Lockhart's unpleasant truth." "The Glorious Revolution had been at last and irrevocably secured." "Scottish independence had been sold for the sake of English security." "The wounds of the Union were fresh." "Louis XIV decided it was time to apply the salt." "He was losing his war with Britain, but the shadow king, James the VIII and III, was 19 years old." "A card ripe for playing." "Louis set the date for the invasion to restore his throne - spring of the next year." "James had waited all his life for this." "He had become a restrained, methodical, focused young man." "Too methodical." "James had a talent for administration." "While the French set about preparing an invasion fleet," "James prepared his pitch to the Scottish people." "The Union was deeply unpopular." "He would offer himself as the King of Scots, first and foremost." "He would dissolve the Union." "He would leave the settlement of the Church in Parliament's hands and he promised that Parliament itself would be free of any interference on his part." "Once again, the exiled Stuarts were offering their people greater freedom, more at least than they currently enjoyed." "In Scotland, George Lockhart calculated there were 30,000 or 40,000 men who would rise if James should land." "Most of the government's troops were at war abroad." "There were only 2,500 regulars left in Scotland, 5,000 in England." "It was going to be a walkover." "The French fleet set sail on March 17th, followed by a British fleet from the very first." "The weather was appalling." "For James, the experience was unpleasantly novel." "The French fleet anchored off (rail in Fife." "It was James's first sight of Scotland." "His feet itched to walk there." "And then the British fleet appeared astern." "James begged the French admiral to put him ashore, but the admiral refused." "He had been briefed by Louis." "Whatever else, James must return alive." "They sailed north and anchored off Stains Castle, north of Aberdeen." "James begged once again to be set ashore and was once again refused as the British fleet hove into view." "The chance to land was gone." "The French fleet sailed round the north of Scotland and struggled back to Dunkirk." "Lockhart despaired." "Had the weather been better or the French admiral less fearful of Louis' wrath, James would have landed." "Ordinary Scots hated the Union." "Surely they would have risen for their king?" "But the chance was lost." "The Union stood." "And the Union disappointed." "It disappointed even those who had helped bring it about." "Free trade had been one of the promised perks of Union, but the benefits of free trade spread with excruciating slowness." "In the summer of 1711, the Earl of Mar wrote a letter of complaint to the Crown's leading minister." ""I have not yet grown weary of the Union myself,"" "wrote Mar, "but the attitude of the English Parliament" ""is beyond all sense, reason and fair dealing." ""If nothing is clone to encourage our trade," ""it will be more than flesh and blood can bear," ""and what Scotsman will not grow weary of the Union" ""and do all he can to end it?"" "And that was a letter from one of the Union's friends." "As the Union grew less popular, the Queen gained weight." "Her health was failing." "It would soon be time to see if the British north and south of the border could really hand the Crown to the Hanoverians with their distant claim." "James wrote Anne a letter." ""God and nature call you, madam." ""Settle the succession in the right line once again." ""Make me your heir."" "It was worth a try, but Anne never wrote back." "She sent another sort of answer." "72 years of war between Britain and France were coming to an end." "The British negotiators made it a condition of the peace treaty that James should be expelled from France." "Louis XIV was tired, old and on the losing side." "Early in 1713, he agreed." "The treaty was concluded in April and James became a wanderer." "He had lived with his shadow court in the palace of Saint-Germain for 23 years." "It had sustained all of his illusions." "Now his court was to be allowed to stay, but he would have to leave." "It would be harder in the absence of this palace to pretend." "He was offered asylum in Lorraine, a small dukedom sandwiched uncomfortably between Germany and France." "The home of quiche, the land of cakes, birthplace of rum babas, macaroons and madeleines." "It was agonising." "James was no tourist." "He was a painfully serious young man whose reason for living was across the English Channel." "But then the English broke a promise." "At the Union, they had guaranteed the Scots a permanent holiday from certain taxes, but in 1715, they ordered the Scots to pay a tax on malt, and at the English rate." "There were riots, there were strikes." "The Scots in the House of Lords moved to dissolve the Union and lost by just four votes." "And Queen Anne at last fell properly ill." "Soon, the Hanoverian George would be king." "It was known that George felt the recent treaty with France had been criminally kind to the French." "While Anne was breathing, the jobs in government of those who had made it were safe." "As soon as she stopped, those jobs were history." "Anne died in August of 1714." "The coffin she was buried in was square." "The new king arrived a month later." "He was a stereotype, humourless, stolid, unimaginative." "His reshuffle was even more thorough than expected." "The Earl of Mar was one of those who found himself without a job, so he went back home to Scotland." "And he arrived there an instant revolutionary." "He spread malicious rumours that the English planned taxes on land, corn, cattle, meal, malt, horses, sheep, cocks and hens." "And then he raised the standard of the Jacobites on September 6th." "The reliably pro-Stuart Louis XIV had died five days before he did so." "Perhaps Mar should have waited, perhaps he should have changed his plans." "But the word "plan" does not belong in any sentence describing what Mar did." "All historians agree, when they write their accounts of the Jacobite rising of 1715, their vocabularies converge on words like" ""farce", "buffoon", "idiocy", "incompetent"," ""worst possible time", "disintegrate", "pathetic"," ""half-cocked", "botched up", "monstrous", "bumbling"," ""damp squib", "stupid", "fatuous..."" "But the cause, unlike the Union, was popular." "10,000 men rallied to Mar from Scotland 's north east and the Highlands." "In the north of England, a small group of Jacobite aristocrats gathered." "James set forth from France, bringing money." "But Mar was no general." "At Sheriffmuir near Stirling, he met a government army less than half the size of his and failed to beat it." "The next day, the English Jacobites were captured almost to a man." "Now only a dramatic entrance could save the rebellion." "The arrival of a Catholic Stuart on the mainland for the first time in 26 years." "The shadow king, trailing clouds of glory." "James arrived late in December near Aberdeen." "Always a bad sailor, he was carried ashore by the captain." "There were no clouds of glory, there was just James, two attendants and a chest full of money." "Ordinary, on the beach at Peterhead." "James rendezvoused with Mar, who had returned to Perth." "The army had shrunk." "James estimated their total at 4,000." "There were many things they might have done." "Scone, where the kings of Scotland were traditionally crowned, was hardly far away." "It would have been a moment of great resonance if James had come here." "If the crown, or a reasonable substitute, had been placed upon his head, it might have lit a fire, and set the heather burning." "It never happened." "Reality got in the way." "James was, by all unbiased accounts, a fine man, but he was not a charismatic leader." "He was a bureaucrat, he buckled no swash." "The rebellion evaporated like the morning dew." "A little more than three weeks later," "James embarked on a ship in Montrose." "Mar was with him, so was his sense of failure." "And Mar's nickname, Bobbing john, was with them too." "James left Scotland a note of apology, together with a large amount of money for distribution among some of the villages he had been obliged to damage during his retreat." "For two months, James had trod the earth of his ancestral kingdom." "It had shown him up." "He would never return." "In May of 1716, with the recent comedy of the rising as an excuse," "Parliament passed an act reducing the frequency of elections to once every seven years." "The great freedoms of the Glorious Revolution continued to shrink." "James had not given up." "He began looking for two things." "A wife - it was time to secure the future of the dynasty." "And a military sponsor, to replace France." "It was his quest for a wife that bore real fruit, in the shape of Princess Clementina Sobieski, a Polish noblewoman whose father certainly couldn't afford a real king." "According to reports, she was a fragile beauty, of gentle temperament and fabulous wealth." "Her jewels were legendary." "The Pope was delighted with the marriage." "He declared them King and Queen of Great Britain and awarded them a generous pension." "They moved to Rome." "British diplomacy had effectively closed every other country's doors." "Being in Rome was bad for James's career." "His future crown depended on him convincing his somewhat bigoted subjects that his association with the Roman Catholic Church was anything but close, but here he was at last, cornered in Rome, with all its bells and smells," "its cardinals, monks and nuns, tarred with the brush of popery." "The Pope made a still more generous gift, one that it was churlish to refuse." "So James made his court here, in the Palazzo del Re, the Palace of the King." "After six years of wandering," "James once again had a place upon which to build a better future - substantial, suited to his status, with courtyards and saloons where he could hide from the Roman heat." "A shadow palace." "James and Clementine got down to the pressing business of making babies." "On the last day of 1720, the air of the palace was split by the cries of a very young pretender." "Charles Edward Louis Philippe Casimir Sylvester Maria Stuart." "He was a remarkably bonny baby." "James called him Carluccio," "Italian for "little Charles"." "His mother stuck to her native Polish." "She called him Karleusu." "He grew." "Charles was a source of intense satisfaction for his father." "His very existence was proof that the shadow dynasty was real, that its fortunes would improve, that it would become a reality." "Charles's upbringing was carefully English." "As a young boy, he was taught to speak English." "He ate English." "Roast beef was often on the menu." "James brooded over him." "When the time came for him to take the throne, he would not be, as the Hanoverians were, a foreigner." "He would be going home." "In 1725, two things happened for the second time." "James and Clementina had a second child, Henry." "And in Scotland, the government tried once more to introduce a malt tax." "The riots that followed were predictable and violent." "They had almost nothing to do with Jacobitism." "But George I 's government decided to behave as though they did." "They sent one General Wade to Scotland, with a brief to secure the Highlands against Jacobite insurgents." "The Highlands had remained a nest of Jacobite vipers for so long, because of their inaccessibility." "Wade's job was to tame the Highlands by subjecting them to bridges and roads." "Between 1726 and 1737," "Wade would construct 260 miles of roads across the Highlands, studded every few miles with barracks and forts." "It was a massive demonstration of the Union's power and an indispensable first step in taming the landscape." "The year after Wade began building his roads, George I died." "His son, George II, succeeded to the throne without a hitch." "And in Montrose, the foundations of a house were laid." "When finished, it would be home to David Erskine, the 13th Laird of Dun - a close relation of "Bobbing john" Mar." "Erskine was a pillar of the Scottish legal establishment, best remembered for a legal tome known as Lord Dun's Friendly And Familiar Advices, a handy, dandy book of tips for dealing with all of life's little legal emergencies." "David Erskine was hardly a threatening figure." "But his heart, like the hearts of many still in Scotland's north east, belonged to James Stuart and his infant heir, Charles Edward, who was now five years old." "And at the heart of his house, he allowed himself an expression of his true sympathies." "On one wall, a plea to the sea god Neptune." "Storms had provided the most reliable defence against Jacobite invasion." ""Next time, Neptune, give us a calm and prosperous voyage."" "And over the fireplace, Mars, the god of war." "A cunning reference to the Mar family itself." "The pile he's crushing beneath his feet consists of the Crown, the Union jack and at the bottom of the heap, the British Lion." "These elaborately violent carvings were commissioned at the last stages of the house's construction in 1740." "They depended entirely on the language of myth, which was what the dream of Stuart restoration seemed increasingly to be." "The Stuarts had been in exile for over 50 years." "But, in fact, the ice was melting." "The French had decided, after 27 years of peace, to make war on Britain once again, and Charles Edward had matured into the sort of leader his father could never have been, an athlete of stunning charisma." "In November of 1743, a request arrived at the Palazzo del Re, a request from the King of France for the pleasure of the company of Prince Charles Edward on an invasion of Britain." "Charles left a month later, incognito." "He took two documents with him." "The first, in James' s name, declared him sole regent of England, Scotland and Ireland." "His father had decided, sensibly, to recede into the background." "The other document promised religious liberty, regular parliaments, a limit on Crown servants in Parliament itself, all the freedoms that the Glorious Revolution had still not provided." "Everything he needed, bar the weather." "A storm damaged the invasion fleet and the French cancelled the expedition." "Charles Edward, however, did not." "He bought weapons with borrowed money, took with him seven chosen companions, and sailed for Scotland in July of 1745." "By the second week of August, he had landed on Scotland 's west coast." "A week later, he was here in Glenfinnan, raising the Stuart colours, addressing the faithful Highlanders." "It was like a dream." "A dream he had dreamed all of his life." ""I've not come out of divine right,"" "he told the Camerons, the Keppochs, the men of Clanranald." ""I have come to make my beloved subjects happy."" "The glen resounded." "The army he addressed was far from large." "Many clans that had once favoured the Jacobites had switched to the Hanoverians." "Much less than half the country would support him." "But much less than half the country would oppose." "By the 1740s, one note was dominant in the minds of most Scots, where the Union was concerned indecision." "But no matter." "As the echoes died away in Glenfinnan, Charles was happy, and full to bursting with hope." "More than those few would rise and follow him." "He was sure of it." "As they marched, some people joined." "Most people simply let them pass." "$0 the army was small but quite possibly big enough." "In Perth, they were joined by Lord George Murray, who'd fought for James in 1715." "Charles disliked him but Murray was a seasoned soldier." "He became the army's general." "They marched on Edinburgh." "They entered Edinburgh here, in the early hours of 17th September, through where the city's Netherbow Gate once stood." "The government garrison fled to the castle, and stayed there." "Charles's officers went to the market square to proclaim the reign of James VIII and III," "King of Scotland, England and Ireland," "Leaving Charles free to go to Holyrood, the palace of his ancestors." "Charles's entry to Holyrood palace was triumphant." "Afterwards, with the crowds still cheering outside, perhaps he wandered through its empty rooms, rejoicing amongst the dustsheets." "For a few days, the shadow monarchy and the real world agreed." "Agreed with Charles's vision of himself as well." "See, the conquering hero comes." "There was a Stuart in Holyrood of the true senior line for the first time in almost 60 years." "One fit for purpose, destined for this, fated for this." "Or so it seemed." "He couldn't stay long." "The government's forces had finally concentrated east of Edinburgh at Prestonpans." "Once more, Charles addressed his troops." "Once more, his address was efficient, stirring, short and sharp." ""Gentlemen, I have flung away the scabbard, " he said." ""With God's help, I will make you a free and happy people."" "God's help wasn't needed." "A local showed them a path through the marshes that defended the government position." "The slaughter was awful, but brief." "Charles called a halt to it, appalled, and ordered his surgeon to attend to the government wounded." ""They are my father's subjects," he said." "After Prestonpans, Lord George Murray told Charles that they should simply take Scotland and keep it." "After all, ending the Union had been a Stuart promise since 1708." "But Charles persuaded his supporters that victory awaited them in London." "They marched south, hugging the west coast." "Two government armies had been deployed against them." "General Wade marched down the other side of the country