How the Scots Invented the Modern World (47 page)

Modernity’s smug contempt for the past infuriated him. It was what he most disliked about Presbyterianism, after John Knox and his followers had blithely destroyed ancient churches and monasteries, and blotted out ageless popular customs and reverence for the monarchy. The
Edinburgh Review
crowd did not seem to him all that different. Scott had launched himself on a one-man campaign to reverse that legacy of hostility, or at least indifference, toward Scotland’s past. His narrative poems had been one aspect of this. He also built a house at Abbotsford in his beloved Border country, as a kind of museum of Scottish history, preserving and displaying relics such as the Earl of Montrose’s sword, Rob Roy’s long-barreled gun, and suits of armor and antique crossbows—each object conjuring up for his visitors a vanished time and place, and the people who had inhabited it. He even chose the spot because it stood near the site of a medieval clan battle.

Then, one day in the autumn of 1813, while rummaging through the drawers in an old cupboard, Scott came across a relic of his own past. It was the half-finished manuscript of a novel he had started years before, based on the Forty-five and the stories he had heard about it as a boy. As he thumbed through it, it occurred to him that this might be another way to inspire a broad audience to appreciate Scottish history: through prose fiction. He had already decided it was time to move on from poetry: Lord Byron had published
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
the previous year, and proved that he could execute narrative historical poems even better than Scott could. So Scott brought the pages downstairs to his study. He sent a portion to his publisher, John Ballantyne, and by the time he was back in Edinburgh in January 1814, he had finished the whole first section, with a provisional title:
Waverley: ’Tis Fifty Years Since.

Those who have never read it may be surprised to learn that the novel’s main character, Waverley, is not a Scot at all but an Englishman, an officer in the British army who is garrisoned in Scotland on the eve of Prince Charles’s landing. Waverley meets a Highland chief, Fergus MacIvor, and his sister Flora, and, inspired by their courage and passion for the prince’s cause, becomes a Jacobite himself. It is a story of divided loyalties and clashing cultures, of a man torn between his love for a noble but doomed cause, symbolized by the beautiful Flora, and his own sense of duty. Readers, including his publisher, were blown away by it. When it appeared in July 1814, it outsold all of Scott’s previous works—and created a whole new literary genre, the historical novel.

Even the
Edinburgh Review
was captivated. It wrote of the “surprise that is excited by discovering, that in our country, and almost in our own age, manners and characteristics existed, and were conspicuous, which we had been accustomed to consider as belonging to remote antiquity or extravagant romance.” Of course, the people who were, even that summer, being expelled from their homes in Sutherland and Ross might have told the reviewer that. But no one in 1814 was listening to them. Scott, almost by accident, had become their voice, however indirectly and imperfectly. Through the Highland shepherds, crofters, and fishermen he put into his novels (which, all critics agree, are Scott’s best literary characters), the voice of rural Scotland reached a wider audience than anyone could have imagined.

Scott followed
Waverley
with
Guy Mannering,
then
Old Mortality
and
Rob Roy.
The books poured off his desk at an astonishing rate. They were the capstone of those years that Lord Byron, not without some jealousy, called “the reign of Scott.” The novels made him the best-paid author in Britain; by now he was earning close to ten thousand pounds a year in royalties and advances. They also created a mass market for novels and novelists on which every one of his English successors could capitalize: Jane Austen (whom Scott admired and championed), Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and all the other great names of nineteenth-century literature on the Continent as well: Balzac, Hugo, Flaubert, and Tolstoy. The historical novel became a distinct art form, a way of making the past come alive through an intriguing blend of imaginative fantasy and meticulous fidelity to historical truth—a form that has proved more successful with modern readers than history itself. Tolstoy could never have conceived a work such as
War and Peace
without Scott’s example, or Hugo a work such as
Les
Miserables
; other historical fiction writers, from Balzac and Alexandre Dumas to Bulwer-Lytton (
The
Last Days of Pompeii
), Lew Wallace (
Ben-
Hur
), and Jules Verne, owed Scott a similar debt—not to mention the best of all his Scottish successors, Robert Louis Stevenson.

