You can move up and down the timeline using the date bands: the bottom band moves you along centuries quickly and the middle bank moves along decades. Click on individual events to see more details and description.
A series of articles that chronicles Scotland's history through the ages right up to the present day. Articles provide a summary overview of our history and also link to useful and interesting external resources for even more information.
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Union of the Crowns
By the time James VI arrived in London in 1603 to unite the crowns and take up his throne as James I of England, he had one main aim - to fully bring the two countries together and create a brand new United Kingdom.
After centuries of warfare between the two countries, many Scots supported him in this. Yet it was the English who blocked a quick union because they didn't think it would be good for them.
Astonishingly, many of the arguments made by the English against a union at that time are exactly the same complaints against Scotland that you regularly hear voiced in England today.
Under pressure from James, the Scottish parliament actually passed a Treaty of Union in 1607, exactly 100 years before the two countries finally did merge into one when they both agreed the Act of Union. However, England would have nothing to do with the idea.
After nearly 1000 years of fighting to try and dominate Scotland, it seems incredible that when union was offered to the English on a plate, they turned it down.
They rejected the idea because they claimed - just as English politicians maintain today - that Scotland was poorer than England and so would demand subsidies from London to keep it afloat.
Another worry they had was that if the two countries did join together, then Scots would flood south in the hope and expectation that "their" king would give them a job.
James was able to grant a common citizenship to people born on both sides of the border, but that was about as far as union went during his reign. Both countries kept their own parliament, their own economies and their own trading arrangements.
Despite the setbacks, James's desire to draw the two countries together never dulled. He started to call his new kingdom Great Britain - a name which the English parliament of the time wasn't happy about - and personally supervised plans for a new union flag, which was finally agreed in 1606.
James was a shrewd king who quickly ensured that Scottish influence played a major part in decision making in London. He tried hard to be even handed, giving four out of ten of the appointments to his court at Whitehall to Scots and installing one in five members of the English privy council from north of the border.
Hundreds of Scots joined James in England, determined that they should profit from the closer relationship between the two ancient countries. By and large, they were successful. Slowly but surely, Scotland was finally starting to relinquish its freedom and independence.
James never lost his broad Scots accent, but he felt perfectly happy in London and never really felt the desire to return north. He didn't think he needed to, since he found governing the two countries a relatively easy task.
James even went as far as to boast to the English parliament that he was managing to control the Scots in a way which England had not managed over centuries of war.
He told them famously: "This I must say for Scotland, and may truly vaunt it: here I sit and govern with my pen; I write and it is done; and by a Clerk of the Council I govern Scotland now, which others could not do with the sword." And he was absolutely right.
However, it wasn't just the English who were cautious about the new relationship between the two old enemies. The Scots, too, had every reason to be careful. They recognised that theirs was a poor country, while England was rich, powerful, and influential. Even then, there were worries that the new accommodation could end up being a takeover rather than a partnership.
The fact that Scotland no longer had its own king was something of a shock to the system north of the border. Scots had grown used to their monarchs being away for long periods - not least because of imprisonment by the English - but it was always thought that they would return eventually. It quickly became clear that James VI was not coming back.
There were financial disadvantages too. Edinburgh, for instance, felt the loss of the royal court and its spending power. There was also a worry that trade would begin to suffer.
For all his interest in England, the king did not forget Scotland. The lawless Highland clans, for instance, were still extremely powerful, and he now felt empowered to take them on. He hunted down one of the most troublesome clans, the MacGregors, and effectively banned them, forcing them to take to the mountains.
In another move aimed at bringing order, James ordered the Bishop of the Isles, Andrew Knox, to meet with several of the chiefs on Iona. The aim was to try and persuade them to abandon their Catholic faith and become Protestants, and also to adopt more civilised lowland ways. Unsurprisingly, it didn't take long before the inter-clan slaughter started again.
James was always preoccupied with religion. He rejected the Catholicism of his mother, but at the same time felt uncomfortable with the harsh Calvinist faith of the Church of Scotland. However, he loved what he felt was the ordered, Episcopal dignity of the Church of England, and wanted to see the Kirk adopt the same style of worship.
