Walter Scott! His monument here in Edinburgh dominates the main street, the entrance by rail
to the city and its perambulatory parkland here in Princes Street. Given that it's the largest
monument to a writer in the world, maybe that tells you something about this town,
or given that in the next street there's a statue of James Clerk Maxwell, one of the greatest scientists
ever, I've got a video about him, and one of Henry Dundas of the did he, didn't he slavery fame,
I've got a video about him as well. Maybe Edinburgh is a bit more confused about itself than you might
think, but if you wanted to discover Scotland's confusion about itself, we don't need to go any
further than Walter Scott, born as this Edinburgh new town was being built, he's the Lowlander
who made us wear the kilt. If you're interested in the people, places and events in Scottish history,
then click the subscribe button at the bottom right, in the meantime let me tell you a story.
We're now at Smailholm Tower in the Borders.
I brought you here because of a comment made by Eric Waite of Roseville, California.
He didn't think much of my choice of clothing, and he wrote, 'For the love of all that's holy mate
we're a kilt man'. Now I'm not going to give Eric a hard time about that, I genuinely enjoy
discovering these different perspectives on the two different sides of the Atlantic, and it's
given me the opportunity to address a cultural confusion that exists, not just across the diaspora,
but within Scotland itself. In the comment section, tell me when you wear a kilt. For me it tends to be
a posh do, or a sporting event, or Burns' Suppers; some of them are posh, but some of them are more homely,
and some folk wear kilts to them. Now I've heard the debates; Burns was a Lowlander, why
are you wearing a kilt blahdy, blahdy, blahdy, blah. Now some will know, some will think they know,
and some will be hearing this for the first time, but I suppose it's because of Walter Scott.
If there's anyone who forged the culture and image of a nation, it was Walter Scott. You know
that thing, where a magician takes two torn up fibres and he folds them together and he folds
them again and again, and then he unravels them to reveal a tenner (£10 note), that was Walter Scott. He lived at
a time when Scotland was changing fundamentally, and he would be part of that change, and it all
started here. One of his granddads was a Professor of Medicine at Edinburgh University, but another
was a Border shepherd on a farm around here, and when he was a bairn, Walter contracted polio,
and his medical professor grandad suggested that he should be sent to live with his shepherd grandad
for fresh country air. So as the siblings grew up with mum and dad in Edinburgh, Walter spent his early
years, wild and free with the tups (rams) and the yows (ewes) in border sheep pens. It's where he came back to
all his life. It's where he settled. It's where he was most at home. He had a sharp-minded granny, who told
him tales to inspire later stories. She would live to see Waterloo fall and Wellington enter Paris,
but she also, as a child, had talked with a man who remembered the Battle of Dunbar, and
Cromwell's entry to Edinburgh. She would have seen Jacobites marching. Lady Nithsdale is a heroine of
the 1715 uprising, and she lived at Traquair House, 20 miles in that direction. The Union with England
was a recent memory, Border Clearances, which came before Highland ones, were part of their experience.
The Enlightenment and Transatlantic Slavery, colonial rebellion, and the formation of America,
the French Revolution, guillotines then Napoleon and the birth of Queen Victoria, would all happen
in the span of Walter Scott's purview. The world was being rapidly reformed, and there
was no certainty that Scotland would survive the change, in fact there were powers in London,
maybe even in Edinburgh, who were determined that it wouldn't. Keep in mind
that in the world into which Walter Scott was born, wearing Highland dress was against the law.
As Walter grew stronger, life and education moved to Edinburgh. The rural folk and city folk don't think
the same way, but Walter Scott understood them both. Robert Burns gets more people to wear kilts than
Sir Walter Scott does, but in life, Burns would never have worn one. He was a Lowland farmer.
Now when Burns visited Edinburgh, the young boy, Walter Scott, was thrilled to get the opportunity
to meet him in Adam Ferguson's house. There will be a link at the end to my summary of the life
of Burns, but aside from two trips to Edinburgh, Burns was firmly established as Lowland and rural.
Walter Scott would become even more famous in life than Burns, but he fit into the metropolis
and the countryside, and in both Edinburgh and London. Clerk of Court, living in Edinburgh's new town,
or comfortable in his beloved Borders, talking with shepherds or milkmaids. Don't forget that he
started his own writing career by collecting rural Border ballads from these folk that he
met on his travels. He wanted to explore his homeland, bottle it, and give it to the world,
but when his Border ballads were published, the mother of William Hogg, the Ettrick
Shepherd, and yes, I must do a video about him. Anyway, his mum had sung songs to Scott on his
meanderings, which he'd published, after which she said there was never any of my songs printed till
you printed them yourself, and you have spoiled them all together. They were made for singing,
and no for reading, but you've broken the charm now and they'll never be sung mair (more). Was he
irresponsible, even selfish in writing down what was meant for oral tradition,
or was it he'd already seen depopulation in the Borders, and knew what was still to come.
