Colonial Myth-making and Anti-Scottish Sentiment in Charles Bertram’s Letters to William Stukeley

Sophie Dickson ORCID iD icon https://orcid.org/0009-0004-6171-0513

Sophie Dickson was one of two volunteers who worked with Electronic Enlightenment and Bodleian colleagues to catalogue, image, transcribe, and annotate a selection of letters between antiquarians Charles Bertram and William Stukeley, supported by the UNIQ+ programme. For more information on the programme, and our next UNIQ+ project in summer 2025, “Slave Trade and Plantation Management: The Barham Papers (1792–1820)”, please visit UNIQ+ Projects 2025 where full details can be found under ‘Digital Humanities’.

With the words “nemo sine crimine vivit”, the young English expatriate based at the University of Copenhagen, Charles Bertram, urged William Stukeley to forgive his faults. These faults, he admitted, were his undying love for antiquities and his rude intrusion into Stukeley’s acquaintance.1 However, Bertram’s interruption of Stukeley’s professional and social circle birthed a collection of 32 letters spanning from 1746 to 1764, later collated by Stukeley. Early in their communication, Bertram revealed the spectacular discovery of what he claims were fifteenth-century manuscript fragments written by a “Ricardi Monachi Westmonasteriensis”. The manuscript detailed lost geographical information of Roman Britain, assembled from various contemporary Roman sources such as Beda, Orosius, Pliny, and Ptolemy.2 Through their correspondence, Bertram gradually shared fragments of the manuscript with Stukeley until its publication in 1757 as De Situ Britanniae (The Description of Britain).

This manuscript challenged the established boundaries between Roman Britain and the ‘barbarous north’. Being the first manuscript to feature a description of Roman forts and roads extending further north than Perth, it mapped an area in Scotland called Vespasiana. This comprised of the central Scottish Highlands, with the Northern boundary extending as far north as the Beauly Firth. The revolutionary nature of this discovery and the impeccable timing of its appearance made the manuscript a highly influential and successful find. Only solidified further by Stukeley’s praise of the document, commenting in his notes that "lovers of their country will always be delighted with [it]”.3

As argued by Kristina Hildebrand, the delight surrounding the discovery of Vespasiana was undeniably dependent on the Jacobite uprising of 1746, ending famously in the defeat of the Jacobite forces in the battle of Culloden.4 The significant number of Highlanders taking up arms for Charles Edward Stuart (1720–1788) reflected support for the restoration of the Stuart dynasty, but also their resistance to cultural amalgamation into Britain, threatening British stability and unification. Prince William Augustus, the Duke of Cumberland (1721–1765) led the effort to integrate the Highlands into the wider British identity.5 As general of the government’s forces, he was considered a war hero of the rebellion for ruthlessly defeating the Jacobean supporters, earning an anthem "See the Conquering Hero Comes" by George Frideric Handel (1685–1759) to celebrate his victory. However, the brutality that earned Cumberland the nickname the ‘Butcher’ by opponents manifested in his military occupation of the Scottish Highlands, holding jurisdiction to confiscate lands, punish crime, and manage lands to encourage supposed improvements in the area.6 Mapping and establishing military posts were also included in this national effort to break its isolation, an endeavour commenced in 1747 by the Scottish Major-General William Roy (1726–1790). He wrote that “a country, so very inaccessible by nature, should be thoroughly explored and laid open, by establishing military posts in its inmost recesses, and carrying roads of communication to its remotest parts".7

Bertram’s manuscript supported the political agenda devised to pacify, map, and reform the Highlands of Scotland, aiming to bring an autonomous and peripheral area of Britain safely into the wider British identity. By providing precedent from the Roman occupation of a unified Britain spanning further into Scotland than previously thought, it presented an auspicious opportunity for the history of medieval Britain and its borders to be glossed over, conveniently rewriting Scottish history to be more favourable to a social, economic, and cultural unification.8 However, this convenient historical record was indeed too good to be true: a forgery created by the hand of Charles Bertram.

Bertram’s ‘rediscovery’ of the Roman routes within Scotland as communicated through his letters to William Stukeley almost exactly mirrors the efforts to systematically pacify the Highlands of Scotland. Although rather speculative due to an absence of evidence explaining how news from his native Britain reached Bertram in Copenhagen, as creator of his forgery, each point and location pulled from his map must have been consciously chosen to assure its success. In the observations he relayed to Stukeley, he consistently pinpoints locations of forts and roads that are relevant to the military occupation in the aftermath of the Jacobite uprising, therefore creating a geographical parallel between the military positions of Roman Britain and Hanoverian Britain.

