The hammer of the Scots
Magnus Linklater
THE INVENTION OF SCOTLAND by Hugh Trevor-Roper, edited by Jeremy J. Carter Yale, £18.99, pp. 282, ISBN 9780300136869 ✆ £15.19 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 This is a book from beyond the grave — the last that Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote, and though it is unfinished, there is no mistaking the sting in the tale. There was nothing the Regius Professor of History at Oxford enjoyed more during his lifetime than annoying the Scots. From time to time he would break off from larger works and pen an article or an essay on a theme with which Scottish historians became wearily familiar: that the story of Scotland before the Union was one of fractious rebellion and economic decline; that the country had only come into its own following the Treaty which united it with England in 1707; that devolution, with its promise of a separate parliament, was a slippery slope which threatened the break-up of the United Kingdom; that the Scots (or Scotch as he preferred to call them) were woefully ignorant of their own history.
What made things worse was that Trevor-Roper was virtually an honorary Scot himself. Born and brought up in Northumberland, he was, nevertheless, educated at a Scottish prep school, was immersed, as a student, in the works of Walter Scott, married a Scottish wife, and lived for much of the university vacation in his Scottish fastness of Chiefswood, just outside Melrose. He was a familiar figure at the National Library of Scotland, and a regular attender of the Edinburgh Festival. It was hard for his critics to dismiss him as a dilettante southerner.
Now, five years after his death, he has gone one mischievous step further. Essentially, he tells us, the history on which the Scots have sustained themselves down the centuries — their noble line of kings, their Gaelic culture stretching back into the mists of antiquity, their tartan-swathed clans and skirling pipes — are all based on self-serving myths, sustained by historians who acted as little more than spin-doctors to whichever monarch they were trying to please. Those sceptics who chose occasionally to puncture the myth were dismissed, and their doubts suppressed. Anything that challenged the image of a brave, freedom-loving nation united in its defiance of the great enemy to the south was deemed irrelevant, worse unpatriotic.
He cites medieval chroniclers, such as John of Fordun, Walter Bower, and, particularly, Hector Boece, who simply invented a long line of 40 kings to demonstrate the superior virtues of the Scots over the noisome Picts, whom they had replaced. The Scots had brought, via Spain and Ireland, the culture and wisdom of the Greeks, and the Egyptians. Bower even suggests that the name Scotland comes from an Egyptian princess called Scota, who, dying, insisted that her adopted country be named after her. That modern fabulist, Mohammed Al Fayed is known to favour this theory, and you may buy plentiful copies of Bower’s Scotichronicon at the Harrods branch of Waterstone’s.
Trevor-Roper reserves particular scorn for the works of George Buchanan — ‘by universal consent, the greatest Latin writer, whether in prose or verse, of 16th-century Europe’. Tutor to James VI and historian to Mary Queen of Scots, he switched sides lightly, turning out useful and elegantly expressed propaganda to perpetuate the myths of a freedom-loving nation. When Mary’s star fell, he told her sister that it had been a long tradition of the Scots to choose, and, if necessary, depose their monarchs, so that was all right.
Wherever a sceptical historian arose to demolish these myths, says Trevor-Roper, he was derided. Thus, Buchanan’s own tutor, the far more measured and critical historian, John Major, was subjected to scorn and derision for challenging the myth of a virtuous, stable and civilised nation.
It is the central three chapters of the book, however, that will divert students of the Trevor-Roper canon. For here, the man who authenticated the Hitler Diaries examines in scrupulous detail the perpetration of one of the greatest hoaxes of the 18th century — the invention of Ossian, a previously unheard of Gaelic poet, whose work had lain undiscovered for centuries and who would, for the next 50 years be known as ‘the Celtic Homer’. Ossian became the sensation of Europe, lauded by Sheridan and Mme de Stael, carried by Napoleon in his knapsack, feted by Goethe, the favourite reading of prime ministers. The man who had unearthed these priceless manuscripts was an undistinguished writer, James Macpherson, who became the toast of literary London, but who proved surprisingly reluctant to reveal his sources or produce his evidence. Gradually, as doubts about its authenticity grew, his story fell apart and the whole business was finally exposed as a fraud.
With the forensic skills that he brought to his analysis of Hitler’s last days — but not, sadly, his diaries — Trevor-Roper peels away the layers of what constitutes a successful hoax. He shows how the Ossian myth succeeded because so many people were desperate to believe it; that those who might have exposed it were constrained because they could not read Gaelic; that since great reputations were tied up in sustaining the story, there was a marked reluctance to challenge it. In one uncanny parallel with later events, Trevor-Roper, who once sat in a bank vault ploughing through 40 volumes of the Führer’s alleged ramblings, written in an old German script which he later confessed he could not read, reveals that Macpherson himself could not understand written Gaelic. Hence his reluctance to show his phoney manuscripts to others — he would have to confess that he could not make head nor tail of them.
There is no trace of irony or selfawareness to be found here. Trevor-Roper deals with the Ossian episode without betraying the slightest sense of déjà vu, to say nothing of déjà compris. The mask remains uncracked. Instead it is used as yet further evidence to demonstrate how desperate the Scots were to believe their own myths in order to shore up a shaky identity.
There is a flaw here — not just in the Ossian affair, but in Trevor-Roper’s whole thesis. For the myths that the Scots tell about themselves are surely no worse or no more fraudulent than those with which any small nation sustains itself. The stirring tales of kings and wars and great deeds of heroism on which we were all brought up were the antidote to those of our more powerful southern neighbour, and, in any event, were no less believable than the folk legends of Merrie England, King Arthur or Alfred and his famous cakes.
It is worth pointing out that TrevorRoper’s book was left unfinished, so it does not include any comparative history to set the mythology in context. But it might have been advisable to point out that most of the absurdities which he describes have long since been demolished by Scottish historians. In fact the principal activity of the post-war era has been the ruthless rejection of past inventions. They include those 40 kings, the Ossian hoax and the paraphernalia of tartan, bagpipes and shortbread tins with which the nation has been saddled ever since Sir Walter Scott decided they were good for us. Trevor-Roper is dancing on a well-trodden grave.
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