One of the assumptions which pervades the question of Scottish independence is the idea that Britain is a coalition of nations while England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales are individual nations. But is this really true? Ethnically the population of the British Isles homogenous. A single base population lies under the various waves of invasion and migration and remains the large majority of the genetic heritage across the British Isles about 75% in East Anglia and 95% in Galway. The original name for the islands is Britain (Πρεττανική) the largest island being called megale Brettania and the second largest mikra Brettania. The original language of the Britons is lost (it may have been Basque). While the population remained stable they adopted the language of successive waves of invaders down to the present universal English speech which is no more or less ‘foreign’ than the Celtic languages which are also the tongues of transient invading elites. The legendarium of Britain is also stable. Beowulf is a literary survival with no purchase on folk culture. Princess Scotia is a self conscious invention of the Wars of Independence. From the High King Mac Ercae to Lot of Orkney to Arthur’s Seat to Winchester to Tintagel the mythology of Britain is Arthurian. These are the tales passed down by real people across the generations. The dynasty is likewise pan-insular. The Scottish Kings (and later the English and then the British Kings) are descended from Fergus Mór and crowned upon the Lia Fáil from Tara. The Scottish Kings are also, since St Margaret, the heirs of the House of Wessex. The Union of 1603 thus returned the English Kings to their ancient throne. The name of Scotland in English means Ireland, the name of Scotland in Gaelic (Alba) means Great Britain. The Lion on the Scottish arms symbolises Huntingdon and the earliest Kings of Alba fought under the Red Dragon of the Britons. The liturgy praises St Mungo as the ‘glory of Cambria’. The obsession with the Wars of Independence is absurd. Scotland won these wars and in 1603 took over England not the other way around. On the other hand it seems the injustice of Edward I’s ambitions created the artificial sense of otherness between north and south among the one British people (rather as the Reformation did east-west for Ireland) which to this day feeds the illusion of four nations where in fact, on the deepest level, there is but one.
Laodicea 
November 26, 2020 at 8:07 am
This is interesting. It reminds me of a passage in Chesterton where he discusses what ‘all Britons’ (by which he means the inhabitants of both islands) have in common, in contrast to other Europeans. I can’t remember where it came now, or even what he said, except that there was something about us having the sense of walking on the wild edge of things.
April 8, 2021 at 4:58 pm
It is important to distinguish between the very different cases of Scotland and Ireland. While it may be said that the facts of Irish geography are unionist, the facts of Irish history are nationalist. There was never a period in Irish history in which the majority of Irish people were reconciled to being under the rule of the neighbouring island. Even when the national aspirations of the Irish seem very modest (Home Rule would have amounted in fact to a very limited form of devolution) this was simply because the Irish have always been pragmatic in their aims. Far from being the belligerent pugillists whose ‘wars are merry and whose songs are sad’, the Irish of the early modern period never undertook war except in great desperation and with great trepidation, but the Irish in the main have never identified with the British state, and Irish history from the Norman invasion was experienced by the Irish as a centuries-long occupation and continuous war with periods of respite.
It is a curious paradox that from the Union of the Scottish and English crowns to the defeat of the ’45 Irish Catholics were both loyalist and nationalist. Irish support of the reigning Stuarts was both self-consciously loyalist (in rebuke to the regicidal and exclusionist Protestant Britons who stigmatised the Catholic Irish as rebels) but also very much nationalist, in that it was concerned with establishing the rights of Ireland as an independent kingdom under the crown as much as it was with the free exercise of the Catholic religion.