Scott had not only invented the modern historical novel, but one of its enduring themes: the idea of cultural conflict. He revealed to his readers that the development of “civilization” or modernity does not leave clean or neat breaks; one stage does not effortlessly pass on to the next. They overlap and clash, and individuals get caught in the gap. Waverley and the heroes in
Ivanhoe
and
Redgauntlet
find themselves culturally at odds with their world, and even with their own identities. His novels, whether they are set in the Highlands, in medieval England, or in Palestine, reveal history as a series of “culture wars”: Frank versus Saracen (in
The Talisman
), Jew versus Christian (in
Ivanhoe
), Norman versus Saxon, Scotsman versus Englishman, Lowlander versus Highlander, Presbyterian versus Episcopalian.

And which side is superior, and which deserves to lose, is never fully resolved. Scott detested the old-style Scottish Calvinism—but in a novel such as
Old Mortality,
he treated it sympathetically and left no trace of his own feelings. Virginia Woolf remarked of Scott’s novels, “part of their astonishing freshness, their perennial vitality, is that you may read them over and over again, and never know for certain what Scott himself was or what Scott himself thought.” Scott the novelist introduced a key ingredient of the modern consciousness, a sense of historical detachment—something that Macaulay (who was a great admirer of Scott) and other historians of the early Victorian age still lacked.

Part of that detachment arose from an insight Scott shared with David Hume and the rest of the Scottish Enlightenment: that the modern world generates opposing tensions, which cannot be resolved without destroying the whole. Scott was aware of such divisions in himself—between the romantic poet and the historical scholar, between the lover of nature and the student of science, between the sentimental Jacobite and the hardheaded lawyer, between the staunch Tory and the admirer of progress (he was the first person in Edinburgh to install gas lighting in his house). And he was aware of the same split in Scottish culture. “The Scottish mind was made up of poetry and strong common sense,” he wrote to a friend, “and the very strength of the latter gave perpetuity and luxuriance to the former.” The credit for defining the artist as a person who can hold two inconsistent ideas at once goes to F. Scott Fitzgerald. The credit for realizing that that is precisely what all modern men can do—indeed,
must
be able to do— belongs to Sir Walter Scott.

The Waverley novels thrust Scott onto the public stage (although they were published pseudonymously, everyone knew who wrote them). He became friends with the mighty and great in London and at Whitehall. Following Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, he traveled to Paris to meet his hero, the Duke of Wellington, as well as the Russian Tsar. He also became friends with the Prince of Wales, soon to be George IV. The prince had already offered him the post of Poet Laureate, which Scott declined—the idea of having to compose a poem every year to celebrate the king’s birthday, or for other state occasions, was too much even for this staunch Tory. But in 1815 they finally met in London.

The Prince of Wales was fat, lazy, lecherous, vain, and inconsiderate. He was a drunkard who practically lived on cherry brandy. He had abandoned his wife and betrayed his old political allies, the Whigs. But he was also a cultured and intelligent man, who had read Ossian and knew
Waverley
almost by heart. The prince’s admiration for his work, and his undeniable charm, won Scott over. In turn, Scott began to impress on the man who would soon be king the idea that his mission should be to restore to Britain its rich historical legacy, including the legacy of Scotland. He could be the new Bonnie Prince Charlie, Scott explained, a romantic monarch for a modern empire.

One place to start was to recover the lost regalia of the Scottish monarchy: the Sword, Sceptre, and Crown. They had been stored away in Edinburgh Castle after 1707 and then forgotten. The Prince gave Scott permission to enter the castle to conduct the search. After a long and dramatic hunt through the dark cellars, corridors, and storerooms of the old fortress, which drew enormous public interest and crowds, they were finally found in a dilapidated chest. To Scott, they were the sacred symbols of Scottish nationhood. When one of his assistants jocularly offered to place the crown on the head of a nearby young lady, Scott shouted, “By God, no!” and snatched it away. The recovery of the Scottish regalia earned Scott his baronetcy, and prepared the way for the next step in restoring Scotland’s vanished glory.

