A recent visit to Scotland fired me (as crossing the border always does) with the desire to re-read Sir Walter Scott. I stayed, first, with one of my oldest friends, Allan Maclean, who has a flat in North Charlotte Street, very near (North Castle Street) where Scott lived, while writing the Waverley novels. He is himself a Highland antiquary, much more genial the Antiquary in Scott’s novel of the name, but with a comparable set of preoccupations with Scottish history and genealogy. It was Allan who egged me on to write my first work of non-fiction which was a study of Scott and his novels. (Still worth reading, but I would guess you can only get it on abe-books)
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Because I write so much (“too much”, as is sometimes said, whatever that means) Allan used to rib me by recalling the well-known anecdote by Scott’s future son-in-law J.G.Lockhart . It is probably unnecessary to point out that when Lockhart says that nearly all his friends at the dinner were gay, he was referring to the atmosphere of merriment, rather than hazarding a guess as to anyone’s emotional preference
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“Happening to pass through Edinburgh in June 1814, I dined one day with William Menzies, whose residence was then in George Street, situated near to, and at right angles with, North Castle Street. It was a party of very young persons, most of them, like Menzies and myself, destined for the Bar of Scotland, all gay and thoughtless, enjoying the first flush of manhood, with little remembrance of the yesterday, or care of the morrow. When my companion’s worthy father and uncle, after seeing two or three bottles go round, left the juveniles to themselves, the weather being hot, we adjourned to the library, which had one large window looking northwards. After carousing here for an hour or more, I observed that a shade had come over the aspect of my friend, who happened to be placed immediately opposite to myself, and said something that intimated a fear of his being unwell. ‘No’, said he, ‘I shall be well enough presently, if you will only let me sit where you are, and take my chair; for there is a confounded hand in sight of me here, which has often bothered me before, and now it won’t let me fill my glass with a good will’. I rose to change places with him accordingly, and he pointed out to me this hand which, like the writing on Belshazzar’s wall, disturbed his hour of hilarity. ‘Since we sat down’, he said, ‘I have been watching it - it fascinates my eye - it never stops - page after page is finished and thrown on that heap of MS, and still it goes on unwearied - and so it will be until the candles are brought in, and God knows how long after that. It is the same every night - I can’t stand the sight of it when I am not at my books’. - ‘Some stupid, dogged, engrossing clerk , probably’, exclaimed myself, or some other giddy youth in our society. ‘No, boys’, said our host, ‘I know what hand it is - ‘tis Walter Scott’s.’
At this date, Waverley, Scott’s first novel, had been published anonymously, and Scott had denied the authorship - partly because, from a literary angle, he wanted to be thought of as a poet, partly because, as a member of the Bar himself, he felt that the rather raffish occupation of writing fiction was possibly inconsistent with the dignity of his profession as a lawyer. Menzies, in glimpsing the moving hand, had seen into Scott’s secret. Scott was at that date a couple of years away from writing one of his most remarkable novels, which was the one I happened to take with me on this summer’s visit to Scotland. OLD MORTALITY.
I packed this particular novel in my suitcase, in part because I know it to be one of my favourites, and in part because I was en route for St Andrews, and the action of the book begins with the murder of James Sharp, Professor of Philosophy at that great and ancient seat of learning (in a sense the predecessor of my St Andrews friend Professor Judith Wolfe) - and later the Episcopalian Archbishop of St Andrews. (I know that to say someone is an episcopalian bishop is a tautology, but what I mean to say is, Sharp was appointed a Bishop by Charles II, in an attempt to revive episcopacy in that highly anti-episcopal kingdom.
Sharp was in fact murdered, not in St Andrews ;the book is largely set in the south west of Scotland. The motive for the murder - which makes it seem very immediate, somehow, - is religious hatred. John Balfour of Burley, and the others who hack the moderate-minded philosopher to death, are supporters of the Solemn League and Covenant - an “extreme” vow to keep alive the uncompromising Calvinism of John Knox in the Scottish church, untainted by the Erastianism of the conforming Presbyterians, still more, untainted by the whiff of popery which these people saw in the Anglicans, with their bishops, ceremonial robes, and set-forms of worship in the Book of Common Prayer, which Charles I and Archbishop Laud had unsuccessfully tried to impose upon the Scots in an earlier generation. . The novel traces the London Government’s response to the outrage, and the eventual defeat of the Covenanters by the combined forces of the Duke of Monmouth and John Graham of Claverhouse at the Battle of Bothwell Brig - 1679. When the book begins, you could not imagine having the smallest sympathy with those terrorists who have committed the murder. By the end, when the terrorists have been massacred - many of them - and the “civilized” world has behaved with such bloodthirsty ferocity against them, your sympathies have most disturbingly and interestingly shifted.
I first read this book when I was in my twenties, and hardly a day passed without one side or the other ,in “the Troubles” in Northern Ireland, shooting someone’s head off or at the very least blowing up a building. The Rev Ian Paisley
would come on the telly news most evenings speaking in tones and vocabulary which were pure seventeenth century Calvinism, always taking care to denounce the IRA as “Rawman Cuthalux”. The IRA in turn stored their guns in monasteries and churches and ordained priests officiated at the funerals of their scarier trained murderers . Very little seemed to have changed since the era depicted in Scott’s novel, which is full of just such figures, all finding justification for their murderous activities in the well-thumbed pages of the Scriptures .
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