“Waverley” by Walter Scott

Scott’s first novel, after a successful literary start as a poet, is considered the first book in the genre of  historical romance. Set against the backdrop of the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion, the novel details the coming of age of Edward Waverley. Although descended from a British Jacobite noble family, his father, currying favor with the current regime, buys him a commission in the British army and gets him posted to Scotland, where he comes under the sway of a Highland chieftain, Fergus Mac-Ivor, himself raised in exile in France after his father was executed by the Crown. “These stout idle kinsmen of mine account my estate as held in trust for their support; and I must find them beef and ale, while the rogues will do nothing for themselves but practise the broadsword, or wander about the hills, shooting, fishing, hunting, drinking, and making love to lasses of the strath. But what can I do, Captain Waverley? everything will keep after its kind, whether it be a hawk or a Highlander.”

Before long, Waverley, already a hopeless Romantic and a poet, falls in love with Fergus’ sister, Flora. She explains to the eponymous hero, “A Highland song would suffer still more from my imperfect translation, were I to introduce it without its own wild and appropriate accompaniments. To speak in the poetical language of my country, the seat of the Celtic muse is in the mist of the secret and solitary hill, and her voice in the murmur of the mountain stream. He who wooes her must love the barren rock more than the fertile valley, and the solitude of the desert better than the festivity of the hall.”

Waverley, himself, at first has some doubts about the honor of the Jacobite cause, “He felt inexpressible repugnance at the idea of being accessary to the plague of civil war. Whatever were the original rights of the Stuarts, calm reflection told him, that, omitting the question how far James the Second could forfeit those of his posterity, he had, according to the united voice of the whole nation, justly forfeited his own. Since that period, four monarchs had reigned in peace and glory over Britain, sustaining and exalting the character of the nation abroad, and its liberties at home. Reason asked, was it worth while to disturb a government so long settled and established, and to plunge a kingdom into all the miseries of civil war, for replacing upon the throne the descendants of a monarch by whom it had been willfully forfeited?”

After the defeat of the Jacobites by the Duke of Cumberland’s army, Waverley reflects on the doomed nature of the whole quixotic enterprise, “Here fell the last Vich Ian Vohr, on a nameless heath; and in an obscure night-skirmish was quenched that ardent spirit, who thought it little to cut a way for his master to the British throne! Ambition, policy, bravery, all far beyond their sphere, here learned the fate of mortals.” And as another Jacobite “traitor” the Baron of Bradwardine lamented, “But houses and families and men have a’ stood lang eneugh when they have stood till they fall with honour.” Colonel Talbot, a loyal British soldier, though also a friend of the house of Waverley, was less forgiving in his memories of Mac-Ivor, “Justice which demanded some penalty of those who had wrapped the whole nation in fear and in mourning, could not perhaps have selected a fitter victim. He came to the field with the fullest light upon the nature of his attempt. He had studied and understood the subject. His father’s fate could not intimidate him; the lenity of the laws which had restored to him his father’s property and rights could not melt him. That he was brave, generous, and possessed many good qualities, only rendered him the more dangerous; that he was enlightened and accomplished made his crime the less excusable; that he was an enthusiast in a wrong cause only made him the more fit to be its martyr.”