and there was a second force somewhere ahead, led by the son of King George, the Duke of Cumberland." "Charles dragged his army and his increasingly unwilling general as far as Derby." "And there, Murray insisted on a council of war." "Charles urged attack." "London was so close." "But Murray was unmoveable." "There was Wade to their east, the Duke of Cumberland to their south, 70, 000 men apiece." "And there was a third force." "Murray had a witness, a man called Dudley Bradstreet." ""Yes," said Bradstreet, "there was a third force."" "It was large - 9,000 men, in Northampton." "Charles had Bradstreet ejected from the meeting." "It was too late." "The Jacobite leaders voted to fight another day." "Charles could only watch in horror." "They were voting to make his life meaningless." "But Charles had been right." "Wade was indeed too old and too cautious to engage the Jacobites." "And the Duke of Cumberland 's force was only the size of their own." "As for Dudley Bradstreet, he was an English spy." "There was no third force." "There were only nine men ready to resist in Northampton, as Bradstreet later cheerfully confessed." "To make matters worse, on the clay they met in Derby, a French army of 15,000 men was preparing to embark in Boulogne." "Charles could very easily have taken London." "What if Dudley Bradstreet had missed that meeting in Derby?" "Charles might have prevailed, taken London and set about making good on the promises his family had been making since 1693." "Britain would have been a very different place." "In the real world, the freedoms and reforms that the Stuarts promised wouldn't come for almost a century." "But now they were marching north to Charles's appointment with real history, his true destiny, his fate on Culloden Moor." "By the day of the battle, 16th April 1746," "Charles's relationship with Murray was one of mutual loathing." "There was virtually no communication between them, so the Jacobites were effectively uncommanded, left at one point to stand immobile for minutes on end under a rain of government cannonballs and grapeshot, as though it was simply weather," "the very heaviest of rain, a mortal downpour." "The defeat was total." "And as the clansmen melted under his superior firepower," "Cumberland let it be known that any of his officers who showed mercy would be severely punished." "No punishments proved necessary." "Charles fled the field." "The remnant of the Jacobite army gathered at the nearby Ruth ven Barracks." "4,000 men, enough to try again, enough to need a leader." "Charles never came." "He sent a message instead." "He was going to France." "He would return with an army." "Let each man seek his safety how he will." "For Charles's followers, the message was easily decoded." ""I'm leaving you to your fate."" ""There you go," said one of Charles's generals." ""There you go, for a damned Italian."" "The Prince was gone, vanished into the heather like an embarrassed shadow." ""All flesh is grass."" "It said so in the Bible." "The government applied the phrase to the flesh of any Jacobites that it could capture." "The King's son, the Duke of Cumberland, came north for the harvest." "Reports of the horrendous bloodshed must have come to Charles as he fled in the heather, dressed as a woman, rowed by a woman over the sea to Skye." "The news must have caused him pain and guilt." "But he hid the pain and guilt away." "Charles went AWOL." "He returned to France, but not to Rome." "James wrote him letters, increasingly desperate letters." ""Come home, Carluccio." He was still a father." "Charles was still a son." "They could sit in Rome in a hospitable restaurant and talk about their might-have-beens, their near misses, their barely averted collisions with real power, a real throne, a real kingdom." "Perhaps that was why Charles stayed away." "His father had learnt to accept failure." "He would only remind Charles of how real this wrong world was." "In Scotland, the reality of Hanoverian rule was putting down roots." "Wade's roads had made the Highlands reachable." "Now Cumberland ordered the Highlands mapped." "And within ten years, the rugged grandeur, their dim valleys, their secret places were flattened, tamed and known for ever." "As the maps were made, a massive fort was under construction at the top of the Great Glen." "Fort George nailed the Highlands to the Union, almost the last step in the pacification." "That last step required blood and bone for the mortar in the walls." "In the European wars of the 1750s," "Highlanders died for Britain in their thousands." "Hanoverian reality grew stronger and the shadow kings became, at last, impossible." "In 1766, James died." "His reign, had it been real, would have lasted 64 years." "He was laid here, in the crypt of St Peter's." "Charles returned at last to Rome." "He applied for recognition as King of Scotland, England and Ireland." "The Pope refused." "For the rest of his life," "Charles devoted himself to desperate schemes for restoration." "He steeped the athlete he'd once been in alcohol." "He never ceased to hate the version of reality he'd been condemned to." "But there was no room in history for Charles, not since Culloden Moor." "The only place there was room for him was in the realm of myth." "The golden boy, the flight through the heather, over the sea to Skye." "The myth was glorious and it still is." "Not like the real unreal king, who died in Rome on 31st December 1788, when his family had been throneless for just a few months short of a century." "After his death, the Pope relented." "He recognised dead Charles as King of England, Scotland, Ireland." "A monument was given pride of place near the entrance of St Peter's, dedicated to the Stuarts of Rome," "James VIII, his sons Henry and Charles Ill." "It drew a veil over Charles's real death." "Overweight, stroke-ridden, abscessed, alcoholic, unhappy and still dreaming till the moment that his mind fell silent of what might have been." "The shadow king was dead." "The Union was real." "The Scots had learnt long since to live with it." "Culloden." "In Scotland, no other name casts such a long shadow." "The Jacobites' failure to restore Bonnie Prince Charlie to the British throne in 1746 was a catastrophe." "While the rest of Britain now saw Scots as hated traitors, the defeat had left Scotland divided and bankrupt." "But there was another, less well-known Culloden, here in Jamaica." "This beautiful place was once a sugar plantation." "Many of them round here were owned by Jacobites who'd fled Scotland after their final defeat." "But why travel all this way to re-invent yourself in a new life, while carrying with you all the baggage of the old one?" "Because the very name Culloden was to be a bloody reminder that they must never again allow themselves to be so humiliated." "But rather than dwell on defeat, on the Britain that might have been, the exiled Jacobites started afresh." "Jamaica was a land rich in resources, waiting to be exploited." "From halfway across the world they helped rebuild Scotland, injecting it with wealth and new possibilities." "It was the dawn of a new era, when Scotland made her mark on the world by exporting her most valuable commodities - her people and ideas, ideas that would help start a revolution." "After Culloden, there was chaos." "17-year-old Jacobite John Wedderburn had been lucky to escape the battle with his life, but his father had been captured, his land seized and sentenced to hang." "Now young Wedderburn was on the run." "He needed money and he needed to disappear, fast." "Dodging spies, sleeping in hedges, half-starved," "Wedderburn found his way to Glasgow." "There, he boarded a ship, destined for the Colonies." "Young John Wedderburn's world had been turned upside down." "A trip like this would've been terrifying for a boy who, after all, had spent his whole life living in Scotland." "And even supposing he survived the harsh voyage, who knew where he would end up?" "After months at sea, John Wedderburn arrived here, in Jamaica." "To Wedderburn, it must have seemed fierce and strange." "Men as black as the earth working in fields filled with giant plants, the place splitting with heat." "In spite of its otherworldliness, it was a British colony, a place where a young man with energy and enterprise could re-invent himself." "But what as?" "As John Wedderburn was searching for his future abroad, another young Scot was hoping to find it at home." "Adam Smith had been studying in England and missed the upheaval of the Jacobite rebellion." "As the dust settled, he returned to a country at a crossroads." "To many Scots, the past was a dark place." "It was time to start again." "This was the dawn of a modern age, an age that was ready to embrace new ideas and a new philosophy." "From childhood, Adam Smith had questioned everything around him, even the existence of God." "Now he was determined to make his mark in this new Scotland, as an academic." "Rejecting Christianity as a student at Oxford," "Smith set out to better understand human behaviour and how it impacted upon the codes and laws that governed society." "At the time, it was radical, almost taboo." "Smith argued that if God was removed from our understanding of the world, man's true nature would be revealed." "He said that man's fundamental drive was not to please God, but to please himself, and, controversially, that this invisible hand of self-interest was what made for a healthy, productive society." "The ideas contained in his lectures threatened to blow apart a world that had always been dominated by God." "But just as Smith's reputation began to spread, something happened that would change both Smith's and Scotland's future forever." "Europe's first world war." "In 1756, a global war broke out, over trade." "Until then, trading with colonies in America, Canada and the Caribbean had been a free-for-all, but with so many valuable resources at stake," "Europe's leading powers fought to take control." "The war lasted seven years and a million lives were lost, but eventually, Britain prevailed, securing a trading empire that stretched across the Atlantic for a century to come." "The British victory made a huge impact on one element of Scottish society " "Glasgow's tobacco merchants." "Suddenly the Colonies had opened up and the River Clyde was their gateway to the West." "The Glasgow merchants rapidly became the wealthiest and most successful businessmen in Britain, outstripping their rivals in London and Bristol and gaining 50% of the world trade in tobacco." "With their uniform of gold-topped canes and scarlet frock coats, they announced their presence as the country's first self-made men." "These Tobacco Lords fascinated Adam Smith." "They seemed to embody his ideas." "They were the selfish, self-interested men he believed would benefit society." "It seemed that the wealth created by these men was the key to generating improvement and progress in society." "But Smith wanted to get closer." "He wanted to learn precisely how these men made their money and how they spent it." "You can imagine Adam Smith down here at the docks, watching all the frenzied activity." "This was his first real experience of big business - a huge labour force pulling together to unload the ships, heaving barrels, hauling on fresh supplies." "After the secluded cloisters of the university, the atmosphere here must have been overwhelming." "For Smith, there would have been a resonance to this scene, because it wasn't his first experience of seeing seafaring entrepreneurs." "Smith had grown up in Kirkcaldy in Fife, where smuggling was rampant." "His father was the local Customs officer and had fought a losing battle against the smugglers who found ever more ingenious ways to evade the law." "Adam Smith was left with the feeling that his father's interventions had been pointless, that nothing can stand in the way of self-interest." "Making money was man's natural instinct." "After observing the Glasgow merchants' trading empires at first hand," "Smith concluded that what drove their ambition to succeed in business was an insatiable, stop-at-nothing desire to turn a profit." "And he admired them for it." "On the other side of the world, in Jamaica," "Scottish entrepreneurs were also getting rich, John Wedderburn amongst them." "It didn't take long for the Jacobite runaway to find his way." "He settled here in the west of Jamaica near Montego Bay, and quickly set about finding the occupation that would make him his fortune - sugar." "Running a sugar plantation was not a job for the faint-hearted, but before long, Wedderburn was expanding his estates and amassing huge profits." "John Wedderburn's estate lay just a few miles from the town of Culloden so he would regularly have passed this way." "Within a couple of decades, a name synonymous with defeat and division had come to mean something quite different for the Scots in Jamaica." "Money was beginning to heal the wounds for many exiles like Wedderburn." "Having fled halfway across the globe, he was starting to live the life he once hoped to inherit in Scotland." "John Wedderburn was becoming a comfortable landed gentleman." "Just what kind of money are we talking about?" "How rich could you get?" "Well, John Wedderburn got to own ten...ten properties, um, all totalling over 17,000 acres of land." "Of the 168,000 acres of land which was returned..." " He had 10% of..." " He had 10% of the land and he was the largest land-holder in that part of the world and could be seen as ranking as among the top five landowners in this country." "We have his will here." "His will was probated and we have a copy at the Island Records Office." "All his entire estate was valued at £300,000," "Jamaican currency." "In today's money, you are talking about £22 million sterling." "That would be the value of their entire estate." "By any stretch of the imagination, he was a top dog." "He was." "He was." "As Scottish settlers were making inroads into the Caribbean," "Glasgow tobacco merchants were building on their success in America." "Their transatlantic operation was tightly controlled by three mafia-like families - the Glassfords, Spiers and Cunninghames." "Their fleets of lightweight ships could cross the Atlantic faster than any vessel had done before." "Young William Cunninghame was heir to one of the big Glasgow firms." "His job was to supervise the speedy turnaround of his father's ships." "Time was money, so as soon as the cargo was unloaded here in Virginia, the ship was sent back to Scotland packed with barrels of tobacco." "Here in Chesapeake Bay, between 1750 and 1770," "The Cunninghame docked twice a year, full of goods to sell to the planters." "It was young William's job to get rid of as many leather-bottomed chairs, golf clubs, silver teapots, cream jugs and china plates as he could sell from the company store." "The purpose of the stores was not just to make more money - they were a means to control the supply and price of tobacco." "Cunninghame was expected to find and persuade even the smallest and most far-flung growers to sell their tobacco." "Demand for tobacco in Europe was outstripping the supply, and Scots traders were out to find every last leaf." "Young men like William were hand-picked by the elders back in Glasgow, because they had specific qualities or qualifications." "They had to be single, so they could devote all of their energies to the business." "They had to be likeable and trustworthy so they could ingratiate themselves with the local community." "They were under constant pressure to expand the business and to raise profits." "So, above all else, they had to be ruthless." "On the same day every year, the local price of tobacco was decided, usually at the county courthouse." "It was the most important day of the year." "All the local growers turned up, and a heated exchange ensued." "A market price was set depending on how good the harvest had been and what the demand was from Europe." "It was a gentleman's agreement that everyone should stick to this price, no matter what." "But William Cunninghame's company didn't get get rich playing by the rules." "They played dirty." "Cunninghame was instructed to ignore the market price and to deal with the farmers directly." "The firm back in Glasgow encouraged him to offer credit to farmers who were otherwise paid only once a year, at harvest time." "Now, the credit could take the form of a loan, or it could be a choice of the goods just brought in from Scotland." "But it was a deal with the devil." "Having taken the loan or the goods, the farmers were shackled to the merchants, and at harvest time, those merchants could demand whatever price they wanted for the tobacco." "It was commerce without conscience." "Cunninghame and company did well." "They managed to beat the farmers down to 20% less than the market price, using the lure of credit." "But there would be a price to pay in the long run." "The local economy began to falter as the tobacco growers sank further and further into unsustainable levels of debt." "By the 1770s, the farmers of Virginia and Maryland owed Scottish merchants over £ 1 million." "Scottish business was booming, but it was sucking America dry." "The Scots traders were described by one American farmer as, "Vile weeds," ""which if cut down, grow more fiercely"." "In truth they were clannish, mafia-like, and they put profit before ethics." "Adam Smith considered them perfect examples of the kind of self-interested capitalists he believed were vital to bring forth wealth and progress." "Smith