¹ The phrase must be used with caution: any form of ethnic determinism is clearly to be avoided. Scotland, Ireland and Wales were not uniformly or equally ‘Celtic’, and the label itself, like ‘Puritan’, is at best a shorthand term which carries its own risk of distortion. For a sociological exploration of the issues, see Smith, Anthony D., The ethnic origins of nations (Oxford, 1986)Google Scholar; and for a balancing emphasis on perceptions and culture, Canny, Nicholas and Pagden, Anthony (eds.), Colonial identity in the Atlantic world, 1500–1800 (Princeton, 1987)Google Scholar. The use of ‘Celtic’ as a synonym for ‘Welsh, Irish, Scots, Cornish and Breton’ often serves a political purpose; but it seems unlikely that scholarship will endorse the strong racial claims surviving in socialist calls for ‘Celtic’ nationalist liberation, e.g. Ellis, P. Berresford, The creed of the Celtic revolution (London, 1969)Google Scholar.

² Cf. Malcolmson, R. W., Life and labour in England 1700–1780 (London, 1981)Google Scholar; Porter, Roy, English society in the eighteenth century (Harmondsworth, 1982)Google Scholar; Evans, Eric J., The forging of the modern state: early industrial Britain 1783–1870 (London, 1983)Google Scholar; Sharpe, J. A., Early modern England: a social history 1550–1760 (London, 1987)Google Scholar. The merits of such books in dealing with English issues are not at issue here; the point is the existence of shared historiographical conventions which allow England's neighbours to be marginalized in a more than geographical sense.

³ Pocock, J. G. A., ‘British history: a plea for a new subject’, Journal of Modern History, XLVII (1975) 601–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar and ‘The limits and divisions of British history: in search of the unknown subject’, American Historical Review, LXXXVII (1982), 311–36Google Scholar. For a textbook organized around such themes, see Tompson, Richard S., The Atlantic archipelago: a political history of the British isles (Lewiston, New York, 1986)Google Scholar.

⁴ Clark, J. C. D., Revolution and rebellion: state and society in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Cambridge, 1986), p. 66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Russell, Conrad, ‘The causes of the English Civil War’ (Ford Lectures, University of Oxford, 1988)Google Scholar. The term has been credited to an Irish scholar: Beckett, J. C., The making of modern Ireland 1603–1923 (London, 1966)Google Scholar. English historians were not quick to adopt the idea as a central one.

⁵ By contrast, English historians had been relatively unmoved by contributions of historical sociologists, like Hechter's, MichaelInternal colonialism: the Celtic fringe in British national development, 1536–1966 (London, 1975)Google Scholar, despite the debate it provoked: cf. Page, E., Michael Hechter's internal colonial thesis: some theoretical and methodological problems, University of Strathclyde Centre for the Study of Public Policy: Studies in Public Policy 9 (Glasgow, 1977)Google Scholar. English historians were even unmoved by attempts to exploit the issue for political purposes, most notably Nairn, Tom, The break-up of Britain: crisis and neo-nationalism (London, 1977)Google Scholar.

⁶ For a later period see, inter alia, Robbins', Keith Ford Lectures, published as Nineteenth-century Britain: integration and diversity (Oxford, 1988)Google Scholar; idem, ‘“This grubby wreck of old glories”: the United Kingdom and the end of the British empire’, Journal of Contemporary History, XV (1980), 81–95Google Scholar; and ProfessorRobbins', Raleigh Lecture, ‘Core and periphery in modern British history’, Proceedings of the British Academy, LXX (1984), 275–97Google Scholar. For an earlier period, Levack, Brian P., The formation of the British state: England, Scotland and the union 1603–1707 (Oxford, 1987)Google Scholar.

