The difficult relationship between the English-speaking Lowland Scots and the Gaelic-speaking Highlanders reached a nadir after the ’45. Lowlanders had always regarded the Highlanders as savages and thieves - now they were rebels too. The use of the Gaelic word ‘Sassenach’ (Saxon), now used by Scots solely as a slightly insulting name for the English, symbolises the internal division of Scotland: in the eighteenth century it was still used by Highlanders to describe all English-speakers, including those in the Scottish Lowlands. At the same time, some Lowlanders, such as the philosopher David Hume, could even describe themselves as being English. in large part to the Celtic revival, this division had all but disappeared by the end of the nineteenth century.
The rehabilitation of the reputation of the Gaelic Highlanders after the ’45 was begun by tourism. The spirit of romanticism changed attitudes to the environment in eighteenth-century Europe. Now that humankind increasingly had the upper hand over untamed nature, wild landscapes, that had been thought dreary and frightful, came to be seen as beautiful and spiritually uplifting. Publicised in part by Macpherson’s Ossianic poems, the spectacular scenery of the Highlands drew increasing numbers of tourists, whose experiences cast an aura of romance over the region and its inhabitants. The image of the Gael was further enhanced by the performance of Highland regiments in the wars with France. Though initially wary of recruiting Highlanders, doubting their loyalty, by the end of the eighteenth century the British army regarded them as its finest infantry and preferred shock troops. The tradition of the wild Highland charge survived, though with bayonets rather than claymores. To help foster regimental esprit de corps, the army adopted bagpiping, tartans and uniforms based, somewhat loosely, on traditional Highland dress, aiding their survival and raising their prestige.
With the days of cattle raids and Jacobite rebellions safely in the past, Lowlanders could allow themselves the luxury of romanticising the Gael. Most influential in this respect was Sir Walter Scott’s enduringly popular novel Rob Roy (1818) in which Rob Roy MacGregor, a real-life eighteenth-century cattle thief and protection racketeer, was turned into a Celtic Robin Hood. Scott’s prestige as a historical novelist allowed him to stage-manage King George IV’s visit to Edinburgh in 1822. This was the first time a reigning monarch had visited Scotland for over 150 years and it generated great excitement. Scott dressed the main participants, including the king himself, in tartan, kilts, sporrans and bonnets, in the process single-handedly inventing the idea that the kilt is the traditional dress of Scotland. In fact the pleated kilt, or philibeg, had been invented as recently as 1727 by Thomas Rawlinson, an English ironmaster, for his employees at a Highland ironworks, when he found that their then traditional dress, the belted plaid, hindered their work. Lowlanders did not wear tartan, traditional plaids or new-fangled kilts, and most of them at the time saw through the charade and many agreed (as a great many still do) with James Stuart of Dunearn, that ‘Sir Walter has ridiculously made us appear a nation of Highlanders’. However, the clan chiefs cooperated willingly - they were eager to deflect public attention away from the Clearances, then in full swing - and the image has stuck. Queen Victoria’s love affair with the Highlands and the ‘Balmoralisation’ of the royal family only reinforced it. Canny Lowland textile manufacturers soon cashed in, inventing clan tartans as a clever marketing device - although particular tartans had traditionally been associated with particular areas, tartan was never a badge of clan identity - and even extending the system to Lowland family names. The truth was. Lowland Scots were beginning to find the Highlanders’ Celtic identity increasingly attractive, not simply because it was romantic but because, by adopting many of its trappings (real or invented), they could use it to accentuate the differences between themselves and the English. This reflected a very real fear among nineteenth-century Lowland Scots of cultural assimilation by the English. The Celtification of Scotland was further aided by the migration of tens of thousands of Highlanders to the industrial towns of the Lowlands in search of work. This, and the steady spread of the English language into the Highlands, has led to the blurring of Scotland’s ancient divisions and the emergence of a more homogeneous national identity in which the Celts play an important part. However, the modern Scottish National Party (though by no means all its supporters) has officially rejected ethnic nationalism in favour of a more inclusive civic nationalism.
Plate 33 Romantic statue of Vercingetorix (d.46 bc), Gallic chief of the Arverni, 1865
Source: Alise-Sainte-Reine, Cote d’Or, France/Peter Willi/Bridgeman Art Library,
World History