thought greed was good, and these men were nothing if not very, very greedy." "By the 1760s, Glasgow was beginning to look very different... for some." "Adam Smith watched as the merchants ploughed fortunes into great houses, and the Merchant Quarter became an exclusive community on the edge of the city." "Not content that their mansions were the most expensive houses ever to be built in the city, they went further." "They helped the local burgh to build this church, St Andrew's, which was modelled on St Martin-in-the-Fields in London." "It perfectly sums up their showiness, their conspicuous wealth, and their self-serving aspirations." "The balconies were mahogany, imported from Honduras on one of their ships." "After just six years in Virginia," "William Cunninghame returned from the New World to the Old." "In his short time overseas, he'd been promoted to running the entire Virginia operation." "He'd proved himself in that ruthless world and now he returned to Glasgow to join the ranks of older merchants and to oversee the family firm in considerably more comfort, from home." "As Scotland's trading empire grew, so did the reputation of the Scottish Enlightenment." "The control of the harsh and repressive Scottish Kirk was waning and now a generation of intellectuals made the study of human nature, not God, their new religion." "They made waves which rippled all the way across the Atlantic to America." "One of the Colonies' leading lights, Benjamin Franklin, was keen to meet these radical young thinkers." "During a trip to Scotland, he got the chance." "Franklin's father was English and he had lived on both sides of the Atlantic, so he was familiar with the politics and the culture of both Britain and America." "He had a brilliant mind, he could turn his hand to anything." "He was a publisher, a musician, a scientist, a writer, and he was in Scotland to collect an honorary degree in law from the University of St Andrews." "As both an agent and representative of the Colonies," "Franklin was keen to discover how the Anglo-Scottish union worked, what unity and strength it brought this emerging superpower." "But after touring Scotland," "Franklin gained quite a different impression of Great Britain." "He told Scotland's finest minds one evening in 1759 how all he'd seen was inequality and poverty." "Among the guests was Adam Smith." "Later, he put his thoughts in a letter to a friend." ""I have lately made a tour through Ireland and Scotland." ""In these countries, a small part of the society are landlords," ""great noblemen and gentlemen," ""extremely opulent, living in the highest affluence and magnificence." ""The bulk of the people, tenants, extremely poor," ""living in the most sordid wretchedness" ""in dirty hovels of mud and straw, and clothed only in rags." ""And the effect of this kind of civil society seems only to be," ""the depressing multitudes below the savage state" ""that a few may be raised above it."" "This trip was to have a profound effect on Franklin." "He was disillusioned by what he saw in Scotland." "Its union with England had not made it a thriving country." "Men had no chance of being equal." "At least America was a place where a man could succeed through his own efforts." "America was unfettered by centuries of class division and corruption." "It was a place of new beginnings, where there was real potential to create a civilised and fair society." "Scotland was becoming more polarised than ever." "Tobacco Lords like William Cunninghame were getting rich, but ordinary working people were not." "Dr John Witherspoon was the minister of a church in Paisley and he worried that Scotland was now a place where his congregation struggled both materially and spiritually." "(WOMAN COUGHS)" "As their moral guide, he was hard-pressed to show them anything that was good or fair about the society they lived in." "But he was more than just a minister." "Witherspoon was also one of the leaders of the Popular Party, a movement within the Church opposed to the imperious influence of Scotland's elite classes." "Although he was an educated man, he hated what he regarded as the louche, soft world of the Edinburgh intellectuals, who were hand-picked by the same rich patrons who controlled the country with an unseen hand." "He had become well-known for writing a satire lampooning the system of patronage amongst intellectuals." "For Witherspoon, the ideas of Adam Smith and other leading lights of the Enlightenment were the ideas of the privileged few." "They could afford to intellectual game-play and debate concepts as profound as the significance of God." "In writing it, Witherspoon raised an uncomfortable question." "But what kind of society will we have if our responsibilities are set by man, and not by God?" "Out in Jamaica, just such a society had put down roots." "Not only had it lost God, but it was fast descending into hell." "This was the dark side of Scotland's progress to the modern age, because the engine driving both the tobacco and sugar industries was slavery." "John Wedderburn, although a Christian man, knew that he could not plant, weed and tend his sugar canes and manage his acres of plantation without slaves." "Every port in Jamaica in the 18th century had something called a "scramble"." "When ships docked bringing the newly enslaved from Africa, there was a rush to inspect them and pick the best and strongest for your plantation." "It was much like farmers sizing up the best animals at an agricultural auction." "John Wedderburn found such scrambles hard to face." "Human beings were on display like cattle." "Half had already died during the journey and many others, in the tight confines of the ship, had contracted diseases." "But all of that was as nothing compared to the lives they were about to face, of backbreaking physical labour and soul-destroying confinement." "For all of his career as a sugar planter, Wedderburn had tried to turn a blind eye." "But he did attend one scramble, in the spring of 1762." "And in amongst the sorry crowd, he saw a young boy, only 12 or 13, that he found he couldn't ignore." "He was called Joseph Knight, after the captain of the ship that had been his prison on the three-month journey from Guinea." "He was now a commodity, for sale to the highest bidder." "Joseph became Wedderburn's personal servant." "Something about him appealed to Wedderburn." "So, he spared Joseph the hard labour in the fields and had him brought inside instead, to be trained up as a houseboy." "He learned to speak English, to read and write." "Wedderburn even allowed him to be baptised." "Knight became the focus for Wedderburn's personal struggle with slavery." "Perhaps having one indoors that he treated well, almost humanly, allowed Wedderburn to ignore the hundreds that were no better than animals, whipped and chained in his cane fields." "When Wedderburn was finally rich enough to return to his beloved Scotland, he took Joseph with him." "He'd grown into a fine-looking man, and was a Christian by then as well, equal to any man in the eyes of God." "But he was still Wedderburn's slave." "Although John Wedderburn had returned to a country he had never stopped loving," "Joseph Knight was arriving in yet another place that reminded him how far he was from home." "In Wedderburn's Perthshire mansion, Knight did odd jobs around the house." "He took his meals and slept below stairs along with the domestic staff." "But apart from his colour, there was one other crucial difference that separated him from the rest of the servants." "They were paid." "Knight felt lost." "He drew some comfort from a friendship with a housemaid called Annie Thomson, but it was his only consolation." "He was now 24, educated and restless." "He asked his master if he could learn a trade, perhaps shaving and cutting hair, and Wedderburn agreed." "Knight was released for a few hours a week for training in the local town." "It was probably on one of those trips that he came across a newspaper headlining a fascinating drama that was the talk of London." "An African slave named Somerset had taken his master to court in a bid to gain his freedom." "He had argued that anyone living in England was British, and that all British citizens should be free men." "The Lords of the King's Bench were up in arms and Knight, reading carefully as he'd been taught to by his master, would have been amazed to discover that Somerset had won." "As Knight dreamt of a new life as a free man, the Reverend John Witherspoon gave up his old life in Scotland." "He'd been offered a fresh start in America, teaching at Princeton College, New Jersey." "But his wife thought he'd lost his mind." "For her, this wasn't a new life." "11 weeks at sea was more like a death sentence." "But Witherspoon knew it was time to go." "Scotland had gone soft on religion." "The influence of the Church was waning here, and Scotland was going to hell in a handcart." "It was becoming a country where commerce seemed to matter more than Christianity." "The place had lost its moral compass." "He had a point." "Witherspoon wasn't alone in starting a new life." "Scotland's rural communities were leaving en masse, after years of hardship and poverty." "The famous literary figures Boswell and Johnson wrote a diary of their Highland travels." "They remarked on seeing a whole village celebrating on the eve of their emigration, dancing a jig they called "America"." "Johnson was later to describe the empty villages and broken communities as "an epidemical fury of migration"." "While the Colonies represented a new beginning for Witherspoon and thousands of other rural Scots, the bonds that tied America to Britain were beginning to look like shackles." "America viewed her British master with growing frustration." "Lack of representation at Westminster, coupled with increasing taxes on tobacco and imported goods, fuelled resentment and talk of rebellion, as Witherspoon would soon find out." "In spite of the darkening mood across America, in the hallowed community of Princeton," "Dr Witherspoon could not have received a warmer welcome." "All the students turned out to light up Nassau Hall, the college's central building." "It was a glorious beginning to his career." "In that moment, he fell in love with the place, with its seriousness, its sense of community and its beauty." "It was a place where the New World could be shaped." "If there was one thing Witherspoon could be relied on to do, it was to bring his boundless energy and enthusiasm to the job." "He lived up to his magnificent welcome, and straight away set about spring-cleaning the place, airing it and opening it up to new ideas." "His big obstacle was money." "When he arrived, the college was in debt, and, keen to keep the place independent and away from the meddling of patrons, he set out as a one-man band to raise the funds himself." "Using all the charismatic charms he could muster, he set out on an open-air preaching tour." "Witherspoon's style was unusual - he spoke from the heart rather than the page and he drew people in with a rare mix of emotion, common sense and great oratory." "In Williamsburg, Virginia," "Witherspoon raised the equivalent of £5,500 with just one sermon." "He quickly secured Princeton's future by expanding the library and by funding new places for increasing numbers of students." "As well as raising money, he also unintentionally raised his own profile." "Beyond Princeton, his reputation grew, both as a man of the people and as an eloquent future leader." "Witherspoon had two ambitions for Princeton." "The first was to be a cutting-edge centre of learning." "He brought with him the Scottish Enlightenment's thirst for knowledge and understanding, and he created a curriculum where students would read widely and open their minds to all points of view." "The second was to rid his students of any false sense of entitlement." "Once a week he opened the place up for meetings, inviting townsfolk to mix with students for lively debating sessions that inspired camaraderie and democracy, and blew away the cobwebs of elitism." "In Witherspoon's new America, it would be education, not social standing, that elevated men to great things." "In Perthshire," "John Wedderburn's only ambition was to live the life of an aristocrat." "His sugar fortune had brought him Ballindean House and had ensured him a comfortable retirement." "Of all his staff, he was particularly pleased with Joseph Knight." "He felt that it had been an act of charity to rescue the boy." "But below stairs, all was not well." "Joseph Knight could not settle." "He didn't want to spend the rest of his life in domestic service." "In fact, he had already staked his claim to a different future." "Annie Thomson was pregnant with his child." "He wanted to be free to marry her and have a family." "Knight broke the news to his master." "Uppermost in his mind was the case of Somerset, another African slave." "He was hopeful that Wedderburn would at least consider his liberty, perhaps even give him his freedom." "But Wedderburn was horrified." "Despite all the privileges and help he'd given Knight over the years, all the skills that had endowed him with his independence of mind and spirit," "Wedderburn refused to let him go." "Somerset had been freed in London, but Knight didn't know that the law was different in Scotland." "No slave had ever been freed here." "But he was so enraged by Wedderburn's refusal that he made his mind up to leave." "He would elope with Annie Thomson, the housemaid, who had already been dismissed over her relationship with Knight." "Wedderburn found Knight packing his bags and summoned the magistrate." "He was arrested and taken to Perth Gaol, and no doubt the chains and confinement reminded Knight of the earliest days of his slavery." "John Wedderburn, when pushed, had proved to be the kind of man who was more interested in enjoying his own wealth and liberty than offering it to others." "He had his limits, and Joseph Knight had pushed him to the very edge." "Joseph Knight had no money, no influence, nothing to win him his freedom." "Or so he thought." "But the Lord Advocate of Scotland, Henry Dundas, was outraged by his case and offered to represent him." "The case went to the Court of Session in Edinburgh, the highest court in Scotland." "For Dundas, it was the case of the century." "The rights and liberties of the British subject - it was the most controversial issue of the day." "England had just freed her first slave." "The Colonies were agitating for release from their British master." "Increasingly in Scotland, fundamental human rights were being acknowledged." "But what haunted liberal philosophers and thinkers was the knowledge that Scotland's success and wealth depended on slavery." "The documents of the case have survived." "Both John Wedderburn and Joseph Knight recorded lengthy memorials, stating their grievances in their own words, to be used by the advocates and judges as evidence in court." "What details, what insights come out of this record?" "A great amount of detail about the facts of the case." "Not only that, but the feelings that were involved and I think John Wedderburn's hurt feelings." "He sees himself as a good master and that Joseph Knight is somehow betraying the good treatment that he was given." "On the other hand," "Knight's own strong feelings of wanting to be emancipated from his status." "NEIL OLIVER:" "That's an amazing irony from our 21 st-century perspective, that the slave owner would be indignant about his behaviour being questioned." "Yes, that's right." "He obviously felt he had strong rights in the case and that he'd done the decent thing, if you like." "NEIL OLIVER:" "What aspects of that could you show me in the paperwork?" "DR TRISTRAM CLARKE:" "Well, I think one thing that we can pick out here is where Wedderburn talks about the time when Joseph Knight had read in the newspapers about the famous case decided by Lord Mansfield in England in 1772, which had appeared in the newspapers" "and it gave him an idea that he was now free, so Wedderburn claims that after this time, Knight becomes discontented and sullen, and is wishing to pack up and leave." " Discontented and sullen?" " That's right." "Presumably not speaking." "Taking the huff, if you like." "For having the temerity to want to be free." "That's right, exactly." "Exactly." "There are other parts we can perhaps pick out here." "This is Wedderburn referring to Knight's claim about his clothing and that, "He was clothed as well as the rest of Sir John's servants," ""but his stockings were generally coarse, except four pairs," ""and that he got no regular pocket money."" " Pocket money!" "For a grown man." " Yes." "Yes." "Nothing for wages." "NEIL OLIVER:" "It's quite interesting in a way, isn't it, that given that it was a society that still accepted slavery at that time, and yet his words are recorded in just as much detail as Wedderburn's." "There's a demonstration that the court was recognising him already." "Yes, as an individual with perfect rights to come before the court and make a claim." "This is where the drama unfolded." "The case was called from that little window." "The judges sat in the alcoves." "The advocates took the floor and everybody else stood and watched," "Wedderburn and Knight included." "The case, as predicted, provoked passionate debate." "Counsel for Knight argued that he did not consent to give up his liberty in the first place and that stepping on to British soil should give him the constitutional right to liberty that is offered