⁷ Simpson, John M., ‘Who steered die gravy train, 1707–1766?’ in Phillipson, N. T. and Mitchison, R. (eds.), Scotland in the age of improvement (Edinburgh, 1970), pp. 47–72Google Scholar; Murdoch, Alexander, ‘The people above’: politics and administration in mid-eighteenth century Scotland (Edinburgh, 1980)Google Scholar; Shaw, John Stuart, The management of Scottish society 1707–1764 (Edinburgh, 1983)Google Scholar. The Melville period lacks similar detailed studies; for an oudine, see ‘The twilight of the ancien régime 1815–1827’ in Lenman, Bruce, Integration, Enlightenment, and industrialization: Scotland 1746–1832 (London, 1981), pp. 129–53Google Scholar; for the establishment of the Melville interest, Dwyer, John and Murdoch, Alexander, ‘Paradigms and politics: manners, morals and the rise of Henry Dundas, 1770–1784’, in Dwyer, John, Mason, Roger A. and Murdoch, Alexander (eds.), New perspectives on the politics and culture of early modern Scotland (Edinburgh, 1982)Google Scholar.

⁸ E.g. Simpson, John M., ‘Who steered the gravy train?’, pp. 47, 69Google Scholar; Simpson pointed out how often ‘power struggles in London determined the fate of Scottish patronage’, p. 58. This vision of Scots politics as a series of unideological manoeuvres between two factions, the Argathelians and the Squadrone, had been expressed in its most Namierite form by Riley, P. W. J., The English ministers and Scotland 1707–1727 (London, 1964)Google Scholar.

⁹ Murdoch, , ‘The people above’, pp. vi, 26Google Scholar and passim.

¹⁰ Cf. Sunter, R. M., ‘Stirlingshire politics, 1707–1832’ (University of Edinburgh Ph.D. thesis, 1971)Google Scholar.

¹¹ Cf. Szechi, Daniel and Hayton, David, ‘John Bull's other kingdoms: the English government of Scotland and Ireland’ in Jones, Clyve (ed.), Britain in the first age of party (London, 1987), pp. 241–80Google Scholar. The authors enter a caveat against the unideological vision of Scots politics learnedly presented in the books of Dr P. W. J. Riley, and emphasize instead the similarity between English party alignments from the 1690s and the ideological polarities evident in Ireland.

¹² Quoted in Sunter, , Patronage and politics, p. 4Google Scholar.

¹³ Smout, T. C., A history of the Scottish people 1560–1830 (London 1969), pp. 212, 218Google Scholar. The merits of this magnificent book in every other respect hardly need to be stressed.

¹⁴ The pioneering volumes of The history of parliament, SirNamier, Lewis and Brooke's, JohnThe house of commons 1754–1790 (3 vols., London, 1964)Google Scholar, set the pattern for the series by providing no synoptic treatment of the special political environment of Scotland and Wales, and discussed Scots and Welsh M.P.s, like Irish, merely as foreigners who happened to have found their way to Westminster. The ‘Introductory Survey’ indeed dealt with the three national groups between ‘West Indians and North Americans’ and ‘Suicides and Madmen’. Namier and Brooke (vol. I, pp. 171, 175) dated the emergence of parties and issues in Scotland to the early 1780s; but the weakness and failure of the Scots reform movement was the lesson generally drawn from Cannon, John, Parliamentary reform 1640–1832 (Cambridge, 1973), pp. 107–15, 125–9Google Scholar.

¹⁵ The special difficulties of applying that term to Scotland, Ireland and Wales (explored here) reinforce Quentin Skinner's argument that ‘classical republicanism’ more accurately identifies the phenomenon: cf. Schmitt, Charles B., Skinner, Quentin and Kessler, Eckhard (eds.), The Cambridge History of Renaissance philosophy (Cambridge, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶ For the background to this problem, cf. Schwoerer, Lois, ‘No standing armies!’ The anti-army ideology in seventeenth-century England (Baltimore, 1974)Google Scholar; Webb, Stephen Saunders, The governors-general: the English army and the definition of the empire, 1560–1681 (Chapel Hill, 1979)Google Scholar.

