In light of the referendum yesterday, I happened to be reading at bedtime, just after learning a majority in Scotland had voted to stay with the Brits (though with 1.6 million voting for independence),a book on Sir Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor of England in the 17th century, and found this illuminating quote on the origins of the Scotish/English union from the author, Catherine Drinker Bowen:
“In (King)James’s first parliament of 1604, Bacon had sat for Ipswitch and St. Albans. Both Houses had chosen him as Commissioner in the King’s great cause of a proposed union between Scotland and England — a complex matter which was to take a century for its accomplishment. The commons were stubbornly jealous lest a wild and barren country encroach upon a prosperous one: they hated every Scotish courtier that James brought to England.”
400 years later, the irony is not that that it took a 100 year campaign to roll Scotland into the British Empire, but that the partnership has lasted so long. As nation/states around the world find themselves in a time of re-casting, as our political systems evolve and devolve, it should not be surprising that this old relationship between two disparate peoples is in the limelight. And the future of this odd pairing, based largely upon geographic adjacency, remains anything but certain.
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September 25, 2014 at 02:23
John Beddall
Dear Chuck,
Your writings are invariably entertaining even when the subject matter is sombre. Being of the same age although we’re separated by a few thousand miles, I can fit your recollections into my own personal kaleidoscope looking back as I grew up.
Time lends a special perspective but recent discussions about the breaking up of the United Kingdom have tended to dwell on revisionist history.
As we have seen in the case of your northern neighbour, Canada, certain factions want to rewrite history and separatists do not know when to take ‘No’ as an answer. The small but vociferous minority seem destined to be in outright denial. ‘Pure Laine’ Québécois see no alternative to independence.
I’m writing this from our holiday home in Provence. Another such political element in nearby Corsica (as well as other places) were watching the Scottish vote with fascination. The Catalonians sent a ‘fraternal delegation to Scotland for the vote. The Corsican separatists maintain a watching brief but it’s only a few years since they assassinated their Préfect who was just a civil servant doing his job. ‘The Bullet & the Ballot’ has become a kind-of international handbook for the like-minded.
To my mind….your title of ‘300 years of angst’ is a bit misleading. We could say that in 17thC, the mood was one of ‘economic uncertainty’ (it’s The Economy that lies behind most issues) which culminated in the Scots’ disastrous Darien Scheme. It had briefly held Nova Scotia earlier but in the late 1690’s launched the attempt to colonise part of Central America, resulting in catastrophic losses for its private investors and led, in short order to the Act of Union in 1707. The negotiations (in April 1706 actually took less than a week.)
The Dundee-born, Detroit-educated Arthur Donaldson, who later worked for The Chrysler Corporation, returned to Scotland in the late nineteen-thirties and had discussions with the German National Socialists (Nazi Party) whereby he might be installed as a Quisling-style puppet in the event of a German victory. His activities were discovered by MI5 and he went to prison but bounced back as SNP leader in the 1960’s, even opposing Britain’s Prime Minister-to-be in a 1963 by-election.
The ‘real’ angst period… or the tartan-waving, blue-faced xenophobia only really began with the 1995 Mel Gibson (as William Wallace) film ‘Braveheart’ which has as much historical accuracy as the 2012 movie, ‘Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.’
It would have been fairer I suggest, to have referred to ‘The Golden Age of Scottish Enlightenment’ following the Union which saw works of science, art and literature seen since Greece 500-300 BC or The Renaissance. (A literary hero of yours, James Boswell being one such luminary.)
Readers can brush up on this highly intellectual period of history by looking in The Encyclopaedia Britannica (originally published in Edinburgh in 1768.)
Incidentally, this reference work is more reliable than Wikipedia which seems to be confused as to which of the two ‘Francis Bacons’ it is describing.
As you say, the polymath Bacon was not popular North of the Border as it was he who had pressed strongly for the execution of Mary Queen of Scots in 1587. In 1621, he was himself impeached, admitted bribery, stripped of office and fined £40,000 (about £20m in today’s money.)
Mary’s birthplace was Linlithgow which was coincidentally where Alex Salmond (the SNP’s recent leader) also entered the world. The divisive influences still existing in Scotland might have persuaded Salmond not to conjure the name of the Roman Catholic Mary to encourage a kind-of Jeanne D’Arc, anti-English sentiment. ‘The Maid of Orleans’ was of course captured by the English and executed in 1431.
So there is no shortage of martyrs to fuel the angst but the separatists found a yet older role-model in William Wallace (executed by the English, 1305) but found more passion in the fictional film. A faintly ludicrous and highly-unpopular statue ‘Freedom’ stood briefly in a car park at Stirling. Supposed to depict Wallace but bearing an uncanny resemblance to Mel Gibson, it was unceremoniously removed a few years ago.
It was once said that the only colony England failed to control properly was Hollywood…..
October 7, 2014 at 11:09
applewoody
John: I have enjoyed your two recent reactive responses to my postings, and apologize for not telling you so sooner. We just returned from an enlightening tour of 5 U.S. National Parks in the south of Utah, and I have never seen more raw geology than in these yawning canyons of the apocalypse. In Monument Valley, where incredible mesas rise up like islands from the barren landscape, I read that the Navajo indians hold a vast 27 million acres of reservations (how does that compare to the size of England, with or without Scotland?). But seeing these endless barren reaches, the clever American colonists managed to give the original landowners, the Indians, a realm suitable for not much more than uranium mining and tourists. Nineteenth century European-Americans were in some ways the ISIS of their era in relation to the Native Americans. Of course, from your perspective on the world from the lush environs of Provence, the native American triptychs found on the walls of these mesas and canyons must seem like the depths of some bizarre netherworld, and you would be largely correct. Although I do recall some pretty naked geography driving through the Dordognes some years back. As for Francis Bacon, I think the charges he was pilloried for were somewhat trumped up and a form of vengeance inspired by Edward Coke, whom Bacon had so envied and wronged years before. The two Scottish friends I have here in America were both extremely favorable to separating from England, though for reasons more of national pride than good sense, by all appearances. As I have written, I see the fracturing of nation-states all around the world, as universal communications shatters the relevancy of the codified laws of traditional governments and tends to restore the natural affinities of ethnic, tribal and religious associations. While much of this is seeking to reform earlier civilizational structures upset by wars of conquest and opportunity, some of this restructuring is fueling new conflicts. As for Hollywood, which is now so interlaced with Television, I can only repeat a comment in a magazine profile of British comedian John Oliver, who has one of the hottest new TV shows, “Last Week Tonight,” which described how his British accent seems sophisticated to Americans, though it is in fact a workingman’s dialect. As for the Barbary Pirates, I stand corrected on the timeline of history through your good comments, and I failed to point out that their interest in enslaving all those Europeans were primarily commercial. On a more civilized note, I attended the annual fall reunion last night of the Chicago Literary Club, a tradition we owe to the sympathetic friends of that great tortured British soul Samuel Johnson, who takes up (in consort with his Scottish pet James Boswell) a shelf and a half in my small library here at Applewood Lodge in the woods of Wisconsin.