Walter Scott Andrew Marr's Great Scots: The Writers Who Shaped a Nation

Today, Scotland stands on the edge

of the most important event in her history for 300 years -

the vote on whether to end her union

with the rest of the United Kingdom and become once again independent.

Through the centuries of the Union, Scotland has produced

many great writers and in these programmes I'm looking at how

they dealt with questions of identity and loyalty

which confront today's Scots.

It's not difficult to imagine where the subject of this film

would place his cross.

A prolific novelist and political fixer,

he believed in a proud Scotland

inside the United Kingdom.

He was a literary superstar, known throughout the world

as one of the most brilliant writers of his time,

who through novel after novel reinvented Scotland

as a tartan North Britain.

But he paid a heavy price.

His name is Walter Scott.

At the time of the wars against Napoleon,

the beginning of the 19th century, the Scots were firmly

tied into their union with the English -

firmly but not entirely happily.

That old question, "Who are we, really?" -

highlanders or lowlanders, city folk or Borderers,

loyalists, and to whom?

Or rebels - and against what? -

tormented the writers of the time,

few of them greater than the man whose home this was,

the man who first promoted the idea of the Scotland of misty glens

and unlikely castles - the wizard of the north,

Walt before Disney.

I was brought up with the most Scottish Nationalist literature

you can imagine.

Tiny little ladybird books

about William Wallace and Robert The Bruce hammering the English.

I used to draw lots of pictures of little Scottish people

beating up little English people.

And then I moved on to Walter Scott.

And I don't think you can be a great writer

if you don't listen to the voices and the language

and the instincts of the people of your country.

If you want to know how the Scots of the 1700s and 1800s

talk and thought and spoke, then Scott is absolutely your man.

At one time, it seemed a Scott could be found on every

book shelf in every home in the country.

Swashbuckling adventures, bringing the tumultuous history

of Scotland - and of England - to life.

His legacy is so vast it practically pokes visitors

to Scotland in the eye.

ANNOUNCER: Platform 15 for the 12:35 First ScotRail service to Perth,

calling at Haymarket...

Waverley station in Edinburgh, the only railway station,

anywhere in the world, named after a novel.

Waverley was published in 1814 and instantly recognised as a cracker.

And there's a huge monument to the man who wrote it,

Walter Scott, looming over the station.

In many ways it's a ridiculous monument, it looks like

a Thunderbirds statue, built by monks.

But it's not only the largest statue erected to a writer in Scotland

or in Britain - that is the largest statue ever built

to a writer anywhere in the world.

Down south, Nelson's column,

erected to England's great hero, is 40ft shorter.

During his lifetime,

Walter Scott was perhaps the first global literary superstar.

His novels provided the librettos for more than 90 operas.

He was Byron's hero, spoken of alongside Shakespeare and Homer.

Two centuries ago he wrote his first hit, Waverley.

And in it, and other novels, he sold Scotland as a place

of romantic myths,

tartan-clad heroes and tragic choices.

But if you want a taster, a flavour of his craft, how about this

English jousting scene from Ivanhoe, the novel he wrote in 1819.

The scene he paints is so vivid,

that he's done the film director's job for him, and better.

"The splendid armour of the combatants

"was now defaced with dust and blood,

"and gave way at every stroke of the sword and battle-axe.

"The gay plumage, shorn from the crests,

"drifted upon the breeze like snowflakes.

"All that was beautiful

"and graceful in the martial array had disappeared,

"and what was now visible

"was only calculated to awake terror or compassion."

These days, however,

it's Robert Burns who's absolutely the poet of choice for most Scots.

It wasn't always so. He doesn't have a great stone rocket.

He doesn't have a railway station.

This is what they did for Robert Burns.

It's tucked away about a quarter of a mile behind a hill.

And it's perfectly nice, it's kind of good, but it's not,

in terms of competitive statutory, quite the full shazam.

So is there a competition

between Walter Scott, the conservative novelist,

and Robert Burns, the patriotic songwriter and poet?

In a way there is.

Very, very different sensibilities,

very, very different attitudes to Scotland

and it is something that carries on today.

This morning, I was reading in the paper that,

round the corner at the Scottish Parliament,

nationalists are debating whether

to rename Prestwick airport the Robert Burns International Airport.

A competition back then and certainly, a competition right now.

Burns' reputation as the voice of Scottish nationalism,

the darling of defiance against England is safe.

Not surprisingly, he is Alex Salmond's favourite and will

no doubt be quoted liberally

should the Yes campaign triumph in September.

Burns is a much more lovable character

and his faults and contradictions have been largely forgotten.

