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,