Scotland’s Turmoil 1500-1707 by Johnnie Gallacher review: 'a fresh approach'
This very readable book seeks to encourage serious reflection on a key chapter in our national story, writes Murdo Fraser
In 1649 the Scottish Royalist Patrick Gordon published Britane’s Distemper, his account of the civil wars across three kingdoms over the previous decade, in which he had been a participant. The title may have been an inspiration to Johnnie Gallacher in his very readable book putting this period in the context of Scottish history from 1500-1707.
Gallacher, an alumnus of both Edinburgh and Highlands and Islands Universities and a professional archaeologist, covers two centuries of history in just over 300 pages. We range from Flodden and the Rough Wooing, through Mary Queen of Scots and James VI, to the Covenanters, the Glorious Revolution, and the Parliamentary Union of 1707.
This is the era referred to by historians as the Early Modern Period – in Gallacher’s words “the coming-of-age experience for Scotland’s institutions and society”. This is in effect the start of the modern world, when the great issues were debated: how we will be governed, what freedom would we have to worship, and what would be the nature of the relationship between Scotland and England.
To me, this period is the most significant and interesting, but most poorly understood, in our national story. Gallacher would appear to agree. In his reference to the Cromwellian sack of Dundee in 1651, he observes: “Scotland does itself a disservice by its reckless negation and continual downplaying of the importance of these largely forgotten episodes of national history… why does the period now seem to be a mere curiosity?”
Gallacher rattles fairly quickly through the first 100 years, and it is clear that his major interest is in the conflicts of the 17th century. Much of this is well-worn territory, but the freshness of his approach lies in his equal focus on Highland life and culture as much as Lowland. He details the development of a distinct post-Reformation religious outlook in the North, referencing the Irish Catholic missionary endeavour to the Western Highlands in 1619-46, and recounts little-known clan disputes and warfare in the post-Restoration period. As he observes, the popular view of the Lowlands as “civilised” and the Highlands as “barbarous” is challenged by the fact that witch-hunting – for which James VI was an enthusiast - was virtually unknown in the Highlands until the 1640s whilst it was rife elsewhere in Scotland for decades before.
Gallacher’s aim is to set the events of the period in an appropriate cultural-historical context. He seeks to encourage a serious reflection on our national story as an antidote to simplistic interpretations of disputes such as those between Protestants and Catholics, or Williamites and Jacobites. He decries blind loyalism either to a Presbyterian, Covenanting, Whig tradition or to an Episcopalian, Catholic, Tory one, noting the overlaps between both. His ambition is for modern Scotland to embrace the strands equally: Highland and Lowland, Nationalist and Unionist, Europhile and Anglophile.
This history would have benefitted, in my view, from expanding in two areas. Firstly, greater analysis of how Scotland turned over the period from the historic Auld Alliance with France to complete Union with England, and the crucial contribution of Protestantism to that transformation. Secondly, exploring the political tension between the Stuart kings’ belief in the Divine Right and the more ancient belief – in both Scottish and English constitutional traditions – in contractual monarchy, although Gallacher recognises that the shift from absolutist to contractual and symbolic monarchy was a benefit of two centuries of turmoil.
This is not an academic history: there are few notes, no references, and the bibliography suggests it is based almost entirely on secondary sources, most of recent date. The most often quoted source is Walter Scott’s Waverley novels. None of this is intended as criticism. If Gallacher set out to produce something which explains with clarity a complex period for the general reader, and encourages thought about how Scotland today has been formed by historical disputes, he has achieved his objectives.
Scotland’s Turmoil 1500-1707, by Johnnie Gallacher, Historia, £14.99
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