Jacobitism must necessarily have been the cornerstone of any spiritually-meaningful ‘pan-British isles’ identity that could have come about. Given that the Irish had spent the last century in utmost misery as a result of their support for Stuarts at the time the Jacobite cause became hopeless in the wake of the ’45, it is repulsive to expect that their loyalism should afterwards be transferred to a usurper dynasty (please remember that Jacobitism was almost unanimous among Irish Gaels, which was not the case among Scottish Gaels and Scots as a whole). The death of the Jacobite cause was the death of any possibility of reconciliation between the British and the Irish under conditions of political affiliation or union. The Britons, in following the lead of Henry VIII and Cranmer, Cromwell and King Billy and Cumberland, had permanently lost the moral right to censure the recusant and Jacobite Irish for ‘disloyalty’, and with the death of the Stuart cause the idea of Britain had been revealed to the Irish to be hollow as a spiritual concept. The interval wherein Irish nationalism was coincidental with loyalty to the crown had come to an end. Hughs O’Neill and O’Donnell, regarded with ambivalence during the Stuart era, become heroic figures once in Irish Gaelic literature. Jacobitism turned into Jacobinism for lack of a better alternative. This death of Jacobitism was a kind of ‘death of God’ moment for the Irish and many intellectual pathologies in Irish culture can be traced to the violence of the rupture. Jacobitism was so deeply in consonance with the Irish soul – do not forget that the Stuarts were seen to an extent as Irishmen because of their distant Gaelic ancestry – that nothing has been able to replace it. Irish Republicanism is its awkward heir, but it must be remembered that Irish Republicanism is at heart closer to the Vendée than the Jacobin Club at heart.
I agree that there is a common British culture to a certain extent (I think of the folk melodies common to Britain and Ireland – shared melodies show something profoundly linked in our spiritual constitution, whereas the shared English language is merely a detestable result of history), much as there is a common Balkan culture, but the acknowledgement of this common British culture does not necessarily endorse union under the Windsors, just as the existence of a common Balkan culture does not necessitate the restoration of the state of Yugoslavia, or the Millet of Rum, or the Tsardom of Bulgaria, or the Byzantine Empire etc.
I would like to quote a letter Cardinal Newman sent Gerard Manley Hopkins:
‘The Irish Patriots hold that they have never yielded themselves to the sway of England and therefore never have been under her laws, and never have been rebels. […] This does not diminish the force of your picture – but it suggests that there is no help, no remedy. If I were an Irishman, I should be (in heart) a rebel. Moreover, to clench the difficulty the Irish character and tastes is very different from the English.’
It is telling that the old Scots words for Scottish Gaelic and Scots itself were ‘Erse’ (Irish) and ‘Inglis’ (English). If there is a spiritual integrity to the notion of Britain then it was the obligation of Scotland to be the bridge between the Gaelic and English nations of Ireland and England and that, by its insolent repudiation of its Irish roots and unjustified hatred of Englishness, Scotland utterly failed to be such a conciliatory bridge. I see Scotland as a kind of Belgium, half one nation, half another, generally churlish and resentful.
Furthermore as an Irishman I am offended by the insolence of the Scots in claiming to be or even to have been an oppressed nation. It is very much true that the Gaels (of Ireland and Scotland) were a terribly oppressed race, but the Scots as a whole were not, and the greatest oppressors of the Scottish Gaels were in fact the non-Gaelic Scots. In my opinion the descendants of the Highlanders who survived the clearances and are outraged at the destruction of their culture at the hands of Sassenachs would do better to identify with pan-Gaelic nationalism rather than Scottish nationalism. What would people say to the idea of Ireland, the Isle of Mann and the Scottish Highlands being united under Franz of Wittelsbach, our king over the water, in a Gaelic kingdom? I’m all for it.
April 8, 2021 at 7:52 pm
I’m not sure what the evidence is for the claims in your first paragraph? Lambert Simnel was crowned in Dublin in 1487 as King of England. Also I don’t buy the idea that England and the lowland Scots voluntarily adopted Protestantism and so are a distinct nation from Ireland and the Scots Gaels. It may be true of the lowland Scots but the Reformation in England occasioned the largest popular rebellion in English history and Mary I was also placed on the throne by a popular uprising. There has probably never been a majority adherence to Anglicanism in England. The coercive enforcement of Protestantism in England between 1558 and the 1680s was brutal. It only took a hundred years from the restoration of the Hierarchy for Catholicism to become the largest practicing religious group in England again. I do accept the preposterous character of the House of ‘Windsor’ I would be happy to see Franz of Wittelsbach on the throne of three restored kingdoms.
April 8, 2021 at 9:14 pm
I apologise for the aggressive and presumptuous character of my original comment. I should have thought through much of it better, and the tone in parts was admittedly provocative and unhelpful. I have been feeling in a sour mood against Scotland on account of some personal matters, I landed on this blogpost after some googling and I allowed my ill-feeling to come out for the worse in it. I apologise personally if you are a Scot yourself.
