“TRAITOR SCOT”
I quote what he says about the surrender of the King to the English by the Scots at Newcastle. The position of the Scots Commissioners was perplexing, whether they deliberately lured Charles to come to them or not. They could not keep him in Scotland: they would have had to fight England, and to defy the preachers who rode them. They could not safely let Charles embark secretly at Tynemouth, as Sir Walter suggests: the prospect of a King over the water was agreeable neither to the English nor to the Covenanters. But, says Scott, “Even if the Scots had determined that the exigencies of the times, and the necessity of preserving the peace betwixt England and Scotland, together with their engagements with the Parliament of England, demanded that they should surrender the person of their King to that body, the honour of Scotland was intimately concerned in so conducting the transaction that there should be no room for alleging that any selfish advantage was stipulated by the Scots as a consequence of giving him up. I am almost ashamed to write that this honourable consideration had no weight.
“The Scottish army had a long arrear of pay due to them from the English Parliament, which the latter had refused, or at least delayed to make forthcoming. A treaty for the settlement of these arrears had been set on foot; and it had been agreed that the Scottish forces should retreat into their own country, upon payment of two hundred thousand pounds, which was one half of the debt finally admitted. Now, it is true that these two treaties, concerning the delivery of the King’s person to England and the payment by Parliament of their pecuniary arrears to Scotland, were kept separate, for the sake of decency; but it is certain that they not only coincided in point of time, but bore upon and influenced each other. No man of candour will pretend to believe that the Parliament of England would ever have paid this considerable sum, unless to facilitate their obtaining possession of the King’s person; and this sordid and base transaction, though the work exclusively of a mercenary army, stamped the whole nation of Scotland with infamy. In foreign countries they were upbraided with the shame of having made their unfortunate and confiding Sovereign a hostage, whose liberty or surrender was to depend on their obtaining payment of a paltry sum of arrears; and the English nation reproached them with their greed and treachery, in the popular rhyme,—
Traitor Scot
Sold his king for a groat.
“The Scottish army surrendered the person of Charles to the Commissioners for the English Parliament, on receiving security for their arrears of pay, and immediately evacuated Newcastle, and marched for their own country. I am sorry to conclude the volume with this mercenary and dishonourable transaction; but the limits of the work require me to bring it thus to a close.”
“TALES OF A GRANDFATHER”
By their Covenant, as interpreted by their preachers, the Scots had brought themselves to this pass, and the only course open to them which was not conspicuously base they did not take. A nation is judged by the rulers whom it accepts, and though not a man in a hundred, north of Tweed, approved the course (so a contemporary tells us), “the whole nation of Scotland was stamped with infamy.” Scott does not prefer Scotland to truth, but he does misrepresent, by defect of information, the effectual cause of Argyll’s death. He did not die merely because he expressed, in letters to Monk, “a zeal for the English interest.” He gave information as to the movements of the forces that stood for his King, and were commanded by his own son. Writing for the instruction of the young Scott laid aside all Cavalier sentiment and prejudice; in the opinion of M. Amédée Pichot, he wrote as a Whig. But the Whigamores have never welcomed him as an ally. Even to-day a student who “has no time” cannot gain so rapid and so correct a view of Scottish history from any book as he will find in The Tales of a Grandfather.
Sir Walter’s next task was the Magnum Opus, the preparation of a literary history of the work of his life, especially of the novels and poems. That history took the shape, not wholly fortunate, of new Introductions and new notes. They are of the most genial interest, but perhaps it would have been wiser to write the literary history in separate volumes, than to clog the Authors’ Favourite Edition with so much prefatory matter that the modern reader is frightened away, believing that he will never survive to read the romance in each case. The format and typography of the volumes were excellent, the plates were not better than most illustrations and rather worse than some. Cadell had bought in the copyright at £8,500 on the luckiest of days for Sir Walter’s creditors. Now it was that Scott, having no money to give to a Reverend Mr. Gordon, gave him the copyright of two sermons which he had already written for him, at a moment when he feared that Gordon was too ill and nervous to write sermons for himself. Gordon sold the copyright for £250. Scott disliked appearing as a lay preacher, but good nature carried the day. He would not, however, again oblige James Ballantyne, who pleaded for the life of Oliver Proudfute, in The Fair Maid of Perth. To please James he had ruined St. Ronan’s Well, he had brought back Athelstane in Ivanhoe from the dead, and that was enough, and more than enough.
THE “JOURNAL”
The year 1829 saw the completion of Anne of Geierstein, but as the author of Anne’s being frankly damned her, I am not inclined to plead in her favour, leaving her advocacy to Mr. Saintsbury, who places Anne “on a level with anything and above most things later than The Pirate.” To deem Anne on a level with Redgauntlet, or even with Woodstock, and The Fair Maid of Perth, seems, in Lethington’s words, “a devout imagination.” My friend, Mr. Saintsbury, indeed speaks here of Anne “as a mere romance,” not counting “the personal touches which exalt Redgauntlet and the Introduction to the Chronicles.” But what is there in Anne that comes home to us like Nanty Ewart, Wandering Willie, and Peter Peebles? No Scot can doubt that Sir Walter is at his best in the bounds of “his ain countrie,” this was an inevitable limitation of his genius.