Can we view Walter Scott as a Scottish devolutionist?

Today I will write about other aspects of Scott, the 250th anniversary of whose birth was celebrated on Sunday. Firstly today I want to address a subject that has caused great controversy over the decades – what exactly were Scott’s political leanings?

Scott is often portrayed as an out and out Tory and Unionist, but while I partially accept those descriptions, I must qualify them and after studying his works and his life, I am going to make the claim that, in my opinion, Sir Walter Scott was an early devolutionist.

Like Sir Walter Scott, I have often thought that Scotland is trapped in a British statehood, but our Scottish nationhood is sacrosanct and must not be destroyed. No man of his time did more to preserve that nationhood than Scott, but he accepted that the Union had brought about immense economic improvement for Scotland and did not wish to end the Union, merely alter it.

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In his late teens and 20s the politics of Scott and indeed the UK were greatly determined by the upheavals happening in Europe, particularly France, and the USA, and Scott was so interested in the ballads and literature of revolutionary and pre-revolutionary France that he learned the language.

Thirled to the causes espoused by prime minister William Pitt the Younger, in that sense he was a Tory, or more accurately a New Tory – there was no Conservative or Tory Party at the time, merely associations in Parliament and elsewhere and the New Tories were surprisingly liberal. Scott and just about every other Briton at the time feared invasion by Napoleon Bonaparte’s France, and in 1797 he joined the Royal Edinburgh Volunteer Light Dragoons – his lifelong lameness made no difference to his renowned skill as a horseman.

In the early years of the 19th century, Scott seems to have become obsessed with the erosion of Scottish nationhood and culture and while not advocating the end of the Union, he did not want to see Scotland diminished. In 1826, for instance, he went into literary battle to save Scottish banknotes which the then UK Government wanted to scrap. It was a successful campaign carried out under the pseudonym Malachi Malagrowther and to commemorate it, the Bank of Scotland’s current banknotes all feature a portrait of Scott.

So why do I think he was a devolutionist? I am going to rely on the following passages written by my late and much-missed friend Paul H Scott, a comprehensive expert on Sir Walter.

Paul wrote: “Walter Scott’s conclusion is that Scotland should take charge of her own affairs. He says: “There has been in England a gradual and progressive system of assuming the management of affairs entirely and exclusively proper to Scotland, as if we were totally unworthy of having management of our own concerns. All must centre in London’.

“In Scotland there was such an enthusiastic reaction to Walter Scott’s Malachi that Westminster withdrew their proposal to intervene in Scottish affairs. Scott wrote in his Journal on June 9, 1826: “I shall always be proud of Malachi as having headed back the Southron, or helped to do so, in one instance at least.”

“Strangely enough, Malachi, instead of becoming one of the most celebrated of Scott’s essays, has virtually disappeared. In reference books, Walter Scott is still described as “Conservative and Unionist”. He supported the Conservatives, but he was no Unionist. He virtually launched the movement for the recovery of Scottish independence.”

I would not go that far, but there’s no doubt that Scott was sure that Scottish nationhood was under threat. Hence his championing of Scotland the Scots in his poetry and novels.

But all that was in the future when Scott developed a serious illness and nearly died at the age of 16. It was a bowel haemorrhage, the cause unknown, but he recovered and indeed enjoyed good health until his final years.

HIS law career progressed, too, as he became an advocate in 1792. He practised mainly on the provincial circuit, but he enjoyed the Edinburgh literary life too much and in 1799 he found a solution – he was appointed Sheriff-Depute of Selkirkshire which gave him an income of £300 a year and meant he only had to spend part of the year in the county. He would stay in the post for life. Later he would be appointed a Clerk to the Court of Session and in that post it was he who defined the uniquely Scottish Not Proven verdict as “the bastard verdict”.

By the time of his Selkirkshire appointment, Scott had married Charlotte Carpenter, a French-born woman whose original name was Charpentier. Before Charlotte, Scott had a doomed relationship with Williamina Belsches of Fettercairn, who ended their love rather dramatically by becoming engaged to Scott’s friend Sir William Forbes.

Charlotte was the ward of Lord Downshire, a friend of her father who died when Charlotte was young, as did her mother. After a whirlwind courtship of just three weeks, Scott proposed and they were married on Christmas Eve, 1797, despite Scott’s parents concerns about him marrying a foreigner – the fact that she had her own income helped dispel those doubts. They would remain happily married until Charlotte’s death in 1826, and in all they would have five children.

Scott bought a home for his family at 39 North Castle Street in the New Town and he also had a summer home in Lasswade that he used for writing and entertaining friends. As we have seen, the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Borders kick-started his literary career and from 1805 he combined the law with his writing that included reviews for the Edinburgh Review until he co-founded his own Quarterly Review in 1809 to which he contributed regular reviews for the rest of his life. His review of Jane Austen’s Emma is a particular delight.