I should clarify that by the Irish I specifically meant the ‘Old Irish’, or Gaelic Irish. This is a very important distinction and it was admittedly careless of me not to elaborate on this, so much so that you are correct to find fundamental fault with my comment for lack of it.The other type of Irish Catholic, the ‘Old English’ identified strongly with the state of their mother country, and to this day Irishmen of medieval English descent favour stronger links with Britain than do Irishmen of native descent. Support for the Stuarts was the point at which the two groups became coincidental in their principles and interests and supra-ethnic Irish national identity was formed (although there had been a great deal of cultural assimilation over the previous centuries, and some Old English Catholics fought with Hugh O’Neill in the Nine Years’ War). It was not an entirely harmonious bond, and ethnic fractures contributed to the defeat of the Confederation during the War of the Three Kingdoms, and the division continues to this day in an underground form. In general Fianna Fáil, the anti-treatyite party, is made up of Old Irish Catholics, and Fine Gael (it is ironic that the name of the party of the English-descended Irishmen has a name which literally means ‘Gaelic race’ or ‘Gaelic family’), the treatyite party, is made up mostly of Old English Catholics. The distinction between the Ormond and Rinuccini factions of the 1640s is preserved in the ethnic correlation of support for the Free State and the Republican parties, with the ethnically English party being in each case much more inclined to maintain links with Britain.
April 8, 2021 at 10:30 pm
I should also explain that in stressing the self-perceived loyalty of the Irish compared with the other Britons, I was not personally castigating the English or Scots, but trying to explain the headspace of the early modern (Gaelic) Irishman and his resentment at being yoked to other nations he felt had lost the moral right to his loyalty if they ever had it, which he felt they did not.
I feel no resentment at the idea of pan-Britishness put forth in the original post, and I admire its generous willingness to comprehend the whole cultural and historical heritage of these islands in a spirit of goodwill and reconciliation, and I like to believe this is the position I would take myself were I born a Briton, but I nonetheless believe that Ireland is a distinct nation from Britain in a way that is very difficult if not impossible for Britons to understand. Such a spirit of generosity, goodwill and comprehension as shown in the original post can actually be a disadvantage towards realising that Ireland is a separate nation with a separate history. The Old English, who got the Perkin Warbeck debacle off the ground after having been involved in the Lambert Simnel business, are a people who no longer have a conscious awareness of their identity, but if they were to bring their submerged and unconscious sense of themselves to light they would say they are a people whose history was one of seeking to be treated with the respect due to their origin by their mother country while being acknowledged as Irishmen by their fellow countrymen. They were successful in the latter but not the former. The identity, heritage and traditions of the Old English represent the ‘grey area’ in which Ireland is meaningfully British. The Irish Gaels on the other hand, while they acknowledge Irishmen of non-Gaelic origin as their countrymen, are a people who perceive their history (accurately) as an eight century long war against an occupation.
April 9, 2021 at 1:03 am
Thank you for your reply. I was not at all offended. I’m still not convinced though. The people who conquered Ireland with papal warrant in the twelfth century were French speaking Normans the children and grandchildren of the French speaking Normans who conquered England with papal warrant in the eleventh century. They almost certainly didn’t speak English. The language spoken by the English now is almost as mutually unintelligible with the language spoken by the English before the earlier Norman invasion as the language spoken by the Irish now is with that spoken by them before the later one. I know quite a few Catholic West Brits and Irish Jacobites and none of them seems to be particularly Anglo-Irish and at least one of them is a fluent Irish speaker. The most fervent Republicans I know have Old Scots surnames! I’m not sure why you would leave Wales out of your pan-Celtic Jacobite union of the crowns? As I understand it Goidelic and Brythonic were probably the same language in 1AD.
April 9, 2021 at 2:48 pm
Thank you for your reply.
The same logic you use to support a claim of fundamental affinity between Ireland and Britain could be used to support a union between Britain and France. Britain and France have common Latin, Celtic and Germanic roots, King Billy le premier came over from Normandy to England with papal approval, the Matter of Britain is part of the Matter of France and vice versa, the French and English tongues are interadulterated, the Norman kings of England derived their blood from France, and Scotland and France have a long bond of amity. Are Britain and France really different countries? Ireland is no more one nation with Britain than England is with France, in fact less so. From my perspective, Ireland is not a British nation, but a Stuart restoration in the eighteenth century would have been the means by which Ireland could have become a British nation while still being in consonance with its own soul and nature. It would have been a spiritual vindication of both the Irish nation and the British idea.