to every man in any free country." "Pandering to the pockets of Scotland's elite," "Wedderburn's lawyers made an argument they believed few could reject." ""Make a choice," they said." ""Choose between liberty and money."" "They asserted that Scotland was "the first commercial nation in the world"" "and that we had "interwoven our interests" ""with those of our settlements in the New World", and that therefore "the institution of slavery is absolutely necessary"." "But the judges' decision took everyone by surprise." "In spite of Wedderburn's appeal to collective greed," "Scotland's top judges ruled for freedom." "The Knight case sent a strong message across the Atlantic." "Britain had ruled to free a lowly slave, yet it continued to deny America an equal relationship with its colonial master." "Benjamin Franklin described the storm that was coming if America's grievances weren't recognised." "He wrote, "Every act of oppression will sour their tempers," ""lessen, if not annihilate the profits of your commerce with them," ""and hasten their final revolt." ""For the seeds of liberty are universally sown there," ""and nothing can eradicate them."" "This was the warning bell." "America had had enough." "In Princeton," "Dr Witherspoon couldn't help himself but get involved in the increasing unrest." "He saw the matter as a deeply moral and religious one, and was convinced that it was in God's plan to free America from Britain." "He wrote a public letter to all the Presbyterian churches in the Colonies, urging ordinary people to come together to reject Britain's shackles, with its crippling regime of taxation and control." "Every parishioner from Georgia to Maine would have heard it read out in church." "He urged all of Christian America to listen carefully." ""We must think of America as a nation," he said, "and assert our rights as such."" "He knew that this wouldn't happen without a fight, but he argued that he preferred "war, with all its horrors, even extermination," ""to slavery, riveted on us and on our posterity."" "In April 1775, British troops marched in to Lexington, Massachusetts, to control crowds demonstrating against British rule." "Shots were fired and eight men were killed." "It was the start of the American Revolution." "Witherspoon had got the war he wanted." "And so had William Cunninghame." "Back in Glasgow, many Scottish merchants would never recover the debts owed to them by the American tobacco planters, but war with the Colonies just made Cunninghame wealthier." "In the build-up to the conflict," "Cunninghame had stockpiled as much tobacco as he could lay his hands on." "Now fighting had cut off the supply, he started selling it at an astronomical price." "Cunninghame might have been the talk of the merchant gentleman's club, but to Adam Smith, this was shameless war-profiteering." "As the American Revolution broke out," "Smith was working on a book about commerce." "It was the sum of all his observations on Scotland's trade with America." "But the war proved to be a turning point for him." "The merchants' greed and William Cunninghame's profiteering began to sow doubts in Smith's mind." "Cunninghame's behaviour appalled Smith." "Despite his friendship with them, he began to paint an unflattering picture of the Glasgow merchants and their questionable moral practices." "He attacked their monopolising spirit and even went so far as to say that if the government were composed entirely of merchants," ""it would be the worst of all governments for any country whatsoever"." "The rest of society had not benefited as much as Smith had hoped." "The money had gone into the bricks and mortar of great houses." "Greed and vanity had blinded the merchants to any real self-regulation or social responsibility." "Maybe it was more than just government taxation that provoked the American War of Independence." "If the merchants hadn't displayed such rapacious greed for profit, if they hadn't pushed the tobacco growers into such huge debt, then perhaps America wouldn't have felt aggrieved enough to go to war." "In Princeton," "John Witherspoon believed that America was waging not only a just war, but a war that had God's providence." "His stirring views and increasingly popular sermons drew the attention of the British." "The college became known as "the seedbed of revolution"" "and British forces stormed Princeton, destroying everything in their path." "Witherspoon evacuated the university just in time, and no-one was hurt." "Cannon-fire wrecked many of the buildings." "But to his horror," "British troops damaged the one thing he cared most about - his library." "But this setback only served to strengthen Witherspoon's religious faith and his resolve to fight for liberty and bring democracy to America." "Everything Witherspoon had been working for was to culminate in one tightly-worded document that declared a new set of liberties for this new nation." "It was called the Declaration of Independence." "The wording was argued over to the finest detail." "This was going to be a country whose very beginning was based on democracy and equality." "Not everyone involved could agree to the revolutionary ideas held in it." "But Witherspoon was there, behind the scenes, urging the process along." "Witherspoon didn't just argue for independence and democratic freedom, he brought the pulpit onto the floor of Congress." "The only clergyman present," "Witherspoon argued that many Americans would hesitate to join the revolution unless their cause was seen to be just in the eyes of God." "God must bless America." "It was almost certainly Witherspoon who championed the line that forms the very last sentence in the document, which states," ""And for the support of this declaration," ""with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence," ""we mutually pledge to each other our lives," ""our fortunes and our sacred honour."" "Now the Declaration not only proclaimed independence, it was a visible demonstration to the American people that it was God's will to back the revolution and free America from British tyranny." "Witherspoon persuaded any remaining doubters to sign the Declaration, saying, "There is a tide in the affairs of men, a nick of time." ""We perceive it now before us." ""To hesitate is to consent to our own slavery."" "The fighting continued for another seven years, but in the end, the British conceded defeat." "To Witherspoon, it seemed that divine providence had turned the tide." "In 1783, a peace treaty was signed and America secured her independence." "The ideas of John Witherspoon and Adam Smith had lit the fires of revolution." "Both men were products of the Scottish Enlightenment and both had given the world a new moral philosophy by which to live." "John Witherspoon had combined religion and politics to help bring intellectual and constitutional freedom to America." "In his tenure at Princeton, he had introduced to his campus Native American and black students." "He educated many of the next generation of American leaders." "They included one future president, one vice-president, 39 congressmen and three Supreme Court judges." "And here lies the man who chose Princeton over Paisley." "He decided on America as the best place to fight for the principles of liberty and democracy, backing the country he believed had the best chance of delivering them." "He continued as head of the college for another decade after independence, and he's buried here, in the cemetery at Princeton." "John Wedderburn was a bundle of contradictions." "A Christian man, whose past had taught him to look at the world from the position of the underdog, and yet he could not find it in his heart to give Knight his freedom." "Wedderburn spent the rest of his life in Perthshire, living on the fortune that he built on the exploitation of others." "He also achieved the long-held ambition of laying his Jacobite past to rest and restoring the good name of the Wedderburn family." "He reinstated himself as the sixth baronet of Blackness." "But it's a title that serves only to remind us of a much more shameful past, namely the blackness of Wedderburn's slaves and one slave boy in particular - Joseph Knight." "Knight never saw Wedderburn again." "As a free man, he married his sweetheart, Annie Thomson, and then simply disappeared." "There's no record of him after the trial." "But there's some speculation that he became a miner, where, amidst the coal dust that clung to everything, the colour of his skin no longer marked him out as different." "In 1778, William Cunninghame got to build the house of his dreams, the ultimate symbol of his wealth and vanity, and paid for with the spoils of war and slavery." "At £ 10,000, this was the most expensive house ever built in Glasgow, and now lives on as Glasgow's Gallery of Modern Art." "In the same year as American independence," "Adam Smith finally finished his book." "In writing it, his theories about self-interest as a force of good had fallen apart." "William Cunninghame's profiteering taught Smith that economics isn't just about making money, it's about the social responsibility that comes with it." "In The Wealth Of Nations, Smith gave the world its first study of the moral and political dimensions of a country's economy." "Its success was to mark Adam Smith as one of the Enlightenment's most influential thinkers, and the father of modern economics." "On the last page of the book, he wrote," ""It is surely time that Great Britain should free herself" ""from the expense of defending those provinces in time of war" ""and of supporting any part of their establishments in time of peace."" "He was right, of course." "It was time to let America go." "It reads like a diary of the build-up to the American Revolution, and it's every bit as much about a country's struggle for self-determination as it is about economics." "In the end, there were no winners or losers." "The new American Constitution made good its promises of rights and freedom for all, but it never occurred to the founding fathers to extend those same freedoms to slaves." "It took a civil war to rid America of slavery, and it's struggled with the legacy ever since." "And while Britain's vision of liberty remained bereft of democratic principle for decades to come, it abolished slavery and paved the way for other European nations to follow." "And what of Scotland?" "In the wake of American independence, there was a feeling in the air of anticlimax, of dissatisfaction." "Parallels were drawn between America and Scotland." "It seemed as though all the best intellectual efforts of the Scottish Enlightenment had gone to providing America with the blueprint for liberty." "But while Scotland thought and talked, it was America that had put those ideas into action." "In truth, America had changed everything for Scotland." "She had helped to lay the foundation stones for one of the first and most influential democracies in the world." "As part of Great Britain, she had taken her first faltering steps on to the world stage, and she would never look back." "In 1792, the Highlands of Scotland were being invaded." "Men, women and children were being driven off their land." "The invaders were sheep, new breeds developed for survival on these mountains." "Suddenly, the lairds could make serious money out of this wild country." "They started clearing the people out and bringing the sheep in." "The men of Ross had had enough." "So they decided on a radical and astonishing course of direct action." "They planned to drive the sheep right out of the Highlands." "400 men began herding sheep from Ross, from Sutherland, and pushing them south." "The local sheriff was terrified." "He believed the sheep-rustlers were armed and he'd heard rumours that they'd brought 26th of gunpowder with them." "He wrote to the Lord Advocate and asked for three companies of soldiers to restore order." ""You can be no stranger to the seditious acts that are going on in this county." ""The flame is spreading." "What is our case today," ""if matters are permitted to proceed, will be yours tomorrow."" "This is the story of the violent, unequal struggle between the people who owned the land and the people who lived on it." "But it wasn't just force that kept the Scottish people in their place." "It was fantasy, a myth so powerfully told that it still shapes how we think about Scotland." "1792 was a terrifying year for the landed gentry." "just across the Channel, the revolution was in full swing." "The French had deposed their king." "N0 French aristocrat, property or life was safe." "Dangerous ideas of freedom were spreading like sparks in the wind." "In Ross, the sheriff thought he was facing the start of Scotland's own revolution." "The rustlers crossed the Kyle of Sutherland." "Here, they set up camp for the night." "Over 6,000 stolen sheep filled the glen." "The sheriff's reinforcements arrived at around eight o'clock in the evening." "Three companies of soldiers from Fort William." "The sheriff marched them straight on through the night to confront the sheep-rustlers, but when they arrived in the valley, though the fires were still burning and the sheep were still there, the Highlanders were gone." "For centuries, the Highlands had been a feudal society." "Tenants scraped a living from the land, their housing and grazing provided by the laird, the clan chief." "In return, they gave him their unquestioning loyalty." "But not any more." "In the lowlands, estates had been cleared and landowners had made a great deal of money." "This was a modern, commercial age and the Highland lairds refused to be left behind." "The way they viewed their land was different now." "The clan chiefs had become landlords." "As far as they were concerned, the Highlanders lived in great poverty and squalor." "Why on earth would you want to preserve that?" "So, move them to the coast, make them live on the land that's no good for sheep." "They can't stand in the way of progress." "But for the Highlanders, nothing had changed." "They still believed they had an unwritten right to live on the land of their forefathers, based on centuries of tradition." "The people of the Highlands felt a devastating sense of betrayal." "People fled from the countryside into the swelling industrial towns of Scotland's Central Belt." "It was the start of the new century and everything familiar was swept away in the rush to modernity and profit." "This was a new Scotland." "Many found it absolutely terrifying." "Walter Scott was determined that such radical change should not lead to chaos and anarchy." "Scott was a local sheriff in Melrose." "He had taken part in suppressing a riot among the weavers of Galashiels and been stoned for his trouble." "He believed what had happened in France could easily happen in Scotland." ""The country," he said, "is mined below our feet."" "So what did he do?" "He picked up his pen and wrote." "Scott's novels gave the British people exactly what they needed - an escape from the uncertain modern world into history." "Waverley was the bestselling book of the summer of 1814 and Rob Roy was a publishing sensation, being read everywhere from the Prince of Wales' castle to the weaver's cottage." "Scott told stories of brave Scottish bandits, fiery Highland maidens, stag hunts, great feasts and doomed battles." "Just as the Clearances were emptying the Highlands," "Scott recreated them and celebrated their past." "By 1814, Scott wasn't just writing about history, he was building it." "He had bought a run-down old farmhouse near Melrose called "C [arty Hole Z which means dirty puddle." "He used the money from his writing to knock it down and build himself this." "And he didn't call it Clarty Hole." "He called it Abbotsford and he called himself the Laird of Abbotsford." "Power comes from ownership of the land." "Now Scott had that." "Over the next 20 years, he'd buy up more and more of it, a field here, a wood there, until he owned 74,000 acres." "In a time when you didn't have to worry about border raids or attacking armies," "Scott's house harks back to the fortified buildings of the 16th century." "But this wasn't for defence, this was for show." "This is his riff on the romantic past - a Scotsman's home is his castle." "And Scott was ahead of a trend." "Abbotsford was just one of a rash of fake medieval castles across the country." "The landed gentry started building a dream of Scotland's past in stone and then living the dream." "(BELL CHIMES)" "Scott filled his imitation castle with a magpie collection of relics from the romantic past." "From the minute you walk through the front door, you don't know where to look first." "No, you don't, there's so much to look at." " How long was Scott at this collecting?" " Years." "I think actually all his life." "I think he was a born collector," " particularly of things Scottish." " And this, for example, what is this?" " Whose is this?" " This is Rob Roy's sgian dubh." " This was tucked into Rob Roy's sock?" " It was, it was." "That is the real, genuine article." " Does it open?" " It does, but I'm not going to let you." "What about the cross?" "Whose cross is it?" "That was carried by Mary, Queen of Scots, to her execution." "That would've been in her hand on her last walk?" "Yes." "And it's a beautiful object in its own right." " That's got power, that's magic." " That's got real magic, yes." " This is a strange thing." " Yes." "A musket ball and what?" "It's a piece of oatcake taken from the pocket of a Highlander after the Battle of Culloden." "A fallen Highlander, obviously." "So