Alba gu bra! (Scotland forever)
In the wonderful movie Braveheart, the character of William Wallace speaks to rally Scottish fighters before the battle of Stirling Bridge in 1297:
Aye, fight and you may die. Run and you’ll live, at least a while. And dying in your beds many years from now, would you be willing to trade all the days from this day to that for one chance–just one chance–to come back here and tell our enemies, that they may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom?
As the National Archives of Scotland states, “Edward refused to allow William Wallace’s victory at Stirling Bridge in 1297 to derail his campaign. In 1306 Robert the Bruce seized the throne and began a long struggle to secure his position against internal and external threat. His success at Bannockburn in 1314, when he defeated an English army under Edward II, was a major achievement but the English still did not recognise Scotland’s independence or Bruce’s position as king.
On the European front, by 1320 Scottish relations with the papacy were in crisis after they defied papal efforts to establish a truce with England. When the pope excommunicated the king and three of his bishops, the Scots sent the Declaration of Arbroath as part of a diplomatic counter-offensive. The original letter, delivered to the pope in Avignon, is lost, but we know it reached him. He wrote to Edward II urging him to make peace, but it was not until 1328 that Scotland’s independence was acknowledged.”
So, more historically than the movie quote, in 1320, Scottish independence fighters would proclaim the Declaration of Arbroath that says, in part, this:
For so long as a hundred of us remain alive, we never will in any degree be subject to the dominion of the English, since it is not for glory, riches or honors we fight, but for LIBERTY alone which no good man loses but with his life.