Also, in this particular case: the the Scots were in a situation where the last uprising had been violently quelled and the Highlander gear forbidden, where there was increasing anti-Scots and anti-Northern English feeing in the English south. (I mentioned the Boswell recorded incident when the returning from the 7 Years War soldiers from the Highlander Regiment get booed and hissed at in a London theatre with cries of "No Scots! No Scots!"; as they said to Boswell, "if these were French, could they have done worse?". Scots bashing was en vogue, not just by Tories like Johnson but also by liberal radicals like John Wilkes. (Because of Lady Mary's son-in-law, the PM Lord Bute, who was a Northerner and accused of sleeping with G3's Mom Augusta without any basis for this whatsoever other than G3 treating Lord Bute as a father figure. So if you were writing against the government, you more often than not did not just bash the PM but all Scots while you were at it.) Scots they were constantly told how much lesser they were, accused of being a burden on English tax payers and having nothing to compare to the great English cultural heritage. So the "discovery" of supposedly ancient Gaelic verses by a Scotsman that had nothing to do with Anglosaxon heritage was considered one big identity/heritage booster, too.
(Incidentally:remember George Keith giving Boswell his copy about an actual old Scottish epic about Robert the Bruce, to be read once a year? That's in this spirit, too.)
Just to show how things change just in a few decades, with Sir Walter Scott deserving much of the credit: with his novels, labelled as fiction and specifically his own fiction, he made Scottish history very popular in England. To the degree that when G4, the former Prince Regent, visited Scotland (first Hannover King to do so), Sir Walter Scott got him to wear a Highlander kilt. In public. A King of the House of Hannover, whose great uncle, Billy the Butcher Cumberland, had quelled the 45 uprising with war crimes, after which the wearing of kilts had been strictly forbidden. From this point onwards at the latest, Scotland wasn't the land of primitive boo-hiss worthy barbarians anymore, it was the romantic country of heroes, and of years yet two more decades later you get young Victoria and Albert building themselves a holiday home there, Balmoral, where the royal family holidays to this day, and the English singing Auld Lang Syne on New Year.
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Auld Lang Syne
Date: 2020-10-13 05:31 am (UTC)(Incidentally:remember George Keith giving Boswell his copy about an actual old Scottish epic about Robert the Bruce, to be read once a year? That's in this spirit, too.)
Just to show how things change just in a few decades, with Sir Walter Scott deserving much of the credit: with his novels, labelled as fiction and specifically his own fiction, he made Scottish history very popular in England. To the degree that when G4, the former Prince Regent, visited Scotland (first Hannover King to do so), Sir Walter Scott got him to wear a Highlander kilt. In public. A King of the House of Hannover, whose great uncle, Billy the Butcher Cumberland, had quelled the 45 uprising with war crimes, after which the wearing of kilts had been strictly forbidden. From this point onwards at the latest, Scotland wasn't the land of primitive boo-hiss worthy barbarians anymore, it was the romantic country of heroes, and of years yet two more decades later you get young Victoria and Albert building themselves a holiday home there, Balmoral, where the royal family holidays to this day, and the English singing Auld Lang Syne on New Year.