EIGHT CENTURIES WITH WALTER SCOTT.
By WALLACE BRUCE.
“Woodstock” closed with the return of Charles the Second from long exile, and his hearty reception en route from the cliffs of Dover to London. “Peveril of the Peak” opens with a mixed assembly of Presbyterians and Cavaliers convened at Martindale Castle in honor of “The Blessed Restoration of His most Sacred Majesty.”
As might be premised, the gathering is not entirely harmonious. By wise foresight they are constrained to enter the castle by different gates, and to take their repast in different rooms. In this prologue to the story the reader notes the art with which Scott illustrates history. “By different routes, and forming each a sort of a procession, as if the adherents of each party were desirous of exhibiting its strength and numbers, the two several factions approached the castle; and so distinct did they appear in dress, aspect and manners, that it seemed as if the revelers of a bridal party, and the sad attendants upon a funeral solemnity, were moving toward the same point from different quarters. The Puritan party consisted chiefly of the middling gentry, with others whom industry or successful speculations in commerce or in mining had raised into eminence—the persons who feel most umbrage from the over-shadowing aristocracy, and are usually the most vehement in defense of what they hold to be their rights. Their dress was in general studiously simple and unostentatious, or only remarkable by the contradictory affectation of extreme simplicity or carelessness. The dark color of their cloaks, varying from absolute black to what was called sad-colored, their steeple-crowned hats, with their broad shadowy brims, their long swords, suspended by a simple strap around the loins, without shoulder-belt, sword-knot, plate, buckles, or any of the other decorations with which the Cavaliers loved to adorn their trusty rapiers—the shortness of their hair, which made their ears appear of disproportioned size—above all the stern and gloomy gravity of their looks, announced their belonging to that class of enthusiasts, who, resolute and undismayed, had cast down the former fabric of government, and who now regarded with somewhat more than suspicion that which had been so unexpectedly substituted in its stead.”
The paragraph in which Scott portrays the Cavalier is none the less graphic: “If the Puritan was affectedly plain in his dress, and ridiculously precise in his manners, the Cavalier often carried his love of ornament into tawdry finery, and his contempt of hypocricy into licentious profligacy. Gay, gallant fellows, young and old, thronged together toward the ancient castle. Feathers waved, lace glittered, spears jingled, steeds caracoled; and here and there a petronel or pistol was fired off by some one, who found his own natural talents for making a noise inadequate to the dignity of the occasion. Boys halloo’d and whooped, ‘Down with the Rump,’ and ‘Fie upon Oliver!’ The revelry of the Cavaliers may be easily conceived, since it had the usual accompaniments of singing, jesting, quaffing of healths, and playing of tunes, which have in almost every age and quarter of the world been the accompaniments of festive cheer. The enjoyments of the Puritans were of a different and less noisy character. They neither sung, jested, heard music, nor drank healths; and yet they seemed none the less, in their own phrase, to enjoy the creature-comforts which the frailty of humanity rendered grateful to their outward man.”
It seems almost marvelous that Scott, who loved rank and ancestral dignity, could lay aside his prejudices and speak so eloquently and fairly of the Puritan. His history of Napoleon is generally regarded unfair and distorted; and it could hardly have been otherwise following so closely upon the great triumph of Wellington; but we, as Americans and descendants of those who gave up home and comfort to establish a free government, have reason to feel grateful that the greatest novelist, or, if that is objected to by any of our readers, the greatest historical novelist that Britain has produced, was born and reared with an unprejudiced mind.
It may seem strange to the reader of history to find the Cavalier and the strict Presbyterian, so different in principle, now hand in hand in policy; but the reader must remember that the party which brought Charles to the block consisted of two factors, styled by the haughty Countess of Derby with indignant sarcasm: “Varieties of the same monster, for the Presbyterians hallooed while the others hunted, and bound the victims whom the Independents massacred.” Misery according to Shakspere makes a person acquainted with strange bedfellows; and the politics of those days made England acquainted with strange coalitions. One choice only remained to that distracted nation—Charles the Second or the rule of the army; and to the common sense of discordant factions a solid government seemed preferable to anarchy. To the sensible Presbyterian the divine right of kings was better than the less divine right of petty leaders. The Independents, so powerful under Cromwell, were weak under the government of his son Richard. The people demanded a free Parliament, and a free Parliament meant the restoration of the Stuarts. As Macaulay tersely puts it: “A united army had long kept down a divided nation; but the nation was now united and the army was divided.”