¹⁷ See especially O'Connell, Maurice R., Irish politics and social conflict in the age of the American revolution (Philadelphia, 1965)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for the political consequences, O'Brien, Gerard, Anglo-Irish politics in the age of Grattan and Pitt (Dublin, 1987)Google Scholar.

¹⁸ The Union of 1707 extended the English system of J.P.s to Scotland; but the institution was at once infiltrated by Stuart loyalists. See Carmichael, Elizabeth K., ‘Jacobitism in the Scottish commission of the peace, 1707–1760’, Scottish Historical Review, LVIII (1979), 58–69Google Scholar. The Scots militia, instituted in 1660, was initially thought to have lapsed with the treaty of Union; a bill to re-establish it was killed by the last use of the royal veto in 1708. Gregg, Edward, Queen Anne (London, 1980), p. 144Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Irish protestants had normally been obliged to depend on that more effective instrument, a standing army; but from the mid 1760s, some protestant nationalists, including Henry Flood, began to favour a militia as a focus of national feeling. These initiatives, frustrated by the Dublin Castle executive, found expression in the unofficial Volunteer forces of the 1770s. For the background, cf. SirMcAnally, Henry, The Irish militia 1793–1816 (Dublin, 1949), pp. 1–13Google Scholar; for the willingness of protestants to enrol, if not to serve, see McAnally, , ‘The militia array of 1756 in Ireland’, The Irish Sword, 1 (1949–1951), 94–104Google Scholar.

²⁰ The two movements are well compared by Cannon, Parliamentary reform 1640–1832, chapter 5.

²¹ Cf. Gray, Malcolm, ‘Scottish emigration: the social impact of agrarian change in the rural Lowlands, 1775–1875’, Perspectives in American History, VII (1973), 95–174Google Scholar; Youngson, A. J., After the forty-five: the economic impact on the Scottish Highlands (Edinburgh, 1973)Google Scholar; Bumstead, J. M., The people's clearance: Highland emigration to British north America 1770–1815 (Edinburgh, 1982)Google Scholar; Richards, Eric, A history of the Highland clearances (2 vols., London, 1982, 1985)Google Scholar.

²² Relative numbers entering the professions from the two nations are hard to obtain; but Scots entry began early. During the teaching career at Leyden from 1701 to 1738 of Hermann Boerhaave, 360 English and 244 Scots students are recorded in his charge. Scots finding commissions in the British armed forces were evidently outnumbered by the Irish in the first half of the century: Holmes, Geoffrey, Augustan England: professions, state and society, 1680–1730 (London, 1982), pp. 176–80, 270Google Scholar; Hayes, James, ‘Scottish officers in the British army 1714–63’, Scottish Historical Review, XXXVII (1958), 23–33Google Scholar.

²³ Robbins, Caroline, The eighteenth-century commonwealthman (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), pp. 5–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar, propounded a division into three ‘generations’: the first, emerging to prominence after 1689 and mostly dead by 1727; the second, active in mid-century (Hutcheson, Grove, Foster, Watts, Edmund Law); the third, ‘often called early radicals’ (Price, Priestley, and other American sympathisers). The relations between these putative ‘generations’ was one of the weaker points in an important and seminal work.

²⁴ The problem went deeper: legal ambiguities in the wake of the Union gave scope for the disaffected in 1715 and 1745 largely to prevent the mobilisation of the militia under the Restoration Acts; where men were occasionally assembled, they showed no resolution to fight the Highland host: Robertson, , Militia, p. 52Google Scholar.

²⁵ Western, J. R., ‘The formation of the Scottish militia in 1797’, Scottish Historical Review, XXXIV (1955), 1–18Google Scholar; Logue, K. J., Popular disturbances in Scotland 1780–1815 (Edinburgh, 1979), ch. 3Google Scholar. This was not out of line with English experience: cf. Hayter, Tony, The army and the crowd in mid-Georgian England (London, 1978), pp. 93–107Google Scholar; Stevenson, John, Popular disturbances in England 1700–1870 (London, 1979), pp. 35–40Google Scholar. It is easy to exaggerate the social constituency of civic humanist ideals.