The king didn't use gentle persuasion against the Kirk as much as brutal bullying. He invited eight of the most important Scottish ministers to talks in London in 1606, only to abuse them to their faces.
One of those who went down was his old adversary Andrew Melville, a leading thinker who had studied Calvinism on the continent and helped to draft the Kirk's Second Book of Discipline. James sent him to the Tower and forbade him ever to return to Scotland.
The king felt there was still a real chance of turning his native land away from the harshness of Calvinism and towards the Anglican form of worship. The Kirk was not yet a completely dominant force in Scotland, since parts of the country were still Catholic and some areas, notably Aberdeen, had already embraced episcopacy.
On his one and only visit back north of the border in 1617, James was determined to reform the Kirk and bring it more into line with English practice. However, his actions simply caused antagonism. When he introduced a choir and organ into the Chapel Royal at Holyrood, for instance, it only served to infuriate the locals.
More trouble followed when he attempted to reform the Kirk itself. James wanted to make a series of major changes to the way the church conducted its worship which struck at the very heart of Presbyterianism.
He insisted that Easter and Christmas were both celebrated as religious festivals in Scotland - they had fallen out of favour by this time for being unnecessarily Papist - and also demanded that, as was the case in England, Scots should receive communion on their knees.
Other changes he imposed were to allow private communion and baptism and the insistence that confirmation was carried out not by ministers but by bishops of the Kirk, who still existed at this time.
In 1618 the changes, known as the Five Articles of Perth, were put to the General Assembly, which was meeting in the city, and forced through. The ministers, though, were in rebellious mood and many refused to implement the changes. The result was that an enraged king banned the General Assembly, which did not meet again for another two decades.
It was not just the clergy who were infuriated and insulted by the king's attempts to force Anglican worship on them. The people too, were angry. Quietly and slowly, the Kirk began to plan its fight back.
It was a battle which would eventually split Scotland and consume the whole of Britain in civil war.
Meanwhile...
Victoria and Balmoral
Queen Victoria was the first English-born monarch of Great Britain ever to fall in love with Scotland. She thought it was the finest country in the world, and came north of the border as often as she could.
Yet the Queen - who ruled over the British Empire for 64 long years - only discovered the delights of the Scottish landscape, scenery and people by accident.
She was meant to be going to Brussels for a summer holiday in 1842, but she fell ill and her advisers thought a trip to Scotland would provide a good but less strenuous alternative.
Victoria came north and was immediately captivated. The affection she had for the Scots from then on was to profoundly shape both her own life and that of the country she effectively adopted.
She put the Highlands on the map, made them popular, sparked off a craze for tartan in fashionable society - and struck up a relationship with a servant which almost certainly developed into an illicit love affair.
Victoria's first sight of Scotland after arriving by ship at Leith was Edinburgh. Incredibly, she was only the second reigning British monarch to come north of the border - the first was George IV in 1820 - but she took to the country and its people straight away.
The young Queen was immediately enchanted with the capital, but her true heart lay in the Highlands. She travelled on to Perthshire, with her husband, Prince Albert, enjoying the deerstalking.
The pair immediately fell in love with the vast, open views and the stern but respectful people. And they quickly developed an affection for Balmoral, with its pocket-sized castle hidden deep in the Deeside countryside
At that time, the castle and estate were owned by Sir Robert Gordon, the brother of the Earl of Aberdeen. Victoria was offered the remaining lease when he died in 1847, and she decided to take it, renting the place out for her by-now annual visits north of the border.
The castle was small, but it afforded her privacy and an escape from the rigid protocol and often dull routine of royal life in faraway London. Prince Albert loved it as much as she did, partly because the countryside reminded him of his childhood in Germany.
The royal couple were offered the chance to buy the property and estate in 1852. They snapped up the opportunity, and decided to build a far grander castle on the site.
The old property - which, in any case, was in pretty bad repair - was demolished and a replacement, fashioned in granite and designed in the new and fashionable Scottish baronial style, built in its place.
But Victoria didn't just like the building and the countryside - she loved the local people too, and forged an affection between the Royal Family and the inhabitants of nearby villages such as Braemar and Ballater which continues to this day.
