The hammer of the Scots

This is a book from beyond the grave — the last that Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote, and though it is unfinished, there is no mistaking the sting in the tale. There was nothing the Regius Professor of History at Oxford enjoyed more during his lifetime than annoying the Scots. From time to time he would break off from larger works and pen an article or an essay on a theme with which Scottish historians became wearily familiar: that the story of Scotland before the Union was one of fractious rebellion and economic decline; that the country had only come into its own following the Treaty which united it with England in 1707; that devolution, with its promise of a separate parliament, was a slippery slope which threatened the break-up of the United Kingdom; that the Scots (or Scotch as he preferred to call them) were woefully ignorant of their own history.

What made things worse was that Trevor-Roper was virtually an honorary Scot himself. Born and brought up in Northumberland, he was, nevertheless, educated at a Scottish prep school, was immersed, as a student, in the works of Walter Scott, married a Scottish wife, and lived for much of the university vacation in his Scottish fastness of Chiefswood, just outside Melrose. He was a familiar figure at the National Library of Scotland, and a regular attender of the Edinburgh Festival. It was hard for his critics to dismiss him as a dilettante southerner.

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Now, five years after his death, he has gone one mischievous step further. Essentially, he tells us, the history on which the Scots have sustained themselves down the centuries — their noble line of kings, their Gaelic culture stretching back into the mists of antiquity, their tartan-swathed clans and skirling pipes — are all based on self-serving myths, sustained by historians who acted as little more than spin-doctors to whichever monarch they were trying to please.