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The Celts and the Scots |
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Thousands of years ago, a race known as the Celts (pronounced kelts) migrated across northern Europe and settled in the British Isles, occupying what is now England, Wales, and Ireland. A separate race, the Picts, occupied Alba, which the Romans called Caledonia and has since become Scotland. During the Roman occupation of Great Britain, these tribes proved so intractable that the Emperor Hadrian ordered a wall built which is still visible today, that marked the boundary between Roman civilization and Caledonian wilderness.
Before the time of the legendary King Arthur, a Gaelic tribe of Celtic origin in Ireland, calling themselves Scots, established a beachhead kingdom in western Alba. The kingdom, called Dalriada, soon became the Scots' most important country. In the 9th century A.D., Alpin became the king of Dalriada. His eldest son, Kenneth Mac Alpin, forged alliances with the Picts and eventually united Alba under a single crown -- his -- and thus became the first true King of Scotland.
The fierceness of the Picts and Scots against the Romans was later turned against invaders from the North (Vikings, who as late as the 13th Century A.D. still held the Shetlands and Orkneys north of Scotland) and the South (the English, particularly King Edward I, "the Hammer of the Scots"). It was because of Edward's designs on Scotland that the Scots rose behind William Wallace -- who was finally captured, through treachery, and carted off to London where he was hanged, drawn and quartered. Nevertheless, Wallace's successes in the field against Edward helped to embolden the young Earl of Carrick, Robert the Bruce, who as King of Scotland defeated Edward II, son of the Hammer, at Bannockburn in 1314.
Centuries later, the English captured Scotland by submitting to a Scottish king, James VI, who had been named heir to the English throne by the childless Queen Elizabeth I. James, the son of the ill-fated Mary Queen of Scots, ascended the English throne in 1603, becoming King James I of England as well as VI of Scotland. He thus begat the tumultuous British Stuart dynasty, the reign of which was interrupted by civil war, beset by religious strife, and finally ended by the so-called "Glorious Revolution" of 1688. Yet even today the British royal family is descended from Mary Queen of Scots and her son James.
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