The Royal couple delighted in adopting Scottish customs. They ate porridge for breakfast, for instance, and quickly fell in love with tartan - to the extent that they decked the castle out in it.
Victoria often wore a tartan plaid and clothed her children in the kilt, while Albert actually designed his own tartan for use by the Royals. Their interest in the subject created an enthusiasm for it which made it the most fashionable cloth of the age, and which secured its position in the fashion world right through to the present day.
The Queen also deliberately set out to make contacts with local residents, and even visited them in their homes and made friends with their children. However, there was one local who stood head and shoulders above the rest in terms of her affection - the ghillie John Brown.
Victoria first met Brown shortly after taking the lease on Balmoral. At the time, he was a 21-year-old stable hand on the estate; the Queen was eight years older.
Prince Albert also took to him quickly, since the two men shared a love of shooting, hillwalking and deer shooting. As a result, the ghillie was a natural choice to accompany the Queen when she ventured out in the area alone.
When her beloved husband died suddenly from complications arising from a chill in 1861, Victoria was devastated, and took to the mourning black she would wear for the rest of her life.
In a bid to try and revive the shattered Queen, who was virtually on the edge of a nervous breakdown, courtiers summoned Brown. He travelled down to the Isle of Wight where she was staying at the time and her condition immediately improved.
There is little doubt that from then on, their relationship deepened and probably turned into a love affair. Remarkably, she became submissive to him. If he told her to do something, she immediately obeyed - she would, for instance, change an outfit if he didn't like it or felt it wasn't right for her.
His influence became overpowering. No longer were they just together in Scotland - the dour ghillie from the Highlands was expected to be by the Queen's side in London, too.
On one famous occasion, she refused to attend a military review in Hyde Park unless Brown was with her. Her advisers gently tried to persuade the Queen that with gossip over their relationship at fever pitch, this could cause a riot, but she refused to budge.
The problem was only solved when the Mexican Emperor fortuitously died, allowing relieved officials to cancel the whole thing as a mark of respect for his passing.
Unsurprisingly, rumours about the relationship spread far and wide, and there were even wild allegations that the Queen had given birth to a secret love child by Brown during a holiday in Switzerland in 1868.
Brown's position was deeply resented by the Royal Court, and the Prince of Wales - later to become Edward VII - is said to have loathed him. Yet his power over Victoria simply seemed to increase as the years passed.
He began to be privy to state secrets and exert his own influence and opinions over the politicians of the time. He could hire and fire household staff, and is said to have saved her life on a number of occasions by grabbing attackers and taking control of her runaway horses.
Then, in 1893, tragedy struck again for the ageing Queen. She had bought Brown a house at Balmoral for his retirement, but he never lived to enjoy it. Like Albert before him, he caught a chill while outdoors. Complications turned it to fever, and he was dead within days.
Once again, Victoria went into acute shock. She lost the use of her legs, complaining bitterly: "My grief is unbounded, dreadful, and I know not how to bear it or how to believe it possible. Dear, dear John, my kindest and best friend, to whom I could say everything."
This time, she never really recovered. Four years later, she celebrated her Diamond Jubilee, and four years after that, she died.
An age was finally over. But it had been an age which had been good for Scotland. At the end of Victoria's reign much of he country was prosperous, and its people well educated, ambitious and content.
Thanks to the efforts of the Queen who loved Scotland and everything about it, the country was finally on the world map in a new and different way. Stories of impoverished Highlanders and slum cities had been replaced by the powerful imagery of the shortbread tin - lochs, heather, porridge and tartan.
It was false, kitsch, and touristy, but the world loved it - and continues to love it to this very day.
Meanwhile...
The first settlers arrive in Dunedin, New Zealand
Hale and Burnett found the New York News Agency - later the Associated Press
William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, determines the temperature fo absolute zero
Russian serfs are emancipated
Mrs Beeton?s, ?Book of Household Management? is published
The Mombasa to Lake Victoria railway is completed
The Victorian Highlands
Queen Victoria's love affair with the Highlands inflicted a massive change on the country - by suddenly making it trendy and fashionable to travel north of the border.
In the space of just a few years, Highlanders stopped being seen as savages by the English and suddenly became the centre of fascination and attention.