Irish Gaelic literature from the time of the invasion down to the nineteenth century is fundamentally of the tone and spirit of the famous 1317 remonstrance of the Irish princes. An eminent Irish scholar has remarked on the fact that from the time of the 1688 invasion on there is not a single Irish language poem written in praise of a reigning British monarch. Irish vernacular literature in the modern period invariably celebrated British defeats abroad, even when the defeated British army was made up to no small degree of Catholic Irishmen who could have been the brothers, sons or fathers of the authors. Irish vernacular poetry is always nationalist, and except where it is Jacobite, never loyalist. The Irish attitude to the neighbouring isle in all of Irish history from invasion until independence has been one of deep hatred (except towards Scotland, for one reason or another, rightly or wrongly). The foundations of general amity and feelings of kinship which now exist between the two islands were laid by Connolly, Pearse and De Valera, not Henry II and the Laudabiliter.
I should also say that only in the scholarship of the English-speaking world is the authenticity of the Laudabiliter taken for granted. Most continental scholarship looks on it with a very wary eye.
I was not being entirely serious in suggesting a union of the Goidelic nations (though I was being mostly serious), but my rationale for excluding Wales is that the Welfare of the Welsh people has not suffered to the same extent as have the Goidelic nations from the ‘British idea’. I am not in favour of breaking up a union for the sake of it. It is however impossible to conceive of a more catastrophic political connection for any nation than that which existed between Britain and Ireland for Ireland. Ireland lost its dignity, its language, and millions of its people as a result of the Act of Union, to say nothing of what the six sad centuries of previous history were like. The only period in which the majority of Irish people have been able to live a life of tolerable comfort and dignity has been the period of independence. The only time in which Ireland was honoured and prestigious rather than an occasion of pity and ‘sympathy for the underdog’ was before the Anglo-Norman invasion. The glories of Old Ireland – the early Irish saints, John Scotus Eriugena, the Book of Kells, the Táin Bó Cuailnge etc. – all predate the civilising mission of Henry II.
I am no expert, but given that the Brythonic and Goidelic languages were already different enough at the time of the Scottish invasion of Caledonia for Scottish Gaelic to become moulded by the influence of the Brythonic substrate in its grammar, pronunciation and syntax, I have my doubts that they were mutually intelligible during the time of Our Lord. I know Irish and if I were to see a page of Welsh without knowing what Welsh looked like I would not even guess that it was an Indo-European language.
April 9, 2021 at 7:18 pm
Reply in comment 3….
April 9, 2021 at 6:57 pm
I don’t think the analogy with France works. The Normans never ruled France. The English and the French do not now speak mutually intelligible languages and they never have. The French monarchy was not established by papal grant. The ‘Matter of France’ is about Charlemagne and completely different to the ‘Matter of Britain’. Besides, I am not arguing that England and Ireland are the same nation but that England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales are the same nation. Obviously there is a category difficulty here. I had assumed (as this is how it was presented when I was a child) that English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh were four ethnic identities within one civic British identity but over the years I have come to see it the other way around entirely. The basic population of the British Isles is the same. The same group of original settlers represent at least 75% of the genetic ancestry in all regions. Presumably they arrived when Erin and Albion were the same land mass and also joined to the European mainland. They all presumably spoke the same now lost indigenous language (possibly Basque). They then all lost this language and adopted the language of the invading (but numerically small) Celts. So, sometime before the first century AD all the the inhabitants of the British Isles spoke Insular Celtic. That Insular Celtic is the common ancestor of Goidelic and Brythonic is not very controversial. It is clear from the earliest sources that ‘Britain’ was the name of the entire island group. Now the entire population speaks English but they are no more English than they were Celtic. They are still all the same original group that wandered west after the last Ice Age. I am emphatically not suggesting that the grants of Alexander II to William I or of Adrian IV to Henry II were prudent or justified. I don’t know but if I had to guess I’d say they were not. Nevertheless, papally licensed Norman invasion is not a feature of English and Irish history that divides them it is an experience both populations share. The Anglo-Saxons had a rotten time under the Normans too and their language was also replaced by a tongue that they would not have understood. I am also entirely opposed to the usurpation of 1688 and would very happily see the Duke of Bavaria on the throne. I am pulled both ways on the Union of the Parliaments. Part of me thinks there is an elegant simplicity to a unitary United Kingdom of the British Isles. Indeed the parliamentary union (of England and Scotland) was desired by the Stuarts originally. On the other hand an executive Union of the (three) Crowns seems to do more justice to the civic traditions of the constituent realms.
