Published in Scotland Magazine Issue 27 on 09/06/2006.

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The greatest fraud of all?

James Irvine Robertsonon the strange but highly lucrative case of James Macpherson

Culloden was the last battle to be fought on British soil. After centuries of trying to integrate the alien and barbaric culture that had clung on in the north for so long into mainstream Scottish life, it was finally destroyed and could be forgotten.

A few romantics clung on to the myth of the hero prince, but this was a Lowland aberration. Jacobitism and the Gaels that fought for the cause could be placed in the dustbin of history. Scotland became North Britain, and more importantly, its inhabitants were proud to use the appellation.

But within a couple of generations everything had changed. In 1822, King George IV was in Edinburgh clad in a kilt. At a banquet held in the Great Hall of Parliament House, his toast was not to the nation, but to ‘all chieftains and all the clans of Scotland.’ Several factors had brought about this remarkable rehabilitation.

One was the success of the Highland regiments in the British army, but the most important was a fraud.

James Macpherson was born in 1738 at Ruthven in Invernesshire. His family were from the minor gentry of the clan. He was educated for the church, but never took orders, preferring instead a literary career in Edinburgh. In 1758 he published a poem Highlander, which was received with universal indifference, but he was in the right place at the right moment.

The great men of the Scottish Enlightenment were proving to the world, and to themselves, that the intellectual life of Edinburgh was second to none.

In 1760 he pu.....

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By James Irvine Robertson

Section : Scottish History

Page number : 20