Other non-fiction works followed over the years even as he was becoming a successful novelist. He wrote 7000 letters, and His Life of Napoleon Buonaparte was a crucial success. The best known of his non-fiction works were the four instalments of Tales of a Grandfather, completed in the four years before his death, the last part being about French history from Charlemagne to Louis XIV, while the unpublished fifth instalment finally saw the light of day as recently 1996. Addressed to his six-year-old grandchild John Hugh Lockhart, the three Scottish books in the series were massively popular in Scotland, and though the veracity of his stories is sometime questionable, there’s no doubt that Scott’s work helped feed the growing demand for Scottish history and culture that he had almost single-handedly created.

The last of the five parts remained uncompleted because he never returned to the manuscript after the death of his grandson John Hugh. The Tales form the themes of Magnus Magnusson’s Scotland, The Story of a Nation. In that book Magnusson recounts how Scott wrote Redgauntlet, about a fictional third Jacobite Rebellion with Darsie Latimer as its hero. I concur with Magnusson’s view that it is one of Scott’s best novels, and as our favourite Icelander states “in a sense, the most autobiographical of Scott’s novels.”

The end of the Napoleonic Wars also provided Scott with material. He was one of the first writers to visit the site of the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, while it was the war’s conclusion that provoked the economic collapse that led to the Radical War of 1820, which Scott abhorred as possibly precipitating the collapse of Scottish society. Typically, while he plotted against the radicals, it was Scott who proposed giving the unemployed gainful work in Edinburgh – the Radical Road at Holyrood was the product of their labours.

Much of Scott’s latter life was consumed by two issues – his acquisition and development of Abbotsford near Melrose and his enormous debt problems.

TO really know about Scott you need to visit Abbotsford, so carefully preserved with many of Scott’s own belongings. The complex indebtedness which Scott suffered was a combination of borrowing money against future income to build and furnish Abbotsford – the basic farm cost him 4000 guineas. Eventually he would have the house, 1400 acres around it and plant 4000 trees.

It is a house of history, and Scott himself was fascinated by history, particularly by the movements within a culture and a society. He became a Fellow and later Vice-President of the Society of Antiquaries to add to his Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He was also a freemason and a member of Edinburgh’s Speculative Society. He himself was at ease in all levels of society, and that included royalty, especially the Prince Regent, later King George IV. He was captivated by Scott’s works and the writer used their friendship to accomplish two of his most famous tasks.

In 1815, on a visit to London to see the Prince Regent, Scott suggested that a search should be started to find the “lost” Honours of Scotland, the Scottish Crown Jewels, which had not been seen since the Act of Union in 1707. The Prince set up a Royal Commission and with Scott doing the fact-finding, on February 4, 1818, the commissioners and Scott found the Honours buried deep inside Edinburgh Castle. They went on display the following year, and all of a sudden, Scottish patriotism was fashionable. As a reward, Scott was created a Baronet of Abbotsford in April 1820.

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The second great event was when King George IV suddenly decided to visit Edinburgh and only one man was seen as fit to organise the pageantry. Scott got just three weeks to organise the visit and on August 14, 1822, King George arrived by boat at Leith.

He was told that Scott was part of the welcoming delegation and immediately called for his friend to come aboard: “Walter Scott, the man in Scotland I most want to see.”

Scott wreathed the whole event in tartan, and all the Highland clan chiefs turned up in full dress. Even the King wore a semblance of a kilt. Balls and levées were held and for a week, and Edinburgh was the centre of everyone’s attention. It’s not fair to suggest that Scott was singularly responsible for the invention of tartan, just as he did not invent the Scottish tourist trade, but his contributions were enormous, some might say transformational.

In 1826, the same year his wife died, Britain suffered a financial crisis and his publishers the Ballantynes collapsed, taking Scott down with them. He had the choice of going bankrupt or working to pay back the debts he and the Ballantynes had accrued. He sold his Edinburgh home and went to work at Abbotsford, writing fast and, it has to be said, not always very well. The biggest job was putting together the Magnum Opus, a new edition of all his novels. It sold spectacularly and much of his debt was paid off when a further disaster struck. In 1829, he suffered the first of four strokes and was never the same again.

He rallied to oppose the Great Reform Act but suffered the indignity of being jeered off the stage by his own beloved Borderers. James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, wrote that this event broke Scott’s heart.

He went on tour of France and Italy to see if he could recover his health, but came home in time to die at Abbotsford on September 21, 1832. The man who became known as The Wizard of the North would weave his magic no more.