Sir Walter Scott 250
David Forsyth and Dr Anna Groundwater take us on a tour of a new display at National Museum of Scotland that brings together two of his greatest passions – and speak to us of his literary inspiration
A look at a National Museums Scotland exhibition of rare items connected to the life and work of this well-loved writer
This August marks 250 years since the birth of the great Scottish novelist and antiquarian, Sir Walter Scott. As part of a Scotlandwide celebration of his life and works, Walter Scott 250, National Museums Scotland's tribute is a display called Inspiring Walter Scott.
In this we focus on Scott's two great passions – writing historical fiction and collecting antiquities – by bringing together Scott's dramatic novels with some of the objects that populate them.
Many people in Scotland today will probably know he wrote books. They perhaps also know about his baronial-style home Abbotsford House, near Melrose in the borders. However, in 19th-century Britain, Scott was not simply a successful writer, but a figure of international renown. The Walter Scott monument that towers over Edinburgh's Princes Street is a lasting testament to his hugely influential status.
Scott's historical novels were extremely successful in his lifetime, a first print-run of 10,000 copies of Rob Roy, for example, selling out in a few days, with many of his works translated into foreign languages. A leading figure in the literary romanticism movement of the 19th century, he was the forerunner of such prominent historical novelists today as Hilary Mantel. In the case of Scotland, writers such as Nigel Tranter and Dorothy Dunnett have achieved similar popularity and remain widely read. Centuries of Scottish history were covered in his works, from medieval times to the Covenanting wars and the Jacobite risings. In doing so, Scott wove fictionalised historical characters and epic events into compelling tales of political intrigue, religious division, chivalry and romance. Real people intertwined with fictional characters – for Mantel's Thomas Cromwell, read Scott's Bonnie Prince Charlie, Mary Queen of Scots, and Rob Roy MacGregor.
Scott's novels were also translated into different media. Rob Roy became a stage play within months of its publication, and a musical drama in the 1830s. Many operas were inspired by his novels, most famously Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor and Rossini's La Donna del Lago, and his poetry has been set to music by such composers as Schubert, Berlioz and Beethoven. Creative responses to Scott continued into the 20th and 21st centuries. Many films derive from his work, including a silent movie of Fair Maid of Perth and the fantasy TV series Dark Knight, which was based on Ivanhoe. The director Sergei Tarasov has made Russian versions of Ivanhoe and Quentin Durward and the character of Rob Roy has inspired Walt Disney amongst others.
In this article we look at four sets of objects of the type used by Scott to bring alive his tales of Scotland’s past. Indeed, in a couple of cases they are the specific objects described. This is true of our first example, the gilt spurs and bugle horn that were owned by Auld Wat Scott of Harden (1550-1629), and included by Scott in his poem, The Reiver’s Wedding. Scott’s specificity here is perhaps unsurprising given that these objects were emotionally connected to his love of the borders, and his own family’s history, Harden being an ancestor of Scott’s.
Auld Wat was a notorious character, living at a time when ancient Anglo-Scottish enmities were carried out in the borderers’ cross-border raiding. It is said, that these spurs would be presented by his wife Lady Harden on a silver platter when the men were gathered for dinner, as a sign that the larder was bare, and the men needed to replenish it. Auld Wat was then said to have used this large bull’s horn to have summoned his followers to horseback and arms, as they rode off in search of suitable fare.
Scott used these pieces as tangible connections with a semimythical past in his description of the events leading up to the marriage of Harden’s son in the poem. This was probably first written when he was working on his collection of borders ballads. Needless to say, there’s much action on horseback, and jangling weaponry, but the two stanzas in which these objects appear bring together this display’s main themes – of historical stories of fictionalised characters, studded with vibrantly-imaginable hardware. So, we have a rowdy dinner at Harden followed by the presentation of the spurs:
And loud and loud in Harden tower/ The quaich gaed round wi’ meikle glee;
For the English beef was brought in bower/ And the English ale flowed merrilie.
They ate, they laughed, they sang and quaffed/ Till naught on board was seen,
When knight and squire were bidden to dine/ But a spur of silver sheen.
And we have Scott of Harden, taking to horseback and sounding this horn, with the initials of other Scotts heavily etched into its curved surface:
He took a bugle frae his side/With names carved o’er and o’er —
Full many a chief of meikle pride/ That Border bugle bore —
He blew a note baith sharp and hie/ Till rock and water ran around —
Threescore of moss-troopers and three/ Have mounted at that bugle sound.
