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.

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. Those sceptics who chose occasionally to puncture the myth were dismissed, and their doubts suppressed. Anything that challenged the image of a brave, freedom-loving nation united in its defiance of the great enemy to the south was deemed irrelevant, worse unpatriotic.

He cites medieval chroniclers, such as John of Fordun, Walter Bower, and, particularly, Hector Boece, who simply invented a long line of 40 kings to demonstrate the superior virtues of the Scots over the noisome Picts, whom they had replaced. The Scots had brought, via Spain and Ireland, the culture and wisdom of the Greeks, and the Egyptians. Bower even suggests that the name Scotland comes from an Egyptian princess called Scota, who, dying, insisted that her adopted country be named after her. That modern fabulist, Mohammed Al Fayed is known to favour this theory, and you may buy plentiful copies of Bower’s Scotichronicon at the Harrods branch of Waterstone’s.

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