that's a last morsel that he didn't even have time to eat." "That's right, that's right." "Do you think that's true?" "Could Scott have been able to have it proven to him that that had really come from Culloden?" "Scott was quite keen on getting things that were actually real things with good provenance." "So my feeling is, if Scott said it's an oatcake from a Highlander at the Battle of Culloden, it probably is." "In 1815, Walter Scott grabbed his chance to see history in the making." "In France, the revolutionary terror had been followed by a military dictatorship." "Napoleon had dominated all Europe." "The British had finally beaten him after 22 years of near-continual fighting." "Scott travelled to Waterloo to see the reality of war for himself." "He was one of the first British tourists to get there." "The battlefield was still littered with the corpses of the slain." "Scott was horrified." "This was what you got when the social order broke down." "This was what the French Revolution had led to - anarchy and then tyranny and then death." "He still picked up a few trophies for his collection, though." "Now the Napoleonic Wars were over, the Continent opened up again to trade." "Weavers and factory workers had to compete with cheap goods from abroad." "The economy slumped and the whole of Britain went into recession." "Tens of thousands of ex-soldiers joined the unemployed." "The ideas generated by the French Revolution hadn't disappeared." "They'd just been shouted down while the country was at war." "Now they were back." "Andrew Hardie was a weaver." "Like many weavers, he was an educated man with a fierce interest in radical ideas." "He saw a great deal wrong with the world around him." "He knew the terrible conditions of the workers in Scotland's factories and the desperate poverty of the unemployed." "He believed in votes for all and an end to the powerlessness of the working man." "And he wasn't alone." "A huge demonstration in Paisley demanded no king, no lords, no gentry, no taxes." "They wanted nothing less than a workers' revolution." "It was exactly what Andrew Hardie wanted and what terrified Walter Scott." "So what did Scott do?" "In the midst of all this unrest, he set out on a quest to find the lost crown and sceptre of the Scottish kings." "Odd." "But Scott could see a use for them." "For hundreds of years, the crown, the sceptre and sword had made Scotland 's kings." "They were potent symbols of Scottish nationhood." "Then the Union of 1707 made the Scottish Crown jewels redundant." "For over a century, they'd been locked away in Edinburgh Castle." "There were even rumours they'd been smuggled to England." "Over a rather good dinner, Scott persuaded George, the Prince Regent, that the Scottish Crown jewels still had symbolic power and that finding them would make the people feel patriotic and loyal to their King." "Walter Scott broke into the sealed room in Edinburgh Castle." "Apparently, someone in the little gathering picked up the crown and began to play about with it and then moved as if to place it on someone else's head." "Scott stopped him short." "To him at least, this was a serious business." "And these items belonged to the ancient line of Scotland's monarchs." "After all, these were the very tools of kingmaking." "This was Scotland's history." "Hundreds gathered outside the castle." "The Royal Standard was raised on the battlement to tell them the crown had been found." "(CROWD CHEERING)" "The crowd cheered." "Scott's mission had been successful." "In a time of unrest, Scott pushed a version of Scotland ruled by kings, where everyone else knew their place." "But the radicals weren't listening." "The Scottish Crown jewels and all they stood for hao' nothing to offer them." "Andrew Hardie was 26 now, but he hadn't married his sweetheart, Margaret, probably because he couldn 't afford to." "Margaret hated Hardie's politics." "She thought they'd get him into serious trouble." "She was right." "The unrest spread across Scotland." "In Dundee, a protest meeting 10,000 strong called for electoral reform, general elections every year, and votes for everyone." "The Government listened and responded." "The Government banned public meetings." "This was class war." "The radicals were angry, because they had no voice." "There were over two million people in Scotland, but only 4,000 got to vote." "A Paisley band were locked up for playing Scots Wha Hae at a demonstration." "Burns had written it 25 years before, at least partly as a protest song." "Now it was printed as a broadside and passed from hand to hand." "(THEY PLAY THE TUNE OF SCOTS Wha Hae)" "This is an anthem for the Scots who bled and died with Wallace on the battlefield." "Listen to these words." "Lay the proud usurpers low" "Tyrants fall in every foe" "Liberty's in every blow" "Let us do or die!" "The song was taken up by protesters in England as well as in Scotland." "Wallace had been reinvented as a hero of the revolution." "When Andrew Hardie spoke about another fellow radical, john Baird, he paid him the ultimate compliment by saying," ""He's worthy of being classed with Sir William Wallace."" "Scott decided to act and, again, he looked to the Highlands for an answer." "He called upon the chieftains to raise the Highland host to crush the radicals." "But Sir Walter's rallying cry was met with a deafening silence." "The Highland chieftains had better things to do." "They were busy turning sheep into gold." "So Scott decided to set up his own army." "He recruited 300 men." "He called them the Gala Marksmen." "Scott was spoiling for a fight." "He offered to bring his volunteers anywhere in Scotland they were needed." ""One day's good fighting" ""would cure them most radically of their radical malady." ""And if I had anything to say in the matter" ""they should remember the day for half a century to come. "" "But the authorities didn't take Scott up on his offer and both he and his private army stayed at home." "On the night of Sunday 1st April 1820, walls in Glasgow, Paisley, Dumbarton and Kilsyth were plastered with a poster demanding a general strike to overthrow the Government." "Andrew Hardie was in the crowd when a justice of the Peace came up and ordered one of the posters to be torn down." "Hardie pushed him out of the way." ""Before I permit you to take down yon notice," he said," ""I will part with the last drop of my blood."" "This was the start of the radical war." "On the Monday, 60,000 workers went on strike all across Scotland's industrial heartlands." "In Glasgow, the Provost wrote, "Almost the whole population of the working classes" ""have obeyed the order in the treasonable proclamation by striking work."" "The authorities marshalled the troops and mounted cannon here on Jamaica Bridge." "They were expecting serious trouble." "Hardie was told that the whole city would be in arms in the course of an hour and that England had risen in rebellion already." "He wanted to fight in the uprising." "What do you need to overthrow the state?" "What do you need for a radical war?" "For any war, for that matter?" "Guns." "Hardie joined forces with an ex-soldier, john Baird, and together they led a raiding party of about 50 men." "Their destination was the Carron Ironworks, where the guns that had beaten Napoleon were made." "Hardie's plan was to march to Falkirk and seize control of the guns." "They stopped at a tavern at midday." "They were so sure of the rebellion's success that they got a receipt so they could claim their expenses back later from the new radical government." "When they got to Bonnymuir, they were confronted by a troop of Government cavalry." "Hardie's men took up position beside a five-foot wall here." "The cavalry charged." "The radicals opened fire, stabbing at the horses with their pikes when they drew close enough." "The cavalry withdrew, regrouped and charged again before the radicals had time to reload." "They were finished." "Four men were wounded and 18 taken prisoner." "But the battle for workers' rights wasn't over." "While Baird and Hardie were defeated at Bonnymuir, another radical, James Wilson, marched 100 men into Strathaven, and took over the town." "Wilson was 63 years old." "He'd been politicised by the French Revolution and involved in radical politics for nearly 30 years." "Now his moment had come." "Wilson formed a raiding party and went around the Lanarkshire town requisitioning all the weapons he could find, at gunpoint where necessary." "The local gentry were taken by surprise." "By the end of the night, Wilson had control of Strathaven." "MAN:" "Welcome to this annual commemoration of James Wilson and the events of 1820, specifically the 1820 Rising." ""I am glad to hear my countrymen are resolved to act like men." ""We are seeking nothing but the rights of our forefathers." ""Liberty is not worth having if it is not worth fighting for."" "...and we'll have one minute's silence." "The next morning, Wilson and 24 others set off towards Glasgow." "They hoped to meet up with the rumoured huge radical army of workers who would've joined to overthrow the state." "They carried with them a banner reading, "Scotland free or a desert."" "But the masses hadn't risen." "At the rendezvous at Cathkin Braes, there was no-one else there." "So they hid their weapons in the bracken, turned around and fled for home." "By the end of the week, the status quo had been restored." "The uprising, such as it was, had been suppressed and the radical war was over." "However angry and unhappy the Scottish people were without a vote, they would never again go the way of France and join in open revolution." "88 people were found guilty of high treason." "James Wilson, john Baird and Andrew Hardie were sentenced to death." ""My dear and loving Margaret, before this arrives to your hand," ""I will be made immortal." ""I shall die firm to the cause which I took up arms to defend" ""and although we were outwitted and betrayed," ""yet I protest as a dying man that it was done with a good intention on my part." ""Could you have thought that I was sufficient to stand such a stroke?" ""Which at once burst upon me like an earthquake and buried all my vain," ""earthly hopes beneath its ruins" ""and left me a poor, shipwrecked mariner on this bleak shore," ""separated from the world and thee, in whom all my hopes were centred." ""My dear Margaret, I will be under the necessity" ""of laying down my pen, as this will have to go out immediately." ""Again, farewell, my dear Margaret."" "john Baird and Andrew Hardie were executed in Stirling." "They were only allowed to speak from the scaffold on the condition they didn't talk about politics." "But Hardie shouted to the crowd," ""I die a martyr to the cause of truth and justice. "" "Hardie's letter to Margaret was published in a broadside and sold on the streets of Edinburgh for a penny." "Scott bought a copy and wrote on it," ""Curious particulars regarding Baird, who suffered for high treason, 1820."" "The letter's from Hardie, of course, not Baird." "Scott's got them muddled up." "But, as far as Scott was concerned, the letter was a relic for his collection." "After all, the radical war was history." "But Scotland's workers were still unhappy." "Government by the elite under the King had been defended with the bayonet but, in order to rule effectively, governments need popular consent." "It was a problem." "Scott thought he could solve it." "In 1820, roly-poly George finally became King." "He made Scott a baronet." "Now George IV decided to visit Scotland to see for himself the country he had only read about in Scott's novels." "Naturally, he asked Sir Walter Scott to organise things." "And Scott took the ball and ran with it." "He set up his headquarters here, at 39 Castle Street." "Scott understood the opportunity." "As one of the greatest communicators of his age, he knew that he had to make the visit tell a story." "He realised that what was needed was a simple, dramatic, romantic, visually striking image." "Complexity wouldn't work." "He painted with bright colours and a broad brush." "He turned Scotland tartan." "We were all Highlanders now." "But the tartan image of Scotland wasn't just attractive and appealing." "It was also backward-looking." "The traditional feudal society of the Highlands appealed to Scott, because it was a world where the working classes knew their proper place." "Scott wrote this, an advice pamphlet." "Hints, Addressed To The Inhabitants Of Edinburgh And Others," "In Prospect Of His Majesty's Visit." "In it, he said that George was the descendant of a long line of Scottish kings, and therefore the kinsman of many Scots." ""Let us, on this happy occasion, remember that it is so," ""and behave towards him as a father."" "This was a brilliant lie." "George was mostly German, of the House of Hanover, and yet Scott was telling his fellow Scots that we had to be loyal, because "we are the clan and our King is the chief"." "Because King George was already a huge fan of Scott's Highland romances, he adored the idea of being the Highland chief of chiefs." "And he'd always loved dressing up." "He went to his tailor and ordered the complete Highland dress." "It cost 1,354 pounds and 18 shillings." "In today's money, George spent around £100,000 on his outfit." "Say what you like about Scott, but he wasn't afraid of hard work." "King George gave just two weeks' notice of his visit." "But in 14 days Sir Walter was able to organise three royal processions, a great gathering of the clans, two balls, several grand dinners, a royal review of the troops on Portobello beach and, finally," "a royal visit to the theatre to see a performance of Scott's own play, Rob Roy." "The King's advisers were horrified." "George was always in debt and this sounded very expensive." "Scott was running away with himself." "Couldn 't he keep it simple?" ""When His Majesty comes amongst us, he comes to his ancient kingdom" ""of Scotland and must be received according to ancient usages." ""If you persist in bringing in English customs," ""we turn about one and all and leave you." ""You take the responsibility on yourself."" "That shut them up." "You've got to admire Scott's brass neck here." "He was making up most of these ancient usages as he went along." "And now there was no stopping him." "In a bravura piece of myth-making," "Scott took the Company of Archers, a gentlemen 's sporting club, and reinvented them as the ceremonial bodyguard to the King in Scotland, a role they still have today." "So which one of your ancestors was in the Company of Archers in Walter Scott's day?" "There were a number of my family, me included, who have been in the Royal Company of Archers, but in Scott's day it was the 4th Earl of Hopetoun, who was my five-greats grandfather." "And he was the Captain General, who's the commander of the Royal Company." "And what, then, was the role of the company during the course of George IV's visit?" "They paraded when the King arrived." "They were there to receive him." "They acted as his retinue, his bodyguards, and to be on display and on parade wherever he went." "And this is actually what Scott thought a royal archer should look like?" "This was exactly that." "This is the 4th Earl's uniform, as designed by Sir Walter Scott for the visit." "And this painting, is this a faithful rendition of the King's visit to this house?" "Yes, it is." "This is a painting by a man called Denis Dighton, who was here on the day, and then he worked up this fantastic painting afterwards." "So you've got the house itself in the background." "You've got Royal Company formed up there on the steps of the house to receive the King, looking, I have to say, slightly thinner than we believe he was in real life." " He's been Photoshopped, hasn't he?" " He's been touched up." "He has indeed." "He looks very splendid." "And then round across the roofs of the pavilion for the house you've got members of the local public, you've got tenants, you've got employees and the like, all of whom had turned out to greet the visit of George IV to Scotland." "(CROWD CHEERING)" "Scott knew that what George really wanted to see was the romantic Highlander." "He persuaded the Scottish chiefs to put on all their finery and fill the city." "They absolutely loved the idea." "Scott's gathering of the clans was his masterstroke." "The clan chiefs and their tail of Highlanders in fancy dress knew exactly how bogus this all was." "No Highlander out on the Scottish hills wore a short kilt." "Even the idea of each clan having its own tartan was a fairly recent invention." "But they didn't care." "They were enjoying the party." "As they looked out across the cheering crowds, the landed gentry of Scotland must have thought their position was secure." "It was less than two years since the radical war and the people still didn't have a vote." "But they seemed to have forgotten their hardships in this glorious spectacle." "King George's visit to Scotland was a popular success and a triumph for Scott." "But had it worked?" "Well, no." "Despite all the tugging at the patriotic heartstrings," "Scott's reinvention of Scotland had failed to prevent the one thing he had set out to thwart - electoral reform." "The calls for change hadn't gone away." "Scott's triumph was a triumph of spin, not of substance." "Unemployment, poverty, powerlessness all remained." "The protests continued." "It took another ten years." "But in 1832, the Government finally gave way to the pressure for electoral reform across Britain." ""It is impossible to exaggerate the