Scott, also, in passing, refers to the ejection of the Presbyterian clergy, which took place on St. Bartholomew’s day, when two thousand Presbyterian pastors were displaced and silenced throughout England; even in church matters the rule held good—that the spoils belonged to the victors: the great Baxter, Reynolds and Calamy refused bishoprics, and many ministers declined deaneries, preferring starvation and a clear conscience to the wealth and flattery of a corrupt court.
Five years pass by and we are transported with Julian Peveril, son of the old knight, from the peaks of northern Derbyshire, which form the water-shed of central England, to the picturesque island of Man, the origin of whose name is still a mystery, whose ruins carry the visitor back beyond the legends of King Arthur and the dominion of the Romans to the dim twilight days of the Druids. To this strong sea-girded fortress the brave Countess of Derby fled after the execution of her husband at Bolton le Moor, and she has left in history a character for courage and hardihood allied to cruelty, in the execution of Edward Christian, who in her absence had yielded up the island to the Parliament forces. It is here that the young Peveril dreams away his boyhood, sharing his studies and recreations with the son of the Countess.
In this story of diverse characters, the two pillars, which might be said to uphold the arch, under which the long procession of the narrative passes, are the elder Peveril and his wealthy neighbor Bridgenorth. Alice Bridgenorth was reared under the same roof with young Peveril; and strange to say, in the difference arising between the elder Peveril and Bridgenorth, she also is transported to the home of relatives in a romantic glen of the island of Man. But the course of true love was not destined even in this little island to run entirely smooth; for the old spirit of Bridgenorth is awakened to restore England to the greatness of the days of Cromwell. He endeavors to arouse the same zeal in young Peveril; he had just returned from the south of France, and had many stories to tell of the French Huguenots, who already began to sustain those vexations, which a few years afterward were summed up by the revocation of the edict of Nantz. He had been in Hungary, and spoke from personal knowledge of the leaders of the great Protestant insurrection. He talked also of Savoy, where those of the reformed religion still suffered a cruel persecution. He had even visited America, more especially he said: “The country of New England, into which our land has shaken from her lap, as a drunkard flings from him his treasures, so much that is precious in the eyes of God and of his children. There thousands of our best and most godly men—such whose righteousness might come between the Almighty and his wrath, and prevent the ruin of cities—are content to be the inhabitants of the desert, rather encountering the unenlightened savages, than stooping to extinguish, under the oppression practiced in Britain, the light that is within their own minds. There I remained for a time, during the wars which the colonies maintained with Philip, a great Indian chief, or sachem as they were called, who seemed a messenger sent from Satan to buffet them. His cruelty was great—his dissimulation profound; and the skill and promptitude with which he maintained a destructive and desultory warfare inflicted many dreadful calamities on the settlement. I was by chance at a small village in the woods, more than thirty miles from Boston, and in its situation exceedingly lonely, and surrounded with thickets. It was on a Sabbath morning, when we had assembled to take sweet counsel together in the Lord’s house. Our temple was but constructed of wooden logs; but when shall the chant of trained hirelings, or the sounding of tin and brass tubes amid the aisles of a minster, arise so sweetly to heaven, as did the psalm in which we united at once our voices and our hearts! An excellent worthy, long the companion of my pilgrimage, had just begun to wrestle in prayer, when a woman, with disordered looks and disheveled hair, entered our chapel in a distracted manner, screaming incessantly, ‘The Indians! the Indians!’ In that land no man dares separate himself from his means of defense, and whether in the city or in the field, in the ploughed land or the forest, men keep beside them their weapons, as did the Jews at the re-building of the temple. So we sallied forth with our guns and our pikes, and heard the whoop of these incarnate devils already in possession of a part of the town. It was pitiful to hear the screams of women and children amid the report of guns and the whistling of bullets, mixed with the ferocious yells of these savages. Several houses in the upper part of the village were soon on fire. The smoke which the wind drove against us gave great advantage to the enemy, who fought, as it were invisible, and under cover, whilst we fell fast by their unerring fire. In this state of confusion, and while we were about to adopt the desperate project of evacuating the village, and, placing the women and children in the center, of attempting a retreat to the nearest settlement, it pleased heaven to send us unexpected assistance. A tall man of a reverend appearance, whom no one of us had ever seen before, suddenly was in the midst of us. His garments were of the skin of the elk, and he wore sword and carried gun; I never saw anything more august than his features, overshadowed by locks of gray hair, which mingled with a long beard of the same color. ‘Men and brethren,’ he said in a voice like that which turns back the flight, ‘why sink your hearts? and why are you thus disquieted? Follow me, and you shall see this day that there is a captain in Israel!’ He uttered a few brief but distinct orders, in the tone of one who was accustomed to command; and such was the influence of his appearance, his mien, his language, and his presence of mind, that he was implicitly obeyed by men who had never seen him until that moment. We were hastily divided into two bodies; one of which maintained the defense of the village with more courage than ever; while, under cover of the smoke, the stranger sallied forth from the town, at the head of the other division of New England men, and fetching a circuit, attacked the red warriors in the rear. The heathens fled in confusion, abandoning the half-won village, and leaving behind them such a number of the warriors, that the tribe hath never recovered its loss. Never shall I forget the figure of our venerable leader, when our men, and women and children of the village, rescued from the tomahawk and scalping knife, stood crowded around him. ‘Not unto me be the glory,’ he said, ‘I am but an implement, frail as yourselves, in the hand of Him who is strong to deliver.’ I was nearest to him as he spoke; we exchanged glances; it seemed to me that I recognized a noble friend whom I had long since deemed in glory; but he gave me no time to speak, had speech been prudent. Sinking on his knees, and signing us to obey him, he poured forth a strong and energetic thanksgiving for the turning back of the battle, which, pronounced with a voice loud and clear as a war trumpet, thrilled through the joints and marrows of the hearers. I have heard many an act of devotion in my life; but such a prayer as this, uttered amid the dead and the dying, with a rich tone of mingled triumph and adoration, was beyond them all—it was like the song of the inspired prophetess who dwelt beneath the palm-tree between Ramah and Bethel. He was silent; and for a brief space we remained with our faces bent to the earth—no man daring to lift his head. At length we looked up, but our deliverer was no longer amongst us, nor was he ever again seen in the land which he had rescued.”
This beautiful story, true to fact, and so dramatically told, comes upon the reader with a pleasant surprise, and I have quoted it at length not only for its intrinsic beauty, but also as it commemorates a fact in the early history of our country. That venerable man was Richard Whalley, one of the great soldiers of England under Cromwell, and one of the judges who condemned Charles to the block. After the restoration he fled to Massachusetts, and was secreted in the house of the Rev. Mr. Russel at Hadley. It will be remembered that three of the regicides fled to this country—Dixwell, Goffe and Whalley. Dixwell is buried in New Haven in the rear of Center church. Goffe and Whalley are buried in Hadley. It is claimed by some that it was Goffe instead of Whalley who came to the rescue of the village. Scott in his notes assigns the honor to Whalley.
Returning to our story we find that affairs of great moment on the part of the Countess call the young Peveril to London. He finds his father and mother arrested for supposed complicity in a Romish plot. We see the city in great excitement, heated and inflamed by the villain Oates—an episode which Scott weaves gracefully and naturally into the warp and woof of his story. He draws a picture of Colonel Blood, who made the well-known attempt on the crown-jewels, a bold, resolute man, who strange to say, after many acts of violence, lived to enjoy a pension from the king. We see the gay Rochester, still remembered for his celebrated epigrammatic epitaph on Charles the Second, composed at the king’s request, but too pungent, and too true to be relished.
“Here lies our sovereign lord the king,
Whose word no man relies on;
He never said a foolish thing,
And never did a wise one.”
We see the Duchess of Portsmouth, and many another lady of rank, who had more regard for ancient titles than for ancestral virtues; we see George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, a man of princely fortune and excellent talents, tossed about in a whirlpool of frivolous pleasures, whose character the great Dryden embalmed in vigorous lines:
“A man so various, that he seemed to be
Not one, but all mankind’s epitome;
Stiff in opinions—always in the wrong—
Was everything by starts, but nothing long;
Who in the course of one revolving moon,
Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon.”