²⁶ Distinguished exceptions include the works of Lenman, Bruce, notably The Jacobite risings in Britain 1689–1746 (London, 1980)Google Scholar and The Jacobite clans of the great glen 1650–1784 (London, 1984)Google Scholar.

²⁷ Cf. the length of section 4 of the bibliography, ‘Military history’, and the brevity of section 10, ‘History of ideas’, in Moody, T. W. and Vaughan, W. E. (eds.), A new history of Ireland, IV Eighteenth century Ireland 1691–1800 (Oxford, 1986), 763–6, 779–80Google Scholar. The balance of a bibliography would be very different in the case of Scotland.

²⁸ Simms, , ‘John Toland (1670–1722), a Donegal heretic’, in War and politics, pp. 31–47Google Scholar.

²⁹ Simms, J. G. (ed.), The case of Ireland stated by Molyneux, William (Dublin, 1977)Google Scholar; idem, William Molyneux of Dublin 1656–1698 (Dublin, 1982), p. 115, admits that the Case ‘had no champions in Ireland’, though this would seem to be an overstatement.

³⁰ Simms, J. G., Colonial nationalism 1698–1776 (Cork, 1976)Google Scholar.

³¹ Boyce, D. George, Nationalism in Ireland (London, 1982), pp. 106–8Google Scholar.

³² For occasional Irish requests for a union (1703, 1709, and a groundless rumour of a request in 1759) see Moody, and Vaughan, (eds.), Eighteenth century Ireland 1691–1800, pp. 7, 362–3Google Scholar.

³³ The several authors of the New history of Ireland volume on this period, Moody and Vaughan (eds.), Eighteenth century Ireland 1691–1800, have been charged with portraying ‘a largely tension-free society, one in which antagonisms, hatreds and rivalries are muted or marginal and one in which burgeoning confidence is the salient trait’. For a counterbalancing stress on the lasting antagonism between the communities, and the vivid memories of the massacre of 1641, see Bartlett, Thomas, ‘A new history of Ireland, Past & Present, CXVI (1987), 206–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Such comfortable perspectives, argues Dr Bartlett, ‘seem to tell us more about the 1960s and the spirit of optimism in which the entire “New history” project was conceived’.

³⁴ Simms, ‘Irish catholics and the parliamentary franchise, 1692–1728’ and ‘The making of a penal law (2 Anne, c. 6), 1703–4’ in War and politics; Burns, R. E., ‘The Irish popery Laws’, Review of Politics, XXIV (1962), 485–508CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wall, Maureen, The penal laws, 1691–1760 (Dundalk, 1961)Google Scholar; Simms, J. G., The Williamite confiscation in Ireland 1690–1703 (London, 1956)Google Scholar; Cullen, L. M., The emergence of modern Ireland 1600–1900 (London, 1981)Google Scholar.

³⁵ ‘The period between the 1650s and 1790s has been perceived as a slow-moving cycle during which “catholic Ireland” was ground down and then began, haltingly, to recover strength…the criterion of relevance has been the influence of a particular process on the formation of Irish nationalism or on modern Irish society’: Dickson, David, New foundations: Ireland 1660–1800 (Dublin, 1987), p. viiGoogle Scholar.

³⁶ Dickson, , New foundations, p. 42Google Scholar.

³⁷ Simms, , ‘The Bishops' Banishment Act of 1697 (c. Will. III, c. 1)’ in War and politics, pp. 235–49Google Scholar; cf. Corish, Patrick J., The catholic community in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Dublin, 1981)Google Scholar.

