Scotland's Military Identity

In the early 1960s the back of one of the houses in Edinburgh's Polwarth Gardens was extended not only outwards but also upwards. Home to Charles d'O. Pilkington Jackson, its glass-roofed, two-storey space was his studio. Here he worked on the massive equestrian statue of Robert the Bruce, which cast in bronze now stands on the putative site of the battle of Bannockburn. Pilkington Jackson's rendering of one of Scotland's greatest military heroes is no manifestation of 1960s radical chic. This is not the grimy, bedraggled Wallace of Mel Gibson's Braveheart. The Bruce wears gleaming armour, his surcoat resplendent with the royal arms of Scotland. His commanding height and princely demeanour owe more to Hollywood or to the romanticised illustrations of H.E. Mar-shall's Scotland's Story, on which the young Pilkington Jackson had probably been raised, than on any idea of historical reality.

Bannockburn has cast a long shadow forward. 'The Scots are a nation because of Bannockburn and Flodden, Culloden and the pipes of Lucknow', Lord Simon of Glaisdale ruled in the House of Lords in l972.² Scotland gained its early national identity from victory—and defeat—on the battlefield rather than through the vigour of its political institutions. There is nothing unusual in this. More often than not, at least until very recently, states have defined themselves through wars of independence or through civil wars. The United States engaged in two conflicts to shape itself—one to establish its independence from London, and the other to consolidate the union against the separatism of the south. But the United States also defined itself through the Declaration of Independence. Modern Scotland too has found forms of identity in addition to those purely military ones that gave it birth, not least in the ringing tones of the Declaration of Arbroath. However, today's tourist symbol—the kilted, feather-bonneted piper, instantly recognisable throughout the world as short-hand for Scotland—is still a military symbol, a Victorian reinvention of a Highland way of life preserved largely thanks to its incorporation in the British army. Both the Bruce and the piper identify Scottishness in martial terms, but they do so in different ways. The Bruce stands for the idea of Scotland as a nation; he fought for political independence. The piper is a cultural artefact, and embodies the notion of Scots as warriors. The purpose of what follows is to explore this difference.

The belief that Scots are natural fighters is an observation about ethnicity rather than about political status. After the Indian Mutiny in 1857, the British divided the races of the sub-continent into those they deemed to be martial and those not. Sikhs and Gurkhas were martial; Tamils and Kashmiris were not. Similar ideas were applied elsewhere in the empire. In Africa, the Zulus in the south, the Hausa in the west, and the Masai in the east were all deemed to be more martial than their immediate neighbours. Broadly speaking, the characteristics of the martial races were threefold: they were northern, not southern; they came from mountains, not from the plains; they were rural peoples, not urban. According to this sort of typology the Scottish Highlander was a natural fighter: he may even have been a prototype for the Victorian admiration of the Gurkha or the Sikh. The Lowlander, preoccupied with commerce and industry, with law and learning, was not.

European military supremacy might have exploited these military aptitudes but it did not rest on them. Historians have attributed what Geoffrey Parker has called 'the triumph of the west' to what Michael Roberts before him had dubbed 'the military revolution', a process which began in the Low Countries in about 1590 and was disseminated throughout central Europe by the effects of the Thirty Years War, especially by the Swedes under Gustavus Adolphus. Roberts ended his military revolution in 1640, Parker extended his version of it into the eighteenth century.³ The military revolution turned warriors into soldiers, not least because it paid them. It could do this because its ingredi-ents—uniformed, drilled and disciplined standing armies, armed...