ecstasy of Scotland," ""where, to be sure, it's like liberty given to slaves." ""We are to be brought out of the house of bondage, out of the land of Egypt."" "By now, Scott was very ill, months from death." "But as the bill passed through Parliament he pushed himself to the limit, speaking out against it at public meetings." "When the crowds booed and hissed at him, he told them," ""I regard your gabble no more than geese upon the green."" "Sir Walter Scott died a disappointed man, terrified that electoral reform would bring anarchy to his beloved Scotland and with the huge debts he'd run up buying the estate at Abbotsford still unpaid." "The Scottish Reform Act extended the franchise, but not to everyone." "As long as you had a property worth £70, you got a vote." "So that's not the working man - or women of any class, of course." "The reforms gave 76 times more people than before a vote." "But that's only 65,000 out of two million." "Still, it's a start." "In 1846, Thomas Cook started package tours to Scotland using all the latest technology, the newly built railway and paddle steamers." "Well-heeled middle-class Victorian tourists from London, Manchester and Glasgow started travelling north for their summer holidays." "Now you could visit this heroic wilderness without the bother of trudging through it." "Sir Walter Scott had taught the Victorians to love this landscape." "Visitors looked in awe upon scenery they believed had been left as nature created it." "However, the reality is the people who once lived here had been cleared." "This is as true of the Lowlands and Loch Katrine here in the Trossachs as it is of the Great Glen and the mountains of Sutherland." "The Highlanders were an endangered species, every bit as hard to spot as the rest of the wildlife the tourists had come to see." "They had been moved to the coast." "The Highlanders had become crofters." "Crofts are smallholdings with a little land, but not enough for a family to survive on." "Crofters had to grow their own food and then top up their income catching fish, gathering seaweed or going down to the Lowlands to help with the harvest." "The crofters were barely getting by." "What they mostly survived on was potatoes." "The potato grows in thin soil and it takes up very little space, so every croft grew them." "By 1846, the potato provided the average crofter with four-fifths of his staple diet." "A Highland minister of the time told a story about asking a small boy what he ate for breakfast." ""Mashed potatoes" was the answer." ""And at noon?"" ""Mashed potatoes." "And for dinner?"" ""Mashed potatoes." Did he have anything else, the minister asked." ""Of course I do," said the boy." ""I have a spoon."" "In the 19th century, huge expanses of the Highlands and Islands had absentee landlords." "A third of the islands of Skye and Uist were owned by Lord William Wentworth Macdonald." "But he spent little time here." "Like many Highland chiefs in the 19th century, he was born in London, educated at Eton and married to an Englishwoman." "Lord Macdonald saw his Highland properties" "First and foremost as a way of making money." "In July 1846, potato blight spread on the wind across the sea from Ireland to Scotland." "It was devastating." "Field after field was blasted, full of black, rotting plants." "Then, as now, it's people living on the margins who are vulnerable to famine." "If you're barely making enough to exist when the times are good, when times are bad, you starve." "On Skye, barely a fifth of the potato crop survived." "One minister wrote," ""We frequently had bad springs, but this is a winter of starvation."" "The Government felt no duty of care towards the starving." "It was hard to grasp the scale of the crisis from Westminster." "And anyway, they believed you shouldn't interfere with the free market." "Grain and oats grown here were actually shipped south throughout the famine." "In the spring of 1847, after a winter of hunger, the sight of ships full of food leaving the Highlands was too much to bear." "Food riots erupted across the north east and, in Wick, starving people broke into the grain stores." "The sheriff called for back-up and two companies of soldiers marched to the docks to stop the looting." "The crowd pelted them with stones and, in response, the troopers fixed bayonets and attacked." "The mob fled." "Under armed guard, the ships were safely loaded and set sail." "But bad though the famine was in Scotland, it was infinitely worse in Ireland." "Something like one million people are estimated to have died in the Irish potato famine." "In Scotland, the dead numbered in the hundreds." "Why?" "In Ireland, the better-off felt no moral responsibility to help the starving." "In Scotland, though, they did." "This is at least partly Sir Walter Scott's legacy." "He had celebrated the Highlander and made people across Scotland identify with their romantic history." "Now the city dwellers of Edinburgh and Glasgow were determined not to let their brothers starve." "Scotland's Free Church helped collect money and organise relief." "£250,000 was raised to help the starving." "That's over £15 million in today's money." "But Lord Macdonald, along with many of his fellow landlords, felt there was no future for the crofters." "The Macdonald family seat was this mock-medieval castle, here on Skye." "Sir Walter Scott would have loved it." "Now, though, Lord Macdonald was in debt to the tune of £218,000." "He felt he had no choice." "He decided to turn more of his estates over to sheep farming." "The crofters would have to go." "Emigration was the answer." "The Highland landowners began to clear the land." "Crofters were forced to leave Scotland and travel across the ocean to Canada, America and Australia." "Most would never return." "The clearances on Skye were particularly brutal." "Over 1,700 writs of removal were issued to evict nearly 40,000 people from their homes." "Lord Macdonald's factors evicted thousands of crofters, pulled down the roofs so they couldn't move back and forced them to emigrate." "In 1853, he emptied the township of Suisnish." ""I could see a long and motley procession" ""winding along the road that led north from Suisnish." ""There were old men and women too feeble to walk who were placed in carts," ""while the children with looks of alarm walked alongside." ""Everyone was in tears." ""It seemed as if they could not tear themselves away." ""When they set forth once more, a cry of grief went up to the heaven," ""a long, plaintive wail," ""and, after the last of the emigrants had disappeared behind the hill," ""the sound seemed to re-echo through the whole wide valley" ""in one prolonged note of desolation."" "Most of the people of Suisnish boarded the boats to Canada, but some hid out here in the hills." "After the police and the sheriffs had gone, they crept back to try and repair their ruined homes, but Lord Macdonald's factor was a thorough man." "Five clays after Christmas, he returned." "Among those driven out into the freezing winter weather were an 81-year-old woman and a mother and her three-week-old baby." "John Murdoch was a retired civil servant in Inverness who was horrified by the way the lairds were treating the crofters." "Murdoch always wore the kilt." "By the 1850s, the reinvented kilt had become a symbol of national identity." "Murdoch realised how powerful such symbols could be." ""If Canada and Australia really are gardens of pleasure," ""as the lairds argue, they should emigrate themselves." ""The country can spare them better than it can spare any other class."" "In Ireland, the land reform movement had pushed for a fairer deal for tenants." "The struggle was bitter and bloody." "John Murdoch had worked in Ireland and had seen it for himself." "He hated the violence, but he liked the results." "Now he decided to lead a non-violent campaign to overthrow the power of the landlords." "The first thing john Murdoch had to do was to get the crofters on side, so he travelled all over the Highlands and Islands." "He went to the markets, he went to the shearings, he walked over 20 miles a clay just to get to wherever he thought that crofters would gather." "And he talked to them, but more important than that, he also listened." "Murdoch was canny enough to realise that the way you win people around to your way of thinking is by listening to their way of thinking first." "What he found, he said, were people who lived in such a state of slavish fear that they dare not complain about their grievances in case they were forced from their homes." "john Murdoch had hearts and minds to change, so he set to work." "He set up a crusading newspaper called The Highlander." "The Highlander wasn't just about land reform." "Murdoch was printing his version of history." ""In Highland tradition, the lands in the Highlands" ""belonged to the clans as such and not to the chiefs." ""A chieftain is the head of the clan or family" ""and not owner of the great tract of land which that clan occupied."" "The landlords, in other words, were in the wrong." "Murdoch wasn't just talking to the crofters." "His campaign had another audience, just as important." "It was still the case that only property-owning men got to vote." "Obviously, the lairds were never going to vote for [and reform." "So Murdoch needed to sell his version of Scottish history to the middle classes." "And there was one man who helped him do it." "A man he'd never met, a man who would have hated everything he stood for, a man who'd been dead over 40 years." "Sir Walter Scott." "Brought up on Waverley and Rob Roy, middle-class Victorians saw the Highlanders as a noble people with a proud tradition, so Murdoch was pushing at a half-open door." "50 years earlier, Scott had taken the idea of the Highlander and made it represent all of Scotland." "So when Murdoch told the story of the Highlanders thrown off their land, it wasn't just happening to people far up north, it was happening to everyone, it was happening to Scotland." "In 1881, the Irish Land Act gave the Irish fair rents and security of tenure." "Skye fishermen working in Ireland for the summer brought the news home with them." "One group of Skye crofters said they might" ""turn rebel ourselves in order to obtain the same benefits"." "By now, the generation who'd witnessed the Clearances, whose brothers and friends had been forced to emigrate, were mostly gone." "The next generation were less scared and more angry." "Finally the crofters had had enough, and it all started on Skye." "By 1882, Ronald Archibald was the new Lord Macdonald." "He received a petition from his crofters in Balmeanach demanding their traditional grazing rights on the sides of Ben Lee." "Lord Macdonald said no." "The crofters refused to pay him any rent for their houses until he changed his mind." "So Lord Macdonald told his factor to evict them from their homes." "But when the crofters received the eviction notices they burned them." "50 policemen were sent north from Glasgow to Skye and they arrived here at Balmeanach around six in the morning, when most of the villagers were still asleep or just having their breakfast." "Boys whistled and shouted warnings, but it was too late." "My grandmother was preparing the breakfast when the shout came that the police were here." "And my grandfather..." "He was sitting at the fireside holding a baby." "He just threw the baby across the fire to my granny and then took out up the hill to the road." "So your grandfather and great-grandfather were among those arrested?" "Yes, yes." "But, er, folk..." "they could take so much, stand so much, but it just couldn't go on." "They had to make a stand." "What exactly did the crofters have in mind for this spot on the road?" "Well, it was to release the prisoners and cause all the damage they could to the police." "We had this cairn of stones and clods and whatever else that came to hand just to pitch over the top." "Just rain it down on them?" "Rain it down on them, cause as much damage as they could." "But the police formed a cordon around half a dozen prisoners and, in order not to injure or maybe kill our own folk, the cry went up, "Stop, stop!"" "And then the police broke through and headed towards Portree with their prisoners." "90 years before, when the men of Ross had tried to drive the sheep out of the Highlands, they'd been regarded as dangerous revolutionaries." "35 years before, when the people of Skye had attempted to resist the Clearances, they'd met little public sympathy and the full force of the law." "But now things were different." "Less than a week after the Battle of the Braes, 11 journalists came to Skye to follow the story, including one from the London Standard." "The crofters were seen as plucky underdogs and the message spread." "Thousands of crofters stopped paying rent." "The Sheriff of Skye persuaded the Government to send troops to enforce the rule of law." "On 21st November, a gunboat and 450 troops arrived here in Loch Dunvegan." "But the Government wanted to keep on the right side of public opinion." "They gave the sheriff strict instructions the troops were not to inflame the situation, so the sheriff was not allowed to use them to evict people." "After six months of stalemate, the troops were withdrawn." "Now the crofters knew they could do what they liked." "The factors, the lairds, even the Government, were powerless to stop them." "Lord Lovat of Skye wrote, "The Queen's writ does not now run in the island," ""the lands seized are still mostly in the hands of the law-breakers." ""Rents and taxes are unpaid and many defaulters are still at large."" "And come rent day, when Lord Macdonald put out the demands to his tenants, not a single farthing was paid and not a single tenant appeared." "$0 what did the Government do?" "They set up a commission." "The Napier Commission held its first meeting here, in the church in Braes, close to the spot where the crofters and the 50 police had their pitched battle." "A Royal Commission was the traditional way, then as now, to kick a difficult issue into the long grass." "But john Murdoch realised this could be a real opportunity." "He went around the Highlands organising and preparing people for it." "Crofter after crofter gave testimony." "They told stories of betrayal, of persecution and of hardship." "Public pressure steadily grew to give the crofters more rights." "In the 1885 General Election, four Crofters' Party MPs won seats in Westminster." "This was an astonishing achievement." "Now, the reformers had political power." "The Government had to act." "The Crofters Land Act of 1886 gave them security of tenure and set fair rents." "Never again would the lairds be able to turn crofters out of their homes." "The Clearances were over." "For centuries, the control of the landowners had been absolute." "Now, at last, the balance of power was beginning to shift." "Walter Scott had created the myth of the Highlander in an attempt to secure the loyalty of the Scots to their King." "Ironically, that myth was subverted to give the Highlander rights over the land." "For good or ill, Scott rebranded Scotland." "Nearly two centuries later, his tartan is woven into our national identity." "The stories we tell ourselves about our history don't just shape our past, they shape our future as well." "From the top of a hill on the Isle of Bute, in the early 1920s, Scots would have seen an incredible sight, and a clue to the great hidden catastrophe of 20th-century Scotland." "Down there, the Firth of Clyde would have been full of ships coming and going across the world." "Made from Scottish steel, powered by Scottish coal, these ships were the backbone of Scottish life." "What was so wrong with all of that?" "The cargo." "That cargo was the most precious thing Scotland could produce, its own people, tens of thousands of them abandoning their homeland for the promise of a better life across the sea." "Scotland was bleeding, the lifeblood of the nation draining away." "And as the ambitious, the talented, the optimistic and the restless departed, some of those left behind began to ask what could be done to stop the human haemorrhage, to save this failing nation." "Over 200 years earlier, Scotland had surrendered her sovereignty to become a partner in Great Britain." "And through that union, and the Empire that followed," "Scots had earned rich rewards." "But with Scotland in crisis, was it time to renegotiate that union?" "Was it time for Scotland to take back control of her own affairs?" "The Scotland that entered the 20th century boasted one of the strongest economies in all of Europe - strength that was rooted almost entirely in heavy industry." "The 20th century was forged here, in the ironworks of Lanarkshire." "These hand-stoked furnaces turned iron ore into some of the hardest, strongest metals the world had yet seen, and transformed central Scotland into the workshop of the British Empire when the British Empire covered a quarter of the globe." "Girders, boilers, bridges, ships." "Scottish engineering became a guarantee of precision and quality, renowned across the world, and Scotland's industrialists grew outrageously rich on the rewards." "Their success was fuelled by the iron ore and coal locked inside the earth of central Scotland, around towns like Motherwell." "One family firm of metal-makers, the Colvilles, started smelting iron here in the 1870s." "They were just one of many small independent ironworks in the town, but they were the most innovative." "And they quickly developed the technological know-how