Through the imprisonment of Julian Peveril we are made acquainted with the Tower and Newgate—a sad picture, but somewhat relieved by Scott’s humor in the portrait that he gives us of the well-known doughty dwarf, Sir Geoffrey Hudson; we see London given over to monopolies, to stock-jobbing, and South Sea speculations; we attend a conventicle held in a secret hall of the city, and trace a conspiracy designed to place the Duke of Buckingham upon the throne; until our story, one of the longest and most carefully prepared of the Waverley series, concludes with a court scene in Whitehall, where the faithful love of Edith Bridgenorth and Julian Peveril is announced to the satisfaction at least of two individuals.
“Old Mortality,” our next volume, deals directly with the Covenanters of Scotland. It will be remembered that Charles the Second, on a former expedition into Scotland, before his restoration, had deliberately sworn to support the Solemn League and Covenant. The Presbyterian Church, alive to its own interests, sent an agent to General Monk, who had declared for a free Parliament, and was on his way to London, holding as it were in his hand the destiny of Britain. The agent sent by the Scottish Church was James Sharpe, a man well educated, logical in mind and commanding in character; but, false to his trust, he bartered his principles for power, and received as the price of his infamy the title and office of Lord Bishop of Saint Andrews, and Primate of Scotland. “The great stain” says Scott, in his Miscellaneous Prose Works, “will always remain, that Sharpe deserted and probably betrayed a cause which his brethren entrusted to him. When he returned to Scotland, he pressed the acceptance of the See of Saint Andrews upon Mr. Robert Douglas, affecting himself no ambition for the prelacy. The stern Presbyterian saw into his secret soul, and, when he had given his own positive rejection, demanded of Sharpe what he would do if the offer was made to him? He hesitated. ‘I perceive,’ said Douglas, ‘you are clear—you will engage—you will be Primate of Scotland; take it then,’ he added, laying his hand on his shoulder, ‘and take the curse of God along with it.’ The subject would suit a painter.” Subsequent history shows that the curse was fulfilled.
In the general joy attendant upon the restoration of Charles, the Parliament thought that the people would submit to almost any indignity or inconvenience. By a single sweeping resolution they annulled and rescinded every statute and ordinance which had been made by those holding supreme authority in Scotland since the commencement of the civil wars; the whole Presbyterian Church government was destroyed, and the Episcopal institutions, to which the nation had shown itself averse, were rashly and precipitately established. Thousands of ministers, who, for conscience sake, could not sign the Act of Conformity, were driven from their pulpits. Mere boys and dissolute young men were hastily summoned from schools and colleges to administer spiritual comfort to an indignant people. The solemn league and covenant, which had been solemnly sworn to by nobility, clergy and people, with weeping eyes and uplifted hands, ay, sworn to by the King himself, was burned at the cross of Edinburgh by an edict of Parliament. The Episcopal court severely punished all who left their own parish church to attend private meetings known as conventicles. A persecution like that of the early Christians at Rome was brought home to the descendants of Knox and of Calvin. As the earlier Christians were compelled to hold their meetings in caves and catacombs, so a persecuted people, in the bright dawn of the Reformation, were compelled to fly to the hills and heaths for a refuge, to lift up their banner in solitary and mountain places in order to foil
“A tyrant’s and a bigot’s laws.”
Such was the state of the country at the opening of our story in May, 1679. The west of Scotland is aroused. Archbishop Sharpe is murdered in his carriage, by a party of men, of whom Balfour of Burley is the leader. The battle of Loudon Hill is won by the Covenanters, who increase daily in power until a force of six thousand men are assembled at Bothwell Bridge. Engaged in discussing church polemics, they entirely neglect the discipline necessary for success. Without leaders or guidance they are routed by the Duke of Monmouth. Four hundred men are killed. Twelve hundred prisoners are marched to Edinburgh, and imprisoned “like cattle in a fold” in the Greyfriar’s churchyard. Several ministers are tortured and executed, and many prisoners sent as slaves to the plantations. Henry Morton, one of their leaders, as seen in the story, is exiled. Edith Bellenden, one of the royal party, remains true to him. He returns, after long years of absence and military honor, and readers of fiction can readily guess how the story terminates without reading the postscript by the author.