³⁸ A varying number of regiments of foot and cavalry made up an Irish brigade in the French army until its abolition in 1791. The Irish fought their ancient enemy with particular effect at Fontenoy, uttering blood-chilling cries of ‘Cuimhnigí ar Luimneach agus feall na Sasanach’: Simms, J. G., ‘The Irish on the continent, 1691–1800’ in Moody, and Vaughan, , Eighteenth-century Ireland 1691–1800, pp. 629–56Google Scholar.

³⁹ Rev. W. Percival to Rev. R. Charlet, 10 Aug. 1714; quoted Dickson, , New foundations, P. 63Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ For a largely economic account of the background, cf. Beames, Michael, Peasants and power: the Whiteboy movements and their control in pre-famine Ireland (Brighton, 1983), pp. 1–41Google Scholar.

⁴¹ O'Brien, Gerard, in Anglo-Irish politics in the age of Grattan and Pitt, argues that the Union of 1801 was not Pitt's ‘solution to the constitutional difficulties created by the independent status of the Irish parliament’; its chief object was to facilitate catholic Emancipation (p. 158)Google Scholar.

⁴² For the Defenders as an early sectarian framework of catholic rebellion, see Elliott, Marianne, ‘The origins and transformation of early Irish republicanism’, International Review of Social History, XXIII (1978), 405–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴³ Bartlett, Thomas, ‘An end to moral economy: the Irish militia disturbances of 1793’, Past & Present, IC (1983), 41–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar. DrBartlett's, concept of the ‘moral economy’ which the disturbances of 1793Google Scholar allegedly disrupted owes nothing to civic humanist ideals.

⁴⁴ Study of this episode must henceforth begin with Elliott's, Marianne seminal work Partners in revolution: the United Irishmen and France (New Haven, 1982)Google Scholar; cf. Wells, Roger, Insurrection: the British experience 1795–1803 (Gloucester, 1986)Google Scholar. Dr Elliott emphasizes how far the United Irishmen, before the outbreak of the rebellion of 1798, were heirs to a protestant commonwealth tradition embracing such figures as Locke, Molyneux and Swift.

⁴⁵ Elliott, , Partners in revolution, p. xviGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁶ Quoted Connolly, , Priests and people, p. 1Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ Ibid. pp. 12–13, 110.

⁴⁸ O'Ferrall, Fergus, Catholic emancipation: Daniel O'Connell and the birth of Irish democracy 1820–30 (Dublin, 1985)Google Scholar; cf. the present author's review in Parliamentary History, VI (1987), 351–3Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ Connolly, , Priests and people, pp. 13–15Google Scholar. A feature of catholic political songs, even into the 1840s, was evidently their perception of the enemy as both Lutheran and Hanoverian; the events of 1714 should not be overlooked as determinants of political categories in Ireland, and the extent of any reconciliation between catholic and protestant communities in the ‘long afternoon’ of the Ascendancy, before 1798, calls for further research.

⁵⁰ Quoted in Connolly, , Priests and people, p. 43Google Scholar. It would be an exaggeration to attribute the change entirely to Maynooth; but the contrast is ‘not entirely unfounded’, suggests DrConnolly, (p. 44)Google Scholar.

⁵¹ Ibid. pp. 127–8, 229; Wall, Maureen, ‘The Whiteboys’; in Williams, T. D. (ed.), Secret societies in Ireland (Dublin, 1973), pp. 13–25Google Scholar; Donnelly, J. S., ‘The Whiteboy movement, 1761–5’, Irish Historical Studies, XXI (1978), 20–54Google Scholar.

⁵² Connolly, , Priests and people, pp. 219–29Google Scholar. Dr Connolly argues that only a small minority of parish priests were involved in the 1798 rising, and that the majority threw their influence against the rebellion. This thesis has been challenged by other historians.

⁵³ Connolly, , Priests and people, p. 237Google Scholar; by contrast, ‘There is little to indicate that either the catholic clergy or the persons engaged in agrarian disturbances saw themselves as taking part in a class war’, p. 239.