to make the new metal that everyone wanted, steel, something which would transform their fortunes and allow them to take their place among Scotland's other magnates of global industry." "The Colvilles were the sort of bosses who kept wages low but gave workers time off on Sundays to go to church." "They were big on God, big on politics, and, of course, big on profit." "Archibald and David Colville, the second generation of the family, were in charge of the firm as Britain and Germany prepared for war, and demand for their Motherwell steel was sent rocketing." "The First World War was an opportunity for many Scottish industries, and Colville's was no different." "This plant was flung into the war effort, churning out orders for armour, for shell casings and for tanks." "As the war progressed," "Colville's expanded to become the biggest steelworks in Scotland." "By 1917, this was the kind of munitions factory that the King visited." "(BRASS BAND PLAYS)" "In the post-war years, the firm kept expanding." "As the firm grew and grew, the whole town came to identify itself with steel, with C' ol ville 3 in particular." "The workers formed bands, sports clubs, educational institutes and created a community out of an industry." "Across central Scotland, similar communities rose up around coal seams, iron foundries and steelworks." "Heavy industry wove central Scotland together." "(TRAIN WHISTLE BLOWS)" "But there was a catch - a particularly Scottish catch brought home every week on wages day, the day when Scotland's skilled workers received much less money" "Than their counterparts in England for doing exactly the same job." "It made Scottish industry competitive, but it consigned many Scottish families to live in squalor without running water or basic sanitation." "Overcrowding was six times higher than in England, and infant mortality was among the very worst in Western Europe." "This was the contract - the unspoken agreement that bound industrial Scotland together." "Acceptance of it was the secret ingredient locked inside every ton of coal, every ingot of iron and every penny of profit." "But still the workers came, drawn to the furnaces like moths to the flame, sucked in to the workshop of the Empire, until by 1921, across central Scotland, around 500,000 livelihoods depended on the health of heavy industry," "on steelworks and coal mines and shipbuilding, on an incredible boom that couldn't last for ever." "Scotland had become a house of cards." "When the collapse came, it came fast." "In peacetime, no-one needed shell casings or tanks." "No-one needed new ships." "So the workshop of the Empire grew quiet." "Industrial Scotland was plunged into crisis." "The fortunate ones merely had their wages slashed." "The unfortunate ones lost everything." "Around the steel town of Motherwell alone, unemployment increased from under 2,000 to over 12,000." "Motherwell became one of the worst-hit places in Scotland." "The unemployed - the able-bodied destitute poor, as they were known - flooded into the parish councils of Lanarkshire looking for poor relief." "And here, in Airbles Cemetery in Motherwell, they found the best that industrial Scotland had to offer - one week in three, earning 11 pence a clay, burying the dead." "Those that wanted something better than poor relief or the dole started to leave their stricken communities, to emigrate from central Scotland like they'd never emigrated before." "In 1921 alone, Scotland lost 50,000 people - a greater proportion that year than almost any other country in Europe." "This wasn't a clearance." "But it was an exodus." "Scots left in droves, on one-way tickets to the New World." "And as ship after ship sailed out of the Clyde, away past Canada Hill, more and more Scots began to ask just why their country was in such a mess." "What they wanted was a new world right here in Scotland itself." "Scots weren't alone in seeking a new world, a new beginning." "just a few years earlier, Russia had had its communist revolution." "And in the Balkans, a host of brand-new nations had emerged from the ashes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire." "Much closer to home, Ireland was in the grip of assertive nationalism to free itself from Britain's grip." "Was it time for Scotland to take control of her own future, too?" "Was it time for home rule?" "Home rule was hardly a new idea." "Earlier British governments had flirted with the notion, seeing it as a way to strengthen the Empire rather than weaken it." "But with Scotland in crisis, calls for a new kind of home rule began to grow louder." "The most radical Scots called for complete independence - for national liberation, as they saw it." "And in 1922, one of the strongest supporters of that idea was to be found tucked away in the quiet seaside town of Montrose." "Christopher Murray Grieve was a journalist who lived here in Montrose." "His pen name was Hugh MacDiarmid." "And his house was just along this street." "ANNOUNCER ON ARCHIVE:" "He made his home at 76 Links A venue." "And in 1922 the first number of a literary magazine was issued from that address." "It was the beginning of a Scottish literary revival." "And there was a new name among the contributors." "NEIL OLIVER:" "To MacDiarmid, Scotland's journey to independence had to start with poetry." "He thought that Scotland had lost itself, been swamped by its bigger neighbour - by England." "And he wanted to kick-start Scottish culture, to create something modern and vital by drawing on something old and pure the language of the medieval poets, poets who wrote before the influence of England and English," "who expressed their ideas and their emotions in their own distinctive way." "In 1922, MacDiarmid launched his own magazine, the Scottish Chapbook, publishing modern poems written in a kind of ancient Scots - a language that turned rainbows back into "watergaws." "" Ae weet forenicht I' the yow-trummla" ""I saw yon antrin thing" ""A watergaw wi its chitterin licht" ""Ayont the onding" ""An I thocht 0' the last wild leuk ye gied" ""More ye deed" ""There was nae reek I' the laverock's hoose that nicht" ""And nane I' mine" ""But I hae thocht 0' that foolish licht" ""Even sin syne" ""An I think that mebbe at last I ken" ""What yer leuk meant then."" "NEIL OLIVER:" "MacDiarmid's poems seemed at once ancient and modern and were rapturously received." "MacDiarmid's voice, and his agenda, reached the ears of other writers and poets and ignited the whole Scottish literary scene." "His house became a meeting place for all those drawn into his circle." "Here, great writers like Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Compton Mackenzie congregated to talk about Scotland." "They didn't all share MacDiarmid's conviction that Scotland needed to be liberated from English influence, and they didn't all write in Scots, but they did agree that Scottish culture desperately needed to be revived." "Hugh MacDiarmid had got Scotland going." "He had succeeded in opening a door into the world of modern ideas and started a movement, a movement that became known as a Scottish Renaissance." "Soon, the newspapers and the magazines were full of articles, letters and reviews, all of them discussing the national condition and asking just what it was that was wrong with this small, failing nation and what could be clone to make it better." "With Scottish culture invigorated, MacDiarmid wanted to go further." "He was already involved in local politics, as a socialist councillor with nationalist sympathies." "But in 1923, he took up the latest political movement sweeping Europe Fascism." "(SPEAKS IN ITALIAN)" "NEIL OLIVER:" "Not long after Mussolini marched on Rome to seize power in Italy," "MacDiarmid published an article inciting Scottish fascism." "He even urged unemployed ex-servicemen to march on the Highlands and Islands and reclaim the land for themselves." "MAN: "ls it not time for a Scottish fascism" ""to oppose the anti-national forces" ""which are robbing Scotland of the finest elements of its population" ""and at one and the same time denying the Scottish people" ""access to millions of acres of the finest scenery in Scotland" ""And setting the sport of English plutocrats" ""before the vital needs of the country?" ""Is it not time to smash the laws which sanction and ensure such things?" ""Rights are not asked." ""They are taken, and Scotland is a sovereign country" ""Entitled to resume her independence at will!"" "NEIL OLIVER:" "But MacDiarmid's call to fascism went unheeded among those who might have joined an uprising." "Instead, the unemployed and low-paid workers of the industrial belt listened to the promises of Scotland's growing socialist movement whose activists and Labour MPs encouraged them to believe in the kind of improvements that a socialist government in charge of Britain would deliver." "If Scotland 's socialists also supported home rule, and many of them did, it was never as much of a priority for them as housing or sanitation, or the issue that would finally force Britain into confrontation wages." "In 1926, when coalminers were facing a wage cut," "Britain's unions joined together and called a general strike." "The Government placed troops on standby and called for volunteers to keep essential services running." "Thousands volunteered, terrified that the Bolsheviks, as they saw them, might take over Britain." "After just a few days, the strike in Scotland lost its momentum." "Some miners held out for several months, but eventually they all returned, defeated, to work." "For many workers of the industrial belt, the future would be just like the past, where they had to know their place, not their worth." "And those industrialists who ran Scotland were only too happy to oblige." "Most of the men who owned Scotland 's factories resisted the influence of trade unions." "And if they looked out for their employees, it was largely through good Christian charity." "John Colville, one of the third generation of the family, donated a golf course to his grateful workers to thank them for making his firm a fortune during the last war." "On the board of his family's steel firm, he sat alongside some of the supreme magnates of Scotland's industry, men who, between them, sat on the board of over 50 leading companies, and who effectively controlled the Scottish economy." "Their grip extended deep into politics." "John Colville would himself become an MP, and later, Secretary of State for Scotland." "They were symptomatic of a country that was locked in the past." "And those Scots who wanted a better life had to seek it abroad." "50,000 left in 1926." "And yet another 50,000 in 1927." "To nationalists like Hugh MacDiarmid, the scale of emigration was a sure sign that Scotland was in crisis." "MacDiarmid no longer called for fascist uprisings." "Instead, he concentrated his efforts on the ballot box." "In 1928, he joined up with a small handful of fellow travellers to form a new political party, the National Party of Scotland." "MacDiarmid set out the party's aims in a letter held at Edinburgh University." "Here on page two you see what it was that prompted MacDiarmid to write this." "In one word, emigration." "See here..." ""A very large part of the Scottish expenditure on education has gone" ""not to build up the national prosperity," ""but to export Scotsmen to America and elsewhere" ""to undertake precisely the kind of work they ought to have been doing at home."" "In other words, MacDiarmid wanted all the opportunities of the New World here in Scotland itself and he believed that the only way to do that was through independence." "This wasn't the first time a Scottish parliament had been called for." "Over the years many of the established political parties had backed home rule, but as MacDiarmid says here," "Bill after Bill had been defeated by the sheer number of English MPs at Westminster." "Now Scots who wanted home rule would have a new option - a political party whose sole objective was independence." "MacDiarmid expected the National Party to attract big support at the election of 1929, but they secured just 3,000 votes an unconvincing start for a liberation movement." "Instead, Scots voted for the devil they knew, for socialism, for Union and for men of the old industrial order like john C o!" "ville." "But just a few months after the election, their world was shaken to its core." "The financial markets crashed, the Great Depression took hold, and the economic crises of the previous decade were dreadfully outdone." "MAN: "Now the ice lays its smooth claws on the sill," ""The sun looks from the hill" ""Helmed in his winter casket" ""And sweeps his arctic sword across the sky." ""The water at the mill Sounds more hoarse and dull." ""The miller's daughter walking by" ""With frozen fingers soldered to her basket" ""Seems to be knocking" ""Upon a hundred leagues of floor" ""With her light heels, and mocking Percy and Douglas dead" ""And Bruce on his burial bed."" "NEIL OLIVER:" "To Edwin Muir, one of the leading writers of the Scottish Renaissance, it was as though Scotland was stuck in a perpetual winter." "Unlike MacDiarmid, he wasn't a nationalist first and foremost, but a socialist, a political position that he developed as a youth." "Edwin Muir came originally from Orkney, and arrived in the centre of industrialised Glasgow aged just 14, something that he said was like leaving the 18th century and leaping straight into the 20th." "Muir developed a dark fascination for the industrial world he saw around him." "And in 1934 he decided to go on a journey round Scotland to see for himself what had become of the country at the hands of those who ruled it." "Here in Lanarkshire," "Edwin Muir found a world made up of exploiters and exploited, a landscape utterly devoid of humanity." "Among the unemployed hanging around the labour exchanges, he found only despair." "The civilised world had forgotten about them, had forgotten this whole part of Scotland." "As a socialist, Muir was appalled." "Muir compared it to the most painful episode of Scotland's history." "MAN: "A century ago there was a great clearance from the Highlands" ""which still rouses the anger of the people living there." ""At present, on a far bigger scale," ""a silent clearance is going on in industrial Scotland," ""a clearance not of human beings but of what they depend upon for life." ""Everything which could give meaning to their existence" ""in the grotesque industrial towns of Lanarkshire is slipping from them."" "NEIL OLIVER:" "The 20th century was not even 35 years old, yet almost as many Scottish children had died in poverty as soldiers had been killed during the entire First World War." "And over 400,000 Scots had left in the preceding 13 years alone." "Old Scotland had failed and something had to be done." "To those like Edwin Muir, the solution was clear." "Only the power of a socialist government in Westminster could fix all Scotland's social problems." "But MacDiarmid and his fellow nationalists disagreed." "Their revolution would see all Scotland 's problems fixed by its own parliament." "But the nation's internal problems would be overshadowed by concerns of graver consequence and the new Scotland would have to wait." "(AIR-RAID SIRENS WAIL)" "ON FILM:" "The kingdom of Fife." "Glenrothes is one of the very few Scottish towns without a memorial to the dead either of the First or Second World War, because history didn't start here until 1948." "Glenrothes and the other Scottish new towns were planned towns, emblems of a new world, of an optimism born of victory." "During the Second World War," "Britain had pulled together to defeat Hitler's fascism." "The nation's efforts had been directed from London, specifically from Whitehall." "Now, the first government after the Second World War wanted to use the power of that same central planning to create a new Britain, a socialist Britain that would eradicate five giant evils - squalor, ignorance, want, idleness and disease." "In Glenrothes, their plans included a house and a job for life, at the nearby Rothes "super pit"." "And miners came in their thousands from the central belt, drawn by the prospect of new houses and hourly wages." "From cradle to grave, the state would provide, and Scotland embraced this Great British future." "A visionary scheme to light up the Highlands through hydro-electric power was set up in Argyllshire." "At a stroke, 10,000 jobs were created, 10,000 livelihoods were secured." "A car factory was boldly founded at Linwood, making Hillman Imps." "In Motherwell, money was sunk into more steel-making on a site at Colville's." "Using all the latest technology, this place would roll steel thinner than ever before." "It was to be called Ravenscraig." "The planners had projected that some old industries would struggle, that some would even die." "But these vast new projects would mop up any unemployed - they would be the industrial lynchpins around which the new Scotland would take shape." "And through the next decade, through changes of government and boom and bust, the British state grew, and unemployment remained low." "But by the early 1960s, it was clear that Scotland wasn't going to plan." "Scotland might have started to look different, but for most Scots, it didn't feel different - new industries, major building projects, like this bridge, began to appear, but not quickly enough." "And as the old industries went into terminal decline, so the unemployment figures crept up." "Remote control from Whitehall wasn't working." "It was as if the planners