But Scott's political impact was unarguably greater.

He was just as concerned with Scotland's heritage and its history

as Burns, and his work isn't exactly short of tartan-clad heroes.

But in turbulent times, Scott believed that Scotland,

in its wealth and security, was better off in the union with England

so long as it was a union of equally respected countries.

Despite his huge international fame and the spotlight he brought

onto Scotland, he has not always been fondly regarded by Scots.

Walter Scott was born in Edinburgh in 1771,

the ninth child of a wealthy lawyer.

This was the age when Edinburgh called herself

the Athens Of The North - a city of rational thinkers, practical scientists,

and freethinking inventors admired across the rest of Europe.

People brimming with ambition who spoke and wrote in English

and who called themselves not Scots, but North British.

This was all about order and cleanliness.

Rational, hardworking, Protestant people who would, in time,

help to build the British Empire.

And it came about just before the building of Edinburgh's New Town itself.

A grid system built to the north of the old, crammed, chaotic, squalid,

but democratic Old Town.

A rational town for a reasonable people.

Now, if he'd stayed here throughout the rest of his childhood,

Walter Scott would probably have been a reasonably standard product

of this rational, civilised world.

A lawyer, like his father.

But sickness intervened.

Five of his siblings had already died in infancy.

Little Walter contracted polio and to give him

a chance of survival, he was sent to live at his grandfather's home

in the Borders near Melrose.

His parents hoped plain country food,

fresh air and exercise would save him.

And it did -

although he would walk with a limp for the rest of his life.

And if it transformed his body,

the Borders transformed the way he thought as well.

The three-year-old Scott found himself here,

the only child in a world of old people

and it was here that his imagination really caught fire.

The house didn't have much in the way of an extensive library,

but what it did have was romance.

Tales of the old Border Reivers - of Wat Of Harden,

of Wight Willie Of Aikwood,

of Jamie Telfer Of The Fair Dodhead and other local heroes.

And Scott developed an uncanny ear for the voices of real Scotland.

# I ride on my fleet-footed grey My sword hangin' doon by ma knee

# My name is little Jock Elliot Oh wha daur meddle wi' me?

# Wha daur meddle wi' me? Wha daur meddle wi' me?

# Oh, my name is little Jock Elliot Oh, wha daur meddle wi' me?

# I vanquished the Queen's lieutenant And garr'd her troopers tae flee

# My name is little Jock Elliot Oh wha daur meddle wi' me?

# Wha daur meddle wi' me? Wha daur meddle wi' me?

#Oh, my name is little Jock Elliot An' wha daur meddle wi' me? #

That's wonderful, thank you very much for that.

So Scott was brought up in... presumably, in his day,

this was still a fairly wild area,

not lawless any more, but the old songs and the old stories

would be very much in front of his eyes and ears?

That's right. That's right. Yes.

He spent a lot of his time here with his grandfather and his aunt,

and with a cowherd called Ormiston.

And they fired his imagination for Border culture.

I think he played a massive part

in preserving these ancient ballads and songs.

Had it not been for him, I think they would have went into obscurity.

This dramatic stone tower, known as Smailholm,

a classic 15th-century relic of the Borders' violent and lawless past,

loomed over the young Walter Scott as he walked

the hills beside the farm.

He'd celebrate this scene from his boyish years later in Marmion,

a poem about one of the greatest disasters in Scottish history,

the Battle of Flodden Field.

Thus while I ape the measure wild

Of tales that charmed me yet a child,

Rude though they be, still with the chime

Return the thoughts of early time

And feelings, roused in life's first day,

Glow in the line and prompt the lay

Then rise those crags, that mountain tower,

Which charm'd my fancy's wakening hour.

On fine days, a shepherd would carry the young Walter

on his shoulders up to these crags and here

he learnt to walk using a stick made for him by his grandfather.

And he was told, "Every field has its battle and every rivulet its song."

The Battle of Philiphaugh remembers one such fight in 1645,

when the Royalists were shattered by an army of Covenanters -

Scottish Protestant religious zealots.

On Philiphaugh a fray began, At Hairhead Wood, it ended

The Scots out o'er the Graemes they ran,

Sae merrily they bended

Sir David frae the border came,

Wi' heart an' hand came he

Wi' him 3,000 bonny Scots, to bear him company

Wi' him 3,000 valiant men, A noble sight to see!

A cloud o' mist them weel concealed, as close as e'er might be.

Walter Scott returned to Edinburgh strong enough to attend school in 1778 -

aged seven, with his head stuffed and ringing with poetry and history.

