If there’s a moment for declarations of visions and principles, this is it

Instead, I’ve been surprisingly gripped by it, right in this moment. Pandemics force you to expand your historical timeframe, make you wonder about the collapse and birth of civilisations in their wake.

It is extremely chastening, for example, to discover that the date of the document (1320) is only a scant few years before the advance of the bubonic/pneumonic plague or Black Death (Mongolia and the Gobi desert being its point of origin in the early 1320s).

We enjoy the historical romance of the Declaration: a diplomatic letter sent by barons, nobles and bishops to the then Pope, defending the right of the “whole community of the realm of Scotland” to choose their preferred king.

But it’s arresting: this shining moment of geopolitical ambition is happening just before a global health catastrophe.

At least one could make a modern case for Scottish “freedom, sovereignty and independence” (the great themes of the Arbroath Declaration) as being one way to ride out a plague. If an independent nation state gave us the powers to direct resources to healthcare and medical research, or bolstered our institutions and social consensus enough to ensure we behaved safely, it would be worth having.

On this, and in many other dimensions, we’re ahead of the Bruce and his barons – heedlessly making their petitions, as the miasma advances. But there’s something about the remarkable political idealism of the Arbroath document that keeps its relevance burning into the present moment.

Much of this comes out in a stunning new book of essays edited by the German academic Klaus-Peter Muller, titled Scotland and Arbroath 1320-2020 (expensive, so urge your library to order it in). The historians are in full pernickety debate here, as they always should be. Yet much of what they surface is fascinating and important.

I was first turned on to the Declaration in 2002, when Neal Ascherson explored these Arbroath debates in his rich overview of Scotland, Stone Voices. Neal concluded: “It is difficult to deny that recognisable ideas about a relationship between national and individual liberty were around in medieval Scotland.”

Did the Declaration of Arbroath contain “a freakishly ‘precocious’ understanding of freedom?” asked Ascherson. “Only if medieval England or France are taken as the historical norm” by British-oriented historians, he concluded.

The Muller book has evidence that explains the Declaration’s precocity. Philosopher Alexander Broadie points out that a decade earlier, the “Declaration of the Clergy” made a similar popular justification for their support for Robert the Bruce’s kingship. This 1310 text said Bruce’s claim rested on “the concurrence and consent of the people” and “the commons” [plebis continentes].

Broadie also suggests the influence of the Scots-born philosopher John Duns Scotus, which would have been well known in the ecclesiastical circles that produced the Declaration, is evident in the text. Scotus writes in his Ordinatio (1300-04) that political authority becomes “just” if it is “by common consent and election on the part of the community”.

To be fair, it’s still a petition of elites to fellow elites. And there’s much in the Declaration that burbles on, in a dispiriting fashion, about unbroken blood lines of kings, or the Egyptian roots of the Scots. They can’t see much beyond primogeniture as a form of leadership. However, the scholarship shows there’s clearly something else brewing here. There is some perceived need by these nobles and bishops to widen the discourse of who might count in a national territory, beyond the usual estates.

As Broadie’s colleague Murray Pittock says, the Declaration somewhat challenges the modern theories of nationalism – which says it’s essentially a construct, an “imagined community” that functionally serves the advance of industrialism. But what if some ideas of nation, in some cases, actually do arise from much earlier conditions?

ONE of the most fascinating insights from Scotland and Arbroath is the way such a text could even survive to the present, particularly given the turbulence of the history around it.

The Declaration was first given an English translation in 1689, and entitled A Letter From the Nobility, Barons and Commons of Scotland (note the communal reference). Pittock shows how these translations interplayed with debates about sovereignty and power, right up until the Union in 1707.

Yet as far as the “literati” of the Scottish Enlightenment are concerned, for the rest of the 18th century, the Declaration barely exists. Christopher Berry suggests that its idea of libertatem is too battle-ready, too feudalist, bounded by old loyalties.

David Hume’s vision of an “age of refinement” is one where “industry, knowledge and humanity are linked together in an indissoluble chain”. For him, these are “the most virtuous” societies: or as Berry states clearly, “a society of merchants, not citizen-warriors”.

Citizen-warriors who, in addition, make it clear that their oppressors are England. That’s not a great sell for these periwigged coffee-housers, flourishing nicely in their new United Kingdom.

To be honest, the Declaration of Arbroath – only really given that exact title at the beginning of the 20th century – has also been held with antiseptic tongs by many recent Scottish nationalist politicians. The wilder and woollier elements of political Scottish nationalism have often latched on the Declaration, in predictably alarming ways.

The book tells us that John Maclean chaired a revolutionary meeting to launch it as a pamphlet in the 1920s. Wendy Wood and Hugh MacDiarmid were terrifyingly tartan about it, founding their faintly sinister 1320 Club in 1967.

We’re also saddled with Tartan Day in the US, instituted by conservative Republican Trent Lott. It lands on the very date of the Declaration’s signing, and claims the American Declaration of Independence was “modelled on” the Declaration of Arbroath (very much denied by the historians collected here).

Trump’s Scots parentage promised a choking increase in the fumes of misconstrued tradition. However, one way or another, I think he may have gotten the diplomatic message from Holyrood.

SNP MSP Alasdair Allan writes with grace and patience about the various uses made of the Declaration by contemporary independence advocates. Allan is right to say one of its best effects is to evoke a Scotland independent enough to conduct effective statecraft, at a European and global level. Alasdair is also right to note that Arbroath’s most famous lines – “for we fight not for glory nor riches nor honours, but for freedom itself, which not worthy man gives up except with his life” – have become much more popular with activists than the preceding ones, which resist “the lordship of the English”.

The poet Robert Crawford is also right to note that last December’s “Declaration of Independence”, from artists and intellectuals (I’m a signatory), consciously draws from the metaphoric power of Arbroath – its instigator, James Robertson, “had it in the back of his mind”. The 2019 Declaration completely distances itself from 1320’s “ringing, masculinist rhetoric”. Rightly so.

But if there’s a moment for declarations of visions and principles, it’s now. Muller, the editor, writes an introduction which asks us to think about freedom, sovereignty and independence in a deeply connected age.

How do we relate to the vast and atomising systems of our 21st-century lives? How does libertatem maintain itself, in an era which may be asking us to surrender our autonomy for reasons of safety, security and health?

A “community of the realm” must keep strict tabs on the leaders it chooses. Doesn’t this mean the power to replace them, too?

Much to think about, in our seclusion. But let’s try to restore a healthy public realm in the first place, so we can test out the continuing relevance of the Declaration of Arbroath. We don’t want what was coming their way in 1320 ...

Scotland and Arbroath 1320-2020: 700 Years of Fighting For Freedom, Sovereignty and Independence, is edited by Klaus Peter Müller, and available from Peter Lang Books at www.peterlang.com/view/title/70935

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