The middle classes caught onto Victoria's example and started to fall in love with the customs and culture of Scotland's rugged, mountainous and remote north.
Scotland's changes after the second world war
You are here: Heritage | Timelines | William Wallace
He has a reputation as one of the greatest Scots heroes who ever lived - but the patriot Sir William Wallace may also have been the role model for one of England's greatest historical figures.
Some modern scholars believe that Wallace, whose fearless struggle for his country was immortalised in the film Braveheart, could well have provided the inspiration for the English folk hero Robin Hood.
Comparisons between the man who helped save Scotland from the English yoke and the folk hero of Sherwood Forest who robbed from the rich to give to the poor are uncanny.
For a start, both men were outlaws. Wallace is thought to have had a mistress called Marion, while Robin Hood's partner was called Maid Marion. And Robin had a follower called Friar Tuck, while one of William's retinue was a Benedictine monk called Edward Little.
Another intriguing comparison is that Robin Hood had a colleague called Little John. Wallace, who is reputed to have been six feet seven inches tall, is thought to have had a smaller brother called John, who may have been nicknamed "Little John" by the rest of the great man's followers.
One authority on the period says: "Thus comparison isn't fanciful. The story of Robin Hood could actually be the English making up their own version of William Wallace in order to claim their own hero. It could be the propaganda machine of English history at work."
Many historians are sceptical of the claim, though they do concede that there is no evidence that Robin Hood was a real figure, while we can prove that Wallace existed.
So what do we know about Scotland's great hero? We have plenty of evidence that he was a remarkable man and a great patriot, and that in his short 35-year life, he made a major contribution to Scotland's freedom and independence from England.
Wallace is believed to have been born around 1270 either at Elderslie in present-day Renfrewshire or at Ellerslie near Kilmarnock in Ayrshire. He is thought to have been the son of Sir Malcolm Wallace, a knight and small landowner in Renfrew.
As a boy, Wallace was sent to live with his uncle in Stirlingshire, who instilled him with stories about Scottish freedom and independence. Relations between England and Scotland had been amicable until Edward I took the English throne in 1272 and inaugurated 250 years of bitter hatred, savage warfare, and bloody border forays.
In 1286, when William was a boy, the Scots king Alexander III of Scotland, died. Many claimants to the throne arose, and the Scottish nobles foolishly requested Edward's arbitration. He cleverly compelled them all to recognise his overlordship of Scotland before pronouncing John Balliol king in 1292.
Balliol did homage and was crowned, but Edward's insistence on having the final say in Scottish cases eventually provoked the Scottish nobles to force Balliol to ally with France. Edward invaded and conquered Scotland in 1296, taking the Stone of Destiny on which Scottish kings were crowned to Westminster. Balliol abdicated, and Edward decided to rule the Scots himself.
This treatment, along with the outrages committed by English soldiers, infuriated Wallace, who decided to rise up along with a gang of supporters and take on the invaders. He was made an outlaw after stabbing to death the son of the governor of Dundee in 1291, and news of his bravery and exploits in ambushing English soldiers quickly spread across the country.
Wallace's first major act of resistance came when he sacked Lanark in 1297. He is said to have married his sweetheart, Marion Braidfute, who lived in the town and bore him a daughter. English forces attempted to seize him and when he escaped, they murdered Marion.
The death of his wife turned Wallace's campaign against the English from an act of national liberation into a hate-filled personal vendetta. He returned to Lanark, decapitated the sheriff with his sword, and set fire to the house. The town's population rose up and the entire English garrison was forced out.
Edward's troops on the run, Wallace stepped up the pressure. He put together an army of commoners and small landowners and attacked 500 English soldiers at Ayr. He then seized Glasgow and marched on Scone before moving north into the Western Highlands.
By this stage, Scotland's nobles were beginning to realise the power of this remarkable man, and they started to embrace his cause. Edward responded by sending 40,000 men north to try and sort the problem out. Wallace suffered a setback when many of the nobles deserted to the English near Irvine, but he was undaunted.
