‘By the Imprudence of His Ancestors’: Commemorating Jacobitism and Mary Queen of Scots

Abstract

The Scottish national past was the story of the struggle for civil and religious liberty, reaching its glorious outcome at the Revolution of 1688. With their prologue in the proto-Presbyterian Culdees, collective memories of Scottish nationality ran from Wallace and Bruce, through Knox, to the Covenanters. At each stage in this memory, the heroes of Scotland’s past had overcome the threat posed by their antithesis, whether Edward I or Edward II, the Roman Catholic church, or the later Stuart kings. Both explicitly and implicitly, the narrative of civil and religious liberty framed the commemoration of the Scottish past in the nineteenth century, generating a collective sense of what it meant to be Scottish, explaining or justifying present attitudes and national mores. In a sense, the Glorious Revolution marked the end of Presbyterian history, the closure of a centuries-long struggle to achieve full and coherent Scottish nationality with a free nation and a secure Presbyterian church. It was for this reason that union was made possible. The Scots had proved their point, won their battle, and could give up their statehood, confident that Scottish nationality could never be undone.