In his letter of August 1748 to Stukeley, Bertram describes Vespasiana as “many stations north of Bodotria [Firth of Forth] but also makes the Military Rout Stretch to the very Mouth of the River Varar” [Beauly Firth, as described by Ptolemy].9 He corrects the location of Castra Alata placed on Ptolemy’s map of Britain “tho’ falsely, ascribed to Edenburg”, instead naming it as being close to Inverness.10 Located in the area north-east of Inverness is Fort George, built just after the battle of Culloden. Its construction was to replace an earlier fortress from 1726 and was intended as the main garrison fortress to base the military effort in the Highlands, named after King George II.11 He then continues: "If I might be indulged my Conjecture, I should think the present Road leading from Perth by Dunkeld, Blair and Fort Augustus, either to be the Roman Road reedify’d, or that upon struct scrutiny One would be found not far off; Reason seeming to indicate the Romans had a station not far from that said fort".12 Another fort built with intentions to suppress rebellious Jacobite supporters during the previous uprising of 1715, Fort Augustus was named after the Duke of Cumberland for his contributions to defence.

Finally, Bertram finishes his description of the map by stating: "In like manner, that that which goes from Blair North by Ruthven upon Spey, turning to the left-Hand leads to Inverness, I imagine to be a Roman military Way, & that its course was formerly directly to Nairn. However, Bertram’s description reads as somewhat misinformed. Immediately south-east of Inverness, and south of Nairn lies Ruthven, but it is nestled on the River Findhorn. Therefore, the most probable location of “Ruthven-on-Spey” is Ruthven Barracks, next to Kingussie and the River Spey. Although Ruthven Barracks is much further south of Inverness than Bertram implies, it does follow Blair Atholl when travelling north. If so, built in 1719, the barracks were also constructed in connection to the Jacobite uprisings, just like the previous locations highlighted in Bertram’s correspondence. The navigational errors in Bertram’s description can be simply explained by his unfamiliarity with the geography of Scotland. Seeking aid from a Scottish native named “Mr Gordon” in deciphering his map, Bertram even appealed to Stukeley for additional advice from any other “Scotch persons of erudition” in his acquaintance.13 This mix up indicates he was using contemporary places in the Highlands that he had only heard of from second-hand sources, resulting in misinterpretation. This suggests further the intent that he was purposely fabricating geographical parallels between the locations of the Roman forts of ancient, and the military pacification following the Jacobite uprisings.

The forged manuscript and the accompanying fake map a Roman Scotland cannot be disentangled from the events of the aftermath of the Jacobite uprising, which had mapping and military occupation as important elements of the pacification efforts of the Highlands. Simultaneously, the Roman military routes and fortifications highlighted by Bertram suspiciously echo the placement of significant anti-Jacobean advancements. By creating a parallel between the two periods of history, it would have only served to confirm the popular opinions trending at the time regarding the problemed peripheral areas of Britain. By integrating the Scottish Highlands into a fictive Roman Empire, Betram’s forged history created a historical narrative where a modern British state would be entitled to conquer and unify, both culturally and politically, the whole island of Britain as they liked.

Notes:

  1. Charles Bertram to William Stukeley, 23 August 1746.
  2. ‘Richard of Westminster’, later “officially attributed” to a monk of Cirencester.; Charles Bertram to William Stukeley, 1747
  3. Stukeley continued to offer support and advice to Bertram, later publishing An Account of Richard of Cirencester, Monk of Westminster, and of his Works (1757). David Boyd Haycock, ‘Stukeley, William (1687–1765), antiquary and natural philosopher’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (Oxford, 2004); William Stukeley, Itiner. Rici de Cirencest. I notes, fol. 37r.
  4. Kristina Hildebrand, ’Making up the Middle Ages: Roman Scotland and Medievalism in the Eighteenth Century’, in Mary Boyle (ed.) International Medievalisms: From Nationalism to Activism, (Boydell & Brewer, 2023), p.26.
  5. Geoffrey Plank, ‘Cumberland’s Army in Scotland’, in Rebellion and Savagery: The Jacobite Rising of 1745 and the British Empire, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), p.103.
  6. Ibid, pp.103–104.; Plank, ‘Savagery: Military Execution and the Inhabitants of the Highlands’, p.54.
  7. William Roy, An Account of the Measurement of a Base on Hounslow-Heath, (Royal Society of London, 1785), p.386.
  8. Hildebrand, ‘Making up the Middle Ages: Roman Scotland and Medievalism in the Eighteenth Century’, pp.19–21.
  9. Charles Bertram to William Stukeley, 17 August 1748.
  10. Ibid.
  11. ‘Fort George’, Historic Environment Scotland, [accessed 03/09/2024]
  12. Charles Bertram to William Stukeley, 17 August 1748.
  13. Bodleian Library, Oxford University, M.S. Eng. Lett. b.2, folio 10v and Charles Bertram to William Stukeley, 17 August 1748.

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