⁵⁴ Shaw, , Management of Scottish society, pp. 1–18Google Scholar.

⁵⁵ This was achieved despite attendances at Sunday mass in the 1830s which were no higher than other denominations' attendances in England at the 1851 religious census: Connolly, , Priests and people, pp. 265–6Google Scholar.

⁵⁶ Larkin, Emmett, ‘The devotional revolution in Ireland, 1850–75’, American Historical Review, LXXVII (1972), 625–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Miller, David W., ‘Irish Catholicism and the great famine’, Journal of Social History, IX (1975–1976), 81–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁷ For the economic and legislative pressure, see Youngson, After the forty-five; Jewell, B. F., ‘The legislation relating to Scotland after the forty-five’ (University of North Carolina, Ph.D. thesis, 1975)Google Scholar.

⁵⁸ Jenkins, Philip, The making of a ruling class: the Glamorgan gentry 1640–1790 (Cambridge, 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁹ Much controversy will doubtless be provoked by Newman, Gerald, The rise of English nationalism: a cultural history 1740–1830 (New York, 1987)Google Scholar. See the reviews forthcoming by Ian R. Christie, in Parliamentary History and by J. C. D. Clark, in the Journal of Modern History.

⁶⁰ Jones, , Modern Wales, pp. 29, 45–6Google Scholar.

⁶¹ Jenkins, Geraint H., Literature, religion and society in Wales 1660–1730 (Cardiff, 1978)Google Scholar, traces the introduction of a ‘print culture’ to those years; but its content, even before Methodism, was hostile to the bardic, familial ideals of the past, which Prys Morgan has termed ‘Merrie Wales’.

⁶² Jones, , Modern Wales, pp. 48, 209–10Google Scholar. The activities of the London-based Society of Ancient Britons, founded in 1715, and similar bodies, contained an echo of the desire to vindicate the historical role of the Welsh as the original inhabitants of the British Isles: Morgan, , Eighteenth-century Renaissance, pp. 57–8Google Scholar. These distant aspirations had equally little impact in Wåles and at Westminster.

⁶³ I differ here from the argument of Ellis, P. Berresford and Ghobhainn, S. Mac A', The Scottish insurrection of 1820 (London, 1970)Google Scholar.

⁶⁴ Its feasibility is a matter of speculation. There are grounds for thinking that the Welsh folk memory was as anti-Irish as it was anti-Saxon. Morgan, , Eighteenth-century Renaissance, pp. 16, 96, 107Google Scholar

⁶⁵ Simms, , ‘Toland’, p. 44Google Scholar.

⁶⁶ Jenkins, Geraint H., The foundations of modern Wales: Wales 1642– 1780 (Oxford, 1987), pp. 240–53, 387–9, 424–6Google Scholar. Lhuyd's Oxford pupils failed to carry on his work. For Ossian, see Morgan, , Eighteenth-century Renaissance, pp. 61, 80–4, 113Google Scholar.

⁶⁷ See also Morgan, Prys, ‘From a death to a view: the hunt for the Welsh past in the Romantic period’, in Hobsbawn, Eric and Ranger, Terence (eds.), The invention of tradition (Cambridge, 1983). PP. 43–100Google Scholar.

⁶⁸ Morgan, , Eighteenth-century renaissance, pp. 136–45Google Scholar.

⁶⁹ Ibid. p. 33.

⁷⁰ Cf. Jenkins, , The Glamorgan gentry 1640–1790, reviewed in Historical Journal, XXVII (1984), 773–88Google Scholar.

⁷¹ Historians have – with good reason – been slow to enlist Beau Nash as a civic humanist.

⁷² Jenkins, , Glamorgan gentry, esp. pp. 234–8Google Scholar. Howell, , Patriarchs and parasites, p. 194Google Scholar, has insufficient evidence to make a similar point; but his argument is fully consistent with it.