April 9, 2021 at 9:18 pm
Thank you for taking so much of your time out to answer my comments. I respect your position, and I am sorry for arriving out of the blue to make quarrelsome and controversial arguments. After looking through this site I find myself in great sympathy with it (it is really excellent) and I regret pouncing from thin air to stir up trouble in its comment section. It is not my intention to take up any more of your time but I would like to make a few concluding remarks.
I should explain that in saying that the Matter of France was part of the Matter of the Britain and vice versa I was saying in an imprecise way that material from the two was read and written in both Britain and France, and that some elements of this material could be interpreted as endorsing a union of France and England, such as a claim, if I recall correctly, in the Song of Roland that England was conquered by Charlemagne. As it happens, I seem to recall that there was some rough business between England and France in the middle ages which had something to do the claim of one king to the throne of another. Whether or not there is historical, geographical, cultural or poetical warrant for a union of England and France, certain English kings at one point seemed to think there was.
Ireland and England, while sharing the (probable, depending on whether or not the Laudabiliter was indeed authentic) fact of papally-licensed invasion, had fundamentally different historical experiences as a result of those invasions. The course of English history was determined by the completion of the invasion and the acceptance of the institutions it established whereas the course of Irish history was set by the continued rejection and resistance of the invasion and its institutions. While the suffering Saxons did sigh and groan under the Norman yoke, before too long they identified with the laws and institutions of the Norman-controlled state. As late as the nineteenth century English writers complained that the anarchic and murderous Irish peasants apparently regarded the law as an illegitimate foreign imposition. The Norman conquest of Ireland was still incomplete at the time of the Tudor conquest, which was perceived by the Irish Gaels as yet another phase of a very long war.
A triumphant restoration of the king over the water and the just rewarding of his long-suffering Irish supporters would have been the only event capable of giving British rule the poetic logic needed to legitimise it in the hearts of the Gaelic Irish, but one the thing which could have turned the sad lead of Irish history into reconciliatory gold alas did not occur.
I hope you can forgive my pugnaciousness over this topic! It simply happens that Irishmen are very jealous over matters concerning Ireland and their interpretations, as are Scotsmen over Scotland (I regret my earlier churlishness towards that nation). As it happens I believe that Ireland is a more complex place than anybody knows, including the Irish, and that while all err who speak of Ireland, the ways in which Irishmen misinterpret Irish history are less grievous to the tear-streamed cheeks of Róisín Dubh, and the ultimate truth of things, than are the misinterpretations of Englishmen, including English kings and English Popes, however generous and well-intentioned, though misinformed and unaided by infallibility. To be sure these are confounding questions, but surer still are Irish misunderstandings of them sounder than those of other nations, perhaps especially neighbouring ones. Nonetheless, I remember my end and let enmity cease, and recall also the words of the American president Lincoln who said in his good and resonant Cranmer prayerbook English that we are not enemies but friends, though passion may have strained the bonds of our affection. Eight centuries of passion in this case, though affection is yet stronger than that which is buttressed by duration, because it is illuminated by charity, which is eternal.
April 10, 2021 at 12:35 am
Not at all! You are very kind about the blog. The difference in the assimilation of the Norman ‘experience’ you mention mirror the differences over the Reformation. The English too opposed and resisted the Reformation (which occasioned the largest popular rebellion in English history) but the intensity of the power the crown could bring to bear in England was far greater than in Ireland and so it ultimately prevailed and the level of violence subsided. This is, however, essentially a difference of degree not kind. I agree with you that Jacobitism is the reason why a final reconciliation was not possible but the lack of that reconciliation is the root of the partition. Only two things can overcome that wound a final triumph of Jacobitism and Catholicism (not unthinkable until the post-conciliar horror) or the total secularisation of the entire British Isles.