His father had other ideas for him, though.

He wanted his son to grow up to be modern -

to be a Georgian and a British gentleman.

"Forget this ballad nonsense, boy," he said, "and become a lawyer."

A gentleman's place was at his desk in town,

not roaming castle walls and gallivanting around the countryside.

So poor old dutiful Walter

took an apprenticeship in his father's office.

His new home was a different world to the Borders where people

had revered Scotland's medieval culture and folklore.

But not even Edinburgh was entirely defended from romance and poetry.

In the winter of 1786, Walter Scott got a glimpse of a future

rather more interesting than the law.

The pale, lame boy was invited to the house of the philosopher Adam Fergusson.

There, he'd be confronted by a stocky 28-year-old man

whose future work would often be contrasted to his,

even though they were very, very different writers.

To understand Walter Scott you have to understand

the vast role played in Scottish psyche played by one Robert Burns.

Burns was handsome, self-taught, self-made.

And his poems, which would include

Holy Willy's Prayer, Tam O'Shanter, Scots Wha Hae

and of course Auld Lang Syne,

are still a living, breathing part of Scottish culture.

Scott might have his railway station but Burns has an evening once a year

devoted entirely to him when we have a small drink

and celebrate the "great chieftain o' the puddin'-race."

Burns was both the darling of high society

and the champion of the people,

who spoke to them in their own language, Scots.

He found poetry and meaning in the most unlikely places.

In To A Louse, he comically chides the crawling, creeping insect

for appearing on the hat of a beautiful woman in church,

who has no idea why the congregation are all staring at her.

Ha!

Whaur ye gaun, ye crowlin' ferlie?

Your impudence protects you sairly

I canna say but ye strunt rarely,

Owre gauze and lace

But, faith!

I fear ye dine but sparely

On sic a place

Ye ugly, creepin', blastit wonner

Detested, shunn'd by saunt an' sinner,

How daur ye place your fit upon her - sae fine a lady?

Gae somewhere else and seek your dinner on some poor body.

And he concludes, devastatingly:

"Oh, would some power the giftie gie us,

"to see ourselves as ithers see us."

A universal message from a dirty little Scottish Kirk -

but the tenor of much of Burns' poetry

was more political than that

and took him down a very different path to the young Tory Walter Scott.

Burns' politics were complicated -

he was the natural rebel

who can often sound like a proto-Scottish Nationalist,

often writing songs and poems about Scotland's early battles for independence

and sounding, in many moods, like a Jacobite.

And yet he was also a Government employee, a tax-gatherer no less,

who also wrote a fervent patriotic song against the French.

And yet, in the end, what is essential

about this man of many political moods

is that he is a lifelong supporter of the bottom dog,

an instinctive scourge of the snooty,

the patron poet of democracy.

And these were wild times.

Rebellion was in the air when a radical supporter

of the French Revolution, Thomas Muir, was arrested

on his return from Paris to Scotland and taken to Edinburgh in chains.

Burns saw the man who's been described as the founding father of Scottish democracy,

bound and desperate, as Muir was led off to be tried for sedition.

He faced a show trial in Edinburgh

and was banished to the penal colony of Australia from where,

remarkably, he escaped, made it to California and then to Mexico -

arrested again, sent to Spain,

escaped again and ended his days in Paris.

In Scotland, he has always been remembered

as one of the earliest heroes of Liberty.

Not every monument in Edinburgh commemorates the rich and the powerful.

This magnificent stick of liquorice stands for democracy's martyrs.

There's no record of what Walter Scott made of Muir,

the dangerous rebel, but Robert Burns simmered with fury.

In 1793, it was simply too dangerous, even for Robert Burns,

to write a poem or a song in praise of this political prisoner.

Instead, he wrote his freedom song, but about William Wallace,

the medieval Scottish hero who had become, even in England,

a symbol of the...

spirit of liberty.

# Wha will be a traitor-knave

# Wha can fill a coward's grave

# Wha sae base as be a slave

# Let him turn and flee

# Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace bled

# Scots, wham Bruce have often led

# Welcome tae your gory bed

# Or tae victory! #

Scots Wha Hae takes the heroes of the Scottish independence wars,

Bruce and Wallace, and identifies them with the contemporary struggle

for liberty against the oppression of the British state.

So the English King Edward is identified with chains and slavery.

"There's liberty in every blow, Let's do or die!"

Now, Walter Scott's response to the turmoil

could not have been more different.

The following year he chose to watch the execution of Robert Watt,

another reformer, and when a group of rebel Irish students

disrupted the singing of God Save The Queen at a theatre,

he waded in with his fists in anger.

