ABSTRACT
The rising of 1745-6 was a Highland enterprise. Few people in the Lowlands sympathized with its aims and most of those few did nothing to support the Jacobite cause. For one thing, the Jacobites were campaigning for a Catholic king and the Lowlands were a stronghold of Presbyterianism. If the Lowlanders did not relish the gradual smothering of Scottish national pride and feeling by the overwhelming power of England, with its military forces scattered throughout Scotland, its fortresses specially constructed to hold areas down (like Fort George, the curtain at Corgarff and others now demolished), its predominance in parliament, its tax collectors and customs officials, who made their own rules, they were not prepared to fight about it. And when the rising was crushed and punitive measures put in train, the Highlanders were in no position to resist any longer. The collapse of the second Jacobite rising marks in a sense the end of the ancient Scottish nation. The Scotland whose story we have traced so far, over thousands of years, died on that terrible wet day on Culloden Moor. And you have only to visit the fields and the woods today to feel inescapably something of that ending. Yet in an end there is often a beginning. After Culloden the Scots had to choose between asserting themselves still as a nation, a people with an identity, or succumbing entirely to English pressure, to becoming just another large ‘county’ added to England’s northern border, and a poor and discouraged one at that. The Scots chose to survive. It would have been a betrayal of their history to do otherwise. That they did so and remained a
nation, albeit a changed one, was due to three things: the strength of their institutions, the church, the law and education; the influence of their history and the fundamental character of Scotsmen which that history had forged; and their belief that the English were out to destroy them, borne out by the non-realization of the promises made at the time of the union and by reflecting upon what had happened to both Ireland and Wales. And this determination to survive was soon to be manifested in an artistic and architectural renaissance, an agricultural revolution and an explosion of inventiveness and industry. To begin with, these took place in Scotland, but before long Scottish genius spread across the borders into England and out to the great British Empire to the good of both but to the detriment of the homeland.
