Kilt joys

The Invention of Scotland

Myth and History

Hugh Trevor-Roper

Yale University Press: 282 pp., $30

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In the mid-1700s, Bonnie Prince Charlie (Charles Edward Stuart, a Scot) failed to take the British crown. Scots, suffering from an identity crisis, started rummaging through manuscripts and oral traditions for a great national epic but couldn’t find one -- that is until a certain James McPherson wrote the schmaltzy, bogus ancient poem “Fingal” and passed it off as the real thing.

Suddenly, the dwindling Highland bards, long thought to be “worthless parasites,” were the keepers of an oral history to rival Homer! The educated classes in Edinburgh took to Highlanders much the way nice white boys once took to rap.

Enter the kilt, a garment invented by an (English!) Quaker iron mill owner in the early 1700s for workers who could not afford trousers. A pair of con-artist brothers, the Sobieski Stuarts, hinting that they were claimants to the throne, intimated that kilts and tartans were ancient Scottish garb. Society types from Edinburgh to London were taken in. Doctors, lawyers and aristocrats pranced around in itchy wool skirts, inspired by two faux-royals running around the woods dressed like lunatics. Even George IV became a fashion victim.

You have to know Hugh Trevor-Roper’s agenda here. He was against the granting of a separate parliament to Scotland, seeing the act as nationalistic. He knew that European nationalism often breeds racism and militarism, and he wanted to show that Scots weren’t fit for self-rule because they failed to examine their own history with rigor. (But as my Scottish husband says, Scotland has a talent for splendid failures. When its parliament materialized in 1999, the uglier forms of nationalism failed to appear as thoroughly as Bonnie Prince Charlie failed to acquire the throne.)

Trevor-Roper was English but often lived in Scotland. He was an excellent historian and an Oxbridge-style thinker noted for his book “The Last Days of Hitler,” but he’s mostly known as the man taken in by the 1983 Hitler Diaries hoax -- he declared the manuscripts real based on others’ tests without examining them thoroughly. This book, published posthumously (Trevor-Roper died in 2003), is the result of three decades of scholarship, but the Freudian irony is that Trevor-Roper accuses others of his own sins. He quotes Samuel Johnson: “A Scotchman must be a very sturdy moralist who does not love Scotland better than truth.” The same might be said of Trevor-Roper’s love of Scotland as a subjugated land.

What he doesn’t exactly get is that Scotland’s fun with the truth did little harm. Fake history often supports unfortunate regimes, but Scottish fakery spread tragically bad poetry and made a bunch of rich people look like idiots. “The Invention of Scotland” takes a bit of effort to follow, but it’s worth it. This is one sly hoot of a book.