It could almost have been Walter Scott that Burns was referring to

when he wrote of strutting lords

in arguably his most revolutionary work, A Man's A Man.

A "birkie" just means a young man, and a "coof" is an idiot.

Ye see yon birkie, ca'd a lord,

Wha struts, an' stares, an' a' that,

Tho' hundreds worship at his word,

He's but a coof for a' that.

For a' that, an' a' that,

# His ribband, star an' a' that.

# A man o' independent mind

# He looks an' laughs at a' that. #

Burns died on the 21st of July 1796. He was 37 years old,

worn out by hardship and by hard living.

And what of his legacy? This man of the people,

this natural democrat,

one time supporter of the French Revolution, who could never

quite speak out for fear of losing his government job

as an excise man. He even wore

the King's uniform as a Dumfries Volunteer.

These contradictions meant that after his death,

it was all too easy to rub off Burns' rough edges.

He became the object of a self-satisfied, rather smug,

sentimental cult.

This extraordinary, turbulent, passionate man

was defanged by his admirers.

One of his chief admirers was Walter Scott,

now married with children, settled down, and about to embark

on his own literary career, which would draw on Burns' romantic vision

of Scotland, without, of course, the revolutionary politics.

He published his first significant work,

The Minstrelsy Of The Scottish Border, in 1802.

In it, he gathers and reworks traditional poems and ballads,

many of which he will first have heard as a child at Sandyknowe.

These are rooted in folklore.

There is no hint of politics,

even in the famous grizzly ballad about two crows, or "corbies",

picking at the flesh of the body of a dead knight.

As I was walking all alane,

I heard twa corbies making a mane.

The tane unto t'other say, "Where sall we gang and dine to-day?"

"In behint yon auld fail dyke, I wot there lies a new slain knight,

"And naebody kens that he lies there,

"But his hawk, his hound, and lady fair."

This was essentially an affectionate collection

written mostly in Border Scots,

but it is interesting that even at this point, Scott is looking beyond

for an English speaking, middle class audience, because these simple

ballads are completely surrounded by explanations and notes.

And when he goes on to write his own poetry,

Scott takes the single most important decision

in his literary life, because he writes not in Scots but in English.

The most famous of these poems was The Lay Of The Last Minstrel,

a ballad peopled by goblins, a magic book

and a terrifying strongman called Lord Dacre.

It was reprinted six times in three years.

It brought fame to Walter Scott and tourists in their thousands

to Melrose Abbey, where it was partly set.

And yes, it is patriotic.

In the following glowing lines, Scott's heart broods over

the rugged charms of his Caledonia, his Scotland.

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,

Who never to himself hath said,

This is my own, my native land!

O Caledonia! Stern and wild,

Meet nurse for a poetic child!

Land of brown heath and shaggy wood,

Land of the mountain and the flood,

Land of my sires!

What mortal hand

Can e'er untie the filial band

That knits me to thy rugged strand!

William Pitt, the Tory Prime Minister, was a big fan of The Lay.

More classic poems including The Lady Of The Lake

and Rokeby followed in the next ten years.

But then with the arrival on the literary scene of that

devastatingly talented and wicked rival, Lord Byron,

Scott sensed a declining appetite for his verses.

Years later, he told his biographer,

"Byron beat me out of the field."

The poems had brought him fame, but now Scott needed a bigger stage,

one which could encompass the politics as well as the history of modern Scotland.

And so he made a second dramatic move that was to prove

even more successful than his decision to drop the Scots language.

His first novel, Waverley, was published in 1814, 200 years ago.

There was a long tradition of gentlemen writing poems,

but not of gentlemen writing novels.

This cautious lawyer didn't even want his name on the cover,

just in case things went wrong.

This was an exciting new idea in the history of the novel -

fictional characters rubbing shoulders with real characters inside real events.

Walter Scott virtually invented the historical novel,

and sometimes it seems, aspects of our own history too.

"The Wars of the Roses" was a Walter Scott phrase,

and you know that scene in the Disney film where Robin Hood's arrow

splits the Sherriff of Nottingham's arrow in mid air?

Walter Scott.

James Robertson is a modern historical novelist.

His characters live through World Cups and the rise

of the Scottish National Party. Very different times, but in a way,

his approach to history is similar to Walter Scott's.

The historical novel is a massive genre these days,

can we actually credit that to Walter Scott, do you think?

Yeah, I think we can.

I think Scott probably more than anybody, shapes what we now think of

as a historical novel in the early 19th century.

