If you’re familiar with the oeuvre of Mel Gibson, you may also be familiar with some of my early work. I’m talking specifically about Gibson’s movie version of Hamlet. I appear in that film, as a mourner at Ophelia’s funeral, and I do two emotions only: sad (Ophelia is dead) and surprise! (Hamlet is back) and I don’t do them very well I must say, which is probably why I’m doing this right now instead of that.

In case you’ve never seen the finished movie (and I don’t think it was a hit) let me tell you it’s pretty good really and much better than the film Gibson made next: the one about Scotland. I still remember seeing Braveheart for the first time and knowing, as someone who’d read a book, that the movie wasn’t how things happened: it was souped up and sexed up. But it was fun I guess, and if there was ever a moment when the SNP could have got to me, it was in those first few seconds after leaving the Odeon on Renfield Street in 1995. It faded quickly though. Of course it did. Good sense is better than bad emotion.

One thing Braveheart did get pretty much right though was Edward I, played with teeth-bared relish by Patrick McGoohan. Neither the script nor McGoohan’s portrayal had subtlety – Edward was shown as an outright baddie and definitely not a supporter of LGBTQIA+ rights – but it seems to me that’s about right: Edward didn’t do nuance. As the comedian David Mitchell points out in Unruly, his entertaining new book on England’s monarchs, most early kings did horrible things by modern standards because that’s often how you became king and stayed king and Edward was good at the job judged by those rules.

There’s another point too that Mitchell makes which is closer to home in a way and has been on my mind ever since I read the book. His point essentially is that everything with England and Scotland goes horrible forever because of Edward. Alexander III of Scotland fell off his horse and died and Edward thought: right, here’s my chance, and the rest you know. Mitchell’s bigger point is that we’re still feeling the effects. “Edward scented opportunity,” he writes, “as it turned out, it was the opportunity to f*** up Anglo-Scottish relations for the rest of time.”

You may think Mitchell is over-stating things here but the continuing familiarity and power of the Wallace/Edward story says something else. Mitchell points out that people often cite Boris Johnson or Brexit as reasons Scottish nationalistic feeling has increased – and there’s some truth in it – but he also believes there’s been something deep and ancient for those things to work on: an old feeling, an old wound. Put there, with a broadsword, by the Hammer of the Scots.

It’s worth quoting Mitchell a bit more: “modern Scottish nationalism, the rise of the SNP, are phenomena for which Edward I may be responsible. His hammering, and his inclination to see relations between England and Scotland in unnuanced, hammerish terms, made him an unwitting blacksmith of the sword of Scottish independence.” Edward’s brutal intransigence, Mitchell goes on to say, caused a deep cultural pain and evoked a shared, defensive national emotion which will outlast his castles.

Yes, is what I have to say to that and I know it because, like a lot of Scots, I’ve felt what Mitchell describes: at last, I see who’s to blame for all this: Edward! The English! History! But the good news is that nuance wins in the end. As Mitchell points out, nationalism has positive and negative elements. On the one hand, there’s cultural identity and Freedom! and on the other, there’s xenophobia. But not all people who see themselves as different come to define that as an aspiration for independence.

I think Mitchell really hits, or hammers, the nail on the head with that point. Scots who vote No and Scots who vote Yes are not very different: most of us see ourselves as distinct to the English culturally and so on. But the point is No voters do not then conclude difference has to mean independence: difference within a union is fine too. And maybe No voters are different in one other important respect too: we acknowledge the cultural pain and shared emotion Mitchell describes. But, 700 years later, we don't let it influence us unduly.