were out of touch with the consequences of their decisions." "What Scotland needed was someone who would shake up the planners, someone who could ensure that Britain served Scotland better." "In Harold Wilson's Labour Party, there was just the man." "WILLIE ROSS:" "The actual facts are stark..." "they're grim for Scotland, and only Labour planning will improve the position and give us the 40,000 jobs a year that we really need." "I n housing, it's a tragic story." ""And I shall make you fishers of men."" "Those were Christ's words to Andrew and Peter, the first apostles, when he returned from the wilderness and found them fishing on the Sea of Galilee." "It's meant as a rallying cry for those who work here at St Andrew's House, the Government HQ in Scotland, to look out for the welfare of their fellow men." "In 1964, the new boss here was Willie Ross, and he was determined to do just that... in his own distinctive way." "Willie Ross was the son of a train driver whose political beliefs had been forged when he worked as a teacher in working-class communities in Glasgow in the 1920s and 1930s." "During the war, he had served as Lord Mountbatten 's personal signals officer in the Far East." "Once demobbed, he became a Labour MP and had spent over a decade in opposition, learning how Britain worked." "Willie Ross knew that the fight for Scotland didn't just lie here in Edinburgh so he took it right to the heart of the British Government." "In Cabinet meetings, he would bang on the table demanding more money for his patch, more money for Scotland." "Ross was a fearsome sight, and even the Prime Minister was intimidated." "Willie Ross decided to bring the planning process closer to home, to St Andrew's House, and he quickly set to work on a detailed master plan." "The master plan for improving Scotland was unveiled early in 1966." "It was state planning socialist-style and on a scale never before seen in Scotland." "It was big on ambition and obsessive about the details." "Jobs, houses, roads, power supplies - nothing was overlooked." "And if it succeeded, Scotland would be transformed." "It was to cost £2,000 million." "But the ink was barely dry on the master plan before disaster struck." "In 1967, the pound was devalued, the British Treasury froze all government spending, and the promises Willie Ross had made to the electorate just a year earlier were, at a stroke, in tatters." "The unemployment that he'd been trying to alleviate went through the roof." "And Scots left for Canada and Australia on £10 tickets to a brighter future." "# Oh, flower of Scotland... #" "Away from the world of politics, of failed plans and economic turmoil," "Scotland had been quietly changing." "Seeds sown in the Scottish Renaissance of the 1920s had finally taken root in the popular imagination." "And a new generation had woken up" "To Scotland's distinctive culture and history." "The site of Bannockburn, the battle in 1314, where the Scots decisively defeated an invading English army, was commemorated with this state-of-the-art monument and a statue was raised to the victorious Robert the Bruce." "# .." "And in the past They must remain... #" "Bruce's exploits were further celebrated in a new song " "Flower Of Scotland - that urged Scots to rise now and be a nation again." "# .." "And be the nation again That stood against... #" "The mythology of Scotland as a once-victorious nation struck a chord with those Scots who felt that Scotland had been reduced to Scotland-shire, a sort of badly run province of Britain." "All of this powerful nationalist sentiment couldn't help but spill over into Scottish politics." " Winifred Margaret Ewing..." " Scottish Nationalist." " ...18,397." " (CHEERING)" "And so the Scottish Nationalists have taken Hamilton." "And I declare Winifred Margaret Ewing has been duly elected to serve in Parliament as the Member for the Hamilton constituency." "(APPLAUSE)" "In November 1967, the Scottish National Party won a by-election in Hamilton." "The party that had spent three decades losing deposits up and down the country suddenly seemed to be in tune with the times." "I have to say a thanks to Hamilton for making history for Scotland... (CHEERING)" "The major political parties hoped it was a blip... but it wasn't." "The SNP started to pick up votes from new supporters, drawn from new battlegrounds in Scottish politics." "All along the River Clyde, shipyards had turned out some of the most famous vessels the world had ever seen." "This wasn't just an industry - it was a symbol of a nation's identity and it was in trouble." "One by one, the shipyards started to go to the wall." "In 1971, one shipyard " "Upper Clyde Shipyard - employed around 13,000 people and was struggling with large debts." "Its closure would devastate the local area, yet the Westminster Government was refusing to bail it out." "The workers started a sit-in, and a campaign to keep the shipyard open took off." "Churches, councils, trade unions, tens of thousands of ordinary Scots joined the protests." "Eventually, the shipyard was kept open." "But more Scots than ever before were coming to believe that Westminster was either completely out of touch with Scottish affairs or, worse, simply didn't care." "And all the time, the Scottish National Party felt the benefit." "Then, somewhere in the North Sea off the coast of Scotland, the drill of an oil rig hit black gold and sent support for Scottish independence rocketing." "Oil changed Scottish politics overnight, and there was lots of it." ""Imagine what could happen," said the Nationalists, "if Scotland kept it all."" "It was Scotland's oil, after all... wasn't it?" "To the SNP, it was, and they argued it should be used to benefit Scotland." "After two decades of planning and spending, the five great social evils had far from vanished." "Scots still lived in some of the poorest housing in Britain, had the worst health in the Western world, had the smallest children in the UK." "Oil, said the SNP, could eliminate all of these ills in a way that Westminster planning never had." "The people of Scotland could have the very best health care, housing, education." "Scotland could finally catch up with England, might even be a match for anywhere in the world." "By early 1974, almost a fifth of Scots backed the SNP." "Their picture of a wealthy, independent Scotland was particularly seductive in a Britain that seemed locked in a downward spiral of inflation, strikes and strife." "In the general election of February that year, the SNP turned their support into an all-time electoral high of seven seats." "Where would the SNP rise end?" "To the bigger parties, it was clear that something had to be done." "The answer seemed to be a kind of home rule called devolution." "It would see the powers that one man, Willie Ross, enjoyed as Scottish Secretary placed under the control of an elected assembly." "The only problem was that many of the Scottish Labour MPs didn't want it." "They believed that the problems of Scotland were more likely to be solved by a socialist government in Westminster than by any assembly in Edinburgh." "Chairman, I want to enter this debate in terms of the context of devolution..." "All through the summer of 1974, the ruling Labour Party remained bogged down in debate and divided on grounds of principle." "In Scotland at the moment, there are a very large number of pressure groups, led largely by the SNP..." "But the time for principles was nearing an end." "Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson wanted to call another election to strengthen his position in Westminster." "To him it was simple - devolution would be a vital vote-winner in Scotland." "With another general election looming and the SNP still on the rise, the Labour Party had to have a home-rule policy." "So Harold Wilson forced it through against the wishes of many Scots Labour MPs, who felt it was a betrayal of socialism and a policy guaranteed to lead to the break-up of Britain." "It was in this atmosphere of division and self-interest that Scotland's first home-rule referendum was born." "Labour's promise of a referendum on home rule didn't stave off the rise of the SNP." "Nor did it unite the ruling Labour Party, or even the public." "You think you're going to vote "yes" or would you vote "no"?" " I haven't decided." " OK." " I can't put that on you, then?" " Not yet." "It took the politicians four years to agree the scheme." "And during those four years, it was transformed into a referendum with a catch - a catch that said 40% of the entire electorate would have to vote "yes"" "to win the day." "What actually do we control if we vote "yes"?" "Well, you'll control education, housing, health, the environment, transport - a lot of the things that are run by the Secretary of State at the moment." "REPORTER:" "With an electorate of nearly 3.75 million, the Scottish Office has drafted in an army of clerks to count the votes, and they'll be in action from early tomorrow morning." "NEIL OLIVER:" "On the 1st of March 1979, Scotland went to the polls." "MAN:" "I hereby declare that, on the basis of the count results in the several counting areas, the count result which I intend to certify for Scotland is as follows..." "Oh, look at this!" "This was all prepared for 1979." "Edinburgh's Royal High School was kitted out like a parliament in the expectation that Scots would vote "yes" in the devolution referendum." "MAN:" "Number of "yes" votes - 1,230,937." "Number of "no" votes - 1,153,502."" "Scotland had voted "yes." "But the majority wasn't big enough to win the referendum." "If it was a test of the country's determination," "Then it showed a lack of national resolve." "It also revealed a population divided between Scottishness and Britishness." "The plan for an assembly in the Royal High School was Britain's solution to its Scottish problem." "To many Scots, it was just another Westminster promise that didn't deliver, a half-hearted enterprise that failed because of its half-heartedness." "As the momentum towards home rule petered out, a new era dawned, one that would have a profound influence on Scotland." "MAN:" "Good afternoon, Prime Minister!" "Margaret Thatcher had a new vision for Britain, one inspired by the work of an 18th-century Scot called Adam Smith the man who had given the world the idea of free trade." "Smith believed that markets had to operate freely, according to their own fundamental laws." "And in Margaret Thatcher's modern version of his idea, the free market had to be brought to bear with greatest urgency on Britain's nationalised industries." "To her, these vast, dilapidated and inefficient concerns had been kept open by the state for purely social reasons - to provide jobs rather than make profit - something which couldn't go on." "Shipbuilding had won a few battles, but had lost its war." "And in the early 1980s, that other great pillar of Scottish industry, of Scottish life, came under threat coal." "Coal had been nationalised to free the industry from the worst excesses of private ownership, of exploitation." "But many of the pits had never been profitable and had been kept going only by subsidies." "Now, any pits that couldn't make money were to be closed." "MARGARET THATCHER:" "Where there is discord, may we bring harmony." "Where there is error, may we bring truth." "Where there is doubt, may we bring faith." "And where there is despair, may we bring hope." "NEIL OLIVER:" "Can you describe when you became aware that the industry was going downhill?" "Was there a day came when you realised the game was up?" "I was sorry it was ever coming to that." "I knew it was coming, but I was sorry, because there would be a lot of people with no jobs." "That was that." "It made so much sense, why all these towns were here." "They were either here to support a pit or for the steel..." "That's how it was, aye." "And now it's as if the tide's gone out and left these places high and dry." "There's nothing left." "Allanton, Shotts, Cumnock," "Bonnyrigg - the list of places left behind as that tide went out stretches from one end of central Scotland to the other." "Those who had chosen to stay, those who had faced the future here in Scotland rather than emigrate, were left adrift, as once and for all their way of life was lost." "In the early 1980s, unemployment returned to levels unknown since the 1920s." "If this was Margaret Thatcher's new vision of Britain, then it seemed to many Scots to be a place without compassion." "And Scots began to notice that only a small number of them had voted for her and her party." "When Margaret Thatcher and the Conservatives won the election in 1987, it was their third victory in a row." "And the third time that Scotland voted overwhelmingly against her." "Scotland was being ruled without the consent of the majority of its people, and at this rate, its national interests could be overlooked for ever." "As this reality sank in, home rule got a new lease of life." "The idea of devolution had once divided Scottish opinion." "What was needed now was a scheme that would unite." "In 1988, many of the country's political and civic leaders met to thrash out a plan that would restore the Scottish people's right to decide their own form of government." "A scheme based on the principle of self-determination." "And here it is - a Claim of Right for Scotland." ""We, gathered as the Scottish Constitutional Convention," ""do hereby acknowledge and assert" ""the sovereign right of the Scottish people" ""to determine the form of government best suited to their needs." ""We further declare and pledge that our actions and deliberations" ""shall be directed to the following end " ""to agree a scheme for an assembly or parliament for Scotland."" "And there, the second name - Donald Dewar." "And after his, name after name, page after page." "The Claim of Right was clear and unequivocal." "The crisis of the 20th century had gone far beyond material things - beyond jobs, beyond housing." "It threatened the very nature of Scotland's existence." "The people should no longer be governed without consent, said the Claim of Right." "Only a Scottish parliament could safeguard Scotland's identity now." "One opposition party, the SNP, didn't back the Claim of Right, but for almost 60 years, their calls for a parliament had echoed across Scottish politics." "With support for out-and-out independence increasing and Scotland 's other opposition parties now committed to a parliament as well," "Scotland grew restless." "Among the people, a sense of nationhood grew and was heard." "At Murrayfield, in 1990, Scots embraced their own unofficial national anthem for a rugby match against England." "What song did they choose?" "60,000 Scots got behind their country and belted out the sentimental '60s folk song, Flower Of Scotland, and inspired Scotland to a famous victory over their oldest adversaries." " (# BAGPIPES:" "Flower Of Scotland) - (CROWD SINGS)" "# Oh, flower of Scotland When will we see" "# Your like again?" "# That fought and died for" "# Your wee bit hill and glen" "# And stood against him" "# Proud Edward's army... #" "And the English team went right on singing God Save The Queen, as if England and Britain were one and the same thing." "# .." "Long live our noble Queen... #" "It was just sport." "But it told its own story." "People who had begun the century as loyal subjects of Britain had changed their allegiances and they no longer unquestioningly accepted that to be Scottish was, first and foremost, to be British." "But Britain had changed too." "The version of Britain that Scots had understood and supported was gone and it had been replaced with something very different, something that Scots didn't recognise as their own creation." "Ravenscraig Steelworks had been the jewel of post-war planning, one of the foundations on which" "20th-century Scotland was supposed to be built." "By the time it came down in 1996," "Scots the length and breadth of the country were united in an urgent mission to take back political control." "The nation had a settled will." "The birch trees are reclaiming the site of Ravenscraig." "The furnaces, coke piles, iron stores and cooling towers are long gone, and now any traces of one version of the old Scotland are giving way to a much older one." "The heavy industries of the 19th and 20th centuries have all but vanished." "And Scotland, the land, is taking the place back." "But what lingers is a sense that something has gone that has not yet been replaced." "There once was a settled will." "In 1999, that settled will was turned into a parliament - not an assembly, but a parliament." "When hard economic times forced Scots to question the Union," "Scotland created a new relationship with its old partner, and in doing so helped to create a new kind of Britain." "For most of the 20th century, Scotland's story was the story of a failing nation, one that couldn't keep hold of its population." "In the first years of the 21st century, Scotland's story changed." "Scotland became a place in which to stay rather than leave," "A place to come to, rather than go from." "So what of the future for the five million people who live here today?" "As the 21 st century stretches out ahead, what will fill the empty spaces, what will fill this void where the nation's industrial heart once beat?" "And what will become of us as a nation?" "Is it "Scottish" that most defines us now, or does "British" still run deep too?" "Is Scotland 's journey to self-determination at an end or is there more to come on the road ahead?"