A way of life was coming an end, and he wanted to capture it and preserve it.
He often stopped here at what's now called Scott's Viewpoint, but he travelled further afield to visit
our own Highland borderline. From the banks of Loch Katrine, the Lady of the Lake took him
and Scotland beyond those shores. They say that it was this historical, poetic narrative
that was the advertising brochure that spawned Scottish tourism, because Walter Scott didn't
write with the tick box reporting, or the disdain as Samuel Johnson, the external English observer,
but with delicate, heartfelt observation and a celebration of his native land,
preserving what he'd seen in text, just like a dragonfly in amber.
A lover of Scotland and its people, he communed both with high and with low, but he also loved
Britain. Now today in our political world, that may seem like an unstoppable force, and an immovable
object, but that's in our time. When Scott grew up, we would be referred to as north Britons,
and there were forces acting to wipe out any form of Scottishness at all, but Walter was a Scot, who
was being noticed. John Murray, a friend of his, had told him of a conversation that he'd had
with Lord Byron, about a discussion that he had had with the Prince Regent, and future George the Fourth,
where they both agreed on the quality of Scott's work. Hanoverian royalty admired his work. Scott
went on to write his first novel, Waverley, where he named his hero after the Edinburgh train station!
He set it in the recent Jacobite period, that his storytelling grandmother had lived through,
and the reason that he'd been born into a kilt less land, but the novel paints pictures of honourable
Highlanders, and the possibility of a well-bred Englishman, being caught up for the Jacobite cause,
and forsaking trousers for the kilt. Now gentlemen in the bar, didn't write novels, so Waverley was
published anonymously. It was a sensational success, from a man, who may have been content with the
union, but wasn't going to let Scotland, Border or Highland, wither on the vine, when he could preach
it to the world. Correspondence with Lord Byron turned into friendship, and the next time he was
in London, he found himself dining with the Prince Regent, and they too became friends. This inveterate
old Tory must have loved fraternizing with royalty, but Scotland wasn't far from his mind. Scott
suggested to the Prince that they should seek out the honours of Scotland; the Crown Jewels, lost and
forgotten since the coronation of Charles the Second, and Cromwell's invasion, granny heard about as a child.
Now I've got a video about the honours of Scotland, so I'm not going to cover that stuff. You'll click
the thing up here, I'm just saying that Scott seems determined to reintroduce Scotland's glory lost.
So when in 1822 the Prince Regent, now King George the Fourth, was to visit Edinburgh, little surprise
Walter Scott, the wizard of the north, was given the job of managing the spectacle.
A carnival of Highland pageantry, where the massed clans were invited, and some of them even turned up.
Where Lowlanders were dressed as Highlanders for the first time. Where clothes, outlawed
at his birth, would become the central tenet of Scottish expression throughout the world,
where the Hanoverian King himself took off his breeches and donned the uniform
of the Jacobite army, just like the hero of the Waverley novel, published just eight years before,
and how did George the Fourth look in a kilt? I'm told, that in the recently formed United
States of America, an ancestor of Eric Waite of Roseville, California screamed, 'For the love of
all that's holy mate, wear breeches man'. The volume achieved set a record for the loudest scream ever,
genuinely, it still stands as a record to this day. Was the whole affair tacky? Yes.
Condescending? Of course. Embarrassing spectacle of cultural appropriation? It was all that and more,
but something that was on the list of things to be obliterated a short time before. was now fixed
firm as an integral part of Scottish culture. It's because of Walter Scott, that Highlanders
and Lowlanders alike, get married in kilts, go to posh dinners in kilts. They're the uniform for
attendance at rugby football, and our supporters of association football are called the Tartan Army.
Born into a world, where people were told not to wear the kilt,
Walter Scott's the reason that Eric Waite now sends me a message telling me that I should wear it,
and yet, he's also the reason home-based Scots baulk at the tartan shortbread tin of the wearing of the kilt as
pantomime garb. Would you rather a world where the only tins were empire biscuits?
Dryburgh Abbey is my favourite of the Border abbeys. Melrose is more famous, and Jedburgh's more dramatic,
but there's a tranquillity here. I'm a hurry, hurry, ding, ding kind of guy. I mean don't get me wrong, my
head isn't bursting with the plethora of posey character formation, and storyline that Scots
did, but there's always something going on. Yet I find a peace here. This is far from the hustle
and bustle around Scott's monument in Princes Street in Edinburgh, but in September 1832,
this is where Sir Walter Scott was laid to rest. I hope he finds the same peace here that I do.
The boy who became a poet, who sold Scotland to the world, befriended a Prince, recovered our honours,
and rehabilitated the kilt. Why not find out about the life of our other famous poet,
with my video on the 'Life of Robert Burns in Ten Minutes'. You'll find it
here. In the meantime, tha mi an dochas gum bith lath math leibh. Tiorridh an drasda.