He does this thing that nobody has really done before which is

to populate his stories set in the past

with people who are recognisably the same kind of people as his readers,

the people in the present in other words,

and he mixes those ordinary people up with historical figures,

kings, queens, soldiers, etc,

and that's a kind of new thing that he is doing.

For James Robertson, politically turbulent times today,

and for Scott, politically turbulent times then.

In the pages of his first novel, he tries to weave together

competing strands of Scotland's bloody history

and he begins crucially with the clans of the Highlands.

The clans were essentially kinship groups, tribes if you will.

"Clan" comes from the Gaelic for "children,"

and they engaged in endless warfare between themselves.

Each had their own territory and their own leadership,

and they were involved in almost constant warfare

between one another, developing a terrifying warrior elite.

The Scots north of the Highland line

and the Scots south of the Highland line

were about as similar to one another as the Cheyenne and the Apache were

to the doe-faced, God-fearing Burghers of Boston.

So while in the South, Scotland became a country of landowners,

settled farmers and small towns,

with her own radical Protestant church, her own laws,

and her own traditions of education, Highland Scotland stayed apart,

a much wilder land,

barely acknowledging the authority of the Scottish kings.

The two cultures finally clashed here

in the tragic Battle of Culloden in 1746,

the last to be fought on British soil,

and the culmination of a civil war as brutal as anything

going on in today's Iraq or Syria.

A rebellion led by Charles Edward Stuart,

or Bonnie Prince Charlie as he became known,

and supported by many highlanders, was defeated by a Government army.

Slaughter followed.

This was the stage Walter Scott chose for his fictional characters to walk on.

The Battle of Culloden left Scotland profoundly divided with a great,

gaping, bloody wound running across the country.

On the one side, the defeated, humiliated and retreating

Gaelic culture of the north, and on the other side,

the rising, urban, mercantile and slightly smug culture

of the south, but that Scotland really had no King and no Parliament.

This was a wound which took generations to even begin to heal.

It might sound a touch presumptuous, but in writing Waverley,

and the series of novels that followed it,

our podgy-faced Edinburgh lawyer-turned-writer set about

trying to heal those wounds through the pages of adventure stories.

Waverley's hero, the Englishman Edward Waverley,

quite literally wavers between opposing ideologies -

the rebel Jacobites who wanted to restore a Stuart, Catholic king to the throne,

and the Hanoverians,

supporters of the ruling Protestant King, George II.

In the following extract, Edward has switched sides

and joined the Jacobites well before the disaster of Culloden.

On the day of the Battle Of Prestonpans,

a great Jacobite victory, he finds himself standing with

the highlanders and facing English soldiers he once commanded himself.

They approached so near that Waverley could plainly

recognise the standard of the troops he had formerly commanded,

and hear the trumpets and kettle-drums sound the advance,

which he had so often obeyed.

He could hear, too, the well-known word given in the English dialect

by the equally well-distinguished voice of the commanding officer

for whom he had once felt so much respect.

It was at that instant, that looking around him, he saw the wild

dress and appearance of his Highland associates, heard their whispers

in an uncouth and unknown language, looked upon his own dress, so unlike

that which he had worn from his infancy, and wishes to awake from

what seemed at the moment a dream, strange, horrible, and unnatural.

"Good God," he thought, "am I then a traitor to my country,

"a renegade to my standard, and a foe,

"as that poor dying wretch expressed himself, to my native England!"

So this is Scott's answer to the problem - acknowledge the hurt

but forbid the idea of revolt to answer it, because, for Scott,

revolt, rebellion, revolution are never, ever worth it.

Scotland can't fight back, not in the here and now,

and so we have Waverley, a great Scottish novel

with an English hero.

And time and time again in the Scottish novels, in Waverley,

in Rob Roy, in Redgauntlet, we have a Jacobite hero

or someone who flirts with the romance of the Jacobite cause

and then turns his back and returns to solid sensible Unionism.

Politics as usual.

But it was a union of equals he wanted,

not a lopsided one dominated by the English.

Walter Scott would almost certainly have supported devolution and a Scottish Parliament,

if not independence.

In novel after novel,

Walter Scott expresses his dismay about what was lost with

the Union of 1707, and that includes the Scottish Parliament itself.

In Heart Of Midlothian, which I think is his best novel,

one of the characters, an old lady, explains that when the parliament

met in Edinburgh, if the politicians were doing things the people

didn't like, "we could aye people them with staines" -

throw stones at them.

But of course the stones couldn't reach as far as London any more.

And in the same novel, when the heroine, Jeanie Deans,

seeks justice, she can't get it in Edinburgh or in Scotland.