It is not true, as is sometimes claimed, that the King’s visit to Edinburgh in 1822 was Scott’s idea. The Prince of Wales, now George IV, had been planning a tour of his British dominions for years, and following his state visit to Ireland, Scotland was the next stop. When he announced his plans to Edinburgh’s Lord Provost, the Provost turned to Scott, now Sir Walter Scott, for help. Scott, in turn, called on David Stewart of Garth, the sharp-tongued soldier and critic of the Sutherland clearances, for ideas on how to stage the ceremonies to accompany the royal visit. In the end, it was Stewart as much as Scott who devised the pageantry for “the king’s jaunt” that August, pageantry that changed irrevocably the relationship between England and Scotland, and capped the Highland cultural revival—even as that culture was vanishing forever.

The King made his view of the visit clear when he said, “I dislike seeing anything in Scotland that is not purely national and characteristic.” For an enthusiastic reader of
Waverley
and
Rob Roy,
that meant Highland attire and display, with kilts, bonnets, tartans, bagpipes, and Gaelic battle songs, so those were what Walter Scott and David Stewart decided to provide. Of course, the King had never seen actual Highland dress, except on soldiers in the Black Watch or other Scottish regiments. They wore the shorter version of the kilt, the philabeg or
féileadh-beag,
which strapped around the waist with a yard or so of plaid attached at the shoulder, instead of the
breacan an féileadh,
the full twelve yards of plaid baggily belted in the middle, which had been the traditional dress of Highland males for centuries. On the other hand, the philabeg used less material, was easier to wear, and was less redolent of rural poverty and sleeping out of doors on an empty stomach. So the King’s visit made it the new “authentic” Highland kilt. It has remained so down to today— just as the visit turned Scottish history into
Highland
history, with Lowlanders and Borderers largely forgotten.

If the King had no idea what real Highlanders looked like, neither did most Edinburghers. The ceremonies Stewart and Scott devised were to be as much a lesson in Scottish history for Scots as for George IV, and as much a salute to their country as to the King. It was the first state visit by a reigning monarch since 1650, and the first since the Union. This was Scotland’s chance to shine in the eyes of its King and the rest of the world, a chance to establish its place in the British Empire. For that reason, its organizers decided, too much would probably not be enough.

That July, Scott’s house at Castle Street was a workshop of activity. Every day from seven in the morning until past midnight, a steady stream of messengers, visitors, porters, and officials came and went, while Scott drew up designs, protocols, invitations, lists of guests, and orders of predecent during ritual ceremonies. Everything was to be as it had been before 1707, with a parade of state and regal splendor down High Street such as Edinburgh might have seen in the days of James IV.

Some things had to be changed, however. There was no longer a Scottish Parliament, so no “riding of the Parliament” was possible. Other ways of celebrating Scotland’s political traditions had to be worked out. Scott and Garth turned the Royal Company of Archers, for example, into a sort of King’s bodyguard of Scottish peers and aristocrats. Likewise, the Highland dress everyone would wear for the ceremonies had to be suitably martial, including targes, broadswords, and dirks, with a
sgian dhu,
or short dagger, inserted at the top of the stocking. This would remind onlookers of Scottish courage and valor, whether on Dunrossie Moor at Culloden or, more recently, on the battlefields of Spain, India, and Waterloo.

Yet, ironically, despite all the insistence on things Highlandish, very few Highlanders were actually going to be there. Walter Scott had sent a formal invitation to MacLeod of MacLeod and other great chieftains, summoning them and their followers to a modern-day version of the gathering of the clans to greet their “chief of chiefs.” But only five showed up. Campbell of Breadalbane brought fifty men wearing tartans—not their own tartans, but one the Earl had designed in Edinburgh and sent to them. The MacGregors of Griogaraich were there, as bodyguards to the Regalia. Their chief, Sir Ewan MacGregor, was looking forward to finally erasing the family’s long history of royal disgrace. The flamboyant Alistair MacDonnell of Glengarry also showed up. He had been the inspiration for
Waverley
’s Fergus McIvor and looked the part, with his pipers, henchmen, and foresters in attendance—and proceeded to make an obnoxious nuisance of himself through the whole visit, to the disgust of both Scott and Stewart.