Hugh Trevor-Roper
Yale University Press, £18.99THIS volume, reassembled from the late Hugh Trevor-Roper's notes and essays, purports to recreate a book he was planning to write in the late 1970s, under the "spectre" of a devol
ution referendum. His thesis is best expressed in his own words: "I believe that the whole history of Scotland has been coloured by myth; and that myth, in Scotland, is never driven out by reality, or by reason, but lingers on until another myth has been discovered, or elaborated, to replace it." To prove his theory, he examines three "Scotch" (as he consistently says) myths – the political thinking of the Renaissance scholar George Buchanan, the Ossian Poems of James Macpherson and the invention of the kilt in the 19th century.
Buchanan, tutor to both James V's illegitimate son and James VI, and widely regarded as the greatest writer from Britain in 16th century Europe, gets a bit of a pasting. Introducing the polymath, Trevor-Roper writes "his Scottish independence bordered often upon insolence" and that he showed "the pride, and the volatility, of the Celt". His Latin poems are disparaged as "mimetic, not original". But Trevor-Roper's ire is focused on Buchanan's treatise, De Jure Regni Apud Scotos (The Power Of The Crown In Scotland), where Buchanan argued that unjust rulers could be overthrown, and that the source of political power lay with the people – a document that echoes down through the Civil War, the French and American Revolutions and Marxism.
Trevor-Roper, who was made Lord Dacre by Margaret Thatcher, was having none of it. He seizes on Buchanan's use of fictitious Scottish kings in a romantic history written by Hector Boece a generation beforehand. Citing false evidence, argues Trevor-Roper, invalidates the whole project (although he is curiously quiet about Buchanan's references to the Bible, classical philosophy, Merovingian kingship and the history of the Papacy). At best this is partial; at worst, it smacks of the "pathological" attacks of which Trevor-Roper accuses Buchanan.
Continuing on to Ossian, Trevor-Roper writes that in the 18th century, Scotland abandoned Buchanan's political mythology "because it was now free from politics", and so myth-mania passed into literature. Leaving aside that the period was slightly more political than suggested – after all, it saw two Jacobite rebellions, the Bute Ascendancy, the beginning of the Clearances and the Radical War – the elision from Buchanan to James Macpherson seems tangential rather than causal. These chapters are the best in the book, and Trevor-Roper offers interesting new evidence on the role played by Lachlan Macpherson of Strathmashie. But the same peevish tone prevails: Macpherson is a "bully", and the impetus behind the Ossian scheme is presented as a nationalist grudge: "Where were the Scots to turn in search of a native literature which would humiliate their complacent English neighbours?" This was, incidentally, the period in which David Hume described the Scots as "the people most distinguish'd for Literature in Europe". Yes, Ossian was not a genuine Gaelic epic; but its influence on Burns and Blake, Scott and Arnold, Goethe and Lönnrot cannot be underestimated. Trevor-Roper's judgment is simply that it is "unreadable".
Finally, we get the sartorial myth. As Trevor-Roper rightly observes, the philibeg is of recent date, and the clan tartans are mostly invention. The two English brothers, born John and Charles Allen, who turned themselves into John and Charles Sobieski Stuart and faked the Vestiarium Scoticum pattern book, are treated far more leniently, despite impersonating royalty. They have "mysterious charm" and "artistic ingenuity". These chapters show that The Invention Of Scotland was abandoned, as much more could have been made of the charlatans. No mention is made of their fake Walter Scott poem, The Bridal of Caölchairn; nor of their eye-winking claim to have obtained the Vestiarium through the Urquharts of Cromarty – the 17th century Sir Thomas of that family being a teller of tall-tales, who supposedly died of laughter on hearing of the Restoration of the Stuarts.
For those concerned with the academic legacy of Hugh Trevor-Roper, this must be a welcome addition to the canon. For general (Scottish) readers, it has an almost nostalgic charm – like rewatching the '80s comedy of Russ Abbott in a See You Jimmy hat sending up the Jocks. The enigma of this debunking book is not why Trevor-Roper stopped writing it in the early '80s, but why he never returned to it before his death in 2003. I would hazard that his notorious authentication of the forged Hitler Diaries in 1983 might well have slaked his appetite for exposing myths, fakes and false histories.
The full article contains 788 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