She has to walk all the way to London.

Walter Scott believed that the Union had brought Scotland prosperity

and security, but it came at a hefty democratic price.

And Walter Scott, arch-unionist, never forgot it.

One of the things he does, his project, first through

his big epic poems and then thorough the Waverley novels,

is to find a way for Scottish people to be both Scottish and also

part of the new British imperial project that is going on

all around them, of which he is a signed up member.

He's definitely a member of the establishment, or becomes one,

but he also wants to find a way to be Scottish at the same time.

So he's a sort of nationalist unionist, in the early part of the 19th century.

-Yes. So he is a reconciler in a sense?

-Yes, he is.

And also, within Scotland, he does something else

really interesting as well.

He reconciles divided bits of Scottish culture.

You know, highland and lowland culture.

Waverley was phenomenally successful.

It sold, both north and south of the border, by the bucket-load,

and in America too, in pirate editions

from which Walter Scott never got a penny, which infuriated him.

But at least at first, the domestic profits were more than enough.

Scott's novels, including Guy Mannering and later Ivanhoe,

paid for this, a stately pile in the Borders.

Abbotsford was soon besieged by visitors from around the world.

Walter Scott, now rewarded with a knighthood by the king,

became a tourist attraction in himself.

But at Abbotsford, nothing is quite what it seems. It looks ancient,

it's really quite modern.

Walter Scott was one of the first in the Scotland to convert

to gas lighting, and the plasterwork and woodwork throughout the house

were painted to look like oak.

The art critic Ruskin would write,

"Scott's romance and antiquarianism, his knighthood and his monkery

"are all false, and he knows them to be false."

But Ruskin is profoundly misunderstanding him.

These are real swords, daggers, pistols, instruments of every kind

of violent death, even instruments of torture he's got here,

thumbscrews and so forth.

What's odd is that Scott's political project was all about peace

and social harmony, but his imagination was aflame with blood

and violence and rebellion. There is a profound contradiction.

It's not false but it's very slightly odd.

There is an answer to this conundrum, which is that all

this stuff is absolutely fine, says Scott, in its place,

which here is firmly nailed to a wall, never actually in

someone's hand or being used.

And it's the same with his attitude to Scottish history,

which is absolutely fine, in its place, which is between the covers

of his novels and never out dangerously in the world around him.

And then, suddenly,

everything Walter Scott believed in was threatened.

The radical, democratic spirit which had inspired Robert Burns

returned, stronger than ever.

Between 1816 and 1819, a mass movement sprang up

calling for radical reform.

Once again, Scottish radicals were calling for a Scottish Parliament,

even for a Scottish republic.

The long wars against revolutionary and Napoleonic France

had plunged Scotland into a time of hardship.

A repressive and unsympathetic Government, high food prices

and widespread unemployment

all added to the distress of the common people.

Like some now, they felt London simply wasn't listening.

The poet and republican who might have been their champion

was long dead.

But the radical spirit of Robert Burns was still very much alive.

At a protest meeting in Paisley of 16,000 people, the band played

his Scots Wha Hae to the crowd, and immediately afterwards,

the entire band were rounded up and charged with sedition,

a very serious crime.

The rebels weren't cowed by this.

In 1820, there was an insurrection in southern Scotland,

the so-called Radical War.

# Upon this tree there grows sic fruit

# It's virtues a' can tell, man

# It raises man aboon the brute

# It maks him ken himsel, man. #

60,000 workers went on strike across central Scotland

calling for instant parliamentary reform.

There was unrest as well in many English counties,

including Northumbria.

Unionists like Scott

feared the demands would go well beyond mild reform.

In the paranoid imagination of the Government,

these protesting workers merged into a vision of all the histories

they never wanted repeated.

They were the soldiers behind Bruce at Bannockburn,

they were the militant Presbyterian or Covenanter rebels,

they were they Jacobite army behind Bonnie Prince Charlie,

and they were the Jacobin rebels in France

blood-crazed enough to behead a King.

For Sir Walter, the very existence of the Union,

and the society of which he was such a prominent and successful member,

was at stake. What to do?

First, he suggested trying to divert the disaffected jobless

from joining the rebels.

Unemployed weavers from the west of Scotland were put to work

paving this track around Arthur's Seat,

the extinct volcano that dominates Edinburgh.

Today this path is still known as The Radical Road.

But this bizarre make-work programme wasn't enough to end

a social emergency.

Gentry across southern Scotland, fearing revolutionary horrors

like those in France,

raised volunteer regiments of foot and horse.

Scott, in a sudden fervour of warrior zeal

urged his neighbours to....