⁷³ Vincent, David, Bread, knowledge and freedom: a study of nineteenth-century working class autobiography (London, 1981)Google Scholar suggests its late arrival in a recognizably modern form. Black, Jeremy, The English press in the eighteenth century (London, 1987)Google Scholar shows how newspapers largely failed to perform the role once ascribed to them. Similar conclusions, for pamphlets and books, emerge from the work of Dr James Raven.

⁷⁴ Cf. Cain, Alex M., The cornchest for Scotland: Scots in India (Edinburgh, 1986)Google Scholar.

⁷⁵ Morgan, , ‘From a death to a view’, p. 69Google Scholar.

⁷⁶ See also Withers, Charles W. J., Gaelic in Scotland 1698–1981: the geographical history of a language (Edinburgh, 1984)Google Scholar and ‘Kirk, club and culture change: Gaelic chapels, Highland societies and the urban Gaelic subculture in eighteenth-century Scotland’;, Social History, X (1985), 171–92Google Scholar; Cuív, Brian Ó, ‘Irish language and literature 1691–1845’ in Moody, and Vaughan, (eds.), Eighteenth century Ireland 1691–1800, pp. 374–423Google Scholar.

⁷⁷ Durkacz, , Celtic languages, pp. V, 1–2Google Scholar.

⁷⁸ Ibid. pp. 189–90.

⁷⁹ Macinnes, A. I., ‘Scottish Gaeldom, 1638–1651: the vernacular response to the Covenanting dynamic’ in Dwyer, , Mason, and Murdoch, (eds.), New perspectives, pp. 59–94Google Scholar.

⁸⁰ Durkacz, , Celtic languages, pp. 191–7Google Scholar, argues that bodies like the Edinburgh-based Celtic Society created a Highland myth which ‘had no place for Gaelic as a vehicle of political expression or of day-to-day communication. It was to them a museum piece for the refined sentiments and heroic endeavours of the misty Celtic past…romanticism was ultimately a dead end for Gaelic, and for Irish and Welsh as well’.

⁸¹ Durkacz, , Celtic languages, pp. 191, 206–7Google Scholar; Elliott, , Partners in revolution, pp. 3–34Google Scholar; Cuív, Brian Ó, ‘The Gaelic cultural movements and the new nationalism’ in Nowlan, K. (ed.), The making of 1916 (Dublin, 1969), 1–27Google Scholar.

⁸² Cf. the papers printed in Mews, Stuart (ed.), Religion and national identity, Studies in Church History, XVIII (Oxford, 1982)Google Scholar, especially Anthony Fletcher, ‘The first century of English protestantism and the growth of national identity’; William Stafford, ‘Religion and the doctrine of nationalism in England at the time of the French revolution and Napoleonic wars’; Keith Robbins, ‘Religion and identity in modern British history’; D. W. Bebbington, ‘Religion and national feeling in nineteenth-century Wales and Scotland’.

⁸³ ‘Welshness, and a sense of Welshness, have had a variety of constituents over the centuries’: Jones, , Modern Wales, p. 304Google Scholar. ‘The story of the Celtic languages…fully told…will place the British experience in the context of linguistic and cultural confrontation throughout the world; itself a fundamental theme of world history': Durkacz, , Celtic languages, p. VGoogle Scholar.

⁸⁴ The extent to which American nationalism can be said to predate independence is newly problematic in the context of the experience of Scodand and Ireland.

⁸⁵ This, as much as a reinterpretation of the events of 1688, was the object of Price's, Richard famous sermon A discourse on the love of our country, delivered on Nov. 4, 1789 (London, 1789)Google Scholar.

⁸⁶ ‘The very few bilateral studies that exist of relations between Ireland and Scotland, Ireland and Wales, and Wales and Scotland disclose no fundamental affinity which links them with each other in a way which separates them from England’: Robbins, , ‘Core and periphery’, p. 292Google Scholar.