Scotland

When we depart Edinburgh, with its great castle and marvelous architecture, we will move south into the borderlands. Our home will be the Roxburghe Castle, just a few miles north of the English border with Scotland. This is not a new border. The original castle was built (12th century) just ten miles from the village of Melrose, which is built on the foundations of Trimontium. This northernmost Roman fort was established when Julius Caesar set out to make Great Britain a colony of Rome (55 BC). Within three generations of the Roman conquest, what is now England was pacified and adopted the Roman good life; Roman roads, Roman villas, Roman laws, good wine and fine dining. But up north the ancient and warlike tribes of the Scots and Picts were having none of it. They refused to be colonized and the Romans couldn’t conquer them. After two hundred years the Romans gave up their far outpost at Trimontium (today’s Melrose). They picked a skinny part of the island a hundred miles south and built Hadrian’s Wall (122 AD) and left the wild folks on the other side to do their own thing.

After the fall of Rome came the Anglo Saxons (Germans). They populated what had been Roman England, but as the Anglo Saxons moved north to the borderlands near Hadrian’s Wall, they too decided that trying to civilize these folks was a losing proposition. The Anglo Saxons left them alone. Then came the Normans (Battle of Hastings 1066). They too occupied England but left the Scots to their clannish ways.

About five hundred years later the megalomaniacal Henry VIII decided that he would be the one to finally subdue these ancient folks. When he died it still wasn’t accomplished. The next generation then witnessed one of history’s great ironies. Henry had three heirs. Each of them became a monarch but none of them produced an heir for the next generation of Tudor monarchs. So Henry (VIII) Tudor’s line died out. But part of his plan to conquer Scotland had included sending his sister Margaret up north to marry the king of Scotland (James Stuart). This couple did produce an heir, so when Henry’s last child, Elizabeth I died in 1603, James, the king of Scotland inherited the realm of England. So after two thousand years of England trying and failing to militarily control Scotland, now Scotland ruled over England without a single battle.

Thus was born the fiction of Great Briton, wherein England and Scotland became one country. This fiction fell apart one generation later when the English parliament removed the head of the second Scottish king (Charles I), setting off more that a century of civil wars that only subsided when the Stuarts ran out of heirs and the British parliament brought in another line of German kings. They were all named George (I through V). This German line (the house of Saxe-Colberg and Gotha) still provides British monarchs today, although George V officially dumped the German name in 1917 and changed it to the English sounding “house of Windsor” (see Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor).

But the historical tensions remain. Scottish people are adamantly not English and the majority also do not identify as British. In 2014 there was a vote put before the people to make Scotland an independent country. It narrowly failed, but if the vote were held today, it almost certainly would pass.

From the time when Georgian kings were still proud of their German heritage, Roxburghe changed the name “castle’ to its German equivalent “schloss”, so we will officially stay in the Schloss Roxburghe. This is just one of the many delicious historical ironies we will savor during our sojourn in the borderlands, an area of great buildings, great stories and great parties for over two thousand years.