The Struggle for Independence-. The death of Alexander III's only heir, Margaret of Norway, led to the attempt of Edward I of England and his immediate successors to at tach. Scotland to the English Crown, and for more than half a century she had to fight for her bare existence as a nation. The results of the struggle were of the highest importance for the future of her people. Successfully maim. raining her independence, by the very effort she made for self-preservation she became a united nation with a consciousness of a distinct destiny which had not been present to her even in the (golden of Alexander III. By the ordeal they had passed through, moreover, the Teu tonic section of her people, who had been mainly interested in the issue of the struggle, acquired that national characteristic •the earl o' hemp in mang— that dogged persistence, which the world has recognized as a pecuharity of the typical Lowland Scot. But, as we shall see, there was another result of the struggle for independence which, if it did not affect the national character, powerfully influenced Scot land's laws and institutions, political, social and municipal. In. the contest with England she had sought the alliance of France, and for two centuries and a half she was in closer contact with France than with England. Previous to the War:of Independence it was from England She had borrowed what she needed; now it was to France that she loolsod as her model.
The Development of National Institutions Under French Influence, 1472-1542.-- From the death of David II in 1472 to the beginning of the reign of Mary in 1542 is a well-marked period of Scottish history, during which the national institutions assumed the general form which they maintained till the union of the Scottish and English Parliaments in 1707. Throughout this entire period the dread of Eng lish aggression was still the constant preoccupa tion of the people, and this permanent dread at once deepened the national traits of hardihood and caution and contributed to the strengthen ing of national sentiment In the development of institutions we have again to note the action of causes common to western Europe. Like the kings of other countries the kings of Scots deliberately aimed at crushing the power of the feudal nobles and establishing a central au thority over which they should be supreme. But in this endeavor they were checked by two hostile forces— the power of the Scottish nobles themselves and the insubordination of their Celtic subjects in the Highlands and the Western Islands. As the result of these op posing forces, whose relative strength was con stantly changing, a Parliament like that of England, with well-defined privileges and effi caciously representing the different classes of the people, could not come to birth in Scotland. In the Scottish Parliament or Estates (so-called in imitation of the French Etats), the Lords Temporal and Spiritual, the Commissioners for the Shires and Burghs, sat in one House and nominally legislated for the nation, but the actual power of the Parliament was in the hands of a committee known as 'The Lords of the Articles? the choice of which lay with the king or the greater barons according as the one or the other was in the ascendant. Till the Scottish Parliament ceased to exist, there fore, it was but the convenient instrument of whatever authority chanced to prepondirate in the State. In the case of other institutions it
was from France that Scotland borrowed the models she sought to imitate. It was from France, mainly during the period of which we are speaking, that she took over the Roman law, thus departing from the example of Eng land; and the College of Justice (the present Court of Session), established by James V in 1532, was formed on the pattern of the Parte ment of Paris. In the election of municipal bodies in the burghs the method of France was likewise adopted (the retiring body electing its successor), a method which prevailed till as late as the 18th century. From France, also, dur ing the same period was taken the arrangement of feu-farm by which land was leased in per petuity — an arrangement encouraged by the Estates and intended (ineffectually as it proved) to remedy the system of short and precarious leases which till the 19th century disastrously affected agriculture in Scotland. When to these borrowing4 we add the fact that the majority of highly educated Scots studied in the schools of France, it will be seen that, apart from the political results of the alliance, the influence of France in Scotland is one of-the important facts in the national development.
From the Reformation to the Revolution, 1542-1689; Adoption of Protestantism and Alienation from France.— With the beginning of the reign of Mary (1542) Scotland makes a new departure and enters on a period which definitely closes with the Revolution of 1689. The dominating fact of the period was the adoption of Protestantism in place of Cathol icism as the national religion (1560). The immediate result of the change of religion was alienation from France as a Catholic country and approach to England, with an ever-growing conviction on the part of both peoples that polit ical union was in the interests of both. But there were other results from the religious revolution which permanently affected the na tional character and the future of the country. For the first time in the nation's history an issue was presented which the public mind was mature enough to comprehend and which was of a nature to evoke the inherent contrarieties of thought and feeling which divide man from man. From the change of religion and the political consequences it involved there resulted a collision between two types of mind which have been in antagonism ever since. But this very collision of opposites produced a quicken ing of the general consciousness which made Scotland a nation in the strictest sense of the word. From the Reformation to the Revolu tion the country was cleft in twain by two op posing principles and two oppOsing parties, be tween which compromise was impossible and political equilibrium was unattainable. On the one side were the successive Stewart kings who aimed at absolute control in Church and State, and on the other, the religious party which adopted Presbyterianism as its form of church polity and which maintained the Church's inde pendence of the State. After a struggle that had lasted above a century came the Revolu tion of 1689, when England and Scotland both cast out the House of Stewart and a new order began.