Such is the rude draft of this great romance, which Coleridge pronounces the grandest of Scott’s novels. It is, in fact, a novel that can not be well analyzed. We could speak of Lady Margaret Bellenden, who never forgot that Charles the Second took breakfast with her on his way to meet Cromwell at the field of Worcester; we could speak of the good natured Major, brave, noble, and generous; of Cuddie and his mother; ay, of Guse Gibbie, unfortunate in all fitting regimentals; of the miserly uncle of Henry Morton; of the cannie waiting-maid of Edith, who felt safe in the triumph of either side, as she had a lover in both armies. The reader will laugh and weep at these characters as he meets them in the pages of “Old Mortality.” But it is for us to refer merely to the historical features about which these characters are grouped; to note the ruggedness of Scotch character, destined to triumph at last, and bring victory out of defeat; a character which, perhaps, “shows most to advantage in adversity, when it seems akin to the native sycamore of their hills, which scorns to be biased in its mode of growth, even by the influence of the prevailing wind, but, shooting its branches with equal boldness in every direction, shows no weather side to the storm, and may be broken, but can never be bended.”
In considering the motives, the ambition, the enthusiasm, or fanaticism of these men, we might stir up controversy. We know it was their lofty purpose to convert all England to the Presbyterian faith; and, whenever they were lifted to power, they were quite as arbitrary as the Episcopacy. It was true of both parties that they suffered persecution without learning mercy. Each side felt that, in pushing its own creed, it was doing the Lord’s work; but in this we all delight to-day, that both sides produced brave men, tenacious of their own rights, who struggled on until in our own generation the opposing forces have been adjusted, and out of chaos and confusion the different systems of faith or theology move serenely and calmly in their own spheres around one central and enduring light—the Creator and Father of all.
The Covenanters were indeed the connecting link between the two great revolutions, which beheaded Charles the First and exiled James the Second; and, whatever our prejudices, or “whatever may be thought of the extravagance or narrow-minded bigotry of many of their tenets, it is impossible to deny the praise of devoted courage to a few hundred peasants, who, without leaders, without money, without any fixed plan of action, and almost without arms, borne out only by their innate zeal, and a detestation of the oppression of their rulers, ventured to declare open war against an established government, supported by a regular army and the whole force of three kingdoms.”
It is sometimes claimed that Scott is over partial to Claverhouse—that he paints the man as a hero. If so he has poorly succeeded, for I have yet to meet a reader of “Old Mortality” who is fascinated with the portraiture of that cruel man. Scott makes him what history declares him to be, a cool and calculating soldier, bitter and unrelenting, a man without faith, and with no ambition save worldly glory. It rather seems to me on the contrary, that Scott for the time lays aside his own traditional sentiments as he reports the burning words of these Covenant preachers, as they paint the desolation of the Church, describing her “like Hagar watching the waning life of her infant amid the fountainless desert.” His poetic nature seems moved by brave men repairing “to worship the God of nature amid the fortresses of nature’s own construction.”
There are two dramatic scenes in the volume, which can not be overlooked or forgotten: Burley in the cave, with his clasped Bible in one hand, and his drawn sword in the other. “His figure, dimly ruddied by the light of the red charcoal seems that of a fiend in the lurid atmosphere of Pandemonium striving with an imaginary demon.” The other scene reveals Henry Morton, overpowered, disarmed, bound hand and foot, facing a clock which, at the hour of twelve, was to strike his doom. “Among pale-eyed and ferocious zealots, whose hardened brows were soon to be bent, not merely with indifference, but with triumph upon his execution—without a friend to speak a kindly word, or give a look of either sympathy or encouragement—awaiting till the sword destined to slay him crept out of the scabbard gradually, as it were by straw-breadths, and condemned to drink the bitterness of death drop by drop. His executioners, as he gazed around him, seemed to alter their forms and features, like specters in a feverish dream their figures became larger, and their faces more disturbed; the walls seemed to drop with blood, and the light tick of the clock thrilled on his ear with such loud, painful distinctness, as if each sound were the prick of a bodkin inflicted on the naked nerve of the organ.” The maniac preacher, in an attitude of frenzy, springs upon a chair to push forward the fatal index; the party make ready their weapons for immediate execution, when a noise like the rushing of a brook over the pebbles, or the soughing of wind among the branches stays the executioners; it was the galloping of horse, the door is burst open, and Henry Morton is saved.
Men seem neither to understand their riches nor their strength—of the former they believe much more than they should; of the latter much less. Self-reliance and self-denial will teach a man to drink out of his own cistern, and eat his own sweet bread, and to learn and labor truly to get his living, and carefully to expend the good things committed to his trust.—Bacon.