Prelude and Prologue

Stealthily Stalks The Lion

Prelude- A common cause.


As the air and the atmosphere warmed, the ice flows that for 10,000 years or more had fractured, crushed, massaged, kneaded, and reformed the landscape began their slow northern retreat from this peninsular outpost of what would eventually become Europe.

And there left in their wake as a thumbprint of Mother Nature’s presence was a land of magisterial crags and crannies, of thundering breakwaters, flat lands of coal and ores, prodigious ice and snow topped ranges, and sparkling diamond-clear streams and rivers flowing across the deserted but fertile loam, carving out pioneering paths of the future to the rising seas.

The winds and rain, replacing the freezing air and snow, dispersed the scudding clouds and the soils were seeded with essential nutrients. Across the land bridges from the great plains and mountains to the east in search of bountiful pastures, came the deer, the boar, the bears, the wolves and the birds.

The eagles, ospreys and the winged acrobats of the sky soared, while the wolves, bears and a thousand other mammals, reptiles and lizards made dominion of all they could survey.

The rivers, lochs and surrounding seas abounded with fish; the land and heavens were rich in countless herds and flocks; and as cumulus, nimbus and cirrus alternated in the firmament, an invigorating infusion of the suns rays bathed the land and magnificent variegated flora thrived in this new Eden.

To even the most prosaic of observer of metamorphosis, this was undoubtedly God’s reward to mankind.

But then…….then along came that mankind and discovered this gift, but in truth struggled to understand the talents with which they had been entrusted!?

For 4,000 years, throughout the country they roamed, from north to south, east to west, highland, lowland, wetland, dry-land, coastland, surviving through rain, snow, wind, bitter cold and a myriad of disasters but always following and ultimately thriving with the animals, the birds, the fish, and the land.

Then the settlements arose; and the hunter-gatherer turned to gatherer-hunter, setting up brochs, and crannochs, and henges.

Villages were established, plots and holdings were claimed, possessions disputed, and man battled man in a selfish and regressive fight for supremacy and domination.

The greed for more, and we call it evolution, took over and battles raged between, Gaels, Picts, Celts, and Angles, and eventually the lands of Fortiu, and Rheged, and Strathclyde, and Bernicia came together as one.

The cousins from Dal Riata and the Scotti laid their claim, battling with all-comers, Pyrrhically winning occasionally, losing occasionally, but eventually seeing off or more regularly finding common cause with the Gaels, the Norse, and the Romans.

The English in a multitude of guises came time after time, inspiring in the indigenous people a common cause of unity under one standard and a vision of one dream for the erstwhile competing families and clans of this northern land, as they forged an alliance and let shared blood while repelling the invaders.

Driven and inspired by English arrogance and pillage, enemies became kith, factions became kin and as the blood mixed and families forged dynasties, the followers and the champions of McCalpin, Wallace, and Bruce through that unique strength fashioned by the furnace of pain, suffering and massacre, rallied!

And then through the magic of faith, the fires of destiny and the essence of their spirits they sowed with a cry that resounded from peak to peak and glen to glen, the seeds of that fundamental right of freedom and autonomy.

It was through those giants of men that Scotland nailed the cross of St Andrew to the flagpole of humanity and declared their one true nationhood and also their kindred empathy with the other progressive peoples of a world on a march to justice!

A hundred battles were fought! Many were won and many were lost!

Fifty thousand bodies and souls were cleaved in damp corrosive fields of swamp, peat and graves, but in their parting they nurtured and gave substance to a vision, a culture, a future and a country.

But most of all they fuelled the fire that would become a thousand nationwide beacons, shining the message throughout this and a thousand other lands!

Quem si ab inceptis desisteret, regi Anglorum aut Anglicis nos aut Regnum nostrum volens subicere, tanquam inimicum nostrum et sui nostrique Juris subuersorem statim expellere niteremur et alium Regem nostrum qui ad defensionem nostram sufficeret faceremus. Quia quamdiu Centum ex nobis viui remanserint, nuncquam Anglorum dominio aliquatenus volumus subiugari. Non enim propter gloriam, diuicias aut honores pugnamus set propter libertatem solummodo quam Nemo bonus nisi simul cum vita amittit.