..Appeal at this crisis to the good sense

and loyalty of the lower orders.

All you have to do is sound the men

and mark down those who seem zealous.

They will perhaps have to fight the pitmen and colliers of Northumbria

for defence of their fireside, for those literal blackguards

are got beyond the management of their own people.

Then Scott took an even more active, if somewhat fanciful role.

He too would go into battle, with his loyal soldiers at his back

and under his standard.

He designed grey plaids and blue bonnets for his corps,

which he wanted to call the Buccleuch Legion

or the Royal Foresters.

In the end, they were never called upon to fight.

But Scott, like most other members of the ruling classes,

was still deeply concerned and absolutely convinced

that more needed to be done.

But if the union and the established order survived,

it still seemed to be in deep trouble.

And not the least of the problems was that the leader of the union,

King George IV, was a figure of fun.

Scotland needed to see him differently,

and the King and his court needed to take a second look at Scotland.

So here was an opportunity for Walter Scott,

the celebrity writer and reconciler of Scotland's tribes,

not just to write history but to make it.

George IV was overweight and under-subtle.

He'd lost control of his waistline and his libido.

He wasn't considered safe around foreign diplomats.

Some time in the spring of 1820, the idea emerged of sending him

on a royal visit to Scotland, partly in order to keep him out of the way

while his ministers in London get on with the serious business

of governing the country.

The visit would be the first time a reigning monarch had come

north of the border since 1650.

Someone had to stage manage the whole affair.

Someone who believed in the monarchy

but had a keen eye for Scottish tradition and pageantry.

It was a job made for Sir Walter Scott,

who seized the opportunity to devise a pageant of reconciliation

which would bring the Scots closer to their "chief."

After landing at Leith,

the King went to the Palace of Holyroodhouse,

where on the 17th August, he presented himself

in a belted plaid and tartan hose,

a velvet jacket and a bonnet pierced by eagle feathers.

"Over the top?"

"Yes, Your Majesty. Just a little."

Highland dress, which had been banned until 1782 as the

uniform of barbarian rebels,

was now being proudly worn by a fat Hanoverian king

who covered his fat Hanoverian legs in bright, silk, pink tights.

He looked ridiculous, of course.

The excessive vulgarity of this theatrical costume was seen by some

as a mockery of the simple belted plaid once worn by the Highlander.

But not to Sir Walter Scott.

At the ball held at the Assembly Rooms,

he insisted that no gentleman was to be allowed to appear in anything

but the ancient Highland costume.

Men who had never considered wearing a kilt or trews

were obliged to swathe themselves in tartan.

Highland dress became the affectation of Anglicized lairds,

the uniform of the German king's army,

and the fancy dress of lowlanders, which it still is.

A kind of tartan curtain came down across Scotland,

hiding the contemporary reality of the Highlands,

which was one of poverty and eviction.

But it affected all of the country.

Following Sir Walter, this became a mythic nation

of pretend Highlanders, fired with enthusiasm

for a foreign monarchy now prepared to wear the kilt.

The old clan tartans were commercialised and regimented,

something now for everyone.

It wasn't just Walter Scott, of course.

Politicians and the Highland Society were deeply involved too.

But he was the great impresario.

Go up and down Edinburgh's Royal Mile today

and the distant reverberations of Scott's King's Jaunt,

as it was mockingly called, can still just about be heard.

Walter Scott brings George IV to Edinburgh,

swathes him in tartan and so forth,

and its thanks to Scott, is it not, that the English upper classes

learn to love an aspect of Scottishness and sign up to it?

Yes, there is no question about that,

and certainly the 1822 royal visit, when you look at that,

it's so stage managed and it is absolutely about

reconciling the British establishment to Scotland,

and he definitely plays a huge part in doing that.

You might have imagined that the theatrical director,

the impresario behind it all, would have enjoyed respect and prosperity

in his sham castle until his dying day.

But Scott did not.

He'd become involved in unwise, expensive publishing ventures.

The sheer cost of transforming Abbotsford into a solid piece

of impossible history also drained his pockets.

Bad investments. A rickety bank.

Where have we heard that before?

Scott's last years were grimly industrious,

industrious to the point of being industrial.

He had always been productive,

now he became a writing machine as he coped with the death

of his wife and the constant struggle to make good his debts.

But now Sir Walter Scott,

in some ways so easy to dislike and easy to mock,

becomes a kind of hero.

Writing had built all of this and he would not give in.

He was determined to write his way out of debt.

"My own right hand shall pay," he said.

"Discharging my duty as a man of honour and honesty.