William succeeded in pushing the English south of the Forth, but Edward's army responded by trying to move north again. At the abbey of Cambuskenneth, the two sides finally met. The outnumbered Scots refused to negotiate with the English, saying they were there to prove that Scotland was free.
The result was that, on September 11 1297, the English army under John de Warenne, Earl of Surrey, tried to push across a narrow bridge across the River Forth at Stirling Bridge. It was a poor piece of military judgement, and Wallace immediately capitalised on it.
Wallace, who had only 16,000 men, had two major advantages. Firstly, he commanded the high ground; and secondly, the bridge would only take horse riders two abreast. However, he also faced a dilemma. If he attacked too early, it would have left most of the English army unscathed on the other side of the river and in a position to counter attack. But if he attacked too late, most of the solders would have crossed and he would be hopelessly overwhelmed.
Wallace picked his moment carefully. As the army began to cross in numbers, his forces charged and secured the bridgehead. The English caught on the bridge panicked and fell and jumped into the water. Some of the English army, stunned by the ferocity of Wallace's charge, fled back across the bridge. The ones left behind on the north side were systematically butchered.
The battle lasted barely an hour. More than five thousand English had died while Wallace suffered only negligible losses. De Warenne beat a hasty retreat, harried by Wallace's forces as they moved south. It was a great victory, and led to Wallace being appointed Guardian of Scotland by a delighted Scottish nobility.
By the end of the month the English had been expelled totally from Scotland. Wallace then marched into England in search of booty, which he collected as far south as Newcastle, often showing the same brutality which the English forces had shown the Scots.
A furious Edward swore revenge and put together a massive army of 100,000 footmen and 8000 horsemen. Recognising the superiority of Edward's army, Wallace withdrew north. Unfortunately, his plans to surprise the English in a night attack were betrayed by two Scottish nobles. Edward immediately ordered his men to advance, until the two armies met at Falkirk.
Wallace's problems in being massively outnumbered were made infinitely worse when Comyn, the Lord of Badenoch who provided a large part of the Scots army, deserted the field with his men. It was a fight William could not win. The Scots army was utterly defeated, though Wallace himself slipped away from the battlefield, resigned the Guardianship and went to France to beg for help from the French.
Unable to gain support from Philip - and, it is now believed, from the Pope, as he either planned or actually made a trip to Rome during this time - Wallace returned to Scotland in 1303 and once again began harassing the English.
Since his departure for France, however, things at home had changed. Edward had now completely overwhelmed the Scots, and most nobles now submitted to him. Scotland had become a treacherous place for Wallace, especially since he was still public enemy number one as far as Edward was concerned and a bounty of 300 merks had been placed on his head.
Inevitably, he was betrayed. He was seized by a Scots baron, John Monteith, near Glasgow, taken to Dumbarton castle, and then moved to London under heavy guard. On 23 August 1305, he was tried for treason. In an impassioned statement, Wallace rejected this, point out he had never accepted Edward as king. "I cannot be a traitor", he said, "for I owe him no allegiance. He is not my sovereign; he never received my homage."
His resistance was futile. Wallace was found guilty, condemned, and immediately dragged on a cart through the streets of London to Smithfield. He was subjected to the most brutal of executions - hung until only half-dead, castrated, and then slit open while still alive to have his guts pulled out and burned in front of his eyes. Only then was he finally beheaded.
Even this was not the final ignominy. His head was placed on a pole on London Bridge, and his body cut into quarters and sent to Berwick, Newcastle, Perth and Aberdeen as warning to others. It was an inglorious end, but by then Wallace's place in history as one of the great men of Scotland had been assured.
Modern day historians agree that Wallace was one of the greatest Scots who ever lived. Geoffrey Barrow, Emeritus Professor of Scottish History at Edinburgh University and an expert on the period, says: "His one outstanding quality was his sense of single mindedness. He had one aim - to re-establish the independence of the kingdom - and he stuck to it."
And another Wallace expert, Professor Archie Duncan of Glasgow University, says: "He seems to have been a remarkable man. What is really interesting is that he seems to have been accepted as a leader despite his social class as the younger son of a relatively inconsequential family. You'd normally expect to find someone like that in the entourage of someone further up the social hierarchy."
Meanwhile...
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