Yet if he should give up what he has begun, and agree to make us or our kingdom subject to the King of England or the English, we should exert ourselves at once to drive him out as our enemy and a subverter of his own rights and ours, and make some other man who was well able to defend us our King; for, as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom -- for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.

A freedom won never to be relinquished, and the Lion Rampant roared!

Welcome to Scotland - Fàilte ort a dh'Albainn



Prologue - In Mammon’s cause

17th July 1698

Must fair ambition and righteous hope founder far from home on wave beaten rocks with nothing but the soulless scars of the four merciless horsemen to bear witness to their heroic failure?

Are principles no more than wagers or bargaining tools to be proffered for negotiation and then trimmed, whittled, and carved as we submit to the stain of compromise; or are life and honour so much more than a product of a hopeful gambler’s stake or a bleak artisan’s tool of barter?

What forced our hand, if force was applied, to blinker us to all but the shining fools-gold of mercantile domination? What devious whisper tempted a country so poor and so small to take on the mighty powers of the world and breach the very principles that had given birth to our own nationhood?

To invade a land of peoples not to free them from any shackling occupation, but to become the occupiers ourselves with the aim of garnering whatever wealth, riches and resources lay there.

Without doubt, the iron clad hands of the English stranglers who at every turn and opportunity squeezed the breath and lifeblood from the body of Scottish enterprise fuelled the precarious hand to mouth existence and clouded the judgment of caring families.

But that necessity alone could never have spawned this fated adventure . Without the will, the red-blooded imagination, the smiling wanderlust for adventure, but mostly without the belief that skill and hard-work will reap its righteous rewards it would never even have started.

And so as the wind blew fair on that July morning at Leith harbour, thousands of hi-born, lo-born, and some that knew little of their origin gathered to cheer and wave. The hopes and future of the nation weighed anchor, cast off the mooring ropes and with a prayer to their God, a swallow of apprehension and a brief race of the heart, set sail for their very own promised land.

As their streamlined hulls low in the water with fully laden cargoes approached the sunlit horizon, disappeared from view and lost sight themselves of their homeland, they took with them not only all of the country’s dreams but also half of the country’s wealth!

These five vessels embarking on a 5,000 mile journey to create at the heart of the trade routes between the Atlantic and the Pacific, the pulse of the Scottish nation and at last give the its people a dream of the future of which they could be proud.

And so set sail the Darien Expedition; and as it sailed the nation began their long wait and mumbled indulgencies for their safe travel, a bountiful venture and triumphant return!

But the vision of those who had dreamt and the plans of those who led were undermined initially by their own over-confidence as their supplies dwindled and as the folly of stacking three thousand bibles instead of more vital commodities became daily more apparent. Then short of food and fresh water men became confused, descending to the basic instincts for survival, and finally sinking even further as deprivation twisted their minds and the false god of alcohol tortured their spirits!

The jungle on that far away peninsula harboured dangers and diseases to which no-one had previously been exposed, and the pioneers became ravaged by illness and massacred by death.

Even then as landfall was established, the frightened English could not bring themselves to provide even the most basic of humane support to the desperate frontiersmen. By both their actions and inaction as they fretted that it might actually succeed and undermine their own mercantile hegemony, the English establishment demonstrated their arrogance in the face of horrendous suffering and their belief in an English God!

This bastard establishment supported shamefully by a King and Queen who ostensibly oversaw both kingdoms equally in their withdrawal of support and subsequent refusal to replenish supplies, had not only destroyed the expedition, but had triggered the potential genocide of the Scottish nation!

The bleached bones and unmarked graves peppering the oppressively humid and baking burial ground that Darien had become, would serve evermore in fact and in folklore as a barbaric reminder to those thousands who were still to suffer, still to die, of the treachery and cruelty of ill-begotten power.

But it would not be the last time that tears of the Scottish Nation would be shed as those same usurpers and their blind accomplices once and many times more would violate the body of the Scottish people, ripping the heart out, and displaying it with arrogant triumphalism!

Aye, the heart perhaps, but never the soul!