"I see before me a long tedious and dark path

"but it leads to true fame and stainless reputation.

"If I shall die in the harrows, as is very likely,

"I die with honour."

He wrote biographies, short stories, a wonderful journal

and novel after novel of lower and lower quality.

But in less than six years he'd made more than £50,000 for his creditors,

that's more than five million in today's money.

And he was still politically active.

In 1826, the London Government planned to strip private banks

of their right to print banknotes smaller than £5.

This was considered disastrous for the Scottish economy

where small notes were dominant.

A row over currency then as now,

and using the pen name Malachi Malagrowther, Scott hit back.

There has arisen gradually, on the part of England,

a desire of engrossing the exclusive management of Scottish affairs.

If the English statesmen has a point of greater or lesser consequence

to settle with Scotland as a country, we find him and his friends

at once seized with a jealous, tenacious, wrangling,

overbearing humour.

We cease at once to be the Athenians Of The North.

We have become the caterpillars of the island instead of its pillars.

The Government caved in, Scott won, and to this day,

the notes of the Bank Of Scotland carry Sir Walter Scott's portrait

in recognition of his defence of the Scottish banking tradition.

He was an operator, an insider,

a completely different kind of beast to Robert Burns.

Burns represents the rebellious, impulsive, passionate side

of the Scottish temperament.

Walter Scott represents a more timid but perhaps

more practical political tradition, and also, of course, the quiet heroism

of those who take responsibility, and work their way out of trouble.

Abbotsford still maintained a steady flow of visitors

but its glory days were over.

He'd worked harder than he'd ever done in a hard working life

and his health began to fail.

When he died in the September of 1832, there was still money owing.

But then there were still books selling,

and within a few years, the debt on the house was paid.

Today you can go and see it for yourself, it's open to everyone.

So what in the end is Scott's legacy?

In many ways, a legacy of some grandeur.

It's the opposite of what you might call Robert Burns' divine impertinence.

Scott leaves behind him a Scotland whose military

are famous around the world for their valour,

highland regiments and lowland regiments wearing tartan

at the cutting edge of the British Empire,

and at home he leaves behind a people famous

for their hard work and ingenuity in front of an English audience

who can't deny their growing involvement in the project of Britishness.

A funny character, Scott.

You know, the little lame boy, an outsider and all the rest of it.

In the end, a genius?

Yeah, I think so. I think when you look at the totality of what he did.

He's just so eclectic and he can write about anything. He's interested in everything.

When you read his journal,

the great work of the last six years of his life,

you get a real insight into the complicated and often lonely man

who is behind the facade.

What about the polarity between Burns on the one hand,

the democrat, the republican, the rebel,

and Scott the conservative, the unionist, Tory?

I guess that's also why he is not terribly popular at the moment

in this year of the referendum?

Certainly in Scotland, I think that polarity has become a bit fixed.

So Burns is the man of the people, Scott is the Tory.

He's a bit of a toff, or is perceived to be,

although in fact, in reality he was really quite a man of the people

in some respects himself as well.

But, yes, that polarity exists,

and he has fallen out of favour for that reason.

So take another look at the fabulous monument that punches

Edinburgh's grey skies if you alight here for the Festival,

or to walk the Royal Mile or to cast your vote in September.

It is possible to be a unionist and a Scottish patriot.

Walter Scott teaches us that.

He is the great bestrider,

the writer who tries to hold it all together.

He's was a great gatherer together of different cultures

and different societies, and you can see the issue here in stone

in Edinburgh, because Edinburgh is famously not one

but two towns.

Over there, the unionist, pragmatic, rational New Town.

A straw poll suggests to me a bastion of Better Together even now.

On the other side, the romantic, patriotic Old Town,

and again, an unscientific straw poll suggests to me

a bastion of Yes voters. And what's standing between them,

like the spike on a buckle, yes, it's old Walter Scott.

And yet the political sands may be shifting under Walter Scott

as Scots today prepare to vote to keep something

their writer so passionately believed in, or else perhaps

to begin a new adventure,

to stride out into the distance like one of his heroes.

Scott's novels are all about violent revolt and tragic choices

and bloodshed, but politically he was the comforter.

Scott left behind Scots who are more comfortable with their own

romanticised history, and more comfortable as well,

at least for a while, with their place in the British Union.

What perhaps he forgot is that history rarely sleeps securely.

In the next episode, a poet who lived his life

on the political edge and reinvented Scottish literature,

Hugh MacDiarmid.

He dreamed of an independent Scottish Communist utopia,

never got that, and a great cultural revival,

which has now arrived.