Scott’s passion for the borders landscape and its buildings is also seen in his stories of religion and the Scottish Reformation of 1560, in the tales of The Monastery and The Abbot. These are located in the fictional
Kennaquhair abbey, based on Melrose Abbey. He represented the overthrow of the old church and the establishment of the new Protestant kirk in the clash between the fiercely Presbyterian John Knox, and the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, and ultimately, in 1567, her forced abdication. In The Monastery Scott communicated the despair of monks and parishioners at the destruction of their abbey and their objects of devotion such as their crucifixes:
Cross and banner, pix and chalice, shrines containing relics, and censers steaming with incense, were intermingled with the solemn array of the brotherhood, in their long black gowns and cowls. Women and children came in the rear, bewailing the apprehended desolation of their ancient sanctuary.
The Abbot moves the story on to 1567: Mary is presented in all her dignified and beautiful regal splendour, as she is confronted by the news that letters allegedly between her and her third husband Lord Bothwell have been discovered in an ornate silver casket – a coffer in which she will have kept her rosaries, such potent symbols of her Catholic faith:
She wore a cross of gold around her neck, and had her rosary of gold and ebony hanging from her girdle’ Surely, said the Queen, ‘Scottish nobles would not lend themselves to assassinate a helpless woman?’
‘Bethink you madam’, Melville relied, ‘what horrid spectacles have been seen in our day; and what act is so dark, that some Scottish hand has not been found to dare it? The Council speak of proofs by writing and word, of a casket with letters...
Scotland’s history was a rich seam for Scott, replete with compelling stories of political intrigue, religious division, and derring-do, and a
Scotland’s history was a rich seam for Scott, replete with compelling stories of political intrigue, religious division, and derring-do, and a famous cast-list of romanticised historical figures
famous cast-list of romanticised historical figures. But perhaps the one figure that drew him more than any other, was that of Charles Edward Stuart, and the ultimately doomed Jacobite cause. It is no surprise that the Bonnie Prince was central to Scott’s very first historical novel, Waverley, which kicked off
his Waverley series in 1814. Given that the Jacobite movement made such prominent, yet secretive, use of material culture to promote allegiance under the nose of a suspicious Hanoverian government, such ‘treacherous objects’ appear in Scott’s works too.
Here, in The Bride of Lammermoor, set against the signing of the Act of Union in 1707, a Jacobite drinks a toast to the exiled James VII and II:
Craigengelt went a tiptoe to the door, peeped out, shut it carefully – clapped his tarnished gold-laced hat on his head, took his glass in one hand, and touching the hilt of his hanger with the other, toasted, ‘The King over the water’.
[But] said Bucklaw, ‘Bring me King James to Edinburgh, Captain, with thirty thousand men at his back, and I’ll tell you what I think about his title; but ... when you mean to vapour with your hanger and your dram-cup in support of treasonable toasts, you must find your liquor and company elsewhere’.
Scott’s characters were often at odds with the state, as was the fictionalised owner of the last of our exhibition’s objects, an 18th-century sporran purse lock that was donated to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 1783. Scott as a leading member of this society will have seen it, and it is thought he used it as the model for the one he described as belonging to his characterisation of Rob Roy Macgregor. This colourful historical figure, part-highwayman, part-gentlemen, part-myth, often had large sums of money to secure in his sporran, and Scott describes its lock thus in Rob Roy:
I advise no man to attempt opening this sporran till he has my secret,’ said Rob Roy ... A small steel pistol was concealed within the purse, the trigger of which was connected with the mounting, so that the weapon would certainly be discharged, and in all probability its contents lodged in the person of anyone, who, being unacquainted with the secret, should tamper with the lock which secured his treasure.
Scott himself owned a sporran which allegedly belonged to Rob Roy. It joined the many treasures he amassed at Abbotsford, of which he wrote in 1816, ‘Conundrum Castle for so this romance of a house should be called … an old fashioned Scotch residence full of rusty iron coats and jingling jackets’. In 1817, he called Abbotsford ‘My new Flibbertigibbet of a house because it will suit none but an antiquary’. If any of the novels capture the essence of Scott as writer and collector, none does it better than The Antiquary, in which Scott describes Jonathan Oldbuck, in a room where one end was ‘entirely occupied by bookshelves, too limited in space for the number of volumes placed upon them, which were, therefore, drawn up in rans of two or three files deep, while numberless others littered the floor and the tables, amid a chaos of maps, engravings, scraps of parchment, bundles of papers, pieces of old armour, swords, dirks, helmets, and highland targets’.
He could have been describing Abbotsford, a scene captured above in an engraving by John Burnet, after the original portrait by Sir William Allan: Scott at his desk, surrounded by a chaos of antique objects, and looked over by a bust of Shakespeare on the mantelpiece. In this one image we see objects, stories, writing, history and the man himself who brought all these elements together.
The Inspiring Walter Scott is on at the National Museum of Scotland until 9 January 2022. Free with pre-booked museum entry. Find out more at https://scot.sh/inspiring