guest house edinburgh
    |
guest house edinburgh, bed breakfast , holiday accommodation scotland, hotel central, shopping, guest house edinburgh, festival, tourist breaks ecosse, guest house edinburgh
History
Famous attempts were made to replace the Hanoverian kings of England with Catholic Stuarts, although the Jacobite cause lacked support outside of the Highlands due to the Lowland suspicion of Catholicism. James Edward Stuart, known as the Old Pretender and son of the exiled English king James VII, made several attempts to regain the throne, but fled to France in 1719. In 1745, his son, known as Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Young Pretender, landed in Scotland to claim the crown for his father. His disastrous defeat in 1745 at Culloden caused the government to ban private armies, the wearing of kilts and the playing of the pipes. Coinciding with the inexorable changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution, the bans caused the disappearance of a whole way of life and the quelling of the Highlanders.
In the south, the Industrial Revolution brought flourishing towns and expanding populations, the creation of industries such as cotton and shipbuilding, and booming trade. The spread of urban life coincided with an intellectual flowering, the Scottish Enlightenment, as people fed the energy they'd previously spent on religious issues into their leisure and money-making activities. Literature in particular blossomed. Life for the privileged became increasingly bourgeois, while the poor got poorer, suffering typhoid epidemics and other side-effects of their overcrowded tenement life. Cities grew even bigger following one of the bleakest events in the north's already grim history: the Highland Clearances that began in the late 1700s and continued for more than a century. Overpopulation, the potato famine and the collapse of the kelp industry caused landlords to force or trick people from the land. Waves of Scots emigrated to North America, New Zealand and Australia, taking with them their reputation for thrift and hard work. The few who remained on the land were pushed onto tiny plots called crofts.
Industrial prosperity lasted through WWI, but the world depression of the 1930s struck a mortal blow. Aberdeen was the only city to show marked prosperity in the 20th century, thanks to North Sea oil and gas discoveries in the 1970s. Continuing economic hardship, rampant unemployment, the depopulation of rural areas and lower standards of health and housing than those experienced in England have all led to a loss of confidence. However, dreams of seceding from the Union with England are stronger than they've been for many years.
Strongly Labour, Scotland smarted through the 1980s and '90s under Britain's Conservative-led government, which showed scant regard for Scotland's desire for self-rule. The decisive Labour victory in the 1997 general election resulted in the loss of all Conservative seats in Scotland and the birth of a Scottish Parliament, which first convened in 1999. A new parliament building is being constructed at Holyrood in Edinburgh, and is expected to open in November 2003. The Labour government has already granted limited Scottish devolution, so the birth of an independent Scotland some time in the 21st century isn't such a romantic idea after all.