scot47

On a recent trip to Inverness I went on my first visit to Culloden Battlefield. To my surprise I found it very moving - depsite the hundreds of touristst. Needless toi say hundreds from South nof the Bordewr and Over the Pond and hardly a Scots voice to be heard !

Of late I have been reflecting on my preconceptions and prejudices about Scorttish and Brirtish History. Suffice it to say that I now have a more positive attitude to those who died for the Stuarts. Mt Whigish and Covenanting prejudices are morphing into a respect for "The King Over The Water".

Editha

It is many decades since I visited Culloden, but my experience then was similar to yours.

robin1234

I've had a similar gradual evolution of political preconceptions. Suffice it to say that, born in 1950 and studying history at A level and university, the Whig version of history was unchallenged and my teachers were Marxists - the orthodoxy of the time. Now, I still have a soft spot for Oliver Cromwell but I also think of King Charles I as a saint and martyr. It's partly a result of visiting medieval churches and seeing the vandalism and destruction wrought by the iconoclasts.

I think the Hanoverian Kings were more or less the right thing at the right time ... But I suppose I'm looking at them through an English rather than a Scottish lens.

Editha

Robin, if your teachers were Marxists, then surely they must have challenged the Whig view of history? Or they wouldn't have been Marxists, would they?

robin1234

True but I think back in the 1960s Marxists and Whigs agreed on the perfectibility of man, especially after a few drinks.

Novocastrian

It seems improbable that Whigs and Marxists ever had a drink together. You never know though. We may live in a multiverse.

The Whigs weren't great champions of the working class either, largely because it hadn't been invented back then.

robin1234

Well, the Whigs I'm talking about definitely lived in the twentieth century, and I'm pretty sure some of them sipped sherry in the SCR with Marxists!

The Whig Tradition — Faculty of History

Editha

G.M. Trevelyan is regarded as the last great historian of the Whig tradition. He died in 1903. His life of Garibaldi, and his three volume social history of England are still worth reading.

robin1234

He died in 1962. I actually remember reading (or hearing on the radio) that he'd died.

Editha

I beg your pardon. Oh well, he was around long enough to have had a drink with E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill.

Novocastrian

I'm not sure that being a historian of the Whig tradition is the same thing as being a Whig. A historian of the whig tradition is just a mouthy old fogey eulogising Victorian Britain (and ignoring it's obvious faults).

scot47

Mary Queen of Scots


That is not just for those who look to "The King over the Water".

Editha

Clearly you haven't read the whig historians.

Novocastrian

Actually I have read Trevelyan's English Social History (admittedly 40 years ago).

I think The Archers do better at producing maudlin rubbish.

scot47

The Whigs I am referring to were the political and religious tendency in `17th and 18th century. Not the ghastly Establishment Historians of Oxford !